Category: Big Data

Article on Big Data in Sunday Telegraph’s Business Technology supplement

FireShot Screen Capture #242 - 'Richard Stacy_ The algorithm is the most powerful tool of social control since the sword - Business Technology' - biztechreport_co_uk_2013_07_richard-stacy-the-algorithm-is-most-powerfHere is a small article on Big Data I wrote as the opening shot in the Business Technology supplement published yesterday in the Sunday Telegraph.

Big Data is certainly a big buzzword, but there are those out there who say Big Data is nothing really new.  As a rule I find these people have careers based on what we can now call small data (or perhaps that should be Small Data).  Big Data certainly is something new, and there are two reasons why it is aptly named.

First, Big Data is really big.  It is not just a bit larger than the data we had before, nor is it just lots more of small data.  Big Data is defined by the fact that it is so large, it cannot be handled by the tools or techniques conventionally associated with data analysis (one of the reasons its rubs small data people up the wrong way) and this also means we can use it to do things which were not possible when all we had was small data. Continue reading

Big Data: gold mine or fool’s gold?

(This was published in the print edition of Digital Age in Turkey earlier this month.  It also appeared as few days later as a Digital Age blog post – if you want to read it in Turkish!)

There is a lot of buzz about the concept of Big Data.  But it is really the potential gold mine that some are suggesting?

Back in July I was at the Marketing Week Live show in London participating in an event organised by IBM.  We were looking at data and consumer relationships within fashion retailing, using high-end women’s shoes as the example.  The big issue fashion retailers face is that everyone walking into a store is a stranger.  The sales assistants know nothing about them, other than what they can deduce from their appearance and any conversation they can then strike-up.  We therefore asked ourselves the question: how might it be possible to use data from the digital environment so that potential customers were no longer strangers?  How might we be able to create a digital relationship so that when a potential consumer walks through the door the sales assistant would be able call-up this relationship history and pull this on-line contact into an off-line sales conversation?  One of the IBM analysts put it thus, “we need to be able to identify the exact moment a potential consumer starts to think about buying a new pair of shoes, identified from conversations they have with their friends in social networks and be able to then join those conversations”.

Welcome to the world of Big Data.  In the world of Big Data it is theoretically possible to know as much about your consumers as they know about themselves: to be able to anticipate their every thought and desire and be there with an appropriate product or response.  It is a world of ultimate targeting and profiling Continue reading