Visual.ly – Create, Share, Explore Great Visualizations
A new service founded by a team of infographics geeks, who met at Mint.com. A place where people create and share great visualizations. A one-stop shopping for anyone in need of high quality infographics. Providing a data warehouse, a reporting and editing team, and skilled designers.
Get an early invite http://visual.ly/
Real World Infographics in 3-D
Infographics in 2-D are great, but real life, 3-D infographics are even more mesmerizing and interesting. Jose Duarte, a graphic designer, has been using found physical objects to present his data findings. For example, the balloons you see above represent the amount of Internet users there are in (from left to right) China, Europe, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Portugal. (via Holy Kaw!)
The GOAB Concept – Integrating TV Into Your Digital Ecosystem
Interesting to see how we define and describe concepts in times of merging technology. Syzygy says it’s a new TV experience concept. To me it’s more taking the focus off TV and connecting it with all your other devices. Your TV becomes part of the already existing ecosystem of mobile digital tools and is one of many media surfaces. An opportunity to create more interactive content and keeping the fixed mounted screen in your living room on and alive. Reminds me of another great example by BERG, London.
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How To Build Great Teams – Tine Thygesen
Tine Thygesen is the founder of Everplaces, and previously lead for example 23 and Venture Cup Denmark. She is also the co-founder of Founders House in Copenhagen.
Tine Thygesen’s talk at Build 0.5 focused on the three things entrepreneurs must do right in order to build great teams. Tine notes that entrepreneurs tend to have a couple of bad habits that can be mitigated by building great teams effectively. First, especially in building your team you must focus on the long haul. Teams that are committed and dedicated for the long term consist of great people. Great people might not be easy to get, but taking shortcuts here is not a good idea. While you might get average people easily into the team this is a poor long term solution. You need to attract great people from the beginning, because great people want to work with other great people.
A startup CEO is always hiring, and not necessarily for a role, Tine says. If you find absolutely great people, get them in, even if you don’t know exactly what they should be doing. On the flipside, this means that you must also fire people quickly if they are not contributing and not making the team greater than it was without them.
Second, you must make people come to you. While you are always hiring you cannot possibly do this all of your time. The war for talent means that this will continue to be your biggest challenge in growing a company. Tine suggests you must make yourself the talk of the town and the most attractive place to work in. Having great people already there helps, but you can also do more and reach out to the community, throw parties and enable co-working, for example.
Third, once you have the great people you must work hard not to lose them. People join companies but they quit bosses, Tine says, and suggests you must be conscious of this by leading from the front and involving the whole team. By doing the most boring, unappealing tasks, leaders can free their teams to do the exciting stuff that will further feed their enthusiasm for the team, and also gets them to pitch in with the boring things. “If you don’t take the trash out, don’t expect anyone else to take the trash out”, Tine notes. And by making sure that as a team grows transparency and communication get special attention, the team members sitting in the same room do not feel excluded from the leadership and from the decisions. If your team is disintegrating, you can’t do anything, Tine says. In a startup, keeping your team happy is even more important than keeping your customers happy. (via hackfwd.com)
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Unexpected? Borders Files for Bankruptcy
Image via Wikipedia
Owes Top Publishers $230 Million, and Will Close About 200 Stores.
Readers will recall that we recently tried to frame the coming Borders bankruptcy in the context of the AMS bankruptcy from late 2006. In that filing, the 40 largest publisher creditors were owed $220 million, topped by Random House, which was owed $43.3 million. (via PublishersLunch)
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- Borders bankruptcy could come next week: report (reuters.com)
Biodegradable Sneakers by OAT
OAT is a young innovative shoes company founded two years ago by designer Christiaan Maats with the aim to create products that connect people with their environment in an imaginative way. That’s why in every product there is a story for the buyer to share.
The guys at OAT explain: “Our goal is to make products that are part of the planet we party on. We all like the nice bits in fashion, so why not make those bits fully biodegradable?” It comes of no surprise that for such an innovation OAT had to spend two years in search of the most appropriate materials, focusing at the same time on clean design: “The challenge was to make a sneaker that’s got fresh style, with materials that break down when you bury them. There were no real alternatives on the market, so we had to develop and source our own materials and processes. Available in European stores this spring in a limited edition run of 900 pieces.
The New City – First Episode Of BMW Documentaries Launches Today
(via Faris Yakob)
The first episode of BMW Documentaries: Wherever You Want To Go launches today.
I’m excited.
It has Buzz Aldrin in it. He’s completely awesome.
For the last 100 years, cities have been designed around cars.
In 1800, only 3% of people lived in cities.
In 2008, we became a primarily urban species for the first time – more of us now live in cities than in rural areas.
Soon, many of us will live in megacities [cities with more than 10 million people] and living at this level of human density will represent a shift of similar magnitude.
So, when BMW wanted to explore the future of mobility, we started with The New City.
When we developed the concept, we wanted to create a documentary that was of and for the web.
Content that reflected how content is viewed, discussed, and propagated online.
So, while the films are available at all good videosharingsites, the website provides an enhanced viewing experience.
The films are designed to be non-linear, hypertextual. So you can explore additional pieces of content around the primary narrative, in real time, inside the video player, and then jump straight back into the primary narrative.
The films are designed to precipitate discussion from different points of view, so, by logging in with Facebook, you can comment on specific moments, creating conversations around them.
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