Jun

14

Seven Starters in Data Analytics

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Phil Cotter’s comment on last week’s post here really got me going. Now that I know that suicide bombers max their credit cards before setting off to do the deed I somehow feel a gathering sympathy for the security services. So the starting point is 5 million up-to-the-limit cards? We need to funnel cash into predictive analytics urgently if anything we do is to show better results than airport security (to begin from a very low measure indeed). So I began to look for guidelines in the use and development of predictive analytics, thinking that while we wait for terrorist solutions we might at least get a better handle on marketing. I am surprized and impressed by how much good thinking there is available, so in the spirit of a series of blogs last year (Big Data: Six of the Best) here are some starting points on innovative analytics players who all have resonance for those of us who work in publishing, information and media markets. And a warning: the specialized media in these fields all seem to have lists of favoured start-ups enttitled “50 Best players in Data Analytics”, so I am guilty of scratching lightly at the start-up surface here.

In the same spirit of self-denial that drives me to abstain from a love of eating croissants for breakfast, I have also decided to stop using the expression “B** D***”. I am so depressed by publishers asking what it means, and then finding that, because of “definition creep” or “meaning drift”, I have defined it differently from everyone else, including my own last attempted definition, that I am going to cease the usage until the term dies a natural, or gets limited to one sphere of activity. So Data Analytics is my new string bag, and Predictive Analytics is the first field of relevant activity to be placed inside it. Or do I mean Predictive behaviour analytics?

I was very impressed by analysts studying our use of electricity (http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/want-to-predict-human-behavior-use-these-6-lessons-based-on-data-). Since the work throws up some lessons which we should bear in mind as we push predictive analytics into advertising and marketing. The thought that it was easier to influence human populations through peer pressure and an appeal to altruism, as against offers of “two for one”, cash bonuses and discounts is clearly true, yet our behaviour in marketing and advertising demonstrates that we behave as if the opposite was the case. The emphasis on knowing the industry context – all analytics are contextualised – and the thought that, even today, we tend to try to make the analysis work on insufficient data, are both notions that ring true for me. We need as well to develop some scientific rigour around this type of work, using good scientific method to develop and disprove working hypotheses. Discerning the signal from the noise, like “never stop improving”, are vital, as well as being hard to do. I ended this investigation thinking that even as the science was young, the attitudes of users as customers were even more immature. If we are to get good results we have to school ourselves to ask the right questions – and know which of our expectations are least likely to be met.

Which brings me to the people we should be asking. Amongst the sites and companies that I looked at, many were devoted from differing angles to marketing and advertising. But many took such differing approaches that you could imagine using several in different but aligned contexts. Take a look for example at DataSift (www.datasift.com). It now claims some 70% accuracy (this is a high number) in sentiment tracking, creating an effective toolset for interpreting social data. Here is the answer to those many publishers in the last year who have asked me “what is social media data for, once you have harvested it?” Yet this is completely different from something like SumAll (https://sumall.com), which is a marketeers toolset for data visualization, enabling users to detct and dsiplay the patterns that analysis creates in the data. Then again, marketing people will find MapR (www.mapr.com) fascinating, as a set of tools to support pricing decisions and develop customer experience analytics. Over at Rocket Fuel Inc (www.rocketfuel.com) you can see artificial intelligence being applied to digital advertising. As a great believer in sponsorship, I found their Sponsorship Booster modelling impressive. This player in predictive modelling has venture capital support from a range of players, from Summit to Nokia.

When the data is flowing in real time, different analytical tools are called for, and MemSQL (www.memsql.com) has customers as diverse as Zynga, and Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley to prove it. Zoomdata (www.zoomdata.com) is a wonderful contextualization environment allowing users to connect data, stream it, visualize it and give end-user access to it – on the fly. This is technology which really could have a transformative effect on the way that you interface your content to end users, and you can demo it on the Data Palette on the site. And finally, do you have enough of the right data? Or does some government office somewhere have data that could immensely improve your results? Check it on Enigma (press.enigma.io), the self-styled “Google of Public Data”, a discovery tool which could change radically product offerings throughout the industry. Perhaps it is significent that the New York Times is an investor here.

So, for the publisher who has built the platform and integrated search, and perhaps begun to develop some custom tools, there is a very heartening message in all of this. A prolific tool set industry is growing up around you at enormous pace, and if these seven culled from the data industry long lists are anything to judge by, the move from commoditized data increasingly free on the network to higher levels of value add which preserve customer retention and enhance brand are well within our grasp.

May

22

Education: Ignore the Tablets, Eat the Box!

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Yesterday may have seen the largest single step forward for school-based educational publishing globally for a decade, which makes it confusing, but rather appropriate, that the word “education” did not intrude at all in the hullabaloo of the major product/service launch on the West Coast. Yet I suspect that if we convened a panel of enlightened educationalists from all sorts of international K-12 environments and asked them what they needed in order to deliver a vision of tomorrow’s educational technology then they might put together a shopping list something like this:

* Video, video, video – from the internet, terrestrial and satellite, and DVD/Blu-ray, all in one place, seamlessly
* Games – serious gaming in a context that makes sense to kids in and out of the classroom, capable of collaborative or single user working anywhere
* Connectivity, making the learner a real participant in the process as well as ensuring that all online and broadcast environments were linked into this hub
* Voice and gesture control, and the ability to profile and remember individual participants
* Multiscreen and split screen working, using video and internet at the same time
* Skype connections to remote teachers or wider collaborative groups
* Each user to have the computing power of a top range laptop at their disposal, backed by a network of 300,000 servers – the computing power of 1991 in one application

These are, of course, the headlines from yesterday’s launch of Microsoft’s Xbox One (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/21/new-xbox-console). And I do not care about the numbering system, or whether we get Halo or Call of Duty: Ghosts. Or that some platforms are more backward-compatible than others. Frankly, my son had passed me by as a gamer by the time he was seven, and was making allowances for my mental and physical inability to keep up. But Convergence – that is something else. In the long years while we lurched from one technology to another – from CD-ROM to the iPad – all of our efforts seemed one – dimensional. Which is not to say that the iPad is not a useful tool in an educational context. But dilute the Apple Kool-Aid, please. Whatever Steve Job’s lifelong wishes were about creating a new start in education, nothing that has happened since Apple made its specific education launch convinces me that it is the textbook of the future. Or, as far as el-hi education is concerned, that it is desirable or appropriate to look for an eTextbook of the future. “Textbook” may be an albatross that we have to cut loose from the neck of education 7-18, and especially 11-18, if we are going to make meaningful progress at all.

If education at these ages is going to enter the immersive world of the network, then it has to be rooted in the multiservice environment of the home, as well as the school. Indeed, looking at the expensive and pitiful struggle in the UK to keep the actual physical buildings of the school together I wonder sometimes about how we will keep these locations open for more than one-on-one progress checking and assessment. As K-12 becomes more virtual, here are some of the issues we must look out for:

* the continuing progress towards personalised education, driven through specified learning journeys which are loaded with appropriate learning outcomes. Education is Workflow.
* the ability to monitor in the network the compliance of these outcomes with overall curriculum requirements demanded by education authorities, politicians, parents
* the ability to monitor and assess learner progress on the fly and tweak the system to allow repeat/re-iteration on topics where a full understanding has not been achieved
* the ability of teachers to morph into moderators, enabling them to select and suggest good learning strategies for individual learners, adopt best practice from successful peers and recognize, with the assistance of good monitoring and guidance solutions, where progress is made and when help is needed
* the ability to use this system architecture to keep parents informed of progress and problems, using the same systems for communication and dialogue as those in place in the home. Education is social media.

In this world there will be no examinations, since we shall know who knows what at which required level. In this world, every parent, every night, will be able to know what has been done and how well it has been accomplished. In this world, education will return to being the exploratory journey towards understanding that it has been at its most successful. And while it will take a long time for this world to come about, I think that the only road to the future is not the route of adding more and better devices at the edge of education, but by taking a holistic view through the only available architecture – the games platform.

All of this begs many interesting questions. Will Sony come up with a better answer in the new PlayStation? Perhaps. Will Nintendo make the Wii move here as its gesture control gets refined? Maybe. Of more concern to me is that now that games have come out of the bedroom and into the living room, and are now bidding to be the multiscreen service that runs television and streaming DVD in the home as the Home Hub, it will not be long before they emerge in the school as well. And this time teachers will not be able to say “leave your devices at the door”. OK, Microsoft may have to rebrand and call it XBox Ed. And make it available through its smartphone technology. But maybe, just maybe, yesterday was a new dawn. As EM Forster could not have resisted saying at this point: “Only Kinect”.

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