Bits Blog: Daily Report: E-Book Services Track Readers’ Habits

New Habits Transform Software

They are not using these objects, of course, but clicking on the pictures of them in popular word-processing programs like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The icons linger like vestigial organs of an old-style office, 31 years after I.B.M.’s personal computer brought work into the software age. They symbolize an old style of office software, built for the time when the desktop computer was new and unfamiliar.

But no longer are workers tethered to a desk, or even to an office; we are all toting around laptops, tablets and smartphones to make every place a workplace. And so office software is changing. These days, what is important is collaboration, small screens, fast turnarounds, social media and, most of all, mobility.

“The way people use things is fundamentally changing,” said Bret Taylor, chief executive of Quip, a start-up offering document-writing software that focuses more on mobile than desktop work.

Mr. Taylor, 33, is one of the best-regarded young software engineers in Silicon Valley. He helped create Google Maps before serving as Facebook’s chief technical officer. His co-founder, Kevin Gibbs, also 33, helped create Google’s data centers and as a side project developed the software that suggests completions when people start to type questions into Google search.

Their company is one of several that is developing office software for the mobile world. Some of the new programs still borrow from images of old-fashioned work in their design. But the capabilities they offer are decidedly up-to-date.

Last month Box, an online service for storing documents, pictures and other data, bought Crocodoc, a company that makes it possible to view Microsoft Word documents and other popular file formats across a variety of devices at the right size for whatever screen is being used at the time. Evernote, another online storage outfit, allows people to write, edit and share notes together, instead of e-mailing multiple versions of a Word document to one another.

Sam Schillace, Box’s vice president for engineering, wrote the original program that became Google Docs, which was introduced only six years ago.

He explained that in a mobile world, where everyone is in nearly constant contact, speed and ease of use are more important than lots of font choices. “We were guilty of taking the existing nature of documents,” he said, “but six years ago connectivity was a question. Now everything is connected all the time.”

Both Microsoft and Google are scrambling to make their products reflect a work environment where PCs exist alongside other devices. There is a mobile version of Microsoft Office, which includes Microsoft Word, but it can only be used to edit certain kinds of documents and collaboration is limited. One reason for this, the company says, is that it does not want to force its user base to relearn too much, too quickly.

“We have one billion users of Office,” said Julia White, general manager of Office marketing. “You can’t expect them to change every day.”

Still, social media touches, like “liking” an e-mail to show you’ve read it instead of writing a response, are likely to be seen in the future, she said.

Quip’s product is for now fully available only for Apple’s mobile devices and laptops. It combines instant messaging with document creation, storage and sharing in a primarily touch-screen environment.

Tap an icon of a manila folder and the material inside appears, which any user can organize as they see fit. Tapping one of those documents brings it up to be written, edited or commented on.

Like on Facebook, people’s pictures appear alongside their comments. The pictures also appear on any folder or document a person has open, making it easy to start working with someone else.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a Stanford University researcher. He is Mathias Crawford, not Matthias.

The New Old Age Blog: Online Habits Coming Slowly to Older Adults

Older adults hit a digital milestone last year: For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project began conducting surveys, a majority (53 percent) of people over age 65 used the Internet. The proportion has since inched upward, to 54 percent.

Which certainly represents progress. When Pew first began tracking Internet use in 2000, only 13 percent of seniors were online. But it remains a fairly anemic number compared to the rest of the adult population, more than 80 percent of whom use the Internet.

And among the older old, those over age 77, only about a third are online. Yet that’s the cohort most likely to become isolated by physical limitations, poor transportation and the loss of social connections — the group, in other words, who might particularly benefit from being able to interact with the world digitally, for everything from banking and ordering groceries to e-mailing faraway friends.

I wonder, too, how much satisfaction we can really take in the growth of wired seniors, as Pew used to call them. Back in 2000, more than 40 percent of the group just behind them, those aged 50 to 64, were online. So maybe we haven’t made as much progress as it appears. Maybe, 13 years later, the people online just got older.

Laurie Orlov, a tech industry analyst who writes the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog, has been fuming about this particular digital divide for years. “It matters more than ever,” she told me. “Organizations keep thinking they’ll save a buck by no longer using paper.”

When it comes to government programs, financial and insurance statements, health information or discount coupons, “the assumption is that you’re online.”

Even simple tasks like finding phone numbers for local businesses may soon require Web access. How long will there be print yellow pages? How long will there be movie listings in print newspapers? For that matter, how long will there be print newspapers? Without Internet access, older people could feel even more cut off than many already do.

A number of programs have tried to address this disparity, but they tend to be small-scale and local.

A few years ago, I wrote about a “virtual senior center”: a nonprofit organization acquired computers for about a dozen low-income New York City seniors, provided instruction, then linked their users to discussions at an actual senior center in Queens. A worthy demonstration project, but three years later it still has fewer than 100 participants.

Or take the company called It’s Never 2 Late, which has placed its simplified touch-screen computer systems in 1,200 nursing homes and assisted-living communities, plus some adult day programs. Another good idea with a “but”: most seniors don’t live in congregate settings.

AARP last year started a $169-a-year subscription service that gives its members unlimited phone, online or in-store access to Best Buy’s Geek Squad agents, who can help them choose, install, use and repair electronics.

I hear enough muttering from boomers whose parents call whenever they encounter a computer glitch to think turning over this job to the Geek Squad might be a smart move, but it doesn’t seem like one that can bring large numbers of low-income seniors onto the Internet.

“We want faster adoption,” Ms. Orlov said. “Little efforts start up here and there, but it’s not a national effort to get 100 percent of seniors online.”

She’s convinced, by the way, that older people can make the leap (as many readers here are about to point out, I know) and that most will want to. “With some of the devices available today, if a person is open and interested and there’s something on there that’s worth the trouble — like video of family members or the ability to Skype with family — they can learn to use a computer or a tablet,” she said.

Money will be the big obstacle, of course. As Ms. Orlov points out, it’s going to take big national organizations with deep pockets — foundations, technology corporations, Internet providers and cell carriers, AARP — to undertake a bigger, faster and more effective effort than our current piecemeal approach.

But it may take less than we would have thought a decade back, because tablets are cheaper than most desktops and laptops. And tablet ownership is growing among seniors, Pew reports. Just within 2012, the proportion of the over-65 population with a tablet climbed to 15 percent from 8 percent. Among those over age 77, tablet ownership jumped to 12 percent from 3 percent.

This might be the way. Other ideas are welcomed.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

TiVo to Buy TRA, Which Tracks Buying Habits of TV Viewers

Though the deal is modest compared with most recent media deals — TiVo will spend about $20 million to buy out other investors in TRA — the prospects for the television industry are considerable, said Tom Rogers, the president of TiVo.

“We believe television is at an inflection point,” Mr. Rogers said. “In the digital realm you measure click by click and get increasingly granular information. This kind of metric has not developed well in the television space before now.”

That metric makes it possible for advertisers to tell which networks are most effective at selling beer or cookies, and even which specific television shows are best at selling specific cars. TRA acquires this data by collecting information from 1.5 million set-top cable boxes and matching the viewers (anonymously) with information gleaned from “loyalty cards” presented at supermarkets, as well as with other measurements, like car-registration information.

TRA has signed numerous clients in its five years of existence, including 27 cable and broadcast networks and 45 different advertising brands. Some, including Mars candy bars and Kraft’s Oscar Mayer brand, have offered testimonials to the effectiveness of the information gathered by TRA.

CBS, an early client, has been especially supportive. That network’s chief research officer, David F. Poltrack, praised the acquisition Monday, citing the effectiveness of TRA data in demonstrating increased accountability in television advertising.

CBS has long fought the 50-year-old system of ad-selling on television, which is almost entirely based on the demographic performance of specific shows: success among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 remains the gold standard of television.

The network, although now competitive in that 18-49 age measure, historically has fared less well in that group. In past years, CBS has argued that it is more important to determine whether a show is generating sales for advertisers than whether it simply has a large group of younger people watching.

Mark Lieberman, the chairman of TRA (he will continue in that role after the acquisition), pointed to one study the company did based on sales of shampoo. Four cable networks were measured. One, MTV, had by far the biggest sales to shampoo advertisers, based on its young audience. But a cable network with a much older audience, TNT, had more than twice as many shampoo-buyers watching its shows.

Plans for extensive expansion of TRA’s operations will be enhanced, Mr. Lieberman said, by the alliance with TiVo, which has a large store of capital — as much as $600 million, Mr. Rogers noted, from patent litigation based on its original invention of the digital video recorder.

Both Mr. Rogers and Mr. Lieberman described the TRA data as complementary to the traditional Nielsen ratings. But Mr. Rogers pointed to the potential to go far beyond that basic information for advertisers and networks.

“It gets away from the assumption of what broad demographics do and brings it down to the reality of what actual people do,” Mr. Rogers said.