There are shortages of many things when you are running a startup. Cash, time and talent are all limited resources that must be carefully managed. One thing that their is no shortage of is advice on how to run things. Whether it’s Six Simple Rules of Logo Design, or Ten Ways to Manage Engineers Better, or yet another article on what “Minimum Viable Product” actually means, the internet is awash in blog posts on best practices for startups. Filtering through all this can be a bit overwhelming. The amount of opinion presented as fact is staggering and a lot of it, not necessarily good, is repeated ad infinitum on blog after blog after blog.
This is where things get potentially hazardous. As has been famously noted, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. As a corollary to that, nobody knows if you have any idea what you are talking about either.
My background is graphic design. I’ve worked on major brand campaigns, I’ve designed hundreds of logos and I’ve worked to coordinate the look and feel of companies across multiple media platforms. Until I quit it all to found Graphient, I charged a lot of money for these services. I can safely say that I am an expert graphic designer. I routinely encounter blog posts on graphic design that present superficial understanding of the topic as expert advice. This of course calls into question all the “expert” advice I’ve read on other startup or product development related issues.
So what? The internet is sort of known for a bad signal to noise ratio, right? Yeah, I guess. That doesn’t really justify the sheer volume of posts. I was mulling this over after work the other day with my esteemed colleague, Mark Trumpbour. We decided that like so much in the world the fault lay with Search Engine Optimization and a lack of critical thinking about received wisdom.
One of the first pieces of advice you get when you launch a startup is to have a blog. It is suggested that you use this new platform to project your opinions on things related to your domain in order to increase both your mindshare and your google ranking on searches related to what your company does. This dovetails nicely with the advice that an entrepreneur should seek to become a thought leader within the business community. So, there’s your means and motivation for publishing. Now, what are you going to publish? How about some advice for other entrepreneurs? Maybe you could tell them about the importance of having a blog?
Two final statements before I go back to the salt mines:
The irony of the fact that this opinion is being published on the blog we set up when we founded the company does not escape me. We were following some advice we read on the internet.
The New York Times has an interesting (and somewhat depressing) interactive times series graph of US unemployment rates. The controls let you slice the data demographically to get a sense of how groups you are not a part of might be feeling the effects of the recession. For the dryness of the presentation, this data tells a very compelling and human story.
Coming across our desk via tweet from Sir Time Berneers Lee: an amazing (if not amazing looking) google maps based data mashup showing marine traffic throughout the world. That is to say, Real Time (not really but close) data showing position, speed and heading for ships throut the worlds major shipping lanes. The Mashup runs on top of a big open data set hosted by the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. More information about the project can be found at the open dot dot dot blog. Anyway go check it out.
One funny thing, it shows traffic on canals and rivers, so when you first look at the map you may wonder why there are forty boats in Missouri.
The team behind the core technology that became photosynth is taking things to a much higher level. Sameer Agarwal and his band of computer vision desperadoes rebuilt Rome (or a reasonable simulation thereof) in just under 24 hours. This feat was pulled off using 150,000 images pulled from Flickr and some extremely hot computer vision research.
Check out the digest version here and the full nerd monty here.
FlowingData, if you don't already read them: start now
FlowingData has a nice post today rounding up 20 data visualizations related to crime and criminals. Most revolve around maps with temporal components shoehorned into a few. We love maps here at Graphient. We love them for how they visually describe space, and we really love them for the way they provide a fixed contextual grid for organizing other kinds of data. The map visualizations presented at FlowingData stop short of adding in other data and stick to simply reporting the facts of crime, but those maps could have been used to introduce and connect all sorts of other (possibly sensitive) socioeconomic data and maybe tell a deeper story about crime.
So, you hear a lot less about cloud computing these days and a lot more about “the Real Time Internet.” In a move that should surprise exactly no one, hype factory TechCrunch is going to be hosting an event about the implications of Real Time. I expect to see more of these events, seminars, and camps from the usual suspects over the coming months.
Rest assured that Graphient will not be changing its business model or the specs of FreeTime to meet this new challenge head on. Like the Cloud, Real Time is an important concept to keep in mind as technology evolves in front of us. Filtered streams of data are exciting and in many ways important to the work we are doing at Graphient. But true Real Time is still a long way off and the oncoming hype spasm will likely muddy the waters in many ways. Much like it did for Cloud Computing.
Last week I was in Boston briefly and thanks to a logistical spasm I had the opportunity to ride the Silverline from Logan Airport to South Station. While waiting for said Silverline I encountered this map:
Detail of the map in question.
I took a picture of the map because of the wear pattern created by countless travelers tracing their fingers over it. In that wear pattern we can see those travelers working out their routes on the Silverline and picking out the different transfer points throughout the system. In essence the map carries a second channel of data relative to the first. Of course this second channel is pretty unscientific but we haven’t let that stop us from appreciating the aesthetics of information presentation before and we won’t start now.
Later in the day I was talking to my Dad about this phenomena, and the idea that data is being recorded in the physical world all around us, all the time, simply by the way we use things. He mentioned Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England. The stone stairs of the cathedral’s chapter house date to 1306, and they have been eroded along the preferred path worshippers and clergy have taken ascending and descending those stairs all these years.
Those very steps
While much of this naturally recorded information is of limited utility or has ambiguous meaning, we find ourselves oddly stimulated by the idea that a channel of information is projected onto the world in this way.
Here at Graphient our thoughts are with those engaged in a higher stakes game than any startup ever could be. This morning I set Tweetdeck to search for “Tehran” for about an hour and watched the messages of hope and revolution stream by. It is amazing to see a technology derided by so many as useless and narcissistic have such a profound effect on world affairs.
Good luck to the Iranian people. And to Twitter: congratulations, your shipment of relevance has arrived.
By now, you have probably seen Sir Tim Berners-Lee talking about the importance of Open Data at this year’s TED conference. If you haven’t here it is. Take a look because it’s important:
I’m posting this now because the Open Data movement seems to be getting some traction–at least in Government circles. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration launched Data.gov a clearing house for government data. Washington D.C. has become a leader in municipal public data, putting some 260 feeds of data out in raw form. And now the UK has decided to get in on the act: Gordon Brown the embattled Prime Minister, announced yesterday that none other than Sir Tim Himself would be heading up the initiative to open England’s data up to the public.
This was largely damage control after a series of embarrassing disclosures about how members of Parliament expense things, but it is a welcome development all the same.
We here at Graphient wish Sir Tim the best of luck moving forward and very much hope that FreeTime will become the application of choice for those looking at all that data.
