To the individual user, Big Data might simply mean a new 3-terabyte hard drive, which can be acquired for a hundred bucks or so. But real Big Data projects require clusters of servers, vast amounts of storage, and specialized software to analyze, say, every change...
Most people know what marketing executives do every day. They try to catch people’s attention through email, ads, tweets, and press releases. As for data scientists, well, their work is not nearly as well understood. That’s been slowly changing this year as companies...
Technology advancements are making it easier for people to constantly, effortlessly and sometimes unknowingly generate massive amounts of data every second. Lurking in the sprawling data pipelines of global corporations are complex tangles of information that have the...
oday, people are faced with too many choices and too less time to navigate information on the web. Often, this leads to a counter-intuitive situation where they are not confident about the choices they make. “So, we tried to identify various methods of organising...
Is there really a data scientist shortage, or are organizations simply trying too hard to recruit a unicorn, a jack-of-all-trades who possesses both advanced technical and business acumen? If the unicorn hypothesis is true, it would explain why the scarcity of data...
Analytics India Magazine: What are some of the main tenets (philosophies, goals, attributes) of analytics approach and policies at your organization? Suresh Shankar: Crayon Data aims to simplify the world of big data. Our mission is to make data simpler, more...
Big data has got a lot of attention in the business world, but why shouldn't it be applied to other sectors as well? The ability to integrate and analyse data sets can create useful insights in all areas of life, and several startups have taken that vision and applied...
Big Data and cloud storage paired with the processing capabilities of Apache Hadoop and Hive as a service can be an excellent complement to expensive data warehouses. The ever-increasing storage demands of big data applications put pressure on in-house storage...
The McAfee piece to which he is referring is a Harvard Business Review piece entitled: Big Data’s Biggest Challenge? Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment. Patel’s post and the ensuing debate has brought my background in accounting into fresh focus while...
“The Rise of the Choice Engines will Simplify Making Smart Choices”, written by Suresh Shankar, appeared in the December edition of PC Quest magazine. The coverage placed Crayon Data amongst key players in the Tech space.
By now, you have probably heard of Apache Hadoop - the name is derived from a cute toy elephant but Hadoop is all but a soft toy. Hadoop is an open source project that offers a new way to store and process big data. The software framework is written in Java for...
Can big data and predictive analytics help school leaders hire better teachers? That's the new pitch being made by two companies: TeacherMatch, from Chicago, and Washington-based Hanover Research. Both claim that their new algorithm-driven teacher-selection tools can...
We live in very complex times. As much as we talk about integrated insights, it only seems to be getting worse. If I sound a little bleak it’s because this statement has been shared ad nauseam: digital marketers are literally drowning in data. Data sources range from...
As big data volumes continue to explode, businesses are challenged to quickly extract rich insight from the mountain of machine-generated data streaming in from devices, sensors, smart meters, operational equipment, social-media platforms and other sources. According...
Today, many companies are already using Big Data to turn their data process into actionable insights. However, in reality, companies often find that Big Data doesn’t necessarily translate into easy success. In an exclusive interaction with CXOtoday, Adrian DeLuca,...
Crayon co-founder Srikant Sastri’s article “Data Meets Retail”, which explains the role of Big Data Solutions in retail in India, was published in the December edition of Images Retail magazine. It appeared in a special section called Perspective.
Analytic applications come in all shapes and sizes–and most importantly, are oriented around addressing a particular vertical need. At first glance, they can seem to have little relation to each other across industries and verticals. But in reality, when observed at...
We’re no longer just strangers in a crowd. Imagine any street corner in any Bay Area town where, let’s say, four people — Alexandria, Larry, Cory and Cameron — are lost in private thought. Without a single conversation, without even knowing their names, we could learn...
Big data is a big plus: You can collect, organize, and store vastly more information than before. Data about your customers, products, suppliers, sales, and finances—everything that makes your company run—can be quantified, stored in one place, and analyzed. But...
Consider a typical decision – you have just arrived in a new city after a 6 hour flight, it’s 6.30 PM and you want to get a decent vegetarian meal. What do you do?You fire up Google, search for good restaurants in that city, and filter them by type, price, location...
Leaving behind the old way of sales, companies now have become extremely sophisticated when it comes to helping sales and marketing teams achieve their numbers, and hence the green bucks that inadvertently flow after the quota is achieved, by being creative on Big...
The increasing availability of big data from the likes of CMS to get a better handle on population health patterns is a growing trend in healthcare. Health IT startups such as Social Health Insights and Konnectology are just a couple of examples of that in action. But...
Outside of its growing reputation for poverty wages, worker intimidation and an overall culture of employee repression, a new report released Wednesday reveals that retail giant Walmart is also throwing its weight behind a massive consumer tracking effort with...
Data have long fueled the relationship between sports and their fans. Now, with Big Data tools enabling the collection and analysis of seemingly limitless types of sports-related information, the flow of sports data is poised to accelerate. "If there's data out there,...
The new frontier of data is full of possibilities, but marketers need to be aware that not all data is created equal, a leading marketing scientist warns. Associate professor and director of the not-for-profit Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Dr Rachel Kennedy, told...
Cars are probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear someone talk about data sources, but today’s cars generate approximately 15 gigabytes of data per hour. The reason most of us are unaware of this fact is because most of this data is only stored...
Online consumers generate an avalanche of data. Product purchases; Facebook Likes and comments; Twitter follows; Pinterest pins; on-site searches; pages viewed; recommendations; clicks — consumers do it all, from different devices and locations. And it generates lots...
Often, the best way to avoid a rip-off is to know what others are paying for things. What did the guy sitting next to me on the plane pay for his ticket? How much did the neighbor pay for his kid's wedding? That emergency dental procedure? The water pump replacement...
What do Oscar-winning movies, the perfect Christmas card, and a great analytic strategy all have in common? They're all byproducts of great editing. Editors are often unsung heroes of masterpiece productions, and your big data analytic strategy is no different. In my...
In the wake of the 2012 Presidential election, hundreds of Internet users asked a very important question: “Is Nate Silver a witch?” The accusations of witchcraft came after Silver, statistician and blogger for the New York Times, predicted the winner of all 50 states...
Recruiting has always been seen as an art. Employers and recruiters spend hours writing job descriptions, scouring over resumes and conducting interviews to try to judge which candidate will be the best fit for a position. Many of the factors these businesses use to...
Even today, most organizations technically struggle to answer even the simplest 80/20 analytics questions: Which 20% of customers generate 80% of the profits? Which 20% of suppliers are responsible for 80% of customer UX complaints? What 20% of customers facilitate...
What draws people to engineering and technology is generally the effort to create the best possible product within a series of technical or physical constraints. That same effort to solve a problem underlies the technology behind a Formula 1 race team, although like a...
15 years ago, the defining problem of the Internet age was how I find the information I need? This gave birth to search engines and Google’s great vision of “organizing the world’s information”. A decade later, as Google continues to improve its search with...
Big Data seems to be quite the buzzword these days. So, what is Big Data exactly? Basically, it refers to a collection of data sets or information too large and complex to be processed by standard tools. It is about the art and science of combining enterprise data,...
Over the past few years, Big Data has transformed the way the hospitality, travel and tourism sector (HTT) functions. It has lodged a new dimension of customer care in HTT by opening up mind-boggling possibilities -- spurring a 'paradigm shift' from simply viewing...
Remember a few years ago when all the talk around emerging NoSQL databases was how they’d make history of relational databases any time that scale was an issue? Well, that hasn’t exactly happened yet, and Hummer Winblad Managing Director Mitchell Kertzman has a theory...
"Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future." This quote from Robert L Peters best defines what Crayon is setting out to do. We are having a design discussion, as we shape our products, our culture and our future. This exercise is also...
The discussion about how to fix health care in America shouldn't focus on websites or servers or insurance mandates or policies. It should focus on better data analytics. That's according to a panel of experts who spoke Tuesday at the TechAmerica Foundation's Big Data...
The Army is harnessing big data to help commanders answer questions that were previously unsolvable by pulling relevant information from thousands of databases into a holistic common operating picture, specifically focused on readiness and resources. The Army...
Big data has been getting a lot of press lately. There’s a whole treasure trove of information you can use for your email marketing campaigns. You can look at everything from customer purchase history, to what similar customers bought, to a customer’s behavior on your...
LinkedIn is an essential tool for recruiters, a network where individuals’ professional qualifications are emphasized and easily searchable. But according to Adeyemi Ajao, the co-founder of Identified, a big data and analytics company focused on professional...
What does Big Data have in common with Big Box Retailing... besides the bigness? How much does Walmart have in common with Amazon... besides the obvious? Where do you think retail is going... besides mobile? Let’s start back a week. Twitter and Royal Mail go public in...
At no point in human history have organisations and individuals had more access to information than they do today. For retailers, technology is capable of revealing truly beneficial insight regarding potential and existing customers, but for many this information...
When people talk about ‘big data’, there is an oft-quoted example: a proposed public health tool called Google Flu Trends. It has become something of a pin-up for the big data movement, but it might not be as effective as many claim. The idea behind big data is that...
Using analytics to better understand customer satisfaction, profitability, retention and churn while increasing cross-sell and up-sell are the most dominant uses of cloud-based analytics today. Jim Ericson and James Taylor presented the results of Decision Management...
The North American retail landscape looks quite different today than it did even ten years ago. The way that consumers make purchasing decisions has dramatically altered: they stand in stores, using their smartphones to compare prices and product reviews; family and...
A colorful wheel developed by Rice University bioengineers to visualize protein interactions has won an international competition for novel strategies to study the roots of breast cancer. The winning BioWheel by the Rice lab of bioengineer Amina Qutub was chosen this...
An Indian-Singapore start-up is set to launch next year a “Taste Graph” data that could revolutionise consumers relationships with service-based business houses through information technology. The Taste Graph would provide simple data on specific requirements of...
Big data has gone mainstream. Everywhere you look, people are talking about how to extract value from the massive and ever-growing troves of information residing within and beyond traditional data repositories. Information that, when fully leveraged, has the potential...