Category: trends
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Agencies As Incubators
Does it make sense for an ad agency to launch an incubator for tech start-ups? You could (and many no doubt would) say that this was merely a distraction from the day job. An unnecessary aberration from what agencies are meant to be doing. Personally, I think it makes a bunch of sense. Here's why.…
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#Firestarters 2: Design Thinking In Planning
So, as you may know, Google asked me to curate a series of events for them designed to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more interesting and challenging issues facing planners today and our inaugral #Firestarters event in April, on the subject of Agile Planning, seems to have got off to a flying start,…
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When I Grow Up
I guess it's no big surprise that in a (US) survey of over 10,000 young professionals Google came out as the company that most would like to work at. And by some margin, with nearly a quarter of survey respondents selecting them, almost twice as many as picked the second place business, Apple. As well as…
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The Shamrock Organisation (Redux)
Charles Handy, Irish philosopher, management thinker and writer, first coined the phrase The Shamrock Organisation in the late 80's to describe an organisational structure with three distinct parts: The 'core staff', likely to be experienced or highly trained professionals, essential to continuity and maintaining detailed knowledge of organisational aims, objectives and practices. A second 'leaf' comprising a 'contractual…
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All The Information In The World
I sometimes think that one of the most fundamental issues that content producers (of any kind) consistently fail to get their heads around is just what they are competing against in the new world. As Kevin Kelly said all the way back in 2006, the amount of information we are generating is the fastest increasing quantity…
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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…
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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…