Finance Geek

Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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As Apple and Samsung’s trial looms closer, we’re learning a lot of never-before seen information about the early days of the iPhone and iPad, and what happened behind closed doors at both Apple and Samsung. Here’s a look at 5 of the most interesting discoveries to come out of the companies’ litigation drama.

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Facebook is caught between Wall Street, which wants aggressive ads, and users, who want privacy.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The U.S. economy grew slightly better than expected in the second quarter, up 1.5 percent versus estimates of 1.4 percent, according to the Commerce Department. An increase in personal consumption helped drive the better than expected figure. The last quarter was the weakest period of economic growth since the [...]

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Wired received an exclusive (albeit quick) tour of Twitter’s new offices in the Mid-Market Street sub-neighborhood of San Francisco on Wednesday. Here are the exclusive pictures!

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Most Americans have a sense TARP was a badly managed program that bailed out “fat cat” bankers at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Well, it’s even worse than you think, according to Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general for TARP (SIGTARP). Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Facebook’s stock crashed to new lows this morning after the company’s first earnings report since going public in May. Facebook reported results that were in line with analysts estimates. But the company also announced that it would be radically increasing its rate of investment, which will hurt its profit [...]

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After a summer of waiting, Google finally emerged with details on their new Kansas City Fiber network. The price for Google Internet starts at free. That’s right, for the $300 installation fee, Google will give you free Internet at “today’s speeds” for at least 7 years. If you’re used to thinking of these speeds as fast, take a gander at this comparison and then imagine seven years of technology innovation.

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Today Google are celebrating the official beginning of the London 2012 Olympic Games with a doodle in honor of the opening ceremony tonight in London.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Amazon (AMZN), which has come under intense scrutiny for unfavorable labor conditions at its fulfillment centers, announced a new worker-education program this week to help improve the careers of some of the company’s most dedicated employees. The largest U.S. online retailer plans to reimburse its full-time hourly workers for [...]

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PBS Kids history of producing strong and purposeful learning content for children has continued into the mobile space. With a series of quality apps aligned to their PBS Kids programs like Super Why, Arthur and Dinosaur Train they are setting up a platform that demonstrates how to convert existing content and characters into digital content that both respects the mobile space, but also the children who will be engaging with it.

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My friend Sokratis posted a link to the video below in a comment on the post I wrote Wednesday about building habit forming consumer services. The main point of that post was introducing Nir Eyal’s concept of the Desire Engine – a trigger, action, (variable) reward, commitment loop.

In the video behaviour change expert BJ Fogg unpacks the first two steps – exploring the circumstances under which people respond to a trigger and take an action (or behaviour in Fogg’s parlance).

For me the four takeaways from the video are below, but they don’t come close to doing justice to the richness of understanding you will get from watching Fogg’s talk in full.

1. Build (or invest in) services where the desire or motivation is already there – all big successes on the consumer web have done this – find stuff on the internet, stay in touch with my friends, buy stuff..
2. Behaviours (actions) only happen when motivation, ability to complete the action, and a trigger are present at the same time. Fogg puts that in a formula – B=MAT.
3. The best place to start with a service is triggering the folk who already have motivation and ability – these will be your early adopters and probably long term core users
4. After that it is better to work on the ‘A’ in B=MAT than the ‘M’. Making it easier for people who are motivated to use your service (i.e. increasing their ability) is sticky – if it is easier today it will be easier tomorrow, but with motivation you have to start from scratch every day. This is counterintuitive. For many the first thought is how do I make my service better – i.e. increase motivation.

I think it is the social scientist in me that enjoys these frameworks so much. By themselves they don’t provide any answers, but I find them very helpful in breaking complex issues into manageable chunks.

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