One of the reads I look forward to every week is Neil Perkin’s curated list of posts from across the web. And unfailingly, I get at least a couple of articles that offer me food for thought, and in general, giving me much better fare than the two kinds of automated services I am familiar with – one based on my interests, and the other based on my social connections’ shares.
A fortnight back, two related articles caught my attention – the automation of online advertising and the client side data revolution, both of which point to how user data is going to be harnessed by increasingly efficient tools built by technology companies. Data that goes beyond the cliched demographic criteria and moves towards personalised marketing that encompasses evolving factors like real-time and social.
This actually made me think of the joys of serendipitous discovery-the kind that happens when I go book shopping (in a real bookstore) and find a book that I had never heard of but am likely to cherish-and its future in a world of ubiquitous and easily manageable data.
And guess what I found in Neil Perkin’s list last week – this amazing post at HBR about AmEx’s Nextpedition – a travel service that doesn’t have an itinerary and instead is full of surprises. Towards the end of the article is a clue on how the future could create a well crafted mix of the two – to deliver randomness we will have to be on better terms with randomness. Powered by massive amounts of data, an experience that will be exactly the right measure of customised randomness.
until next time, a cliched appendage – serendipity 2.0. 🙂