nuance intelligence

Getty Images, “the man” of the photo world, just launched a service called Moodstream.

Basically, it creates a slideshow of their images based on your input across five ranges of moods.  Complete with music, it provides something that might be nice background at parties, or could double as a screen-saver replacement.

I got the tip on this one from my good friend, photojournalist and veteran internet newsman Hart Van Denberg at Hart Up North.

What’s the nuance?

I’m not sure there is any…  maybe it’s just a pointless deployment of technology.  It is interesting to wonder about who got to choose whether a photo is happy or sad.

News junkies, commodity traders and climate change scientists are all tracking last week’s midwest flooding, noting the confluence of impacts, including global commodity prices, US food costs, regional property damage, ethanol futures.  All of this is, of course, written in the context of the upcoming US election, and all the subterfuge within.

Over at AWhere (more here, here and here), they spent the week putting together a pretty cool package that allows individuals to make maps specific to any frame of reference.  Rather than relying on the media or on other mapmakers to tell you how to think about the flooding, you can interact with the map, ask it questions, and determine for yourself the impact on your business, life, community or other perspective.

What’s the nuance?

Data visualization is one of the most important frameworks for gaining insight.  But professional mapmakers have owned a near-monopoly over the frame of reference since mapping began.  Now the power is in your hands.  Google Maps, Google Earth and Virtual Earth have set the stage for interacting with maps.  AWhere takes this evolution to the next step, and lets you plot your data (as many layers as you can generate) on to a map, creating your own view of things.

Please take a second to review our revised clients page.  We’ve reorganized it, added some exciting new projects, and updated the descriptions of some of our partnerships, which have evolved in recent months.

Let us know how we can help you connect to these interesting opportunities.

(note: here’s a version of a piece I ran over at AWhere’s new blog. Check it out for good info on 2008′s biggest trend in business intelligence (BI).)

TechWeb published the Executive Summary of Ventana Research’s new benchmark survey on the impact of location and geo-analytics on business intelligence practices in the enterprise, calling it one of the major corporate trends of 2008.

Essentially, it demonstrates a strong business case for the deep integration of location intelligence and geo-analytics into business analysis in the growing field of BI, though it’s important to notice that it was financed by two of the largest providers of location intelligence software.

Beyond the bromides, there were some interesting revelations that buttress the benefits location intelligence provides.

Continue reading

Although we’re not known to report on every SEC filing in the known universe, the recent news that Digital Global filed for an IPO (the first in many steps before they go public) is interesting on a couple levels:

1. It’s been a while since a Colorado technology company went public, so this is another indicator of a thriving entrepreneurial economy in the state, counter to the national trend toward recession, and a depressing outlook for Silicon Valley VC investing.
2. It’s a good indicator of the value of location-based services, which includes friends at local companies including Virtual Earth and AWhere.  Read more about what these local leaders are thinking about.

What do you think about their prospects?  Would you go public today?

John Corbett turned me on to a good article at Tech Target about business-focused, web-based, location-aware data mashups, which the author terms ‘bashups.’ Here’s the nut:

BI systems are already very good at sifting through (and/or aggregating) huge volumes of data and turning it into information. If we combine this with mapping, we can get a huge increase in the understandability of the information for very little effort.

What’s the nuance? Continue reading

Bill Gail, a new acquaintance who runs strategy for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, is also the editor of the Geoscience Remote Sensing Society’s Private Sector Newsletter. He ran a great piece in this month’s issue, which I’ve excerpted here:

** 4. ACCURATE DATA VS USEFUL DATA – why accuracy is not always best
As scientists and engineers, we often assume that more accurate is always better than less accurate. For the end-users of information, this is not always true. Car navigation devices provide perhaps the best illustration of this issue. They show “notional” maps, in which the width of streets and their separation is less important than assisting with rapid visual recognition of where to go and which way to turn. In this, and in many similar situations, portraying something inaccurately can provide the user better knowledge than portraying it accurately. This phenomenon might be described as “objective inaccuracy”. Within the remote sensing industry there are many examples of objective inaccuracy – from the widespread use of ortho-projection imagery (a non-physical projection from a vantage point at infinity) to the well-known distortions of the Mercator map projection. In the end, all are engineered in an “objective” way to provide useful information rather than to preserve less-useful accuracy.

What’s the nuance? Web and software entrepreneurs (along with many other professionals) confront this compromise all the time.  And it’s easy to tell who’s running the show by observing the outcome.  Too many times in technology, engineers over-build a solution to manage every single case, when providing the simplest functionality is really what the market wants.  Apple is an interesting case of the inverse, where useful trumps accurate at every turn.

We are seeing this at the Colorado Capital Conference.  As the finalists are picked, the more nuanced differences begin to appear, and over-engineered solutions begin to lose out to useful applications that win the hearts and minds of customers and investors.

Inventing a new market category to go with your new business is exhausting and time consuming. This I have learned from experience. Painful experience.

So, when I sit down to talk through messaging and the slow pace of marketplace adoption with John Corbett of AWhere, he can end up a bit exacerbated, which I understand — it’s tough to be able to see a revolutionary shift incredibly clearly while others nod their head and continue along their previous path. (insert more painful experience here)

McKinsey, along with the rest of the top-dollar business analysts recognize that the fastest way to create business value is the management of information. Visualization of information not only speeds analysis, but also provides comprehension of trends that escapes even the most rabid Excel geeks.

Location provides a meaningful signal amidst the noise of business analysis. Customers (and the rest of us, as well) exist in the context of location — your competitors’ location, proximity to transportation, places where it rains, snows and gets very hot. Do these things affect their purchasing? Only all of the time.

AWhere tunes business analysts (and the rest of us, as well) into the signal of location and how it affects their business. Meanwhile, businesses spend millions of dollars generating new information, without adopting some simple tools (in this case, $250 software) that provides them with a clear multiplier of the value of existing data.

Why is it hard for people to see things in a new way? Continue reading

I’m doing a fair bit of research into location intelligence, geo-coding of data, and data visualization for AWhere these days, and found out that Quantcast (competitor of Alexa and comScore) is now including location-based info in their reports.

From their announcement:

We believe geographic and business/organizational data will be a powerful characterization of publishers’ audiences, especially as advertisers begin to evaluate online media opportunities on a more targeted basis.

I thought the localization of advertising started in the ’97 and ’98 not ’07 and ’08, but it’s great to see the trend coming around again through another sales cycle.

I got to visit with an old friend, musician, music producer and uber-geek Jim Ruberto for a bit on Friday.

In addition to talking about online reputation and Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses as a platform to support social networking and rapid development, he showed me some of the next generation graphics toys on the web (Jim was the first to tune me into Second Life, three or four years ago, where he was running an early online casino).

So, enjoy these:

1. PicLens – Firefox plug-in that provides a whole new way to surf images from lots of foto feeds, including the big photo sites, as well as Google image search and others. Lets you see entire collections (including dozens of pages of Google image search results) in one ‘photo wall’. Check this out now.
2. Photosynth – Microsoft’s newest image searching and matching technology takes a series of images of a particular area (they demonstrate with an ancient city center somewhere in Italy), and places the images in a 3D map of the area, as well as sorting by similarity, and estimating where each photo of the same location was taken from. Very cool, even if it doesn’t run on my Mac.
3. Havok – This graphics engine powers some pretty incredible online games and movie special effects. Their new physics engine provides eerily-real effects that is providing breakthrough reality for the way things work in the graphical realm.

Have a good weekend, and don’t spend it all in front of PicLens!