Latitude is excited to announce that it teamed up with Shareable last week to co-launch an innovation study around food and digital connectivity: “Food, Connected.”
Shareable, headed up by Jeremy Adam Smith and Neal Gorenflo, is a non-profit online magazine that reports on people, places, and projects working to enact a more shareable world—these include social innovations, communities, and services like Zipcar, Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Burning Man, Freecycle, and Creative Commons. The site discusses the broader trends and implications vaulting all things shareable, in addition to offering tools and actionable tips for readers to take part in the design of a more shareable world.
If you have a child who is age 12 or younger, we invite you to participate in the study. Click here to begin.
(We’re very conscious of privacy on the Internet, so please regard the notice on the instruction screen.)
Latitude Partners with ReadWriteWeb
Yesterday, we co-launched a Latitude 42 study with ReadWriteWeb, one of the world’s top 20 blogs; ReadWriteWeb speaks to an intelligent audience of web enthusiasts, early adopters and innovators, and is syndicated by the New York Times.
Children’s “Future Requests” for Computers & the Internet
The study utilizes children’s underlying thinking ability and creativity (unfettered by the practical constraints of what seems practical or possible), asking them to innovate on current Web technologies.
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.
With a bit of creative insight on the analytical side, we plan to extrapolate real-world opportunities for the Web technology sphere from the ideas that children generate (represented visually, as drawings) around expressed needs or desires. The study should shed light on potential innovations for audiences beyond merely the younger demographic.
Latitude developed Kaleidoscope as an interactive, generative research tool that allows participants to respond to directed research questions by uploading images and entering textual explanations regarding their choices. Respondents can interact with the entire set of uploaded images, providing behavioral data about interactions with other users’ contributions.
Kaleidoscope is a tool for directed idea generation; it is a Web application which allows user to contribute and interact with creative input in a behavioral environment.
Below is a screenshot of Kaleidoscope:
If you have a child who is age 12 or under and would like to experience Kaleidoscope—with the ability to view other users’ contributions to the study—click here to participate.
A limited amount of entered information is available for public viewing. Read Kaleidoscope’s privacy notice to understand what’s public and what’s not.
Latitude is a research-driven consultancy for technology and media companies. We work with clients to discover and develop opportunities for next-generation content, software, and communications technologies through a combination of Web-based applications and innovative research methods. Email ischulte@latd.com to learn more about working with Latitude.
Header image courtesy of diegocupolo’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.
Last week we launched The iPad Haiku Contest to capture some of the quirky, well-informed, on-the-fly feedback we were hearing about the new tablet.
We’re offering $100 to the individual with the best haiku, and $25 each to 2 runners-up.
We received excellent response to the contest and had difficulty narrowing all the entries down to a manageable number—5 finalists—for open voting.
Vote Now
Click on a haiku below to vote for it.
Only one vote per person will be counted. Voting open through Friday, Feb. 12th, 6pm EST.
You can also submit your votes by tweet or text message. Either:
Tweet @poll the keyword associated with your preferred haiku. Only tweet the keyword and do not preface the keyword/author name with an “@” symbol. (ex. @poll luciuskwok)
OR
Send an SMS to 99503—only from US numbers—with the keyword of your preferred haiku. (ex. SMS to 99503: julievank)
Live-Polling Results
The Twitter usernames of the haiku authors are displayed in bold text below. So give ‘em a nod (and a follow). These usernames are also the keywords used for Twitter/SMS voting.
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.
Live audience polling by PollEverywhere; header image courtesy of mattbuchanan’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
Latitude is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Shareable for its Food, Connected study! Results will be posted to both life-connected.com and Shareable.net.
Food is integral to the way we live, with far-reaching effects on the environment, personal health and enjoyment. Latitude is conducting a 42study 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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)
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.
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.
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