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 is generated today provides a huge opportunity for companies to grow their business. It [...]
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 [...]
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 could become really [...]
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 Significant Objects project, a [...]
I met a slightly creepy yet really interesting company yesterday. Voiceprism has a technology that analyzes sound waves generated by the human voice. This gives them the ability to listen to an individual for 10 minutes, establish a baseline voice pattern and then detect the deviations from the normal frequencies. These deviations have proven to be [...]