Only Dead Fish

Fashionable Data

London Fashion Week finished this past week (strangely, I wasn't invited) so with my sometime obsession around interesting applications of data streams, it's timely to think about what the collision of two such polar opposite worlds as fashion and data might look like. Fortunately there's already some interesting examples.

Take Fashiolista. Backed by one of the founders of Skype, Fashiolista provides a "Love" button (rather similar to a Facebook "Like" button) through a user installed toolbar that allows you to "love" items as you browse shopping sites, build your own collection, and follow other people and collections. Apparently, over 1 million items are currently "loved" per month. But the real potential here of-course is data driven - being able to build up profiles of people and their preferences in order to power recommendations and facilitate connection with likeminded people. In other words scrobbling fashion.

And then we have Google's Boutiques.com, a site that is designed to not only make it easier to find clothes you like, but to actually predict what those clothes will be. As well as a series of 'Boutiques' curated by designers, fashion bloggers and celebrities which you can browse, the site uses a Hunch-like quiz designed to pick out quirks of personality and taste, which then decide which style bucket you fall into. Visual search technology is used to help create a personalised Boutique, make recommendations, and in theory get you to the stuff you like quicker.

But the ultimate use of data of-course is to be able to predict fashion trends. Which is just what EditD ("fashion industry intelligence in real-time") is trying to do, generating 18 month fashion forecasts by analysing streams of internet data from blogs, status updates and tweets (up to 600,000 a day apparently) using natural-language processing to measure sentiment, and attributing a measure of influence to each datapoint. Geoff Watts, computer scientist and co-founder, points out that fashion forecasting previously worked on little more than educated hunches: " Those hunches worked well when the industry was based on six-month catwalk cycles, but fashion nowadays is moving too fast. There are no 'seasons' any more."

There's been some really interesting examples of community-driven innovation in fashion recently (Uniqlo with their Burberry Art of the Trench-like Uniqlooks, ASOS opening their facebook store, the NY Times curating readers photos of NY fashion week, and models such as GoTryItOn) but fashion and data is an equally fascinating mix. The real challenge of-course for all data-driven models in this space is getting the balance right between the art and the science.

P.S. the guys at MadeByMany have put together a really useful list of fashion start-ups

P.P.S. In case you're wondering, I take my own fashion inspiration from the guy on the left.

Agile Innovation

So, earlier this month I did a mini roadshow on behalf of Econsultancy to give a series of talks on digital innovation, future trends, and all that kind of good stuff. The talk was framed by some points I made about what I call agile innovation, and so I've penned a piece for them on the subject as a follow up (if you're an Econsultancy member you can also view the full deck of slides). Six points that desribe what I mean by the term, and just why I think it's important. Would love to know what you think.

Contamination

Oh so true.

Via the ever marvellous StartUpQuote

Making Stuff Hackable

"Give hackers an inch, and they'll take you a mile" Paul Graham

Seeing this brilliant Spotify hack (pictured below) by Jordi Parra, an Interaction Design student at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, is a reminder of what excellent stuff can happen when you let people play around with your product.

The player uses RFID technology to allow you upload Spotify playlists to different coloured tags which you can then place onto a magnetised volume knob to play them (watch the video). The information is extracted from the tag using magnetic induction and an Arduino processing board. A display of 192 LED nodes on the front shows volume levels, battery life and internet connectivity. It was done in collaboration with Spotify, and it reminds me of IDEO's C60 Project, and it's really rather cool.

Spotify: Final prototype first videos from Jordi Parra on Vimeo.

Hack culture is proliferating.Yet the idea of letting people tamper with your product remains anathema to most organisational cultures. When Kinect launched, it unleashed a wave of unofficial platform hacks and applications. Microsoft initially began by saying that they did not condone the modification of their products and would work with law enforcement to stop it. Soon after that, perhaps realising what an outdated stance this was, they reversed this position saying that because the algorithms that sit inside the XBox hadn't been tampered with it wasn't a hack in the truest sense of the word.

The assumption has long been that the majority of ideas for new products and services come from business and industry. And yet huge value in innovation sits outside of organisations. Research (which was sponsored by the British Government) by Eric A. von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, showed that over a three year period the amount of money that individuals spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development.

Most R & D processes seek to turn out perfectly crafted products. Anything which is even slightly surplus to requirements is ruthlessly cut out in the name of efficiency. Conventional wisdom is if it's not essential, drop it. Now is the time to reconsider this approach.

As Paul Graham noted, it has turned out to be great thing that Apple put accelerometers in their tablets since developers have used it in ways that Apple could never have imagined: "That's the nature of platforms. The more versatile the tool, the less you can predict how people will use it. So tablet makers should be thinking: what else can we put in there? Not merely hardware, but software too. What else can we give developers access to?"

Which leads to an interesting place. The inclusion of capabilities in products that whilst not of immediately obvious value, open up the potential for new abilities and applications through collaboration. Designing for hackability.

Predicting The Unpredictable

Ever since I read Taleb's Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness I've had a heightened awareness of the limitations of our attempts to predict the future, and our tendency to post-rationalise events, create false narratives and illusions around our own influence and control. Prediction is difficult.

But that shouldn't stop us from trying. When Martin Bailie wrote that post (the one that won Post Of The Month back in December) about moving from ad-hoc research to real-time insight, he was writing about the failure of the research industry to innovate: to build new models for a future characterised by a multiplicity of new data sets that are now streaming from the web.

I thought he made an excellent point. One of his exceptions that proved his rule was Brainjuicer (disclosure: I have done some work with Brainjuicer in the past) whose successful Predictive Markets product asks 500 random respondents to play a game in which they can buy or sell shares in ideas based on how well they think the idea will perform in market (instead of, as most research methodologies would champion, asking them how likely they are to buy it).

Brainjuicer's founder (and Chief Juicer) John Kearon co-authored an excellent Esomar paper (PDF) with Mark Earls not so long ago, on Me-To-We Research. It contains some good innovative thinking on a different approach to how research can add value to business. We are, says the paper, unreliable witnesses to our own motivations yet extremely good at noticing what other people are doing. So it shifts the focus onto a model shaped by mass anthropology (smart observation of mass behaviour from data streams), mass prediction (using the wisdom of the crowd to predict winning concepts), mass ethnography (using people's natural ability to observe their peers) and mass creation (co-creation, collaboration).

Much market research is about the collection of fresh data. Yet with a sensible approach to the collection and application of such data sets, anaysis of existing streams can yield some truly fascinating results.

A Hewlett Packard study (PDF) that studied 3 million tweets about 25 blockbuster movies found that Twitter can accurately predict the future box-office takings of big release films. Taking account of the rate at which messages were posted proved to be an accurate indicator of the box office takings before the film opened. Sentiment analysis on the content of messages could similarly foresee the ongoing degree of success or failure. Both with a high degree of accuracy. Higher, for example, than the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the platform that enables thousands of people to buy and trade in virtual shares in actors and movies which is in itself lauded for it's predictive capability.

So if twitter can predict the success of movie releases, can it predict the stock exchange? Indiana University Bloomington studied 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters, using a complex but well recognised psychological profiling standard to select keywords which were then monitored to guage the mood of the twitterverse. The study found that on a given day this measure can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 %. Yes, you read that right: 87%.

Similarly a Facebook study found that social activity and the number of Facebook fans turned out to be a remarkably good predictor of the results in the US Mid-term elections last year. Facebook tracked 98 of the most hotly contested House races (as decided by leading independent political observers) and 74% of the candidates with the most Facebook fans won their races. Just over 82% of the 34 Senate races were won by the candidate with more Facebook fans.

Studies such as these may be something of a news-worthy curiosity right now, but they are surely illustrative of a greater, untapped opportunity: the capability to generate useful knowledge from the mass of data that accumulates around behaviours, consumption, and experiences. It's not difficult to see where this might go. For Google (for example) the future of search is unlikely to be search. More likely it will be 'contextual discovery': moving towards being able to look at either a person’s browsing profile or their location profile and serving up interesting data to them without them searching for anything.

It strikes me that we have barely scratched the surface of what might be possible. The ability to utilise existing data streams to deliver new insights, to visualise the intangible, but also to support what Martin Bailie called more 'Flexible Guessing': to work out what to anticipate and what to commit to; to help inform short, medium and long-term activity; to propose what might happen, then adopt agile methodology to adapt on the fly; to embrace the future whilst keeping a link to the past. And what he called 'Responsive doing': lighting lots of fires; starting small and amplifying; testing, learning and changing in real time collaboration with our communities.

How much value lies untapped in existing corporate and public data streams? My guess is a lot. How many companies are truly joining up their data to extract and interpret the kind of intangible insight that has real tangible value? My guess is very few. That, to me, has opportunity written all over it.

Image courtesy

Everything Is A Remix

"the remix is the very nature of the digital" William Gibson

As Faris (from whom I remixed the Gibson quote above) has said eloquently for a few years now, culture is inherently recombinant. Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker, is producing a web series on the subject. The first couple of short films are quite absorbing, and make the point very well with some fascinating examples. Worth a watch.

Part 1:

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

...and Part 2:

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

(HT to Rubbishcorp for the find)

*Real* Competitive Advantage

According to the Deloitte Centre for the Edge, under 25% of the workers it surveyed are passionate about their work. Worse, the level of passion in the workforce turned out to be inversely related to the size of the company. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the self-employed were the most passionate, but the findings indicated that the larger the company, the lower the level of passion among the workers.

It's a US survey, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if the same were not true elsewhere in the world. And it's nothing less than a tragedy. My sense (and I have no data to back this up, merely a belief that this is the case) is that this is not a reflection of a lack of ambition or a strong desire to make things better in most employees. More likely it is a consequence of the motivation-sapping rigidity and organisational inflexibility that many of these people find themsleves caught up in. Many, many people, want to change things for the better, to improve performance by actively seeking out new challenges and the people that can help address those challenges. But too often hierarchy, process and resistance to change gets in the way. It becomes an attritional battle, and it wears you down.

The implication of all this is that businesses have an increasing responsibility to provide the kind of working environment that goes in the opposite direction. One that facilitates networked collaboration and innovation, and makes it as easy as possible for people to really make a difference. One that is focused around motivated, talented  employees who have a far greater say in how they choose to address the challenges that the business faces. Those that ignore this, will find it increasingly difficult to get the best people. Those that cannot get the best people will fail to bring in the best new thinking. Those that don't have the best new thinking, will fail. 

This is something I feel passionate about (see what I did there), so I dedicated my latest column in New Media Age to it, and you can read it here. I hope you enjoy it.

Post Of The Month - January 2011 - The Winner

So, after a strong showing for both Mel Exon's Think While You Make, Make While You Think and Amelia Torode's "Future Of Advertising" Is Utterly Depressing it was the former that in the end secured the most votes and is the winner of Post Of The Month for January 2011. Well done Mel, you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the hallowed ThinkTank Hall Of Fame. Thanks everyone for taking part, and don't forget to bookmark your good reads for February's nominations in just under a month's time.

Closed Publishing Apps? I Don't Get It

Or rather (sadly), perhaps I do.

So The Daily is finally with us. My disclosure right up front is that (since it is not available in the UK) I haven't actually seen it. I applaud bold experimentation of this kind but the written and video reviews of it have left me somewhat underwhelmed. It's a shame. The concept of consuming news and feature driven content via a tablet interface is genuinely exciting.

The idea with The Daily is that you download it every day. Just like buying a newspaper a new edition is available every 24 hours. It seems its had its share of download problems, but I think that what may hamper it most is not a technical glitch. It's the fact that it is too much like an analogue newspaper. As Bryan McComb pointed out The Daily is static. As the day gets old and things happen across the world, The Daily stays the same. Unlike every news website, it doesn't update to reflect breaking stories. It is out of date as soon as it’s published.

Print publishers of all kinds have got very excited by tablet apps. And its not hard to see why. A slick new interface with which to present content in new and interesting ways. A fresh and varied palette with which to incorporate video and do justice to high production imagery. But it seems it's also an opportunity to return to an approach characterised by control. To create siloed audience segments. To sell a closed curated experience and achieve a much sought after paid-content nirvana. In other words, iPad applications are the new walled garden. Articles stripped of links. Content that is unlinkable, unsearchable, unshareable.

In the early days of digital content, publishers took time to learn the lessons of the open web and to move away from destination thinking that precluded linking out to external websites for fear that you would 'leak' traffic and it would never return. The counter-intuitive lesson of-course is that as Dave Winer once said, "if you want to make money on the web, send them away". Links add value to content, different kinds of curation add value to the experience, and so best practice, in the words of Jeff Jarvis, has become to "do what you do best and link to the rest".

Closed apps of this kind ignore the potential to constantly update like just about every other connected stream of content we dip into. To easily share content we find interesting as we are so used to doing. To show us what our friends or other likeminded people find interesting or are recommending in the manner of some of the more interesting content driven servces (like Flipboard) that combine different forms of curation (including social) in ways that publishers seem slow to embrace. I agree with Erick Schonfeld and Matthew Ingram: digital magazines and newspapers should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer.

There's no shortage of things for them to compete with. The competition for digital magazine apps isn't other magazine apps. It's Angry Birds. And every other app that's calling for your attention on that screen. And the mobile web itself. In order for closed content apps to make sense they have to create a curated experience that is significantly better than the open web. And right now, I can't see that happening.

Don't get me wrong. There's a valid place for packaged applications that deliver real utility and value. But in thinking about apps vs the mobile internet, this is not (as Forrester have also said) a question of either/or, but both. Closed, unlinkable applications are attempting to confine content that is asking to be freed and connected. The problem is that right now, publishers seem to be pretending that the open web never happened.

Image Courtesy

Post Of The Month - January 2011 - The Vote

Good shortlist this month so thanks everyone for the nominations. Gemma asked if she could nominate the talk from Toby Barnes at Interesting North which was posted up in Jan. I don't necessarily want to make a habit of incorporating talks into the vote, but I'm going to include it. Mostly because I really liked it. So there you go. OK, so our vote this time is between:

The Web Is A Customer Service Medium by Paul Ford

Messiness At Scale from Stowe Boyd

"Future Of Advertising" Is Utterly Depressing by Amelia Torode

Think While You Make, Make While You Think by Mel Exon

James Bond, Architecture Critic by Toby Barnes (warning: some swearing)

iPadonia And The Coming Ad Rebellion by Ben Kunz

Rockstars, Ninjas, and Assholes from Bud Caddell

 And you can vote below: