Charting the rise of the Internet of Things

I've been following the Internet of Things for a few years now, the wireless home/city with more and more connected devices talking to each other is almost a tangible reality rather than some sci-fi future.

The number of devices connected to the web, sharing data, enabling new behaviours and capabilities is growing at a rapid rate.  So if you haven't watched the video from the IBM Internet of Things project, do so here, and then click to make this nice infographic from Cisco,(who also have a rather nifty data projection graphing tool),  big enough to read properly!

Click to enlarge

How to Fix Threads in Mango: A Concept

One of the most frequent complaints we've seen in most of the articles from press with the new Mango preview build is the confusing implementation of Threads. After giving it some thought, we realized that we actually agreed; Threads in its current incarnation seems overly complex and requires a few too many taps to jump between methods of messaging and thus hampers the potential efficient use. So we've come up with a solution in the form of the infographic you see above.

Read it, ogle the pictures, and then tell us what you think!

In 60 seconds in digital lot of things happen...

Take note: Storytelling doesn't have to use Powerpoint

Over time I've sat through a lot of long dull company satisfaction survey presentations or webinars. Yawn.
I've probably been for my fair share of interviews too. Only last week I wrote a piece about using data in compelling ways.

Confused? Lost about where I am going with this one?

Well I've just spotted this nice example of a slightly tongue in cheek recruitment video that is designed to attract candidates to UK ad agency Dare whilst saying something about the company. It combines the output of a company survey (of sorts),  has taken the data and created a series of infographics, and combined them to form a short film which I think you'll admit is much more appealing than a dull presentation or a load of facts on a website.


This is Dare. Are you? from thisisdare on Vimeo.

How could you interrogate the data you have around a given topic to create something similar?  I came across Gartner's notion of Pattern Based Strategy earlier today and it really resonated: the notion not of purely copying something but learning from the principles or core ingredients to create something repeatable and scaleable. Now that's smart.

Nice infographic gives perspective on the geo-social world

Hats off to the Jess3 team for yet again rustling up a nice, useful infographic.

Albeit I have to confess that aesthetically I still love the (updated for 2010) Flowtown digital world map. Must be my inner explorer. Can't beat a nice map!

There's also a heap of others worth a peruse through here. Obviously anything with numbers out-dates pretty quickly and just because things look pretty doesn't necessarily mean that they are robust (given people are quite quick to trust things on the web) so think for yourself but....

Misconception: No-one tweets outside the heart of big cities?

Wrong!

Sure there'll always be a concentration of people at the front end of technology in places where geeks like me tend to work : every big city tends to have areas with lots of creative / strategy shops, but lots of people commute a long way to work and if they are enthusiastic about what they are doing will advocate / influence those around them when they are not in the office.

Just found this fab, fab infographic that maps Tweets like contours on a map.

Have a play (they've added some amusing tweaks of place names), or go and see a selection of other images from the creator over on Flickr... Clever stuff.