Noise Between Stations

March 2005

  • HP taking lessons from Apple?

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    1 min read

    HP bought Snapfish, but I think the comparison to Yahoo/Flickr is less interesting than a comparison to Apple. Apple enhanced hardware by adding software and services (iTunes -> Music Store), lengthening the value chain and creating an integrated system that makes it easy for people to buy what they want. It’s also a razor/blades situation.…

  • Information Esthetics lecture series in NYC

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    1 min read

    A group calling themselves Information Esthetics have formed to examine “making data meaningful” with an expansive view on how that happens. They plan a promising lecture series including folks like Judith Donath and Bill Buxton which will be right around the corner from my office and cost a whopping $3. Bless them.

  • When marketing isn’t enough

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    2 min read

    Recently I was telling an insurance industry executive about Tonik, an affiliate of Blue Cross of California that only offers health insurance to “the young invincibles” — people in their 20’s. At first glance he thought this was niche marketing, nothing new. But Tonik is different, it’s a whole new subsidiary that created new products…

  • The Story of the Weeping Camel

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    1 min read

    “The Story of the Weeping Camel” is the best movie I’ve seen recently. Their description introduces it nicely… An enchanting tale about a family of herders in Mongolia’s Gobi desert who face a crisis when a mother camel unexpectedly rejects her newborn calf. Uniquely composed of equal parts reality, drama and magic, the movie provides…

  • The Wisdom of Crowds: cognition problems

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    2 min read

    More notes from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds… As an example of solving cognition problems, he discusses decision markets like The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which has generally outperformed election polls. Over time, they are also less volatile than polls, changing less dramatically to new information. The IEM is not big or diverse, involving…

  • Design thinking isn’t just for designers anymore

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    1 min read

    My colleagues and I realized recently that although designers are (obviously) a primary source of the design thinking at the heart of business design, the proposition that only designers possess the thinking skills required is a little arrogant and even a little separatist. In fact, the most interesting writing on the subject thus far has…

  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Intro

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    2 min read

    James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is the best book I’ve read in a while. In it he forwards a compelling thesis: If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior…

  • Focusing on business design

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    1 min read

    At the Information Architecture Summit there was a strong thread of interest in business and management (my hypothesis for this centers on two trends: the population bell curve places many IAs at an age where they are rapidly moving into management for the first time, and as a discipline IAs have already invented many of…

  • Away to Montreal

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    1 min read

    I’m off to Montreal for the information architecture summit and traveling incommunicado, or at least sans powerbook. If you need me, ring.

  • The Information Architecture Institute

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    1 min read

    It’s official, AIfIA is now the The Information Architecture Institute. Dig the new logo and design courtesy James Spahr, designer extraordinaire.

  • Stanford’s d.school

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    1 min read

    “Be a part of the design thinking movement“