Amplified Content Marketing

by Michael Stuart

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There is no good digital transformation without cybersecurity

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Network engineers and CIOs agree that cybersecurity issues represent the biggest risk for organizations that fail to put networks at the heart of digital transformation plans. According to a research commissioned by Opengear, 53% of network engineers and 52% of CIOs polled in the U.S., U.K.,…

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You do not need email confirmation

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Get more a lot more conversions!
You do not need email confirmation in your sign up flow

This email signup is overcomplicated
  1. Create an account with an email and password
  2. Thank you message: “Please confirm your account”
  3. Go to your inbox, click the “Confirm your email”
  4. Thank you message: “Please sign in”
  5. You still there? Now you can actually start using the app…

It might sound familiar to you. It is how many applications work today.

There is a much better way!


Do we need email confirmation?

I have yet to find anyone telling me they like to receive email confirmations. They are needed to verify a user is the legitimate owner of the email they used to sign up.

To make sure the user is the rightful receiver of the data and that they are not impersonating someone else. Accounting for these uses cases we set out to reduce friction in our sign up flow without sacrificing privacy or security.

What does signing up look like without email confirmation?

  1. Create an account with an email and password
  2. That’s it… you’re in!

We reduced a 4 step process to 1. Previously, the user would have to go to their inbox and often the confirmation email can take time to arrive or even end up in spam causing them to hang around looking at their inbox pressing refresh frantically, or worse – get distracted by more pressing matters waiting in their inbox and not return to the app. Now you can experience our product right away.

  • How do you access the limited features then?
  • How do you access the limited features then?

As soon as the user wants to take one of the limited actions mentioned above, prompt them with a message explaining “For your security, because we really care for security, this feature is only available once you confirm your email.”

  • Email confirmation is still painful at this point, but the user understands why we need it. It is not an arbitrary requirement that you need to go through first hand.
  • Automatically log him out after 48 hours and send him another email to let him know. This gives an extra incentive to confirm his account in a timely fashion.
  • We went from a 4 step process to 1 and we made the application resilient to email deliverability issues.

We moved the pain closer to the actual benefit. And we let the user test our application with no strings attached. It definitely was some extra work but as the data suggests, it was well worth the effort!

source visible.vc/engineering/signup-flow-without-email-confirmation/


The State of Big Data

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The 2015 edition of Gartner’s conversation-provoking “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.” Big Data was poised to tumble into the Disillusion, when early interest wanes and vendors either step up and deliver or drop out.

But Big Data was nowhere on the curve because it’s gone mainstream. “It’s not special today,” says Gartner “It’s just the way business is done.”

Big Data is characterizing the mounting corpus of digital data generated through and about human behavior.

  • The potential value of all that data points to one of the key drivers of the Big Data market.
  • Every industry is investing in Big Data in some way, if not by themselves, then by using software-as-a-service scenarios to conglomerate a solution.

Look Ahead for Big Data

There’s Big Data, and then there’s the ability to use it to solve problems.

  • Part of the problem is measuring ROI.

  • One way to shrink the Big Data analysis gap is by having machines do more of the heavy lifting.


  • The pressure to create tools to better automate how Big Data is handled relates to a stark hiring reality: Finding enough data scientists to go around remains a challenge.
The focus has traditionally been transactional security, but now it’s about the analytical audit trail: the journey of the data, what was done with it, and by whom.

source: econtentmag.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/The-State-of-Big-Data-108666.htm

The new digital retail – APIs the key to all interactions

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The new digital retail E-commerce reached its prime during the late 1990s. Since then, it has gone mainstream. Recent estimates of retail e-commerce put it at about $1.4 trillion, or about 22% of overall retail commerce. By 2019, this is going to be about $2.4 trillion, or about 33% of the overall retail commerce.
E-commerce was “digital” for the 2000s. But m-commerce (mobile commerce) is digital for 2015. It’s not just a new modality–it’s a whole new experience. Enabling this experience requires a lot of new infrastructure: APIs, BaaS, big data analytics. This is the digital transformation our retailer customers talk to us about.
But something else is happening in this retail digital transformation. The channels (physical, web, and mobile) are blurring. Who has not seen the “Buy online and pick up in store” option in your favorite retailer’s mobile app? This is omnichannel, and it’s also the new digital. Enabling this experience of course requires the APIs, BaaS, and big data we mentioned above to power every channel. In addition, it requires a consistency of experience through common APIs, and new business and data logic to sit in or near the API layer.
APIs: the key to all interactions
APIs are the underpinning of all system-to-people, system-to-system, and business-to-business interactions.How big is this? Mobile commerce is supposed to be $2 trillion by 2019. So APIs will drive at least $2 trillion of commerce. With omnichannel, this number could easily be $4 trillion (all of e-commerce). APIs are that big.
Example, travel. When was the last time you walked into an airline booking center and booked a ticket? Or walked up to a hotel lobby and booked a room? It’s all digital now, and, increasingly, mobile. Mobile travel bookings are growing at 3x the rate of web travel bookings, easily surpassing the latter to be at least $1.5 trillion by 2019. All mobile bookings, ratings, and browsing happen through APIs, so it follows that at least $1.5 trillion of travel sales (out of an industry total of $6 trillion) will happen through APIs.

Now that nearly every aspect of our lives is available online along with a growing number of home appliances such as Televisions, refrigerators, thermostats and even toasters, maybe its time that we all began to take a holistic view of security rather than just assuming everything will be ok.
Expect the boring and safe IT guys that famously said no to many of the modern requests to say I told you so in the very near future. Traditionally IT has taken their thankless roles as custodians or guardians of networks incredibly seriously, and there is an argument that it’s only since we started lowering our guard and going our own way that we are starting to realize the error of our ways.
source: www.huffingtonpost.com/anant-jhingran/the-impact-of-digital-tra_b_9195902.html

FLASH RETIRES FOR GOOD 2016?

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2016 will be the first year marketers will not have Flash to fall back on as a crutch.


As an interactive element, Flash has been intertwined with the user experience since its inception. With Web design now more important than ever, marketers must turn to other tools to maximize how visitors interact with their Web elements.

Why Adobe Flash Player must go is best described by a five-year-old essay by Steve Jobs. At the time, Jobs was explaining why Flash would never show up on iPhones and iPads. See https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

  • Security remains a major concern, with new exploits popping up on a regular basis. In one example, hackers were able to break through the sandboxing that’s meant to minimize vulnerabilities in Google Chrome.
  • Flash is also a notorious resource hog, which is a problem as laptops become thinner, lighter, and more reliant on power efficiency for long battery life.

All of this has brought calls to kill Flash everywhere. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, wrote on Twitter last month that Adobe should set a firm end-of-life date for the plugin. The “Occupy Flash” website urges users to uninstall Flash and use HTML5.

It is easy to browse the web Flash-free today as sites have moved away from Flash to HTML5

For more information see “Why should we care about HTML5” at http://visual.ly/wtf-html5-and-why-should-we-all-care

Infographic: HTML5 vs Flash Games

Jacob Gube sixrevisions.com/html/html5-infographics