Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: big data

  • Evolving into a data centric company

    Evolving into a data centric company

    I’m currently at the HP Enterprise Seize the Data roadshow in Singapore where the recently split company is showing off its range of data analytics tools.

    Like companies such as IBM and Google, HPE are looking to make money out of data feeds and analytics with a key part being a platform for developers to create applications.

    In launching their Haven OnDemand service, HPE are entering a crowded field with IBM, Salesforce, AWS and Splunk – among others – offering similar products. What compelling difference HPE will add to the field will be something I’ll be asking the company’s executive later.

    One of the other services, HP Vertica, looks running data analytics against structured and ‘semi-structured’ sources. Again this is a field where other companies are well established and have an advantage in being able to examine unstructured data.

    The overwhelming question though is how big, and lucrative, the market is for these data products. It’s not clear exactly how all of these companies are going to monetize these services and, should they be able to, their profitability.

    As a company finding its feet less than a year after being split in two with the added problem of seeing its core server hardware business being eroded, HP Enterprise is realigning its business around data analytics and cloud services.

    The challenge for the company is differentiating itself and providing competitive products in these markets, this will be a tough challenge.

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  • Guessing ethnic affinity

    Guessing ethnic affinity

    What’s your ethnic affinity? Apparently Facebook thinks its algorithm can guess your race based upon the nature of your posts.

    This application is an interesting, and dangerous, development although it shouldn’t be expected that it’s any more accurate than the plethora of ‘guess your age/nationality/star sign’ sites that trawl through Facebook pages.

    Guessing your race is something clumsy and obvious but its clear that services like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook have a mass of data on each of their millions of users that enables them to crunch some big numbers and come up with all manner of conclusions.

    Some of these will be useful to governments, marketers and businesses and in some cases it may lead to unforeseen consequences.

    The truth may lie in the data but if we don’t understand the questions we’re asking, we risk creating a whole new range of problems.

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  • Actuaries and the future of Public Relations

    Actuaries and the future of Public Relations

    One of the truisms of modern industry is we’re going to need more workers with data skills. Could it be actuaries will be the profession of the information age.

    Much of the focus around how companies will deal with an information rich age come down to the need for ‘data scientists’, those with a combination of statistical, analytical and coding skills will be required to coax insights out of complex and rapidly changing data sets.

    At a Future of PR meetup in Sydney earlier this week, one of the panellists raised the possibility that tomorrow’s most valued agency employees will be actuaries as data analytics comes to dominate the industry.

    That boring old actuaries – one particularly cruel joke is atuaries are accountants who failed the personality test – could be the hottest profession in the sexy PR industry is quite a delicious scenario.

    Should that turn out to be the case though, it won’t just be the PR industry chasing actuaries, almost every industry is going to demanding the same set of skills.

    In a strange way it could be the staid professions of today that are the exciting jobs of tomorrow, we’ll reserve judgement on the actuaries though.

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  • Redefining sports media

    Redefining sports media

    Over the last 50 years the relationship between professional sport and television broadcasters has been defined by broadcasting rights. Like most other media business models that relationship is now under threat.

    Touring the Australian Open tennis tournament this week, it was striking how the relationship between sports organisations and broadcasters has changed as the internet changes distribution models and data starts to become a valuable asset in itself.

    A tour of the data infrastructure behind the tournament as a guest of sponsor and service provider IBM showed how sporting organisations are hoping to use data to improve their fans’ experience and add value for sponsors and competitors.

    Last year the Australian Open collected 23 Terabytes of data, a 136 percent increase on 2014, which the organisers distribute on their MatchCenter web platform along with analysis through their Slamtracker system.

    Using IBMs Bluemix development platform and the company’s Watson artificial intelligence service, the Australian Open website analyses factors ranging from the audience’s social media sentiment through to predicting competitors’ performance based on historical data.

    This wealth of data gives the event organisers a great platform to engage with statistics hungry fans and it was notable when talking to the Australian Open staffers how they now see the television broadcasters as much as their competitors as their partners.

    When coupled with the changes to broadcasting rights – like most sports organisations the Australian Open has moved to the model pioneered by Major League Baseball of providing their own video feeds rather than engaging a host broadcaster to record the events and distribute the video – this has put the television and pay-TV networks in a far less powerful position.

    For the sports organisations those broadcast rights deals are still by far the most lucrative income stream they have but the days of the host broadcasters holding power over the events are slipping away.

    One telling statistic was the shift to mobile platforms. Kim Trengrove, the digital manager for Tennis Australia, pointed out how in 2015 online traffic was split equally between desktop and mobile use while in 2016 it was appearing to be 60% mobile. That change in itself has major ramifications for the market.

    In the future as the data becomes more valuable and the video feeds can be distributed across web browsers and even artificial reality headsets, the late Twentieth Century broadcast model becomes even more tenuous.

    For the television networks it means their power and income is reduced while those collecting, processing and distributing data become more important. However it may be the software companies managing the information aren’t able to pay the immense sums the broadcasters have been able to offer for the last fifty years.

    One thing a tour of the Australian Open did show was how business model of professional sports is dramatically changing. A data driven world is going to be very different to that of the last fifty years.

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  • Calculating the threat score

    Calculating the threat score

    Forget credit scores, police are now running Threat Scores reports the Washington Post.

    This isn’t surprising given the risks involved for officers attending an incident or detaining a suspect and now with treasure troves of data available, police forces and public safety agencies are able to evaluate what threats are present.

    However there are real concerns about these databases and tools, particularly in how the algorithm determines what a ‘threat’ is. As the Washington Post explains one package will give a military veteran a greater risk rating as they are more likely than the general population to be suffering post traumatic stress disorder.

    In promotional materials, Intrado writes that Beware could reveal that the resident of a particular address was a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had criminal convictions for assault and had posted worrisome messages about his battle experiences on social media. The “big data” that has transformed marketing and other industries has now come to law enforcement.

    The marketing industry’s use of Big Data has, and continues to be, problematic from a privacy and security point of view, that public agencies are using the same tools raises bigger concern.

    Over time, we’re going to need rigorous supervision of how these tools are used. The stakes for individual citizens are high.

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