Ethnographic Insights On Demand

As many of you know (because you are clients) the only way to get good ethnographic data has been to conduct an expensive study.  Well, with the completion of our 3rd cross country study (the Cyber Census), we now have 100’s of hours and over 500 bins of multimedia data to sell on demand.  Our [...]

The Price of Free on the Internet

Part of the internet culture of today entails the free movement of knowledge, but how is free knowledge profitable? The distribution of products and services has historically been in control of businesses and companies. However, some factions of internet culture have found ways of pirating mainstream products or developing their own and redistributing them for [...]

Update on Roadtrip

Well, we’ve been to 17 of our goal of 22 states and we’ve conducted ethnographic interviews with 35 Americans. Whew! We are all taking a break and will continue on in later March and the beginning of April to finish our Cyber Census study. Here’s a map of where we’ve been. [...]

Will Google Replace MS Outlook?

OK…first I have to say that I’ve written this blog 2 times and when I went to save it, it disappeared into cyber space somewhere!!!  Even though we are observing that many people are moving to online tools to do their work (like Google docs & calendar)…it is very frustrating for me to get online [...]

Generational Gaps

You would think having two baby boomer parents would have given me a bit of a heads up on the divide between boomers and their kids, but it wasn’t until this research trip that I understood the full extent of the situation at hand, that the mindset of boomers and gen-Xers are vastly different. The [...]

What is Hiving

        
One of the main findings of this study is that people are not working in the space they thought they would in their homes.  Many people, despite having beautiful home offices, are choosing to take their laptops (and sometimes the desktop) and work in the more social areas of the home.  The [...]

Cyber Census Introduction Video

What was born a carefree and innocent little clip has grown into a professional video production. This video visually summarizes the essence of Cyber Census 2008, a collaborative effort to travel from coast to coast to examine the increasingly blurred line between cyber and physical space in the reality of [...]

Day 8 San Antonio to Houston

Had a great interview last night with a family here in San Antonio.  Interesting insight to how their 11 year old son is driving technology uptake within the whole family.  He’s on YouTube for music and uses the only Smart Phone in the family.  Here’s a video we took this morning from the RV parked [...]

RV Cam Day 6

Dallas – Day 6 of the ethnographic road trip and we have completed 17 interviews…driven over 2000 miles…and had 3 plugged toilet incidents on our RV. We spent yesterday at a flea market in Dallas and were having fun filming what really seemed like a techno graveyard. Old computers, ancient gaming technology, tons [...]

Embedded In Cyber Reality

As we moved through California, Arizona, New Mexico and now to Texas, we are learning that people’s cyber lives are full of surprises and insights.  It’s amazing how many people are completely comfortable with certain aspects of the Internet, but are challenged by others.  Some people are experts on their computer, but still find their [...]