VisionJar | Passion for visual communication and presentation design

For the next five days I’ll trek around Austin, TX, participating in SXSWi. 32 sessions (!) on storytelling, content, visualization, innovation are in my schedule. I hope to fill my head with inspiration, new thoughts, ideas and actions for the upcoming year. Some of my favorite visual thinkers are here and speaking and it’s going to be such a treat to see them live in action. Moleskine and Flipcam  is ready

Last week I dived in to the concept of “big data” during the Strata – Make Data Work conference in Santa Clara, CA. Lots of takeouts and lots of inspiration. I wrote a summary on United Minds’ blog:

The most important trend in the world of big data is the importance of insights

Why is the concept of “Big Data” important for communication managers in all types of organizations? Isn’t big data something that former rocket scientists with programming skills divulge in? Something that is being processed in big, cold data centers? Big data is a term applied to “data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time”. The New York Times recently explained big data as “people and companies are putting huge amounts of information about prices, locations, intentions and just about everything else into large databases. Big Data, which should probably be called Big Analysis, is about looking at that information in novel ways to find new patterns for prediction”. Johanna Rehnvall, Prime & United Minds, summarizes the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California.

Big data has been said being the new oil in this new Age of Big Data and it has been classified as an economic asset for organizations and McKinsey has said that big data is the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity. Many of the new and most powerful companies, such as Google and Facebook, are experts at harnessing massive amounts of data.

During three days last week, over 2500 people gathered in Santa Clara Convention Center, located in a part of Silicon Valley that hosts some of the big data companies, to explore the concept of big data at the biannual “Strata | Make data work”-conference. Most knowledge shared during the numerous sessions and keynotes was on deep down aspects of handing all these data, but among one of the major conclusions was that after the hype of the big data comes a new layer – what does it all mean? What are the conclusions and the insights and how can they be visualized and presented so that the rest of us understand, can use it – and – take the right actions.

Companies need to take care of this new asset, the data they already collect and store, make it grow, develop and nourish it – but most importantly find ways to find the stories hidden in all this data. And this is where the communicators come into the picture. We might not be deep down database nerds (aka rocket scientists) but we sure know how to find a good and important story, find the important trends and insights and draw the right conclusions. We know how to find the best ways to visualize the insights to make them more comprehensible. Cheryl Phillips of The Seattle Times, concluded that big data is the transformative power of technology and storytelling and that data visualization is the big thing in the newsrooms these days. How do we visually express the usual “who, what, when, where and why”? As communicators for organizations of all types and forms, we need to be on top of the meaning of these intangible assets our organizations already own. We have to ask ourselves – what stories can we tell, what trends can we find and how can we visualize our data.

Communication managers need to be better at understanding the language of data and the rocket scientists need to be better at collaborating with the communicators in their organizations. Together we can create the monumental stories that can change our organizations – and maybe even now and then – our world. Do you know what data your organization already collect and owns? Are you sure you collect the right data and could your data be used with public data to correlate even more information?

This weekend I participated in PresentationCamp in San Francisco. The nice people at the great online service SlideShare sponsored the event and let people invade their offices for a full day of un-conferencing. It sure was a fun and interesting experience. It took an hour of somewhat organized chaos to get the schedule in place – and then the day went on full speed (read Twitter feed here). This was my first “BarCamp” and I wasn’t sure what to expect – but it was a fun way to spend a Saturday – in the company of others with the same passion and interest as yourself.  I learned about ways to add Twitter feed to presentation (Stowe Boyd), how to better open a presentation (Carmen Taran), presenting to generation X and Y (Scott Schwertly from the very cool company Ethos3) among other things.  By the time I had to leave, my head was full, my spirit was high and my body was tired from sitting all day. But I would do it again any time! 

The schedule is forming at the SlideShare office in San Francisco. 

The final schedule.