Just because someone has a good story doesn't mean they can tell a good story. ~ Karl Gude | The Power of Visual Storytelling @ #SXSW

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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

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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?

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One of the big current issues in Sacramento, California is the NBA team King’s future arena – and the subsequent financing. Lots of different views on how it should be financed – but sometimes reporting is done too fast. Someone sure forgot to sum up the pieces in this chart, shown on Fox 40 the other night. Looks even worse for the city than the pie chart visualizes… $265 millions sure are way more than half of the funding if you use head counting (or a calculator).

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I’m a bookworm. And I’m so glad I am. Books have taken me to so many different places and made me meet so many different people. The other night, my 8-year old daughter told me, as I was turning off her lights way too late – “But mom, I forget to put down the book, when I read, it’s like I’m there, in the book, I forget time. I love books, mom!”. It made me proud of myself – I have managed to raise a book lover and I’m so happy for the joy she will have in life.

What will books look like in the future? What new ways to create visual, illustrative children’s books will we see?

I’m was so happy to see The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore win an Oscar for Best Short Animated movie tonight. Not only is it a beautiful short movie – it’s a fantastic story – and their iPad app is a beautiful attempt to find a way to write childrens’ books for the future. The story is about love for books and how they live on forever and the book app lets you be part of the story and  Mr Lessmore’s love for books. A big congratulations to Moonbot Studios – can’t wait to see their next project!

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I’m almost done with upgrading the website after our server was hacked last fall. It was hacked through this webpage due to a security hole in the Woo-themes template – which they had addressed in an e-mail named “Announcements Ahoy!” that I didn’t even open… Probably would have opened if it had said “Major security flaw found – please read and patch”, which would be basic communication 101.

Oh well, still liked my template even though I had to “pay” much more for it than initially thought. Hopefully I can now give WordPress administration a rest and focus on content – looking forward to that. Stay tuned!

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via betterppt.com

A couple of years ago I was randomly searching the world wide web for more on presentation design and came across an upcoming conference on PowerPoint in San Diego. Not too far from Sacramento, I decided at the spur of the moment to sign up and spent 3 awesome days with others like me, exploring presentations from all different angles. It’s a conference like no other and you leave energized and full of new knowledge.

This year, my 4th year as a patron, The Presentation Summit, the “conference for presenters, presentation designers and powerpoint junkies”, takes place in Austin, Texas and the seminars look just as good as usual.

Find more information at: www.presentationsummit.com

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