Monthly Archive

In my line of work, I meet many young people, some of whom have never known dial-up. For them, having to wait a few seconds for a web page to load seems like “ages.” But as we speed things up, I have begun to sense people are actually slowing down, unable to cope with the torrent of data coming at them.

So the lure of a much faster internet, while it sounds wonderful, could rev up our lives more than we need, eliminating the need for quiet pauses, the “white space” in our thinking process. Getting past the ‘world wide wait’ is one thing. Being paralyzed by TMI and TMI (too much information, too many inputs) is another. A new word ‘exabyte’ is being tossed around. One Exabyte (EB) being one quintillion bytes. Never mind what quintillion means, it’s way too much!

In the UK, they are looking at “super-fast broadband” piped into homes through underground water pipes. Some years ago, Caltech developed a protocol called FAST –a geeky acronym for “Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)” Basically a new way of routing around congestion.

A warning cry is going out: “The exaflood is coming.” Maybe we should voluntarily slow down, before we are compelled to do it by other means.

There is some speculation about an ambush marketing tactic by Abercrombie and Fitch, placing people with their logo behind Barack Obama.

If they did, it’s a smart move. A&B said it was no more than a coincidence. The New York Post commenting on these ‘three mystery men’ with Abercrombie logos, note that campaign records reveal that an A&B employee has donated $500 to Obama’s campaign.

Nothing is too far fetched, with so much media attention given to the two Democrats. Let’s just hope Adidas shows up on the Clinton campaign with the “Impossible is nothing” slogan. Beats the generic “Yes we will!”

“He’s getting his ass kicked.”

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, on the ‘credibility’ of Jeff Immelt, GE’s present CEO

“Nothing, nothing, nothing is as disgusting to me as some old CEO chirping away about how things aren’t as good under the new guy as they were under him.”

Jack Welch, on CNBC, making up for his previous criticism Jeff Immelt.

“Don’t pollute Earth Day with irrelevant advertising.”

Editorial in Advertising Age about marketers’ attempt to saturate the day with “Hey, look at us! We love trees” type of advertising.

“No happy label on toxic or wasteful product will ever change its contents.”

Abby Strauss, NY, a reader of Fast Company, commenting on Green Business practices article (”Another Inconvenient Truth“)

“Change everything…except for your wife and children.”

A 1993 quote attributed to Samsung chairman, Lee Kun Hee, to his chief executives. He now under government investigation.

“For the iced coffee drinks. Make them with ice cubes made from coffee.”

A consumer-generated idea on MyStarbucksIdea.com, that received 13,050 votes

“Phoenix is sprawling at a rate that seems to rival Moore’s Law.”

Matthew Power, in WIRED magazine in an extensive article (Peak Water) about ground water.

The concept of ‘paying it forward’ has been used in in various ways. Often it is a random act of kindness that someone does and it gets carried forward –or backward in this case.

So it is interesting to see it used as an expression of corporate culture, as we hear from Mallory Messina, an employee of Southwest Airlines, posting on the NutsaboutSouthwest blog. It involves paper towels in the restroom! Employees had noticed that paper towels were being left (dispensed) in restrooms, eliminating the need to touch the “germy lever.”

“every time I washed my hands in the ladies’ room, paper towels were magically waiting for me,” Ms. Messina noted.

She later discovered that this random act of towel dispensing had been happening in the men’s restroom as well. One more reason to fly Southwest: friendly folks + clean hands on deck.

Lest you think Encyclopedia Britannica is to Wikipedia what moleskin notebooks are to blogs, check out what Britannica has been up to. It embraced widgets, Twitter, RSS, and is now introducing WebShare –a way for for bloggers and editors to link to content in the paid areas of Britannica, letting the blog’s or publication’s readers access that piece of content free. It’s still in a soft launch mode.

Why free, when everyone else is paying ($ 69.95) for the privilege? Britannica says it wants to give a blogger’s readers “background.” And no, the service is not aimed at A-list bloggers –those with low traffic qualify. Meaning, I suppose, that EB has realized the value of social media and has moved past the Wikipedia vs Britannica debate.

If you’re a content manager for your agency, give it a shot. Register here.

Britannica’s own blog and forum are very well managed. It covers topics such as Web 2.0, books, media, etc. I found an interesting piece on its nemesis, Wikipedia, titled Am I my brother’s Web 2.0 gatekeeper (the truth about Wikipedia.) OK, so it’s forcing the comparison, but it is really good to know that knowledge seekers now have two strong choices.

We don’t have to choose between old media and new media, between a flawed one and a poor also ran.

Unlike rivers and dams, aquifers are not something we think about. After all, they are a few hundred feet below. But in Arizona, these constitute our back-up plans in the advent of a drought. They are also the intangible benefits of a desert state.

Unfortunately Arizona doesn’t market its water advantage enough. Water is framed as a crisis, rather than an asset because it’s the damn easiest thing to do. The media don’t help either, focusing on the problem not the solution.

This month WIRED magazine has an extensive feature called “Peak Water” by Matthew Power, covering the US, England and Australia. It leads with water management strategies in Arizona –Chandler in particular. “Thanks to this so-called recharge, the local aquifer is actually rising a few feet a year.” he says, illustrating it with a program between one of Intel’s fabrication plants (Fab 32) which uses 2 million gallons of water a day, and pumps back 1.5 million gallons a day into an aquifer six miles down the road.

Peak Water is a topic close to me, by virtue of where I work -at the Decision Theater. Among other ways of addressing issues through visualization, we have a sophisticated supply and demand model of water called WaterSim. We are also right next to DCDC which plans for these precious resources. I mean assets.

To some the aquifer is either half empty. To others the aquifer is half full.

In Arizona, what story do we like to tell?

Let’s talk bias. Who deems something one-sided, slanted, and sometimes even libelous?

How about your press release? What’s that you just said about your CEO? Is your product really a “the world’s most advanced…?” (insert “battery,” “fiber optic solution,” “online file-sharing…”) Is your corporate blog verging on spin, and do you let people join the conversation?

And then there’s what you’d like to maintain on Wikipedia, if not for those pesky editors.

Solomon Trujillo’s PR people are not happy. You probably may not have heard of Mr. Trujillo, unless you were in the telecom space, or peeked behind the curtain on Wikipedia now and then. On the Wikipedia entry for the new Telstra boss, there is what we now call an ‘edit war’. Someone seems to have an axe to grind about Trujillo, going back a year. “It’s hard not to have a NPOV when he has not done nothing positive,” the person says. NPOV refers to Wikipedia’s ‘Neutral Point of View’ policy. Meaning, you cannot slip in hyperbolic statements or snide attacks. If they find out you get called out. In Wikipedia’s terms, the statement:

“This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards.”

It’s the equivalent of the scarlet letter that screams “Bias!” I have found many Wikipedia entries with these stamps of disapproval.

Two weeks ago Tarnya Dunning, a senior PR person at Telstra tried to fix the mess, staying away from the edit war mentality saying: “I’m here to contribute information that will improve the quality of Telstra-related pages. I am aware of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and I will abide by them. My edits will be restricted to talk pages, and I will not engage in editing directly any Telstra-related page. Instead, I would volunteer information on the talk pages, and ask for Wikipedians’ help.”

So far no one in Wikipedia has responded. Is Wikipedia the ultimate arbiter of what’s neutral, and what’s biased?

On the other side of the coin, Telstra has had its share of social media criticism. Its blog, Nowwearetalking, which encourages a “lively informed debate” is a moderated blog. They do have a wikipedia-like policy, though which says.

“If you object to a moderator modifying your posting then it may be rejected.”

Which sound a lot like “your post may need some cleanup to meet our quality standards.”

Someday we will use our cell phone, I mean mobile device, as a portable hard drive, projector and remote control for a range of communication functions that are still add-ons, not core features. (How many people do you know who carry phones AND Blackberries?)

Until then we are all forced to email files to ourselves, so that these large attachments are floating around between Outlook and Gmail, and are easily accessible from a Mac at home, a PC at work, and a Windows Mobile phone in the airport, say. Damn devices!

So this service called SugarSync is a huge asset. It keeps files freshly updated for people on the run. Basically any file you work on, on one device, is automatically updated on the others. No version control headaches.

You could also create a folder (a “magic briefcase”) and drop any file or photo from one device to have it it accessible from the others.

For now, I use a variety of tools and services including the trusty flash drive, a wiki, a free online file storage service like DropBoks, and of course a shared drive. SugarSync will solve a lot of the runaround. Unfortunately it is not priced for everyone. At $2.49 a month for 10 gigabytes it is a good low-end solution. But if you are shuttling larger files like short videos, a folder of photographs for a presentation, and large documents –basically backing up most of the stuff on your laptop –you could easily be spending $100 a year.

Some employers might ask you to carry one of those small portable hard drives that cost $80 for 160 gigabytes, but it still won’t make every file accessible from your mobile device, and it will mean carrying around another piece of hardware.

Could you complete the sentence, without a single mean-spirited side-swipe, or making it sound like you were looking for a new job? I had this idea reading a comment from a student in Christopher Sessum’s class who said:

“I would like to be able to belong to a university network where each course had a socially managed website where students could upload their notes for a particular class, engage in discussions, share resources, collaborate on assignments.”

I also interviewed a few students for an upcoming internship and ask an open-ended question. In an economic downturn, I know a couple of people who are looking for jobs, and while I have heard a lot about what kind of organizations they rather not work for, the “I would like to belong to an organization that…” question helps an employer better understand if there is a match.

Give it a shot. The best answers will be featured in an upcoming article.

“We’ve been waiting for the internet bubble to burst.”

Nick Denton, founder and publisher of Gawker Media, on selling off Wonkette a gossip blog, and two other blogs.

“The Internet, which is shorthand for ‘interconnected network’ …is often broken because applications don’t interact.”

Robert Scoble, in Fast Company

“SugarSync may be just as sweet as you like it.”

Stephen Wildstrom, Tech columnist in BusinessWeek, on a new service that keeps stores the most resent files on a server  and synchronizes them with all devices.

“It’s a good idea to have a chief blogger.”

Mack Collier, social media consultant and blogger at Viral Garden, in a round table conversation hosted by Advertising Age.

“The drug industry appears to treat scientific data as if it were a marketing tool.”

Bruce Psaty, co-author of an article in the Journal of American Medical Association, on Merck & Co’s “studies” on Vioxx.

“Never use an agency to buy mobile media.”

Are Traasdahl, president-CEO of Thumbplay.

“They are being ignored by the Western media.”

Alicia Chen, senior at Arizona State University, on the too much attention in the news to politics, and not enough focus on the sports.

There was a sad piece of news yesterday about an accident in Peoria hat involved students trying to “make it” by performing a stunt filmed with the idea of uploading it to YouTube. I can see where the whole concept of user-generated creativity, and the lure of 15-minutes of fame will give sites like YouTube a bad name.

You can’t simply blame the tool. But I think that while everyone (myself included) talks up the value of sites like YouTube as being the killer app (in relation to TV) of media, there has not been enough discussion aimed at young people about the need to steer away from acting stupid.

I thought about this more because I just completed an article on what I call the “Social Media Resume” and how people, starting young, should start thinking less about doing projects and internships because “it would look good on their resume” and start engaging in activity in a way that does not make them look stupid on their social media resume –something that shows up without one authoring it.

Sites like “Commercial Pitch” let a college student pitch an idea via text or video and get rewarded for it. YouTube holds its “awards” for the best user generated material with categories such as Music, Film, Politics etc. Higly attractive to young creatives. Many want to come up with the next “Lonely Girl 15” idea to launch a career. But no one should have to risk his/her life trying to get a Google hit.

My former colleague Jonathan Cottrel was featured today in an article about Blippr.com, a ratings site for music, movies, books and games. It promises “radically short ratings and reviews.”

The “ratings’ business is quite a busy area to compete in, with everything from tagging, social bookmarking and all manner of reviews –for books, teachers, technology, consumer products etc. For every Delicious, there is a Furl tempting you to save or share or vote on something. For every Digg, theres a Reddit. There is CiteULike for academic papers… the list goes on.

But Jonathan is a extremely smart guy, and I can’t wait to see the niche they will go after. It debuts on Facebook soon.

McCain’s got an amazing sense of positioning. I am not talking of the web site and Straight Talk Express, but in day-to-day communication that makes him come across as very human and in touch with people’s needs. He can be serious and funny at the same time.

Funny: For those who wonder about his age, he comes across as someone perfectly capable of taking down his critics. Watch him “take down” David Letterman. Sure it’s scripted, but well done. Watch this. Last year he did an impressive block-and-bridge maneuver on the age thing as well.

Serious: Then there are statements like this in a bid to simplify the tax code: fully aware of people needing not just tax breaks but relief from the “thousands of pages of needless and often irrational rules and demands from the IRS.”

Off the cuff. If the above sounds a prepared statement, consider what he says when he’s unplugged — when he looked back at his high school years calling himself a “pretty rambunctious boy with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.” Most handlers polishing up his talking points would have deleted the last 10 words.

So while Clinton and Obama demolish each other over semantics and borrowed or misplaced rhetoric, McCain’s “rhetoric” is to simply say things as is.

In the battle for taglines and positioning, organizations spend a lot of time wordsmithing a line or a word they like to own. What they never think about are those words they inherit by their own misstatements, product design and great/horrible customer service.

I could think up a few:

• “Touch” - practically owned by iPod, without any assistance of its advertising
• Friendly - Starbucks exudes this, even if you don’t care for the coffee
• Trapped - my take away from a sour experience with Vonage
• Fun - Southwest Airlines, of course
• Un-edgy -the feeling one gets when you see a GoDaddy ad that tries (hard) to be “edgy”

So it was hard to figure the benefit of this Microsoft statement: “The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious.”

It was attributed to David Cross, at a presentation last week. The “UAC’ message in question is one that pops up on Vista, alerting users of a security feature. “We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it.”

Aw! How thoughtful: Heavy hammer TLC. Whatever happened to ‘delighting’ customers? Maybe this has been blown out of proportion, but if you Google ‘designed to annoy’ it looks like Microsoft has begun to own that phrase. All that after the effort to own “Wow.”

“Nobody has the right to say ’shut up’.”

The Dalai Lama in Japan, saying he supports the Olympics in China, but that protesters have their freedom to speak.

“experience great nights out without the fatigue.”

Description of Burn Alter Ego, a Facebook application from energy drink, Burn (a Coca Cola product) that lets people’s avatars go out and mingle with others, and have an automatic blog post about the encounters.

“Geoffrey Moore’s “late majority” and “laggards” have yet to join the party, but they will.”

Shel Holtz, interviewed by ValleyPRBlog, on the adoption of social media and its impact on PR.

“It’s a dreamer’s ad.”

Barb Rechterman, Exec VP at domain registrar GoDaddy, on the un-risque ad, “Kart” featuring (finally) a message about web sites.

“It is depressing that sound bites have replaced sound judgement, and that character assassination of one’s opponent has become expected political strategy.”

Cal Thomas, Tribune Media Services

“I just wonder why the torch was running away from the people.”

Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, on the tactics used to protect the Olympic torch in San Francisco.

“That, ladies and gentleman, is what you call your ‘marketing challenge’.”

Bob Garfield, Advertising Age, about an ad by John McCain that makes us forget the Iraq war, but unhelpfully invokes Vietnam.

Gone are the PDFs that used to be the static receptacles of data. Now there’s Dashboard. A way to show data as gauges, charts and tables in a more dynamic way

At ASU, we’re moving into this more dynamic format so that a media person, a student or a researcher may be able to get to see the university not as a list of numbers, but by seeing these numbers map out a context.

It’s called ASU Dashboard. Some data like this is public. Other areas require a student/staff/faculty login. The data can be exported to an Excel file, or converted to a PDF.

Visualization and data and using it for decision making has come a long way since PowerPoint. You begin to respect data when you can see business intelligence in a dynamic state. On Corda, the company behind Dashboard, you can track such things as campaign finance by state or zip code, and see up to date results. Or you could see gas prices or unemployment numbers charted out.

How does it work? The application pulls raw data from a variety of public sources, some of which is accurate up to the day.

Someone asked me to describe the “positioning” of the three candidates in the race for the White House. Were we facing tough choices between the first possible Black president, the first potential woman in the White House, and an “veteran” candidate?

I tried to explain how while their positioning is blurred, they were good studies of branding. Their cross-over ideologies and mutual respect for one another (Clinton’s not in this camp) make them less a Coke vs Pepsi, and more like Mountain Dew vs Red Bull –which are now called “functional soft drinks.” Yes, McCain exhibits exhibits characteristics of an energy drink, with functional benefits. His packaging is very strong, and his positioning is very shrewd.

On the beverage side, all this election interest has not escaped Mountain Dew, which is holding its own “Dew-mocracy” to find the elixir of freedom.

As for Red Bull, WIRED’s (What’s Inside) analysis of Taurine, an elixir, called it a mild sedative, an age-defying antioxidant with “the potential to steady irregular heartbeats.”

Sounds like Obama?

The pastor at a church in Pinetop, Arizona made a point that got me rethinking the role of photography. “Like the Pueblos and the Navajos ask,” he said, “come in and join us, don’t observe us…please no photography.”

I’ve been into photography for a long time. At conferences, weddings and children’s school events I switch between participation and observation, making an effort to blend in and be as non intrusive as possible. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself that I could make the switch.

Photo journalists face another part of this join-us-don’t-observe-us dilemma when covering events: should they stop what they came to do and get involved, or stand back and be objective? Through their lens, they see monks getting tear gassed, accident victims traumatized, children fleeing attacks, and natural disasters. Often see journalists among the first responders. Minutes after Nik Ut captured the Pulitzer prize winning photograph of children fleeing a North Vietnam attack on a village, he and another journalist poured water from their canteens on the burned child. He then drove her to hospital.

Where does the word “engagement” stack up in this line of work? Read this story and you will realize it’s not a black and white issue. Marc Halevi of the Eagle-Tribune went to cover a rescue on Plum Island. He first saw the took pictures of a woman on a sand bank of the stormy ocean. “Seconds later as he was looking through his viewfinder, he saw a wave crash against the embankment on which she was standing, knocking down the sand and pulling the woman into the water.” So he did what any photographer would do. He clicked. He also shouted to the rescuers on the scene. “Rather than do it myself,” said Halevi, “I just made this immediate decision that (these people) would be better than I (at rescuing her).”

Participation or Observation?

Reputation. Reasoning. Responses. Our writing has a huge influence on them.

I am working on an article about the ‘fluff’ that creeps into resumes, and why the format is in need of an overhaul. I came across this quote in Writer’s Digest: “Unless you’re doing laundry, you’re not allowed to fluff.”

To which I would like to add:

• Unless you’re calling in to the Rush Limbaugh show, you’re not allowed to use circumlocutory arguments.
• Unless you’re wordsmithing legal copy for the back of a cholesterol-reducing drug ad, you’re not allowed to write long, entangled sentences which provoke zero emotional response.

“So why not bridge the gap between reader interest ad reader engagement by adding SMS codes, 2D barcodes, coupon codes and keyword search?”

Copy in Google ad about the value of adding encoded 2D bar codes (left) in newspaper ads that could be photographed with a mobile phone, and link reader to a virtual bookmark.

“During the inadequate training days prior to the opening, any staff questions were bounced back with ‘I don’t know’ “

British Airways baggage handler, quoted on BBC, about the chaos in Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

“Between information overload, globalization, and the sheer complexity of modern business, we’ve got to be more visual and less language dependent in communicating ideas.”

Dan Roam, visual consultant and author of The back of the napkin.

“Virgle”

Google’s April Fool’s joke (complete with maps and a Press Release) about Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin enabling users to colonize Mars.

“Simultaneity of input.”

Mark Vacay, director of the architecture firm, SmithGroup, on the need for builders to take into account the Millennial generation’s use of space, and using electronics for multiple inputs and interaction.

Lots of discussion around the new AZCentral web site. It’s a discussion around whether the new site reflects the newspaper brand. It doesn’t, and I wondered if that was accident or intentional heresy. Take a look at AZCentral. If you’re in Arizona, you probably remember the cluttered site that bore no resemblance to the newspaper it was an extension of — The Arizona Republic.

We all worry about two things when it comes to online presence: Usability and Branding. Often we get all fired up over the latter, and pay lip service to the former.

The rhetorical question I often ask is, does an online product need to reflect the branding of the mothership? And often the answer is, “Yes of course!” But if we probe a bit deeper, we may find that the audience for the online product may be looking for a different experience than the audience of the physical product. Even if some part of the audience patronizes both. Do users walk away from an online experience because it is different from the physical entity? Will a McDonald’s user walk away from the site because there is no giant golden arch on the landing page? The McDonald’s.com site is quite plain in comparison to the physical store. Mcdonald’s USA on the other hand is a lot more interactive than its mothership.

If we design web sites based on who our users are, and how they visit us, maybe our online brand deserves its own identity. Ikea is one huge confusing place that encourages people to get lost, and find plants and window drapes when they only came in to buy a ice bucket. But the Ikea site is organized by the way people search, not the way store customers go to get lost. There are just seven tabs for seven rooms, and one more for three others. It’s that simple. The store is supposed to slow down customers. The site is supposed to speed things up. Usability took home the trophy, for a good reason.

I read a quote somewhere that “mashups are an inalienable right.” To which we could add: Personalization, instant gratification, live streaming, and on-demand are inalienable rights, too.

So we have to expect more of the rip, mix burn possibilities (rip, remix, burn?) as in this latest attempt by Oxford rock band, Radiohead to let its fans remix their own versions of a song, giving them the five elements of the track.

In December last year, Thom Yorke of Radiohead told WIRED, that their “pay what you can” experiment for the album In Rainbows was not a business model but “a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do?” No one quite believed them, as it seemed more like a pilot study for some savvy marketing.

This latest tactic is definitely more than a “response” –a strategy to build a fan base among users who have been weaned on the above-mentioned inalienable rights.

How do we keep up with the explosion of new social media tools?

Do you feel slightly behind the curve? You’re not alone. And that curve, is more like …a wave, right? IABC Phoenix is bringing in Shel Holtz, blogger, podcaster and technology guru for half-day seminar on social media specially tailored for communicators.

It is designed to help you determine what tools are worth your attention based on your organization’s objectives.

It’s next Tuesday, April 8th. Register here.

Just like Rapp Collins’ (greatfnplace.com) scrambled ad I wrote about, their web site is meant to disturb. In a good way, perhaps.

Take a look. You can’t scroll via conventional scroll bars. Graphics are almost wacky: cables, birds, mobile phones, Bluetoooth devices, ink blots and web cams beg you to click and interact. But in the end, you feel deprived of content. Deliberately? Who knows. Is this the secret of direct marketing -information underloading for a change?

Apart from the business it is after, it makes you rethink what an online experience could be instead of the boring ‘about’ pages and ‘vision statements’ that are cues for making a hasty retreat.

The only thing that bothers me about the design elements are the wires. As`in cables. Intertwined, and enhanced by Flash, they cleverly mimic DNA strands (thus eliminating the need for pathetic copy that “digital is our DNA…” etc). But in a rapidly unwired Comsumerscape, these USB and Cat-5 cables will soon be as quaint as, floppy drives.

Easy fix, that. Disrupt once more.

We writers tend to think that anything can be explained away with a sentence, a headline, a turn of phrase.

But I am also a huge believer in information graphics and icons. Often a few lines with a Sharpie on the back of a napkin can tell a story much, much better than a few PowerPoint slides. Or an ad. (seen the napkin visual in a Saleforce.com ad?) The downside to this is I have a growing collection of napkins from coffee shops and restaurants.

I picked up a brilliant book that deals with just this –throwing light on complex problems using pictures– called The back of the napkin by Dan Roam. “The best way to see something that isn’t there,” says Roam,” “is to look with your eyes closed.”

Visual thinking is the more intuitive way to understand and crack problems, he says. Couldn’t agree more, being (or in spite of being) a writer. That’s why we still need white boards, Visio, and of course napkins.

On a larger scale I see visualization at work everyday when dealing with intangibles –essentially data– involving complex issues such as epidemiology, environment, performance figures, underground water etc. And the trick is to put visualization at the service of problem-solving and make people “see with their eyes closed.”

Marketers have not tapped into this type of mapping, visualizing and problem-solving. Their ‘maps’ are still connected at the hip to org charts, flow diagrams, spread sheets and supply-chain matrices. The intangibles tend to get lost in the forest of data. When you learn to visualize intangibles, a whole new world opens up.