Nov
13
Hyperlocal: Lost in the Data Mix?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
On my good days I scan the screen for the re-invention of local news in a personalized framework, which is how I have defined “hyperlocal” for some years now. On the bad ones, I search for news of Ashley Highfield, erstwhile creator of the BBC web customization service, iPlayer, and now running Johnston Press. If he cannot re-invent the press, then who can? Or maybe there is another Johann Carolus in somewhere like Strasbourg, just about to do digitally what his namesake did in 1605, and develop the first news sheet. Yet Mr Carolus put the news to work for local businessmen (seventeenth century Germany was as yet oblivious of the bogus distinction of B2B from B2C), and it thus occurs to me that I may be looking in the wrong place for the renaissance of local news.
These thoughts were triggered by a piece in the New York Times (November 10) which did look as if it was going to tackle my “hyperlocal” anxieties.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/technology/gathering-more-data-faster-to-produce-more-up-to-date-information.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1384288878-xYaeMfcYZuVjg950SS64xg&pagewanted=print) This piece, entitled Big Data’s Little Brother”, is in fact a story about data analytics, featuring Premise , a service which collects and analyses photos of market stalls around the globe in order to compile inflation and availability data for food supply and cost analysis, and Clear Story data, which does custom predictive analysis from the data available on the web and/or supplied by clients. Indeed this works with my own observations: SaaS in data analytics is becoming a boom industry, with players like RecordedFutures.com now creating multi-faceted analysis from cyber intelligence to competitive positioning. And these tools can only get smarter, which leads me to believe that we may have to re-create “news” for people who will have commercial reasons to pay before we can personalize news for the general reader/citizen at large.
So what are these data- driven, analytical insight organs going to look like? Well, for a start, we shall have to redefine the word “news”. The services that grab the attention now do not use the news to report something so much as to predict something. When Takadu.com is deployed by a water utility company, it is putting together analysis around sensor, image, staff and public reporting on water leaks. Since 25-30% of global water supplies are NRW water – non-revenue contributing, a glorious term for leaks – this is as vital to the utility as it is to the globe, but the important matter may not be the leak itself, but the trend, the order of repair, and the potential future impact. While it is hard to appreciate FoodGenius.com, which helps food processors develop ever more nutritional disasters for our consumption, it reads 300,000 menus daily to find the trend and create the prediction – lambs’ kidneys in guacamole will be big in 2014 – and will be available everywhere. And moving swiftly to a subject that makes me feel less emotional, companies like Molecular Connections can use the analytics on one side of their business for advanced drug discovery processes, finding and analysing news from the future, while using their technology to give meaning to archival news, as they have done with Nature, the pre-eminent science journal.
None of this is News as we know it, and part of me now accepts the idea that the networked society will never quite want News as newspapers once knew it. Things like the Huffington Post are hybrids, the results of miscegenation, not a new evolutionary track. Things like Buzzfeed are entertainments, brilliant if you want to contemplate the life and works of Rob Ford, Torontonian mayor/buffoon/jester, reduced to 22 captioned images, but only customizable in the “more like that” sense. Nothing here speaks to me about the use of the one thing we have in plenty – data – to inform us of the patterns of our lives and the way that they may change in future.
And we know so much. Isotrak.com reckon they are saving their haulier clients £150 m per annum on areas like building patterns of more efficient driving. This links to my interest, already expressed here, in lower motor insurance costs as your car speaks to your insurer via your smartphone and reports your performance. While recording your journey on Wayze, and noting car accidents and traffic congestion as a result. So maybe these services of the future have active advertising – not just “buy our service to save money” – but lets do it and save it now! And maybe the “news” is about you – in society, against the backdrop of the performance of others, all living anxiously in a rated, graded world. After long years when news tycoons and advertising gurus fought to create “My” service environments and telling us all how to behave, it would be poetic justice if we ended up making them for ourselves, and letting the data modelling tell us how to behave.
Which is what I think we will do. Soon the tools will become available to view all the niche networks that we join in the post-Facebook world in a single viewer which allows us one view of our separate networks for family, for college friends, for business and professional associates, sports aficionados etc. Here we will pull in more data – is anyone getting better wholesale prices for his home- produced electricity than I am? And analysis. And prediction. And we will move the dial from the congested relief road to who is standing for office who wants to do something about it. And before we know it we are back to wondering how any group of well-adjusted people elected Rob Ford, or Boris Johnson, or any other mayor, and then we want commentary and analysis to explain these things. Here “journalism” is by definition self-employed.
But in the meanwhile, the deconstruction of news has to be total before we can begin to reconstruct the flows of data and information which will make a digital economy in a networked society perform and function. So it is probably just as well we have the guys we have in charge of our press. From power-broking to phone hacking , they are doing a grand job of destroying public trust in the world of paper and preparing us all for the digital yet to come. So good, in fact, that rather than put them on trial we should give them an award!
Oct
20
Bonfires of B2B Vanities
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Do you hear that slightly soggy, slushy sound, followed by a low moan? That is the sound of a whole industry falling on its sword. The signs are everywhere. Here is W H Smith in the UK, banning self-published books because it cannot see which ones are pornographic and which are not (http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/whsmith-boycotts-self-published-authors). Remember when booksellers used to be able to read? And over here, in my favoured B2B zone, I came across a suggestion in the building and construction information marketplace last week that, to quote my correspondent “it is not the publishers job to produce data for automated building processes; builders have to learn that for themselves”!
As you may imagine, this lit my blue touch paper. In the user-centric world of the network, it will probably become a capital crime to tell the user what he should do – but for me it will always be a criminal offence to stop short, or define the publishing role so that it stops short, of going to the very last point of user satisfaction. Our obligation in every instance must surely be to create the ultimate in end user satisfaction in order to prevent third parties from inserting themselves between us and our customers, and removing our value-add leverage. I do not much mind if in the process we become a content- to -software company – or even a software company – since I see less risk in this than in the removal of our direct-to-client relationships and our ability to raise prices and margins through value add and enhanced client satisfaction. And I refuse to believe that the construction industry, as it slowly unfreezes from recession in Europe, is any different from any other vertical market. I have talked in these columns about the aircraft industry, the workflow of science, medical diagnostic systems, legal practice work-engines and similar developments in the auto industry and elsewhere.
So you cannot find a vertical market without finding automation of basic functions, workflow modelling, data analysis and predictive analytics, and machine-to-machine communications. And when I made my phone call I was looking at the German and Nordic construction markets, since there has been interest recently in Docu Group, a major player comprised of the former Bau Verlag companies of Springer, with the ByggFacta companies that I well recall from Thomson. And I was surprized by how little reaction there has been amongst the European construction information services to the arrival of BIM. And my call was intended to check out whether this was true as well in the UK. It appears that it was, and that no one was very willing to invest in doing anything about it.
This may be linked to the deep recession in the building industry, and it is certainly does not mean that the companies concerned do not have the data. While they remain publishers of magazines, for some curious reason, all the players I looked at – EMAP, Bau, (former) UBM ,Byggfacta – all had familiar collections of data on new building starts, on materials and labour pricing, and on regulation, and good services for bid-monitoring. They showed no sign of collecting public or third party data, enriching it or building knowledge stores of any sort. And yet if you look at the US websites of Hanley Wood, Reed Construction or the McGraw-Hill services you see an acute awareness of the importance of predictive data modelling and an anxiety to help customers use it. This I find almost completely absent in Europe. Yet in a networked society the architect, the builder, the contractor, the engineer, and the property developer are working cheek-by-jowl. It is in everyone’s interest to ensure, through predictive data modelling, that what is planned will work, within its budget, before physical work begins. And we are not short in Europe of institutions like the Institute for Applied Building Informatics in Munich to tell us how to do this. So why not?
My conclusion at the end of my phone call was that many in the information industry went as far as “research” and then stopped dead. It is almost as if by assembling data and allowing users to search it, the publishers satisfied all processing requirements, and that the role of the industry, at least in Europe, stops there. Well, said my colleague, AutoCAD will do all that when its needed, and the big global players will build their own, and the small builders aren’t interested and anyway our events are where we make our money and we are going to concentrate on those. And much of this may be true (indeed, Bau runs excellent technical conferences that train builders to use innovations that they themselves play no part in providing). But to me it all sounds like elements in a collective death wish. If AutoCAD are to do it (and I have not a clue as to where their ambitions lie), who will be their partners and marketeers in European countries. Who can supply the data attached to trusted brands?
There can be no doubt that the European construction industry will revive. Negotiating the streets in central London closed by construction work last week it was hard not to think that it had not done so already. But will the European construction information industry recover in time to be any use other than as legacy data providers? And while this appears to me to be acute in Construction, is it also the case in other vertical markets? Recovery depends upon re-investment and new partnerships. Where are they? And if they are not in place, then those trying to sell untransformed B2B players with ancient lineage but no leverage may find the prices offered hugely disappointing.
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