Month: May 2012
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On Company Values
I'm not really a fan of mission statements. Rather than being an exercise in inspiration, looking at an aggregated list of the mission statements of the Fortune 500 companies makes you realise how vague and riddled with corporate-speak many of them are. Mission statements are all too often just that – a statement of intent that is…
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Organised Complexity
This is an image from the Blue Brain project, showing a network of 30 million connections between the 10,000 neurons that make up just one neocortical column. Our brains contain around ten million times this many neurons in total. Manuel Lima (a senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing) uses this as illustration in this wonderful…
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Distributed And Destination Thinking
When I talk to clients about getting into a 'digital mindset' I often end up talking about the differences between distributed and destination thinking. Destination thinking is the kind of media approaches that have been with us for many years. We create content, attract (or 'drive') users to that content in order to keep them…
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The Rise Of Product Management
The function and role of Product Management is increasingly becoming a really pivotal one in many digitally facing organisations. Having been aware of it's increasing popularity amongst media owner organisations, the growing importance of Product Management into a much broader spectrum of businesses and sectors became clear when I was researching organisational structures and resourcing for…
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Aggregating, And Being Aggregated
I've been playing around with the Tomahawk Music Player. Tomahawk is described by Word Magazine (which is where I first saw mention of it) as a "high-precision one-stop desktop app for millions of tracks from every last corner of the web". It's a pretty good description. Tomahawk runs many sources of music side-by-side,…
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The Man Who Prints Houses
I wrote about Enrico Dini a couple of years ago. Enrico has developed a 3D printing technology large enough to print buildings. Yes, buildings. It uses sand combined with an inorganic binder to print structures in stone with no human intervention. Constructions which are strong, cheap, environmentally-friendly, and rather amazing. The technology allows the design of…
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Digital Intimacy And Gestures
There's some rather lovely work here by Marco Triverio, an interaction designer at IDEO, playing around with (and disrupting) the asynchronous nature of much non-verbal communication over mobile devices. Feel Me experiments with different ways of creating a 'sweet, playful connection with the person on the other side'. I'm quite taken with some of the ideas…
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Google Firestarters 5 Visualised
It can't have been easy for the guys at Scriberia to visualise Cory Doctorow's amazing talk at last weeks Firestarters event. But chief scribe Dan has done a fantastic job at committing to illustration a talk crammed with great metaphors and delivered at some pace. So, as a follow up to the write ups of the event,…
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Post Of The Month – April 2012 – The Winner
Well, it was run close by Patricia McDonald's strong post on the interest graph and social commerce but in the end, the winner of Post Of The Month was Dan Hon's personal and powerful post: Myself, Quantified. So well done Dan. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall…