Latitude

Computers are always processing information, but they don’t know how to process knowledge… It is always humanity that generates meaning.

This is why I now believe that the primary goal for technology should not be replacing human intelligence but, rather, facilitating human interaction.

Damon Horowitz, “Why Machines Need People”

From Social Data to Real Results: Taking the Initiative, Finally

A few weeks ago we wrote about Aardvark in the context of people as real-time information.

The amount of information in people’s heads positively dwarves the amount of information online, even today.

This time we’d like to hat-tip Aardvark for its transparency and research-savvy. It recently released an impressive paper entitled: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine.”

Popular social applications—especially those with real-time capabilities, location-awareness, or both (Aardvark, FourSquare, Brightkite, Blippy—and scores of others) are a veritable gold mine of user-generated information about everyday human behavior—social, physical, economic.

It takes someone to view creatively, organize intelligently and make transparent the aggregate results, but this information should be used to manifest and explore latent ideas that have real implications for the way we live.

Aardvark vs. Google

Aardvark conducted a test alongside Google search to assess the relative efficacy of its own social search engine from a user-experience standpoint. Aardvark users opted into “an experiment” where they also reformulated their question as a keyword query to Google.

(The paper acknowledges possible bias in favor of Aardvark; current Aardvark users, who already believe the service is helpful, were recruited—and it’s reasonable to expect that, in some cases, Aardvark was chosen because an initial Google search was unsatisfactory. Still, even considered independently, the values for Aardvark are impressive.)

Engineered Serendipity

Sharing a little from Aardvark’s recent paper, which primarily discusses the algorithm underlying its revolutionary platform, we thought that the way people are “indexed” and matched according to knowledge needs and abilities was rather fascinating.

Aardvark computes user matches along the following axes:

• Social connection (common friends and affiliations)
• Demographic similarity
• Profile similarity (e.g., common favorite movies)
• Vocabulary match (e.g., IM shortcuts)
• Chattiness match (frequency of follow-up messages)
• Verbosity match (the average length of messages)
• Politeness match (e.g., use of “Thanks!”)
• Speed match (responsiveness to other users)

Aardvark on TEDx: Why Machines Need People

Below is a TEDx video of Aardvark’s Damon Horowitz discussing his history as an AI developer and his arrived-at conviction that “the primary goal for technology should not be replacing human intelligence but, rather, facilitating human interaction.”

To give you an example: we have systems today which can search through all news articles that have ever been published, and find just those that are about the recent earthquake in Haiti. Then we have semantic technologies that can read through those articles, pull out all the facts and figures, and tell you what happened—they can tell you what Obama’s reaction was to the Earthquake in Haiti. Well, that’s kind of incredible.

But I can’t then turn around and ask my computer: “Hey, computer, how does that compare to other presidents’ reactions to other natural crises?” I can’t say, “Would you please explain to me how foreign aid works?” I can’t brainstorm with my computer about creative ideas how I could get involved and how I could help.

Damon Horowitz, “Why Machines Need People”

Header image courtesy of deapeajay’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

long vacation gone
busy people flock to jobs
and misspell “ipod”

Latitude is sponsoring a Haiku Contest around Apple’s iPad launch!

We’ve heard some wonderfully astute, humorous, and just downright interesting commentary on the new tablet—and the big issues surrounding it, such as lack of flash support, questionable utility (in light of smartphones), renewed hope for print media companies, and eBook pricing disputes—to name a few.

We’d like you to give us your reactions to the iPad–in haiku.

Rules

Each individual may submit up to 3 haikus. Haikus must be in English, and conform to a 3-line format with 5-7-5 syllable count. (Examples here.)

Haikus can be tweeted to @latddotcom, or emailed to life-connected@latd.com.

Prizes & Voting

One first prize winner will receive $100. Two runners-up will receive $25.

All submissions must be in by Friday, Feb. 5th at 11pm EST. We’ll begin open voting for the finalists on Tuesday, Feb. 9th.

Latitude is a research-fueled consultancy at the forefront of learning how users interact with physical and electronic media. We use generative research methods and Web-based technologies, engaging participants in creative exercises to articulate—and propose solutions to—key problems affecting organizations of all types. Learn more about Latitude here, or email life-connected@latd.com.

Header image courtesy of mattbuchanan’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Food is integral to the way we live, with far-reaching effects on the environment, personal health and enjoyment. Latitude is conducting a 42 study to understand how new connectivity—improved accessibility, transparency, and organization of information—alters our desires and decisions around food and food-purchasing.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

When the study reaches 50 participants, Latitude will donate $500 to The Hunger Project:

Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook to hear when we’ve reached our goal and to receive informational study updates.

The Hunger Project (THP) is a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

They work in 13 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to develop effective bottom-up strategies to end hunger and poverty—by empowering people to lead lives of self-reliance, to meet their own basic needs, and to build better futures for their children.

Some of THP’s initiatives include the creation of economically and environmentally sustainable community centers for meeting basic needs in rural villages—and micro-financing loans to women food farmers in Africa, whilst providing these women with training, support, and economic education to help them increase their incomes and better provide for their families.

Read more about THP’s key initiatives here.

Latitude 42: Food, Connected

Tell us about a specific instance during a grocery-shopping trip where you wished you had more information of some sort. This can be any type of information – food origin, health, price, location in the store, or anything else that was frustrating during your experience.

Learn more about Latitude’s Food, Connected study, or watch the introduction video below.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Header image courtesy of transaid’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Researchers theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

New York Times, “The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s”

Children as Active Users

The majority of content written about children and information psychology conceives of them as passive entities—describing how new connectivity and heavy media interaction is affecting them. (How do we monitor kids’ Web activity? Is it making them overweight? Unhappy? Unsuccessful in school?)

Instead, Latitude’s 42: Children’s Future Requests for Computers and the Internet, is interested in the unique perspective that children bring to the realm of innovation as active thinkers.

“It’s certainly no longer true that kids are just blindly consuming what commercial culture has to offer.”

One obvious result is that younger generations are going to have some very peculiar and unique expectations about the world.

New York Times, “The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s”

Tech’s “Critical Period”

A 2006 study by Zheng Yan found that age was a significant factor in children’s objective, “top-down” understanding of how the Internet works as a technical and social system (even most adults never reach the “scientific” level).

But, as the study only examined one cohort of children, it left off asking: “How do children learn and understand concepts that are newly emerged and highly complex?”

“My 3-year-old has become so accustomed to her father’s multi-touch iPhone screen that she approaches laptops by swiping her fingers across the screen, expecting a reaction.”

There’s evidence to support that, like language-learning, there may be a “critical period” or optimal stage of life (in childhood) during which some skills and concepts can take hold with more “fluency” than when acquired at later stages of life. Because technology, digital interactivity, and the psychology of new connectivity are so fast-evolving, younger generations may be uniquely positioned to understand these concepts, if primarily through intuition.

What are the Differences Across Mini-Generation Gaps?

A recent study by Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that kids (8-18) spend about two hours per day interacting with media on their mobile phones (and another hour viewing “old” content, like television programs, via newer mediums such as Hulu and iTunes).

The technology and interaction expectations for children today (dubbed “the iGeneration,” by one NYT article) include real-timeness, altered notions of community and geography, and, increasingly, interoperability across devices / device-agnostic content, as well as touch-screen/gestural interfaces—to name just a few.

If these standards are intuitable to children even just a “mini-generation gap” shy of millenials, it’s conceivable that their vision into the future spans further, even if it’s not well-articulated or concretely imagined.

Latitude 42: Children’s Future Requests for Computers & the Internet

To extrapolate real business opportunities from children’s creativity and their unique relationship to technology, Latitude is asking children to create visual representations (drawings) of something they’d like to do on their computers/the Internet, but can’t right now, as a structured problem-solving exercise. With some creativity, acumen, and analytical rigor of our own, we’ll extract some practical applications from the visual submissions (in tandem with a brief survey).

What would be really interesting or fun to do on your computer/the Internet that your computer can’t do right now? Please draw a picture of what this activity looks like.

To request participation, please send a brief email to innovation@latd.com.

Learn more about Latitude 42: Children’s Future Request for Computers & the Internet.

Header image courtesy of ciadefoto’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Contributing editor: Marina Miloslavsky.

Food & the Rise of Information

Fast Company recently selected “The 8 Biggest Kitchen Innovations of the Last Decade.” While a number were—predictably—devices, 2 of the 8 selections were Web-based (the epicurious iPhone app and freshdirect.com).

Food is integral to the way we live, with far-reaching effects on the environment, personal health and enjoyment. Latitude is conducting a 42 study to understand how new connectivity—improved accessibility, transparency, and organization of information—alters our desires and decisions around food and food-purchasing, with implications for retail experiences in general.

Using computers, including hand-helds and smartphones, we can make our preferences better known to the people who bring us the food we buy and eat: farmers, processors, distributors and retailers. We can demand and eventually get precisely the kind of food we want.

Essentially, the power to change the way we shop for food, the way it gets delivered to us and ultimately the way it gets produced.

New York Times, “The Way We Live Now: Faster Slow Food”

These recent technological innovations are empowering people with information; they’re filling gaps in the food shopping experience that we may not have even acknowledged previously, but which have a significant impact on the way we live.

Latitude 42: Food, Connected from latddotcom on Vimeo.

To participate in the study, click here.
Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Latitude’s 42 aims to explore these gaps more fully, to understand how existing solutions can be repurposed to fill these gaps, and to discover novel opportunities rooted in real needs and desires.

A Taste of the Future

In an earlier post on the projected future of food shopping, we speculated what the opportunity space for “information innovations” might look like—search-filtering by personal preferences like health, price, and food origins, and digital grocery lists with “smart memory,” recommendation capabilities, and compatibility with online grocery stores.

(Food for thought: up-and-coming blippy.com socializes real-time purchasing, asking “What are people buying right now?” and Ikan is a home bar-code scanner that digitizes your store list as you throw items away, then provides home delivery for items on the list—”the Netflix of groceries.”)

Narrative Analysis: the Power of Personal Storytelling

Personal narratives are the chosen “input” for this 42 study (textual, audio, or video formats). Implicitly or explicitly, structured storytelling can indicate “problems” (needs/desires), and suggest the latent or future solutions that could fill these gaps to better improve an individual’s experience.

More than traditional surveys, narrative analysis can reduce the gap which results from what individuals say versus what they actually do.  (A study called “Reality Bites,” which profiled the behavior of 1000 UK grocery shoppers against their stated attitudes on health, environmentally responsible purchasing, etc. found significant discrepancies here.)

Latitude 42: Food, Connected

Tell us about a specific instance during a grocery-shopping trip where you wished you had more information of some sort.  This can be any type of information – food origin, health, price, location in the store, or anything else that was frustrating during your experience.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Email innovation@latd.com if you have any questions, or to request more information.

Follow Latitude 42: Food, Connected study updates here.

Header image courtesy of yourdon’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

I fear that most contemporary people are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention; they’re answering questions because they feel as though they deserve to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special, so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty. This, in one paragraph, explains the rise of New Media.

Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur

On Chuck’s side, we have the narcissistic-exhibitionist “Growing Up On Facebook” perspective with regard to information-sharing. (Perhaps, with an extra tinge of the self-important. He delineates the phenomenon of liking to be heard from the feeling that one ought to be heard.)

More optimistically, we also have the channeling of this “personal drive to inform” in useful ways, as embodied in targeted knowledge-sharing platforms like Aardvark. It’s possible that answering questions only for those who want to know is enough to satisfy the “contemporary people’s” call to answer. (It may also be the key to new engagement.)

Aardvark appeals to the “know-it-all”–or, rather, the “know-a-lot-about-a-little,” in all of us; the engagement element is easy.

Latitude, “Aardvark: People as Information [Real-Time]“

Perhaps digital identity’s “faux friendship age” of personal profile grooming and (accusably) vapid status updates has grown up to surpass general, unsolicited loudmouthedness—to fulfill a truly information-driven destiny. (Or is getting there, at least.)

“… and we’ll both fade back into the ether, until we form transient connections with others in the name of good-will information exchange.”

Latitude, “Aardvark: People as Information [Real-Time]“

Thoughts on this? Other platforms that engage our knowledge “outspokenness” in useful or information-centric ways?

Contributing editor: Ian Schulte.

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) LLC is a cross-industry initiative developing the next generation digital media experience based on open, licensable specifications and designed to create a viable, global digital marketplace.

This new digital media specification and logo program will enable consumers to purchase digital video content from a choice of online retailers and play it on a variety of devices and platforms from different manufacturers.

Press Release: “Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) Announces Key Milestones”

Dozens of companies, from consumer electronics manufacturers to content distributors, have banded together to form the DECE. Essentially, they propose a “rights locker,” or virtual library, which will ensure that users’ content is accessible from and interoperable across all their devices.

The DECE includes:

• Network hardware manufacturers (Cisco)
• Computers / television /mobile device manufacturers (Sony, Samsung, HP)
• Content producers  (Fox, Warner Bros.)
• A/V Encoding Companies (Dolby, DTS, DivX)
• Big box retailers (Best Buy)
• Cable companies / Content distributors (Comcast, Netflix)

Complete list of participating companies in DECE’s press release.

The hope is to increase sales and to minimize motivation for piracy by improving the user experience, via comprehensive device-content interoperability.

Consumers would have to register the devices on which they want to play content, similar to Apple’s approach with iTunes, but there would be fewer restrictions. “The same buy once, play everywhere attribute: There is no product in the marketplace today that offers it,” says DECE’s President, Mitch Singer.

Businessweek, “Digital Content Wherever You Want It”

Access is King

We think this venture holds a great deal of promise. In an earlier post on pay-worthy digital content models, we highlighted the importance of interoperability in improving the overall user experience:

Based on recent studies with music access, Latitude found that more than half of both free (streaming, sharing, etc.) and paid music listeners deemed access from multiple devices to be a pay-worthy feature.

Header image courtesy of cleevillasor’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

But the adult is not the highest stage of development. The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear-minded, all-seeing Child.

Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh, excerpted on Andy Eklund’s blog, “Creativity Streak.”

Innovation-Thinking

Many brilliant innovations come about by transposing one solution onto a new category of problem, the result of which may strike us as a kind of curious juxtaposition. (Blogging by e-mail, anyone? How about systems thinking and children’s toys?)

Kids Solve Problems

Children are naturally more fluent with ideas than adults, unfettered by the “necessity” and experience of applying their underlying thinking ability to knowledge areas in conditioned ways, within the boundaries of what is practical and possible. (Rote learning is an extreme example of the thinking “refinement” we undergo on the way to adulthood.)

A child’s knowledge and experience are limited and so the problem solutions are often impractical. But what matters is the way the child’s mind uses the limited material at its disposal.

When children were given the “political” problem of stopping a cat and a dog from fighting, their ideas went far beyond the approaches used by politicians.

Edward de Bono, Children Solve Problems

In a 2006 Developmental Psychology study by Zheng Yan, children between the ages of 9 and 13 were asked to represent pictorially what the Internet looks like. Some of the drawings (c & d below), convey a complex understanding of a system that even most adults struggle to comprehend.

The Merlin Factor: Putting Kids’ Solutions to Practical Use

It takes some insight and patience (the more you look, the more you find) for an adult to appreciate the creativity in children’s responses because they are often unconventional or “impossible.” Thus, questions posed to children should be targeted and thoughtful–a structured problem-solving objective should exist–to elicit solutions that manifest the power of children’s undamped creativity.

For example, asking children: “If you wanted to build a house more quickly, how would you do it?” ultimately requires children to generate solutions for how to make an existing process faster and more efficient. (Example from Edward de Bono’s, Children Solve Problems).

Latitude 42: Children’s “Future Requests” for Computers & the Internet

As part of its 42s: An Innovation Series, Latitude is launching a generative thought study around Web technology–with the help of children ages 12 and under.

What would be really interesting or fun to do on your computer/the Internet that your computer can’t do right now?  Please draw a picture of what this activity looks like.

Additionally, the study will explore: how children use and understand Web technology, which environmental factors contribute to these understandings, and the extent to which children can think “innovatively” (beyond the bounds of their known environment).

We expect to be impressed. We also expect to learn a few things from our participants.

Let’s say you get an idea – or, as Pooh would more accurately say – it gets you. Where did it come from? If you are able to trace it all the way back to its source, you will discover that it came from Nothing. And chances are, the greater the idea, the more directly it came from there.

The wise are children who know their minds have been emptied of the countless minute somethings of small learning, and filled with the wisdom of the Great Nothing.

Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh, excerpted on Andy Eklund’s blog, “Creativity Streak.”

To learn more about Latitude 42: Children’s “Future Requests” for Computers & the Internet, check back at life-connected.com over the next week.

To request participation (children ages 12 and under), email innovation@latd.com.

Header image courtesy of mamchenkov’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

People are Essential for Improved Information Access

There are platforms which connect people to information, and those which connect people to people.

From “In Search of a Community That Takes ‘Me’ Out of Social Media” by Dan Schultz

Increasingly, the endpoints of “people” and “information” are converging. (Some “people” services, like Twitter, can get you to either destination depending on how you opt to use them, and life-streaming platforms have effectively become socially-based recommendation engines.)

In recent studies probing the nature of innovation and information psychology, Latitude examined a wide variety of ventures which address the ever-more-relevant issues of information access and organization; more than half of these innovations viewed people as integral to improving the quantity, quality, and accessibility of information.

Aardvark: “The Real-Time Web of People”

Aardvark, recently named ReadWriteWeb’s “Best LittleCo of 2009,” allows a user to ask any question, then searches “the real-time Web of people” according to users’ self-selected knowledge tags. Its bot then utilizes iPhone push notifications, Web, email, or Twitter to mediate conversations efficiently between mutually relevant individuals.

Aardvark appeals to the “know-it-all”–or, rather, the “know-a-lot-about-a-little,” in all of us; the engagement element is easy.

The Internet has been celebrated for the wonder of bringing vast oceans of content right to our fingertips. Then we interjected the value of social recommendations with the rise of the blog–and services like Yelp.

And now with real-time people connectivity, I needn’t rely on my desired answer to already exist, or worry about sifting through vast oceans of content to find it… or find just the right person to ask, in the event I can’t find what I’m looking for. Aardvark is a real-time people search engine for targeted queries.

People as Information: Functional Transiency

The curious thing about Aardvark is that its design actually precludes people from forming long-term connections (unlike, say, Twitter). I’m not going to “follow” the 24 year old female from Boston who told me where to take good, relatively inexpensive Italian classes around my neighborhood; I’m going to thank her, and we’ll both fade back into the ether, until we form transient connections with others in the name of good-will information exchange.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Header image courtesy of scobleizer’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

As an application-developing research company, we couldn’t help but pass this along.

xkcd cartoons, by randall munroe, are licensed under (cc); this image reproduced with permission.