The Grove Thoughts from and for The Grove Worldwide Network

Doug McKechnie, a media producer associate of The Grove, found this original drawing of the internet on Day One. It was December 5, 1969 when the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at U.C.L.A., the Stanford Research Institute, U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

A more recent image is The Grove’s Evolution of the Internet, shown below. We created this for Coopers & Lybrand’s telecoms group in 1995 as a give-away to their clients. One of our forecaster colleagues, Paul Saffo, is fond of siting this story as an example of things taking 30 years to be overnight successes. It’s inspiring for The Grove’s work to realize that was the graphic user interface provided by Mosaic that seemed to be the enabling technology that finally resulted in the hockey stick growth we all experienced in 1993.

Bob Horn, our visual scout from MacroMedia, sent us a link to this county-by-county view of unemployement. You can actually see some interesting areas of low unemployment–like North Carolina, New Orleans, parts of Texas, the break basket, etc. I would bet somewhere there is an even more fine grained view that would show disparities within counties. Click here to see the map animated from 2007-2009. Unemployment by County.

I met up with Bryce Pearsall in Vancouver BC for the annual Dean’s Forum of the Large Firm Roundtable where I facilitate 15 Large firm partners talking with 15 deans of architectural schools each year. Bryce is Chair this year, and a long-term Grove client with his own architecture/ engineering firm DLR Group (The post before this about DLRU is about his firm). In the context of talking about the economy and the rough time A&E firms are having, he forwarded me a link to a very compelling graphic treatment of job gains and losses in the US over the last 4 years. Click through the whole presentation from the beginning and see the monthly stats change in graphic form. It’s a smart use of graphic language and a pretty shocking picture of what has happened since mid 2008. Click “The Geography of Jobs” to see the map.

Geography of Jobs Map