Sara Ponnert 29 Apr 2013

Öppna – Stora Data & API’er

Kristin, Andreas, Peter, Eira & Tomas

Kristin, Andreas, Peter, Eira & Tomas


Fredagen den 26 april hade vi besök av en mycket kunnig panel som pratade om Öppna-Stora Data och API’er. Peter Krantz (Open government advocate & consultant), Tomas Wennström (Co-founder av Vackertväder.se, Sweden Social Web Camp), Andreas Krohn (API Specialist på Dopter AB) och Kristin Lygn (senior legal counsel at The Norwegian Meteorological Institute) pratade om utmaningarna med öppna data, hur arbetar vi med big data idag och vad behövs för att API’er ska funka i praktiken.

Panelen konstaterade att om ni sitter på data, släpp den fri, i bulk, eller hur som, att skapa ett API kan vara kostsamt om det visar sig att det gjordes med fel användningsområde i fokus. Släpp den fri – låt andra fundera på vad man kan göra med den!

Se samtalet här:

Läs också vår eminenta publikation Från byråkrati till innovation – en introduktion till att arbeta med öppna data, som tagits fram ihop med Sydsvenska Handelskammaren, BTH och Lunds Universitet.

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Christin Persson 17 Apr 2013

We have a correspondent!

Sophie Uesson lives in London where she is doing her MA in Digital Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first report below for Media Evolution is a glimpse from London Web Summit 2013 and London-traffic. 
//Christin Persson, head of publications

Transforming maps into collaborative helpers

A while back I listened to an onstage interview with Di-Ann Eisnor, VP Platforms and Partnerships at Waze during London Web Summit. Waze is a free, social, real-time traffic application which helps drivers find the fastest and smoothest route to any preferred destination. While maps like Google, Nokia and Apple have become increasingly dynamic through adding locations and names to their databases, Waze takes maps one step further and focuses on traffic – with help from the crowd.

With the use of GPS-tracking and a committed community of drivers, Waze provide a fluid real-time map displaying traffic jams, road blocks, police traps and more. Drivers can passively provide information about their current routes just by opening the app or actively report accidents and road closures.

Screenshot from the Waze-app

Crowdsourcing in our daily lives
- this time through traffic

‘Crowdsourcing without a crowd is not a very interesting thing’ says Di-Ann and tells the story of how the Silicon Valley based startup started their journey using static base maps from the government and slowly built a crowd of users which recently surpassed 40 million drivers. The community combined with Waze’s own algorithm create a full layered database with maps, traffic, incidents and a social layer with gaming elements such as collectable cupcakes and scoreboards.

How big data saved LA from carmageddon

Waze is not only an app but also a big data business with the most interesting uses coming from mistakes and problems. In 2010 during what has been known as ‘Carmageddon’, a 53-hour shutdown of the main highway in Los Angeles with 500.000 displaced vehicles, Waze was the only crowdsourced app which could help the city with traffic management. They were embedded in the major news channels and reported about the traffic situation during three whole days. During hurricane Sandy ‘wazers’ helped others to find gas stations with fuel by leaving notes within the app about the situation at different stations. Crowdsourcing was proven to not only be a fun gamified activity but also as a tool to gather data to a improve a whole infrastructure.

Citizen participation for big social impact

These examples show how crowdsourcing does not necessarily only provide information within a specific community. It also has a big impact on a larger scale, acting out to make cities smarter with the help of citizens, making separate communities come together and providing governments and other actors with data that can improve society. As Waze is turning cars into ‘the internet of things’ through big data, they are taking this one step further in July 2013 by launching their service in a fully embedded car in collaboration with a big car manufacturer. What this may mean in the context of creating smarter cities and the impact of citizens and the crowd will be extremely interesting to follow.

Sophie Uesson
Sophie Uesson

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Martin Thörnkvist 05 Nov 2012

Gender equality at media and tech conferences

Martin Thörnkvist is the Program Director for Media Evolution’s annual conference Media Evolution The Conference and the Technology for Design track at Business of Design Week in Hong Kong.

Speakers, v. 3
Some of the spekears at The Conference 2012 (photo by Kate Miltner).

There’s been a debate about gender equality at conferences in Sweden recently. It was started by Brit Stakston and enhanced by our Minister for Information Technology and Energy, Anna-Karin Hatt.

Over and over again I hear people say that it’s hard to find female speakers for tech and media conferences, and that it’s impossible to have a gender equal speakers lineup.

At this year’s edition of Media Evolution The Conference 50% of the keynote speakers and 45% of the total speakers lineup were women.

We are a living proof that gender equal conferences is possible.

Correlation between speakers and participants

Even more interestingly, when we went through the participants list we found that 42% of the participants were women. Which is almost the same proportion as the speakers. Last year 39% of the attendees were female and 38% of the speakers.

Last year at Sweden Social Web Camp, an unconference where the participants put their name in a big grid of slots to hold a session, I counted how many session where held be women. One third. It turned out that one third of the attendees where female.

So, in these two cases there seems to be a correlation between the gender split of speakers and participants. I find it very interesting for both the event experience and from a business perspective. 

It doesn’t just happen

Initiatives such as Rättviseförmedlingen and Change the Ratio have been of big importance for us to keep working towards our goal of gender equal conference (and we know we’re not there just yet).

We experienced something that was shocking to us when we invited people to suggest topics for an unconference track at our conference. Only one (1!) woman did so. We ended up with 11 men and 1 woman in this crowdsourced track. This shows that you need to be constantly on your feet to change the ratio and accomplish the goal of gender equality.

We’ve learned that it’s not enough to invite women. You need to start by looking at the design and set up in which you want somebody to be a part. In many cases it’s rather the topic that needs to change. In most cases the outcome become much better if you force yourself to go beyond the most obvious solution.

The bigger picture

My hope is that by having many women on our stages we will inspire other conferences to do the same. And also encourage women to start companies and bigger corporations to hire female executives.

It’s easy to book the usual suspects and the executives of well known companies, but it’s much more interesting to dig a little deeper and build trust in your community that whoever speaks will deliver on a high level.

Ignoring 50% of the population is the biggest mistake you can make in the 21st century.

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Read more:
Kvinnor, mångfald och it. Hur gör vi? – Brit Stakston
Jämställdheten och it-branschen – Anna-Karin Hatt
Könsfördelningen bland talarna på Internetdagarna – Janne Elvelid

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Heidi Nilsson 04 Oct 2012

Courage in the digital era

Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Today at Medea (Malmö Universty), a few lucky ones had got out of bed for an early morning seminar with former Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

Daniel was to give us an insight to his new platform Openleaks, and together with lawyer Jennie Kastberg and researcher Stefan Larsson discuss issues such as openness, the juridical status of whistle blowers in different countries and different kinds of organizations.

As soon as Daniel started telling us about Openleaks, some kind of mindshift took place in the room. This was no ordinary session on a new, bright business idea, this was a discussion on some of the most fundamental humanistic questions. Our right to speak our mind, our joint responsibility for building a better world, and what we can do in order to make this possible.

Whistle blowing as a part of the system

Sweden is a great country for whistle blowers, at least in theory. Daniel told us a story of a German woman working at a hospital with the elderly, who reported things she felt, was treated the wrong way at the hospital. Today, many years later, she has lost a number of lawsuits, she is never to get a job in her profession again, and there’s been no improvement in her former workplace. In Sweden, people working in health care must report any mishandling or violations they encounter in their work.

Regulations like these are of course much harder to implement in the private sector, where the employer may feel a fear of loosing his or her job if revealing shady business activities, poor working conditions e.g. Still, people in Sweden have the right to speak their mind, as long as they have presented the problem to the company’s management, and they haven’t resolved it.

A plattform to canalize courage

To be a whistle blower requires a lot of courage. Courage that may be hard to keep on to for days and weeks, while you’re looking for the right moment, the right journalist or the right organization to share your experiences with. Openleak’s vision is to offer a platform that works as a bridge between whistle blowers and people or organizations that know how to handle this kind of information. As Daniel put it – using Openleks gives courageous people the opportunity to share their information in minutes, when in momentum.

Openleaks may not be an answer to all our problems, but it’s an important building block in making the world a tiny bit better.

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Martin Thörnkvist 28 Sep 2012

It’s time to start wasting pixels #theconf [video]

What if all surfaces are potential screens?! And how will we think about computing on those srceens in public spaces? That was the premise of one of the sessions at Media Evolution The Conference.

With personal computing we deal with private stuff, social computing is something we do with family and friends, public computing is something you will do with strangers on screens public spaces.

Wasting pixels

In his presentation Venkatesh Rao (Ribbonfarm.com) talked about wasting pixels, much like Alan Kay talked about wasting bits in 1970. Computer power used to be so expensive that it was only for calculating “important thing”, but as it became cheaper we could waste it things like design and user interface. According to Venkatesh “screens” will go the same way because “pixels will be as cheap as paint”.

Driving forces for adopting screens everywhere

Since the technology will be expensive to roll out in the beginning, Dan Gärdenfors (RIM TAT) believes that advertising companies will lead the way. They already have a business model for selling surfaces that can catch our attention.

And there will be some really cool new ways for designers to make use of the new screens, “When information can move from the side of a buss to the wall of house and back again to the bus we are leaving the rectangular design of messages”. It’s just a matter of time, “there’s an economic argument for pushing out screens everywhere, it’s technologically possible and there are some really good possibilities to design some interesting experiences”

Improvement of technologies will make them more affordable

“Every single school in the world will replace ordinary books with e-books” says Sriram Peruvemba (Eink). Even though it’s very costly to improve the technologies, that’s what is happening. Apart from developing new displays is actually a good business, there’s also a strong driving force in the ability to put a knowledge device in every persons hand.

“We love books. Libraries are magnificent, but visiting statistics show they are on decline. The people that go them doesn’t borrow books. They go there for free internet and to look for jobs.” Sriram envisions a future where the all people in the world have access to all books ever relesead on a display that is better than paper, “every single school in the world will replace ordinary books with e-books”

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Martin Thörnkvist 11 Sep 2012

Growth hackers – the new gold diggers we should all become

Listen, Understand, Act
We have come to a point in the digital era where good ideas, and not even good products, are enough for a service, product or company to become successful.

Too many products are being built without being used. Talking to an empty room is a waste of time. To solve this problem there is a lot of talk right now about growth hacking and an increasing amount if startup companies are looking for growth hackers. It sounds cool. But what is it? And why should all of us care?

The growth hacker’s craftsmanship

A growth hackers job is to find new ways to acquire and keep users. Mattan Griffel offers a good definition: “Growth hacking is a set of tactics and best practices for dealing with the problem of user growth”. It’s about having a sense of design, human behavior on the internet and technology and to feed what you learn to the developing processes of a product or service.

Keep track of data
The first thing you need to do is to really try to understand what the real problem for non existing user growth is. By understanding the user behaviour behind the data you have you will be able to get clues to what works and what doesn’t and kick off the process of testing new things and set new goals. The ability to find inspiration on how to change the product to perform better, rather than pushing out new features is crucial.

Be creative
“Growth hacking is both an art and a science” explains Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo. Since products usually are in the starting phase, budgets are slim, smart product design, copywriting and use of game based mechanics are the factors that will make the desired user more likely to growth happen.

Develop methodologies
From the looking at the data and doing live tests with the product you’ll be able develop and enhance methods for understanding what users do and is looking for to do with the product.

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, SEO, onboarding and behavioural economics, now is a good time to educate yourself in it. Getting a sense of how people use what you’re building will give you a better ability to deliver awesomeness from the position you have.

At the end of the day, everybody at a company is responsible for making it a success.

Learn more

“Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” – Andrew Chen
“Growth hacking, lean marketing for startups” – a presenation by Mattan Griffel
“How to hack engagement [video]“ – Jeremy Fisher
“What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched?” – Quora thread
- “This Is Your Brain On Boarding: How To Turn Visitors Into Users” – Nir Eyal
- “What is Behavioral Economics? [video]“ – Dan Ariely
- “A primer on A/B testing” – Mike Greenfield

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Martin Thörnkvist 06 Sep 2012

How to get people to create content for you #theconf [video]

In his book “Cognitive Surplus” Clay Shirky wrote about the possibilities we have to do astonishing things in our spare time, if we do it together and if somebody provides us with a framework to work in.

How to hack engagement

At Media Evolution The Conference this year Jeremy Fisher from Wander spoke about smart ways of designing a service to trigger and maximize users engagement. In his presentation Jeremy provides nine steps to hack users engagement and use Wander’s pre-launch success as a case.


Download video from iTunes.

Getting started
1. Ask nicely – make it simple to contribute
2. Let people express themselves
3. Use a progress bar and give people prompts

Getting people to come back
4. Let users be pet – nobody wants to feel like they’re talking to an empty room
5. Build in status – everybody wants to feel that they’re kings
6. Give people treats

Going big and viral
7. Think of what atomic units of content you should build your service around – choose something that happens frequently and is connected to real world behaviors
8. Enable people to republish content – one persons trash is another persons content
9. Give people a sense of ownership – let users customize their presence on your service

Jesse Schell on Gamification

Some of Jeremy’s steps are mechanics that is taken from games. Two years ago at Moving Images (the predecessor of The Conference) Jesse Schell spoke thoroughly about it:

Read more

Our publication about Gamification
The worlds leading blog – Gamification.co

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Sara Ohlsson 06 Jul 2012

Are we ready for Collaborative Consumption?

Sara Ohlsson is CEO and founder of the HinnerDu.se platform. The text is taken from our publication “Access over ownership”, about the trend of wanting access to things instead of owning them.

Our service HinnerDu.se works better in cities than in rural areas. Maybe it’s because you don’t need Internet to connect people in the countryside. That’s despite the fact that neighbours are geographically further away, the obstacles for asking for help feel less than in the city.

This anonymity in cities and on the web is also our greatest challenge. How do you create the same trust between people who only met online as among people in rural areas. How do we get these people to feel
that getting help from a private person rather than an established company works equally well, perhaps even better?

To build confidence in private people let’s highlight Jonas, father of two, who enjoys DIY, and has put together a lot of IKEA furniture, and 25-year-old Cecilia who’s studying to be a landscape architect and gladly helps with weeding or chopping wood.

Asking for help from a private person rather than a company

A few weeks ago it dawned on me how much more confident you spontaneously feel when you use a large company. I needed to find someone who could go to IKEA in Copenhagen and buy, deliver and install a green Billy cabinet that was sold-out in Sweden. I took the opportunity to try one of the larger online quotation services. I put up my ad and thought I would be flooded with calls from different companies who wanted to help me.

After three days and I still hadn’t heard anything, I asked the same question on HinnerDu.se. It took just an hour or two and I had a reply from Fredrik who really wanted to help me. On his profile page I could see that he carried out lots of tasks in the past and his reviews were excellent. We agreed on a price and time and everything went very smoothly.

Some lessons learned

The most common requests are quite traditional. It has been shown that many people need help with walking the dog and the dog-sitting category is now our largest category. Craftsmen are most in demand on our sister site in Denmark, DenLilleTjeneste.dk. That’s possibly due to that fact that there is no tax deduction for craftsmen in Denmark (as they do in Sweden and Finland) which makes it very expensive to hire a craftsman in the traditional way.

Mind you, people are not as careful in making sure the dog to get its daily dose of exercise. What we see is that you mainly get help with things you can’t do yourself. You can’t be a dog-sitter for your own dog, you need help. It’s less common to ask for help because you feel you can’t do something yourself or want to buy your free time. Maybe it’s because it’s still seen as a bit of a “no-no” Sweden if you don’t do everything yourself.

Unfortunately, asking for help is something we are bad at, which is a shame because we see that people who do the job do it to feel needed, to be helpful and to make new contacts. Giving another person an opportunity to help and also make a small income is something that should be encouraged.

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Lisa Gansky 04 Jul 2012

Seriously better things, easily shared

Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh – Why the Future of Business
is Sharing. The text is taken from our publication “Access over ownership”, about the trend of wanting access to things instead of owning them.

Most companies have stubbornly stuck to various twists on a single tried-and- true formula: Create a product or service, sell it, and collect money. Just sell the guy a dishwasher, and watch him walk out the door.

Few businesspeople, including most entrepreneurs and investors, have imagined creating wealth or customers any other way. Though they may use social media to market their products, their minds are still stuck in a 2-D buyer/seller/own-it world.

Yet around this entrenched way of thinking, a new model is thriving, one that I call “the Mesh.” Enter the Mesh. That’s what I call the rapidly growing network of sharing-based goods and services. The Mesh is based on having convenient access to what you need and want, without the expense and hassles of owning more stuff.

Network-enable sharing

Fundamentally, the Mesh is based on network-enabled sharing—on access rather than ownership. Mesh businesses understand and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile, location-based capabilities and social network growth to give us convenient access to what we want and need, just when we want or need it. In my view, a major theme of the Share Economy is ‘unused value = waste’.

In a nutshell, we, as a global community have a lot of excess capacity: cars and bicycles sitting around, offices, factories and tools idle and, of course, talent. As access continues to triumph over ownership, we will continue to identify and make available ‘unused value’ as a major fuel for our local and global economies. This shift to the Mesh is rapidly changing the way business is done, and it’s picking up speed.

Why is the Mesh growing so fast?

There are a few significant reasons: population growth, the recession and that we are living in a time when anyone, almost anywhere, can reach a person, company or market faster, with far less capital required.

We now have an enhanced ability not only to leverage existing platforms, but also to refine and test our offering more quickly and inexpensively than ever before through social media networks, popup shops and galleries and apps.

Some of these Mesh businesses are international enterprises (Like ZipCar.com and LoveFilm.com). These services own the inventory of products or facility which they then make available to their customers via a ‘share’ or membership model. Many other Mesh companies are two sided marketplaces which are peer-to-peer or community based. In other words, marketplaces which allow us to borrow, swap and rent things from one another. These businesses take advantage of local peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms like Facebook and Foursquare, which make it easy to be connected while mobile.

There are now over 6,500 share-based companies in the Mesh community directory at Meshing.it. The competitive advantages for Mesh companies are so enormous that the new model has become the major driver for businesses old and new.

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Markus Wiklander 03 Jul 2012

Power to the people

Markus Wiklander is founder and CEO of Emues.com. The text is taken from our publication “Access over ownership”, about the trend of wanting access to things instead of owning them.

We have built a platform where music fans can influence and develop the offering of live music, concerts, shows and clubs.

By fans suggesting concerts with artists on dates when venues are not booked for a function, we can match the desire for more gigs from artists with the spare capacity of venues, that is to say the evenings when venues are not booked. The service is built as a crowd funding model, if a proposed concert has sold the minimum number of tickets within a given time, the concert will go ahead.

It gives fans the opportunity to influence which artists have the chance to play, gives artists more gigs, and at the same time reduces the financial risks that concerts today put on venues. If the concert doesn’t happen, everyone gets their money back directly.

The challenge of changing behaviour

We work in close relationship with music venues, artists, agents and consumers to design and develop the service. We are currently operating in Sweden and Denmark. Our challenge lies in changing behaviour in the music industry, and for the people who want to experience music. One reaction I often come across is ”Can my friends and I really book a concert?”

But we see that fans throughout the world are not content to just consume. We want to be more involved than that. Creative people are posting projects on platforms like Kickstarter that become reality because there are people who are interested in contributing money and commitment in the early stages. That’s just how Emues works, except it’s for concerts and tours. Just like Lauren Anderson writes, we believe that the music niche raises commitment even more.

At the same time we see a great need from the industry for more live gigs. As music sales fall, the need for artists to get income from live shows has increased. Fees have not risen for most artists, instead they simply need to perform at more concerts.

Breathing life into the music industry

With the pressure we are seeing from artists and audiences nationally and internationally to participate in and influence on more concerts, I see no reason why music venues and arenas have to be empty one single day in a week.

To get concerts in more alternative environments, and even in faster, more flash mob-like ways, we are working with music venues such as public environments, industrial buildings and apartments.

With Emues we want to create new, open attitudes and exciting solutions within the music industry and boost creativity. Concerts are booked where the audience is! Our goal is to provide well-established artists with the opportunity to secure longer periods of more gigs globally. That upcoming artists can reach and play to their right audiences much more quickly. And that all of us who want to watch and experience music are able to influence who will play.

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