Posts filed under ‘Uncategorized’
Even Geniuses Pass Away
Today, I got the sad news that a dear friend and an early contributor to PatternBuilders passed away.
Andrew (Andrei) Leman was a gruff, kind and generous man who will be deeply missed. Andrei was also a very talented mathematician and software engineer who created some of the fundamental theories around the mathematics of graphs. His papers on that subject are still heavily cited.
More importantly Andrei was a loving husband to his wife Elena and a great friend and mentor to many, many folks.
He will be missed but his work and the respect and affection he engendered will endure.
пухом my friend.
Data Security Reminder: Strong Passwords are Your Best Line of Defense
Yes, I am still working on my second post about the McKinsey Report which focuses on the U.S. health care system and what we can do to “analytically” fix it but I am also, as always, keeping an eye out for interesting news items to pass along. In particular, a WSJ blog post about data security (yours and mine) caught my eye because it reminded me of the importance of passwords.
As you may remember, a while back the WJS “broke” a story that smartphone apps are hijacking our personal information. Well, according to the WSJ, this is still the case:
“Computer security firm viaForensics has found the applications for top Internet companies LinkedIn Corp., Netflix, Inc., Foursquare and Square, Inc. stored various forms of users’ personal data in plain text on a mobile device, putting sensitive information at risk to computer criminals… The Android applications of LinkedIn, Netflix and Foursquare stored user names and passwords in unencrypted form on their Google-powered devices. Storing that data in plain text violates a commonly accepted best practice in computer security. Since many people tend to use the same usernames and passwords across any number of sites, the failing could help hackers penetrate other accounts… ViaForensics also found the iPhone version of Square’s mobile payments app exposed a user’s transaction amount history and the most recent digital signature of a person who signed an electronic receipt on the app.”
Data Privacy: Facebook, Facial Recognition, and Opting Out
I have been neck deep in the McKinsey Report working on my post about big data and the enormous impact it could have on the U.S. health care system when the whole Facebook facial recognition brouhaha came across my digital desktop. Followed by lots and lots of emails and calls from friends and family asking me what it means and what the heck (stronger words were used, but I like to keep my posts PG) they were supposed to do to TURN IT OFF. So, without further ado, my thoughts on this new great (sarcasm on) opt-out feature from Facebook as well as what appears to be a disturbing industry trend towards opt-out privacy settings.
First, full disclosure to any new readers: I do not have a Facebook page. Long story short: I decided long ago and far away to keep my personal life off the Internet (as much as possible). Yes, I am in marketing and yes, I love social media, but I live my professional life pretty much for everyone to see and I like to keep my private life, well, private. I also believe that everyone has the right to keep their private lives private (time to plug our book on “Privacy and Big Data”) no matter what those pesky personal information data collectors and users, like Facebook or Google or Amazon or fill-in-the-blank, would like you to do. (more…)
Reflections on pii2011 and MongoSF and a Shout Out to Rackspace for Great Customer Service
Regular readers may have noticed I have been a bit quiet on the blog front lately – but as Mary mentioned, things got very hectic here in PatternBuilders land over the last couple of weeks. In the midst of all the business-related activities, I was also invited to speak at two great conferences—pii2011 and MongoSF 2011.
pii2011 is one of the premier events on digital privacy and included smart people from the entire spectrum of the privacy debate. The speakers and the audience were very diverse but included: technologists, analysts, journalists, folks living off the grid, consumer advocates, chief privacy officers, privacy related startups, lawyers, executives from the large Internet properties, including Facebook and Google, large data collection services (including Acxiom, and Intelius) and even a few folks from the government (but as one of the speakers pointed out, not nearly as many as you would hope for such an important issue). (more…)
Speaking at MongoSF Conference: Building a Streaming Analytics System with Mongo
I am excited to announce that I will be speaking at MongoSF 2011 with my fellow data wrangler, Tim. Our talk will cover how we used Mongo to build the PatternBuilders Analytics Framework. The official title for our talk is: Building a Streaming Analytics System with Mongo.
In a previous post, I talked about the impact our Social Media Analytics solution had on our deployment choices. Briefly, we wanted to make a beta version of our solution publicly available on the web and to do that, we needed to ensure sufficient capacity. Since we did not want to make a massive investment in the infrastructure to support it, we investigated the state of cloud servers. Long story short, as part of our move from our colo to the cloud we made a significant change in architecture, fully embraced some of MongoDB’s more advanced capabilities, and created a radically improved product – although the previous version was pretty cool too! (more…)
Social Media Analytics: What is the Value of a Hug?
You know it’s going to be an interesting day when the CEO (that would be Terence) who also happens to be your esteemed co-blogger asks: “How much is a hug really worth?” This question was brought about by a recent article on how banks are using social media analytics tools to gain insights about their products and services. Here’s a direct quote from the article:
“Though she gets asked a lot about the ROI of social media, SunTrust’s Buckridee acknowledges that it’s hard to measure the ROI on goodwill generated through positive social media conversations. My question is, how do you measure the ROI of a hug? … Because that’s what we’re doing with the Twitter team. We’re putting a face to the brand — giving them a human voice and talking to them. We’re focused on building loyalty. … We’re starting to turn that thorny dialogue into happy customer tweets.”
Okay. Well, first of all, as most marketers will tell you, “hugs” have value. Actually, what most marketers will tell you is this: “You better be able to measure the value of that hug so that you can justify how much you are willing to spend to get it and show just how that ‘spend’ results in sales.” Because if you don’t, you may find yourself standing in front of a CEO (say from a fortune 500 company) and when you tell him that you grew Facebook friends by 20%, have the CEO reply, “I don’t care how many friends we have! I need more revenue!” True story (and believe me, every marketer has at least one of these). (more…)
Whither Mono?
The rumors have been flying hot and heavy about the future of Mono, the portable version of Microsoft’s .NET platform since Novell has been purchased by Attachmate. While Mono was, and remains, open source, its development was driven primarily by a team at Novell led by the brilliant hacker Miguel De Icaza. The gist of the rumors seems to indicate that some/all of the Mono developers have been laid off and that further development of Mono by Novell/Attachmate is in jeopardy. If either is true, it is a shame.
Mono never got the support it deserved from Microsoft, who never seemed to appreciate its potential to increase Windows legitimacy and presence in the server room by increasing the number of folks using the .NET framework. This lack of support, combined with some concerns about certain patents that Microsoft has that could be problematic for OS vendors who bundled Mono, dramatically slowed its adoption rate. And although the Java programming language left “the window open,” falling behind Mono/.NET technically due to political battles about its direction, Mono was unable to gain ground. (more…)
Speaking at Privacy Identity Innovation conference (pii2011): Building Trust in a Digital Age
I am excited to announce that I will be participating in a roundtable session at pii2011. The topic I will be discussing is something that I spend quite a bit of time on both professionally and personally: Getting Personal with Big Data. It is a topic I have blogged about, several times including here and here and it forms a big part of the Ebook I am co-authoring as well. (We haven’t worked out the details yet, but we got permission from our publisher, O’Reilly, to give away the first chapter of the book at the show so look for an announcement on how to get it if you will be attending.)
As a company in the big data and analytics space, it is important for us to understand the issues of privacy as it applies to big data sets, singularly and in aggregate. And while the “greater good” benefits of big data analysis are significant, our industry must also address, in a proactive way, the data privacy issues that can result. After all, if we do not, we will lose the trust of the very people that we rely on for much of our data: the consumers. And once trust is lost, much more restrictive regulations will result which will impact the many valuable benefits of big data analysis. (more…)
Social Media Initiatives: Marketing Fundamentals are the Same, Vehicles are Different
Whenever you throw a bunch of marketers in a room and say, “let’s talk about doing some social media outreach,” I can guarantee you that there will be an energetic (yelling and gesticulating) conversation with some eye rolling involved. Whenever you throw a bunch of social media experts in a room and say, “Company A does not see the value of their social media programs,” I can guarantee you that there will be an energetic (yelling and gesticulating) conversation with some eye rolling involved. Whenever you throw a bunch of software engineers in a room who have come specifically to talk with you about what you would like to see in a social media analytics tool, I can guarantee you that there will be an energetic (me yelling and gesticulating) conversation with some eye rolling (engineering and product management team) involved.
Why all the storm and dirge? Well, social media has moved from an “interesting fad” to an entrenched channel but the jury is still out on how we marketers are going to “measure success.” A recent Harvard Business Review social media study found the following:
“… nearly two thirds of the participating organizations said that they are either currently using social media channels, or have plans in the works. However, only 12 percent of the companies surveyed said they felt they were effective users of social media. These were the companies most likely to use multiple channels; use metrics for reporting; have a strategy for social media usage; and integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy.” (more…)
On Social Media: The Real Marketing Transformation
We are going to be releasing the beta version of our Social Media Analytics solution in the near future and as a result, have been steeped in what I like to call the social media monitoring versus analytics debate. As a B2B marketer I have some thoughts on this topic as do some of my B2C marketing colleagues (hah! I feel a metrics faceoff in the making) but I am going to save that discussion for our beta announcement post. That being said, the whole topic of social media got me thinking about marketing in general and how the advent of social media has had a profound effect on the way we communicate.
In the “olden” days we B2B marketers were focused on the message as in “be on message.” We spent a great deal of time on the message platform, carefully crafting messages that articulated the pain of our targeted audience and spelled out our value in words that would resonate with them. To begin the process, we’d throw a bunch of executives, our top sales performers, and one or two product marketing folks into a room and begin with this simple exercise: if our company was a car, what kind of a car would it be? Pretty silly huh? And what has this to do with messaging? (more…)
Big Data Big Analytics 