The World's First Video Game Interface for News & Social Media Alerts

Always an engineer at heart, I have always been inspired by the addition of useful visual imagery as part of decision support and analysis.  In fact I started my career with Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC) as a co-op student using advanced dynamic visualization of vibrating structures as part of engineering designs.  SDRC was a leader in what we now call CAD or computer assisted design. Today, in the era of BIG DATA, it is an imperative to integrate visualizations into decisions that cannot be accomplished with text readouts alone.  News Patterns (aka Netro City Design) was founded on this vision of visualizations and decision support.

As our developments in visualizations grew, it became obvious that the CAD metaphor for news insights was insufficient.  For example, CAD solutions do not necessarily take into account the real-time and dynamic nature of changing situations found in competitive news patterns.  A metaphor more dynamic and interactive was required.  And that metaphor was the Video Game.

The logical foundation of detecting news based competitive patterns with a video game interface starts with these simple ideas:

• Faster- Our brains perceive patterns at 10,000,000 bits/second versus we read at only 200 bits/sec.

• Superior Insights- Movements can highlight important alerts and emerging trends.

• Intriguing- Videos, animations  and interactions earn attention that static displays cannot.  (Especially next generation members.)

• Winning- News Pattern network members read news to be better competitors.  Video game interface reinforces the idea of competitive advantage.

Members of News Patterns read news to win in their business, political, financial or societal security jobs.  There are always competitive forces that hinder their successes. Nevertheless, with the greater visibility of competitive patterns based on real-time news, our members can see more and react more quickly by interacting with our News Radar interfaces as they would play a video game.

 

A Collective Wisdom Lives in the Seeming Chaos of News

I had the opportunity to discuss the trends that one can discover with our News Patterns algorithms and visualizations.  I was talking with a group of sophisticated managers from the financial services industry.  It was not long before I realized that they were very skeptical that any useful patterns could be derived from the data we call news.  (News in this blog can include traditional news, message boards, blogs, RSS feeds, Google Alerts, videos, social media and Twitter.)  They were convinced that news was mostly biased and dominated by ignorant contributors, or Garbage In = Garbage Out.

In answering their skepticism, I started by referred to a 2004 book by James Surowiecki called The Wisdom of Crowds - Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies and Nations.  At the time of publication, James Surowiecki was a staff writer at the New Yorker, with other publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Wired and Slate.  I started my explanations with two references from the "Wisdom of Crowds."

• In 1884, at the International Exhibition in London, a British scientist named Francis Galton collected all the individual entries for a weight judging contest of a slaughtered and dressed ox.  Eight hundred contestants of various abilities entered the contest.  "Galton undoubtedly thought that the average guess of the group would be way off the mark.  After all, mix a very few smart people with some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems likely you'd end up with a dumb answer.  But Galton was wrong. The crowd had guessed that the ox, after it had been slaughtered and dressed would weigh 1,197 pounds."  The actual weight was 1,198 pounds, or an error or 0.08%!

• John Craven was a naval officer who was tasked to locate the U.S. submarine Scorpion that sank in the Atlantic Ocean in 1968.  Craven assembled a team of various experts who were to independently offer sinking and location scenarios without consulting with each other.  Craven compiled the individual scenarios and with some calculations, determined the "collective" location of the submarine.  This location was unique from any individual guess.  The "collective" location was 220 yards from the actual location.

The point that Surowiecki was making is that there is a collective wisdom among groups of humans, even though nobody can point to a central coordination of this wisdom.   Here is an example of the  collective wisdom of news creators from my experience at News Patterns that supports the ideas of James Surowiecki:

• In 2009, Nokia had continued its dominance of the cell phone and smart phones markets, often kissing a 40% share of handset sales.  Yet starting in the Fall of 2009, two new competitors entered the smart-phone market.  The first was Apple with its iPhone.  The second was not really a distinct competitor but a new competing operating system from Google called Android.  We at News Patterns collected and patterned hundreds of thousands of articles with special algorithms over many months.  The collective wisdom of thousands of news creators soon discovered that iPhone and Android displaced Nokia, causing Nokia to fall from a central market relevancy to a peripheral relevancy position by November of 2009.  A competitive fall from news pattern relevancy often correlates with an actual decline in market or campaign relevancy. In November of 2009, a significant divergence of stock price versus news pattern relevancy occurred.  This drop in competitive news pattern relevancy was not noticed by the stock market.  In April of 2010, Nokia announced that it was falling far short of market expectations with its smart-phones due to competition from iPhone and Android.  In a short period of time in April, Nokia's stock price dropped 52%, a move that started to realign Nokia's stock price with the competitive news pattern relevancy (or irrelevancy) of Nokia among its competitors.  The collective wisdom of thousands of news creators, as part of a mass of 200,000 plus articles over 5 months was a front-runner to the new competitive pressures on Nokia.

Of course there are no absolutes in the value of discovered news patterns.  Sometimes a news reporting community is too small.  Sometimes, it is possible to "fool all of the people some of the time."  Yet with modern collection and computation processes, it is possible for news to be a source of a greater collective wisdom, not seen by any participaing member of the collective.

See more details about the collective wisdom of news creators in this paper: Anticipating Financial Market Moves Using Long Term Patterns in the News .