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Good piece in Business Week by Alonzo Canada of Jump Associates about how companies can see expansion opportunities beyond their core area of business.

"Their Explore team was given the audacious task of helping Nike become a sports company. The team met the challenge by creating a map to identify the richest opportunities, define a strategy for growth, and set first steps toward a future vision. The map helped the team see product beyond shoes, such as sunglasses, watches, MP3 players, and sports apparel. The data on their map included consumer needs, societal and technology trends, and Nike's chief competitors, adidas, Puma, and Reebok. It also included indirect competitors such as MTV, because it offers a rival option for what kids can do after school: Nike wants them playing sports; MTV wants them parked in front of the tube. By drawing such a comprehensive map, Nike was able to consider new directions, such as partnerships that marry sports and digital entertainment like its successful Nike + iPod platform."

Clearly, looking over the horizon and exploring all the possibilities is a way to see opportunities, but this no test of whether a brand can credibly stretch into these new areas. Much work has to be done to understand the strength and equity of the brand and it's ability to expand into other areas.

In addition, rather than rely on existing published data about surrounding markets, it would make sense to talk leading edge opinion leaders in these areas and in other fields to get some speculative understanding of how the shape of this map could change.

It's also further proof that strategists increasingly need great designers to bring their thinking and ideas to life.


Posted by Ed Cotton I have written in the past about the new world of data visualization and the fact it has almost become a new art form. I am going to change my tune here a little and suggest that is going to become an essential tool for anyone working in the agency, strategy, media space.

Our clients are demanding more and more interesting looks at data from us, so we better have a nice way to communicate all this stuff. Aside from the creative department, not many of us have the visual skills to make this work, so we are going to rely on existing tools to make this happen.

One example is Modest Maps which requires a little bit of technical expertise, but can be used to great effect. Take a look at this which shows the spread of Wal-Mart over time.

Going back to the seductiveness of data visualization, at it's best it can become great content as this BBC series, Britain from Above shows. If you get it right it can fascinate, delight us and help us to better understand our world or our business.






Posted by Ed Cotton Geo Enabling the Internet (37.333147152394034 , -121.88935160636902) This week at the Where 2.0 conference we witnessed an exciting aspect of the near-future Internet.  For the last couple of years the focus has been on ‘what’, as in what is something associated with and what kinds of meta data can be used to make that content indexable and sortable.  Now the goal becomes to add location data to content, thus enabling the geo aware web.  The map mashup, so prevalent over the last year or two, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah, Second Life is cool, but what about moving around the real earth and its buildings, inside and out.  That’s the aim of Planet9’s application,‘Raygun’, which allows you to walk around in virtual cities modeled after their real namesakes and potentially interact with other people in the virtual world.  It's currently in private Beta, but promises to be worth a look when it goes public.

Although not brand new Microsoft’s live maps are now 3d enabled directly in the browser via a plugin.  Now when you search for your hotel in San Francisco, you can zoom in, look at the building in 3d, and see what landmarks are around it.   Then head over to Google maps to see actual pictures of the area via the new ‘Street View’ functionality.      

Communities of neocartographers are helping produce the openstreetmap.org map, a wiki based map of the world .  The content is submitted by dedicated people armed with GPS units and a desire to make maps open for all to use and share.  This project was started because many countries (Great Britain specifically in this case) tightly control map data and that so desperately wants to be free or at least inexpensive.

The gap between the Internet and location-aware mobile devices is rapidly breaking down.  Check Twittervision for an example or Boost’s product created by Loopt that allows you to keep track of your friends.

Although the online mapping community is a relatively young movement overall, many of the people involved are very experienced in building amazing applications.  There are some real heavy hitters investing massive amounts of money in this endeavor.  The kinds of hardware, software, networks, and communities that are available for use on these projects have and will continue to ensure amazing products and ideas.  The next few years are going to witness amazing software that is unlike anything you’ve seen on the Internet so far.  You really don’t have to think very hard to start dreaming up amazing applications for geo-aware data and how it not only makes the Internet more interesting in general, but also enables more relevant and interactive marketing.

Joshua Brewer
Senior Software Engineer
SFI
  Frank Taylor of Google Earth blog captured some amazing footage of new Google camera technology that was shown at yesterday's Where 2.0 conference. Just think of the advertising possibilities!