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It seems these days that relying on logic and facts to do business is not quite enough to paint a complete picture. Business persons who default to the right-brained, intuitive sensibility are becoming more prevalent, so much that products and business processes are being adapted to meet their needs. One such invention is called Prezi, the newest presentation generator created by Adam Somlai-Fischer and Peter Halacsy in 2007. This platform allows presenters to create a free-flowing, organic form of presentation that is more interactive than a typical linear slideshow. You begin with a canvas in which to write ideas, post pictures and videos, or create timelines. The play arrow allows the presenter to advance from one idea to the next by zooming in and out, sliding forward or backward, or by animating the image or words. Moreover, one can click into the canvas at any point to emphasis an image or return to an idea.
Several reviews have been written about Prezi from different standpoints, the business model standpoint being from the Harvard Business Review and the technology standpoint being from the New York Times. In addition to these, from a marketing standpoint, Prezi has significantly changed the face of typical idea-sharing. The interface allows the presenter to engage the audience with an interactive story instead of simply clicking and advancing from one thought to the next. The organic platform lends itself to being more visual in nature; therefore it has more appeal and retains attention longer. Prezi creators took into account the new creative “big picture” mindset of professionals, stating that they learn from culture first, and then react by using technology. Overall, this program is well worth the fee if any business professional wishes to set their ideas apart from the crowd in the newest, most creative way.
I gave up reading books that can be found in the business/advertising/marketing section of the bookstore a while back. Most of the books you find in that section should have never been written in the first place: authors rehashing their previous work, self-help for the cubicle crowd, and whatever flavor of behavioral psychology is cool this month. I also posit that the original, interesting books in this section are likely to be rambling, 300 page tomes that would work better as 8 page articles in the New Yorker.
So, with few exceptions, the New York Times Business Bestseller List is dead to me. One of those exceptions is Rework, from the founders of 37signals (and the masterminds behind the best blog in the world, signal vs. noise).
Rework is essentially a collection of a hundred or so brief essays on how they do business. Anyone who has read their blog knows that they are feisty, irreverent, critical, and, in the end, brutally honest and usually right. The essays are no different. From advice on how to nurture office culture, to their thoughts on the futility of meeting and conference calls, they lay it all out there for the reader to do with as they please.
I have a strong suspicion that anyone who read this book and tried to follow their lead word for word would fail – miserably. Taken with a level head and grain of salt, however, the book is filled with provocations that will change the way they go about their life at work.
Here is a brief PDF excerpt from the book. Enjoy.
We’ve laid off the “Infographic of the Day” posts for awhile, as so many other blogs feature similar content. This one demanded attention though. The information itself is important and interesting, but I found the interactive functions of this home energy use tool to be so well-designed that I couldn’t pass up the chance to pass it along. This infographic works in three dimensions: question asked (there are 4 options); appliances selected and their individual data; and the running total usage at the bottom. If only there was a way for the user to indicate when they own multiples of these products…
Click through and around to assess your home’s energy usage:
A little Friday afternoon ribbing – graph-er to photographer. Click through for a closer look and the sourcing path.
As a researcher and a cyclist, I was doubly interested in this Slate article about the absence of fixed-gear, or fixie, bicycles in China. (For those of you not familiar with the hipster fixie trend, here’s a quick primer.) While the article is ostensibly about this one product in this one country, it makes a larger point about trends and cultural context.
What is “cool” and “trendy” to one audience can be “weird” and “useless” to another. And this is not just true when comparing Brooklyn and Beijing. In research, subtle differences in demography can have huge effects on the perceptions of a product. Considering the cultural context in which we operate is always key.
Even the ‘screw it all’ attitude of British punk rock had a business element to it, money was to be made. And no one was more aware of this, and arguably more important in developing, packaging, and selling punk to the world media than Malcolm McLaren. Malcolm died yesterday of cancer at age 64.
Malcolm was the original “cool hunter” for no one could sniff out a trend more effectvely. I can’t even begin to account for the ripple effect he’s had on today’s world of music, fashion, advertising, and general culture. Like the name of the company his son founded, Malcolm was an Agent Provocateur.
God rest his provocative soul, for the business world could sure use a few more Malcolms and a heck of a lot less of everyone else…
Since everyone else seems to be talking about this spot, I figured I’d throw my two cents in. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s simple…Tiger stares into camera. Tiger’s dead father provides the voiceover. Cameras flash. Simple.
Most of the comments I’m seeing are critical, to say the least. Take this New York Times article:
“Did you learn anything?” Earl Woods asks. A valuable question, and one that his son has attempted to answer in his no-questions news conference in February; his brief interviews with ESPN and the Golf Channel last month; and his pre-Masters news conference on Monday.
But the answer to the father’s question appears to be that serial philandering and addiction rehab can be positioned as a commodity — and that you can roll it out in phases leading to the Nike amendment to the 12 steps: a TV commercial.
Personally, I like the spot. It’s an apology, a glimpse into Tiger’s conscience, and a return to the spotlight all rolled into one. When I read the criticism, I have to wonder what people expected. Short of keeping one of their marquee endorsers on the bench, or cutting him loose altogether, this was the only thing Nike could do.
Nike frames him as the fallen hero. Anything else would have been an outrage.
I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts. The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)
But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.
“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman
I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.” I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.
You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics. Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!
Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them! Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!
