Another new Software as a Service (SaaS) idea that might work for some of our business customers is Avatars.

Avatars are a digital representation of people. You find them all over the internet these days, in virtual worlds and increasingly in commercial use for customer support.

A more recent innovation however is the use of these Avatars to sell your products. In pre-sales not post-sales, as it is a very different area because people are less tolerant of poor quality voice or images.

We set one up recently to welcome new visitors to saasu. If you have any feedback let us know. It’s easy to get one for your own site.

The downside of course is that they appear less ‘real’, you can’t replace people. The upside is substantial in some industries. You can do many things that you can’t do with professional talent. For example support multiple languages and cultures within the same language with one ‘actor’, even try different text to test effectiveness. An area that we are sure will catch on.

The good providers even allow you to use their talent library of people from around the world as well as text to speech or even load your own sound file in WAV format or phone in if you don’t have a microphone use the telephone and pin number to record it.

This will be an interesting area to watch as the ability to tailor appearance such as hair type, eyes, skin tone and clothing merges with other technologies such as the hologram the Prince of Wales used recently to attend an overseas conference and present.

Prince Charles was criticised for his huge air travel carbon footprint recently so he solved it with a video recording that was converted to a hologram. It is only a matter of time before the 3d avatar meets the holgram and allows his to acheive the same result with a simple email. Perhaps with simple markups to recognise emotion.

Y-gen and late X-gen are most likely to be the demographics who will readily accept them. After all they look distictly like the characters you see running around in Second Life and the The Sims.

• Why did it take so long for Captain Cook in his ship ‘The Endeavour; so long to find the world’s best harbour in Sydney?
• Why are yachts always ladies?
• Why don’t we do this more often ?
• Why is it so hot?
• How does animoto let you make such great videos in under 10 minutes? Why don’t we use it more often? Why doesn’t every small business use it on their website when it is sooo easy?

The thing I love about the net is unfortunately the thing I also dislike about it. You can meet people online from all around the world but at the same time you don’t often get to meet them face to face without great expense. Last week was different when I travelled to Perth, I met some great customers, giving me a chance to put faces to weblogs and avatars.

Number 1 tip – visit customers that you’d be happy to be friends with.

This really makes the whole thing very enjoyable. It drives you to do it again. I met some great people who reminded why Perth is such a great place (I grew up there). Had a dinner catch-up at the Two Fat Indians with the Mad Pilot, aka Myles Eftos and his gorgeous Italian descent girlfriend Giovanna (Myles act fast or someone will steal her from you). Myles has a cool time tracking app called 88miles built with Ruby
Also present from Millstream and equally as beautifully designed people were Rosemary and Adrian Lynch. Millstream has an awesome CMS called Spring which I got a chance to quickly check out. Looks a lot cleaner and far more image management friendly than WordPress, Blogger etc. It has the ability to manage image shadows and fades better than any CMS I have seen. (I’ve tried and used many a CMS).

Between this group of people they are a large part of Port80 and the Australian Web Industry Association. All of whom use Saasu!

More Top Tips To Leverage Your Travel

• Piggy Back – If you have one big reason to travel then use the opportunity to pile on a bunch of other value adds.
• Jam it in – Book up your time but leave some personal time to keep the whole experience enjoyable so you’ll want to do it again.
• Meet customers you like – Time, money and physical effort is being expended. Travel is hard work, see people you like, you’re out laying a lot to do it.
• Watch your travel footprint – I try and catch trams, buses, ferries, whenever I can. You get a better feel for the people and the place than you would from a cab whose driver will just chew your ear off. You can also lower your carbon footprint. The plane trip alone used up all your Carbon budget!
• Learn about your product – Do an in person Q&A of customers you catch up with. Learn what they think of your product, understand their needs and business better and ask them what they would like to see in your product or service offering.
• Break habits – When you go away you break your normal flow. This is actually a very good time to break habits. On my last trip my aim was to stop checking what was on TV that night as the first thing I do when I get home (after saying hello to everyone obviously).
• Follow Up – book all your new prospects into Saasu, thank everyone for their time and progress leads. Most good business trips are killed off by the failure to follow up.

So the next time you’re preparing a presentation, stop and ask yourself; what message am I sending my viewers when I use a pie chart? Ultimately, the one thing you can be certain of is that it won’t be a clear one.

Check out his post for a really clear example of why they’re problematic.

Garr Reynolds looks at some alternative ways to present data, including a brief discussion on the pros and cons of pie charts, when reviewing a presentation by Whole Foods Market’s CEO, John Mackey.

While we’re on the topic of data visualisation (incl. charting), I’ve come across a few related links recently:

• Tufte charts in Excel
• Excel “in cell” graphing – a clever method of visualising data on a cell-by-cell basis (check out the screenshots in the article to see what I’m trying to say…)

And lastly – Seth Godin has had a thing about bad PowerPoint for a while. Now he has found some research to back it up.

Update: Oh – I forgot this one: Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods.

The 5 (read Kathy’s post for the full details):

• Do NOT start at the beginning!
• Show, Don’t Tell
• For the love of god, DO NOT start with history!
• DO NOT start with prereqs
• MYTH: you must establish credibility up front