Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 01
I spoke with Vikram Savkar, senior vp and publishing director of Nature Education. He's also the head of Scitable.com, a Web site that mixes elements of crowdsourcing, social media, and peer-reviewed science for educational purposes. Thought it's free, it's not nonprofit. The site is part of a plan by Nature Publishing Group, which has been publishing scientific journals for 140 years, to extend its reach to the college-aged crowd.
Continue reading "Scitable Mixes Science, Crowdsourcing, and Social Networking"
Posted by: Damian Joseph on June 24
I know what you're asking: "How can you crowdsource your own company?" Well, in this case I'm referring to the fact that once a year, Disney (DIS) puts out a call for product ideas to its entire consumer products division of 12,532 employees, which includes Fashion & Home, Toys & Electronics, Food, Health & Beauty, Stationery and Publishing. That means sales, communications, and other non-inventing divisions get to participate. It's what they call the "Big Idears" contest. For the first time, one of these ideas is coming to the mass market...
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Posted by: Damian Joseph on June 22
Coca-Cola's (KO) Director of Industrial Design Vince Voron just finished up his talk with Sapient’s Director of Program Management Michael Leonard at the Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum in New York. In the speech, “How Coca-Cola is Integrating Brand Equities, Industrial Design, and Marketing To Gain Competitive Advantage in the Marketplace,” Voron talked about how the two companies worked together on new Coca-Cola vending machines, fountains, and coolers to enhance customer experience.
Continue reading "Coca-Cola Flexes Its Design Chops on New Machines"
Posted by: Damian Joseph on June 22
C. David Cush is the president and ceo of Virgin America. I caught his keynote speech this morning at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum in New York City. During, “A Good Airline Experience is Not an Oxymoron,” Cush talked about how good design, a pleasant workplace for employees, and technology are all driving the company's business.
Continue reading "Virgin America: Social Media Replaces Advertising"
Posted by: Michael Arndt on June 19
This is a guest blog by Venessa Wong, who joined BusinessWeek's Innovation+Design team in June.
Data, packaged usefully and cleverly, can have enormous utility and appeal. Nate Silver proved this when his political Web site fivethirtyeight.com gained a following with its stats-based projections and analysis during the 2008 presidential election.
In the supply chain world, a geek-chic startup called Panjiva is crunching numbers for a business purpose—to evaluate suppliers worldwide. Sitting in an airy studio office in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, CEO Josh Green, 31, explains that supplier databases such as Alibaba.com already exist but none takes objective data to evaluate and rate companies exporting to the U.S. Scoring can add perspective to previously overlooked or underutilized information—and make it suddenly irresistible to consumers.
"Every data source was underused," he says. "U.S. Customs was a great data source but underused because it was so messy.”
Continue reading "A Data Site, Panjiva, for U.S. Importers"
