Real-time Crowd-sourced Incident Dashboard

Because the stakes are high (loss of life, financial disruption, loss of property), many countries, cities, and private citizens have devoted time and resources into developing this global network of seismic tracking and archiving.

It would be great if an easy-to-use interactive dashboard for businesses tracked activities such as real-time sales pipeline flow, new product activation or purchases, campaign effectiveness, budget vs actual spends, etc. The visualization below is from the USGS and it tracks all earthquakes that happen around the world. It can be filtered to show either all magnitudes or 2.5 M and above, and within the last 7 or 30 days. And, this map display has evolved over the past several years to what it is today. There is a beta mobile version of it, though it doesn't seem to spew out useful data to a casual observer. 

USGS: real-time display of 2.5M earthquakes

While there aren't major fault lines running through the Pacific northwest like in California, this regional display (click to view) shows where earthquakes have occurred in the last two weeks.

Interested in other data projects from the USGS? Here are a few more links that show how the earthquake data is crowd-sourced:

• Did you feel it?
• International Registry of Seismograph Stations
• Netquakes: Volunteer Monitoring for urban areas

Event: Ignite Seattle

I am often amazed about the courage these people have to stand up in front of a large crowd and talk about their passion.

As a newcomer to the metro area, I am fortunate for having stumbled upon the Town Hall venue and this particular event. Imagine watching 15 speakers, allotted 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes speaking time, talk about a subject, business idea, traumatic experience, life experience, or why no one should eat cheese. What I liked about it was that the speakers were able to succinctly do their storytelling in an engaging way (through slides) that made us (the audience) care about their story.


As for myself, do I have a passion I could talk to a crowd about, and would it be inspirational to others? I have no idea. I've always thought that my life and work passions could intermingle; though I'm not sure if I can separate the idea of a hobby from a passion from a side project. I have few of the first, an undecided part on passion, and many side projects.

One of the speakers' advice was: don't think, just do. 

Save the date: May 16, that's the next Ignite Seattle at Town Hall (8th & Seneca)

Want an extra $5 on your Starbucks Card?

If you are unfamiliar with the Starbucks rewards card system, you might not know that you can transfer balances between Starbucks reward cards. Say if you got a stray $5 gift card from a promotion or as a holiday or workplace perk, you could take that balance and port it over to your regular Starbucks rewards card (or account, if you are using their mobile app for purchase transactions).

Starbucks promo email, 2013-02-20

When it comes to content and design, the Starbucks email and accompanying rewards landing page are minimalist. The content certainly does do the job of providing a meaningful amount of information that has a targeted call-to-action which encourages a user to do other steps, maybe check into what else Starbucks is offering, check on reward status or account balance, etc.

What you might not know is that you can also transfer a balance from a cash gift card, say a $100 Visa gift card to your Starbucks rewards card at any Starbucks-owned kiosk or store. And, if you're a Coinstar customer, you can convert your deposited coin balance to a Starbucks rewards card without incurring any service fees.

Want to know how they're tracking this campaign? By product SKU and registered reward card swipes at the register. This is an online/mobile campaign to drive in-store purchases.

And, if you're an avid coffee drinker, this is a darn good deal for 1 lb of whole bean coffee. 'Nuff said.

Weights and Measures

I was thinking about corn this morning and came to the realization that while I had the vague notion that corn commodities were measured in bushels, I hadn't thought about what that meant until I looked it up online. As it turns out, when the tv news channel reports about bushels of wheat or bushels of corn, they aren't referring to the same measurement. Corn used to be measured by volume, where one U.S. bushel of corn was equivalent to eight dry gallons of kernels.

One bushel of measurement is not the same for different types of grains and seeds. These differ from corn in that they are also measured by weight and moisture content. To understand how moisture content affects unit, pricing, and weight, let's use fresh chestnuts as an example. It takes roughly six weeks (according to Allen Creek Farms) to convert freshly harvested chestnuts into dried chestnuts (less than 15% moisture content) in order to store dried chestnuts or to grind it into flour. One pound of whole dried chestnuts can then be reconstituted into two pounds six ounces of rehydrated chestnuts, for culinary purposes.

Here is a basic guide to how other bushels are measured:

• oats: 32 lbs (in the US) or 34 lbs (in Canada)
• barley: 48 lbs
• malted barley: 34 lbs
• shelled corn at 15.5% moisture by weight: 56 lbs
• wheat at 13.5% moisture by weight: 60 lbs
• soybeans at 13% moisture by weight 60 lbs

That said, the next time you are in a discussion about weights and measures or someone casually asks for your definition of an "order of magnitude", it is best to ask what definitions are being used.

Target Ad Audience and Branding

I don't follow football, or much of sports for that matter except for the Olympics. The only time to tune in for Superbowl Sunday is to watch the cacophony of ads. At $4 million per 30 second slot, this is all the more reason to make whatever message your company wants to convey really count. Instead of harping on the truly terribly ads, I thought I might point out ones that really captured my attention. Movie previews are excluded. I looked at things like:

• Core (corporate) message or product brand easily understood?
• Speaks value to the right audiences?
• Feel good? Wacky? Clever?
• Did the end of the ad drive another campaign action?

Worth Mentioning to Others:

Budweiser: Clydesdales "Brotherhood" - 9.3 million views on YouTube (budweiser)
Jeep: Whole Again with Oprah narration - 1.3 million views (thejeepchannel)
Skechers: Man vs Cheetah - 335k views (skechersperformance)
Audi: Prom - 9.2 million views (audiofamerica)

These ads had multichannel flair, presumably to drive the audience from TV to social media. 

Oreo: Whisper Fight - 1.1 million views (oreo); Choose you side at Instagram (2200 followers before ad aired, post-Sunday almost 50k followers); would have a higher impact if the Instagram purl was advertised

Budweiser: Clydesdales "Brotherhood" - Name the baby Clydesdale (Hope and Stan), tweet name using #clydesdales @budweiser

Speed Stick:Unattended Laundry - 1.1 million views (speedstick); Tweet your #handleit moment