John Brookmyre's Blog : Presentation styles

Tourism and Technology - Virtual Tour of London and South Africa 2010

john.brookmyre — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:56:00 GMT

Living away from home makes you miss friends, family… and, perhaps oddly, the place. VR Web Design offer a service which gives a Virtual Tour of London and other cities which is very innovative and cool.

Note: the spheres are areas of focus / interest which can be clicked on to shift the focus to another part of the city.

This was another Matthew Harris find (thanks for the gems big show). It is especially relevant as I recently was interviewed for an article in the South African media regarding the impact of the Internet and how information can help the leisure and hotel industry in the South Africa in the lead up to the World Cup 2010 and beyond. Below are some of the thoughts I had on this and I would be really interested to know your thoughts:

The opportunities offered to hotel and leisure organisations by the internet and Web 2.0.

The routes to market for the hotel and leisure industry have dramatically changed over the last decade as well as the behavioural patterns of users – this is thanks to the Internet’s evolution (in terms of technology, the Internet’s reach and bandwidth improvements – the above is a perfect example) and revolution (with the dawning of social network sites) both contributing to the explosion of Internet users making the internet the norm for information gathering and importantly, sharing. No longer do people visit travel agents as their main research point for holiday travel or a simple website but rather they use a myriad of sources such as interactive maps – where a potential visitor can explore the services of the facility / area, or user generated content (previous visitors have shared comments along with pictures and movies) which gives the customer a much better appreciation of the experience of people with the same make up – the reputation of companies is now totally in the public domain.

CRM, ERP, BI and other operational systems – are they worth implementing?

IT is an enabler and can be used to give a competitive advantage in any industry; this is true of the hotel and leisure industry. Information and data which is held by a company is an asset and like all assets this should be fully utilised. The data held on customers (nationality, number of guests in the party, stay, frequency of stay, questionnaire responses, activities) should contribute to building up the picture of the types of people who should be targeted – this can assist with marketing campaigns, it can ensure continuous improvements to cater for the guests and also potentially show opportunities to highlight potential weaknesses or opportunities to partner. Planning for events should use the benefit of hindsight and therefore historic data so that effective planning can occur. The information you have should also be enriched with other data which is in the public domain – dates of games, weather, scheduled trips etc so that an effective looking glass is available to use what if analysis. The other facet of technology which may be utilised is collaboration – find out what your staff think, find out what your guests think while they are there, share ideas and thoughts with partner operators or even competitors.

Gearing up for 2010 – how IT can help.

Whether you are a small or large firm we are approaching a fantastically exciting time with 2010 for the hotel and leisure industry in South Africa - technology is here as an enabler and an accelerator - failure to use it is not asking to fail but it increases the risk of missing out on making the most of this opportunity – 2010 can be a spring board to an exciting future and technology will give a competitive advantage – the customers are using it shouldn’t you? As the old adage goes the customer is always right - with the explosion of user generated content the customer is now always right and if he is not happy he will tell the world and they are listening.

On this subject, I am in Seattle this week for a conference and have noticed that in the hotel lobby there are Surface devices to explore the local area and facilities which is quite cool although the people who were on them earlier where playing draughts / checkers – still collaboration, right?…

Would love to hear your thoughts,

John

Technorati Tags: Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,South Africa 2010,Knowlege Management,Information Visualisation,Innovation

Outsourcing the information worker

john.brookmyre — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:25:27 GMT

You may have heard the latest developing trend around outsourcing the information worker such as the law firm Pinsent who outsource litigation work to South Africa, however I was very impressed by this article which Matt Harris passed on to me – essentially the Telegraph have had a fantastic couple of months with the expenses scandal and held all the cards on this huge story… that is until the information entered the public domain, this is where the Guardian came up with the ingenious plan – get the public to sift through the information and spot new insights.

The user goes to the site and can then trawl through the claims, through a simple interface certain storeys can be flagged and then the Guardians journalists can investigate the most interesting / highlighted cases – almost feels like you are playing a game / being nosey:

At the time of writing – of 458,832 pages of documents 200,139 have been reviewed by 23,089 people. So only 258,693 to go...

There is another site, Galaxy Zoo, which I know of which harnesses the power of the public as a free resource and that is in identifying galaxies

Next question – how can you make this work for commercial gain – Guardian have started already in identifying areas of interest in order to get their employees to do the high value investigation / analytics rather than trawling. Keen to know your thoughts?

Thanks,

John

Technorati Tags: Outsourcing,Information Worker,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Information Visualisation,Information Visualization,Knowledge Management,Social BI,User Experience,User Interaction,John Brookmyre

Geo Data Visualization – Here and There

john.brookmyre — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:47:01 GMT

I have come across a visualization technique called Here and There by Schulze and Webb from Alexis Kennedy (as ever thanks), other blogs and Wired Magazine (UK, June 2009). See below what it looks like:

As mentioned in Wired, it is like street view on a roller coaster – eye level and birds eye view. It is definitely innovative but it is not immediately clear what this gives above the “old world” of Google Maps and Google Earth. It is cool but what benefits can it offer - Some ideas that are suggested on S&W’s blog are:

see through the city into the distance
real-time activities like:

traffic volume overlaid on the distant city map
taxis or other services
bottle necks
all the things you can do with Google Earth / maps

All the same it is always nice to see a new way of visualising. Comments, thoughts and ideas would be appreciated!

John

Technorati Tags: Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Geo,Wired,John Brookmyre,Information Visualisation,Information Visualization

Social BI - there is not a monopoly on good ideas

john.brookmyre — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:36:00 GMT

I don't mean Social BI as in a Social Smoker or Social Drinker - someone who only does it on weekends, in a crowd or once in a while....

I am coming from the collaboration, decision making dialogue, tagging perspective. Where users have a greater ability to collaborate informally as people do with other social sites (LinkedIn, Facebook etc) - harnessing the knowledge held by individuals and supporting users to create communities to encourage adoption and collaboration across the organisation. For example the ability to share photos of safety risks from their camera phone and add tags to enable other users to find them or rating reports based on the number of people who have viewed them or a user rating system so that users can quickly see the high value reports - this information could then be used for future requirements / investment priorities and to avoid reinventing the wheel by discovering the valuable reports. Organisations have a lot of great resources and by empowering the individuals to drive, share, comment, rate their BI / areas of interest will contribute to an exiting, dynamic, and transparent environment. Gartner have highlighted this in their Five Predictions report - "exploit[ing] the groundswell of interest in informal collaboration. Instead of promoting a formal, top-down decision-making initiative, these IT leaders will tap people's natural inclination to use social software to collaborate and make decisions". One leader in this field is Antivia, whilst I prefer to be technology agnostic, some of the things that they are doing are very impressive. A short intro video can be found here.

Looking at some similar examples which are used now - Facebook allows photos, status messages to be commented on and photos can be tagged by other users so a dialogue can be created. Flickr allows photos and videos to be tagged so that users can find similar items of interest or geo. Amazon show you products which are frequently bought with what you are looking at and what other users who bought this have bought (see above). And I haven't even touched Twitter yet:

As always feedback and thoughts would be really appreciated,

John

twitter.com/brookmyre

Technorati Tags: Social BI,Antivia,Conchango,Cosultants,Data Analysis,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Gartner,Geo Spatial,John Brookmyre,User Centric