'Case study' on improving factory efficiency

This is the story of the toothpaste factory that had a problem detecting empty toothpaste boxes at the end of the assembly line.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” – he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.

“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.

Regardless of whether it's just a made-up story or not, it's still a good way to look at things. Sometimes the solution is easier than expected.

The age of mega-viral content

Gangnam Style became world famous for its South Korean creator Psy's extreme electro-pop soundtrack, neon stylings and novel dance moves. What really made me take notice was the fact that it was the first YouTube video to top 1 BILLION views (currently at 1.5 billion at time of writing). A billion views is an almost unfathomable number but this video has (amongst many other things such as paving the way to creating mega-viral content) provided a benchmark in 21st century history for us to look back and remember the age when people who were online were collectively consuming the same content in near real-time.



Psy's new video called 'Gentleman' is another noticeable piece of online content since it has managed to secure 60 MILLION views in 2 DAYS purely because it is the next piece of content to come from Psy. 60 million views in 2 days is a ridiculous statistic and one that is often overlooked in articles elsewhere given its predecessor's success. 60 million in 2 days is mega-viral. But it will become a perfectly normal figure within the next 6 months. The rate at which content can go viral and then mega-viral is increasing as networks of people are able to share content faster and faster. Ultimately there will be a point in time where there will be one channel online, the mainstream, that plays the most viral piece of content for that day / hour / minute. We can already see the first steps of this in Twitter's #hashtag trending list.

The content delivery model is still based on the old-school method of users being fed the latest information from an authoritative source. People currently look to content-hub websites (Reddit, Buzzfeed, news websites etc) or to tastemakers for what's hot since they are considered the authority on what should be watched right now. Incredibly, some mega-memes like the Harlem Shake have even been jumped on as a direct way to make money for the man.

However that is changing as online social groups are becoming more fragmented and specialist. The opinion of a known friend is more valuable than an entertainment source and online social groups are now evolving their own tastemakers, those who are always posting the latest videos in their feeds - we all know one person like that. The fact that they still look to get their content from entertainment sources is irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is now someone, a real person, a trusted person who is filtering this content and then sharing the stuff that they think you'd like.

This TED Talk from Kevin Allocca neatly explains “Why videos go viral”. Put simply, anything new that consists of the magic three ingredients will go viral: to gain recognition it must be noticed and promoted by a select few people (tastemakers) with a large number of followers, then it must allow anyone to participate creatively in their own way, and lastly it must have complete unexpectedness.



Although that video describes how how quickly the music charts can change based what’s popular with online communities, it is also listing the founding pieces of content that were around at the time that people started to all tune into the same content together. The ancestors of mega-memes.

Very soon there will be a very strong sense of community online as a whole, and it will become comforting to all be online together, all consuming the latest content together. This will reflect humanity online; what people currently find funny, sad, interesting, shocking, and so on. This already exists but it's in various places and is very disparate - to say the Twitter community, or the Reddit community, or the Guardian online community who comment on articles is representative of humanity online is incorrect. Those are still relatively small groups of people who have been drawn together by a common interest. What still needs to happen is for people to come completely together online in one place. This is essentially a hive mind and in its early stages is one that is only used for watching Gangnam Style, but imagine a future with the power of that many people all focussing on the same thing together at the same moment in time. It'll happen once the platform for it is available, and when it does it will dwarf everything else that came before it.

In politics, the era of big data has arrived

This is a really interesting article from Time about the quantitative data analysis that was carried out to ensure that Obama won the 2012 election.

It explores a previously secret department of Obama's campaign team that was tasked with number crunching on a phenomenal scale. By first merging all the data sets the campaign team had on Obama's voters (a task which took 18 months) they were then able to create models of Obama's potential voters, see what type of person was likely to donate to the campaign, assess when was the best time to screen campaign ads on the television, and even simulate the election night to see where they had to spend their budget to increase their chances.

On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.

Read the whole article here: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

Thoughts on social networks

It was the start of 2007 and I had just moved to London to start my Masters in Interactive Media when I signed up to MySpace. I was a fairly late adopter of social media since I favoured (and still do) using the mobile phone when I want to speak to my friends. It immediately annoyed me that people stopped using their mobiles when they realised that they could message each other through MySpace for free. It got to a point where some friends would only contact me on MySpace and if I didn’t check it, I would miss things. For about five months, I enjoyed using MySpace and spent time crafting my page using html to make sure that I was completely happy with it. I quickly became aware of how important it is to edit your ‘details’ to ensure that you present yourself properly to your friends online. The popular thing to do was to fill in all sorts of ridiculous information about yourself such as your favourite bands and who were your ‘top friends’. This was awkward and put quite a lot of pressure on me and my friends to appear to be cool. A little too much concern was given to editing and re-editing this information, and it was great fun to edit someone else’s entire page when you discovered that they’d forgotten to sign themselves out.

Then, one day I saw a friend logging out of his MySpace and then logging in to his Facebook account. I asked what it was all about and he said, “it’s like MySpace but better. Things don’t look as good, but it’s easier to use’. I doubted this, and was immediately against the idea of having to re-enter all of my carefully selected information about myself. My friend told me, “trust me, once you’re on Facebook, you’ll forget all about MySpace”. For another two months I resisted as more and more of my friends started signing up to Facebook. I even deleted my MySpace account as I was fed up with people relying on it to get in contact with me. Then, one Monday in July 2007 I crumbled and signed up to Facebook. Immediately, I wasn’t impressed. It was confusing and felt incredibly sterile; there were no custom pages, or music playing on people’s ‘walls’. However, after a month of using it, I had made ‘friends’ with almost everyone I have said more than five words to in the last twenty years. I then was shocked to discover that photos of me were popping up and that everyone could see them. Censoring myself became a daily chore as I untagged myself from entire albums of nights out that my friends were enthusiastically uploading.

This is when I began to understand the allure of the site; it’s all about you, the user. You are encouraged to interact under the premise that the more you put in, the more you get out of it. Logging in becomes an exciting activity as you eagerly anticipate seeing just how many people have interacted with you in some way (tagging, poking, sharing a link, sending you a message). Herein lies the problem – Facebook’s users become hooked on all the little features available to them and it soon becomes part of the routine’ to check in on your account and see what’s new. This sucks as it is siphoning off the time that should be spent catching up with someone in real life. I would rather spend one evening a week catching up with an old friend than spending that time flipping through Facebook to see how many people have ‘liked’ my link of a dog running into a wall. Facebook has become a serious problem because too many people take it too seriously; for example, a friend of mine became incredibly agitated recently when I didn’t bother responding to their invitation to birthday drinks, I figured I would just turn up to it, and when I did, I was confronted with “I didn’t expect to see you here because you didn’t reply to my event invitation on old FaceyB”. Ridiculous.

Recently I went on a Facebook friend ‘cull’ and decided that I’d had enough of people that I spoke to one afternoon when I was sixteen being able to track my every movement through my wall. I now only have ‘friends’ on Facebook that I speak to regularly in the real world, and am very careful to not add anyone I work with. I’ve worked it out: keep your friends on Facebook, and your colleagues on Linked In and everyone else (including family) can email me.

MAKE Magazine with Layar Vision

Augmented reality (AR) is a fun technology that overlays digital media onto the physical world. Modern mobile devices like iPhones and Android phones are loaded with sensors like GPS, accelerometers and cameras that make AR possible. In this project we will augment the cover of MAKE magazine with a digital image and link it to a video on the web. To accomplish this, we'll learn the basics of the Layar AR platform, design a simple AR layer, and develop a very basic web service to deliver the AR layer to your smartphone.

Fantastic how-to article about creating an augmented reality magazine cover is here via BoingBoing

The tactical displays in Star Wars

As mentioned in a previous post, I have something of a soft spot for movie GUI's and am fascinated by their creation. So, I was more than happy to be recommended this cracking article by a friend.

The article opens:
We had a quick chat with Alien creator Dan O'Bannon and found out just how much CGI there is - and isn't - in the original episode IV...

And without wanting to simply reiterate what has already been written very eloquently, here is the link to the article over at Den of Geek!

Ben Greenman’s Museum of Silly Charts

This post on silly charts is really funny. The rest of the blog is not bad either.

via http://ilovecharts.tumblr.com/BenGreenman

Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

Great article on the poor usability of restaurant websites

The first thing that pops up when you visit the website of the San Francisco restaurant Fleur de Lys is a nearly full-screen animation of celebrity chef Hubert Keller's autograph. That makes sense—when I'm choosing a restaurant, the first thing I want to know is, Can the chef sign his name?

via http://www.slate.com/id/2301228/