Influx Insights Weblog

do you care about the users you purchased?

Influx Insights — 2008-05-15T22:03:31Z

Comcast just went out and purchased Plaxo for $170 million, so the big communications giant can integrate some social networky type feature.

Of course, Plaxo has a few loyal users who are more than a little upset at the news.

Here's one.

"I think the consensus is "what a shame." How is this positive at all? Plaxo is getting absorbed by a big comms player. Imagine how people feel if Microsoft subsumed Facebook. Social-oriented sites cultivate customers who start to trust them When one gets acquired by a big comms player, the initial reaction is "I don't want that company's paws on my data." And now you can't guarantee that. All the work -- Pulse -- to free up siloed e-mail contacts is for naught, no?"

This creates all kind of interesting strategic questions.

Could this group of loyal users contaminate the water for Comcast and make gaining traction difficult?

Should they do something and keep them happy?

Should they even care, knowing this is all about scale and buying an application that can take them places and to people who have never even heard of Facebook.

The problem is that in a 2.0 world, these users can make life rather difficult. They are already "educating" people about concerns with Comcast and private data. It's a tough call and going to very difficult for Comcast to deal with.

Posted by Ed Cotton

nike-entering a new era?

Influx Insights — 2008-05-15T16:43:27Z

Nike is a brand that was built on the back of raw emotion of sports, but is it about to change?

Are product performance and technological innovation going to be the drivers from now on?

Take a look at the amazing exhibition the brand is putting on in Beijing that celebrates the 100 most important innovations in the company's history.

In the past, the company has been reluctant to let technology dominate the story, but in this show, it's the star.

Perhaps, the brand feels it needs to demonstrate the substance that lies at the heart of the company and put fear into anyone, especially the smaller Chinese upstarts, that Nike's success isn't something that can be easily copied.

Posted by Ed Cotton

clay shirky's talk about the cognitive surplus

Influx Insights — 2008-05-01T05:12:25Z

Lots of smart thinking in this from Clay Shirky's presentation at the Web 2,0 conference and therefore, plenty to steal, or use and build upon, depending on where you stand.

Posted by Ed Cotton

does you data viz fit your brand?- current tv's does

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T20:11:34Z

Interesting data visualization exercise from the folks at Current TV.

It's a technique that fits the brand.

In 48 seconds they cover the 500 most popular images on current.com.

The length of time the image stays on the screen represents its popularity.

Done as an experiment for the Web 2.0 conference and spotted here.

Posted by Ed Cotton

Notes from Web2.0 Expo 2008 (SF)

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T20:05:48Z

This year felt a lot less hectic than last year. Crowds were noticeably smaller than last year, probably because of the economy. Discounting the crowd size as a factor, the buzz seemed more controlled and thoughtful than last year. The question has shifted, thankfully, from how do we make a mashup and put it on Facebook to how do we make the cloud smarter, easier to use and the same regardless of how you access it. Open standards are the rallying call of the day.

Tim O'Reilly’s keynote was nothing short of inspiring in my opinion. The takeaway: we are at a critical juncture in human technological advancement and we should all concentrate on how to use any and all of the various inputs around us in new and unthought-of of ways to get people useful information in real time, without regard to desktop vs mobile vs refrigerator. He’s encouraging us to all look at the big picture and do something amazing with the mountain of technology that surrounds us. Obviously O’Reilly loves the open source methods for doing these things, as should we all.

From Joseph Smarr’s Web2.0 presentation

Most exciting new technology (stack): OpenId, OAuth, OpenSocial, Google Social Graph API. I attended a great session hosted by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo where he talked being able to login to a site that you’ve never been to before using OpenId and having the site auto-populate your profile with content from your friends already on the site based on your social graph. The need to maintain a spreadsheet full of username and passwords goes away. The need to manually find your friends on the 27th social site you join is gone. The need to give your google login to an application so it can scrape your contacts is gone. You maintain control over how much of your information the site can use via OAuth. Permissions to use your data can be revoked at any time. Eventually everything works this way - one cloud working seamlessly from the user’s perspective with complete control over the profile data. There’s been a lot of coverage about OpenSocial and OpenId already this year, but to brainstorm about what these technologies could actually do together is exciting.

Mesh from Microsoft makes your data available 'anywhere' you want it and should be interesting. It was kind of funny how much prominence the mac user had in the promo video they showed though. Can’t wait to have my files synced everywhere I go. The little bit they talked about the smarts built into the technology sounded interesting as well.

How to make money by the pallet: Dash’s ability to glean (and then sell) specific search queries from in car GPS units to companies wondering where they should build their next franchise as demo’d with aggregated Starbucks searches along an Arkansas highway.

Posted by Josh Brewer

the congnitive surplus

Influx Insights — 2008-04-28T04:03:46Z

Some great thinking from Clay Shirky on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads....

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? "

It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!

From a version of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week.

Posted by Ed Cotton

play is the thing- dopplr's matt jones

Influx Insights — 2008-04-24T14:57:09Z

Matt Jones, one of the founders of the hip, travel-based social network, Dopplr, spoke at last night's IXDA event in San Francisco.

His presentation was a sort of biography meets sources of inspiration ramble, but it was good.

Jones, worked for three years (2003-2006) in Nokia's design research team spent a lot of time talking and learning about play, a core project he'd been involved in for a couple of years.

Nokia started by searching for universal human experiences something that required no research, just a book, Human Universals by Donald Brown that lists all the commonalities that exist in the human world. Matt and his team discovered there was a lot of global commonality in play which suited Nokia because at the time, it was searching for its own space in gaming.

While Jones and his gang came up with a lot of trend-right directions/themes (social networking, hacking, just-in-time situationalists, reclaim the streets,mundane is the new fun, etc) it appears the only thing that Nokia had on its mind was the doomed N-Gage.

This play project seems to have informed Matt's philosophy for design, he used the idea/quote of Play= Improvisation + Exploring, to make the link back to the design world.

He suggests that most people don't take play seriously, but play is the best way people learn and is all around us. It's the thing that can make experiences sticky and compelling, if you know how to use it right.

He had some nice examples;

The Prius dashboard "makes MPG, the new high score"

Dopplr's brand identity that is personalized for each user and changes as their behavior changes

Playfulness in copy on Dopplr- "July, no trips, we envy you."

As a distraction, Jones talked about his sideline projects for Welsh clothing company, Howies; a computer meets printer meets conveyor belt thingy that spits out Flickr images tagged with Howies. (Russell Davies is a co-conspirator on this).

Another project revolves around creating a map chest for the Howies London store complete with bugs, mid wind speed monitors and web cam feeds from Welsh surfing breaks. His inspiration was to stop the Howies people from becoming homesick for their roots when they were in Central London.

He ended with an interesting thought about the current vogue for the Big Idea, which he doesn't really believe in, instead he feels it's much more about the details and nuances, which are hard to get right and hard to copy.

Posted by Ed Cotton

htc seeks the impossible

Influx Insights — 2008-04-22T22:03:40Z

HTC is a company that up until recently manufactured products for other brands in the handset world.

HTC now wants to break out on its own and is looking not only to develop its own brand, but also position its products as viable alternatives to Apple's iPhone.

That's tough.

Posted by Ed Cotton

the data of love

Influx Insights — 2008-04-21T00:33:08Z

"I Want You To Want Me", by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition.

It examines and organizes data from online dating sites and reveals some deep insights into who we are and what we are looking for.

Of course, it also shows us how data can be turned into art.

Posted by Ed Cotton

what if products could twitter?

Influx Insights — 2008-04-16T14:17:55Z

There's an interesting story on Textually about kettles that send messages.

A group that represents the elderly in Australia is looking at some technology that can send a message from a kettle.

The thought being that every time the elderly person makes a cup of tea a message is sent to their children, letting them know that they are OK.

I think the idea of thinking laterally about how information generated by a product can have additional uses is really smart.

Then there's the thought of our products telling us when they need things; cars needing servicing is something we have already, refrigerators needing replenishing is something that's often talked about.

As chip technology gets ever smaller and cheaper, it's possible that most things will have the ability to share information with their owners. Even something as simple as deodorant bottle could send you a "money off next purchase" message when it's running low.

Hopefully, not applications will be as crass and promotional and its worth thinking about what a product might say to its owner if it could talk and how some of those things might be useful.

This might lead to a whole new world for Twitter.

Posted by Ed Cotton

wii hacks

Influx Insights — 2008-04-15T22:19:33Z

I am interested in the idea of brands delivering something in their products that I am terming- malleability.

Meaning, do they allow themselves to be easily adapted and changed for new uses?

This is basically hacking.

The Wii is one of the more interesting ones of the moment because of its cultural presence and the interesting infa red and motion sensing technology that it has.

Here Johnny Lee shows a stunned audience at this year's TED conference, a couple of very cool hacks.

I think his comment about spreading the hacks through YouTube is especially relevant.

Brands could create whole ecosystems with communities of users who play, develop and share ideas in this way.

Perhaps, it's no longer about a closed box, but something that's open and can be constantly played with and its limits tested and explored.

Posted by Ed Cotton

dazzling mobile phone stats from nokia

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T22:59:06Z

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

jan chipchase- the life of a digital nomad

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T21:53:23Z

Nice piece from The Economist that follows the life of Nokia's Jan Chipchase (see our previous post)

It's a film that uses photos and a phone recording.

Jan offers his observations on technology in his work life and life in general.

Posted by Ed Cotton

ingenuity in developing markets

Influx Insights — 2008-04-11T19:37:35Z

I was fortunate enough to attend Jan Chipchase's Street Hacks (avail for download from his site) presentation at Adaptive Path the other night.

He's Nokia's resident field researcher/ethnographer.

His function is to help Nokia better understand how people use mobile phone and identify potential opportunities.

In his presentation he shared some great examples of how people in the developing world are adapting/hacking and playing with limited resources to deliver experiences they want and need.

Here are some of his examples;

1. Not An Official Product: Two SIM cards on the space of a single SIM so users can switch between providers

2. Stealing Electricity, but with a Meter- from Brazil- It costs to add the meter, but having the meter gives you an address and the "rights" from having an address.

3. A system for airtime transfer gets turned by its users into a banking system- Africa- people can send airtime quicker than money and in towns and villages, individuals exchange that airtime for cash.

Posted by Ed Cotton

we are hard-wired to be info junkies

Influx Insights — 2008-04-02T16:54:26Z

There's a good piece in the WSJ about research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.

His research has found that we crave information, just like we crave food. If there's lots of information to look at and digest, we seem hard-wired to enjoy wallowing in it. This explains why fundamental disloyalty and clicking away from a site to something else is so attractive to us.

It suggests that the experiences we create for brands should be multi-dimensional and give the user more control, rather than something that's tightly edited.

It appears that we are happiest when we roam and don't want to be boxed in.

"In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.' "

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives."

Posted by Ed Cotton