From the department of “you heard it here first,” a few observations.

First, the personal laptop PC is dead. Not a big insight, really. We all kind of know this with people buying tablet devices, though its basically a zero-sum gain with folks spending their time on one device over another. I’m seeing less and less laptops out in the world; consumer PCs in general are a dying breed. Just look at the recent earnings reports of some of the largest PC manufacturers for hard evidence of category turmoil. At a recent conference I attended I saw exactly two laptops in sessions, along with a smattering of tablets devices and smart phones.

Second, and more importantly, the conference’s rooms were filled with attendees writing on “writing tablets.” Yellow legal pads and blank notebooks such as Moleskine. Most of the people were hand writing! I thought I had been transported back twenty years. I noticed people were not just writing long-hand, but also drawing symbols and related graphical mnemonics to represent information they were taking down. Learning was non-linear and more holisitic using personalized cognitive script. 

On my return to the office, I mentioned this to a colleague and she said lately people in her graduate program at Duke have switched from laptops to paper tablets to take class notes. I find this fascinating. What’s up?

Have we hit a ceiling with electronic devices as information sources? Is the recent proliferation of managing social media returning us to the locus of self in order to process more critical information processing situations? Are we just bored with ‘things?’ Whatever it is, I’m keeping an eye on this…

Television shows tend to follow a cycle.  In the nineties there were several shows with the same concept circling around a group of friends like “Seinfeld, “Friends”, and “Will and Grace” that were popular and thrived in their time.  Then came the forensic crime investigation shows like “CSI”, some of which still air today.  I believe that today we live under two reigns, the mockumentary and the supernaturals.  Between “The Office”, “Modern Family”, “Grimm”, “True Blood”, and “Once Upon a Time”,  the same type of shows dominate networks as well as top the charts for prime-time television.  Shows like “Terra Nova” are too diverse and therefore too distinct for audiences.  I believe this is why most shows see the chopping block.  As viewers, we find a rut and become obsessed with the same type of shows. Maybe one day television will become dominated with pre-historic survival shows and “Terra Nova” might have made the cut.

Check out information on other shows that were cut here.

The Sony SmartWatch is out and links to Sony Android phones (and some others) while on Kickstarter, an E-Paper Watch called the Pebble didn’t just raise the $100,000 it was seeking, it raised over $10 million.

While we’re being inundated with the idea that Smart devices will be everywhere shortly, the idea of adding functionality to the watch (and a new notification screen to the phone) seems like an actual innovation we should have seen long ago. It will be interesting to see how many other seemingly mundane devices will follow.

But numbers themselves don’t lie, people do. What’s even worse is when certain numbers are removed wholesale from data sets. You really don’t see this happen in market reseach studies. If so, the data is usually incorrectly defined when collected, and the collection is usually redone. But it sure does happen with the U.S. government. Especially, it seems, with really important numbers they share with the general population. Bellweather benchmarks numbers of how the country is doing.

A great example is the official unemployment rate. Big news nowadays given the sluggish economy; big news in a presedential election year. Up until 1994 reporting was, give or take, a number representing the percentage of those not in school of legal and unretired work age who were unemployed. Then, for whatever reasons, the method for calculating this number was changed, overnight, by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They removed what was termed “discouraged workers.”

Take the U.S. unemployment number (chart, right). The red line (U.3) is what the goverment says is going on, the official number that is reported., i.e., the monthly headline number we all read. The gray line (U.6) includes “short-term discouraged workers,” those seeking full-time employment, but only employed part-time, i.e., the ‘under-employed’ that was once only Christmas help and jobs for schoolkids. This number is not included in unemployment statistics, nor is it reported. A big difference. The blue line (SGS) includes “long-term discouraged workers” defined as “those who have looked for work in the past 12 months, but are not currently looking because of real or perceived poor employment prospects,” i.e., those who’ve tried everthing they know, and don’t know what to do. Or, in other words, lots of my freinds who have been out of work for a while. This number is not included in unemployment statistics, nor is it reported. A huge difference that is baffling.

A great place to dig and find the numbers that may better reflect what’s really going is “Shadow Government Statistics.” Sure, it may have a bit of an anti-government conspiratorial tone, but offers food for thought…

Watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson educate Richard Dawkins on the importance of understanding context when “teaching” others. Tyson makes a wonderful point about the difference between information and persuasion.

Looking for a week in Europe this summer? Don’t want to get stuck in overcrowded hotels, cueing for expensive meals served by less then caring staff? Looking to “get away from it all” but meet a cross section of interesting gregarious Europeans? I have the perfect solution, travel to Nowhere.

Set in the northern Spanish wilderness, Nowhere is an arts festival. But it’s quite different than the usual wine and cheese gallery stroll throught Le Marais or a day at the Tate Modern.  Instead, Nowhere is descibed as “an experiment in creative freedom, participation and cash-free community, conceived, built, experienced and returned to nothing by you.” If this intrigues you, you may end up having a very different summer vacation.

To get the data for the graphic, Netbase analyzed 27 billion online conversations taking place over the course of one year. After the conversations were observed and collected, Netbase used natural language processing to search for the phrase “I want X.” The data was then analyzed and compiled into a top ten list for each sex.

Think you know what women and men want most? Keep reading to find out.

It’s official! The next Planning-ness conference will be held May 17 & 18 in LA (Santa Monica, to be precise) at the Annenberg Community Beach House (to be even more precise), right on the beach off the PCH. Tickets go on sale April 9, not before, at: www.planningness.com.  

As is always the case, get your tickets early. This event sells out, fast! We cap attendance at a couple of hundred, and that’s it. No more. And as usual, it’s a real deal, with individual tickets priced at a couple hundred dollars each. A steal.

Refer to the conference website for updates on speakers (we’re lining them up now) and other fun events (ditto…). If you’ve never attended Planning-ness and want to get a feel for the event, check out the website for profiles of last year’s speakers and the like. The conference is a bit ‘different,’ as you’ll have to be involved throughout. We’ve designed it in such a way that you can’t really be banging away on your phone or be otherwise disengaged. And you might actually take something away from it, too.

But not all people agree. Michael Moyer wrote a blog for Scientific American in which he agrees with Krulwich that there is no single wavelength that appears pink and that pink is not “out there” but he agrees for different reasons. He brings up the point that no color is really “out there” because color is all in your brain. Referring to the biologist Timothy H. Goldsmith’s article “What Birds See”, Moyer quotes, “Color is not actually a property of light or of objects that reflect light. It is a sensation that arises within the brain.” Therefore, pink may or may not be real, but if that’s the case all other colors are or are not real.

Interesting perspectives from both parties but I’m going to stick with the fact that I love pink and that’s that. Whether it’s a figment of my imagination or just the way our brains work or both, as long as I get my pink flip flops, I’m a happy camper.

It’s true. We give little thought to what we do, once done. It doesn’t mean we can’t reflect and think or feel about what we’ve done, it’s just that we easily continue to ‘do.’ And once we do anything enough, it’s tough to stop.

Lehrer points out that recent scientific inquiry is coming to the consensus that habits are really just an extreme form of learning. Like those of us who swim or play the piano a lot, once you have it down, you just go at it.

The same may be true for shopping and the brands we buy. Products that communicate and convey messaging in line with our habitual natures are likely successes. Lehrer points to a case from Charle’s Duhigg’s recent book “The Power of Habit” where the P&G brand Febreze didn’t become a hit until it incorporated habitual behavior into its product messaging.

Seems that consumers neither understood the product nor its benefits when it debuted. That’s until P&G  revamped the advertising campaign to bundle its use with perfoming the usual household chores of making the bed, cleaning the kitchen floor, and then spritizing Febreze into the air as part of the usual routine. Nothing new, but an integral part of habitual weekend cleaning. Bingo!

The lesson learned? Don’t make ‘too’ much out of your product or service.  We see a lot of that here at W5. Clients spending so much time on differientating themselves or making their product or service special and novel. The goal, we think, is rather to communicate that it’s a part of the norm, the ordinary, the mundane of every day; bundle the product into accepted habits and practices: find a slot in the routine of people’s life, highlight it in a nuanced manner, and you’re home free. You are swimming with the tide.