Category: trends
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A Rant About Customer-Centricity
Just about every large organisation thinks of itself as customer-centric. Many have this laudable objective as one of their strategic pillars. Yet it never ceases to amaze me that those same organisations seem to want to put as many barriers in the way of great customer service as possible. So here’s my version of what…
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Stripe, and ‘Schlep Blindness’
Stripe is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting businesses that not many people have heard of. I hadn't come across them myself until James mentioned them last week in his excellent Dots talk on banks becoming 'dumb pipes'. And then suddenly I see news about them three times in past 7 days. Back in…
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Google Firestarters 13 – Agencies and Product Innovation
A few years back Murat Mutlu wrote a post that got a lot of conversation going around whether an agency could build the next Instagram or Angry Birds. His post raised some interesting questions around what capabilities modern agencies should have and whether they should be messing around with digital products at all or just…
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Usability Trumps Persuasion
So the Dots conference, hosted admirably by Antony Mayfield and the smart folk at Brilliant Noise on Wednesday was rather good. Antony kindly asked me to curate it for them so I'm somewhat biased, but it seems like lots of other people think so too, which is nice. Adam (the best live blogger I know)…
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Performance Firestarters 6: The Profit-Driven Marketer
For the sixth in our series of Google Firestarters events focusing specifically on issues around performance marketing we've picked a theme that must be close to the heart of just about any marketer – how to align marketing activity more directly with the bottom line. Taking marketing as a profit (rather than a cost) centre…
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Predicting the Box Office Revenues of Films
I'm rather fascinated by the potential of smart use of data for prediction (notwithstanding some of the issues that need to be ironed out with so-called big data) and particularly when applied to something as tricky to forecast as the box office takings of big budget movies. Data is already being used fairly extensively in realtion…
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Location Tracking
I've come across two examples in the past few days of how real-time location tracking is beginning to be embedded in the technologies we use and every day experiences. Reading up about the new Foursquare redesign led me to this piece about how the app now tracks users even when the app is closed (Facebook…
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The Growth Share Matrix Revisited
Thanks to Andrew Warren-Payne for pointing me at this work by Boston Consulting Group revisiting their classic growth share matrix. The matrix, originated by BCG founder Bruce Henderson 40 years ago, famously plots a product portfolio on a 2 x 2 against growth rate and market share, giving us categorisations like 'stars', 'problem child' (or…
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Google Firestarters 12 – Designing for the Future – The Event
Wednesday night saw the great and the good of UK planning come together for our twelfth (twelfth!) Google Firestarters event, themed around ‘Designing for the Future’, and we had three amazing speakers who gave three excellent provocations. Anab Jain, TED fellow, founder of Superflux, lecturer at the Royal College of Art (and whose work has…
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Google Firestarters 12 – Designing for the Future
The next Google Firestarters event is happening next week on Tues 15th at 6.15pm, at Google HQ in London. We're theming the event around 'Designing for the Future', and considering how we design for a world filled with sensors, connected devices, wearables and embedded internet. The only thing we can say for sure is that…