A good data visualization communicates ideas instantly, but designing one can be a complex task—it’s more than just throwing together colors and shapes. A well-designed graphic can completely change how we perceive information, and how data should always trump style. “Aesthetics cannot rescue failed content,” says data visualization pioneer Ed Tufte. “There are enormously beautiful visualizations, but that’s a byproduct of the truth and goodness of the information.” Careful information design is paramount to pulling it off.

Humans have a powerful capacity to process visual information, skills that date far back in our evolutionary lineage. And since the advent of science, we have employed intricate visual strategies to communicate data, often utilizing design principles that draw on these basic cognitive skills. In a modern world where we have far more data than we can process, the practice of data visualization has gained even more importance. From scientific visualization to pop infographics, designers are increasingly tasked with incorporating data into the media experience. Data has emerged as such a critical part of modern life that it has entered into the realm of art, where data-driven visual experiences challenge viewers to find personal meaning from a sea of information, a task that is increasingly present in every aspect of our information-infused lives.

The amazing video features: Edward Tufte, Yale University, Julie Steele, O’Reilly Media, Josh Smith, Hyperakt, & Jer Thorp, Office for Creative Research

Austrian-bred producer, composer and musician Patrick Pulsinger. He is a really awesome nerd when it comes to modular synthesizers. Here, he demonstrates patching his bespoke modular synth at the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy in New York. Watch how rapt the room full of people are in his explanations.

Enjoy

A quick History lesson about the Modular Synth:

The earliest commercial modular synthesizers were developed, in parallel, by R.A. Moog Co., and Buchla in 1963. The synthesizer both broadened the spectrum, and greatly eased the creation of electronic music, which before was made via tape splicing, use of primitive electronic oscillators, and earlier electronic or electromechanical instruments. In 1976, the Japanese company Roland came out with the Roland System 100.

This short tilt-shift time-lapse film, entitled “Miniature Melbourne” was created by Nathan Kaso and creates the illusion that the city of Melbourne, Australia is actually a toy. According to the description this short took 10 months to making and features a range of different events and festivals held in the city throughout the year.

Enjoy

Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go. enjoy.

My friends Jeff Silverman, Geoff Judge, and I will be presenting on Monday morning at the NY Angels Educational Series on the Online Ad Ecosystem.

Click here to join us.

The event is called: “Online advertising eco-system – who makes money and how” We have been working on the content all summer to create a wonderful environment for those who are new (and more experienced) to the Online Ad Ecosystem to understand how it works, and where to invest time and money. The event will be held at the Microsoft’s Emerging Company Center (Map)

Click here to join us.

Here is a description of the event:

The online advertising eco-system has grown by leaps and bounds, on any metric (revenues, advertisers, placements and many more) since its inception in the 1990’s. The topic we will be exploring is what role do the 100 plus companies in this eco-system play within it. These companies include media buying platforms, ad & data optimization companies , ad exchanges, contextual, behavioral & social targeting companies and so much more. What is the objective of each of these companies? Who makes money and how? This session will spend three hours trying to simplify this online advertising matrix and follow the flow of money, data, and risk from the point where ad inventory is produced by online publishers to its use by online marketers and its ultimate consumption by mobile and online users.

8am to 9:30am First Session

Introduction – Jeffrey Silverman of the NY Angels
Speakers: Scott Hoffman at Cliqology and Geoff Judge, Partner at iNovia Capital
Topic: Provide an overview of the online advertising eco-system
Slides to accompany the discussion with a Q&A session

9:45am to 11:00am Second Session

Moderator: Nick MacShane, Founder and Senior Managing Director at Progress Partners
Panel:
Brian Kaminsky, Group Publisher of Huffington Post at AOL
Art Muldoon, CEO/Co-Founder of Accordant Media
Albert Azout, CEO of Sociocast
Moritz Loew, Sr. Director of Sales at MSNBC Interactive
Scott Meyer, CEO of Evidon
Jon Greenwood, General Manager of Media Innovation Group

Topic: Roundtable discussion of the online advertising eco-system and what do each of our panel members see occurring in the future.

Big Thanks to all the panelist for participating.

Why is this the Golden Age of Digital Advertising Technology?

We are in the midst of a Golden Age of Digital Advertising Technology. There are literally hundreds of smart companies that are now engaged actively in streamlining the process of digital media buying, selling, optimization, etc. So why is this happening now? Did everyone in digital media business suddenly get smarter? No doubt some folks have gotten smarter, but that is not the underlying cause for the amazing growth in the sector.

The answer is two-fold: Data and Technology:

DATA: The quantity and quality data that is available today is overwhelming. In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) — growing by a factor of 9 in just five years, source IDC. Social Media is the driving force behind this explosion of data. As recently ago as 2007, publishing content on the web was controlled by professionals, companies like AOL, MSN, Yahoo, NYTimes. There was very little ability for the average Joe to publish anything online. Fast forward 4 years to 2011, and the ability to publish has never been easier, with the click of a few buttons, my 80 year old Aunt can update her status on Facebook, tweet on Twitter, Tumble on Tumblr, all with relative ease. Or as my friend Peter Shankman says:

By some estimates there are more than a billion people participating in Social Media, each creating some form of content, and as a byproduct data. The sheer volume of consumers creating content exponentially increases the amount of data that is created.

But there are some differences in the data that is being created. The data is largely unstructured. When professional produce content, that organize that content very carefully, which allows the data that is created to also be easily organized. Consumers are not concerned with how they organize the content that they create, and publish content about widely different topics on the same page.

As an aside, this muddled content on the page, was the impetus for some of the first generation of Ad Technology players in the space today. When a publisher organized content on page, they created context. If everything on a web page was about Golf, then those marketers who covet golf enthusiast would be willing to pay to market to the users that viewed that page. In consumer generated unorganized pages, there is little context, rendering the ad space on the page much less valuable. What the first generation Ad Technology companies did was track a user who visited a page that had organized content, let’s say Golf, and subsequently display a marketing message about Golf, on a page that didn’t have organized content, and theoretically increasing the ad space value of the consumer generated unorganized page.

TECHNOLOGY:

Technology is the second half of the equation. The cost to store, sort, and, process the vast amount of data has been drastically reduced. Technology, in the form of teraflops and zettabytes that was once reserved for the most essential of human activities, became accessible to us, the marketing community. We now have the means to sort through the vast quantities of unstructured data to create the value from the Data, a practice sometimes referred to as Data Mining. To give you some perspective on the accessibility of technology to the average person, take a look at this advertisement circa 1995.

In August of 2010 the cost for a 10 MB of storage was $.0008 Cents, source Seagate Techbologies.

I expect that we will see many more advancements in the coming months and years with the Ad Technology front, with Data and Technology being the agents of change. I think that the data and the technology that we are just starting to use in the Digital Space will be transposed to the more traditional forms of marketing and media in the not so distant future. Industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors in this space will all look back on this time, and smile.

We are in the Golden Age, like 90 years ago in the car industry. There wasn’t just 5 or 6 dominate car companies, when all the innovation hit the car industry, there were thousands of car companies, with hundreds running at any one time.

From Wikipedia:

Throughout this era, development of automotive technology was rapid, due in part to a huge number (hundreds) of small manufacturers all competing to gain the world’s attention. Key developments included electric ignition (by Robert Bosch, 1903), independent suspension, and four-wheel brakes (by the Arrol-Johnston Company of Scotland in 1909).[16] Leaf springs were widely used for suspension, though many other systems were still in use, with angle steel taking over from armored wood as the frame material of choice. Transmissions and throttle controls were widely adopted, allowing a variety of cruising speeds, though vehicles generally still had discrete speed settings rather than the infinitely variable system familiar in cars of later eras.

Related articles

• How big will the Marketing Data Marketplace Get? (cliqology.com)
• World’s Big Data to Grow 50X Bigger in Next Decade (fastforwardblog.com)
• Is P&G the next digital giant? (tech.fortune.cnn.com)

Not understanding your own technology is one way to damage your ad technology companies reputation.

In the ad technology business, sales people who represent new emerging technology sometimes have no idea how it really works, and are just selling marketing speak. These salespeople present a deck, promotional material, perhaps even deliver a demonstration of the technology, and sometimes these salespeople get a deal sold.

But when a client actually subscribes, buys, or deploys, the technology and it doesn’t work as described, the salesperson is often times at a loss. This happens — a lot, it’s called selling false expectations. It gets worse if the buyer bragged about it to his/her boss, or promised a client it could do what the salesperson told it would. And then it doesn’t.

Then again, the technology could work exactly as promised but it’s not grounded in sound marketing principles, so it never actually hits the right note with customers or your business.

This type of naive selling, where a sales staff doesn’t understand their own technology will end up creating an extremely bad reputation for your company, and it happens very fast. Our media community is still very small, and the moniker of “over promising and under delivering” are the kiss of death for any start-up.

To avoid making these mistakes, make sure that your salespeople have access to the technology staff, receive extensive training, and are not just “the sales people” but rather experts on how your technology works, and how it benefits your potential clients. Make sure you have someone on your end who also understands the technology and can ask the tough questions of your own company.

Also be wary of the sales that are generated by people who may have over promised on the technology. Know what the benefits are as well as the risks, and have contingency plans in place.

In 60 Seconds:

• 98,000+ Tweets
• 695,000+ Facebook Status Updates
• 6,600+ new Pictures on Flickr
• 600+ new Videos on Youtube
• 13,000+ iPhone Apps Downloaded
• 20,000+ new post on Tumblr

Hat tip to Fred Wilson who posted this picture on his Tumblr

and the Folks at go-globe.com who created the infographic.

Hat Tip to my friend Jon Lawrence at Arjent for sending this to me.

Today I came across this video infographic that projects digital life statistics out to the year 2015. It is from NeoLabs, and you can click here for more information.

Based on their research they have put together some little snack bite information snippets like:

• More consumers will access the Internet by mobile devices than by desktop or laptop by 2014.
• Traffic generated by 20 homes will be greater than the total traffic of Internet in 1995.

Watch the video – enjoy:

Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.

Hat tip the Micheal at @xplusone for discovering this goodie!