Data is a Product

Hello! Following up on my earlier posts about how free products like Facebook, Apps, loyalty cards and so on are less about benefiting you and more about generating marketing leads for the companies who supply these products and services to you; Google have launched something else for us all to enjoy. Thanks to Martin Eriksson (@bfgmartin) for the very pertinent Tweet: Google Drive was launched to much fanfare this week offering up to 5GB of online storage for free with additional storage available (up to 16TB for a monthly fee). For more on this, check out Wired . OK, so this is great right? 5GB of space to back up all of my pictures, important files and maybe some of my music? Where do I sign? Hold on though; before you sign up, think about what you're actually giving to Google. According to their terms and conditions (nicely described here alongside those of competitor services by ZD Net), you could be getting more than you're expecting. In essence, when you sub...

Firstly, thanks to Duncan Ross for inspiring this post (@duncan3ross) about how organisations are using 'Free' products to get data they can monetise for profit. I'll be looking at this from both sides of the fence. In this post, we'll tackle what you, the consumer gets from these 'Free' products. This way of providing products and services is often called the 'Freemium' model and is one that has become very popular over the last couple of years. Anyone with a smartphone will probably have some free software in the form of apps featuring enraged feathered creatures or links to your favourite social network. You'll often see adverts pop up in these apps and games which is obviously a way for the developers to make money. However, how do they know which advert is going to appeal most to you? We'll cover this piece in more detail in the next post. Let's look first at what you get.