It’s week 153, a triangular number of some esteem. 153 also shares the name of a large main belt asteroid, 153 Hilda and a comet discovered in 02002 called 153P/Ikeya-Zhang.

This week we started to migrate to our new office space which is currently in complete disarray. We’re repainting all the surfaces and rewiring the electrics. The building was built in 1937, by the Architect Gunnlaugur Halldorsson and probably hasn’t seem many electrical changes since then. The fiber-optic connection for internet and terrestrial television has also been ordered and will be installed soon. The next step was to formally changed our address with all the government services and banks. Over the next few weeks we’ll move the furniture, desks and the library. What should be a simple task is taking longer and more time than expected. Which is partly why we’ve been a bit quiet around here lately.

On Feb 7th, we’ll be giving a short presentation about the Internet of Things for UTMessan here in Reykjavik, Iceland. It should be interesting to go over some of the ideas and companies doing great things in this space. Especially after it turns out this week that Nest, the makes of the internet connected thermostat and smoke detector were bought by Google for $3.4 Billion USD. That’s an amazing price tag for a 4 year old company! Hopefully Google won’t just shut it down and all the users of their Internet of Things have their devices go dark.

This week we finally launched our Kindergarten parent survey test. 240+ emails sent out to parents asking them to take our survey, which was swiftly followed-up with 180+ SMS messages to those who still haven’t competed. At present we have a response rate of 34%. There are two more emails to go out as further reminders next week, then the participating schools make some one-on-one phone calls to get their response rate up to an acceptable 80% before we turn over any data. This is just a pre-test so we’ll analyze the data, make any changes by the way of adding or dropping questions or response options then offer this to all the kindergartens in Iceland in March. There is a betting pool at the office to see how many sign-ups we get – we’ll keep you posted.

We also have been busy on a few more internal projects. Recently we’ve spent some time improving Tindfell’s visualization and reporting. This has made it more useful for us to see the progress. Virkisfell has also been rekindled. We had a pitch meeting last Thursday night to get some feedback and development commitment from a few interested parties. It went well and we’re planning the next round of meetings to better understand the requirements and how the software can help.

There have also been a spate of conference invitations as well. In the near future we’ll be able to announce a few more cities where we’ll be visiting this year. If you are around or attending these conferences, we’d love to meet-up.

Bric-à-brac

Companies want more and more metrics on their advertising spending. Companies and videos like this show how it is possible to track the number or people, vehicles (and if they are speeding) and foot traffic inside the building. Metrics like this will become the norm for product placement. Instead of “potential reach” or “distribution size” it is possible to know the foot-fall or traffic which travels at a speed where an advertisement of a certain dimension can be read.

CSIS Global Data Chandelier

Functional and a beautiful data visualization, this chandler is an excellent example of what is possible beyond the screen.