Assistants Using Wikipedia

A conversation at Wikipediocracy discusses how personal assistants like Alexa, Google Home and Siri use and attribute (or not)  knowledge from the Wikipedia.   Back to the complicated world of licenses and copyrights.   Was also re-introduced to the considerable undercurrent of WP authors complaining about how their work is used.

Google Reader Agreement Update

Have followed Google book scanning project for years.  Why not create the universal library? Full text would be available free only for the huge numbers of books that are out of print.   Google Books exists today.  https://books.google.com/   The agreement between authors and Google,  looked like it had been worked out as class action.   Has been stalled by Google's competitors and Antitrust law.

Now it seems that the whole idea is awaiting the amending of copyright law.  With little likelihood of proceeding.  50-60 Petabytes on disk and 25 million volumes,  content inaccessible to anyone.   The Atlantic article linked to below has considerable detail on the status of this.  But probably not enough for lawyers.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” .... ' 

Google Books Copyright Case

Success, I think for broad knowledge access.  Long followed.  In the CACM:

Fair Use Prevails as Supreme Court Rejects Google Books Copyright Case
The Supreme Court on Monday declined (PDF) to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming Google's scanning of their books amounts to wanton copyright infringement and not fair use.  .... " 

On Fair Use

In TechDirt:   Good extended piece on recent hearings on copyright and fair use.  A concept often made use of in this blog.   " .... It is twenty years since the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its landmark decision on copyright law and the defence of fair use in the "Pretty Woman" case, Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music. Inspired by the jurisprudence of Justice Story and Justice Leval, Justice Souter developed a doctrine of transformative use. His Honour stressed that "the goal of copyright, to promote science and the arts, is generally furthered by the creation of transformative works." Justice Souter observed: "Such works thus lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine's guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright, and the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use."  ... " 

A Look at SAP Lava

From a SAP community blog. Was involved fairy early on with SAP's Business Objects data visualization play.  We approved it for use in the enterprise.  New is a redesign of SAP Lava that addresses visualization to support better design.  Now examining for an application.  " ... Project LAVA was inspired by visualization experts such as Stephen Few, David McCandless and Prof. Hichert but goes beyond the academic through adaptations to SAP needs and the frontiers of interactivity, multi-device distribution, and high system performance. .. " 

Google Wins Book Scanning Case

In GigaOM: A long term suit against Google scanning and storing books.  Have followed this for a long time.  Finally decided in Google's favor, apparently using fair use arguments. " ... Google has won a resounding victory in its eight-year copyright battle with the Authors Guild over the search giant’s controversial decision to scan more than 20 million books from libraries and make them available on the internet  ... " 

Kroger Knows Your Shopping Habits

In Forbes:  Good overview of what is fairly common practice in the use of analytics in retail/CPG today. " ... Working with dunnhumby, the customer data specialist which so impressed the UK’s Tesco that the grocer bought the firm, Kroger tracks each customer as an individual.... 

Those quarterly mailers contain 12 coupons specific to an individual household and are carefully designed. The upper left may offer a slightly esoteric product like a special cheese, while Tide may be lower on the flyer and the last two coupons might be experiments, such as adjacent products — a purchaser of baby food who doesn’t buy diapers might see an offer for diapers, for example. Eighty percent of dunnhumby’s effort is focused on what it knows about a customer and 20 percent is focused on discovery. ... " 

How Fast is Broadband Fast

Its fairly rare that I need broadband inside a project.  Yes it is certainly useful for general browsing, or up and downloading files.  This Readwrite Web article is about a comparison of speeds.   A recent project made me think about how to refresh points from a distant algorithm on a screen.  Which made me consider how fast such a network could be refreshed for a simulation.    It is still far slower than a video refresh needs to be.

IDEO Design Apps

I had heard of this before and reported on it, but never experimented with it. This is a reminder to give it a try.  We used IDEO for consumer creativity lab development and our allied innovation centers.    " ...   Napkin Labs Turns IDEO's Innovation Process Into Web Apps For All An off-the-shelf crowdsourcing platform will let companies create "challenges" to gather insight, and guide users with a series of design-focused exercises. ... " . 

" ... While the power of a design thinking app store has yet to be proven -- right now they have brainstorm, discuss, refine, but look for updates in a few weeks -- Gibson gave some hints for the kinds of tools they hope to make, which sound promising from a brand standpoint. "Any type of research method for how to draw out insights from people in a non-obvious way is fair game for our exploration." ... " 

Google Glass Alternative in Japan

And yet more in the world of wearable devices, this from Japan: At least in its prototype this looks fairly clunky .... Note too that these are being billed as augmented reality implementations,  while Google Glass is positioned more as a wearable display.

" ... This week at Ceatec, a technology trade show in Tokyo, Docomo showed off so-called wearable technology that, among other things, provides nearly instant translation of written texts. The device, called Intelligent Glass, is Docomo’s answer to Google Glass — eyewear that uses technology to perform a variety of tasks.

Slip on the device and look at text and it can be translated into a different language before your eyes. The device also performs face recognition, providing a sort of virtual business card service for people whose names you struggle to remember. ... " 

Scoping the Digital Divide

Pew Statistics on US access to the Internet.  20% of US adults have no access. But is that fair since most US libraries do have public connections to the net?  Plus lots more statistics.

" ... The proliferation of smartphones has helped narrow the digital divide because more consumers have obtained mobile Internet access, according to a report from Pew Research Center that says 10% of Americans rely on such devices as their sole connection to the Web. The survey found that despite the new options for access, 30% of Americans remain unconnected to the Internet at home, although Pew suggested this may be by choice for many .. " 

Retailers Using Tweet Chats

In Supermarket News:  A view of how grocers are using and can use tweet chats.  Fairly obvious, but a good review of a retail strategy.  Not much here about its use to promote private label, where I think it can provide value.

Building Dashboards in R

Have not tried this in my recent R exploration, but looks to be very useful.  Be aware this is fairly technical. 

Marketing Engineering Revisited

I am reposting my review of this book below.  First because I had a need to take another look at it.  Second because it now has a second edition, which I have not looked at yet.  Love it as a mix of quant and qualitative methods.  ....  Wish I had the excel sheets that implement the methods described. 

As part of a practice of applied marketing meeting at Wharton I received a copy of the new book: Principles of Marketing Engineering, by Gary L. Lilien et al. Marketing engineering? Could there be such a thing? At least it's not marketing physics. First I admit though I have taken many engineering and physics courses I have never taken a marketing course. I have learned a bit of the quantitative aspects of the field over the years here.

I had a chance to read and overview a good portion of this book, and to my surprise it does a good job of positioning marketing as quantitative engineering in a meager 192 pages. Each topic: response models, market share, customer value, segmentation, perceptual maps, forecasting, conjoint, new product development, marketing mix and promotions are carefully positioned with only a minimum number of equations and some real-world examples.

Surprising, too is that this book is readable, I managed a third of it on a long flight. I don't think it can be complete given its size, but it positions a lot of fairly new techniques well. I would like to go through this book with a knowledgeable P&G person to see if, and how we use each technique, and have altered it to our own requirements. Much recommended for someone who wants a readable introduction to modern quantitative marketing methods. Even the analysis of Web 2.0 topics like blogs are mentioned, and the use of advanced simulation techniques to iteratively test proposed solutions.

The primary author Gary Lilien of Penn State, is one of the well-known deans of marketing science. He has a consultancy (who doesn't) called DecisonPro. They sell a number of marketing analysis frameworks that work in Excel, free for evaluation, have not tried any of them.

Involve Employees in Strategic Planning

Fairly obvious.    Well worth thinking through.   Involve your employees as early as possible.   Use analytic methods to understand the implications for  decisions. " ...  The failure is in the strategic planning process itself. Senior leaders spend copious amounts of time creating the strategic plan, often in isolation. When they return with a plan in hand, they double-down on their time expenditure, seeking “buy-in” from their team. In other words, the strategy is foisted upon employees, who are then tasked with implementing it — without understanding the nuances and debates that went into its creation. ... " 

Networked Things

A good overview of the current state of the network of things.  Which points back to our own experiments with networked refrigerators, in that nexus of the modern home, the kitchen.   A talk by Bill Joy inspired us to take closer look.   Now it seems the future is very close.  " ... Well over a decade ago, Bill Joy was mocked for talking about a future that included network-enabled refrigerators. That was both unfair and unproductive, and since then, I’ve been interested in a related game: take the most unlikely household product you can and figure out what you could do if it were network-enabled. That might have been a futuristic exercise in 1998, but the future is here. Now. And there are few reasons we couldn’t have had that future back then, if we’d have the vision.... " 

Software Patents

In the WSJ:  On software patents.   A survey and debate on the topic.   The patent system, like the copyright laws, are broken and impede innovation.   Process within software perhaps, but the system is heavily gamed and poorly managed.

Der Spiegel on Numbers

Der Spiegel, German news magazine, has a readable piece, in English, on big data and its use for forward looking predictive analytics.   Read it here.  Fairly good introduction.

Managing Projects Outside Core Mission

Vic Uzumeri wrote about an interesting idea:

I've been working on a project management concept for organizations that need periodic "side projects", but have difficulty organizing and managing activities outside their core mission. They may be overloaded. They may lack specialized skills. They may be fully consumed with a big initiative. They may have a tight budget. I am convinced that there is a new way to handle this type of work. You can see the problem statement in this Prezi:  http://tinyurl.com/cnpmj37
It connects to a second Prezi that outlines a solution: http://tinyurl.com/cytybh8

I am curious what you think. Does this concept make sense? If not, what are the holes? If it does make sense, I am looking for business contacts who have the problem and might welcome a solution. A start-up business? An established business struggling to branch out? An overworked, understaffed business facing new challenges? If you can't use it personally, do you know someone who might?

If you have read this far, I thank you. I hope you will watch the Prezi's. They are fairly short and pretty snappy. If you haven't seen a Prezi before, that may be interesting in itself.... 
Contact: vic.uzumeri@ipov.net

National Digital Public Library

Just launched.  A new open source library of US resources has launched in Beta.  The DPLA.  Some have been talking about how decrepit US copyright laws will influence this effort.  " ... Two years in the making, the DLPA will make available to the public 2.4 million records at its launch, including electronic images, video and audio from America's libraries, archives and museums. It also makes many scientific records available.... "  On twitter as @DPLA