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Corinna Sherman

A special report on managing information: A different game | The Economist - 0 views

  • Analytics—performing statistical operations for forecasting or uncovering correlations such as between Pop-Tarts and hurricanes—can have a big pay-off. In Britain the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) sifted through seven years of sales data for a marketing campaign that increased regular visitors by 70%. By examining more than 2m transaction records, the RSC discovered a lot more about its best customers: not just income, but things like occupation and family status, which allowed it to target its marketing more precisely. That was of crucial importance, says the RSC’s Mary Butlin, because it substantially boosted membership as well as fund-raising revenue.
  • Most CIOs admit that their data are of poor quality. In a study by IBM half the managers quizzed did not trust the information on which they had to base decisions. Many say that the technology meant to make sense of it often just produces more data. Instead of finding a needle in the haystack, they are making more hay
  • Many new business insights come from “dead data”: stored information about past transactions that are examined to reveal hidden correlations. But now companies are increasingly moving to analysing real-time information flows.
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  • A free programming language called R lets companies examine and present big data sets, and free software called Hadoop now allows ordinary PCs to analyse huge quantities of data that previously required a supercomputer. It does this by parcelling out the tasks to numerous computers at once. This saves time and money. For example, the New York Times a few years ago used cloud computing and Hadoop to convert over 400,000 scanned images from its archives, from 1851 to 1922. By harnessing the power of hundreds of computers, it was able to do the job in 36 hours.
  • Capturing such data enables firms to act before a breakdown.
  • With real-time images we can make changes quicker,
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    "Analytics-performing statistical operations for forecasting or uncovering correlations such as between Pop-Tarts and hurricanes-can have a big pay-off. In Britain the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) sifted through seven years of sales data for a marketing campaign that increased regular visitors by 70%. By examining more than 2m transaction records, the RSC discovered a lot more about its best customers: not just income, but things like occupation and family status, which allowed it to target its marketing more precisely. That was of crucial importance, says the RSC's Mary Butlin, because it substantially boosted membership as well as fund-raising revenue."
Corinna Sherman

A special report on managing information: Clicking for gold | The Economist - 2 views

  • Across the internet economy, companies are compiling masses of data on people, their activities, their likes and dislikes, their relationships with others and even where they are at any particular moment—and keeping mum.
  • “They are uncomfortable bringing so much attention to this because it is at the heart of their competitive advantage,” says Tim O’Reilly, a technology insider and publisher. “Data are the coin of the realm. They have a big lead over other companies that do not ‘get’ this.”
  • Amazon and Netflix, a site that offers films for hire, use a statistical technique called collaborative filtering to make recommendations to users based on what other users like. The technique they came up with has produced millions of dollars of additional sales. Nearly two-thirds of the film selections by Netflix’s customer come from the referrals made by computer. EBay, which at first sight looks like nothing more than a neutral platform for commercial exchanges, makes myriad adjustments based on information culled from listing activity, bidding behaviour, pricing trends, search terms and the length of time users look at a page. Every product category is treated as a micro-economy that is actively managed. Lots of searches but few sales for an expensive item may signal unmet demand, so eBay will find a partner to offer sellers insurance to increase listings. The company that gets the most out of its data is Google. Creating new economic value from unthinkably large amounts of information is its lifeblood. That helps explain why, on inspection, the market capitalisation of the 11-year-old firm, of around $170 billion, is not so outlandish. Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.
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  • The design of the feedback loop is critical. Google asks users for their opinions, but not much else. A translation start-up in Germany called Linguee is trying something different: it presents users with snippets of possible translations and asks them to click on the best. That provides feedback on which version is the most accurate.
  • Re-using data represents a new model for how computing is done, says Edward Felten of Princeton University. “Looking at large data sets and making inferences about what goes together is advancing more rapidly than expected. ‘Understanding’ turns out to be overrated, and statistical analysis goes a lot of the way.”
  • Recycling data exhaust is a common theme in the myriad projects going on in Google’s empire and helps explain why almost all of them are labelled as a “beta” or early test version: they truly are in continuous development.
  • Google does not need to own the data. Usually all it wants is to have access to them (and see that its rivals do not). In an initiative called “Data Liberation Front” that quietly began last September, Google is planning to rejig all its services so that users can discontinue them very easily and take their data with them. In an industry built on locking in the customer, the company says it wants to reduce the “barriers to exit”. That should help save its engineers from complacency, the curse of many a tech champion.
Corinna Sherman

Getting news online | Pew Internet & American Life Project - 1 views

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    "Educational attainment and income are both positively correlated with getting news online," for adults, and teens and their parents' education/income.
Chelsey Delaney

Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile than Desktop - 1 views

  • A less quantifiable statistic that may also have impacted the rise of mobile social networking to the point where it has surpassed desktop-based social networking is the fact that it's an activity that taps into how people - normal, everyday people - go about their lives.
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