Data visualization tools have made it somewhat easier to glean intelligence from a mass of information. But today’s tools are still extremely inefficient, as they fail to incorporate the science of human visual perception into their data visualization techniques. This...
Month: May 2014
Recent Articles
Virtual Reality brings Big Data visualization to life
Data visualization tools have made it somewhat easier to glean intelligence from a mass of information. But today’s tools are still extremely inefficient, as they fail to incorporate the science of human visual perception into their data visualization techniques. This...
Big Data and Analytics In Sports: A Game Changer
If there is one area in which big data is literally guaranteed to be a game-changer, it’s sports. Sports have for a long time been accompanied by a wealth of statistics – what’s different today is the amount of data and the multitude of ways that we have to analyze...
Big Data Banking Is Not Just for Big Banks
All banks, large and small, are swelling with data. The growth in data is not only coming from the traditional relational data stored in product and customer-servicing systems, but in voice call logs, emails, website click streams, and in social media sites. Data...
New Algorithm Turns the Emotion of Language into Music
The future of e-books, or any electronic text, may be soundtracked. A new experiment in automation is generating music in response to the emotion of words in literature. TransPose was created by Hannah Davis, a programmer, artist, and musician based in New York, and...
Business or Pleasure? – why not both: The Roadmap to ‘Hadoop in the Cloud’
The Twitter ball started rolling again just now. Matt Asay posed an interesting question about Forrester suggesting Hadoop isn't a great fit for the cloud. (Even) without context Vijay Vijayasankar and I started firing off questions and answers which inevitable led to...
Big data’s pivotal role in mitigating electronics counterfeiting
News surfaced in late 2012 that the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) wanted to reduce the risk of counterfeit parts in its supply chain and issued an authentication-marking requirement for electronic microcircuits. "Implementation of this new requirement will...
Nine large problems with big data
Big data is suddenly everywhere. Everyone seems to be collecting it, analyzing it, making money from it and celebrating (or fearing) its powers. Whether we’re talking about analyzing zillions of Google search queries to predict flu outbreaks, or zillions of phone...
Leveraging Big Data To Improve TV Targeting Precision
Big data now represents the next step in improving television program selection and targeting precision. Merge, append, fuse and model are all terms that can bring increased precision for reaching high value prospects. These methods are discussed below: This is is a...
Data Science vs. Statistics – One in the Same?
I recently ran across a thought-provoking post on the USC Anneberg Innovation Lab blog – “Why Do We Need Data Science when We’ve Had Statistics for Centuries.” With all the debate of late surrounding the relatively new “data science” term, I’ve been thinking a lot...
Actually, Every Company Is a Big Data Company
Every day companies collect data about their customers and industries, simply as an artifact of the act conducting business. As I listened to a panel on Big Data yesterday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass., I had an epiphany: every company is a Big...
4 ways eCommerce merchants misuse data!
The use of customer data can help you make smarter decisions that can improve your store, enhance the shopper experience, and increase conversions. When used incorrectly, however, data can waste resources and alienate your visitors. Below are four ways that ecommerce...
Crayon Data gets global recognition
India (Chennai) and Singapore based Crayon Data has been declared winner at TieCon 2014 held at Santa Clara US, in which it competed with top 50 global technology startups, shortlisted from 2800 companies worldwide. The start-up has been getting attention lately at...
Big data? Internet of things? Sport of Kings inches into high tech
In Clare Balding’s autobiography My Animals and Other Family she relates the story of her father, a renowned horse trainer, telling an owner after Mrs Thatcher’s 1979 election victory that “it’s going to take a while to get used to a woman running the country”. The...
Despite Worries, Big Data Can Be Key For Student Success
The idea that a company is keeping tabs on a student's every computer click is a scary concept for parents. A recent article compared this monitoring to NSA spying and raised questions such as who gets access to the students' data and what will be its ultimate use....
Deconstructing Taste – The Crayon Way
Crayon’s product manager Ajay Kashyap explains how Crayon’s proprietary taste algorithm helps in understanding customer taste in a holistic way; not bounded by traditional constraints of category, availability, costs and location proximity, in conversation with...
Why you still don’t need a chief data officer
For those who have followed my writings on the subject of the chief data officer (CDO), you know well that I am no advocate of this role. Having endured one wave of hype after another on this subject and being that I just attended the CDO Summit in London, I felt that...
Big Data meets big-time basketball
Not long ago, if the Los Angeles Clippers had wanted to figure out how to best defend Warriors star guard Steph Curry, they might have sent a scout to a game or watched video clips. For their recent first-round playoff matchup, they had another way. As of this year,...
Big data needs to be more than just expensive noise
For all the vaunted potential of big data, the consumer benefits aren’t fully apparent yet. Netflix still recommends me movies I don’t want to watch, Spotify still nudges me towards bands I don’t particularly like and most of the companies targeting ads at me on...
How Wearable Tech Is Changing Exercise Research
The technology in fitness trackers is changing the way researchers study exercise, allowing them to gather much more detailed information about how people move throughout the day, experts say. The change is being driven, in part, by advances in accelerometers, the...
Do We Still Need Database Design in the Era of Big Data?
Many big data application implementations seem to begin with an existing data warehouse, one or more new high-volume data streams, and some specialized hardware and software to support data storage and business analytics. The data storage issue is often accommodated...
The future of Big Data is linked to Cloud
Data volumes are growing exponentially. Unstructured data from Twitter, LinkedIn, Mailling Lists, etc. has the potential to transform many industries if it could be combined with structured data. Machine learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, etc....
Big data decisions: Why C-level is wrong to tell IT to butt out
IT departments have been told so often they don't understand the business that many are now fearful of standing up against bad C-level technology decisions. That reticence, added to a lack of access for IT to top executives, is hampering businesses' ability to make...
Big data brings new power to open-source intelligence
In November 2013, the New Yorker published a profile of Eliot Higgins – or Brown Moses as he is known to almost 17,000 Twitter followers. An unemployed finance and admin worker at the time, Higgins was held up as an example of what can happen when we take advantage of...
Can big data predict the next cyber attack?
The battle to secure private data, whether financial information or intellectual property, may be won through big data analysis. That, at any rate, is what Bob Griffin, cybersecurity firm RSA’s chief security architect, thinks. “The ability to take massive volumes of...
Re-Imagining the Store of the Future – Part II
You are in a department store. After waiting in line, you get to the fitting room - and try out the outfit you've picked out. You love it, except…..it’s the wrong size. You now have to change back into your clothes - go out pick the right size, and get back to the...
Why Machine Learning Matters
Like it or not big data is here to stay. While some businesses may have been skeptical or intimidated at the prospect of incorporating big data into their operations, the reality is that without big data analytics, a company is likely to fall behind its competitors....
Beyond Big Data: Why Human Interpretation Still Counts
Many companies boast that they are "data driven," and rely heavily on customer information gathered from a variety of sources. But if you blindly follow that data, you'll miss the motivations behind it — the human emotions and factors that drive customers to make the...
Buyers, beware: The analytics field is consolidating
Most technology sectors go through a certain maturity cycle. At the beginning of the cycle a number of pure-play companies, flush with venture capital in their pockets, come in for the gold rush. Next, a few of them crash and burn while a few others gain revenue...
How big data is going to help feed nine billion people by 2050
To feed the world's rapidly-expanding population in the coming decades, agriculture must produce more. Big data holds one of the keys for farmers, but it's also a weapon that could be used against them. Dusty wooden stairs lead up to the barn office, which overlooks...
How Hollywood is reshaping Big Data visualization
Hollywood storytelling is reshaping the world Big Data. We’ve heard plenty about Big Data changing business, but here is an interesting angle on how the Hollywood business is reshaping Big Data. One great example comes by way of Tableau, the data visualization...
Defining Big Data
As the field of big data grows, increasing numbers are introduced to its concepts, and I often hear the basic question of “is my data big enough to be big data?” Seven terabytes? Seventy terabytes? Seven hundred? It’s too late now to change the name, of course, but...
Hadoop, big data, and the elephant in the room
In the 1800s, John Godfrey Saxe wrote a poem about six blind men and an elephant based on an old Indian story. In an effort to discover what the elephant is, each man touches a different part of the creature and subsequently draws his own unique — and incorrect —...
Analytics Will Be Embedded into Every Piece of Decision Making in Coming Years
What are the top trends seen in big data analytics space in India today? In today’s fast-paced and edgy market environment, firms are looking at ways in which they can gain a competitive advantage by exploiting the opportunities presented by big data. In retail,...
Are medical devices safe?
Medical device cybersecurity issues arrive at the Heart Rhythm Society's annual meeting, with reps from industry and regulation making the case for collaboration in the interest of patient safety. It'll take a village to ensure that medical devices are ready to face...
How Big Data Builds The Sensor Society
As our cars, phones and computers get “smarter” they — and the companies that provide them — know a lot more about us than they used to. A large part of this data collection stems from the fact that these devices act as sensors, collecting information we’d probably...
5 technologies that will help big data cross the chasm
We’re on the cusp of a real turning point for big data. Its applications are becoming clearer, its tools are getting easier and its architectures are maturing in a hurry. It’s no longer just about log files, clickstreams and tweets. It’s not just about Hadoop and...
Maya from Crayon Data shortlisted for IBM challenge
Crayon Data, a new generation big data analytics company focused on simplifying the world’s choices, announced it has been selected as one of the top list of companies for the IBM’s Watson Mobile Developer Challenge. The short list allows Crayon’s entry, the Maya...
5 big data solutions for small businesses like yours
Big Data isn't just for big businesses with even bigger budgets. Today, small business, too, can reap the benefits of the massive amounts of online and offline information to make wise, data-driven decisions to grow their businesses. Although most Big Data discussions...
How Big Data Influences Design
Big data is influencing every aspect of our lives, both on and offline. On Friday, May 2, Umbel joined IBM, along with Peter Kim, to talk about how the big data revolution is affecting design. In the 30 minute talk, held monthly by IBM's David Pittman, we touched on...
Can big data save horse-racing industry?
On Saturday, May 3, the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby took place. Twenty 3-year-old Thoroughbreds took a 1.25-mile sprint in what is commonly referred to as “The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.” For casual horse-racing fans, the Derby is likely one of only a...
45 surprising facts about big data!
What will Big-Data convey with some of it’s startling factoids. I recently ran through google to find some good factoids. I stumble upon some of these facts which are worth mentioning and keeping a note on. 1. Google’s Eric Schmidt claims that every two days now we...
Top 30 simple tools for Data Visualization
There have never been more technologies available to collect, examine, and render data. Here are 30 different notable pieces of data visualization software good for any designer's repertoire. They're not just powerful; they're easy to use. In fact, most of these tools...
Relational Vs Non-Relational databases – Part 2
In my previous post, we have seen some fundamental differences between Relational and Non-Relational databases. In this post, let's talk about Scalability of these two. Scalability It is an ability of a system that can easily accommodate the rapid incoming data...
Can an Algorithm Solve Twitter’s Credibility Problem?
On October 29, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy made landfall, I was in my Brooklyn apartment, refreshing Twitter. The news on my timeline consisted mostly of grim dispatches from amateur storm spotters tracking Sandy’s march up the coast. By the time the storm reached New...
Car-sharing, GPS data changing transportation patterns
Why drive a car when you can tap out a ride on your smartphone and get picked up in minutes. Need to drive? Rent a car by the hour and then leave it on the street when you’re done with it. But if you must own a car, one California automaker is betting it won’t use...
What The Heck Is Machine Learning?
Machine learning is a computer’s way of learning from examples, and it is one of the most useful tools we have for the construction of artificially intelligent systems. It starts with the effort of incredibly talented mathematicians and scientists who design...
Five Key Properties of Interactive Data Visualization
According to renowned AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories statistician John Tukey, “data may not contain the answer. The coordination of some data and an aching desire for an answer will not ensure that a reasonable one can be extracted from a given body of data.” While...
Finance sector is too slow with big data analytics
Financial services organisations need to move more quickly when it comes to the practical implementation of big data analytics. Many of the larger banks and insurance companies are just taking too long to make this happen, and there are no excuses as we, as an...
My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal
This week, the President is expected to release a report on big data, the result of a 90-day study that brought together experts and the public to weigh in on the opportunities and pitfalls of the collection and use of personal information in government, academia, and...