What's New - 7 September 2017
Athena’s 4th Birthday gifts to you
Contexts, Dimensions, Alternatives: We are pleased to extend our forecasting service to offer the contexts, dimensions and alternative futures surrounding your interest topics. You can now quickly find the best links to:
Context: Importance, History, Condition, Archetypes, Worldviews, Assumptions, Players, Jobs, Patents
Dimensions: Size, Data, Bibliometrics, Infographics, Benchmarks, Polls
Alternatives: Controversies, Countertrends, Risks and opportunities, Writings, Scenarios, Pros & cons, Ethics, Approaches, Policies
from a single keyword search to deepen and complete your futures research extraordinarily quickly.
In a similar vein, you can now click the ‘Topic’ or ‘PESTLE’ criteria in a Snapshot to open ‘Context’, ‘Dimensions’ and ‘Alternatives’ too.
Simplification: to accommodate these additional capabilities we have:
- subsumed ADD Sources into FORECASTS and moved the ‘Sources Log’ back into your profile.
- You can still search Sources and obtain your list of added Sources from the ‘Sources Log’.
- Eliminated the very old Web Search pop up button in favour of the far better, focused ‘Contexts’, ‘Dimensions’ and ‘Alternatives’ capabilities.
- Dropped the ‘Contributors’ button as the robot is now doing 99% of the scanning work.
Questions: We are now using the automatically extracted questions gleaned by Athena to present links to potential ‘Ideas’, solutions and answers to these questions that may help you make better decisions today.
Athena is now beginning to offer knowledge on what could be done by finding answers to extracted questions as our DIKW shows below.
More improvements to come here.
Self-learning: Athena now learns from your searches above and extracts more related forecasts on a weekly basis, behind the scenes.
Forecasts: we now offer new automatically generated, forecast reports on the future of ‘Occupations’ by key sector.
Challenges: clients can now set up forward Competitive Intelligence and Benchmarking reports on their rivals and best practice organisations.
We have also developed a new list of automatically strategic ‘management questions’ to challenge your thinking on current developments.
Duplicates: we have now developed an algorithm to identify near duplicates (about 0.8% of the current forecasts). The database has already been cleaned of 2,500 near duplicates in the past few days and the algorithm will now become part of the ongoing daily process. Please note that this algorithm does not remove related forecasts or those written with no currently identifiable similarities.
Metrics (beta): A new Metrics visualization showing expected tipping points in the form of Pie Charts now helps you get an at-a-glance perspective on your interest topics likelihood, relevance and impact.
NB: We have yet to find a technical way to properly name the Relevance scale above. A ‘7’ represents very high relevance and therefore a well-articulated, numerically defined forecast. A ’2’ represents a very low relevance akin to a weak signal that contains no data: just an early stage idea or thought. More work to do here.
Chatbot: We have upgraded Athena’s flash messages to help you work more effectively and efficiently and for us to learn what you need next. Please use this to help you and others become more effective and efficient. We welcome your feedback.
Happy futuring
The Shaping Tomorrow team.