The future of research

Forecasting without doing any research is a dangerous business. As proof of this pudding, the majority of the forecasting profession still sits within the research industry broadly defined. More on the how research works with forecasting later, but for now, a lot of stuff on the future of research has passed my mental desk of late. First up is this excellent set of presentations from the Advertising Research Foundation on The Research Company of the Future presented by Scribe Media (Thanks to Michael Cervieri and the team for producing a never ending stream of quality content – also check out his recent weather report):

Appearing together for the first time ever, the CEOs of the “Big Four” global market research companies explain their vision for their companies and where they see the industry going > > >

Lee McEwan is on to this and I’ll leave the perceptive commentary there for now.

To push the boat out further on this topic and bring in one of the most jaw dropping submissions we have ever had to i spy cool, may I present we feel fine:

 

This has to be seen to be believed.

This amazing invention from Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar tracks emotions across the Internet and shows you how people are feeling all over the world at this very moment. Try out the ‘mounds’ view, indeed try them all, there are strong sign posts here on the visualisation of information, as well as its collection and analysis.

Why i spy cool?

A while ago I had an idea.

At the time I was doing some cool hunting work – cool hunting means, literally, hunting for cool new things, marketers use it to figure out where the youths are at – and I was surveying the cool information scene. There are a fair few cool hunting websites on the Internet now, but they all have one thing in common, they are run by expert individuals or networked groups of them.

So this was the idea; ‘why don’t we liberate cool‘ I said to my friend Bonnie who was looking for something to get her teeth into ‘and have a site where anyone can send in stuff they think is cool?‘ She liked it and that’s what we did. The things that get submitted to i spy cool always fascinate me, but more than that, a lot of the stuff is really relevant to the subject of change. I like to think that, in a way, it is a real time record of the changing perception of what cool is.