I’m Sari Aapola, and I was recently appointed VP for Product Management at Xtract. My background is in BtoB marketing and product marketing, and mostly in telecoms and software companies such as Tecnomen and Basware. I’ve recently spent two years in Germany, and one of my projects there was writing a book called “Sustainable Thought Leadership – how to build awareness and credibility to support business”. In it I present a model especially for growth companies with great innovations on becoming thought leaders in their category and target group. I’m now thrilled to work in a thought leader company, promoting its ambition to take its innovative solutions to benefit customers. The book will be out in a few weeks’ time…

A new version of Xtract Social Links was introduced at the Mobile World Congress in February. It includes great improvements, especially as its new interface helps marketers to take full advantage of the product. For the further development of our offering, I’m looking forward to a dialogue with our customers, real insight that will help us delight our customer over and over again.

Marc Davis at MobileMonday in Helsinki

Marc started his presentation of by outlining Yahoo!’s visions of how to combine social networking and mobile into something that is ubiquitous and easy to use and develop for. I’ve always viewed the mobile phone as very good tool for social networking. Of course, you can call your friends, but I’ve also been texting to them for over 10 years now by both SMS and email, nowadays I can do video calls from the mobile too. So how is that changing? Well, I guess it isn’t. We’re just adding more ways to communicate to the same device. Which, let’s face it, is not a mobile phone anymore, but the most personal computer you have.

Marc also told us about Australian Aboriginal tribe, the Achilpa. They carry a sacred pole with them all the time as they wander around the desert to find food and water. To them, the pole marks the center of the universe – Which is very convenient as they never get lost (unless the pole breaks). “Where ever you go, is the center of the universe. And your people are always with you.”

The mobile has definitely become our sacred pole. (What three things do you take with you always when you go outside your home?) If our modern pole breaks, or runs out of battery, we would be lost and without any contact to our people.

However, is it too easy to think that you are in contact with our friends and loved ones if you just check their Pulse? I sometimes think that we are becoming more and more like the people in Solaria, a world envisioned by Isaac Asimov. Solaria is a world that is extremely sparsely inhabited and the people never meet each other in person, only through holographic viewing systems. They even have strong phobia about meeting in person. Isn’t this the direction we are going? Soon all that is required is to broadcast yourself and read the Pulse of your friends? And, in the best or worst case – depending how you look at it, that Pulse is already filtered by some ingenious system that tells me what is important.
I hope not. However, even though it was very nice to go home and give my wife an old fashioned analog hug, I have to admit that I’ve been away from home so many times that to be able to send at least digital hugs is very welcome.

What about the bag of ideas? Well Marc gave a good presentation of new Yahoo! technologies, like BluePrint and Fire Eagle. Take a look, and I’m sure you will get some great ideas. I did.

“the main point of information visualization is not to decorate, nor to show-off but, to help in making the right conclusions on unexplored data”

I recently googled for information on visualization, or casually, “infovis”. I ran into a weblog on Information Aesthtics (”infosthetics”). Visualizing social networks seems to be one of the leading topics in this blog, too. Network visualization is, as Janne recently pointed out, technically difficult as such, but also conceptually problematic. And network visualization is only one visualization task in our work.

The term infosthetics reminded me of the seminal books by Edward Tufte, that crystallize making good visual representations in conjectures of graphical excellence and a couple of quantitative measures. Tufte’s books are a delight to read – not only because of their highly professional graphical standard – but because of the interesting stories. The most startling of them is perhaps the possible role of a disinformative data visualization in the tragedy of th e explosion of space shuttle Challenger (STS-51-L). Its, of course, often too easy to second-guess; to get another perspective, see also a thoroughful criticism on Tufte’s claims on the Challenger issue by Wade Robinson and others.

Another seminal classic is “Semiologie Graphique” by the French semiologist-cartograph Jacques Bertin. He is attributed the first detailed theory and taxonomy of data graphics. Bertin is a semiologist and he treats maps and data graphics as a language where the elements of visualizations are signs. The theory involves detailed taxonomy graphical attributes, such as, luminance, color, texture, position, and size of objects, classifying them according to their most suitable purpose of use. The theory preludes the modern psycho-visual, scientific approach to the theory behind data graphics and information visualization. The thesis by Jarkko Venna, recently defended in my “academic home”, is worth reading as an example of psycho-visually based visual data mining on high-dimensional data and similarity structures.

Visualizing information is difficult in general, and it is not a question of computer graphics alone. The visualizations have a multitude of roles. They can be a form of aesthetics; they can be promotional, informative, pedagogical and most importantly in data analysis, be tools of analysis that “amplify cognition” – just as Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman put it (see here).

Aesthetics, or elegancy of the visualization helps in achieving in this task at least when understood as a form follows function principle. However, the main point of information visualization is not to decorate, nor to show-off but, to help in making the right conclusions on unexplored data and in communicating them to others. That’s why information visualization is difficult.