Imagine you return home one day and there in your living room is a talking horse. After the necessary introductions and asking where it came from, you fall into conversation. Many pleasant days of equine interaction follow as you enjoy the unexpected insights of your new companion. So much so that you forget the fact that it is a horse. Until the first time you invite a third party round...
Overlooking the obvious and forgetting it is potentially shocking can easily happen if you only keep company with people who hold similar views to yourself. When an outsider to the group joins in, they may be startled by your commonly-held assumptions.
That was the experience I had at the IDM’s Networking and Knowledge event covering the relationship between Marketing and IT. A valuable...
Is it a leap forward, helping the world to run smoothly on unprecedented levels of unstructured data? Or is big data a new buzzword used by sales and marketing to frighten organisations into purchasing multimillion dollar IT platforms?
History is certainly repeating itself. I’m old enough to remember the birth of CRM and how the industry was split between IT companies and their solve-it-all multimillion pound databases, plus the pointy heads claiming it was their domain. CRM turned out to be data-driven marketing using IT as a tool and eventually became the buzzword of the 90s.
With this in mind, it’s vital that we monitor how the big data debate develops and how it will impact on our industry. But there are some cautionary steps that must be taken. Some companies are...
Much has been made of the fact that a new Facebook test is charging £10.68 to send a message to diver Tom Daley (if you are not already a friend of his on the network, that is.) If you want to send a message to somebody you just don’t know, but who is not a celebrity, it will cost you 71p. Others in your so-called social circle - friends of your friends - can still be contacted for free.
One in ten UK users of the social network are being given the chance to trial the new service, called Priority Messages. Those who continue to send messages to people they do not know - but who choose not to pay for the privilege - will only reach a “less visible” inbox.
The intelligence behind the service is a black box algorithm that calculates the value of each...
Oppenheimer understood the dilemma. The science says it is possible. But what about the ethics of the decision to use that science and its potentially unforeseen consequences? He spent the rest of his life post Hiroshima and Nagasaki considering whether he had made the right choice.
Digital marketers do not face anything like the same degree of danger from their decisions. Yet there is a genuine possibility that what happens in the realm of social media analytics could either significantly enrich the quality of digital marketing - or potentially destroy it completely.
Predicting personality traits from social media data is a core objective for many digital marketers. Open source data provides the raw materials to understand individuals who are otherwise anonymous online -...
So, did Commissioner Reding show her softer side when the Justice Council discussed the Data Protection Regulation proposals on 8th March? UK media got excited about the prospect of her giving ground in the face of pressure to make changes. Having read her intervention during the debate, all I can say is, if you think this is soft, what do you use for toilet paper?
Firstly, on the timetable for passing the Regulation. The outside hope for those opposed to the proposals is for the schedule to slip until the Lithuanians take over the presidency of the European Union. (Or even better, that it drags on for a further six months until Greece is in charge, by when there will be little chance of it becoming law.)
According to Reding, “all the elements are falling into place to make...
Cheltenham Festival has just proven you can stage a great sporting event despite adverse weather conditions - and even produce a record-making result. For jumps fans and festival goers alike, it was a fitting start to the horse-racing season (unless you backed the wrong runner, that is...)
Bookies will have been hoping you did, of course. But more importantly, they will have been putting a lot of effort into ensuring you could get your bet on in the first place. A few weeks before the event, I was talking to somebody from the e-commerce team at one of the major betting companies. He explained how the business was getting as many servers as possible in place to support its website to ensure it did not crash under the weight of demand.
Availability is one of the key metrics used by...
Recent stories circulating around the litigation between Genesco and Visa over PCI compliance and a data breach shine a spotlight on some of the grey areas in PCI DSS. At the same time, they spotlight how retailers may misinterpret PCI DSS and what it means to them in reducing risk. The bottom line is that retailers can easily avoid the pain of a breach – and get rid of the PCI DSS challenge in a major way.
So what’s underneath this case hitting the front pages of the popular media? There are some unusual and conflicting issues around PCI compliance as reported so far, so it’s worth breaking this down for further investigation. As this case unfolds, we will no doubt learn more about what actually happened in this unfortunate data breach, but already there are lessons to...
Ripples of excitement have been spreading in the wake of an article in the Financial Times on 6th March that the Data Protection Regulation proposals will be “softened”. It quoted a memo by the Irish presidency noting the dissenting voices that have been raised and claimed a majority of countries were now opposed to the original draft.
The timing of the news item was significant - on Friday, 8th March the European Commission’s Justice Council is meeting with the DPR at the top of its agenda. Headed by Viviane Reding, the architect of the proposals, it is a key moment in the considerations by the Commission on how to respond to the pressure coming from all sides for changes.
While the FT report reflected a very US-oriented view from business about the challenges which...
Apple and Microsoft get it. Google doesn’t. That line-up is surprising, yet it reflects recent decisions made by each of those mega-brands which illustrate an important shift in how business is viewing data. Any other company thinking about the balance between privacy and profit would do well to take a close look.
So what did they do? Apple decided to ship the iPhone with its Safari web browser set to “Do Not Track” as the default. That means handsets will refuse cookies unless users change their preferences. Microsoft put the latest version of Internet Explorer into the market with exactly the same default.
There is no legislation in America which required them to do this. Although Do Not Track is one of the mechanisms being promoted as a way for consumers to manage...
Cloud-hosted apps are levelling the playing field by giving small and medium-sized companies access to capabilities that were previously only available to large enterprises. Those cloud apps create, process and store data owned by your company, just as your internal legacy IT systems do.
And therein lies the divide: data stored in the cloud is separated from data stored in your company’s legacy IT systems. Bridging the divide will be a necessary challenge for any business in future. Why? Because companies will not be able to leverage the value held in their data, or to see the whole picture that their data gives them, unless all their data is brought together in one place.
Typically, the cloud apps that have been adopted first have been tools that support secondary or tertiary...
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