Category Archives: Trends

Big Data = Big Brother??

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Big Data can make your life simpler, profit for businesses and at a lower cost than traditional business intelligence solutions.  Sound too good to be true??!  Read on…

What’s the problem with Little Data?
When you call a bank, they essentially validate who you are, against the information you gave on an application form.  The way they make sure that is you, is by validating that against a credit agency (like Experian or Call Credit) to make sure you are who you say you are, and that you can afford what you are buying.

Now as you well know, a lot can change between the day you opened a current account and today. Not least your mobile number, email address and importantly things like your lifestyle and buying habits.  What you buy and wanted 10 years ago, are very different to today I imagine!

What is Big Data?
Many modern businesses are made up of products that have been bolted on over the years.  These systems rarely talk to each other, and if they do, it’s even less likely the business is linking the data to be valuable for them, and valuable for you.

Big Data describes the patterns that emerge from analyzing trends across systems inside and outside the company.

Companies like Cloudera & Datameer specialize in very quickly doing what business management have dreamed about for at least a decade, without the expense of a data warehouse, and in real time.  They have the tools to connect to all of your data sources, then provide very visual, actionable analysis.

Where does Big Data come from?
As you go about your life, you leave behind data, like a trail of crumbs.  Every time you correspond with a company, government department or make a purchase – all of that data is logged.  What’s more that has been standard procedure for many years.

On it’s own in a dark corner data about what you bought for lunch isn’t very valuable.  When that data is linked to data in other dark corners it becomes tremendously valuable.

What can you do with Big Data?

  • Predict when you might be coming into financial trouble (because your MOT and car insurance is due) – and offer you a temporary credit limit increase (That’s helpful banking!!)
  • Send you offers or deals from Burger King if you eat and McDonalds a lot – saving you money, and making money for the bank by selling that data.  (That data might also be of interest to a health insurance company!!)
  • Check your driving record against the DVLA, instead of relying on you to inform them of speeding offenses etc.
  • Offer an appointment with your bank branch manager when you are looking for a new house and asking friends for advice on social networks.

I’m sure you get the idea, and there are plenty more too.  The Big Data revolution has the potential to make your life a whole lot simpler, whilst giving struggling companies another way to make money if sales are down.

What about my privacy?
Always the big worry.  The key will be to make all of these services opt in.  Under the Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information Act, no entity can store information without your express permission.

As I find myself saying often lately… your data is the cost of free

Will you take advantage of Big Data?
Companies are heading this way, very slowly.  Centralized contact data bases, improved cross business data sharing, and developments like data.gov show even the UK Government endorses a Big Data future.  Big Data doesn’t have to mean big brother, and doesn’t have to be feared.  For most of us it will mean less painful interaction with companies that have the data they need to actually be helpful.  Some further reading on how Big Data is different from Business Analytics

What do you think of Big Data?

  1. Will it be profitable for business?
  2. Will it struggle against privacy laws?
  3. Do you trust it?

Is Facebook overvalued? Will it fail?

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This question has popped up a lot since their recent $50 Billion valuation (albeit, speculators on secondmarket.com are trading Facebook ‘shares’ at a Market Cap of $70+ Billion).  For those who lived through the .com bubble, alarm bells are no doubt ringing.

Does the massive growth they have experienced mean they will go the way of so many .com companies in the 90s?

Lessons from history
Facebook has avoided acquisitions, and is being advised by Sillicon Valley’s experienced heads. Peter Theil (PayPal founder), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder), Sean Parker (Napster co-founder) have all been there.

Mark Zuckerberg is benefiting from their experience, and picks the brains of Steve Jobs, Tim O’Reilly and his trusted leuitennant Sheryl Sandberg (who build the Google Revenue model) regularly.

Yahoo, Google & Microsoft have all tried to buy Facebook, as has Time Warner and News Corp.  If anything Facebook appears to have learned the lessons of what not to do from the .com bubble, very well.

Workable Revenue Model
The major difference is Sheryl Sandberg’s ability to build revenue from advertising. Facebook have figured out how to drive demand with advertising, as opposed to fulfilling a need like Google does. A young father with very few pictures will get an advert for a digital camera. In Google you have to know what’s missing, and Sandberg did a pretty good job with revenue there.

Facebook has nearly 600 million users, and they haven’t really focussed on anything other than growth yet. What happen’s when their core focus shifts from growth in terms of users, to growth in terms of revenue?

Challenges
In order to reach that point they will have to successfully

  • Break China
  • Complete an IPO
  • Become a part of internet infrastructure

Those are some big challenges, and I await with baited breath to see how Facebook tackle them. Facebook can still gradually fail, but it would likely be a steady decline rather than the rapid nose dive Myspace experienced.

NewsCorp’s takeover of Myspace was a revenue buy. Buying revenue so early in a company’s life before it has matured stunts it’s growth.

If building such a massive service didn’t make or cost money, I’m pretty certain Mark Zuckerberg would still be building it. He’s not in it for the money, and in a strange way, that commitment to quality is what drives their continued success.

Economic Impact
Facebook grew in size, and took on massive investments throughout the worst financial crisis since the great depression. To me that suggests we’re dealing with a very different type of organisation.

Expecting Facebook to become a sustainable business while it is still growing is missing the point. For now revenue isn’t their key goal, they want to change the internet, make it more open and useful.  I doubt they will IPO until they get much closer to that goal.

Success Factors
If something far better than Facebook comes along then sure it could go the way of the old AOL, but it would have to:

  1. Compete on products quality (Photos, News Feed, Events)
  2. Compete on ease of use (Parents can use it)
  3. Compete on network size (Network effect)
  4. Build a successful revenue model
  5. Gain massive investment from VCs and existing tech companies

In short, the competition has a mountain to climb. The one remaining huge hole in facebook is the differentiation between relationships. It assumes everyone is a ‘friend’. If a service could plug that gap, and grow at a similar ‘Moore’s law like’ pace they’d be set.

Google tried and failed.  Myspace tried and failed.  Twitter serves a different purpose.  Facebook’s main competition is geographic (Russia and China).  It’s going to take something very special indeed to dislodge Facebook.  Building a successful social network isn’t easy!

How do you compete with Facebook?

In my view you don’t compete. You work with. Facebook has the social graph, and likely will for some years to come in the western world.

  • Do you think Facebook is overvalued?
  • Do you think it will fail?
  • How can Facebook sustain their growth?
  • What big challenges does it face?

Understanding Social Media – Four Steps to Social Media Revenue

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Social Media is very much the buzzword at the moment, because the board level execs, and therefore middle management have recognised the massive user base.  Their thinking is along the lines of “We know there are a lot of users there, can we plug what we do today into that?”

In a word, No! It’s a very different space.

Before you can plug your product into a social space, your brand and business needs to be on there.  You’re dealing with real people in a much more intimate way than via a call centre or your website.  The rules are different.  Before you can even think about making money from it, you have to accept you have some learning to do.  Then we can talk about monetisation strategy.

Four Levels of Engagement

Joe Wiggins at Perfect Circle PR, lists the four levels of engagement in the financial sector.

  • Let’s Be Social – simply using social technology to build the brand and community
  • Enlightened Engagement – informing customers through reviews, experts or other respected sources
  • Store of the Community – customers help drive product selection assortment and merchandising
  • Frictionless Commerce – the buying experience is completely redesigned to create a fully customer-centric experience

Let’s be social

Step 1 “Let’s be social” whilst a starting point, is usually a siren of a business who’s marketing department convinced the board that they needed to “just put out press releases” because the competition is doing that.  This is akin to using a telephone for morse code, a waste of potential, but a step in the right direction

Enlightened Engagement

This usually happens when someone high up in the business has the Eureka moment and gets it.  It’s when the business recognises that their customers are talking to each other, and their friends about the business and interactions with your company.

It’s a paradigm shift.  Not everyone outside your employee list is against you.  In fact, some of them really like you and want you to succeed!

Social Media gives you insight to those conversations, and as an insight & perception management tool is invaluable.  This is real time feedback, from people who want to help your brand or business.

Store of the community

Also known as an “App Store”, is a big topc in itself, and a massive investment for businesses that are not already on the cloud infrastructure route.

The idea of having an ecosystem and marketplace of developers vying to make your channels better, for free seems like a tempting one.  It’s entirely possible with the developments in coporate IT Infrastructure and software to begin to make your services open for integration with clients, or 3rd party systems.  PayPal X is a solid example of how to do this in a gentle, risk averse way.

An open platform a huge stepping stone onto the quest for the holy grail…

Frictionless Payments

I’m willing to bet everyone see’s the value in this, pay any merchant from any account, anywhere.  On a pure technology roadmap, you could certainly get there without going social… but then how do you interact with this new world of Social Networks once you get there?

You may have the worlds greatest product, but if it doesn’t play well with social networks you’re stuffed.  More importantly, if your business doesn’t support it on the human level, consumers won’t trust you, and the service will fail.

That’s why it is vital your business follows the social and open technology and values equally. It’s as much about how you do business, as the technology.

Spend time getting to know your professional and human audience.  Listen to them.  Interact.  Then let them build the services they want, on top of your core value!  In effect the community will do the integration for you, you just have to open the front door, by being a platform.

What do you think?

  • Will business truly embrace social?
  • How would you implement it?

Quora – Why you need to be using this service

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What is Quora? It took a few hours for me to “get it”, but after reading around and having a play here’s where I’m at.

A global Q+A site that actually works!

Unlike Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn’s Q+A, the hooks to other Social networks make this very easy to spread to your existing network.  Unlike Facebook Questions, the ability to search for, or ask questions is exceptionally easy.  If you have a burning question you cannot get answered anywhere else, try it! You will be impressed.

The Geek reaction is palpable

I found Techcrunch’s article by MG Seigler a little whacky when I first read it.  Claims like “Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?” are pretty strong.

It’s worth remembering Quora has been around for a few months, and has been steadily winning over sceptics, and beginning to form consensus.

Adam at Comms Corner makes the case for why brands need to get into the FAQ space, like they have done Social Media.

1) If you don’t someone else will answer questions on behalf of your brand – like the early days of Wikipedia.

2) This is a great way to find dissatisfied customers and help them get the best from your product.

Emergence of global, centralised tools & products

We now have Wikipedia (Encyclopaedia), Google (Search,Translate), Facebook (Social), Skype (Speak), Ebay (Marketplace) and many more tools where the world comes together on one platform.  They all benefit from the network effect.  They are made better by the fact that everyone uses them.  Delaying moving to these platforms, means you miss the party & miss the opportunity.

  • Have you used Quora?
  • Will you sign up?
  • Have you got any value from it?
  • Do you think it will become mainstream?

How will your company move to the cloud?

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Reading Mashable’s article about the new Box.net cloud storage app got me thinking.  If their goal really is to allow individuals to be able to access their work documents remotely via the cloud, the piece that is missing isn’t the cloud or the mobile app.  The mobile app has matured quite nicely into a feature rich, usable piece of software.

In fact what appears to be missing, is the understanding in business.  Corporates have enough trouble trying to sell their product & make next year’s revenue numbers.

Teach a man to fish

The consultancy that teaches a business how to integrate & transition away from their expensive internal Intranet towards cloud based storage solutions is completely missing (or it’s trying to sell you Tivoli software).

As corporate, I’d want someone who could build an interface to my existing file servers, and make my existing Microsoft Office documents available through the cloud.

User Driven IT

As the Security specialist firm RSA reports, the rise of user driven IT means the days of buying your employees hardware are over.

A laptop, a secure intranet & your own data centre are very expensive!  The new model is having your data hosted outside your business, and employee’s accessing using their own devices. We’re already seeing this start with those pesky CEO’s and CTO’s using their iPads & personal notebook’s in business.

Real cost savings?

In effect this is a double edged sword for business.  With one hand you can save a lot of cost by reducing hardware investment.  With the other, you introduce a massive security risk.

If you can’t secure the device & your workers are buying their own IT equipment, how do build the interface and policy /procedures required to get you from your existing internal Intranet to a cloud based solution?

Consider your information touchpoints

  • When does data enter & exit your business’s confidentiality boundary?
  • What quality checks can you perform data entry & data exit?
  • What tools do you need to perform quality checks?
  • What policies and procedures do you need to develop to enforce these checks?

In effect you can no longer control an employee’s behaviour hour to hour, but you can control data entry, exit & quality inside your business boundary.

Time to invest?

The cloud is a massive cost saving tool, it allows you to leverage existing / free tool’s and networks in an employee’s home life.  This is a potentially invaluable asset.  The way we look at our business will fundamentally change.  Do you think business will embrace the cloud any time soon?  What else do they need to consider?

How to do Great Things

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We humans need to be inspired to do Great Things. So why don’t we? Well, ever so occasionally we do, for example:

All of these have one thing in common. They are triumphs of people working towards meaning (except maybe the Slinky).  When it comes to the doing Great Things we are capable of incredible action.

The problem we have is that our lives have become fairly mundane, full of frustration or boredom. How often have you been sick of work, bored by TV or frustrated with the same old routine? We crave meaning. We crave more than just what’s on TV… but we don’t take action.

The need for Great Things

Yet we live in a world that still has some pretty big problems.

Jane McGonigal has figured out why some of us would rather spend time playing video games than solving these problems. It boils down to the fact that video games inspire people. They are works of art that infuse urgent optimism with a sense of purpose.

You are capable of doing Great Things. What you need is to be inspired…

Art creating action

Art gave us an Inconvenient truth, Live Aid and Live 8. While well intentioned, they were low on real action, low on real results…

What if instead of putting on a concert, musicians collaborated with video game artists to create a game world where we solve hunger as the aim? What if instead of an artist making a statement through their graphic novel, they used that storytelling technique to engage us to solve water shortages in a virtual world?

We are not motivated by solving problems unless we have a reason to. We don’t lack desire. We need meaning, we need to be engaged. Our art provides rich meaning, while our lives provide little.

The art of engagement

Jane talks about how she believes humanity is teaching itself how to collaborate through social networks and online games.  We did it with facebook and beat Simon Cowell. We did it with twitter and the #Iranelection.

Yet in Copenhagen we put our trust in politicians to solve problems. As well intentioned as I believe Copenhagen was, a small group of career politicians are not as capable as the rest of humanity.

Art moves us

Avatar made the climate argument in a more attractive way.  Rather than entertain us, art now needs to engage us.  Instead of Copenhagen & and Inconvenient Truth, we need an Interactive ‘Avatar’ that helps us develop solutions to our real world problems.

For example Evoke starts with a Graphic Novel of a food shortage.  How will you help solve it?

Do you think art can convince people to do Great Things?  Do you have other examples of Game Theory solving problems? I’d like to know your thoughts…

How do we Go Green & Make Life better?

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It’s been fashionable for a while for us to talk about how we “should” go green.  It’s a little like the smoker saying they “should” stop, and the fatty saying they “should” diet.  What are we really doing to change the systems & technology we depend on to solve this massive problem of dependence on fossil fuels?

How do we move to green technology without plunging the vast majority of society into poverty needs to be the key question.  We could throw away power stations tomorrow, and with it would go Medicine, Oversea’s aid, Cancer Treatment, Pharmacies, Animal Welfare, The Internet (Free Knowledge)… and you can forget about investment in sustainable technology if we did everything we “should” do.

In short, it’s time to move from sentiment to action.  We’ve known for at least 2 decades we “should” change.  That doesn’t mean anything without real action.  Yes, recycle.  Yes, take the bus.  Yes, turn the lights out… But do so in the knowledge that every year China builds 2 new coal power stations.  It will take a lot more than efficiency improvements, or the adoption of one single technology to get us where we need to be.

We are rightly, moving to a world where previously less important aspects of humanity are gaining focus because they are delivering results the old way of working couldn’t.  It was historically very easy to criticise innovation, design & sustainability as being mental masturbation.  A “nice idea that doesn’t get results”.

Then the world changed.  Like all change, it doesn’t happen with an election, it happens very slowly over the course of a generation or so.  Suddenly sustainability won awards.  Profit chasing mega coporates found themselves on the wrong side of the law… and most importantly of all, the public perception shifted.  People love nature, and can see for themselves the damage we have caused it already.

On the flip side, business cannot make a profit going back to the oil well for much longer.  We have seen the beginnings of oil market instability, a huge shake in financial market confidence as well as the beginnings of profitable renewable energy.  We’re at a tipping point between beating and ignoring sustainable development & making it the very centre of business execution.

Yet there is still a massive communication problem.  The type of person who does design, and the type of person who is capable  of getting a product to market are rarely anything other than strange bedfellows.  The design types have to make a leap of faith into mass market thinking with their skill, while the mass market has to sit up and listen to our designers.  The old enemy has to be our friend if we are to achieve anything.

It requires a full scale investment and replacement in our power infrastructure, technology , and distribution systems.  It requires replacing with an equivalent every package, building block or material that is not sustainable, with one that is…  A monumental task.  How will you be part of the solution?  At the individual level?  At the activist level?  Or at the socio-economic level, where a real difference will be made?

The Social Media Vibe

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“The vibe” is something that you either love or hate about twitter, and social media. Like everything that is a trend, from the outside it is downright annoying. Partially because everyone won’t shut up about it. The criticism is that all people do on twitter is talk about their love of twitter. (Unless they’re the celeb stalker type, I’m looking at you Justin Beiber fans).

But is there something to this twitter thing?

The mainstream media loves to talk about how big Facebook got on a slow news day, but you get the sense they still don’t take it as seriously as they could… and I’m beginning to think the gap is generational. For this post to make sense, we’re going to have to generalise a little, but here goes:

Baby Boomers – Born Prior to 1961


The Baby Boomers still occupy the prominent social & business positions, their thinking is the status quo for how business and society reacts to new trends. Their lens, is the lens we have used successfully for a very long time. Kudos to the Baby Boomers. Things are a changin’ though…

Generation X – Born between 1961 and 1981


Generation X or the “MTV” Generation is often cited as the rebel generation and is a little more reactive. Responsible for the .com boom, the growth of the personal technology industry and further liberalisation of media Generation X lived up to its name. It still did all of this through the Baby Boomer lens of Globalisation…

Generation Y – Born between 1976 and 1990


Generation Y is the favourite of AdAge and a whole lot of PR / Marketing companies right now. Understanding Generation Y, is fundamental to getting the Social Media Vibe. Having grown up with technology and to a lesser extent the internet, as a generation; Y see’s nothing wrong with giving away its data to the information for convenience. Facebook and Google are trusted because they are Trust Agents, ie. They are trust worthy in the eyes of todays youth.

Social media has real value to these Generation Y types. Not because it’s a fad, but because it fits the way they see the world. These views are challenging convention and causing an awful lot of upheaval in the old economy. Just look at how unhappy News Corp is with Google, or the Advertising revenues of Newspapers. The Baby Boomers and Generation X take some level of comfort from the human interaction, but the very key of Social Media is humanising our online interactions. Being ourselves online.

It leads to a lot of philosophical questions. Am I more myself online? In person? Alone? Outdoors?

These kinds of questions don’t sit well with the old world, since they challenge some pretty fundemental beliefs. The key is how this change will impact YOU. The way we interact is changing. Knowing the change is coming means you can take action today to be ready as these changes begin sweeping through into daily life, and business as usual. No matter what age you are, these trends beg some very interesting questions indeed.

  • Maybe you could pitch social media to your company?
  • Maybe you could start a blog and begin building your digital identitiy?
  • How about looking into this Social Media thing, are you part of the conversation?
  • Does this Generation Y lot have a point?

Or you could just wake when the change has already happened. You don’t have to do anything, you lucky thing! There is an awful lot to be gained by taking advantage though. Worth a shot right?

Oh and a word to the wise. High pressure sales don’t trick anyone but other high pressure sales types. Snake Oil is endangered.

Sitting Comfortably?

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The Leeds #CozyTweetup just made the big time.

CozyTweetup in Leeds – 10th of December

Hi. I’m Simon, how are ya?

We have a CozyTweetup happening in Leeds, on the 10th of December at 6pm at Boutique

Like you the cozytweetup idea caught my attention. One because the name is very human and inclusive, everything a socially savvy twitter meetup should be… and two because the concept is nifty. Why meet people in a high pressure convention center, when there are far better, more informal places to meet?

Like you I’m on a journey to expand my twitter network, meet people and generally enjoy the process. So the idea struck; why not organise a CozyTweetup in Leeds?

Leeds is Little London, and has a vibrant community of exciting talent, wanting to network, the cozy way. You don’t have to be from Leeds to attend, but given the times involved it’s a head start.

We have The Snug at Boutique, all to ourselves to use and abuse. It is just off Call Lane in Leeds, between Normans and Mook. If you’re struggling for directions, drop me a note @sytaylor and I’ll hook you up with the info you need

A big Thanks to Mazi for the assist. So who’s coming?

Cool R&D

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What are the best / coolest Research and Development Departments you can think of?

History teaches us a thing or two:

Xerox Parc once had one of the best known to man (or pooch). Widely credited with bitmap graphics, the WYSIWUG text editor, Ethernet, Object Oriented Programming and of course the Graphical User Interface. Not bad for a photocopying company. Apple did well to swoop in and take credit for a lot of the above.

In modern examples who do we have though? Who is really pushing the boundaries? Steve Ballmer of Microsoft mentioned in a recent interview @Techcrunch that Microsoft spend $9.5 Billion a year on R&D.

A pretty impressive figure, but when you consider most of that investment is in the 5 core business functions, Microsoft are investing heavily to stand still and then move forward in a very fast moving technology market.

Paypal have announced Innovate 09 a conference dedicated to their new upstream payments and future innovations. Even in a traditionally compliant market, the internet and networking is having an impact and changing the rules. Rules we now have to question.

Then you have the startup big three of social media. Facebook, Twitter and Google (What blog would be complete without name checking the biggest dogs in the yard?). These have to be the prime examples of human based interaction and Interest led innovation. The key with all of them is they have managed to tap into something brilliant about humans. When inspired we will work our socks off, and almost for free.

Not everyone has a killer budget to blow on “Cool R&D” but there are some steps we can take in the right direction. We’re witnessing a changing of the guard in the working population. Generation X now holds the key the baby boomers once had, and Generation Y is finally making it’s presence felt. We have two digital natives in the working crowd, but we still work in our compliant business speak / mid-90s ivory towers, hidden behind the Baby Boomers.

Business Gametheory is all together quite a useful tool. So is your Google Fu and ability to demonstrate personality from miles away. Business always felt stuffy and full of protocol. There is defintely a place and time for professionalism. It’s losing it’s traction as a key tool though. The population wants your company to show its human side.

Chris Brogan wrote something wonderful about “How to Level Up” taking the RPG concept of building your character and applying it to your business life. It can be applied to all life. It can be applied to the gym too! The idea of making achievement measureable and satisfying is something that seems to mistify our education system, yet we naturally seek it out.

Just like we naturally seek out our interests. Cool R&D requires understanding the massive benefits of the long term view, but crucially understanding ourselves better.