Econophysicists and the Swans

Ultrafast Trades Trigger Black Swan Events Every Day, Say Econophysicists The US financial markets have suffered over 18,000 extreme price changes caused by ultrafast trading, according to a new study of market data between 2006 and 2011  .... "

E-Books Changing the Book Industry

It is obvious that it is, but how?  In E-Commerce Times.  An author speaks:  " ... Just as the iPod changed the music industry a decade ago, e-books are changing the publishing world right now. The rule book is being rewritten, and lessons in success and failure are coming from new and unexpected places... " 

Shiny Packages

Dan Ariely on the effect of packaging design on choice.  Good exploration based on eye tracking research.  " ... when making such simple choices, consumers can spot and choose most of their preferred items in as little as a third of a second. Granted, the visual saliency bias may, in some instances, lead us to make suboptimal choices, but that may be a small price to pay in order to go about our daily lives making rapid, mostly good, decisions. After all, who wants to spend an entire afternoon in front of the store shelf choosing between Snickers and Sour Skittles? ... "

Choosing Relevant KPI's

A slide show in Information Management that has some useful information.  Though this contains useful information, it is also an example of how the style of information delivery can get in the way of the content.  I guess making this a slide show with lots of pictures allows for more advertising impressions.  Another invasion of the infographic.  For me it makes me what to exit quickly.

Activating Brand Advocates

In Chief Marketer. Thoughts on how to activate your brand advocates. For years I saw apathy to this idea in the enterprise.  No more.

Packaging Design

Thoughts on packaging design from a recent conference.  " ... "Packaging is the number one medium to communicate the brand," said Michael Okoroafor, VP global packaging at H.J. Heinz. ... " 

Emergence of Whorfian Economists?

I have always been intrigued by the Whorfian hypothesis.  The idea that different human languages strongly affect our thinking styles, communication capabilities and even world view.  Now we have the notion of a Whorfian economist,  previously unknown to me.  The linguists that comment on it, in academic style,  think the whole thing needs to be peer reviewed.

Democratization of Data Science

As I start a study of the democratization of data, and of the Wolfram Alpha Pro release I also see an on-point post by Stephen Wolfram: Launching a Democratization of Data Science.   Well put with good examples.   It is about data and math, but also about organizing human language.   Also nicely attempted  by Tableau Public, which embraces free, public visualization.

You have to have the data you want to transform into insight.  Then you have to have a means of transforming it that is as easy as possible to understand to create an initial visual, plus the means to interact cleanly and obviously with the results.   Taking that a step further, you need the math to manipulate things.

Starting with the simplest transformations, then equations, then statistics and the models beyond.    And all that needs to be backed by enough documentation to help you succeed with minimum numeric literacy.  I like the direction of all of this.

Speaking Out

In the WSJ:   Why people fail to speak up in various contexts.  We examined this in focus group settings.   I see it in myself in very specific group contexts.  Another reason for better understanding of people unconscious reactions.  Good article.

Wolfram Alpha Pro Announced

The full announcement on Wolfram Alpha Pro.   Quite impressive detail.  A useful front end to business analytics?  Plan to take a much closer look and report back.

Smarter Energy Usage

IBM report on smarter energy usage:  " .. . From our prior surveys, we know consumers like the idea of having cleaner power options, and more control and efficiency at their fingertips. But have they assumed these benefits would be accessible immediately once a smart meter was attached to their homes? Do they have sufficient understanding that, in order to optimize these benefits, changes in energy consumption patterns and more permission to access information about that energy usage might be required? ... " 

Wolfram Alpha Pro

Wolfram Alpha Pro is here, and only $4 a month.  In Technology Review.  Democratizing data analaysis in some new ways, both structured and unstructured.  It has been a long time since I have looked at Alpha. When I did I was quite impressed,  making it easy to do simple analytic things based on public data.   Will take another look to  see how it has evolved.   More in depth look.

Finding out Where an Image Originated

Wired provides a good how-to that details some services that allow you to find out where an image on the web originated.     Useful to have at hand.

Brand Promise Health Check

All about brand promise, aka brand equity.  Does it still make sense? " .. Most people want to know how to determine if they have a strong and compelling promise, and once they’ve decided on a specific promise they want to know how to ensure they are communicating it well.... " 

Trends shaping Business Intelligence and Analytics

In TDWI:   5 Macro Trends Shaping next Generation BI and Analytics.    Useful thoughts.  " .. Although the business intelligence (BI) market is growing again at a lightning-fast pace, it has so far failed to deliver a great experience to the designers and consumers of modern analytics. Yesterday's BI solutions are being displaced by "agile" providers that move beyond basic reporting, dashboards, and ad hoc analysis. Yesterday's BI stack (e.g., the layering of OLAP engines, ETL technologies, and data warehouse solutions) is completely incapable of solving modern analytical challenges ... " 

I do not agree here, things could clearly be done in a much better way, but I think this is still a matter of wrapping IT methodologies around the appropriate technologies.

Looking at Text

Bill Inmon takes a general, non technical look at the problem of dealing with textual data.  It remains a more difficult form of data to deal with. He introduces the use of ETL to convert text to relational databases. His introduction:

" .. It is stated that in most corporations 80% of the data is textual. In some corporations – insurance companies, for one – that ratio may be low. And for a long time it has been held that textual data cannot be manipulated by a computer. Textual data is notoriously non repetitive, and non-repetitive data simply does not fit well into a standard database management system. Database management systems are built for data with a structure that repeats itself over and over .. "

More on Hand Scanning at Fresh & Easy

From the comments, Clive Black links to a more detailed article on the Fresh & Easy Scanning, including some pictures.  Based on the pictures shown, there were the same designs that we orginally tested in out lab for Motorola.

Hand Scanning at Fresh & Easy

More on another test of shopper barcode hand scanning to improve the checkout process and provide targeted promotions.    Note this uses dedicated devices rather than smartphones.    The same system was tested at AHold.  We experimented with related systems.  Here at Fresh & Easy, a subsidiary of Tesco in the US.

From the comments, more details.

Turning iPhones into Microscopes

In GigaOm.   Or at least displays for real microscopes.  Another example of sensors linked to mobile devices.  We will continue to see more of these.  Its adding the analysis and sharing piece that will make this interesting to health data applications.

Headline: Value Drives Loyalty

In Mediapost: Surprise, consumer experience, especially 'delight' drives loyalty.  Nothing very new here, but the specifics of the categories and data are interesting.  In particular that emotional values continue to increase in importance.  " ... More than ever, the core drivers of brand loyalty are emotional rather than rational. That’s the takeaway from the 2012 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index (CLEI), which marks the survey’s 16th year. While emotional engagement factors have become more critical each year, the influence of two core, overarching components rose markedly in 2012: the brand’s “values” and the consumer’s brand “experience.” ... '