Businessweek writing - on Facebook, Apple, Pandora & EcoATM

There were a few Businessweek pieces from the past few issues that stood out as being on interesting companies... with a couple of the stories being fairly short and a couple well written in-depth looks.

The features were from the recent issue with Facebook on the cover and Ashlee Vance wrote a solid lead story with "Facebook: The Making of 1 Billion Users." Fascinating content that delves into the engineering at the company and features interesting revelations such as Facebook basically launching a new site version with tweaks each and every day.

The Opening Remarks piece from the same issue was also terribly interesting with Brad Stone, Adam Satariano, and Peter Burrows writing "Mapping a Path Out of Steve Jobs's Shadow" on Apple.

Finally, the two smaller pieces of interest were "Apple Radio Might Put Pandora in Play" about online music and "EcoATM, the Automated iPhone Pawn Shop" on the mall kiosk company offering money for no longer needed cell phones with $175 "the average going rate for a slightly damaged iPhone 4 or 4S."

Recommendation Pieces from Time Magazine

A couple of interesting pieces from the last two issues of Time around the concept of recommendation... with the first being from the May 31 cover story on Facebook.

The story by Dan Fletcher is titled "How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy" and looks at the concept of sharing information online via Facebook and how the company enables (or as some privacy advocates assert, forces) that sharing.  One very interesting area that Facebook is getting into is that of recommendation with the company making a concerted effort to enable users to easily click a button on other websites saying they "like" a product or service.  With this information then broadcasting to the friends of that user, you've got a powerful influence mechanism. 

In this same category of recommendation, the June 7 issue of Time contained the Lev Grossman piece "How Computers Know What We Want — Before We Do" about Internet music company Pandora.  The concept is the company breaks a song down to the presence or absence of some 20-30 specific attributes and then uses the results to recommend/play songs for users. Basically you have users who say they like a song (or group), then a database of now 740,000 songs which Pandora algorithms use to match up other music with the same characteristics.

It's pretty ingenious stuff (with additional details about Pandora and concept on the below video)...



The examples from Facebook and Pandora are different in that one handles recommendation based on individual feeling and one on technology and defined characteristics, but both cases are about influencing perception and then purchase decisions.  Coupling these examples with recommendation efforts from other companies like Amazon and Netflix (with Netflix and their recommendation engine being fairly heavily featured in the Grossman piece)... you've got a whole new world around purchase decisions.

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On a completely different note, but something that also struck me from Time lately was the Nancy Gibbs essay "TAPS: Help for the Families of Fallen Soldiers."  Powerful stuff that's also profiled in this ABC News story...