Last week Ogilvy launched their new thought leadership program called the Red Paper series. I was fortunate enough to be able to write the very first one – Learning to read the river. The paper describes how all the data that - - Read More - -
Imagine this - a Census worker walks on dirt road deep in the woods somewhere in North Michigan. After half an hour she reaches a bungalow, the 1st sign of life she’s seen in a while. Just as she pulls out her new 2010 Census form she sees a bag hanging from the doorknob. In it she finds a Census from 2000 … - - Read More - -
The latest video on thedoublethinkTV is an interview with Dominique Hanssens, Dominique Hanssens is the Bud Knapp Professor of Marketing at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, where he has been on the faculty since 1977. He has served as the school's faculty chair,
- - Read More - -
A friend just sent me this beautiful visualization of where people are taking pictures in London. You can clearly see the high traffic areas around the tourist hotspots. It’s a great use of the type of data people are generating by going about their everyday lives. It also shows how this data
- - Read More - -
What is the actual value of a story? Are people prepared to pay more for something if there is a story attached to it? It turns out that they are. That is the outcome of a very original experiment by writer / NYT columnist Rob Walker. I saw Rob speak about his
- - Read More - -
The last couple of weeks have seen the ‘new data’ in the news.
The Financial Times ran an article “Smarter Leaders are Betting on Data” by Stefan Stern. This introduced me to a useful idea from Vivek Ranadive, the CEO of Tibco, a software company and general data visionary. He argues that in measurement of consumer activity, we should think of events not transactions or “in-memory analytics” - - Read More - -
As you can imagine, there was much to entertain data watchers at this year’s TED conference.
Here’ s a quick roundup of the talks most relevant to what we’re talking about on this blog.
There was a live - - Read More - -
Probably the most talked about new company ad TED was Blippy. This audacious start-up can be thought of as a Twitter linked to your credit card. The idea is similar to Facebook’s disastrous Beacon feature, where purchases members made were automatically posted.
If this sounds like an invasion of privacy, it is - gloriously so. To join you simply register your credit card with the site and then - - Read More - -
Just to prove that the graphic presentation is new, take a look at this selection of images from BibliOdyssesy, a blog devoted to “amazing archival images from the internet”. (There’s a book too.) The image above is titled, "A timetable indicating the differences in time between the principle cities of the world", with their air line distances from Washington. It was published in 1883, in Philadelphia by WM Bradley.
These - - Read More - -
Take a look at this superb interactive tool developed by The New York Times: A Peek into the Netflix Queue.
The principle is simple enough. The Times has taken a database of most rented movies from Netflix and overlapped it on ZIP codes on a Google map to create a geodemographic look at tastes and the hyper local level. New York is shown here, but they’ve featured - - Read More - -