Read original story on: New York Times
Once again putting the vast amount of data it gathers to good use, Google has announced a plan to issue fashion trend reports biannually based on web searches. This move underscores the company’s bid for greater influence in the fashion ecommerce space. Such insights, for example, have allowed Google to begin consulting for major retailers including Calvin Klein, which use Google search data in fashion planning.
Last Friday we attended the annual PSFK conference in New York City to observe new trends in digital design and user behavior. Here are the key takeaways:
Better Living Through Big Data
The theme for this year’s conference was “Live, Work, Play Better”, and various panels acknowledged the importance of utilizing big data to come up with more user-centric “human” designs. Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of x.ia, explained how his artificially intelligent personal assistant, Amy, emulates the ideal human-like experience by scheduling meetings through e-mail. With the rise of mobile and IoT devices, data is creating connections not only to our own personal devices, but to one another. As Marcela Sapone, CEO at Alfred, noted, through the power of big data, there is an “overarching cultural acceptance of collaborating and sharing more”.
Digital Design Puts Mobile First
According to Manoush Zomorodi, on average people check their phones around 60 times a day, clocking in at over 2 hours a day. As mobile usage continues to rise, digital designers are starting to put mobile first when it comes to creating user experiences. For instance, boutique hotel CitizenM provides its “Mobile Citizens” with a “mood pad” tablet to control everything from lighting, to room temperature, and even infotainment system in each room. Also putting mobile front and center is Toca Boca, a design studio that makes digital apps for the “mobile-native” kids.
Shared Economy Impacts Design
Another ongoing trend reflected in the design community is the rapid expansion of the shared economy. NeueHouse, for example, is an ambitious startup that aims to become the “Airbnb for the creatives” by creating shared office spaces designed to cultivate hospitality and design culture. Similarly, Tactivate is working on creating shared workspace for veterans, furnished with innovative office furniture designed for mobility and collaboration. The aforementioned CitizenM is also pushing for shared office and living space in its hotel design.
Uniting Fashion And Tech With Design
We have long observed the ongoing convergence of fashion and technology, and the design community has seemed to realize its vital role in uniting the two forces as well. Manufacture NY, led by Amanda Parkes, is building a next-gen innovation center—a tech-forward fashion incubator that feels like a design studio— that aims to fuse the language and process of fashion and tech with design.
Image courtesy of PSFK
Read original story on: VentureBeat
Today Foursquare unveiled its newest ad platform, Pinpoint, which enables brands to target Foursquare users based on where they’ve been. The platform isn’t limited to Foursquare’s apps, as the company expressed interest in opening it up for a “verified ecosystem of apps, exchanges and publishers” in the near future. A prime example of leveraging its vast user-generated location data into consumer insights, this should provide a new revenue stream for Foursquare.
Read original story on: Wired
Last week, Amazon quietly launched a new service aimed at opening its own AI technology, which its mighty recommendation engine is built on, to all businesses to use. The new service, known as the Amazon Machine Learning Service, is designed to help developers easily integrate targeted recommendation engines based on data and machine learning into their own websites and apps. As part its ever-growing suite of AWS cloud computing services, Amazon continues to claim Internet infrastructures, one piece at a time.
Read original story on: VentureBeat
Earlier today, mobile payment solution provider, Square announced its new expansion into email marketing. Aiming to help its cohort of businesses to engage with their customers, the company introduced a new tool suite that makes good use of its purchase and payment data to gain consumer insight and help businesses optimize their newsletter campaigns for better personalization and targeting. This marks the latest in Square’s continuous effort to diversify its revenue streams.
Header image taken from Square’s Official Blog
Read original story on: CNET
Without much fanfare, Google unleashed its Chrome OS onto a fleet of new devices, including the new Asus Chromebit dongle, Asus Chromebook Flip, and two laptops from Chinese manufacturers Hisense and Haier, earlier this week. Google has good reason to push out its Chrome OS, a simplistic browser-based operating system previously designed for its Chromebook laptop. The system serves as an entry point to get more people to use Google’s wide range of apps and services, keeping users within its ecosystem. And the more data Google can glean from the users, the more potential revenue it can make from targeted ads.
Aside from a certain Austin-based media fest last week, the annual TED 2015 conference also took place, spotlighting some of the most innovative ideas in Technology, Entertainment, and Design. There’s no need to go through all 12 sessions featured this year, because we’ve got all the relevant highlights right here.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence
Fei-Fei Li, director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, has spent fifteen years working on a key component of machine learning—visual recognition. She presented one of the first computer vision models capable of generating a human-like sentence when it sees a picture for the first time.
Similarly, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute has worked in artificial intelligence for 20 years and is a firm believer in the fundamental difference between intelligence and autonomy. “AI won’t exterminate us,” he claimed, but will instead empower us to tackle real problems and help humanity.
The Necessity of Driverless Cars
Every year, 1.2 million people are killed on roads, and Chris Urmson, Director of Self-Driving Cars at Google[x], firmly believes that self-driving cars are the right approach to eliminate car accidents. He demonstrated how Google’s driverless cars handles all types of situations, from a turning truck to jaywalkers, with simulations that break a road down to a series of lines, boxes, and dots.
The Beauty of Big Data
With the help of some elegant visualizations, data artist Manuel Lima explored how the changing visual language reflects and shapes our understanding of the world. From radial convergence to arc diagrams, he believes that “growing visual taxonomy” can help us analyze complex systems of knowledge, social ties, species and ecosystems.
The Internet of Moving Things
Shiva Shivakumar, founder of Urban Engines, proposed a new take on the Internet of Things—the Internet of Moving Things, namely the network of any device, app, or software that tracks movement throughout space. By aggregating and analyzing cloud data from this IoMT, he created interactive models that visualize patterns of movement within cities that could vastly improve urban planning and transportation.
Read original story on: Re/code
Facebook is looking to help advertisers better understand what people are talking about with a new “Topic Data” social listening tool. It mines Facebook posts for keywords and phrases for insights into how users feel about a particular brand, event, or subject. The social media giant claims that all information used for topic data will be anonymized and aggregated, and it is partnering with DataSift to help develop and scale the topical data.
Read original story on: Wired
Introduced back in November of 2013, the Disney MagicBand is a waterproof plastic wristband that doubles as an RFID-enabled ticketing and payment device for Disneyland visitors, connecting them to a powerful system of sensors scattered throughout the park to offer a frictionless experience. The system, which reportedly cost Disney over $1 billion to develop, collects real-time data about where visitors are, what they’re doing, and what they want to purchase next.
Since its debut, MagicBand has received largely positive reviews and has been credited to the record-high park attendance and Disney resort occupancy in the last quarter. By all accounts, it looks like Disney’s billon-dollar gamble on wearables is paying off.
Header image taken from Disney Online Store
On Thursday, the Lab attended the New York Ad Club’s Measurement: Now, a half-day event dedicated to data tracking and responding to the consumer journey. Three key themes emerged from the panels and keynote speeches:
Content and Context: Though the idea of a “consumer journey” isn’t new, brands are now acquiring the ability to target individuals in a specific context—time, physical location, device, point in the sales funnel, and so on—with an appropriate message. What this means is that marketers can develop more nuanced segmentation based on behavior and flesh out personas into real humans. This will increase brands’ relevancy, since as Audrey Hendley, Senior VP and GM, Acquisition & Prospect Engagement of American Express OPEN, noted, data must ultimately answer the question “what does our prospect want?”
Privacy and the Value Exchange: Ad technology is rapidly approaching the point where data from multiple devices (phones, television, and more) will be able to be tied to a unique, comprehensive consumer profile. While this has great potential for brands, “what thrills me as a marketer terrifies me as a citizen,” said Deborah Marquardt, SVP, Managing Director at MediaVest. In order to avoid what Kosta Skoulikaris, VP, Advertiser Solutions, Nielsen called the “icky factor,” brands must safeguard consumer data and provide value in return.
Redefining ROI: As Aaron Fetters, Director of Insights and Analytics Solutions Center of the Kellogg Company, pointed out, marketers are increasingly accountable for budgets, making it imperative to get the “most of out of the money we spend.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that brands should focus entirely on ROI—in fact, Shelley Zallis, CEO of Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange, suggested that ROE, or “return on engagement” may be a better metric.
