I went to an informal presentation-and-workshop by this company and design outfit called Powerkiss around Helsinki today. You can see its Web site here. The animation is revealing of how the Finns find romance without alcohol... i.e. it takes a long time and in the meanwhile both parties are silent about what they want. But that aside...
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I suppose the most obvious thing about any successful application is how flexible enough it is to allow users to take it and do whatever they want with it. You cannot predict how people would like to use whatever tools you give them, so nothing beats having something fun and addictive, and letting users play around with it until something clicks.

Like Google Maps, for example, which has the power of showing everyone with a computer and an Internet connection the earth they live on and quite a lot of things about its geography.
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Advertising and surveillance make fine friends. They always have I suppose, but these days the hysteria over the partnership has reached new heights. Beware the applications you add on Facebook! But I am really much more interested in physical advertising (that is in real environments, such as billboards) because that is advertising you don't have much control over. Not you the audience, nor the broadcaster. It's based on not very detailed ideas of most of the type of people that would walk past it on MOST days. No variations, and well, not much tracking.
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Still on my info-graphics binge. I stumbled upon this site Capital Words. Interesting to note the number of times some words were said over others. Like "Oil" for example, as compared with "Education" and "Literacy", etc.
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The world is about numbers and figures. The death of an individual is a tragedy, the death of thousands but a statistic. We can paint a good picture of a particular country, city, town, village with a few statistics. GDP per head, PPP, agricultural dependency, literacy, etc. Throughout our lives (as privileged, numerically literate, socially aware individuals), we are immersed in environments that show up as words + pictures. 
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