Making Sense:

This is something that has fascinated me ever since my business mentor recommended the book featured here.

• The Language of Lying: Animated Primer on How to Detect Deception. Brain Pickings: When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, “Hey, my world, our world, it’s going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized.” And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit.

• Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind. David Linvigstone Smith: The ever-present possibility of deceit is a crucial dimension of every human relationship, even the most central: our relationship with our very selves. [note: if you are familiar with principles of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, you will find few surprises in this book. For everyone else, this might provide some good food for thought about social interactions.]

Making Do:

The messaging space is heating up, in this case on the back end; while at the same time not every industry and organization can get to real time as quickly.

• The team that created Kafka is leaving LinkedIn to build a company around it. GigaOm: Unlike traditional enterprise messaging software, Kreps explained, Kafka is built to handle all the data flowing through a company, and to do it in near real time. With Confluent, he and his co-founders hope to help companies outside the the web build the types of real-time platforms that Kafka anchors at places including LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber and Verizon.

• Collaborative Filtering at LinkedIn. [via] For the Geek in you: This paper presents LinkedIn’s horizontal collaborative filtering infrastructure, known as browsemaps. Great lessons learned, including context and presentation of browsemaps or any recommendation is paramount for a truly relevant user experience. That is, design and presentation represents the largest ROI, with data engineering being a second, and algorithms last.

• Financial Regulators Issue Final Guidance on Social Media. Federal Financial Institution Examination Council: The guidance provides considerations that financial institutions may find useful in conducting risk assessments and crafting and evaluating policies and procedures regarding social media.

Making it:

The idea that communication should be embedded in the product and service is finally starting to take root; do stuff first, then tell people.

• From Nail Polish to Peanut Butter: 16 Unlikely Products Launched by Ad Agencies. HubSpot: Hackaball started out as a side project for Made by Many; something the team was interested in experimenting with. As the concept and prototype evolved, the project became a larger initiative for the company. The ball is controlled by an iPhone program, where you can input commands that are triggered by movements or interactions, such as kicking.

• How to Really Make Something… that People Actually Want. Made by Many: It's a couple of years old, yet still holds well. About putting forth the concept of minimum desirable product, open testing it at scale, documenting learning. Start with what you know about your customers!

 

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effect on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.