Description: IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen — What makes a good manager?
Source: NYTimes.com
Date: March 12, 2011
They wanted to build better bosses.
So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out: Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
What attributes does a good manager have?
Do you feel that using data mining techniques is a legitimate method of doing management behavioural studies?
Description: GOVERNMENTS have learned a cheap new way to improve people’s lives. Here is the basic recipe:
Source: NYTimes.com
Date: March 12, 2011
Take data that you and I have already paid a government agency to collect, and post it online in a way that computer programmers can easily use. Then wait a few months. Voilà! The private sector gets busy, creating Web sites and smartphone apps that reformat the information in ways that are helpful to consumers, workers and companies.
Not surprisingly, San Francisco, with its proximity to Silicon Valley, has been a pioneer in these efforts. For some years, Bay Area transit systems had been tracking the locations of their trains and buses via onboard GPS. Then someone got the bright idea to post that information in real time. Thus the delightful app Routesy was born. Install it on a smartphone and the app can tell you that your bus is stuck in traffic and will be 10 minutes late — or it can help you realize that you are standing on the wrong street, dummy. It gives consumers a great new way to find out when and where the bus is coming, and all at minimal government expense. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
What attributes can make data valuable?
Is information that goverments collect free? Should it be free to all other users of the data? Why or Why not?
Description: There is now an enormous multibillion-dollar industry based on the collection and sale of this personal and behavioral data.
Source: Time.com
Date: March 10, 2011
Google’s Ads Preferences believes I’m a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn’t care about “books & literature” or “people & society.” (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes and beauty products; it also thinks I live in New York, even though I moved to Los Angeles more than six years ago. Alliance Data, an enormous data-marketing firm in Texas, knows that I’m a 39-year-old college-educated Jewish male who takes in at least $125,000 a year, makes most of his purchases online and spends an average of only $25 per item. Specifically, it knows that on Jan. 24, 2004, I spent $46 on “low-ticket gifts and merchandise” and that on Oct. 10, 2010, I spent $180 on intimate apparel. It knows about more than 100 purchases in between. Alliance also knows I owe $854,000 on a house built in 1939 that — get this — it thinks has stucco walls. They’re mostly wood siding with a little stucco on the bottom! Idiots. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
Why is there such little outcry for loss of control of our personal information in this digital age?
Should this personal data mining be reined in by government policy?
Description: An older type of social network, and it’s being used to help detect fraud. It is the connections between people in the physical world.
Source: Globe&Mail.com
Date: March 8, 2011
Banks, telecoms providers and insurance companies, among other businesses, are using analytic software to correlate all of their various data sources to produce visualizations of relationships between customers and customer activity so that they can identify suspicious behaviour. And they are seeing incredible results, says Dan McKenzie, fraud solutions specialist at SAS Canada. Financial organizations are finding 20 to 50 times more fraudulent activity than they did without the tools, says Mr. McKenzie, because a computer can quickly analyze much more data than a human investigator and flag suspected mischief.
For example, fraudsters will take out a credit card, run up bills on it (they can get up to 150 per cent of the stated credit limit), then disappear without paying it off. They do this repeatedly under different names and rake in substantial sums of money, with the card issuer none the wiser. But using link analysis, fraud hunters can identify links between these apparently different people, determine they are actually one person and build a map of the fraudulent activity that helps investigators spot the culprit when they apply for a new card. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
How can Social networks help businesses detect fraud?
Are there any downsides with using these tools to detect fraud in terms of giving up public privacy?
Description: Canucks spend more time online than anyone else on Earth, according to new data from Web research firm comScore. And it’s not even by a small margin – the average Canadian spends 43.5 hours a month on the Web, almost twice the worldwide average of 23.1 hours.
Source: Globe&Mail.com
Date: March 8, 2011
According to the comScore report, the number of unique online visitors in Canada hovered at about 23 million users in the fourth quarter of 2010, almost unchanged from the same period a year earlier, and less than a 10th of the number of Web users in China. Of 11 countries surveyed, Canada ranks first in the number of website visits per user per month, at 95.2, and second only to South Korea in number of pages viewed, at 3,349. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
Why do you feel that Canadians use more Internet that other countries?
Are there any downsides to Canada as a result of Canadians using the Internet more than others?
Description: The iPad 2, unveiled on Wednesday, offers several sleek improvements over its predecessor. But its most attractive feature is perhaps the same one its predecessor had: the price tag
Source: Globeandmail.com
Date: March 7, 2011
“There have been nearly a hundred competitive tablets that have been introduced since the iPad,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “But it seems that no one has eclipsed or even matched Apple on pricing.” Analysts and industry experts point to a number of reasons. Primarily, they say, Apple’s deep pockets – a staggering $60-billion in cash reserves – have allowed it to form strategic partnerships with other companies to buy large supplies of components, for example, inexpensive flash memory. By doing this, the company probably secures a lower price from suppliers, ensuring a lower manufacturing cost. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
What are Ipad’s competive advantages over its competitors?
What are the sources of those competititive advanatages?
If you were a competitor, how would you compete against the ipad?
Description: MOBI is part of an emerging technology that can tell a company almost instantaneously how people are feeling about a particular business, executive, product, stock, or advertising campaign
Source: Businessweek.com
Date: March 1, 2011
Automated sentiment analysis is an emerging field that overlaps with many others such as business intelligence, customer service, and brand reputation management, and the market is hard to measure. Many types of sentiment software use a technology known as text analytics, which extracts insight from text, such as in social media, news articles, or internal documents and databases. The market for text analytics alone may rise to $978 million in 2014 from $499 million in 2011, according to an October 2009 report by Forrester Research (FORR).
The technology makes it possible for nearly anyone to analyze consumer feelings without having any inside knowledge of the company. For example, WiseWindow looks at certain industries such as the airline industry. The company has been able to determine that a new Southwest Airlines (LUV) ad campaign that touts a frequent-flier program isn’t as popular as a previous one, says WiseWindow Chief Executive Officer Sid Mohasseb. The previous “Bags Fly Free” campaign emphasized that, unlike rivals, Southwest doesn’t charge for checked baggage. “They’re losing market share of opinion,” he says. Mohasseb declined to say which airlines, if any, are his clients. Southwest declined to comment. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
What is “sentiment analysis” and how can a business benfit by using it?
Are there any downsides to using this form of Business Intelligence?
Description: The publishing industry has not been having fun in the last few years. Newspapers, magazines and books were hurt by competition from the Internet and the changes caused by consumers choosing digital content rather than traditional ink on paper.
Source: Globe&Mail.com
Date: Feb 25, 2011
Will Apple or Google (or someone else) end up “winning the subscription war?” I don’t have a clue, and I don’t think it actually matters to publishers … they will probably end up having to deal with both.
I am very sure that for publishers to talk about their business model and how it is threatened by these new deals is the wrong way to go. Readers don’t understand how the business model is changing. And even if they did, they wouldn’t care. They want to read great content, and they want to do so in the easiest way possible.
The publishing industry has had to deal with distributors before – some of whom took a more than 30 per cent cut. If buying becomes very easy, then we can expect sales of books, newspapers and magazines to rise, not fall. Read rest of story
Questions for discussion:
Explain what you see as the new business model for publishers?
Do you feel that this industry can change from a downward trend into a growing industry?
What are the biggest challenges in implementing and adopting this new business model in the publishing industry?
