One man’s trash is another man’s big data

In 2012 the Senseable City Lab, part of MIT, conducted an experiment called Trash Track to see just what happens when someone takes out the trash. By attaching transmitters to over 3,000 pieces of rubbish they were able to track where that item went, whether they went to the correct recycling facility or not, and how far […]

Snowden told us things we should have already known

Snowden’s stories of a far-reaching NSA shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone working with Big Data. We’re entering a new age and the technology and techniques of the past won’t hold up. Just reading the headlines is all the evidence we need. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone was being monitored by […]

New ways to architect for the Internet of Things

In a previous post, Preparing for the internet of things, extreme scalability, real-time event handling, and time-to-insight were given as the three biggest challenges for Big Data and the Internet of Things. These are challenges that can be addressed now if companies are ready to invest and be proactive about what’s surely coming in the next […]

Customer loyalty is a bird in the hand

We’ve heard the phrase, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” since childhood. We were being told by wiser adults to value what we have over the things we don’t. Customer engagement has the same lesson at its heart: We can more easily achieve our goals by creating better, more loyal […]

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face

I attended The Big Data Conference in Chicago these past three days and noticed common threads consistently woven through each session and side conversation. First, we’re beyond the questions about what big data means (finally…I heard no V’s for three days). Instead, the conversations centered on where to get started, what approach to take, and […]

Our devices are going to coach us

Adidas announced at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2013 Conference that they’re creating a smartwatch that can provide location, speed, heart rate and serve music during workouts. That’s interesting, sure, but there’s something remarkable they’re adding: coaching. An athlete wearing the Adidas smartwatch will provide coaching through the watch’s screen or headphones. This is certainly a glimpse of what’s […]

BPM and the Internet of Everything

Peter Schooff, writing on BPM.com, asked, “How will the Internet of Everything impact BPM?” This is a great and timely question because the Internet of Everything, the growth and convergence of people, process, data and things on the Internet, is a phrase that’s popping up everywhere. This week at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Paul LaBelle […]

Reading tomorrow’s newspaper today

What’s the value of yesterday’s newspaper? Not much. What’s the value of tomorrow’s? Priceless. We’re fast moving into a world where tomorrow’s news is accessible today. The chips light When I flew for the US Navy back in the 90’s, I was fascinated by something we called the “chips light.” The chips light was the […]

3 reasons Google Glass is inevitable

Even when Google Glass was  only a rumor, there were questions about whether it was a glimpse of the future or just a gimmick. It was enough of a question that it made the Weekend Update on Saturday Night LIve as the cast ridiculed the device (it was very, very funny). It was clear that […]

Big Data calls for the rise of the citizen developer

John Skovron has over twenty years of experience working with systems that run mega scale grid computing solutions. These are the systems used primarily at financial trading shops that are able to compute against loosely coupled, high variety and distributed data that most of the world wouldn’t ever consider as possible. When he slows down […]

Analytics is the marriage of geek and (business) jock

Harvard Business Review published a really interesting interview with Nate Silver this week. Silver was asked about how to approach analytics based on several different points of entry to the field. One of the best questions involved how an organization should deploy ‘stat heads’, Silver’s term for data analytics experts. The interviewer wanted to know if […]

Big Data’s dark corners

Fabless Labs CEO Piyush Govil isn’t the loudest voice in the room but is often the smartest when it comes to Big Data. His work with VinSpin, an app that provides a new way to choose wine, was written up last year in the Harvard Business Review as an example of bringing Big Data to the […]

How to do data science without a data scientist

We’ve all heard by now that data scientists are in short supply. According to the TIBCO Spotfire Trends and Outliers Blog, this isn’t a problem that’s going away any time soon: According to McKinsey Global Institute, the US could be facing a shortage of 190,000 people with analytical skills by 2018. McKinsey isn’t the only organization […]

Advanced analytics doesn’t have to be so hard

Bruno Aziza describes himself as a “data geek.” From his roles with Microsoft and BusinessObjects/SAP to SiSense, he has been on a mission to bring advanced analytics to the business user for over a decade. We first met Bruno when he spoke at Interop’s Big Data Workshop in Las Vegas last May and shared thoughts on […]

The surprising gift that comes with the iPhone 5S

Whether we realized it or not (they didn’t make a big deal out of it), Apple launched the iPhone 5S with a special gift for the consumer and business alike. People spent the night on sidewalks to buy the next incarnation of Apple’s red-hot smartphone without even realizing it. Before I saw what it was, […]

The intersection of marketing and Big Data

There are few topics hotter than Big Data. There are few professions being transformed by Big Data more than marketing, with the conversation rapidly shifting to customer engagement through loyalty programs; these include mobile, social, and other channel data as part of an omni-channel loyalty platform. Just as quickly as we digitize our world, we […]