"A successful formula for innovation"/ "Youtube spots troubling videos"

Dec. 8, 2017 "A successful formula for innovation": Today I found this article by Shawn Malhotra in the Globe and Mail: 

Vice-president, Thomson Reuters Toronto Technology Centre.

Generally speaking, large multilateral corporations are not good at innovation. Big, established companies tend to be hierarchical, mired in bureaucracy and victims of "the way we've always done it" thinking.

So, how do you infuse the entrepreneurial spirit, speed and agility of a startup into years of established practices and layers upon layers of matrixed management? Start with those who already live in a world of constant change: the technology team.

How we at Thomson Reuters are addressing innovation is multifaceted.

First, at a corporate level, efforts are underway to build a culture that fosters and enables innovation. Systemic culture changes in large companies can be hard and take time to implement. So, along with an enterprise-wide push, you need a short-term plan to augment these efforts and ensure you are keeping pace.

Second, we created a network of labs that partner with startups, academics and others to explore opportunities that are taking place at a grassroots level. These labs are interconnected with an ecosystem of innovators that bring forward ideas that are unique and hard to recreate organically.

We have one of these labs in Waterloo, Ont.

Finally, we are creating our own "de facto" startup, the Thomson Reuters Technology Centre, where we are focusing on innovation and amplifying our solutions with emerging technologies. To date, we have hired 200 of the best and brightest technology experts from a cross-section of startups, technology leaders and industry competitors. Our mandate is twofold: first, steward and/or disrupt our existing software and, secondly, invent our own technology.

As we started to build this team, we recognized that, while our successes may be measured in technological achievements, it all starts with people – the truly innovative workforce of the future doesn't have senior leaders.

It just has leaders that work together to create an environment defined by trust, transparency and dynamic thought. Also, we embrace failure as a real opportunity for learning and encourage experimentation. At the Toronto Technology Centre, we follow three philosophies to help us get there.

First, democratize the process

We believe it is important to involve everyone. We enable ideas to come from any level of our organization. In the technology sector, the next big idea could come from a co-op student or a 20-year veteran and both have to feel comfortable putting forward ideas and challenging one another.

We meet regularly to get to know each other on a professional and, equally important, personal basis. We believe getting to know each other's strengths and expertise can help us work together as a team to solve common problems.

Innovation can mean finding a new path to reach customers when they need support or automating processes that once required human intervention. Our artificial intelligence experts need to work with our data analytics team, our software developers need to work with our domain experts. It's a team game that we will only win if everyone is involved and feels empowered.

Second, create open channels

It is crucially important to inspire information- and technology-sharing across the organization. Rarely is the real "magic" of innovation done in a vacuum. We have addressed this challenge in both formal and informal ways.

Formally, we have created forums so managers can share goals and learnings. As a fast-growing, nimble office, we all have the opportunity to share, to learn quickly and course correct.

Informally, we have instituted "guilds" that bring together a cross-section of people from different teams interested in a common technology to meet on an ad hoc basis. We also create forums to engage directly with customers and business counterparts to help inspire a customer-centric approach to innovation.

Employees need to have the freedom to explore the problems and technology that excite them. When you get a small group excited about a common challenge, where new perspectives and expertise are shared, you pave the way to that "eureka" moment.

Third, scale innovation

Finally, mechanisms need to be put in place to help scale the culture as the organization grows. We codify best practices and implement them across teams as we expand. We also ensure the efforts of innovators are recognized. Be it rapid career advancement, recognition from executive leadership or desired new opportunities, innovation must be rewarded in a swift and meaningful way.

Innovation happens when someone begins to understand something beyond their day-to-day job and connects the dots.

All in all, innovation in a large corporation is as much about a broad culture shift as any single investment or a bright new idea. One size doesn't fit all. However, to stay ahead of trends, retain and attract top talent, and get ready for the next technology coming over the horizon, you need to be innovative. Our recommendation is to approach this challenge in a dynamic systemic, multiphased and multifaceted manner.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/leadership-lab/a-successful-formula-for-innovation/article37176672/

rf9

2 days ago

So, do the engineers keep royalty rights on patents they generate?

Or is it standard practice in your employment contracts that all rights are signed away?

If they're not getting an authentic cut of the rewards they're not going to give their ideas away. Understand the salary is just to get them to show up.

"YouTube enlists people to help machines spot troubling videos": Today I found this article by Daisuke Wakabayashi in the Globe and Mail:

Google Inc.’s YouTube is hiring more humans to teach machines how to think like humans.

In a blog post from Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s chief executive, the company said on Monday that it planned to add thousands of human reviewers to remove videos that violated its guidelines while teaching computers how to spot troublesome videos.

YouTube plans to have 10,000 people dedicated to reviewing videos in 2018 – although it would not say how many workers it has doing that job now.

The hiring spree comes as YouTube is mired, yet again, in controversy over failing to properly police content uploaded to its site. The latest batch of problematic videos, reported earlier by The Times of London, are videos of children in states of undress, with comments from pedophiles attracted to the content. Those videos also had advertisements running with them, prompting marketers to pull their ads.

Last week, YouTube said it took down more than 150,000 videos featuring children and disabled comments for more than 625,000 videos.

It also kicked several hundred YouTube users off the platform for posting “predatory comments on videos featuring minors.”

This comes on the heels of a New York Times report about how inappropriate videos featuring children’s cartoon characters in violent or lewd situations slipped past its filters and appeared on YouTube Kids, an app that is supposed to present only child-friendly videos.

“I’ve also seen up-close that there can be another, more troubling, side of YouTube’s openness,” Ms. Wojcicki wrote. “I’ve seen how some bad actors are exploiting our openness to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.” Because it is easy to upload videos to the site, YouTube has become a repository for all types of content – replacing television as the primary destination for a younger audience.

However, it has also drawn a range of objectionable material, from videos promoting conspiracy theories to violent extremists.

More than 400 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and company executives have long said that monitoring that fire hose of content is difficult. They contend that computers – learning from the example of humans – are the answer.

YouTube said it has taken down 150,000 videos for violent extremism – in large part because of machines flagging more videos for human reviewers to take down.

YouTube said it had been successful in catching extremist videos using machine learning. Since YouTube laid out new policies aimed at curbing extremist videos on the platform after the London Bridge attacks in June, the company said its machines have improved at catching extremist videos shortly after they were uploaded.

YouTube said it has taken down 150,000 videos for violent extremism – in large part because of machines flagging more videos for human reviewers to take down. The video service said it planned to take a similar approach to tackling videos unsafe for children and content featuring hate speech.

When it comes to advertising, YouTube said it would take a “new approach.” It plans to consider which channels and videos are eligible for advertising. Ms. Wojcicki did not lay out specific changes, but said YouTube planned to speak to advertisers and content creators in the coming weeks to hone its approach.

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-bc-edition/20171208/282218011126935

My opinion: That YouTube article was kind of upsetting, but at least they are trying to solve the problem.

online course producer/ SEO marketer

Oct. 11, 2017 "So, you want to be an online-course producer?": Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:

The fast-emerging industry comes with some challenges, though self-driven entrepreneurs stand to make a pretty penny

Job

Online-course producer

The Role

Digital technologies are enabling everyday people to learn new skills online, and the market for these services is booming. In fact, the global eLearning industry surpassed $165-billion (U.S.) in 2015 and is predicted to reach more than $275-billion by the year 2022.

Countless users are taking to their desktops, tablets or smartphone screens to gain knowledge in fields ranging from marketing to nutrition to entrepreneurship, and it is up to course producers to plan, shoot and market all of this content.

“As a course producer, I create educational experiences and content online to teach people new skills,” says Gwen Elliot, who works for Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify Inc.

Ms. Elliot explains that the job can involve relationship building with instructors and experts, shooting and production, talent coaching, copywriting, lesson-plan development as well as marketing and branding. As a relatively new profession with constantly changing expectations, Ms. Elliot adds that staying up to date on trends and innovations in the industry is also an important element of the job.

“A course producer, a really good one, wants to create an online course that is engaging and helpful and teaches a student a skill that they can apply in their life,” she says. “I have had to become a jack-of-all-trades.”

Salary

The salary of a course producer ranges widely because compensation can be structured in a number of different ways. Ms. Elliot says that, while she now has a consistent salary with an employer, course producers often work as contractors first and can be paid in a lump sum, by the hour or through a percentage of sales.

“From an industry perspective, course producers can make anywhere from $55,000 [Canadian] to six figures,” she says. “This depends on their experience in content creation and content marketing, though there is no limit to what course creators can earn, especially as an independent creator.”

Ms. Elliot explains that, since anyone can post an instructional video and charge any amount, there really is no limit to what someone stands to earn. Los Angeles-based course producer Melyssa Griffin, for example, selfreported e-course sales of more than $258,000 (U.S.) last year, earning a net profit of more than $190,000.

“It’s an industry that’s growing so fast, there’s really no ceiling to this industry to how much money you can make and how much impact you can make,” Ms. Elliot says. “It really is a limitless kind of job.”

Education

With no oversight or regulating body, there is no mandatory educational background, licence or qualifications required to be employed as a course producer.

“If anybody reading this article has a skill, and they want to market it and create their own course, they can do that. No one will stop them,” Ms. Elliot says.

While there are no official requirements, however, Ms. Elliot explains that a postsecondary education in media, content development or online marketing is a great foundation for a career as an online-course producer.

“My education also involved investing thousands of dollars in online courses myself to learn skills like how to run a webinar, SEO [search-engine optimization], learning about Facebook and Instagram advertising, affiliate marketing, branding and copywriting,” she says. “It’s really a self-directed education at this point.”

In other words, Ms. Elliot believes the best way to learn how to produce online courses is by watching relevant online courses.

Job prospects

Though the industry is young, it is growing quickly, and opportunities for both independent and in-house course producers are expected to skyrocket over the coming years. Ms. Elliot says that today many of the big technology companies, including her employer, are investing in course producers to help teach customers how to get the most out of their products, but she expects the field to become even more mainstream moving forward.

“This industry is booming,” she said. “Companies like Twitter and Facebook and Hootsuite are all creating their own online academies to teach customers how to have success with their product, so this is definitely a growing industry.”

Challenges

The industry continues to face the growing pains typical of any new and quickly growing field, which results in a number of challenges for today’s practitioners. For one thing, Ms. Elliot says it’s often difficult to articulate her role, even to co-workers. Working in a quickly evolving field also requires today’s course producers to be constantly updating their own knowledge and expertise to stay up to date.

“There’s no go-to place to learn everything,” she said. “Because there is no holy grail of resources, there’s no one place to go, it does require some hustle and being scrappy and figuring out who are the north stars that are leading this industry and learning from them.”

Furthermore, without the oversight of a regulatory body, Ms. Elliot says she comes across many “flashy” ads that seem to present the field as a get-richquick scheme. These ads typically offer expensive courses that claim to teach students how to make a lot of money producing their own expensive courses.

“People who are new to creating a course and want to create one themselves, they might see marketing saying they can create a six-figure course or make a million dollars really fast, and that is really painful for people to learn the hard way when they try to do it themselves and don’t make the money back they spent on the course,” she said.

Why they do it

Ms. Elliot says that course producers enjoy working in a fastmoving and growing field where they have the opportunity to take on a wide variety of tasks and roles each day.

“If you’re a person that thrives in an environment that’s changing and you enjoy the challenge of one day being on set and one day just writing and being in a quiet space, if you enjoy that, you’ll thrive as a course producer,” she says.

Misconceptions

Though the role is too young to have many established conceptions, let alone misconceptions, one that Ms. Elliot hears often from those with some understanding of the position is that it’s as simple as speaking into a camera and uploading it to YouTube.

“It takes a bit longer than people think to create an online course,” she said. “There’s a lot to learn about the technology, there’s a lot to learn about online marketing and actually taking time to do the work to understand who your customer is and what’s the best online marketing to use for your courses, so it’s not as easy as it appears to be.”

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-ottawaquebec-edition/20171011/282097751925254

 Nov. 8, 2017 "The expertise and skill of an SEO marketer": Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:

Search-engine optimization means using algorithms to land your employer as high up in results pages as possible

The job:

Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) marketer

The role:

When you type a query into a search engine, it uses a complex algorithm to provide you with the best possible results. The role of an SEO marketer is to land their employer, company or client as high up on those search results pages as possible.

“Ultimately, we convince search engines that we provide the best answer to a question someone might ask,” said Tony Tie, a senior SEO specialist for travel website Expedia. “If you’re number one, if you’re higher up on [the results page], people are more likely to click on you, which leads to more transactions.”

There are a number of techniques SEO marketers use to improve their client or employer’s ranking, which Mr. Tie breaks into three broad categories. One is technical, which may encompass anything from how quickly the page loads to how it’s coded; second is content, ensuring the page best answers the question users search for; and the third is online buzz, or how many others have shared that page.

Salary:

The salary of an SEO marketer will range depending on their level of experience, the additional skills they bring to the table and whether they’re employed by an agency or work in-house.

“Entry level, when you’re starting off, expect anywhere between $35,000 and $45,000 as an annual salary,” Mr. Tie said. “As you get to more senior roles, like a manager, anywhere between $60,000 and $80,000 and when you’re talking about a director role, about $90,000 to $150,000.”

While in-house roles are often harder to come by, Mr. Tie says that their compensation typically lands one full bracket higher than those employed by an agency. He adds that having a proven track record or some technical-development skills could increase salary expectations as well.

Education:

There are no formal education requirements to become an SEO marketer.

Since the rules of the search engine algorithm are subject to change at the whims of the provider, the industry values self-directed learners more than those with formal educational backgrounds. Enrolling in crash courses, e-learning programs and reading through the content provided by the searchengine providers themselves is a great way to build a knowledge base.

“A really good SEO person has the ability to be fairly scrappy with their learning,” said Mr. Tie, adding that they’re often expected to remain active in online communities and forums. “Anybody who upplays their education paints an image that they may be more of an academic than a practitioner.”

Mr. Tie adds that it’s good for SEO marketers to know the basics of HTML coding, but that doesn’t necessarily require formal education.

“Many of the best SEOs I know have had degrees in arts or unrelated fields,” Mr. Tie said. “The only thing that might be important is engineering or computer science; that will give you a bit of an advantage.”

Job prospects:

London-based content and SEO platform Conductor has tracked the SEO industry in nine countries, including Canada, since 2012. In its 2017 study, it was revealed that SEO jobs are at an all-time high, after seeing a decline in both job opportunities and compensation in 2016.

The report concludes that while the need for SEO skills is increasing, they are often being rolled into other content-marketing roles. As a result, the need for SEO skills is growing faster than the rate of dedicated SEO positions.

Challenges:

Mr. Tie says one of the biggest challenges SEO marketers face is managing their employer or client’s expectations, as results are not as immediate as other marketing efforts. “SEO is a slow burning process in terms of results,” he said. “It can take months, even more than a year, to yield results.”

Mr. Tie adds that staying up to date on the ever-changing standards and algorithms is also a common challenge.

Why they do it:

SEO is increasingly recognized as a key pillar of any digital marketing strategy, and those with SEO skills are able to put them to use in a lot of different arenas. “SEO is the hardest marketing channel to learn, and if you can do SEO you can do anything else [in digital marketing],” Mr. Tie said.

Misconceptions:

Many confuse SEO marketing with what is known as “paid search,” or paying to appear at the very top of the search rankings as an advertisement. SEO is instead a form of what’s called “organic marketing” and focuses on improving results rankings on merit alone.

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-bc-edition/20171108/282127816752729

Stephen Vizinczey's novel If Only

Jan. 2, 2017 "Author Stephen Vizinczey on why his current novel, If Only, has been stuck in limbo": Today I found this article by James Reith in the Globe and Mail:

After selling seven million books worldwide, Stephen Vizinczey discusses why his current novel has been stuck in limbo, what it feels like to be alien and ‘how events happen’ (Zoe Cormier for The Globe and Mail)

In 1965, Stephen Vizinczey, in his own words, “became famous from people writing about how stupid” he was to self-publish his debut novel, In Praise of Older Women. A controversial Bildungsroman mixing aphoristic insight and candid sexuality, it went on to sell half a million copies in Canada that year alone.

Today, self-publishing is an established industry – and one quite separate from the literary world.

“I never knew before In Praise what it was to be hated,” Vizinczey says. “Hate is more memorable than praise.”

But hate requires engagement.

Until recently, Vizinczey’s latest, and self-published, novel If Only – a book 30 years in the making – sat in a critical and commercial limbo: Major bookstores would not stock it until it was reviewed and major newspapers would not review it until it was in bookstores.

A man who has sold more than seven million books worldwide, a living author with a Penguin Modern Classic to his name, could not reach his own audience. So as we look back on 2016, it’s worth discussing one of the most overlooked books of 2016.

That book concerns Jim, a Toronto-born cellist of Hungarian descent who is “determined to be Canadian,” and ends up settling in London. It opens with him contemplating suicide, while holidaying with his wife on a Florida island resort. Jim’s life, as we learn, has been a succession of ever-increasing compromises, accompanied by ever more complex justifications.

“We all believe what makes life easier to bear,” Vizinczey says, quoting his own novel. Though he adds: “The only thing that keeps us alone, apart, is beliefs.”

The book begins as a regretful parable. Then an alien, called Neb, arrives.

“We are all foreigners,” he tells me, discussing the migratory history of early Hungarian settlers (Neb’s planet is, wonderfully, called “Otthon,” Hungarian for “home”). “Deep down,” he continues, “everybody’s an alien. We don’t get into another person.”

Vizinczey’s father was murdered by the Nazis when Vizinczey – born in 1933 – was two years old. Vizinczey went on to study under Kodaly, the renowned composer, and Gyorgy Lukacs, the noted Marxist critic.

Vizinczey, who wrote plays that were banned by his country’s regime, fought in the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956 before fleeing westward, eventually arriving in Canada.

“I worked out, incidentally, how events happen,” he tells me, casually. An absurd proposition, surely? Yet, it was with this theory, which he outlines in his book The Rules of Chaos, that he predicted that very revolution in Hungary, and America losing the Vietnam War. And Brexit. It is certainly no more absurd than a Hungarian refugee in Canada, then knowing only 50 words of English, going on to become a writer who, as Anthony Burgess said, “could teach the English how to write English.” But it was not easy.

“When I went to Canada,” he says, “I thought I would go insane. I was so lonely there, because it was such a different world.” What kept him sane were books. “Literature transcends nation,” Vizinczey continues, “when we read a book that reflects our own life, our own interests, then we don’t feel alone.”

This is, as he says, “particularly important if you have been a refugee.” Whereas other novelists may focus on what makes them different from other people, what is important in Vizinczey’s work, and life, is what he shares with others.

It was this focus that helped him learn English in Canada. “They are like me,” he says of Canadians, “they have a mouth, a nose and two ears, and they talk! So I should be able to understand them.” After a year, he even felt like a Canadian, “because we have to belong.”

“I couldn’t have become a great writer If I hadn’t changed languages,” Vizinczey continues. It forced him to be more critical of himself. “Whatever good is in my writing comes also from the fact that I learned to look at life from different points of view.”

In If Only, Jim’s grandfather publishes a pamphlet titled The Nation of Foreigners. It’s central premise: that migrants, by virtue of leaving wherever they are from, share a common consciousness, and are “at the centre of historic changes.”

Jim never buys into the dream of commerce, but follows it regardless. About to enact his own death, Neb, the alien, gives Jim a chance to be young again. To learn from what he has lost. It is a book about understanding, of both ourselves and others. Or perhaps not.

We talk for hours. About crosswords being a creative act. About how those interested in power, or furniture, might not enjoy his work. When he realizes I haven’t read one of his major critical essays, he reads the entire piece to me.

But, when it comes to If Only, Vizinczey is eloquently evasive. Even an attempt to summarize the book only gets as far as “Jim is a cellist” before diverting into a discussion about the relationship between the structures of literature and music.

He is as much a writer as a rewriter, and 30 years of thought have been condensed into If Only. “I can now express in a paragraph what previously took me three chapters,” he says. Extrapolating a single argument from the book seems futile.

Vizinczey does not think highly of traditional publishing. He has the lawsuits to prove it. His second novel, An Innocent Millionaire, is an epic yarn about recovering a lost treasure. The treasure, it turns out, is a metaphor for the publishing rights to In Praise of Older Women.

Pushkin, one of Vizinczey’s literary idols, wrote about duels. And died in a duel. “He was checking his own writing,” Vizinczey says, “and it cost him his life. It is very admirable. This is the only attitude writers should have towards their work.”

He is a life-or-death romantic in an era in which the self-published author is as much a writer as a marketeer. And yet, by virtue of his new book having languished among the glut of badly written genre fiction associated with cheap e-books, I wonder how many great writers are lost in this gulf between self-publishing and its traditional cousin. Does a secret Pushkin lie hidden in the Kindle store?

Some time after our interview, I received Van ecstatic e-mail from Vizinczey (who now resides in London): Still no reviews, but If Only now has Britain-wide distribution. It will finally be on store shelves, somewhere. Progress is starting to be made.

“One of the main points of reading is to find people who are like you,” Vizinczey tells me. I sincerely hope people finally happen upon If Only.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/author-stephen-vizinczey-on-why-his-current-novel-if-only-has-been-stuck-in-limbo/article33467629/