Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: analytics

  • SurveyMonkey builds its war chest

    SurveyMonkey builds its war chest

    Earlier this year Decoding The New Economy interviewed SurveyMonkey’s  CEO Dave Goldberg on his vision for the business and how the company’s services are helping people understand the context of the data pouring into their organisations.

    Yesterday SurveyMonkey announced it had raised 250 million dollars through an equity round that values the business at $1.3 billion, an amount only a little more than what the company has raised since being founded in 1999.

    The additional funds are earmarked for privately held SurveyMonkey to acquire more companies and “provide meaningful liquidity to our employees and investors” with participants in the new funding round including CEO Goldberg and Google Ventures increasing their existing stakes.

    In his interview with Decoding The New Economy last February, Goldberg described how he sees mobile technologies changing both SurveyMonkey and business in general along with the challenge for companies in understanding the data pouring into business.

    It’s not hard to image many of the acquisitions SurveyMonkey makes with its latest fundraising will be in the mobile and analytics sectors.

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  • Salesforce faces the end of the database era

    Salesforce faces the end of the database era

    Last week we looked at the way we organise information is changing in the face of exploding data volumes.

    One of the consequences of the data explosion is that structured databases are beginning to struggle as information sources and business needs are becoming more diverse.

    Yesterday, cloud Customer Relationship Management company Salesforce announced their Wave analytics product which the company says “with its schema-free architecture, data no longer has to be pre-sorted or organized in some narrowly defined manner before it can be analyzed.”

    The end of the database era

    Salesforce’s move is interesting for a company whose success has been based upon structured databases to run its CRM and other services.

    What the company’s move could be interpreted that the age of the database is over; that organising data is a fool’s errand as it becomes harder to sort and categorise the information pouring into businesses.

    This was the theme at the previous week’s Splunk conference in Las Vegas where the company’s CTO, Todd Papaioannou, told Decoding The New Economy how the world is moving away from structured databases.

    “We’re going through a sea change in the analytics space,” Papaioannou said. “What characterised the last thirty years was what I call the ‘schema write’ era; big databases that have a schema where you have to load the data into that schema then transform before you can ask questions of it.”

    Breaking the structure

    The key with programs like Salesforce and other database driven products like SAP and Oracle is that both the data structures — the schema — and the questions are largely pre-configured. With the unstructured model it’s Google-like queries on the stored data that matters.

    For companies like Salesforce this means a fundamental change to their underlying product and possibly their business models as well.

    It may well be that Salesforce, a company that defined itself by the ‘No Software’ slogan is now being challenged by the No Database era.

    Paul travelled to San Francisco and Las Vegas as a guest of Salesforce and Splunk respectively

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  • Adrift in the data lake

    Adrift in the data lake

    Last week Yahoo! closed down their directory pages ending one of the defining services of the 1990s internet and showing how the internet has changed since the first dot com boom.

    The Yahoo! Directory was victim of a fundamental change in how we manage data as Google showed it wasn’t necessary to tag and label every piece of information before it could be used.

    Yahoo!’s Directory was a classic case of applying old methods to new technologies – in this case carrying out a librarian’s function of cataloguing and categorising every web page.

    One problem with that way of saving information is you need to know part of the answer before you can start searching; you need to have some idea of what category your query comes under or the name of the business or person you’re looking for.

    That pan was exploited by the Yellow Pages where licensees around the world harvested a healthy cash flow from businesses forced to list under a dozen different categories to make sure prospective customers found them.

    With the arrival of Google that way of structuring information came to an end as Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s smart algorithm showed it wasn’t necessary to pigeonhole information into highly structured databases.

    Unstructured data

    Rather than being structured, data is now becoming ‘unstructured’ and instead of employing an army of clerks to categorise information it’s now the job of computers to analyse that raw information and pick out what we need for our businesses and lives.

    As information pours into companies from increasingly diverse sources, a flood that’s becoming so great it’s being referred to as the ‘data lake’, it’s become clear the battle to structure data is lost.

    At the Splunk Conference in Las Vegas this week, the term ‘data lake’ is being used a lot as the company explains its technology for analysing business information.

    Splunk, along with services like IBM’s Watson and Tableau Software, is one the companies capitalising on businesses’ need to manage unstructured data by giving customers the tools to analyse their information without having first to shoehorn it into a database.

    “Thanks to Google we got to look at data a different way,” says Splunk’s CEO and Chairman Godfrey Sullivan. “You don’t have to know the question before you start the search.”

    Diving into the data lake

    It’s always dangerous applying simple labels to computing technologies but some terms, like ‘Cloud Computing’, don’t do a bad job of describing the principles involved and so it is with the ‘data lake’.

    Rather than a nice, orderly world where everything can be pigeonholed, we know have a fluid environment where it wouldn’t be possible to label everything even if we wanted to. A lake is a good description of the mass of data pouring into our lives.

    The web was an early example of having to manage that data lake and Google showed how it could be done. Now it’s the turn of other companies to apply the principles to business.

    Google fatally damaged both Yahoo! and the Yellow Pages, other companies that are stuck in the age of structured data are going to find the future equally dismal. Don’t drown in that data lake.

    Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Splunk

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  • A unicorn in the wine industry

    A unicorn in the wine industry

    “I was a closet tech guy until the 2000s,” says Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray in describing how digital technologies are changing the wine industry to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel.

    We’d spoken to Paul before about the forces changing the wine industry and visiting him in the Napa Valley gives some perspective on the opportunity the sector has in capturing the enthusiastic US wine market.

    Paul’s first venture into wine technology was with Inertia Beverage Group in 2002, “when I started Inertia I said ‘hey, there’s this thing called the internet’”, Mabray recalls. “They said ‘hey Paul you’re so cute, the internet won’t be around in a couple of years.’”

    The internet being a fad turned out not to be the case and Vintank evolved out of the rising importance of social media to industries like wineries.

    “Vintank is the mission control of social media, the one stop engagement platform for the wine industry,” says Paul of his social media listening service which he and co-founder James Jory established in 2009.

    Wine is lagging other industries in adopting social media and other digital technologies because it’s avoided many of the disruptions other sectors have had to deal with.

    “The wine industry is the last industry that hasn’t been changed by the internet,” Mabray says. “If you look at hotels with expedia.com or restaurants with Yelp or Open Table, that hasn’t happened yet.”

    A key facet of Vintank is its use of the freemium business model in offering a basic service for free; a common practice in the consumer (B2C) market but fairly rare in business (B2C) software services.

    “It’s a very different way to do freemium in B2B. Freemium in B2C you do mass adoption — that tiny fraction that pay makes it profitable because so many people have it.”

    “In the B2B freemium model what you have to do is distribute it for free and then you measure the usage; who is using it the most is where you send the sales team in.”

    For Mabray, we’re in early days of using digital media and the wine industry is one of the sectors that needs to adopt the technologies quickly: “The driver for me is this horribly complex problem that needs to be solved — the wine industry needs digital to survive.”

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  • The what and the why

    The what and the why

    “People are drowning in big data,” SurveyMonkey’s CEO Dave Goldberg says in the latest Decoding The New Economy video.

    Goldberg sees SurveyMonkey as bringing order to the world of big data in allowing organisations to put their information in context, “We want people to ask the right questions so we can get better data.”

    “Here’s a question I need to answer – how happy are my employees? what do customers think of my new product? What are my students doing at school this year?”

    Growing the survey industry

    One group that’s uncomfortable with the rise of SurveyMonkey, a privately listed company that’s worth $1.3 billion after a capital raising last year, are traditional market research firms who see the service as putting a powerful tool in experienced hands. Goldberg sees it as an opportunity for the market research industry.

    “We’re not replacing market researchers,” says Goldberg, “most people who come to SurveyMonkey haven’t used a market researcher before. It actually probably creates more demand for more sophisticated research down the line.”

    Goldberg himself isn’t from a market research background, instead he hails from the tech sector having set up LAUNCH in 1994, one of the early music streaming companies which he sold to Yahoo! in 2001 and became the company’s Director of Music.

    He left Yahoo1 in 2007 and spent two years in the venture capital industry before joining SurveyMonkey as CEO in 2009.

    Understanding the data

    From his experience, Goldberg sees understanding data the key business skill for today’s workers, firmly believing that kids should be taught statistic rather than coding.

    “Everyone is going to have to learn how to use data.” Says Goldberg, “someone was asking me the other day about sort of skills should we teach our kids to prepare them for the future and I think the thing we’re not doing enough of is teaching them how to use and analyze data.”

    To Goldberg we’re still in the early days of understanding how mobile and social media are going to change business with understanding data being one of the great opportunities.

    “Implicit data is really interesting but it tells you ‘what’, it doesn’t tell you the ‘why’, believes Goldberg. “We think what we do is the explicit side, we gotta ask people to get the ‘why.”

     

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