Data is a Product

This blog post was written using the Recorder app on a Google Pixel 3a phone. It transcribes speech so there may be a few small errors but I've corrected what I could see. Enjoy! I wanted to talk about concept for a while now that tries to align big data with what people are really doing in the real world which is often called small data, which is defined as the amount of data that's small enough for human comprehension. Now, obviously lots of organizations have been talking about big data for a long time and there are lots and lots of services to help with that and then this this small data concept has been around for a little while trying to kind of tackle what people can actually manage. But what the problem is that we need something in the middle and lots of organizations can do big data some still do small data, but there are a huge bunch of organizations in the middle that can't do big data. And is big data the right concept for them? It's used to des...

Hi everyone! Now that the Olympics is over, I’ve been left with nothing to watch on TV.. until now! Being a fan of stuff like Lost, I thought I’d give ‘ Person of Interest ’ a go. Shown on CBS in the US; the first episode was aired here in the UK by Channel 5 on Tuesday. It’s got a good pedigree with people like Jonathan Nolan and J. J. Abrams involved and stars Jim Caviezel (the guy who played Jesus in that film about Jesus) and Michael Emerson (Ben from Lost). Now, I’m not going to review the show itself here.. All I’ll say is that Jim Caviezel wore an obviously fake beard, acted a little robotic and Michael Emerson had a fantastic fake limp. Anyway, the show is set in modern day America with an ex-CIA agent (Caveizel) being picked up by a strange Billionaire (Emerson) who offers him a job. The pitch went something like this: “Imagine if you knew that something bad was going to happen to someone. It could be a terrible accident or murder or something else. ...

Some of you may know me quite well and know a little about the company I work for. Yes, we deal with a lot of data and offer a lot of services around the intelligent use of data across an organisation. One of these is helping companies create what is generically known as a Single Customer View (or Single Citizen View in the Public Sector). I wanted to spend a little time looking at what a Single Customer View (SCV) is and what it could be in the future as the effects of Big Data enable us to do more.

I attended the 1st Big Data Insight Forum this week where organisations like Microsoft, Teradata, EMC Greenplum and Orange explained more about this 'revolution'. The take aways for me were quite simple. It's all about the 3 V's: Volume - the amount of data Variety - the types of data (text, social network updates, address, behaviour, pictures and so on) Velocity - the speed of collection, storage and analysis Simply put, Big Data is not really that new. It's all about analysis of data. The interesting bit is that, thanks to the falling cost of data storage and growth of analytical tools like Hadoop and Splunk, organisations can now get at more of the data that they used to ignore (data exhaust) and make decisions more quickly. The event was very useful in helping me to inform my decisions on how I can build future products (that while I may not describe them as 'Big') will use lots of different types of data and help users make decisions quickly....

Hands up anyone who’s exceeded 64Gb of music in their  iTunes  library (or other generic MP3 music service)? I’m guessing that it’s quite a lot of us.. Now, that’s a pretty big database of music. But what exactly is Big Data? How do you define Big Data? What has this got to do with a database about a dead  East Coast rapper ? In short, it has nothing to do with Biggie Smalls but is actually a fairly loose definition that is being used to describe the growth in the amount of data produced and analysed by organisations, governments and individuals and the difficulties that are being encountered in storing, using and analysing these large datasets. There’s now a growing market for suppliers of data storage, networking and analysis tools such as  IBM ,  Teradata  and  Google  who have the experience and capability to make sense of all of this information about shopping habits, Facebook status’, DNA sequences and the movements of Galaxies...