EXP: August 2009 Archives

Crimespotting Visualizations

By Craig Kanarick on August 27, 2009 3:58 PM | No Comments

Following the success of DataSF, an online repository of datasets about San Francisco, Stamen Design recently launched San Francisco CrimeSpotting -- a San Francisco-based version of their Oakland Crimespotting project.

The Crimespotting sites include interactive maps of reported crimes alongside clean and efficient graphics -- both great examples of map-based data visualizations that can quickly tell stories. Other excellent geo-mapped crime experiences include MSNBC's Every Block, LAPD's Crime Maps and The NY Times' Homocide Map.

How Does an Open Innovation Company Work With its Partners?

By Craig Kanarick on August 25, 2009 11:48 PM | No Comments

One of the aspects I find most exciting about the growth of open innovation is the consequent growth of firms' consulting services in order to better utilize open innovation to solve problems. How and why does that work? Watch Dwayne Spradlin, President and CEO of InnoCentive, explain how the process works in this quick and interesting video:

In this fascinating video about cleaning up the Exxon Valdez spill years after it happened, Spradlin explains why open innovation is essentially a sustainable business practice:

Loyalty is Shifting from Brands to Experiences

By Craig Kanarick on August 25, 2009 2:42 PM | No Comments

Earlier this week, The Seattle Times wrote about research by local firm Hartman Group, who asserts that consumer loyalty is shifting from products and brands to retailers, based on the experiences that are offered as opposed to product selection.

This comes as no surprise, for nearly 15 years I've been saying that for retailers, digital technology removes their previous competitive advantage of location. While it may be true that there is a Barnes & Noble in the local mall, bn.com and amazon.com and powells.com are all the same distance away from me: one click. Now that I can shop from the comfort of my own home from bookstores all around the world, all of which carry exactly the same product at essentially the same price, my experience with them is the deciding factor for who I chose to shop with.

According to the research, this type of mindset is also starting to impact real-world retailers. "Capturing the attention of the consumer requires different tactics, getting a lot more intimate and experiential."

I formed much of my thinking about integrating digital technology into physical space in order to create a unique and memorable experience during my time at Rockwell Group - where I learned that telling the story of a brand through architecture and space is a powerful tool. Much of that thinking is what led me to start this blog, and it is nice to see other organizations starting to publicize this thinking as well.

Clearly, companies like Starbucks, Apple, Zingermans, Zappos and Trader Joe's all understand the value of a great experience is equally important as a great product. I'm excited for our future, when a majority of companies understand this concept and are busy making sure their customers are happy and satisfied in an experiential way.

For some additional great thinking on this topic, check out Jonathan Salem Baskin's take on this interesting study.

Monitoring the Twitterverse

By Craig Kanarick on August 24, 2009 3:09 PM | No Comments

According to a recent Mashable article, almost 70% of adults in the US don't know enough about Twitter to "have an opinion" about it. Even so, its popularity continues to grow and so do tools to measure it, complete with data visualizations to tell stories about these measurements. In this post, I'll cover a few of the ones I've been monitoring lately.

Twitalyzer measures traffic based on usernames (i.e. @kanarick) and defines derived values such as brand Strength, Signal, Favor, Passion and Clout based on that traffic. They also use globally aggregated data to create interesting lists such as the 100 most influential Twitterers. (Is 'Twitterer' a word?)

Open Brands, a service of Earthsite Labs, is a user-created directory of over 300 brands, which they call "Brand Channels," using the Twitalyzer measurements on both usernames and hashtags for slightly different results.

Along with content, a user's network is another slice of the Twitter ecosystem. TwitterFriends is a good stab at creating visualizations and data analysis of a network's shape and size. Here you can see some of the results of analyzing social media blogger, Dave Armano's network.

TweetEffect charts how a network changes in size between tweets, suggesting that you might find a pattern between what you tweet and how many people start or stop following you. I'm not convinced that any singular tweet really changes the size of your network, unless you specifically ask people to pass something on.

Blending a part of the real-time twitter stream with an artistic lens can create both beautiful and informative experiences that evolve over time. One of the best examples of this is well-known Twistori, an elegant unfolding experience of animated tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish. It makes a great screensaver and is never dull.

Rosling's World: A Swedish Documentary

By Craig Kanarick on August 21, 2009 3:05 PM | No Comments

Swedish broadcaster SVT recently posted a 57-minute biography on data visualization hero and TED favorite, Hans Rosling. It is in Swedish mostly, but has English subtitles.

Thanks, Mika.

Ten Thousand Cents

By Craig Kanarick on August 21, 2009 5:14 AM | No Comments

Ten Thousand Cents is a innovative 2008 project from the talented Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. For the project, they used Amazon's Mechanical Turk system to get 10,000 anonymous participants from over 50 countries to draw one small section of a $100 bill without knowing what they were drawing. They paid each artist one cent, for a total cost of $100. Using custom software written in Processing, the process was recorded from start to finish and combined together to create a fantastic application of a large community of users all working on one small part of a larger solution.

The animations are viewable online as a whole or individually, creating a unique rendition of a $100 bill. I particularly love looking at the different drawings to find the ways in which people draw, and to see the few "easter egg"-like drawings that have nothing to do with what they are meant to become.

Printed versions of the final images are available for $100 each (naturally) and all proceeds from the sales of each piece are donated to OLPC.

I just recently posted a presentation by Aaron, which you can see here.

The SEC's New Media Policy is Forward-Thinking and Madness (UPDATED)

By Craig Kanarick on August 20, 2009 3:53 PM | No Comments

The Southeastern Conference of college sports earlier this month sent an updated media policy to the 12 member schools. The policy places new stringent limits on how much audio, video and "real-time" blogging they can do at events such as games, practices and new conferences. While the rules are stringent, they aren't that unexpected. What is really crazy, however, is that the same restrictions are placed on fans in the stands. That means, in theory, that fans are prohibited from updating Twitter, Facebook or their blogs from a game. It means no taking photos with phones and sending them to the internet for public viewing. In theory, it means no calling a friend during a game and telling them the score!

The SEC is a very wealthy organization. ESPN and CBS pay over $3 billion to them for the exclusive right to broadcast games over the next 15 years. They also own their own digital broadcast network and a robust SECSports.com web presence.

How, you might ask, are they going to enforce a rule like this in a stadium full of 90,000 fans? I'm not really sure, but perhaps they will take the tack that the music industry took and prosecute a few violators and try to fine them ridiculously large sums of money in order to make examples of them and scare the other fans.

Look, I'm all for protecting the intellectual property rights of exclusive content, and I know that fan-based videos from cellphones are not a threat to CBS or ESPN and won't be for a few years. In some ways, the policy is very forward-thinking as it anticipates a day when fans have very high-quality broadcast capabilities in their mobile devices. Even so, I hope that broadcast networks would augment their video feed with enough commentary, graphics, data and other content that a fan in the stands will still not be a threat to the currently established set of media companies. If they can't evolve, I say let them die.

Does the SEC really want to prevent fans from seeing great fan-taken shots from a game? Wouldn't the posting of images from a game in real time on a site like facebook get people to turn on their TV and watch a game? Seems like they are going after the wrong things with this policy.

Thanks to The St. Petersberg Times for writing a great article about this subject.

UPDATE: Seems the SEC was influenced by the real-time response to the article mentioned above. The day after the article was published, the SEC revised their policy to allow fans to send pictures and updates as long as they aren't for commercial purposes but still makes videos against the rules.

What Britain Eats

By Craig Kanarick on August 20, 2009 4:54 AM | No Comments

As food consumption becomes an increasingly hot topic, data visualizations are being used as tools to convey information about eating habits.

A recent project from the incredible London Times Online Labs provides a beautiful look for a collection of lifeless surveys done by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, showing What Britain Eats through a simple and clean interactive graphic.

My Persona

By Craig Kanarick on August 19, 2009 9:48 PM | No Comments

Personas, part of the Metropath(ologies) installation at the MIT Museum, is created by Aaron Zinman (with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath) of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is a beautiful visualization of search results, but the story is that it presents a infographic as "how the internet sees you."

After typing in your name, the system searches the web and processes the words around the results, presenting them as a view of your personality. With terms like education, politics, illegal and others, as you quickly watch the search results on a name go by, you can't help but think the system knows what it is doing. But this really isn't an accurate assessment.

There are many people with the same name. If you don't have a unique name, how would the system know it is you? The results, even though they are based on data, are missing critical information necessary to be factually correct. This makes this art piece work for me -- as a modern digital fortune teller x personality test x social commentary experiment x tribute to my former advisor, the late great Muriel Cooper, designer of the Media Lab's identity system pictured below.

Personas has me coming back day after day.

Nike AM90 TV Ad Contest

By Craig Kanarick on August 19, 2009 10:47 AM | No Comments

To promote new colorways for their popular Air Max 90 sneaker, Nike just launched an open innovation contest: make a 28-second television ad by remixing various videos supplied on a website. The winner, chosen by Nike and Foot Locker, will be broadcast on MTV.

I love these types of contests - they are open to a huge community of participants and have to be extremely cost-effective. Yes, the sponsors are paying some money to administer the program and AKQA probably received a modest fee to design the interface, but it has to be way less money than they would have to pay an ad agency to get the same amount of creativity. They are using collaborative contest service eYeka, which features a slew of other video and graphics contests.

I really loved when Doritos did a similar thing with Crash the Super Bowl, a contest last year where people had a few months to produce ads and post them online. The community then chose a winner which was broadcast during the Super Bowl. Creator of the ad, Joe Herbert, not only saw his ad on the Super Bowl, but was flown to the game and awarded a $1 million prize!

(Thanks @tombed)

Business Week on the Power of "Data Visualization"

By Craig Kanarick on August 12, 2009 6:19 PM | No Comments

Business Week published an article today about how useful data visualization can be to companies. As they say, "There are real implications for business here."

My favorite quote, however, is at the end of the article saying that data visualization isn't about innovation, "It's about the most ancient of social rituals: storytelling."

There is a nice gallery that accompanies the article called The 21 Heroes of Data Visualization. I love the gallery, but not the name.

Aaron Koblin is "The Wizard of Data Art"

By Craig Kanarick on August 11, 2009 4:53 PM | No Comments

Today Creativity Online posted a video of a recent internal presentation by Aaron Koblin, in which he reviews a handful of projects that he has worked on over the past few years in data visualization. The name of the presentation, which he didn't choose, is The Wizard of Data Art.

Here is is for your enjoyment: Seems like the video below doesn't work, so click the link above.

He really seems to enjoy his job and after watching this video, it is easy to see why.

Technology on the farm

By Craig Kanarick on August 10, 2009 12:08 AM | No Comments

Demonstrating the broad reach of real-time communications tools, CNN recently published an article about how people like 39-year old Nebraska wheat farmer Steve Tucker uses twitter over ten times a day during work. This usage isn't unique -- every Tuesday from 6-8pm Eastern, farmers meet on twitter and post with the hashtag #agchat, utilizing the platform as a large public chatroom. Started by agriculture advocacy writer and speaker Michele Payn-Knoper, these chats have dedicated subjects each week and can draw thousands of participants.

Discussions aren't the only use of real-time digital technologies being embraced by the farm. PureSense, an irrigation software company, recently released an iPhone version of their main product, allowing farmers to remotely monitor the real-time water content of various locations of their land. According to most reports, the system not only saves farmers water, they also have higher yields, clearly a sustainable benefit.

Another example comes from Danish firm Smarterfarming who just released its CowDetect RFID system for tracking cows' locations, consumption and other activities. By looking at visualizations of the data, cow owners can discover information about a cow's health and optimie milking schedules. They claim that a $511 per cow investment (for a farm with 200 cows) will yield $500 per cow per year in savings. The system also issues daily warnings about cows it thinks might be at a health risk or crisis, allowing early intervention on potentially damaging conditions.

Visualizing Britain

By Craig Kanarick on August 7, 2009 12:38 AM | No Comments

A year ago, BBC One aired a special series of HD documentaries about Britain focusing on viewing the city from above. They created a series of beautiful visualizations for the series, one of which you can see below. The rest are available on their site.

Visualizing Our Goverment's IT Investments (UPDATED)

By Craig Kanarick on August 6, 2009 11:35 PM | No Comments

The US Government's march towards public transparency continues with the recent launch of the IT Dashboard, a visualization of Federal "information technology investments" and part of the massive USASpending.gov effort.

The still-in-beta site displays information on over 7000 investments with detailed data for over 10% of them, mostly the ones categorized as "major" investments. Each investment is ranked by its manager on a five-point scale ranging from low-risk to high-risk, based on a large number of factors. With almost 7% of the investments at high-risk, a debate will certainly ensue around to the government's ability to manage particular types of IT projects and investments, especially when each department is considered individually. For example, the Department of Veteran's Affairs seems particularly troubled with a whopping 82% of its $2.6 billion in investments considered high-risk -- especially when compared to the $1.6 billion investments by Department of Energy, 96% of which have little or no risk.

The data is updated frequently and while the graphics are slightly misleading (they are in 3-D) and have a garish color palette, they are easy to read and easy to process.

For a spot-on negative and extensive critique of the site, read this post by Stephen Fry.

Nasa's New Green Challenge

By Craig Kanarick on August 6, 2009 1:06 AM | No Comments

Last week, NASA and the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation announced the a $1.5 million dollar prize for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon. Calling it the Green Flight Challenge, this program joins the 6-year old Nasa Centennial Challenges, which also include the $2 miliion Power Beaming Challenge, a Tether Challenge (see below), the Regolith Excavation Challenge, the $1.6 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X Prize Challenge and Astronaut Glove Challenge sponsored by the Innovative Partnerships Program and seeks to spur the development of high-efficiency aircraft. This contest is not only innovative, it is the most sustainable NASA challenge yet.

SF Chronicle on Open Innovation

By Craig Kanarick on August 6, 2009 1:01 AM | No Comments

Covering similar territory as the the recent article in the NY Times, The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote about Open Innovation, starting the story by explaining the recent Netflix Prize, set to announce a winner in just a few weeks. Companies Use Contests to Drive Innovation is the title of the article and it quotes people from Innocentive and Henry Chesbrough, credited with coining the term "open innovation." It is a good overview and introduction to the field for many audiences.

IDSA 2009 Winners

By Craig Kanarick on August 4, 2009 5:42 PM | No Comments

Congratulations to Nike, Dell, Tatil Design, Red Ingot and the rest of the design teams who won awards in the 2009 IDSA International Design Excellence Awards in the Ecodesign category. Let's hope that in a few years, "ecodesign" stops being a category and is just the price of entry for everything. In fact, I would argue that IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit is Eco-friendly. It is certainly sustainable.

Nike's Trash Talk, pictured here, not only took a Gold in the Ecodesign category, they also won Best in Show, highlighting the importance of sustainable design.

The NFL: Don't Tweet

By Craig Kanarick on August 4, 2009 12:06 PM | No Comments

In what surely will be reversed in years to come, the NFL has recently told players that they are not allowed to text or tweet from team meetings or coaching sessions. Not every team has a specific ban, but players were told at training camps this week to keep precious information close to the vest.

For more coverage, read the NY Times article The NFL Has Identified the Enemy and It Is Twitter.

What Americans Are Doing

By Craig Kanarick on August 4, 2009 12:00 PM | No Comments

The New York Times latest info graphic about How Different Groups Spend Their Day is a fascinating interactive stacked line graph visualizing what Americans are doing at ever minute of every day, in about 15 categories of activities.

By digging in you can see significant differences between Black and non-Blacks in terms of the lunch habits, the employed and unemployed in terms of sleep, and the childless and those with more than two kids in terms of TV watching, among others. Once again the Times does a great job with a clean, understandable and interesting graphic.

As infosthetics points out, it is evocative of Tokyo Tuesday: Japan Right Now.

Steven Johnson on The Future of News

By Craig Kanarick on August 3, 2009 4:49 PM | No Comments

In March of 2009 Steven B. Johnson gave a great speech at SXSW in Austin called Old Growth Media and the Future of News which does a great job explaining that news, just like every other form of information, is happening in real-time more frequently. The entire thing is worth reading, but here is a great pullquote:

"...there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered..."

While this speech focuses on the future of news media, the same arguments could be made for all media.

August 2009 Archives