The Future Place Blog

What's Opera Doc?

In great seasonal spirit Cognitive Edge has a YouTube link to one of my favourite cartoons, a Bugs Bunny episode, called What's the Opera Doc, from Merrie Melodies (Warner Bros), made in 1957. The cartoon is loosely themed on Wagner's opera, check out "Kill the Rabbit" to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries.

Great list of top tens

Lifehacker has a great list of different top 10s, for example Top 10 iphone Applicatons and Top 10 Free Windows Downloads.

Sharing ideas on FaceBook

Increasingly, I am linking my explorations on FaceBook, with my Blog, with articles for magazines such ESOMAR's Research World, and more recently Twitter. If somebody is looking for a definition of Web 3.0, it will be when all of these channels are seamlessly linked.

At present I find the most useful FaceBook group as being The Big List of Market Researchers (partly because I am the administrator of it), the group has over 800 members and a reasonably active debate.

Other useful groups on FaceBook include:
Research 2.0
Quant research
Qualitative research
Marketing Sciences
SSI User Group
Confirmit Users Group

And, the biggest of all the groups, with over 1200 researchers is I work in Market Research & no I don't stand in the street with a clipboard.

BTW, the poll about the meaning of ASAP is still running, to see the latest results go here, and click view results (near the Vote button), if you have not voted, then please add your views.

Death of Netscape

Lots of sites have been reporting that AOL are discontinuing Netscape, with support being removed from Feb 1st 2008. Most of these did not catch my eye as I was aware that Netscape's share had fallen to 1% or less. However, the Wikinomics blog highlighted that this is another example of how quickly the world is changing, about 12 years ago Netscape had 80%-90% of the browser market

Too many air miles!

I have just used Great Circle Mapper to calculate the number of miles I flew in 2007. It seems I flew 71,600 miles, about 115,000 kilometres. I am now in the process of working out the Carbon Footprint of my flying, but it is clearly horrendous.

I am resolved to reduce my air miles in 2008, wherever possible, but given that a large part of my business is running workshops in places like Canada and Australia that will not be easy. I am also resolved to use carbon offsetting in 2008. There is a lot of debate about carbon offsetting, with many people pointing out that it is more akin to using sticking plaster than cure - but it is something that I can do, and the cost will remind me of the problem.

Don't use the term ASAP

Last night I started an experiment by launching a poll to find out what people mean when they type "ASAP" into an email. At the time of writing this email 59 people have filled in the poll and the results are already very revealing. The sample is drawn from people who visit my blog and people who are members of the Big List of Market Researchers on FaceBook. This sample is something like 900 people, from around the globe, who are loosely connected with the market research industry.

As you can see from the graph below, the views about what sort of response is required by the term ASAP are dangerously divergent. The largest group feel it means "Drop everything, deal with it NOW!", and the next largest group thinks it means deal with it today and let me know if that is not going to happen. However, about one-third feel it is less urgent, it might be today, it might not be today.

What this means is that we should all avoid saying ASAP and instead make it clear when we want the request to be complied with. Note, this research does not mean that one-third mean NOW, one-third mean today, and one-third mean whenever convenient, the sample frame and size is not sufficient for that sort of conclusion. What the poll has revealed is that this simple phrase means very different things to different people.

However, the experiment continues. People who respond more slowly to the email invite might have a slower interpretation of ASAP. If you would like to vote or just to see the latest figures click here. Note to see the latest results, click on the "View Results" text, near the Vote button.

A couple of people have queried why "As soon as possible" was not in the response list. The reason is that most people would have picked this option, as it is the correct matching of words to the acronym. However, as the research illustrates, many people re-interpret "as soon as possible" to be the same as "as soon as convenient", whilst most of us do not.

I will come back to this topic when the poll runs out of steam.

WiFi Detecting Watch

Guy Kawasaki's Truemors site has a post about a WiFi watch which can tell you if there is a WiFi in the area and how strong the signal is. Just push a button and get a reading in the range 0-8.

Whilst this is interesting, I think it is but a foretaste of what is to come. Pushing a button! Way too much work! What many of us will want is a watch or more likely a phone, which gives an option to give constant information about WiFi, 3G, BlueTooth, along with devices that will use any available service to get connected.

What does ASAP mean to you?

I have had a couple of misunderstandings recently when receiving a request with the acronym ASAP included in it. I am curious to know what other people think. Please complete the poll below so that we can all see the range of views.

Many thanks
Ray

Twitter's Inventor

The Economist has a great article about Evan Williams, the creator of Twitter, and before that the creator of Blogger.com. The article covers a bit of history, Williams' approach to accidental inventions, his success with Blogger and Twitter, and his failure with a project called Odeo.

The story of Odeo is perhaps the most interesting part of the article. Odeo was a product aimed at making podcasts easier to listen to. The problem, according to Williams, was that the problem was so obvious that the big guns were also looking at the same problem. One such big gun was Apple, whose iTunes solution became the industry standard. Williams' lesson from the Odeo experience was that small fish need to work on non-obvious innovations, leaving the obvious ones to the big players.

Whilst I think this is good advice, I all to often meet people who think they have a non-obvious innovation, who actually have an obvious idea.

Updated list of events

Here is an updated list of what I will be doing in 2008, I hope to meet as many of you as possible at one or more of these events.

AMSRS Summer School, Coffs Harbour, Australia, 17 & 18 February 2008, Ray is running a two day workshop on Research in a Web 2.0 World, Theory and Practice.

SMRD, Stockholm, Sweden, 6 March 2008, Ray is addressing the Swedish Societies annual conference.

ESOMAR Asia Pacific Conference - Workshop, Singapore,  7 April 2008, Ray and Jon Pinnell are running an advanced quantitative techniques workshop.

ESOMAR Asia Pacific Conference,  7-9 April 2008, Ray, John Shanahan, and Jason Ho are presenting a paper on the impact of Social Networks on research in Asia Pacific.

MRS Workshop - Advanced Thinking In Quant, London, UK, 29 April 2008, Ray is giving a presentation on integrating advanced quant and online.

BIG Conference, Chepstow, UK, 21-23 May 2008, Ray is showing how tools like RSS readers can massively increase a researcher's productivity.

MRS Workshop - Social Networking, Web 2.0, and Research, London, UK, 18 June 2008, Ray is helping run a workshop on using Web 2.0 approaches in research.

ESOMAR Congress - Workshop, Montreal, Canada,  22 September 2008, Ray and Jon Pinnell are running an advanced qantitative techniques workshop.