How Big Data Can Bring Big Sales / Insurance Industry See Vanlue in Analytics
How Big Data Can Bring Big Sales: The holy grail of retail has been to anticipate what consumers need even before they realize they need it. … Take printer cartridges, for example. There’s nothing worse than having to print a boarding pass with the taxi waiting outside and realizing you’re out of ink. Today, office supply retailers are able to track purchases of customers’ in-store credit cards and rewards cards and, based on purchase history, anticipate when a consumer might need to reorder a product. Marketing can send an email offer for printer cartridges as well as an accompanying promotion for paper, with a guaranteed delivery time of 24 hours. (ZDNet) http://goo.gl/grqOZ
Massachusetts Big Data Initiative: The initiative will lead to a grants-matching program for research and development into big data, create internships, and launch the Massachusetts Big Data Consortium. That group will bring together academia, industry, and government to foster new big data tools and technologies. And [Governor Deval] Patrick has tasked the Commonwealth to work with the consortium ‘to see how data analytics and applications can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs and services.’” (IT World) http://goo.gl/mr4x8
— “Chief among the initiatives is MIT’s new big data research center, known as bigdata(at)CSAIL, which will be run out of the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The center will focus on data collections that are too big for current information technology systems and will call on industry, government and academic leaders to develop techniques to process, share, store and manage the large amount of data.” (AP) http://goo.gl/TZJJo
Data Driven Knowledge vs. Expert Knowledge: “…data-driven knowledge, as its name suggests, is based upon data—usually, lots of it. A few decades ago, a series of statistical techniques emerged with the intent of uncovering data patterns typically hidden to the human eye. Given that we capture data in an ever-increasing volume today, these techniques are proving indispensable to extracting value from data, making processes repeatable and accurate.”
–“The movie Moneyball exemplifies that really well. In the movie, a group of experienced recruiting agents offer their first-hand knowledge and hunches on which players should be pursued to be part of the team. That is contrasted with a data-driven approach in which knowledge is extracted from the data already available for each player, and a team assembled from that. Although Moneyball chooses one type of knowledge over another, in most cases, we should and do use expert knowledge and data-driven knowledge together.” (Smart Data Collective) http://goo.gl/OGBcL
Salesforce Intros Radian6 Insights for Social Big Data: “Acquired roughly 18 months ago, Radian6 is now expanding with this new platform to tackle sentiments, intents, demographics and more key metrics found within the most commonly used social media channels. The idea is to then convey this information in a way that will better enable business customers to optimize their marketing, customer service, and lead techniques.” (ZDNet) http://goo.gl/OZSXI
Top 10 Categories For Big Data Sources and Mining Technologies: “Since every answer will be different, this means there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Success lies in recognizing the different types of Big Data sources, using the proper mining technologies to find the treasure within each type, and then integrating and presenting those new insights appropriately according to your unique goals, to enable your organization to make more effective steering decisions.” See the top 10 list here (ZDNet)
Insurance Industry See Vanlue in Analytics: “‘Insurers are investing in analytics, with the survey showing that North American insurers spend about nine percent of their IT budgets on data and analytics,’ says Mark Breading, partner with SMA. ‘What is even more interesting is that business units outside of IT are spending approximately the same amount. All together this represents almost $10 billion in spending each year.'” (Property Casualty 360) http://goo.gl/5X4si
