This left my travel needs uncovered at the low end: while the Thule bag approaches perfection for day trips, it does not cover my daily commuting needs or when I stay somewhere for more than one day and therefore leave it at the hotel – despite my fondness for traveling light, my standard carry on inventory includes:

• MacBook Air
• iPad / Kindle (one or the other)
• power brick + cable
• mouse
• Thunderbolt to VGA adaptor
• clicker
• pens + notepad (paper, yes, paper !)
• document folders
• phone charger
• USB cables
• thumbdrive(s)

This is way too much for one of those sleek folios, but a regular case would not fit in the little space I have in the roller; this dualism made me review and discard so many briefcases I can’t even remember but yesterday I spotted this gem from Piquadro (not sure the direct link works, in case it doesn’t, search for product code CA2172W17).

Definitely a high-end product, made of great quality leather and VERY light notwithstanding; it features a padded compartment just right for my MBA (not sure thicker laptops would fit, though) a rear pocket for iPad or Kindle which you can access without unzipping the main one and snaps close with a neodymium magnetic fastener, a front zippered roomy pocket where I can toss the power brick, pendrives, cables and chargers; inside you find a detachable key ring, more zippered or fastened pockets, pen loops, and there’s still room for documents, jotter pad etc.

It’s carried messenger-style with an adjustable strap featuring the trademark solid metal Piquadro clasps.

If I really must find a defect, I would not have minded retractable handles when you don’t want to use the strap, but I know I am being picky here.

Comes in black, burgundy or blue, which is the color I chose AND, being this after Christmas, also got a reasonable deal @90 quid off the rather steep EUR270 list price. A must have.

If you are one of these, and don’t know this already, check out Lytro. There’s a sexy rumor that says that a Light Field Camera  may be featured on the next iPhone.

This is because most marketeers fear measurements like Count Dracula fears the wooden spike: it may kill them, exposing too openly the assumptions and approximations which make beancounters cringe

In an attempt to exorcise this fear, not unlike teenagers gorging on Nightmare movies, marketeers LOVE to talk about measurement, love to read books on measurement and attend sessions talking about measurement.

My skepticism is the skepticism of the engineer: for us, stuff you don’t measure does not exist: unlike those pesky physicists claiming the very act of measurement is what precipitates a waveform into the particle-like quantum state we can observe, we carry sliderules and calibers and like to slap a label with a number on things.

In marketing, Investments are usually clear and defined, Returns much less so, making the calculation of their ratio an exercise ranging from futile to outright false: you change a small assumption into your calculation of returns, and swing a project from Hero to Zero.

I have therefore usually refrained from entering this conversation for fear my skepticism would seep through the thin veil of diplomacy.

Recently, however, a couple of projects have helped me come to better terms with the whole measurement thing and can perhaps point to  a method robust enough to be applied in a more general way.

Rules for measuring

The basic rule for measurement is simple: it should be repeatable.

For example, the kilo of apples I buy at the fruit store should still weigh a kilo when I get home (unless I ate some, of course). Moreover, my kilo should be the same as the store kilo, otherwise there would be an argument about which one I am buying: in other words a repeatable measurement requires standardized units.

You may take this for granted, but it took humanity 99% of its existence to realize how important this was and to agree in 1875 on the metric system establishing the BIPM. As a consequence, should somebody wonder how much a kilo weighs, all they have to do is go to Sèvres and look at the internationally recognized platinum-iridium block which defines how much stuff there is in a kilo.

No such metric exists in marketing, with a twofold complication: the first layer is to decide what we MUST measure but the second is what we CAN measure.

In our case, the MUST part is easy: I sell widgets at a certain rate; I then deploy a marketing action and measure again the rate: if it changes, the difference is due to the marketing action and I can then calculate a meaningful ROI.

Unfortunately, in real life many things happen at the same time, and any marketing action is a complex entity made up of many subparts: for example an advertising campaign is a function of the visual, but also of the media plan or its frequency; establishing a clear cause-and-effect relationship is not easy.

Therefore we must build a model representing a detail fine enough to give me confidence such a cause-and-effect relationship can be established, making measurement effective.

A model for Dynamic Efficiency

The model I will use is the one I described in a previous post, and which we have used many times over with good results, also in projects which are not in B2B, but where the sell cycle is long enough to allow us to distinguish between the stages of the purchasing decision maturation.

Experience shows that the sell cycle moves through three different maturation stages:

The overall efficiency of the process depends on the individual conversion efficiencies of each stage: the faster a user moves from A to B to C, the faster s/he approaches the purchase; unfortunately, while measuring populations at each stage is not difficult, measuring directly flows requires advanced analytics involving in most cases individual tracking (cookies).

This problem, however, is not dissimilar to the problem of those who analyze electoral results: I know exactly how many people voted for party X, but don’t know how many of these did vote for the same party last time around.

This problem has been analyzed and the solution proposed by L.A.Goodman in the 50′s (Ecological Inference) has now been in use for over fifty years (probably more than any marketing metric), a track record ong anough to give us some confidence about its accuracy.

Essentially, the problem consists in the evaluation of a Multivariate Linear Regression (sounds a mouthful, but it’s a single Excel function) on a given month’ stage population, giving us a table of coefficients who tell us where the people we had in stage A in January went to in February.

If we take the coefficients in the diagonal of each matrix, these represent exactly how well we are moving people from one stage to the next, and can therefore relate the behaviours of these granular efficiencies to specific actions we performed.

There are many other things that we can infer from the analysis of these tables (for example, how many people go straight to the last stage? How many people are moving backwards ?) allowing us an even better understanding of the dynamics in the population for our Social Media system, but the attractiveness of Dynamic Efficiency for me lies in how a simple measurement conveys a great deal of information we can act upon.

My slide rule is happy.

Descriptively it is a manufactured item made of paper, ink, string and perhaps some leather which contains information, i.e. a representation of reality (or fantasy) as perceived or told by the author.

In this age in which the concept of the “book” is being redefined, the physical, manufactured side is perhaps losing importance, in favor of the meta-item representing something; technology is making it possible to consume the information in ways much richer than the simple linearly sequential nature associated with the manufactured item, enabling the “reader” (but is this word still appropriate?) to build connections and therefore enrich the information at each successive consumption.

All this was prompted by a conversation with my friend Giulia Zorzi, who’s a photography expert and critic, as well as owner of the MiCamera Bookstore; her concept of books is tightly linked with images and she’s had this ambitious idea to narrate the history of Italy from 1945 to the present as depicted in a series of photography books divided into 6 categories: Society, Landscape, Urban Dwellings, Industry, Social Uprisings and Culture.

Giulia involved the Museum of Contemporary Photography and its 15,000-title-library, located in an ancient villa in the outskirts of Milan. Together, they have selected over 200 books that not only describe our post-war history, but  present a path though the evolution of book design and photography.

Combining the past with the present, the project foresees an integrated use of  electronic reader devices (i.e. Amazon’s Kindle) to allow visitors to peruse all of the books in the exhibition and whose first venue will be at the Museum, as well as realizing an e-book version of the publication. At the same time, a copy of each selected book would be acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Photography (if not already in its possession), making them physically available to the public.

As its often the case with Giulia, the idea is so ambitious and innovative that I am sure they will manage to convince a sponsor. I  find the idea of “a book of books of images” fascinating, a sort of third level meta-storytelling  which could greatly profit from a non-linear, non-sequential consumption style coupled with the more traditional one.

This blog post is the most I can do to promote this bold idea – who knows, one of its readers may be captivated as I was, in which case I’d be happy to put such a munificent party in contact with her – not before I appropriate all the merit, though !

The most profitable companies in the Dow30. ’nuff said !!!

New Scientist reports about an ongoing project at IBM’s Zurich labs where scientists are testing a prototype of a Lithium-Air battery that shows an energy density level similar to that of gasoline, making electric a viable alternative to internal combustion engines.

It turns out we MAY be buying cars like they were computers, after all…

This means we could potentially have 100TB iPods. Think how many Lady Gaga songs this is….

SoMe junkie as I am, I am pretty sure FB will stay out of my car for the foreseeable sure, and for two good reasons:

1. I do need more distractions and certainly I do not need any visual ones; if I absolutely need to check my FB page, I will use a tablet
2. I do not trust ANY car manufacturer to implement anything related to computers. Last time I did, I bought a Solid State Memory option which I thought was a USB port and instead it turned out to be a PCMCIA slot. In 2010!!

Remember the old but hilarious “If we bought cars like computers” thingy? Perhaps it is time someone wrote “If we bought computers like cars”…

Not surprising given only about 3% of India is on FB, but my question is what this does to the very concept of a Facebook “audience”; one billion people is A LOT of people and FB membership may soon become a proxy for “access to a computer”, but not much more.

Audiences of this size do splinter in a myriad subgroups who exhibit similar characteristics and therefore we must begin to look at measurable dimensions that allow us to slce and dice the nine zeros into more manageable chunks where we can find a common trait to pit our relevance offering against.

Marketeers (and their Brands) are more than ever faced with the Challenge of Relevance, and the ubiquity of Facebook membership has made matter worse because it’s compounded with the fact it is much more difficult to find relevant stuff on FB than it is on the Internets – in fact, FB would like us to stick to the simple “it’s in your stream” heuristics, but I do not think users will play ball for long, also given the fact some of us weren’t particularly selective when it came to FB friends and the resulting stream’ quality has (ample) room for improvement.