Monday, April 28, 2014

Advertising on the Web Evolves

Advertising has been the solution to the quandary of numerous websites that have attracted people to them without charge. How could they make money? What would be their business model? For many of them, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are good examples, advertising was determined to be the logical source of funds.

Initially, the advertising was limited to placing ads on the sites by anyone who would pay for them. This worked well for a while, but then advertising became more specific and sophisticated. The emergence of big data meant that companies were less willing to pay big bucks for general advertising. They wanted their ads to be directed to where they would be most likely to yield results. That meant they were looking for data on their customer's and potential customer's habits and locations at any particular point in time.

The purveyors of the ads were forced to make better use of the data they could gather on their own users, so that ads could be directed to them and their specific interests.

This worked Ok for a while, and the growing use of mobile units helped in pinning down locations data. But the growth of mobile units also had a downside. Their users were not as likely to notice ads, and the returns on mobile ads were not as good as the advertisers wanted.

So the Facebooks of the world had to look to ways to expand the scope of their data. This meant drawing data from various sites they controlled and sharing the data across the board, which raises privacy and ethical concerns, But those concerns can be addressed, as Google, a leader in multiplatform advertising, has proven.

The result has been that social media, as well as other sites that use advertising as their basic business model, have had to expand by buying or developing new activities that attract users from a wider range of the populace. so we have Facebook sharing data across Messenger and Instagram and Google sharing data across Youtube and its other apps. Same with Twitter. Essentially, they are drawing data from as wide a base as possible and then using it for ads on their websites with the highest volume of users..

For further reading on this, check this article.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Mobile Collaboration - A Very Contemporary Phenom

To say that office work has changed because of technology is a vast understatement. Personal computers brought about a lot of change, mobility, growth in personal productivity. But potentially the biggest change has come about because of mobile devices - smartphones and tablets.

Today, everyone uses one or both of these mobile devices. They enable a lot of things to get done on the move. More interestingly, they have triggered a wave of new ways of communicating in the work environment, from texting to social media type apps.

Examples of the latter, collaborative software built with mobile devices in mind, such as Quip and Quickoffice, along with the standard file sharing utilities such as Google Drive and Dropbox, are proving that people can be productive no matter where they are and can work collaboratively - sharing their work and working on the same document at the same time. A recent great article on this topic points to more examples, Check it out.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Privacy Trends for 2014

Consultations by E&Y have led to the identification of several trends evident in emerging and growing technologies which have privacy implications. These trends include the anonymization of big data without gaining permissions, growing numbers of cloud providers, and new memory techniques in computer usage, among others. For a summary of their findings, check out the E&Y website.

Friday, April 11, 2014

The Quest for Talent Points to Changes Needed in our Educational System

There is no question that data analytics is taking a front row seat in business management and strategy. Last October a group of top executives from leading companies in this field met to discuss a number of important issues of concern to them. The following five issues topped the list:
  • Are data and analytics overhyped?
  • Do privacy issues threaten progress?
  • Is talent acquisition slowing strategy?
  • What organizational models work best?
  • What’s the best way to assure adoption?

A good deal of attention was given to the issue of finding talent - i.e, qualified staff. "Talent is a hot issue for everyone", they said. They added that "they need more “translators”—people whose talents bridge the disciplines of IT and data, analytics, and business decision making. These translators can drive the design and execution of the overall data-analytics strategy while linking IT, analytics, and business-unit teams. Without such employees, the impact of new data strategies, tools, and methodologies, no matter how advanced, is disappointing."

"A widespread observation among participants was that the usual sources of talent—elite universities and MBA programs—are falling short. Few are developing the courses needed to turn out people with these combinations of skills. To compensate, and to get more individuals grounded in business and quantitative skills, some companies are luring data scientists from leading Internet companies; others are looking offshore."

This is a major failing of our education system. Most young people go to university to be able to get a good job (The universities are not the best one to do the job, but then that is the way society has organized itself over the past number of years), they spend very large sums of money to get that education, and then find that their degrees and courses are out of touch with the needs of the business world. 

One of the problems is that the world is changing very quickly and the universities, not being geared for rapid change, can't keep up. They need help, primarily from the communities for which they are trying to provide "talent". That doesn't mean more advisory boards. There are lots of those and they are not helping. It means more active help, in terms of joint ventures, active involvement in program delivery and a strong say in curriculum delivery. Some if this is anathema to the educational establishment. But they need to change. We need to change the system to place less reliance on the universities in delivering the skilled people that businesses need. The best way to do that is to extend the deliver system beyond the universities.

That's not only in the interests of business and the students, it is in the interests of society generally. A summary of that meeting of executives is on this website.


Wednesday, April 09, 2014

The World Wide Web - An amazing 25 Years.

Last month, the World Wide Web had its 25th birthday. It was in 1989 that Sir Berners-Lee came up with the idea that has changed the world in ways that would have been unimaginable then. It’s hard to believe the massive extent of change that has taken place in those short 25 years, which is an incredibly short period of time in the grand sweep of history.

Prior to 1989, the Internet existed without the World Wide Web. Many people think the two are the same, but they are not.  The Internet is a large network of computers and other devices, that enables computer files to be stored and shared with others on the network. Prior to the Web, the files were stored under various hierarchical arrangements, mostly the old tree form, which required going to specific servers and searching for a particular file. And they didn’t have Google then to do the searching.

Berners-Lee’s idea was to connect the access to the various files by using links to enable direct access to them. With those links, the resulting system would resemble a spider web. The idea now seems very elementary and basic but then it was revolutionary. And of course, it wasn’t as simple as all that when you got down to actual implementation.

It was in 1989 that Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN management on the subject, entitled “Information Management: A Proposal”.  The paper is still available on the CERN site. While Berners-Lee laid the groundwork, the Web didn’t really take off until 1990, when the Browser Mosaic was released. It was the first graphical browser and made the navigation of the Web easy and intuitive. And the Pew Research Centre has done some great research on the growth in the Internet since that time, showing, among other things, that the percentage of American adults who use the internet has grown from 14% in 1995 to 89% in 2010. They catalogue why that has been a good thing. And it has. Check it out.

The Internet epoch has been quite a ride! Just imagine what will happen in the next 25 years!

Friday, April 04, 2014

Companies Missing the Boat on Using Big Data to Control Fraud

An analysis by Ernst & Young shows that most companies are not even aware of techniques in analyzing big data that can be used to help them prevent fraud and other forms of corruption. Techniques known as Forensic Data Analytics (FDA), focus on risk analysis and mine the data for indications of illicit behaviour. These techniques are known to forensic specialists but are not widely known to companies generally. However, companies could be using them and should be considering them for inclusion in their control oriented big data analyses. For a copy of the E&Y study, follow this link.