The world is generating data quicker than it can consume it. The world is generating far more data at a pace much higher than ever before. This is all great, except that data is meaningless without context. I’m a big fan of using data visualization to derive new insights. And when the insights can be be basis for a strategy that leads to something new and wonderful, that’s something special and ground-breaking.
Facebook has done a nice job showcasing the relationships between countries from a friendship level, something that you won’t find in government almanacs or reports. It’s a novel way to show relative depth of connections of people between two countries, even if the two are at odds with each other. There’s something about the power of connection that supercedes political agendas.
Not all money is created equal. Sometimes less money can mean a whole lot more.
It’s been over a year since Google Wallet came onto the market. Since then, there has been some traction with some vendors supporting it. While device support hasn’t been as broad, Apple’s inclusion of Passbook into the forthcoming iOS 6 will undoubtedly make mobile payment more mainstream. Microsoft has also gotten into the game with its own version of a mobile wallet.
This week saw a slew of mobile payment developments, but not from the usual tech company suspects. The New York Times reported that Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven and others formed a network to standardize mobile payments called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX). The cross-platform app is designed to work across most smartphone platforms and can handle all major credit cards. Clearly, these retailers do not want to cede payment control to other vendors and are doing whatever they can to build a version of their own.
This is the response from Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer for NBC to #NBCFail, a Twitter topic started by frustrated viewers of tape delayed Olympic events.
It’s 2012 and we are living in a world where consumers expect and demand live coverage of any newsworthy event. Everything from presidential speeches to awards shows to major sporting events are live blogged and live-tweeted by thousands of people around the world. Most recently, the Euro 2012 championship was aired live around the world and generated huge social conversation on Twitter. The second screen phenomenon is here and robust.
Fast forward a couple of months to the London 2012 Olympics. In keeping with tradition, NBC refuses to air events live and goes with tape delayed broadcasts. Not only is this infuriating for viewers, those of us who live in social media will typically see the results tweeted long before we’ll get a chance to watch them on TV. Not only that, we need to deal with an endless array of commercials that we can’t skip through without watching at an even later date.
Finally, NBC programming decided to make the Olympics one single continuous TV event, which makes each instance a 9 hour episode that eats up enormous amounts of time and DVR space. In this day and age, why can’t we pick the events we want to watch on demand and simply watch them and not the ones we’re not interested in?
The reason is simple. NBC is holding on to an antiquated business model where they believe they know what’s best for the consumer. Rather than ceding programming control to the people who consumer their content, they are perpetuating a decades old model where they dictate what we watch and when we watch. Contrast this with the World Cup which is arguably as big a global event that is shown without tape delay and frequently without commercials during critical moments.
Olympic events are about excitement and often determined by 1/100th of a second. But that excitement goes away when the race you want to watch is delayed by hours. If NBC was smart, it would learn to accept that the world is moving faster than they want — and the smart money will bet on where consumers want to go.
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