John Battelle

John Battelle
John Linwood Battelleis an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle helped launch Wired in the 1990s and launched The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom. In 2005, he founded the online advertising network Federated Media Publishing. In January 2014, Battelle sold Federated Media Publishing's direct sales business to LIN Media and relaunched the company's programmatic advertising business from Lijit Networks to sovrn Holdings...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth4 November 1965
CountryUnited States of America
'The Victorian Internet' is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.
The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept.
It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.
There are essentially two main reasons to hold a phone up at a show. First, to capture a memory for yourself, a reminder of the moment you're enjoying. And second, to share that moment with someone - to express your emotions socially. Both seem perfectly legitimate to me.
Google Now is one of those products that to many users doesn't seem like a product at all. It is instead the experience one has when you use the Google Search application on your Android or iPhone device (it's consistently a top free app on the iTunes charts). You probably know it as Google search, but it's far, far more than that.
It seems everyone is converging on a simple set of facts: Our lives are digital, and we wish to share our lives. Pinterest came at it through images, artfully curated. Facebook came at it through friends, cunningly organized. Dropbox came to it via files, cleverly clouded.
It would be another way for Google to sell targeted advertising and burnish its brand. And it's very much in the tradition of Google's brand promise - great stuff free.
The smart phone isn't a perfect device, as we all know. It forces the world into a tiny screen. It runs out of battery, bandwidth, and power. It distracts us from the world around us.
I sense that the sea of smart phones lit up at concerts is a temporary phenomenon. The integration of technology, sharing, and social into our physical world, on the other hand, well, that ain't going away.
Publishers are born connectors; they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer.
Brand marketers don't believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone.
Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it's driven by direct response metrics.
Bitcoin woke us all up to a new way to pay, and culturally, I think a much larger percentage of us have become accustomed to the idea that money no longer comes with the friction it once had.
I've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.