kip/bot/blog

IBM recently rolled out a customer intelligence appliance (optimized for price and analytics) for retailers struggling with merging its large to big data. Interesting to me for three reasons: 1) creating an appliance for retailers of many sizes shows a big commitment to a hardware/software/consulting mix in the space; 2) IBM’s attempt to jazz it up and make it friendlier, and most interesting 3):

“70 percent of a customer’s first interaction with a product or service takes place online,”

Here is why we need to move into a-centric, non-linear, emergent thinking for customer purchase behaviors. For more than 2/3 of product awareness moments, a digital touchpoint will be the first go/no-go point or consider/shunt out of memory moment for a consumer.

The Future Belongs to the Curious from Skillshare on Vimeo.

Love it. Sleepy conveyor to the beginning of the cycle. Mad careening zig-zag path with randomizations from friction and other factors of physics. Slow to the end. Back to the sleepy conveyor.

From a friend, who had just clicked that he didn’t like a song, this weak “contextual” and “relevant” ad:

Another moment around why big marketing and ad ideas aren’t the center of consumer thinking. Here’s Steve Jobs halfway through his presentation of Apple’s new cloud offering.

The arc of the presentation was simple and functional: 1) the PC was the hub of digital life; 2) then other devices became equally important; 3) putting the PC at the center of today’s digital life (managing photos, songs, docs, etc.) was creating headaches; 4) so they came up with a cloud solution; and 5) “it just works”.

Rousing applause. No emotional tear-jerking, no story, no clever catchphrase. If Apple can solve the increasingly annoying and difficult issue of syncing, that will be its own ad campaign.

I’m working on a talk for Ignite NYC 2012 next week and I could use two kinds of help. My talk is:

Kip Voytek: Shallows, Echoes, and Inner Space

I love the internet, “new media”, code, games, and gadgets. But after seeing Derek Jacobi in King Lear at BAM, I felt an aliveness that went down to my toetips and lasted well into the next day. Going deep (not the shallows), going far afield (beyond my social media echo chamber), and being inner – I want balance with all the cool web stuff I do, and with extremely limited (and dwindling time). My first pass at finding that energizing mix – with the help of the internet and other media, even.

Kip is an SVP doing digital innovation stuff in advertising. He’s been a creative director, a copywriter, a Congressional speechwriter, a computer game designer, and union organizer.

I actually submitted this idea while I was still buzzing from King Lear and I had no idea what the answer was. While most people are like, dude, you gotta unplug” or “buy some more theater tickets, whatever”, I’m determined to try and find similar buzzes (or nourishment) through digital means. I’ve had some deeply satisfying and lasting experiences on the computer (the Beethoven’s Ninth CD-ROM, MYST, Journeyman Project Turbo, The Last Express), but those seem a long time ago on a platform far, far away.

Anyway, I want to find a Carl Sagan quote that I read many moons ago. I’m pretty sure it’s from Broca’s Brain or Dragons of Eden. The line occurs when Sagan is describing a science problem that can be held in your head and reasoned out – without lab equipment or doing lots of math on a whiteboard. He says something like “this is the kind of problem that’s fun to think about while you’re walking in woods on a winter day.” It struck me as terribly romantic and, so, stuck with me. Anyone have that quote or remember some context?

Also, if anyone has shared a similar goal: getting past the sugar highs of digital and finding more fulfilling, full-person, satisfactions, I’d love to hear them.

For months, there has been a box visible from my office which has – if you can believe – an unopened makerbot! My company bought a bunch and gave them to partners and we kept one for ourselves. So, this weekend, I will put it together, learn the minimum amount of CAD and make cool, precise-edged, plastic blobs!

I’m a big fan of Bre Pettis and his whole sensibility about DIY, and the welcome letter to the Makerbot (specifically, the Cupcake) is infused with that charming sense of play and discovery:

#psyched #dorkfest

Best part starts at 2:20:

I love this commercial:

A few days ago, I posted some critical comments about the data visualization techniques used in an iPad app. The designer responded (the links can be found in the post) and it highlighted some larger design issues.

There is no longer a dichotomy of stats-people and civilians. Everyone is surrounded by data and everyone is increasingly using data and, with it, data visualization. The commercial above highlights this amusingly, Steven Johnson writes about it in Everything Bad is Good for You, and newspapers and TV news outlets are building teams to define that new literacy.

All info-graphics and data visualizations have the same standards: to bring meaning to the data or turn that data into a story. While the goal of the content may change and the technical proficiency of the audiences may vary, those two standards apply universally. New info-graphic techniques should improve the meaning or the story-telling ability of earlier techniques. When we replace an efficient, clear, easy-to-scan table with a map containing blobs, there needs to be an improvement in either or both of those criteria.

Tufte is not a statistician’s statistician, he’s more the Orwell of the data-literate age. Having referenced Tufte in my earlier post, I got hit with a lot of comments about ivory tower, academic approaches, and statistical wonkiness. The truth is, Tufte studies a whole range of data visualizations from restaurant menus to ballots to subway maps to train time tables to sun spot charts. Throughout his writing, he rails, like Orwell, against data treatment that obscures meaning, muddles thought, or deliberately distorts. For Tufte, and you see this most clearly in his analysis of the Space Shuttle disaster, there’s an ethical responsibility to be clear and accessible to as broad an audience as possible.

Anyway, I just love that commercial. It shows as clearly as anything that people love richness, complexity, and depth in their content.