The Summit International Awards (SIA) organization is dedicated to furthering excellence in the communications industry by rewarding innovation and “those pushing the bounds of the communication badlands.” Book of Odds and its strategic partner Kurani Interactive received two such awards recently, and we are justly proud of both. Both were in the Emerging Media category, which Summit describes as “an award for the pioneers of the bleeding edge means of modern communication.”

Emerging media companies such as Book of Odds break the bounds of the traditional rules of advertising design to find ways “to directly affect the lifestyle and emotions of the consumer.” Since Book of Odds deals with the odds of everyday life, it directly addresses people’s needs, concerns, fears, fascinations, and deepest interests in a simple, often highly visual format.

The Innovator Award recognizes that Book of Odds offers new-to-the-world content and forms of content which make new ways of advertising possible. Recent articles on the odds associated with the Butterball Turkey Hotline and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were picked up nationally. Visualizations of the odds of a white Christmas, winning American Idol, and the racial divide for Martin Luther King Day were similarly widely used. Good data about the things people care deeply about, with strong visuals, make for a powerful new media message.

The Visionary Award for Best Visual Functionality commended Kurani and Book of Odds on the creation of two remarkable visualizations.

One is Visual Browse, which allows the searcher to wander through a landscape of over 400,000 Odds Statements. Although the dedicated searcher will use traditional searches for keywords and probabilities, the daring explorer will discover unexpected facts and ideas by navigating Visual Browse. One blogger called it an “epiphany machine.”

The second is the visualization of the individual Odds Statement found in every Odds Statement detail page. It represents the odds with an animation showing the iconic red dot of the “1” in a larger black circle. The size and the time it takes to run give cues that can be deeply grasped as to the relative differences between probabilities. Although this visualization is completely new, Book of Odds and Kurani’s team of Alan Mazzan, Dan Kurani, and Matt Holloway think of it as an homage to the Eames brothers’ brilliant “Powers of Ten.”

We thank the judges at Summit for having singled us out as having pushed the boundaries of what people and advertisers expect to get from a website. We are not finished, though. As Summit writes, “The future focuses on this constant reinvention.” We have new visualizations in the pipeline and new ways of pushing the boundaries of service delivery to our fans, our users, and our customers.