Infomagination

IBM: a clever campaign for a Smarter Planet

In the face of an ever-increasing tidal wave of data, companies today have two choices: drown, or learn to surf.  Now, whilst most of us are trying to keep our heads above water, the ones who got started early are out there pulling tricks.  One such company is IBM.

In a campaign that's just launched in the UK (although I think the States have had it for a while now) IBM have come out in force to celebrate the information revolution and showcase the ways it's changing our world for the better.  The message is that IBM are on a mission to create a "Smarter Planet" - and personally, I think it's a very clever campaign indeed.

As well as feeling fresh and engaging, whilst true to IBM's fairly corporate image, Smarter Planet is effectively a land grab around the clever use of information for the benefit of society - a positioning which should only become more powerful and relevant in the years to come. 

At a time when fear of information remains rife, the use of ordinary people and IBM employees is also smart, as their humanity and warmth should help conquer concerns that this data driven future will be mechanical and cold.  If I was an IBM employee it would also help me feel like a bit of a rock star - and proud, passionate employees are some of the best adverts you can get for any company.

Smarter Planet is a big, rich and interesting idea that IBM have already begun exploring in lots of ways.   Here are just a few to get you started - from the launch manifesto to the ways that information will revolutionise healthcare. 

Enjoy!

Data as seductive material

Great slideshare from Matt Jones, one of the guys who set up Dopplr, about the ever increasing size of our "data shadows," the power and opportunity in the world's data and the danger of making the way we represent our data more seductive than the truth...  Well worth a flick through.

Data as Seductive Material, Spring Summit, Umeå March09

Microsoft predicts data a-go-go by 2019

Anyone whose wondering what all this "Age of Infomagination" malarky is about should check out this video from the guys at Microsoft Labs.  According to them, by 2019 we'll have a veritable orgy of inter-connected, interactive information, quite literally at our fingertips:

Looks like the future is shaping up to be a pretty exciting place.  So let's get making it!

PS  If you like this, have a watch of the longer sister video on John's blog.  Props to him & the Faris Twitterers for digging it up.

Word of the day: Dopplr

If you wanna keep up to date with stuff, keep up with someone whose up to date.  That's what I say. 

With that in mind, it's always worth reading Russell Davies' columns in Campaign - and today he mentioned two very tasty data tidbits in his "Totally Made-up and Spurious Awards for Excellence in the Fields of Media and Digitally Type Stuff."  One of them, a way of getting your plant to twitter you if it needs watering, I'd heard of before.  The other, which won Russell's award for "Delighting with Data", was a new one on me.  And that's why my word of the day is "Dopplr".

Dopplr is a social network for regular travellers.  You sign up, you tell it what trips you have planned and it gives you handy information about the place you're going and tells you if anyone you know is goingto be nearby (once they're signed up too).  I signed up today and it's already given me some interesting info about where to go and where to stay in Paris, for my trip there next week.

Dopplr is a great example of a brand mashing up your personal data with other data out there in the world to provide a useful and interesting service.  As I've said before, the future is about brands using data to their customer's advantage, rather than their own.  It's also another example of how brands can stoke our interest in analysing ourselves - as proven by Dopplr's annual reports, where you're given an awesome infographic breaking down your yearly travels.  Brandon Schauer, of US experiential agency Adaptive Path, describes receiving his report as a "long wow" moment, that's made him more loyal to the brand as a result.  Check out the report that Dopplr made for Barrack Obama for an example:

Makes your bank statement, telephone bill and Tesco Clubcard report look kinda dull, doesn't it?!  Yep, what all this tells us is that established brands have much to learn about Delighting with Data.  At the moment it's the new brands, like Dopplr, who are doing most of the innovating - but surely lastminute.com or BA could have gotten there first, if only they were quicker off the mark?  This, of course, is where we come in.  If we can make the leap from keeping up with the latest to getting our clients excited about it, then hopefully we won't be stuck reading about the future when we could be out there making it.

The panic and promise of mobile location data

 

This is the first thing I read on my way to work today.  Not only has a rather fetching young man/lady just set the record for the youngest ever sex change, but Google is putting a "spy" in my pocket.  Bejesus!  On the one hand I'm heartened that broader acceptance of gender issues has led to at least one confused young person finding happiness, on the other I'm disappointed in the continued sensationalisation that characterises reporting around personal information.  What a morning!

To give you a quick summary of the story, basically Google Latitude is piece of software that allows users to track their friend's whereabouts in 27 countries worldwide once they've installed in on their phone.  Users will have to sign up to the service and can agree to give contacts their precise location, their city or no details.  Only the most recent information is given and none of the information is stored.  Interesting, but not actually new.  Yahoo! Fire Eagle has been doing all that stuff for a while now.  Followus is a whole service dedicated to offering parents and companies the option to track their kids/workers using their mobile phone data.

What the newspaper reports seem to miss is how useful this kind of information could be to the people.  Aside from making meeting up with your mates much easier, once you don't have to tell your phone where you are, then it can quite easily tell you how to get somewhere else, or where the nearest pubs or places of interest are near you.  It could also help you with your shopping, find you a nearby cab, or facilitate real world gaming.  The reason many people are so worried about sharing information is because they don't realise what the benefits will be.  As this chart from the Institute for Insight in the Public Services shows, however, once people know that they'll be getting better service in return then perceptions of data sharing change dramatically.

Data is an unsettling, scary world for a lot of people, but whilst being wary of the issues around supplying personal information we shouldn't forget the benefits that it can bring.  For brands, the lesson is to be clear and up front about what kind of information you're gathering, how it will be stored and how people will benefit as a result.  Only then will people realise that if Google are putting a spy in your pocket, it's only so he can work for you.

Data that tells you who you are

A little while ago, my friend John and I were chatting about the marvels of Last.fm (the social music website that monitors what music you're listening to so it can recommend you new stuff) and John made an interesting observation - that this kind of data doesn't just report on what you do, it tells you who you are.

John's right.  Data's not just helping us understand the world, but ourselves.  New ways of capturing information about our behaviour are throwing a mirror on our lives like never before; telling us what we like, how we act and what we do, rather than what we think or claim we do (even if why we do some things is still a bit of a mystery!).

In the past, if someone asked me what music I listened to, I might have been biased by what I'd been listening to recently, what was popular or what I thought they liked.  Now, Last.fm will tell me what I've really been listening to at the click of a button and how that compares to other people.  Naturally, there's a big, long tail, but here's my top artists right now.  Maybe they'll help you get to know me a little better?

But why stop at music?  Everyone's favourite database, Facebook, has an increasing array of tools to help you analyse the information you put into it.  The one I've discovered most recently is TouchGraph, which turns your social network data into a map that lets you see how all your friends are connected.  So this is my Facebook life, at a glance.  Suddenly, I can tell you that there's about 10 groups of people I mix with online - with my current workmates being the biggest.  It'd be interesting to try this again in a few years, to see how much changes!

 

If friends and relationships are all a bit big for you, why not check out Mycrocosm - a website developed by MIT that helps you share information from the minutiae of daily life, all in the form of simple graphs.  Ever feel like analysing where you drink your coffee, how much sleep you get or what you have for dinner?  Well this one's for you..! 

 

The quest to understand who we are has been at the cornerstone of enlightenment ever since the Ancient Greeks inscribed the Temple of Apollo with a deceptively simple instruction: "Know Yourself".  Now, whether we're keeping track of our listening tastes, our social connections, our little habits, how fast we jog, how safely we drive or how often we have sex, new tools to report on our behaviour are appearing all the time.  The question, therefore, is not whether we'll know ourselves better in the future - but how much we'd like to know, whether we'll like what we find and what we'll do about it afterwards.

Personally, I've no idea what I'll learn about me - but I do know it's going to be fun finding out.

We live in exponential times

As Ferris Bueller once said, "life moves pretty fast.  You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."  With that in mind, check out this awesome, rapid fire set of stats that takes in the state of play for the planet.  In itself, this shows you how inspiring and enlightening information can be, when it's presented in the right way - and as the film points out, we made more of the stuff this year than in the previous 5,000...

 

 

Watch the world's data EXPLOOOOODE!!!

 

       

Check out this neat little ticker showing the amount of data created in the world since the start of 2008.  It's hard to get your head around figures like 449 TRILLION gigabytes (just this year!) , but as you can see from this report, the avalanche has only just begun:

 

 

 

A tidal wave is upon us.  So do we drown, or learn to surf?