Data Nerd's Corner

As the title of the session implies, Subramanian believes that the data needs to do the talking, not armies of analysts searching and querying databases. Her company has developed high-speed, advanced algorithms to automate pattern detection for rapid, real-time discovery of the “unknown unknows” in structured and unstructured data.

Understand the current implementation level: Most organizations have early forms of big data solutions in-house, and it only makes sense to get educated on their implementation and how they stack up against industry standards. This is a logical starting point of the program.

The need to ask for and act on data more quickly is due in part to heightened customer and business expectations. With ubiquitous access to data via smartphones and tablets, businesses no longer have an excuse not to make informed decisions in real time. Mobile technology also enables workers to track insights about customers, products, work orders and more from anywhere.

“Being Googley in Australia is about having fun while doing great things,” explains the promotionalvideo for Google Australia. And I’m sure you can picture the Sydney office: it is is extremely funky, boasts sleep pods (which look excitingly space-age) and offers free gourmet food (served in brightly coloured mini-beach-hut alcoves). All the employees interviewed are ridiculously enthusiastic: it’s “like a resort… but you get paid for it,” says one, whilst another eulogises you “get to do a little bit of everything… like you do in a start-up.”

According to a 2012 Google study about multi-screen usage, 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal. In other words, people may start reading an email on their phone on the train home from work, but finish reading it at home on their tablet -- or maybe they watch a commercial on TV and then turn to their laptop to research the product. Based on what we know about users' multi-screen habits, it's no wonder Google's design changes to Google+ attempt to achieve consistency across all devices. While the Google+ tablet and mobile apps had already accomplished a consistent look and feel, prior to the redesign, this same consistency had been lacking in the web platform. The Google+ redesign makes the experience across all devices much more cohesive through the following changes ...  

Is it any wonder that everyone at HubSpot loves Nate Silver, and why we’re psyched that he's doing a keynote speech at our INBOUND conference in August? Apparently we’re not alone in our Nate Silver fandom, as Fast Company just placed this 35-year-old “freelance data scientist” at the top of its 2013 “100 Most Creative People in Business” list.

Manufacturing execution system software is already a big market at $1.5 billion per year, according to Gartner. Such software has done a great job automating processes and protecting quality, but big data is helping manufacturers measure their productivity over time and determine the best settings and methods for systems in their plants. Harley-Davidson, for example, says it can be more consistent by paying attention to tiny details like fan speed, temperature and humidity in the painting room.

Read more: Big data pays attention to detail in manufacturing - FierceBigData http://www.fiercebigdata.com/story/big-data-pays-attention-detail-manufacturing/2013-05-16#ixzz2TUMHvNVA ;
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Just like the concept of content marketing itself, the idea of using “information” as an increasingly important way to compete is not new. As far back as 1959, Peter Drucker talked about the importance of “knowledge workers.” As an example of this, consider that the cost to produce an automobile is 40 percent materials and 25 percent labor. On the other hand, the cost to produce a silicon chip is about 1 percent materials, 10 percent labor, and about 70 percent information.

For most sites, the home page is the most popular landing page. That makes it valuable real estate, and it means that it deserves a little extra data collection. Home pages tend to have at least one "feature” area, and many have both primary and secondary promotional areas — promoting individual products and special offers or campaigns. There are two things to track about these features.

To James Kobielus - yes, if you have the drive and willingness to learn it can be done but make no mistakes - it is NOT the easiest field - it requires practice, practice, practice in REAL world data handling, no book can teach you everything you need to know and I personally, don't know any true Data Scientist who have the time to train for free, so yes, they can learn and if they stick with it it's a great field but I do not believe there enough HARD core data people out there to fill the GAP per sae... hope YOU are right and I'm wrong!

This is all of special relevance for marketers. As Forrester Research analyst Anthony Mullen pointed out in a blog post today, "The Future of Marketing is (Better) Context." Mullen points out that context means more than just location. It will involve sifting signals from multiple sources, understanding people as individuals, and using that information at every stage of the marketing funnel.

The top 1% of subscribers in North America account for 34.2% of upstream traffic, while for downstream traffic, the comparable 1% account for 10.4% of traffic. By contrast, the bottom half account for just 6.4% of total monthly downstream traffic.

“Science’s spirit is philosophical,” Sagan concluded. “It is the spirit of questioning, of curiosity, of critical inquiry combined with fact-checking. It is the spirit of being able to admit you’re wrong, of appealing to data, not authority.”

“Science,” as his father Carl Sagan said, “is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” By extension, we could say that data science is about a way of thinking much more than it is about big data or about being data-driven.

Here's the thing. Ad impressions are not free -- they are ads you pay for. Organic listings are free (minus headcount) -- they are based on whether the content you create is valuable enough for Google or Facebook to warrant giving your content digital face time in front of their users.

 

This approach, this mindset, is the reason this digital "experiment" isn't going so well for P&G, and 6,250 people -- most of them brand managers -- are being laid off. It's the reason they stillspend close to $10 billion a year on ads, yet simultaneously talk about the need to cut costs.

By comparison, brands answered60% of the questions posed to them by Facebook fans in Q1, according to separate data from Socialbakers, although it took them almost a full day (22.6 hours) on average to do so.

It's difficult to provide a recommendation after a very limited experience using All Access, but so far I like it. The ability to combine music I like with new music discovery, and then customize that discovery by eliminating or re-ordering tracks was a vast improvement over other services. I also liked that I could create a radio station based on a track I was enjoying.

The key items for Google's cloud platform go like this:

There are sub-hour billing increments down to one minute. Google argues that this sub-hour billing will save money on cloud bursting.Smaller instances for low workloads.Routing and networking knowhow from Google.Persistent disk storage.A Cloud Datastore service that is designed to be used for big data applications.Google's cloud is also offering premium support and engineers pledged to improve the program, which it argues is already "quite responsive," say execs

That’s the thing about Star Trek. It’s utopian. There’s no money, partly because they have ways to make food and objects materialize on a whim. There’s no financial system of any kind that I’ve noticed, although there’s plenty of barter, mostly dealing in natural resources. And the crucial resource that characters are constantly seeking, that somehow make the ships fly through space, are called dilithium crystals. They’re rare but they also seem to be lying around on uninhabited planets, at least for now.

There’s a growing technology gap: phone records, e-mail, computer forensics, and outright hacking are valuable weapons for anyone looking to identify a journalist’s source. With some exceptions, the press has done little to keep pace: our information-security efforts tend to gravitate toward the parts of our infrastructure that accept credit cards.

Twitter has bought Lucky Sort. The Portland, OR-based startup  helps users find patterns in live, large data streams like those on Twitter. The move appears aimed at bolstering the social network’s advertising revenue.

Lucky Sort released its first product, called TopicWatch, last year. It enables users to dig through social media posts, news stories and government filings to find, summarize and analyze text-based content around a particular topic—for instance, “big data.”