Visualization for Business People

Google SketchUp

2008-12-18T08:59:00.001+09:00

Google has everything. And I think Google would have hard time to develop new product portfolio. Their first product Google search engine was categorized to "Destructive Innovation"- brutally easy.

So their 3D program follows the policy. East and intuitive. However it takes time to get certain level because you need to get used to their rules. It uses push and pull approach to form shapes. I am not sure how many people are working in 3D industry - from star artists of Pixer to CAD operator in Japan - but I am afraid this would be a switching barrier.

After struggled 1 hour, I gave up and forced to learn in Google's website. An amateur instructor (by the way, it is one of Google ways) was screaming and claimed "it was a easy product" several times.

I know, at least for you right?

Then those are my first pieces. (To be honest I used Bryce - it is free too) for background. Also you can match up with photos.

Actually, you do not have to build everything by yourself. You can find your favorite furniture in Google's gallery like this. You can match up with your a CAD file.

Also you can output sketchy picture to add some scent to your presentation. What you have to do is to find your favorite items.

The best part is not yet. It is Free of Charge as long as you stick with free version.

As you may know the latest version of Photoshop CS4 Extended can handle SketchUp files.

Social Graph Visualization

2008-12-16T09:41:00.000+09:00

Your website is connected with many other web sites. With Google Social Graph API vieweryou can find out how your web site is connected. Also you can visualize this connection. I used PHP + SVG to draw the graph.

However there is a big problem - browser compatibility. Firefox2.0.0, Safari 1.3.2 and Opera 8.15 could not display embedded SVG. Firefox 3, Opera 3 are fine with it. Opera 9 needed viewer software.

Also you can bring this format to Adobe Illustrator to edit.

This can be used to find out people. For example you can go to Linkedin and find out people and connection to find out who is the center of influence.

Decision Tree

2008-12-09T21:36:00.004+09:00

Developing a decision tree is not that easy. I thought R might have function to develop a decision tree. However, I could not find that. Then I googled (as usual) and found Weka.

OK, I found data online and draw a tree like this and now what?

In MBA program you use Excel to develop a decision tree. Weka is much far better with a beautiful visualization. But Weka can't save the image file. So I need to design a program with this.

A decision tree is useful for web designers. If you know a campaign A is much better developing potential customer than campaign B, you can optimize budget allocation for campaign.

So it is useful only if you know how to apply this decision tree to an application.

Grouping Items

2008-12-09T21:14:00.006+09:00

The second move was little bit challenging to me. First of all, I needed to learn how to group things. According to 集合知プログラミング (Programming Collective Intelligence) you may use K-means.

Then I googled for k-means and struggled. What I learned was Europe is divided to 2 sub-sets and Japan is a part of the second one (in the middle of the chart) while other East Asian countries belong to a different cluster.

So it might not be a good idea to form "Asia/ Pacific" devision because management style can be different.

Similar analysis might be useful to design localization policy. When distance is far from your form country you may need to consider re-developing your product for your host country.

/// break into cluster
result <- kmeans(pdi_idv,5)

/// Creat a new dataset dataset_pdi_idv<-data.frame(cluster=result$cluster,PDV=pdi_idv[,1],IDV=pdi_idv[,2])

/// Plot a graph plot(subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 1)[,2],subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 1)[,3], main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="red")

par (new=T) plot(subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 2)[,2],subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 2)[,3], main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="blue")

par (new=T) plot(subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 3)[,2],subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 3)[,3], main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="purple")

par (new=T) plot(subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 4)[,2],subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 4)[,3], main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="green")

par (new=T) plot(subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 5)[,2],subset(dataset_pdi_idv, cluster == 5)[,3], main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="black")

R

2008-12-07T22:56:00.001+09:00

With "R" (GNU R) I took two hours to reach this chart. You need to learn programming but it is very easy and straight forward.

plot(hof1$PDI,hof1$IDV,main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="red")

par (new=T)

plot(hof8$PDI,hof8$IDV,main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="blue")

par (new=T)

plot(hof7$PDI,hof7$IDV,main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="green")

par (new=T)

plot(hof5$PDI,hof5$IDV,main="PDI/IDV",xlim=c(0,100),ylim=c(0,100),col="purple")

This is famous Hofstede's indexes. Power Distance Index and Individual Index are plotted. You can easily find out Japan is in unique place (between Asia and Europe). Japan and Spain are similar.

I plotted the chat on R and used Photoshop for final touch.

This is not 3D but still useful.

You can download R here.

Simulation

2008-11-26T19:22:00.003+09:00

I just learned how to cycle objects... So I wanted to simulate how planets move. You can observe how Venus and Mercury retrograde and Mars stays.

The Earth takes 365.25 days for one cycle. Mercury's cycle is 87 days and one of Venus is 224.70 days. A year of Mars is 687 years. The moon's cycle is 27 days.

In this movie the moon cycles every 2 seconds. Therefore one year is 27 seconds. Time flies fast!

Disruptive Innovation

2008-11-25T17:16:00.002+09:00

Christensen's disruptive innovation.

Wooden one is for low cost solution and a green cube is for a new market.

I like animation can express dynamism.

But need more refinement for sophistication...

QuickTime VR Presentation

2008-11-25T10:34:00.001+09:00

There are many problems. First of all, it does not make easy to grab whole image with this file format. Blogger converts a quicktime movie and does not recognize a QTVR file for some reasons.

I needed to edit HTML file and host this QTVR file to another site.

I just wanted to show you what you can do with 3D format while I feel it is less useful.

Movement

2008-11-25T09:39:00.006+09:00

QuickTime Presentation

2008-11-25T08:58:00.002+09:00

Sometimes it is easier to use animation to show concept or mechanism.

2D chart is ...

2008-11-23T11:29:00.005+09:00

2D chart is just a 2D chart. I thought it would be impressive to make it 3 dimensional. But it might not be so good idea to do so. It made it more difficult to read the chart.

Adding too much information is no good.

By the way this is penetration rate of mobile phone, the internet connection and PC. PC hasn't been not so popular because it doesn't have a clear purpose. Also a mobile phone set was free of charge for a long time (from 1995 until recently).

Showing concept - Disruptive innovation.

2008-11-23T09:24:00.001+09:00

Disruptive innovation is Christensen's famous concept. It it a good concept but described with 2D charts. Especially, new market is 2D move. You understand better with 3D chart.

Also sophisticated concept has beautiful shape because it is simple to understand.

1. Every entrepreneur wants to survive and wants to put all effort at any cost.

2. As Ansoff explained to you, every company need to grow to survive. In 60's it sounded like a good idea and it is still valid - basically. Effort is called "innovation". Continuous innovation is very important.

However, Clayton Christensen found some companies have been defeated with small people.

3. In the sphere, you are the king because higher share promise you higher profit according to Porter.

Ultimately innovation reach to the end. Those end up with "too much" innovation. It is called "overshooting". Also organizations do not want to pay extra attention to new innovation because existing market and customers are very conformable to deal with.

So it seems to be there is invisible sphere.

4. One innovation is underneath your sphere and therefore you can't see. This is a low cost solution. Personal photocopy machine was not good enough compare with photocopy in a copy shop but still attractive for small businesses.

5. Another is of your side. It is called a new market. Telephone was not an alternative solution for telegraph. It was used for internal communication but eventually altered telegraph.

6. Christensen called those "disruptive innovation". Those are away from existing market and it is a key to survive. On the other hand, existing companies need to analyze their invisible spheres.

In your room simulation...

2008-11-23T08:53:00.000+09:00

It is possible to use a real picture of your room. It took little effort to fit angle of the picture. Also Bryce and Photoshop is not suit to define exact scale.

But I think it is a good idea to use this technique for your product. For example your product might not fit into a typical Japanese small room. I found there is no room for a bed...

You can share your idea with others with this small picture.

Color Coordination

2008-11-23T08:48:00.000+09:00

Easy color coordination sample. It is not a good idea to paint a real studio especially in try and error phase.

Imaginary Studio

2008-11-22T12:09:00.002+09:00

Just for fun. It take two hours to develop parts but took one hour or more to render for some reasons. Might be useful to have a virtual studio for presentation because rental studio is expensive.

3 simple steps to generate idea.

2008-11-22T10:49:00.000+09:00

According to books, it is easy to develop good ideas. Do you agree with it?

So what is "fog" anyway? For some people it is failure. For some it is about experience. Some painters visit museums while some don't.

There is no regular formula to generate idea.

However, you have 5 tools to get idea. The first one is to develop your idea with vision. Mozart just copied tune in his mind to score! Some people can do like this.

Some other people rely on observation. Ask people or observe what your potential customers are doing.

The third one is transfer rule applied in one field to another place.

Also you may learn from failure. In other word, you "need" to make mistake. If you can make mistake efficiently, you have better chance to win though creativity itself can't be managed.

The last one it to simplify the rule. Recommendation it to learn from history.

Simple Product Design

2008-11-22T10:09:00.003+09:00

What would you do when you need a simple product design for your presentation? It is very easy to generate one. Whole process is less than one hour only if you have equipments. Are those expensive?

What you need is as follows;

Personal Computer - I use two computers. Macintosh PowerPC G4/ OS 9.2.1 and PowerBook G4/ OS 10.5.5.
3D software - I used Strata Studio Pro Blitz. [this is very old software]
Landscape Generator - Bryce 5.5 is free to download.
Image manipulator - Photoshop and Illustrator.
Your idea.

It allow you to have more time for try and error. Also you can have chance to ask to your target consumers.

First step is to generate a label. Your idea is very important here while design itself is very simple and straight forward. Prepare some ideas in this stage.

You need it for a cap and top of a tube. If you just want to add a label to your product, you may skip this section.

Strata Studio Pro Blitz 1.75 is old software work under classic Mac OS. Observe a real tube. You will soon find out two simple shape consist the tube. It takes 2 minutes to generate the shape. I added a simple table.

Strata Studio 1.75 is good software but can not export to standard formats. So I rendered here with alpha channel. If you do not need background to focus on the product, the process is done. You can use the image for your presentation.

I was bit surprised because Bryce 5.5 is now free. Unless you want to be a professional free version is just fine. It is easy to create a scene. Put elements and render.

Compose images with Photoshop and the presentation is done. The whole process took less than 1 hour.