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Most of us have seen how something like Mint can be useful tool to better understand our spending habits when we compare it with others or Nike+ also us to compare our training performance with others.

We are obviously going to see more of the benefits of collective data over time and especially with the data coming from mobile devices.

Mobile Logger is an iPhone application developed by Robert Carlsen that's designed for bicyclist to log their journeys and share the data from those journeys with us. Obviously, the more data that gets input into the system, the better it is for everyone.



While we might all use social media and geo-social applications, the level of data provide is pretty minimal, it's all surface and basic. Clearly, the players have a lot more data than they would care to share with their users and perhaps this something they should look into more. Sharing more data could be useful to users from a comparison perspective and pure insight, it would also enable the players to be seen as more transparent, which is clearly a big issue right now.

Mobile Logger might be one of the first of it's kind beyond Nike+, it goes beyond the basic functionality and uses the phone's microphone to pick up and monitor noise levels which gives a nice indication of traffic flow.

It appears the shine might be off branded applications, but if they were more useful and engaged users around shared data, perhaps they could play a role.


Posted by Ed Cotton An amazing example of a brand using data to create an experience. In this case it's Lufthansa in its brand academy in Frankfurt.



Posted by Ed Cotton I have written in the past about the new world of data visualization and the fact it has almost become a new art form. I am going to change my tune here a little and suggest that is going to become an essential tool for anyone working in the agency, strategy, media space.

Our clients are demanding more and more interesting looks at data from us, so we better have a nice way to communicate all this stuff. Aside from the creative department, not many of us have the visual skills to make this work, so we are going to rely on existing tools to make this happen.

One example is Modest Maps which requires a little bit of technical expertise, but can be used to great effect. Take a look at this which shows the spread of Wal-Mart over time.

Going back to the seductiveness of data visualization, at it's best it can become great content as this BBC series, Britain from Above shows. If you get it right it can fascinate, delight us and help us to better understand our world or our business.






Posted by Ed Cotton Many of us have been struggling to find the ultimate example of brand utility, something that goes beyond the cliche that Nike Plus has become, but now I think I have found it.

Created by an enterprising design company in the UK, Wattson and Holmes (the Brits are good with naming puns) are an elegant solution to measuring your home's energy consumption.

Wattson is the sensor unit and Holmes is the software that allows you to see snazzy graphs and data.



Utility companies have some of the worst brand reputations in the world, they get no respect because people feel they are being gouged, a tool like this could help repair their broken reputations and image.

The beauty of the device is that it makes people personally accountable for their consumption and gives them data in an easy to use and understandable format.

We need more tools like this to show people how their individual actions can make a difference.

All Wattson and Holmes now need to do is to hook themselves up to a networked community so the cumulative impact of users energy savings can be measured.


Posted by Ed Cotton It's Chipchase day here at Influx Insights, so here's another post with a great slide from his deck.

Mobile is a huge business and I am not sure we quite realize how big.

One billion + phones are sold a year!!

Worryingly, 400,000 phones a day are retired in the US.

One surely has to question the sustainability of a fashion driven business.

Bring on the modular eco phone...


Posted by Ed Cotton The visualization of data is fast becoming the next art form.

This is a nice example that comes from JK Keller



Here's how he creates the visuals.

"This is a program I wrote that reads a source text and looks for words that are used repeatedly. The more the word is used, the larger its cube gets. Red cubes are words that are not unique, blue cubes are. The size of the rings is determined by the size of the paragraphs."

Found by This is That

Posted by Ed Cotton