Crowds Need Independence for Wisdom

More evidence that crowds need to retain independence to maintain the 'outlier canceling' effect that can make them useful to solve problems. Obvious, but important to remember. Our own experience was that it was easy to have influential individuals skew the results. Influential could mean many things, including well spoken, being well known or unknown, management role or apparent group role. Bottom line, anonymous worked better. Avoid even clarifying discussions.

Quite Liked

 I was introduced to QuiteLiked today:

What’s going on here? Who’s in charge?

           "   ... We believe that the emergence of the web as a dominant publishing platform (providing an abundance of great stories), along with the increasing trend towards websites becoming more social, has created an opportunity to quickly and easily discover and consume great content from thousands of different publishers.

QuiteLiked strives to provide the best most relevant stories based on interaction from other readers, across the web. We don't just rely on an editor or other readers to submit the best stories, we scour the web and surface them via our proprietary algorithm.
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Our mission is to curate the web's best content and make it easy to discover, consume, and share ...  "       

Supermarkets Morphing to Restaurants

Prepared foods continue to increase in availability in supermarkets, due to bigger margins.  The next step is to wrap in the restaurant as well.  More margin and more time spent in the retail space equal more earnings.  

Dunnhumby Acquires BzzAgent

BzzAgent is a company that seeks to get people talk about brands.They are being acquired by loyalty data agent Dunnhumby.  BzzAgent reminds, in name and direction, of a  company called PlanetFeedback, which I was involved with a number of years ago and was eventually folded into Nielsen.  Nice to see that Dunnhumby is modernizing its channels.

Online Currency: Bitcoin

Bitcoin, the experiment with encrypted online currency.  Dangerous? A Scam? Revolutionary or just a renaming of something old? Will it be made illegal? It ultimately comes down to how many people will accept it.

Archiving Everything

Remembering being surprised in 2010 that the US Library of Congress was archiving Twitter.   Lots of details about that effort here.  So many data mining opportunities will exist based on this data in the future.  Is that scary?  It is less surprising now, after so many people have joined up.  I continue my own 'experiment' with it,  three years old, largely using it to drive traffic, but now have also started to use it to do quick communications. There are today many fewer criticisms of it just being silly.

Crowd Sourced Eyetracking

A look at YouEye ... An interesting concept that is likely very cheap. But what will the quality be like? Tracks using your own camera for user interface design and analysis.

Touchscreen vs Heavy Lifting OS

A look at touchscreen as an interface versus full operating systems. Praises an early look at Windows 8, but says it cannot match the simplicity of an iPad. But can it provide more functionality? Certainly a full spreadsheet has more embedded numerical power than finger gestures?

Ford's Cars to Talk to Each Other

GigaOm report on development of technology by Ford to allow cars to talk to each other and avoid crashes and otherwise cooperate.  Cooperative autonomy is interesting, but could also lead to some curious liability issues.  We examined some similar issues in the days of enterprise artificial intelligence.

MindBox

Met today with Jeff Dyck of Mindbox Studios.  They have done some very interesting things, including some intriguing work with nonprofits.  Emphasis on symbolic representations and simple user interfaces.  Hope to make use of their excellent open source methods.  Keep up the good work.

Take Virtual Chef Training

Be a virtual Top Chef.  Take the basic training. An example of entertainment based online games.  Not particularly engaging to me, though I am a foodie, but this has apparently attracted quite a few people.

Make Every e-Book a Social Network

Thoughts about turning an e-book into a social reading network.  Makes sense, though I wonder how often people will interact in this way.  Comments on the books, linking it to background books, teacher analyses, other readers.

Magazines Rush to the Pads

Is it based on Insanity and Fear?  And will it take decades to complete?  An AdAge interview looks at the implications.  I think there will be dual channels for some time, if not for decades.  If the traditional advertising model continues, the pad will sell to those with more money for some time. 

Greenbook on Mobile Market Research

Their section on Mobile, an increasingly important area, as mobile devices become data gathering and sensor devices.    At an event recently I gave an impromptu demonstration of using a smartphone to explore location-based demographics.

"GreenBook Blog provides original insight into the challenges faced by the market research industry today. Contributors from both sides of the table share their expertise and offer unique perspectives on a wide variety of issues, both strategic and tactical ... "

Using Recorded Future for Competitive Intelligence

A good presentation video on competitive intelligence.  The startup Recorded Future is a novel search engine that uses the rich time-based information found in searches.  Semantic search and in particular results that have implications about the future.  What will happen next based on the results of a search?   What events can be reliably predicted?     I am currently studying how their methods can be used inside the enterprise to do competitive intelligence.  See also their informative blog, which includes an example relating to when the IPhone 5 might be released.

Visual Beauty of Machine Learning

From Matthew Hurst's site. I remember seeing similar visuals which represented processes like sorting, also very naturally visual.  Since this is so visual, could human driven vision help the process?

Tide Brings Loads of Hope

Tide's Loads of Hope comes to the tornado strucken area. In Drug Store News, a simple but very useful gesture that follows disaster, by my former employer.

Behavioral Economics for Startups

Reports Dan Ariely:  Looks to be quite interesting, would love to attend.

"August 26-28th, 2011   Introducing Startup-Onomics

Startup-Onomics is about infusing behavioral economics into the core DNA of new companies.
Through interactive lectures in the morning and 1:1 working sessions with famous industry experts in the afternoon, you’ll walk away with the scientific tools to better understand your customers and build products that meet their needs ... " 

Gigabit Network Case Study

Case study of a Chattanooga network. Impressive work in a two part article.

Recommendation Engines for Art

Recommendation has exist for music and books for some time. Now it is starting to be seen for visual art as well. In ReadWriteWeb. " ...  there's been no comparable recommendation engine for works of art. If you like a particular Henri Matisse painting, there hasn't been a website for you to visit that will suggest other works by the artist or that will recommend other artists altogether. But that's the aim of ArtFinder, a London-based startup that wants to help make it easier for people to find art that they love. Or rather, that's part of the aim .... "