Business Storytelling

I found an interesting and educational article, which describes how to do storytelling the right way. Storytelling is a means to market, or introduce yourself as a business to potential partners or customers. By telling stories the right way, you involve the listener in a dimension they can relate to. Combined with images and video to deliver your story, it may be a powerful combination.

Storytelling is widely used when crowdfunding a project, but are also widely used, when Apple, Microsoft and other large companies run ad-campains.

Observation

Back in the day, we had “protocols” for what you were about to send over the net. A lot went P2P, a lot went to BBS, a lot went to IRC.
Then came the web, with its own use area. Namely, web pages for distribution of information, «homepages» and the likes.
After the web took off, and we got web-apps, absolutely everything should be accessed from your browser. Web 2.0.

In a way, you could say that we’re heading back to distributed services again.
The number of apps on smartphones have increased exponentially. More and more of the communication is happening in dedicated channels.
More and more of our content is being consumed on pads and phones, and in a less degree on traditional PCs. With the introduction of smart watches, I wonder how we will use our watches in two years.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the same degree of standardisation as before.
It is interesting to follow the progress. I note that we can see an expanded degree of commersialization of services, most of wich is ad-funded.
In many cases, you end up being the product by using ad-funded services, even if that isn’t necessarily always the case.

Relevant: Snapchat embeds news-sources. They also try out mobile payments. Will apps challenge traditional lines of business?

High resolution desktop wallpapers

It has been a while since last upload of desktop wallpapers. In this upload, however, the resolution have been increased to 2880×1800. You know, laptops with a high screen resolution are more common nowadays. Click the images for full resolution.

IMG_3230 IMG_3293

The image below is one of my better wallpapers, in my opinion. It is actually three images layered on top of each other. It is called high dynamic range (HDR) photographing. See the wikipedia article for the facts, or my other attempts and some thoughts on the software needed.IMG_3700 - Version 2 IMG_3768

Another HDR image below. The sunset almost looked like a red northern lights.  There was northern lights the night before, but I forgot to bring my camera that night. Bad luck.IMG_3856 - Version 2I will definitely do more HDR images. I think they look stunning, once you get the hang of it.

Leave a comment if you like the images. All photos are taken by yours truly, in Hemsedal, Norway.

 

Should companies depreciate email?

Todays post is about electronic mail. It occurred to me, that I might be writing to the generation 40+. Everyone from 13-30s think they have it all figured out, especially in regards to computers.

Lots of companies depreciate the use of email. An argument I’ve heard often is: «But, the young generation today doesn’t use email, they use the hippest social media tool around!». Another argument is: «our employees spend too much time reading, sorting and answering mail».

Well, I like email. For me it is all about using the right tool for the job. I won’t use email for collaborating on a document, we have file repositories for that. I wouldn’t use it for marketing, as we have social media for this. On the other hand, email is a very versatile tool. It is widespread, and although it has its flaws, email is used by everyone and every company.

We do spend a lot of time organizing and answering e-mails. In my opinion it is because it has become a part of how we communicate at work. Email will not die for a very long time. The key is knowing when to send a mail, and when not to. Read through your email before you send it (link in norwegian). Lastly, use automated email sorting rules, and sort your inbox. In my opinion, the inbox should have less then 20 emails. The rest is sorted into folders.

I might be old and dull in the sense that I often prefer email communication. I do have my own blog, and I even use IRC from time to time. Yes, IRC, you know the old chat protocol one could use, which didn’t involve in sending all your personal information to third party advertisers.

Note, I do use social sites when I’m off work. Mostly, to keep up with companies I like. For example, I follow Tim Wendelboe (coffee roaster), and lots of artists, so I get the news on what’s up. By the way, Guy Kawasaki has written a book (excerpt in link) for reaching those hip-young-curling-generation, and not to seem clueless on social sites.

Crowdfunding

I have backed a number of crowdfunding projects. I find it particular interesting to participate in music projects. This way, by backing their projects, I may follow their studio recording sessions, listen to samples and give feedback. For artists composing music, it enables a complete new way of involving the listener (or fans if you like).

Most crowdfunding projects work like this: Bob has an idea for a music project, business plan, product or something of the likes. Bob needs cash to make it happen. Bob makes a prototype, some sample songs and signs up at a crowdfunding site. Bob does a huge amount of social networking to get the word spread. People like me gain interest, and backs his project with cash, in the hopes of getting the perks when his project is finished.

Some might say that crowdfunding is «so 2012» or the hype of last year, but i think it might be the future for small businesses and entrepreneurs with an exiting idea.

If you think this is something for you, i would recommend an article «the basics of crowdfunding», or the shorter and more tabloid version «five tips for running a successful crowdfunding campaign».

There is also a Norwegian version of the last one.

Predictive Business Intelligence

Lately, I have spent some time on the future of BI. We know we need reporting, and data warehouses. What about going beyond data warehousing and business reporting?

Instead of asking the question:
How many leads did our last campaign result in?

We turn the question around to:
Which campaign should we run? This question is based on common sense and insight in customers.

Eventually we will ask:
How many leads will our next campaign return? Now, our answer will rely on statistical data.

Hindsight vs Prediction:
“[…]you still need business intelligence to know what really happened in the past, but you also need predictive analytics to optimize your resources as you look to make decisions and take actions for the future[…]”

For more information regarding this topic:
I have found that the blogs at EMC.com provide thoughts and concepts from one of the bigger players in the market. Look up the articles of Bill Schmartzo for more thoughts around this topic.

Source: EMC.com
BI Analyst vs Data Scientist, what is the difference? 

Begin to set focus on predictive analysis. Discover who is the most valuable customers.

Statistical abilities of the Data Scientist.

IT Transformation storymap (in pdf). IT and related processes are always changing. This illustration and its linked articles brings up this topic.

In the banking & technology business?

Servers - By Helpameout (Eget verk) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Ok, if you – like me are in the combined banking & information technology sectors, you might find this weblog interesting.

I must say I liked his series about the “semantic layer” between your data warehouse & end users. This is a topic I have spent some time on in periods the last couple of weeks.

Corrupted file names?

If you, like me are from some country where we use characters outside your average ascii-spectrum, you might have some filenames with your local chars in them.

Now, in a perfect world, this might not be a problem, because all your computers, external hard drive and the NAS has the same encoding, so this works fine.

For me however, whenever I run my backup-script, I get error messages. Some filenames have been «corrupted» being like this «st°rste sand°y..jpg» or «vÕr.jpg». I did not try to figure out the encoding of the file-name, or why they got invalid characters.

What i did to fix this issue, was to run the following script, found on the interwebz.

Code:

find /path/to/files -type f -print0 | \
perl -n0e '$new = $_; if($new =~ s/[^[:ascii:]]/_/g) {
 print("Renaming $_ to $new\n"); rename($_, $new);
}'

I am always careful not to run scripts, found on the internet without knowing that it is not harmful, and this also applies for you.

When I’m on the topic of the alphabet: This youtube-video elaborates how we see things from the cold north.

Hope this fixes things for you as well.

Autumn in Bergen

After I bought the Photomatix HDR plugin for Aperture, I’ve been trying to make time for an evening outside, shooting some more images with high dynamic range.

Here are some pictures i shot during last “photowalk”.

Fototur til Fløien HDR Fototur til Fløien HDR Fototur til Fløien HDR Fototur til Fløien HDR

 

I am still not completely satisfied with the results. As you might know, there are many factors influencing the result. When I shoot three images with different exposures, objects in the image may move, or the camera might slightly get out of place, giving “ghosts” or a fuzzy image. Camera-settings, noise in the picture and the settings in the photomatix-plugin will affect the quality of your “end-product”. Theres much to learn, and it’s really fun!

//Christoffer

New attempt at HDR photographing

I’ve never been a fan of instagram-effects on photos taken on a device with 0,5mm image sensor. However high quality HDR photos has always amazed me. I’ve tried before, but even with hours spent in Adobe Photoshop, I could not get the image to POP.

I don’t normally use Photoshop, and think it is a to “big” tool to use when you’re editing photos. I googled around a bit and the first three results were Hydra, Photomatix and HDR EFEX PRO 2. I landed on Photomatix, because, firstly I liked the idea of having the HDR functionality as a plugin in Aperture (which is the image editing and sorting app I use), and secondly, it looked like it produced better true HDR images then Hydra’s images.

Buying, installing and using Photomatix was as easy as hoped, and gave me the editing options I wanted. Took me 5 minutes to get the result below, by of course over-doing the sliders a bit. Will probably get better results when I’m done toying around. But still, I think the result is a lot better then insta-hipsta-über-matic apps for Android/iPhone.

Sunset in Hemsedal, HDR-testing

Ps. Photomatix is currently working on a standalone Linux version. Hopefully, more application developers will follow in their footsteps.