MIT Advertising Lab reports that Japanese scientists are developing a smell recorder. All you do is point the gizmo at a smelly object, press a button, and the recorder will reproduce the smell using a built-in collection of non-toxic chemicals. Sure, it's easy to see (or smell?) the e-commerce advantages (smell that fruitcake before you send it to Aunt Nellie for Christmas!), but I immediately thought of its uses in gaming. One can only imagine how much more immersive games like Grand Theft Auto or Battlefield 2 would be if you could smell the action as well as see it. "Mmmmm! I love the smell of napalm in the morning! It smells like victory!"

Several weeks back, I wrote about Bill Gates and his decision to step to the side at Microsoft and to focus his attention on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This change seems drastic, but if you think about it, at some level, the two jobs are not all that different: he will continue to whip-up brilliant ploys to eradicate viruses.

So, yes, it is amazing that he is doing this. And the world has a lot to gain by this decision. But recent news of Warren Buffett’s gift of 37.4 billion bucks (that’s 85% of his fortune) to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes Buffett a modern day Robin Hood, and gives the Gates Foundation the teeth and claws to fight a good fight.

Anyway, an unexpected piece of information surfaced from this media swarm. It caught me off guard and it pleased me a lot. Susan Thompson Buffett, Warren’s late wife, was a visionary in her own right. Wow! 68th wealthiest person in America.

Her story was on NPR this morning. Warren’s granddaughter was interviewed and she said that Susan was her greatest inspiration. It turns out that Susan had five principles that she used to navigate her life:

1. Show Up
2. Listen Hard
3. Don’t Lie
4. Do Your Best
5. Don’t Be Attached to the Results

I love it! It’s so simple that I was able to immediately commit them to memory (good thing too because NPR.org’s search engine was not nice to me).

Think about a big recent accomplishment and cross-reference the experience to her principles – you might surprise yourself with the results.

Did I mention that both Susan and Warren are from Omaha? Omawhat? Omawhere?

I am VERY skeptical that this actually works, but it is an entertaining tool nonetheless.

Microsoft has released an online Adcenter tool which can "predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior—that is, from search queries and webpage views."

"flower" is a female oriented search query with a 65% degree of confidence. "Sex" is male oriented search query with a 60% degree of confidence. "attentionscan" produces, not a surprise: "unknown".

http://adlab.microsoft.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx

We've all had to preach it before, to clients or in meetings. "A logo is not a brand. A brand is not a logo."

The notion of a logo "not as an object which will tell every detail of an organization - but as a lens through which people will see it" is a great way to express this.

I've been through the laborious and often overthought process of typeface selection for enough identity projects now to fully appreciate the point being made here. This article
perfectly distinguishes logo from brand, and offers a perfect demonstration to prove its point. A demonstration that might come in handy next time you're facing "design by committee" or dealing with a client who is not fully trusting you to do your job as a designer. When confronted with complaints about a typeface selection ("too generic, too mechanical, too unstylish, too unrefined,") designer, Michael Bierut performed a simple and effective test with a simple sans-serif C.

Read on...

Logos can tell a story of an age. If we take a look at logos from the 50s and 60s they tell a story of the slowly empowered consumer. If we look at 80's logos we can see the powerful rise of finance and the emergence of upstart corporate goliaths such as microsoft and apple. The 90's tell a story of "irrational exuberance" and the emergence of youthful internet bombs.

Web 2.0 logos (and yes, I know, yahoo does not belong among them) show a clumsy adolescence, an awkward period when there are a profusion of "betas" out there and a heartfelt thrill in the technology of connecting people. This collection of logos makes me think of what a iggling bunch of teenage girls might come up with if they were building companies off of a "talking on the phone" business model. But don't get me wrong, I scan these and I see more than a few of them I really like and that I hope I will be enjoying ten years from now.

Look and enjoy.

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=101793494&context=set-72057594060779001&size=l

Labels: Design, Fine Financial Branding

Not long ago, I posted a solution to the problem of finding high resolution versions of logos to use in print pieces. My hack was to basically take large screenshots of logos buried in .pdfs, then manipulate them through channels in Photoshop. I found myself doing this because I couldn't find a good resource for downloading vector based .eps versions that was immediate and free (the two most important issues). Of course, as luck would have it, I found the resource I needed right after the piece went to print.

Brands of the World has an extensive collection of vector based logos of well known brands. It's a great resource worth bookmarking.

Labels: Design

The Chinese have paid a lavish amount of attention to their modern architecture recently, and it is only reasonable to expect them to do the same with the Olympics of 2008.

I really really like the proposed plans for the main Olympic stadium.

Here are my three favorite:

B12

At first glance this one seems unimpressive, but there is much to like. It has a floating roof that rises up and lights at night. There is a gentle angle to the elevation of the seating and the eye travels nicely around the gliding lines of the seating and overhead areas.

B11


This is my favorite. It is a lattice of tightly woven superstructure elements with no façade at all. It is like a bird’s nest or a basket, where the supports become the walls and roof. The flowing lines of the structure create an ambiguity around “inside” and “outside” so that you can catch glimpses of the activities within.

B08


Almost more airport than stadium, this one strikes me as very Olympic. Furthermore, it is BIG, with a capacity to hold 100,000 comfortably. I like its odd organic shape and the way the roof will apparently retract while spinning.

Find out more:
http://www.bjghw.gov.cn/forNationalStadium/indexeng.asp

Labels: Design

What is the internet for? Wasting time, of course.
In this case I just found this addictive collection of 80's music videos.

Betcha can't watch just one.

http://www.worksafevideos.com/music_videos/

Stephen Wiltshire has an almost perfect visual memory matched with an energetic and appealing capacity to draw. Called “idiot savant” in the past, Stephen is autistic, has difficulty communicating and is a successful commercial artist.

"Like other savant artists, Stephen's work depicts exactly what he sees without embellishment, stylization, or interpretation. He makes no notes; impressions are indelibly and faithfully inscribed from a single exposure for later recall and he draws swiftly, beginning anywhere on the page."



In the excerpt of the video I saw he flew over Rome in a helicopter for an hour, and then in the next 3 days proceeded to draw all of the city on a gigantic canvas. It was startlingly accurate, down to the number of windows, arches, columns and how much of the Tiber can be seen from which angle.

Find out more here:
http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/wiltshire.cfm
http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/

Labels: Design

Bill Gates decided yesterday to hang up his hat at Microsoft. He plans to remain a senior advisor to the company, but come 2008, he is more or less hands off.

Billy boy is the architect of the software and arguably the entire computer industry. He found a way to convince a lot of people to buy, use, love and need his products. For as long as I can remember, Billy has caught a lot of slack for flexing his strategic muscles. We all have a lot to learn from this Harvard University drop out – including knowing when to step to the side and let someone else take over. Gates has been having a hard time finding a way to hedge the competition he is getting from other software titans cannibalizing his market share. Microsoft has battalions of geeks lined up to help it remain competitive in an environment where they are not the best player and good software is free.

Bill plans to take a more active strategic role in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation focuses on contributing money for health programs in developing countries and education in the United States.

I can’t wait to see him flex his strategy muscles again. This time, his strategy will be centered on distributing vaccines, not software.

As we're openly discussing, and putting our own processes into place, I thought this was an entertaining, but frighteningly possible series of visuals related to roles and interpretations. This situation is what we can not allow to happen. It's easy to see how the same information can be interpreted, or misinterpreted in so many ways. Different perspectives and agendas ensure this variance. Let's make sure our processes are rigid enough to provide accountability, responsibility, and predictability, but flexible enough to accommodate the wide range of projects we handle and most important, allowing for creativity.

Very timely. Enjoy.

Guy Kawasaki's wonderful post on how to start your own silicon valley hit home for me. Here are some of my favorite points he made, with my thoughts appended:

Stuff you need:

"High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies."

I have ALWAYS thought the reverse was true, that an affordable landscape housing-wise was the best way to foster innovation because the barriers to entry weren't so high. But his point is well taken - if the barriers to comfort are high, then people will work hard to get comfortable.

"Life-threatening enemies. Israel is a speck of dust that has few natural resources, and it’s surrounded by real enemies. And yet the country has produced some of the world’s best technology companies. There’s nothing like a life-threatening environment to get the entrepreneurial juices flowing, I guess."

Risk is a key component to success, sure, but let's not underestimate the effect of "battle fatigue" on an otherwise innovative population. Also, lets focus on causality too: innovation occurs in Israel but we don't see much of it from Lebanon or Iraq.

"Focus on educating engineers. The most important thing you can do is establish a world-class school of engineering. Engineering schools beget engineers. Engineers beget ideas. And ideas beget companies. End of discussion. If I had to point to the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence, it would be Stanford University—specifically, the School of Engineering. Business schools are not of primary importance because MBAs seldom sit around discussing how to change the world with great products."

There are many great engineering schools that haven't fostered this innovative spirit though, and what are some reasons for that? Also, I immediately wonder what a great art or design school might be able to foster. Is it only engineering?

"Encourage immigration. I am a third-generation Japanese American. My family moved here to drive a taxi and clean white people’s homes. If I had a choice between funding someone from a family who moved here from Vietnam whose father and mother run a 7-Eleven versus a descendant of a Mayflower passenger with “IV” in his name, I’ll give you half a guess as to my preference. You need to encourage smart, hungry, and aggressive people to immigrate from around the world. And to do that, you need good schools."

Completely true. There are hungry people all around, people who yearn to build and build big, and as a society we would be damn fools not to scream "build here! please!"

"Celebrate your heroes. Every region needs its heroes. These folks take role modeling to an extreme; they have names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Steve Case, Anita Roddick, and Oprah Winfrey."

We have a hero wall here at the idfive office. It isn't big enough, but maybe someday it will be.

"Forgive your failures. There is no better place to fail in the world than in Silicon Valley. (Where else can you get your clock cleaned by Microsoft and become a venture capitalist and top-ranked blogger?) Indeed, some people here have made a career of failing. Some of this is cultural—failing in Europe or Asia casts a cloud over one’s family for generations. Not in Silicon Valley. Here, it doesn’t matter (within reason) how many times you fail as long as you eventually succeed. So many entrepreneurs who failed went on to create massive successes that we’ve learned that failure is a poor predictor of future results."


I am very big on failure as a learning tool, I think the greatest gift for any kind of builder or creative person is a hefty dose of error tolerance meshed with patience and optimism.


Guy Kawasaki does a great job of telling us how to start our own silicon valley: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/how_to_kick_sil.html

If you curse like a sailor, chances are you'll get through to a live customer service representative more quickly, according to this article on Lifehacker. Apparently most customer service IVR (interactive voice response or "voice jail") systems are programmed to send you through to a person if you use dirty words as a way of lessening customer frustration. How's about just answering the dang phone?

If you don't feel like swearing, you might want to check out Gethuman, a database of "secret" numbers and IVR responses that'll bypass voicejail and connect you to a real person. Bookmark the site, because the list is always growing as visitors add their own "secret" methods.

If you doubt that old media is on the way out, this recent story in AdAge (Google cache link) should change your mind pretty quickly. According to a new study by Bolt Media, only one in four 12-34 year olds can name all four major broadcast networks (that's ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, if you forgot). What are these folks doing? According to Bolt's president Lou Kerner, they're:

...surfing the Internet, which 84% said they did during their idle periods. Hanging out with friends came in second at 76%, watching movies third at 71% and TV viewing fourth at 69%. The five most-watched TV networks were Fox, Comedy Central, ABC, MTV and Cartoon Network. "There's a massive movement going on in people under 30 and how they spend their media time," said Bolt President Lou Kerner, who once upon a time was a cable analyst on Wall Street before leaving to run TV.com and then Bolt. "Our audience spends lots of time on net, creating their own media."

Remember: they might be kids now, but in a very short time these will be the target consumers that advertisers are really going to go after.

Still think those millions spent on TV ads are a good idea?

Labels: Old Media Deathwatch

I've written about the interruption driven workday once before, yet doing so had no effect whatsoever on the amount of distractions and sidebars that occur during my (and I'm sure) everyone else's days. Therefore, I will try again.

I saw this article from the NYT on my new favorite constructive distraction lifehacker then I saw it again at 43 Folders.

There are enough people talking about this that it's easily seen that the non-productive productivity of the day is effecting everyone. This week however, I have found myself actually delivering by focusing on getting one thing done well each day (regardless of my intention to accomplish 3 or 4). Of course there are still the smaller unavoidable tasks like responding to emails and occasionally answering the phone. But I am finding that allocating your time in large chunks is even more imperitive when there seem to be a million things to do.

Wal-Mart has made oodles of dollars by applying some smart and consistent strategies to their operation. They have made significant investments to their infrastructure, information technology, inventory management and distribution. It has paid off. They are a machine.

To play with Wal-Mart, suppliers have to follow strict rules - and when they don’t they lose access to millions of customers worldwide. If you don’t believe me, ask Rubbermaid about their run-in with Wal-Mart several years back.

Competing against Wal-Mart is as promising as the future of broadcast radio. But in their glory, if you take a close look at what they have done to get to the top, their consumer value proposition is one dimensional: price.

Wal-Mart has made an ungodly investment to understand, predict and adjust to inventory. Imagine where they would be if they made a similar investment to understand, predict and adjust to their customers' needs and preferences.

U.K.’s Tesco is as committed to tuning their business supply chain as they are to understanding their consumers. Suddenly, competing with Wal-Mart is not as silly as it first seemed. In fact, Tesco has Wal-Mart on the run in the U.K.

How? They developed an affinity program that tracks and analyzes customers’ purchases. The data is mined in ten billion dimensions, generating personalized coupons. For example, parents of newborns are offered diaper and beer coupons at the same time – because new parents stay home and can’t go to the pubs as much.

With this sophistication, companies can not only offer lower prices but also make more meaningful connections that result in loyal customers. Simple, huh?

In an age where traditional advertising is just not working as well as it used to, data-driven strategies such as Tesco’s take center stage. The data and the analysis Tesco is producing is so strong, that companies such as Coca-Cola and P&G regularly purchase it.

Soon, Tesco might find itself selling groceries so that it can sell data.

This is a screen shot of my tag cloud on del.icio.us, and it shows in point-size relationships the weight I have given specific tags in my “favorites” collection. If you are just seeing this tag-cloud phenomenon for the first time, I advise that you click around the blogsphere, there are some robust and exciting ones out there. To see my live tag cloud, go to my page here:

What is quite nice about tag clouds is that the numeric emphasis is translated into simple visual cues of point size. Tag clouds are actually an information graphic. That is, the tags “Flash” and “design” are important to me, and you can immediately see that just by looking. In the case of my tag cloud I have added the number of occurrences so you can see how the point size is weighted by the frequency.

So why is this compelling? Well, I think it is visually tantalizing, and seduces some clicks, but it also gives a fuller window into the purpose and elegance that is del.icio.us. Recently dubbed “Folksonomies” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy ), del.icio.us is one of many popular collaborative labeling efforts that tries to categorize and give common nomenclature to emerging memes. Or in terser language: folksonomies name what’s cool.

Why do I find del.icio.us interesting? Because it is as if there were a whole bunch of eager people naming the things they care about, and I find, with pleasure, that their words for things teaches me almost as much as the things themselves.

A great description of the advantages, explained in readily understood language, can be found here:

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/interview_with_experts_whats_so_cool_about_delicious.html

If you listen to all the Web 2.0 hype floating around out there you'd think that we're about one AJAX app away from the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, with peace, love, and free beer for all. That may or may not be true (I'm personally coming down on the side of "not"), but one has to admit that the plethora of new Web sites based around online services and (more importantly) social interaction and collaboration are pretty cool. One glance at the traffic stats for Web2.0 poster site YouTube will show you that a lot of other people think so too. The combination of social interaction with remote collaboration to accomplish shared goals is a pretty effective way to get some serious work (and play) done.

Of course, this kind of thing has been going on for a while now with distributed computing projects like SETI@Home, Rosetta@Home, and even the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, all projects that attempt to use a large number of computers spread out across the Internet to accomplish a task. Now Texas Governor Rick Perry has a new idea: use thousands of Web cams available to anyone online to surveil the border between Texas and Mexico.

It seems like a pretty simple idea to use cheaply available technology and unpaid human volunteers to patrol the biggest single-state border in the US. Citizens see some illegal crossers, dial a toll-free number, and the deputies roll in.

Ummm...maybe. See, it seems that most deputies in the area have to patrol an area about the size of Rhode Island. Oh, and since the people looking at the Web cams are untrained amateurs it may be a little tough for them to tell if the blur they see moving through the night vision scopes is a deer or an illegal immigrant. And even though the system's online they still have to dial an 800 number and report what they see. Hmmm...

The first cameras go up in 30 days, so I guess we'll see how it works. Personally I think it's kind of creepy and seems a little too close to Internet Hunting to me. On the other hand, it does open up the door to a whole range of applications for distributing work that requires human eyeballs to work.