technology

data / inspiration / technology — No Comments
28
Apr 12

Big Data vs. A Lot of Data

The term Big Data is getting thrown around a lot lately. As is the case with buzzwords, people have begun to use the term to describe a broad category of interest, (similar things happened to “innovation”, “social”, and “Web 2.0″.) If this wasn’t enough, add all the hype/marketing from hardware, software, and service firms driving the “importance of Big Data”, and finding any real clarity becomes impossible.

A lot of people seem to be using “big data” as a proxy for systems at scale and the data that comes with those systems. The general suggestion is that if you have a large system with lots of users, there must be patterns hidden in that data. And it follows that those hidden patterns must be worth something to somebody (right?)…so there’s gold in them there digital hills. (So many references to prospecting in the data world; mining, sharding, etc.)

I had the good fortune of hearing Cesar Hidalgo this week the Media Lab. He spends a lot of time thinking about networks and large data sets, and he had some great thoughts on the topic. In his talk, Hidalgo defined a nice framework to distinguish Big Data from a lot of data. He had three simple qualifying questions.

- Do you have size? – This is pretty relative to the problem you’re working on. But it’s usually in the hundreds of thousands/millions of records. You’ll need enough to provide some statistical significance across your population. But the greater the set of data the more edges you may be able to discover.

- Do you have resolution? – This brings some analysis to the data at hand. Just as all rock does not contain gold, all data does not contain (new) patterns. Low-fidelity data might be all customers transitions with order-level (total amount spent, etc). High-fidelity data would be all the customer transitions with item-level data, (the thing the customer purchased to make up the transaction.) Visa has the former and Amazon has the latter, and it’s no surprise Amazon knows you better. High-resolution data will illuminate new patterns, like Target’s recent misstep of identifying a pregnant teen before she could tell her father.

- Do you have scope? – This question starts to consider the reach of your data. Are you only gathering data against a very focused problem, or are you gathering data that will give you insight beyond your core business? Being able to understand patterns outside your immediate market will create new opportunities for understanding. As an example, Hidalgo spoke about telephone companies, who know your calling patterns, but also can also make determinations around mobility patterns because they know which cell towers you’ve used during your day.

So, though there’s a lot of noise around this space there’s a lot to be done here. And as the hardware, software, and services companies wind people up to capture more data, there will be more patterns to discover – this space is very self-fulfilling like that. Along those lines, this stat came up during the talk: 70% of all data captured about people it’s gathered by machines. So as we put more sensors in everything, we’ll push this ratio further.)

Getting beyond the hype, I’m excited to see what type of new patterns emerge from deeper analysis of data. There’s definitely space for data scientists to unearth new patterns that help designers create new experiences. But to be certain, the real opportunity isn’t in Big Data, it’s in gaining better resolution to the problems we’re trying to solve and the markets we’re trying to serve.

(If you’re into this sort of thing, here’s another talk by Cesar Hidalgo. It’s really nice, definitely worth your time.)

Business Design / inspiration / technology — 2 Comments
30
Jan 11

Designed to Disappear

I discovered a really smart phone app this weekend called Glympse. It’s a pretty simple app that helps users share their location. Using your phone you can send an SMS or email to anyone letting them track your location.

In the design of the app, the developers must have really thought hard about people’s hesitance to share their location because they designed a timeline into each notification. So, if we were meeting somewhere and I was running late, I could send you a link that would display my location on map and that link would only work for a configurable amount of time, (say 30 minutes). During that time, as I moved around you could see where I was on the map. After 30 minutes, the link goes dead.

I’m pretty excited about this little bit of functionality because I think we’ve entered into a new phase of how we deal with our connected life. We have so much data and so many connections, sometimes the data or the connection would be better if it wasn’t permanent.

What if the systems that carry more temporal data really started to reflect that data’s ephemerality? Twitter is decent example of a designed to decay system, tweets only hang around for a handful of weeks. What if restaurant reviews created a year ago carried less weight than the ones made last week? What if past-date promotional emails just disappeared from my inbox? I have loads of weak Facebook connections that I wouldn’t miss if they just expired? (No offense, but that let’s me focus on the people I have greater connection with).

Right now we live at the end of the digital firehouse, everything just lands in our lap and we have to decide what to do with it. Some of The most meaningful online interactions mirror their real world counterparts. For the moments that matter now but not later, we will begin to have to design for disappearance.

Half-Baked Ideas / social apps / technology — 1 Comment
1
Dec 10

Grinding out Happpiness

I’ve been wondering what it is about social games that bug me – you know those massively addicting games like Farmville, Maffia Wars, and WeRule. There’s something really fascinating about how these interactions have captured the attention of social circles way beyond the web. It seems like everybody knows somebody whose mom is playing Farmville on Facebook. There’s something simultaneously brilliant and insidious going on in these games, and I think there’s a way to tweak the game design to unlock the good and bury the bad.

Most of the social games we’re seeing today are largely about ‘grind and reward’; you have to farm to get a currency (grind) and then you can trade currency for that little special something to show off to your friends (reward). The props are different, but the mechanics are largely the same. The games are really approachable because anyone with enough patience and tenacity can grind out goods, and the experience is satisfying because in some small way, you’re earned for that reward. In a society of complex tasks and relationships its satisfying the same way cleaning your house might be, or working in your yard. From a distance its mockable, but the experience is real. There are millions of people grinding on virtual farms and frontiers even as you read this. The rewards are satisfying too; people pay real money to buy virtual currency to skip grinding out their rewards.

In certain circles, people have a problem with these sorts of games. You see when you have a grinding mechanic in a game and your repeat the same action over and over, it starts to feel like a little bit of an addictive mechanism. Players are sure to go back to their farms everyday to play and earn goods (and the games are designed to promote that). Just like mindlessly dropping tokens in a slot machine, players head back to their farms just after the cyber veggies have ripened to retrieve them and sell them. Zynga is the darling of the startup world because they’ve figured out how to do something no one else has; they’ve got an algorithm that makes people predictable.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to redesign some of these game mechanics. I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to navigate the tension of making the game exciting enough for people to play often, but make it rewarding and diverse enough and get rid of the grinding. I think if the game designers flipped the scarcity model in the game they could unlock something completely new, I’ll explain.

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openIDEO / technology — 6 Comments
2
Aug 10

Going Open

The last few years has seen quite a few companies build idea generation platforms. Some have gone the semi-open route, retaining a network of participant who will contribute to mostly private challenges. Others have gone radically open, Victor & Spoils and 99 Designs post the actual client briefs calling for entrants to do the work, rewarding a few with the winning ideas. There are some brave experiments going on in this space; it’s a brave new world and no one really knows what’s going to happen here.

Today, IDEO threw it’s hat in ring today launching OpenIDEO. I’m biased, but I think they’ve designed a new evolution for this space. Many sites serve as a platform to capture ideas, but most haven’t truly involved ‘the crowd’ in the process past “hey give me your idea”. OpenIDEO creates Challenges that are designed to lead the community through the design process. Participants contribute inspiration, then generate concepts, and finally help select the best idea in the end. The idea is that everyone can participate as the process diverges and converges toward the final selected solution.

I’m really inspired by the site because it realizes a very important point: ideas aren’t scarce. Now it’s not about gathering tons of those ideas just to collect them, it’s about creating a framework where ideas can inspire each other. I think the smart cookies behind OpenIDEO have nailed this in the site design. The experience basically creates like the largest, most unorthodox design team in the world thinking, submitting, and churning on some really big problems. I have no idea how the site will play out and that’s exactly why I think the site is so important. It’s a big fat social experiment that’s daring, inspired and super smart.

Ok, don’t take my word for it, join in the fun here. There’s two hot challenges up at the moment; one hopes to help Jamie Oliver in his effort to help children improve their diet, the other is aimed at fostering educational tools for the developing world.

inspiration / technology — 1 Comment
23
May 10

Androids, iPhones, and Informal Collusion.

I ran across this recent post on the constant evolution of the Android phone. The post talks a lot about how the Android platform is evolving so rapidly that phones become antiquated pretty quickly. That’s probably not great news for Android customers, but it’s even worse for Google/Android competitors people like Apple.

I started to ask myself this question: If you really wanted to beat Apple, who seems years a head of many phone providers, what would you do? I started to think about Apple’s main Achilles heal – planned obsolescence. Apple may do a lot of radical things, but there’s one thing you can set your watch to; they’ll refresh a product line about every 2-3 years. You can count on each new model to contain amazing new functionality, but that feature set is framed around one single release. (They’re beginning to break this pattern with phone OS updates, but those are rather rare.)

All this Android activity could hit Apple in their weak spot. By using an open platform Google has convinced many providers to constantly evolve a product platform. What this mean is that multiple companies are working to add more customers to the common platform, which will create more apps, and an overall better experience. This open platform is sort of working as an informal collusion amongst many of Apple’s competitors. The platform is their agreement on how the market will evolve. If you notice how rapidly this platform has begun to gain parity with the iPhone experience, you can also see how soon it could actually surpass it. Sure, the fact that the platform doesn’t have walled gardens creates some quality control problem on their apps, but it also allows for some pretty cool features, (mobile, ad hoc wifi networks.)

This made me realize that the products that a company creates can actually be a fleeting advantage. I had a strategy professor in school that used to talk about ‘economic time.’ His big thesis was that no competitive advantage could withstand the tests of time, and you could only create temporary inhibitors (patents will expire, technology will obsolesce, relationships will erode).

As Android (and other open platforms) gain ground, it sort of takes the wind out of planned obsoleteness for Apple. They’re going to have to start pushing more OS updates, they’re going to have to get better carrier partners. They created a solid game, but now a group of players is looking like they’re ready to play harder (which could be rocky for their customers). While working on the same platform will make it more difficult for any one player to surpass the others, that’s still bad news for Apple, who quickly becomes the odd man out.

Apple has a lot of other advantages that hurt the overall Android movement, but if you were Apple, how would you defend?

(Side note: I ran across this ridiculously extensive review of smart phone sales. If you’re interested, you can grab it here.)

markets and models / social apps / technology — No Comments
20
Oct 09

Investing with the Crowd

An interesting article in the NY Times yesterday detailed a tech start-up called KaChing. The site basically allows people to create mock portfolios and try their hand at investing in the market. The big news in the NYT article is that KaChing now allows you to be able to create actual investment portfolios that mimic user portfolios on KaChing.

The site seems to have built some pretty interesting ideas around investor transparency – you can see current holdings and trades, investors are rated on returns over time, etc. The metrics aren’t so different from what’s offered by mutual funds (at least on a quarterly basis), but there’s something very powerful about the service being framed around an actual person. It also allows KaChing to position themselves as an interesting alternative against this big, evil, opaque $10T mutual fund industry.

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social apps / technology — No Comments
11
Aug 09

The Twitter plot thickens

This thing is just getting more and more interesting.

Reason 1: The denial-of-service attack that brought Twitter down, could have awoken a sleeping giant – the fact that Twitter is a single point of failure. If that service goes down, the fun stops…and the internet hates it when the fun stops. This Wired article covers some of the particulars, but this sounds similar to something I wrote a few months ago. Mark my words, this event will ultimately spawn the services that displace twitter. Competitors won’t compete directly with Twitter, they’ll just begin to wrap/mask it.

Reason 2: Tweens aren’t Tweeting. I had seen from some of our internal research that Twitter just wasn’t resonating with younger users, but now these reports corroborate that fact. For me this is interesting because (if this service becomes more than a fad) it will be the first service that a younger generation didn’t bring to an older generation. It’s another incident of technology moving in a bidirectional pattern, (which means our society is reaching some comfort/satuation point with technology, it’s no longer an emergent/youth thing). Clay Shirkey had another great example of bi-directional technology movement in his excellent TED talk (the first story, the one about elections.)

As an aside, here’s a great story of how the Twitter was born. Oddly enough, there was a team in pace to build a different piece of software that ultimately became less and less promising. They had to come up with a different idea mid-stream.

My colleague, Diego Rodriguez commented that Twitter works a little like MMPORGs like World of Warcraft. From a distance, it just looks wierd and socially strange. But if you get into it and try to understand all the underlying principles and interactions, it’s infinitely fascinating. (I’m paraphrasing what he said, but I think he’s dead on.)

social apps / technology — No Comments
23
Apr 09

Bigger than Twitter?

(Warning, heavy nerding ahead….)

So, I’ve been struggling with this Twitter thing for a while. It’s the first piece of technology to gain lots of users that just didn’t feel right to me. I get all the interactions, I get the viral part, I just couldn’t see anything substantive. It’s massively popular, but besides that I can’ see where it’s going (and, like Twitter, I decided to just ignore the “what’s the business model question”).

This post from Grant McCraken has been hanging out in my browser for a few weeks. He has a fascinating point comparing Twitter and the social conventions of puns. I’ll spare you from quoting the whole post (please read it), but this sentence has had me churning since I read it.

Maybe we groan at “twitter” because it represents a cultural confusion, a semantic overload, an immensity of messages too much for our frail cognitive capacity.

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