Miguel Gomez Winebrenner, Vice President at Added Value Cheskin, is scheduled to speak at the Hispanic Retail 360 Summit on Thursday, August 16, 2012.

Read more…

We have seen computing interfaces come a long way since Xerox Parc invented the mouse some 40 years ago. The mouse and keyboard, along with the desktop metaphor, have long been standard fare for computing. It’s hard to believe that functional voice recognition has been around since the 80’s, given that it still seems in its infancy – good for basic information, yet nowhere near ready for a conversation. Touch screens are proliferating, on devices as small as a wrist watch and as large as a Surface table. And most recently gesture computing has arrived, with the Xbox Kinect selling over 8 million units so far and EyeSight recently releasing its gesture UI for Android tablets. 

Looking at these interfaces on an adoption curve, I can’t help but speculate where it’s all heading.

Read more…

Roberto Suro has a long and storied career as a journalist (Time Magazine, Washington Post), author and founder of the Pew Hispanic Center.  We sought his studied perspective on ethnic identity and its role in U.S. society…

Commentary on the Cheskin Added Value/The Futures Company Study of Cultural Openness

by Roberto Suro
Professor of Journalism and Public Policy, Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, University of Southern California

Read more…

In early 2010, Facebook passed Google in website traffic.   This is astonishing because Google has been the greatest growth story of all time.  How could this be?  What is fundamentally driving this behavior?  And what are the implications moving forward?

Read more…

“Why hasn’t America moved beyond the old, stultifying debate on race in the age of Obama?” asks this weekend’s New York Times.

Every time an issue related to race relations in the United States hits the news, we are inundated with references to the presumed ideal that President Obama purportedly represents – the Post Racial Society. Articles and news pundits fill the airwaves lamenting the shortfall of this generally undefined state of being. This has been happening increasingly since the day Obama was elected (literally, go back and check the editorial sections of major newspapers from November 7, 2008). I thought then (and said it that very day as a speaker at a conference on the multicultural media consumer), and think now, that this should stop. Here’s why:

Read more…

Ideas about what Design is, how it creates value and how it is best executed have changed dramatically over the years. True, designers have certainly become more educated, skilled and professional, but the shifting definition of Design has evolved in response to the pressing issues of the day. The current debate on “Design Thinking” is one answer to the challenges that organizations are now facing and the failure of the established conceptual frameworks and toolsets to drive their growth in a sustainable way. Clearly, businesses need help — something is missing and the Design Profession is doing its best to fill that void.

The same can be said about the practices of Business Strategy. In fact, because strategy consultants have played such an influential role on how corporate strategy is developed today, the glaring inadequacies of the practice revealed by the global recession are causing them to scramble too. We’re going through a period where both Design and Strategy Consulting are rapidly evolving. What’s most interesting is that they are not just evolving but converging.

One important theme that both Design and Strategy are championing is a shift in how organizations think about their purpose…

Read more…