Once you know what a ripple looks like, and the content of that ripple, you can track it. And you start to see the others. And eventually, you start to identify the ripples that preceded a discrete event instead of the ones that followed. (Via OccasRazr)

Item 1: Google Search Trends and Insights allow you to enter any search term and see how it has relatively trended over the last 5 years. Beanie babies (why beanie babies? why NOT beanie babies!?) for example, had been on the steady decline [thankfully] until recently when they got a huge spike when Teenie Beanie Babies were brought back (whatever that means). The highest search volume coming from Reston, VA. Of mild interest unless you are a seller or manufacturer of beanie babies, then it becomes massively important. If I were looking to start a beanie baby store, Reston, VA would be at the top of my list for potential locations.

Large companies would pay handsomely for an up to the minute trending of their relevant keywords. Imagine being able to have a week or two of advance notice that a product is about to hit it big? I would guess the evidence in searches would predate the data on the ground by weeks or months.

And, what about as a measure of the success of a branding campaign? Companies could track exactly how much of an effect a campaign is having. Are people searching for the brand more? Has one campaign been more successful than others? Did one particular brand exposure have a disproportionate effect?

Item 2: Google Finance Domestic Trends Indexes These track search terms related to various industries. Combined with data on consumer price indexes and consumer confidence, one might be able to predict a rebound in a particular industry. After all, financial markets are built on the confidence and sentiment of the universe of investors and if you can wedge yourself in the time between the upswell of negative/positive feeling about an industry and the increase/decrease of an index, you can rule the world.

(Here’s a tip: the lowest volume of searches around airlines and travel have occurred at about December 15th each year over the last 5. I’m guessing if you want to reserve a room or a plane ticket, that is the time to do it. That also happens to be a good time to buy a car.)

Item 3: Google Flu Trends. Google has “found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms” and can predict flu outbreaks 1 to 2 weeks earlier than the CDC and is 97% to 98% accurate. (This becomes less useful when cases are in the hundreds as opposed to thousands, becoming far more valuable in an epi- or pandemic.)

As Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi (Google’s Chief economist and Decision Support Engineering Analyst) pointed out they are currently only focusing on predicting the present, but given the mounting data available, the diverse channels and types of data available, and the identification of significantly correlated variables in models they will be able to predict the future. (Here is a model that uses Google trend data to improve predictions of changes in credit levels.)

Search can be an early warning of people’s shifting interests and intentions, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. However, the accuracy and importance of these predictions will be ever increasing given:

• the increasing number of people online
• improvements in sentiment analysis and scoring
• increasing importance of real time search (i.e. Twitter search)
• their ability to bring in data from other services such as Gmail, blogs, and news sources

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Google Predicts the Present… and soon The Future is a post from: co>innovative

Over the summer I took a trip to New Zealand and Fiji. I spent my time in Fiji on just one island dubbed Vorovoro by Tribewanted. Now, Tribewanted is a pretty wild eco-tourism/online community/adventure travel/communE-like experience. The group leased half of a Fijian island for 3 years. Tribe members have been voting and discussing online since mid-2006 regarding what to build and how things should be run. It was pretty incredible to be a part of the development, watch the progress, and then show up on the island to see what had been accomplished and meet the people behind it. The main point of the experiment is to have travelers very involved in the development (yup, most visitors join in the building and managing of the projects) 0f an extremely environmentally friendly and locally sensitive vacation spot.

The entire project was sanctioned by the local chief and employs a group of locals as well. It is perhaps cliche but it was incredible to see how happy everyone is on the island. No electricity. No running water. No phones. No hospitals anywhere close by. Yet, they pretty much laugh all day long. On regular occasions they come together to drink kava, a root that is pounded into a paste and squeezed into a communal bowl of water. It ends up looking like muddy water, but it is a mild narcotic. Every night they got together and invited us tourists as well to sit, sing, drink, and talk late into the night.

It’s a shame, though: a site called the Jem Report comes up in the first few results when you Google Tribewanted. The headline for that link? “Is Tribewanted.com a scam?” Now, Tribewanted has been going strong since September of 2006 and I can say, having spent a week there, it is very much not a scam and actually an incredible experience. If you go to that site, you’ll see the post has been up since July of 2006, when, granted, it was valid to have doubts about the project. Unfortunately you can’t easily email Jem and the only way to respond to the post is to register on the site and put a post up on the forum which is wildly unsatisfying.

I remember, around that time, Tribewanted had set a limit of 5,000 participants over the first 3 years. I found out about it when they had about 500 members paid up and was worried it might hit the tipping point and fill up within days. In part because of the above post (and the military coup several months later didn’t help either), I believe, the number of members shot up to 1,200 or so and pretty much stayed there. It is now at 1,328.

Hopefully this link will fall down the ranking once the book by Ben Keene about the first year and the BBC 5 hour documentary are released in the spring. (Ben is a great guy. I talked to him for hours about Tribewanted and his plans, etc. Can’t wait for the book and to pick myself out in the documentary.) For further proof: here are my flickr photos and some MP3s of songs we danced to during the wedding held on the island.

So if you’re looking for something completely different on your next vacation, check out Tribewanted.

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Tribewanted is not a scam. Actually, it’s ridiculously awesome. is a post from: co>innovative

I’ve added:

A banner to the extremely worthwhile and totally awesome Kiva.org to the sidebar. If you have always wondered what microfinance was all about, check this out. Similar to Prosper, you can loan money to individuals in developing countries and even keep in touch with them to learn how their business is developing over the course of the 6 to 12 month loan. The most amazing thing is that as they pay off the loan, you get your money back which you can then either re-loan or withdraw. It’s an incredible model, applying business returns and principles to development work.

A ReadThese page above of recommended reading, some good beach reading if you ask me.

An InnovativeCompanies page above of sweet companies you should check out.

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Some new changes to the blog is a post from: co>innovative

Click To Play

Why obsessively check this site on an hourly basis when you could have the site come to you?

Step 1: go to Google Reader
Step 2: Click “Add subscription” and past this in there: http://feeds.feedburner.com/coinnovative

(Or if you don’t dig on that, just submit your email address in the box to the right to get a nice email update of my brilliant posts.)

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I’m here to help: Why you should use RSS is a post from: co>innovative

Just don’t ask her to make monkey bread.

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Go read it: brought to you by the letter l is a post from: co>innovative