Media and Markets
Physibles and the future of brands
By cdharris at February 1, 2012 | 9:57 am | 0 Comment
Brands have a psychological reality in that they provide differentiation for goods that might otherwise be seen as interchangeable commodities. I give you vodka, salt, and baking soda, as pertinent examples. The advent of 3-D printers in recent years, though, introduces a possibility that branded goods may have less utility in the future. The Pirate Bay, more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Emerging Science and Technology , Media and Markets
Augmented Reality Glasses
By cdharris at January 15, 2012 | 12:46 am | 0 Comment
Daily Mail: "Translucent TV: Lumus' PD-18-2 is a set of spectacles that can beam high-quality images directly into your eyes but allows the user to see through the images more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Emerging Science and Technology , Media and Markets
Will Daily Deals Revitalize Newspapers?
By cdharris at January 14, 2012 | 3:42 pm | 0 Comment
"Groupon is Hastening the Demise of the Newspaper Industry," wrote a trade publication in April 2011. However, some newspapers are betting that "daily deal" offerings could reinvigorate the industry. Newspapers are turning to startups such as Shoutback and Nimble Commerce and others offering consulting and white-label systems to power deal mechanisms. And more...
LinkedIn InMaps Reveals your Professional Network
By information aesthetics at January 24, 2011 | 11:13 pm | 0 Comment
INMAPS [linkedinlabs.com] is a new service that visualizes the collection of a LinkedIn 'connections' as a single network graph.? Each color corresponds to a different group within an individual's professional network and helps identify ways in which the LinkedIn member is connected to others in different categories (and areas where the connections may be more...
BMW Puts Its Logo On The Back of Eyelids
By cdharris at January 2, 2011 | 5:49 pm | 0 Comment
"Persistence of vision" is a phenomenon that allows our eyes to experience a continuous moving picture when confronted with a series of still images or frames that pass by in a fast sequence.?? Recently,? experiments on "closed eye visualization" have been used for advertising purposes,? as when BMW's Dutch ad group flashed the BMW logo in a dark movie theater,? then more...
Visualizing Science Readers
By cdharris at December 8, 2010 | 2:25 pm | 0 Comment
Curious about what scientists might be reading?? Springer (noted publisher of more than 5 million scientific and academic titles) has launched a new analytics tool that reveals how its users and subscribers are downloading its content. There are a number of interactive visualization tools at the site,? including a world map illustrating the origin of download more...
Blog , Data Visualization , Datamining , Geolocation and Psychogeography , Media and Markets
What “Watching TV” means today
By cdharris at October 19, 2010 | 2:24 am | 0 Comment
A significant audience has moved away from scheduled television (whether broadcast or cable delivery) to "demand" entertainment.? Mass media has detailed, in recent months,? the cost savings that could be realized from turning off cable TV subscriptions and relying on streaming or "on demand" models.??? Literally hundreds of blogs have followed suit,? by showing how it's more...
Do we really see 5,000 ad messages everyday?
By cdharris at August 2, 2010 | 8:30 am | 0 Comment
I've seen it published as fact dozens of times, used it myself in numerous lectures and classes, but where did this factoid come from? Who did the research to determine that the "average American is exposed to 5,000 ad messages (or more) each day?" Apparently the number came from a 1990's vintage Yankelovich study, and the purpose of that study was not to measure more...
Billboards With Facial Recognition Tech Collect Demographic Data
By cdharris at July 19, 2010 | 6:22 pm | 0 Comment
A group of Japanese train stations are testing a new set of billboards with facial recognition technology. ?The billboards have been compared to the personalized signage in Minority Report. The stated goal of the project is to collect demographic data on people in the immediate area that are potentially exposed to the billboard's advertising. ? "The displays are part more...
Blog , Emerging Science and Technology , Media and Markets , Technology and Privacy
How the government uses psychiatric subcontractors
By Ilya Vedrashko at July 19, 2010 | 4:42 pm | 0 Comment
The Washington Post, as part of its investigation into subcontracting among the intelligence community,? released findings in the " Top Secret America" project.? It contains a list of 37 companies to which the intelligence community contracts some of its secret psychiatric-operations work.? The website of one contractor states "MeriTec Information Operations (IO) more...
The Marfa Ring
By Rhizome.org Artwork at December 11, 2009 | 6:59 pm | 0 Comment
The Marfa Ring project is an experiment in colonizing the virtual geography of the small town of Marfa, Texas by creating a "Web Ring" of sites about it. Due to the Ring's interlinking, Google search results are skewed in favor of the ring sites (which vary in levels of veracity and intent) as opposed to Marfa's legitimate web presence. more...
Blog , Geolocation and Psychogeography , Media and Markets , Technology and Art
We’re watching
By cdharris at October 18, 2008 | 1:23 pm | 0 Comment
A Canadian company has developed a technology called Eyebox2 that it says can monitor the gaze of passersby and respond to shifts in attention, even tracking multiple people at once, and even from more than 30 feet away.The company says the advertising potential is large, wherein outdoor or unconventional ad space could be sold "by the eyeball." In more...
Bioreactive Media , Blog , Data Visualization , Emerging Science and Technology , Geolocation and Psychogeography , Media and Markets , Technology and Privacy
Pollster Pleads Guilty to Fraud
By cdharris at July 13, 2008 | 9:17 pm | 0 Comment
"The former Director of Operations of a US company that conducted campaign polls for President Bush and other political candidates, has been found guilty of ordering employees to fabricate survey results and sentenced to more than two years in jail. Tracy Costin, owner of political polling firm DataUSA (now known as Viewpoint USA), admitted in her plea that she had more...
Google takes over the world
By cdharris at February 20, 2007 | 11:45 am | 0 Comment
Google has revealed ambitious plans to create a unified advertising platform that could sell and deliver ads to print, radio, television and streaming media, including podcasts and Google Video.Advertisers would like to get the same kind of accountability and tracking that search advertising provides in other media, said Google cofounder Sergey Brin, The technology that more...
Is search engine “text box” marketing over?
By cdharris at February 20, 2007 | 11:37 am | 0 Comment
Jakob Nielsen recently conducted an eyetracking study of webpages?and is worried that "text box blindness" is becoming as common as "banner blindness."? One recent eyetracking study by MIT's Advertising/Media Lab(heatmap depicted here) showed that users "didn?t look at the Google ads in the right-hand margin of this page any more than they did banner more...
