This week in everybody in Cannes is totally talking about how scent is the new UI:
The London Squared Map (4min) is a fascinating idea with a challenging remit:
How can a city be reshaped to allow for a more even presentation of data without obliterating the forms that make it a recognizable space?
Put more simply: how does one design to avoid the distortion normally built into map-based data visualizations? After the Flood have done some really smart work here. H/T to Matt Webb for the link.
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Joanne Schofield has written a smart primer on content design (3min) for the Co-op blog. Circulate it generously within your organization.
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Racked has a fabulous profile of ‘indie artisanal perfume pioneer’ Frederic Malle (5min) that you should absolutely read. Really. Still not sold? Consider the opening:
“I was at Chateau Marmont yesterday in the elevator and there was this girl preparing for a party, and I was really sad for her because she smelled like a Duty Free.”
You’re welcome.
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Shipping containers are the new Sarah Records singles: (4min):
He has been keeping his eyes out for a refrigerated Maersk box, which he has never seen. “Maersk might not be the most boutique one to spot,” he said, “but it’s my favorite as a layperson in the world of container spotting.”
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This week in ‘I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought a DMP’:
“Markets don’t work for everything. Truth is one place where they fail.”
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Plenty of people have been circulating Andrew Chen’s excellent essay on the challenges of growth at the end of a tech cycle (9min), and with great reason. He outlines six key trends that serve as meaningful obstacles to product growth, namely:
- mobile platform consolidation
- competition on paid channels
- banner blindness
- superior tooling
- smarter, faster competitors
- “Competing with boredom is easier than competing with Google/Facebook”
The most interesting to me is the parity produced by the fourth factor, superior tooling, through products like Mixpanel that commoditize cohort analysis. We’re working at a really interesting time when complex analytics tools are becoming commonplace. Read the whole piece, please.
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Zillow is threatening to sue the McMansion Hell blog (3min) — always a sign that things are going well.
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I finally got around to Ramzi Yakob’s piece on the enterprise value of first-party data (7min). You should, too. This is especially good:
To me, ‘meaningful use of data’ is any use that has a positive contribution to one of the three ways you can grow a business:
- Increase usage of the existing product or service (more people and / or more often)
- Increase the value derived from each instance of use (higher price)
- Increase the utility of your business by serving a larger number of needs (new products & services / bigger share of wallet)
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Sam Ford on ‘slow innovation’ (6min) is wonderful:
Slow innovation is the realm of pattern recognition: searching for emerging developments outside the organization’s immediate line-of-sight or that may be happening steadily, but not rapidly.
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This week in training Watson on a steady diet of vintage Geoff McFetridge prints:
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“(Organizations) have to invest to create what our colleague Todd Supplee calls data factories: systems that can combine data from proprietary, third-party, and public- and partner-generated sources and extract value. While doing so, they must build the capacity for data governance and be sensitive to norms, regulations, and expectations surrounding transparency and privacy.”
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Using neural networks to explain neural networks (better on desktop than on mobile).
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Until next week.