Data is a Product

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...

I know it's been a while since my last post. Don't worry! I haven't gone anywhere. I've just been busy with my day job and then relaxing for a couple of weeks after a manic product launch. While I get a new post written, take a look at what I've been up to at PublicTechnology.net .

A while ago, I wrote a post about how our use of social media can be advantageous in finding us special deals, helping us contact friends and find new jobs. In this post, I wanted to look at the other side of the coin. Namely, what do the companies offering us these free services and special deals get out of it? To start, let's look at one of the obvious and less technical uses of data products: Grocery Shopping! Shopping While this may seem rather simplistic, the use of shopping data linked to a loyalty card has been the clearest example of the power of data in creating strong product propositions. While many will talk about the potential of Facebook and Twitter (I'll come onto this in the future); the loyalty card has proven to be the best promotional tool available. So, we know that our shopping habits are collected when we use our Clubcard (Tesco), Advantage card (Boots) or our Costa Coffee card. The shopping habits of consumers have been tracked by supermarkets sin...

Much like one of Santa’s Elves I’ve been working hard to bring you the latest data blog - not so much Product this time, but certainly data! All wrapped up in a pretty bow. Now, before we all get stuck into Sprouts and Turkey on the 25 th (I’ll be avoiding that one this year by taking extreme measures – leaving the Country!) I wanted to somehow combine the themes of Christmas and Data. What I’ve come up with is of course something akin to Good King Wenceslas combined with the Dr Who Special. To start with we’ll look at Christmas cards. David Cameron (aka Santa) has been busily sending cards to his nearest and dearest. Included on his list this year are the President of Kyrgyzstan, the Prime Minister of Chile and of course, the Pope. The Guardian have a great article about the full list and who’s made Dave’s ‘Naughty’ list (we’re looking at you South Africa). Next up, Christmas Presents. I’ve found some nice data on US Christmas Shopping habits from last year. Did ...

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.

Last night, I watched the excellent documentary on BBC 2 about the growth of Facebook and how they use the data created by users to make money. If you didn't catch it, have a look on the iPlayer for Inside Facebook. So, Facebook take your data and use it to do several things. Firstly, they use your friends, links between them and your interests to suggest new friends to you. Very helpful! This often means that you end up with about 200 people in your network who can see what you do or like and vice-versa. That's actually quite helpful and is probably why you joined.. to communicate! Next up, you Like various company pages, band pages and so on. Again, your friends can see this. More importantly, Facebook can see what you Like, who your friends are and the basic details about you. For example, you are Male, live in London, went to school in Cambridge and are currently single. This then allows Facebook to sell you adverts based upon your details. It also allows the compan...

Before you start to visualize tents, camp fires and sing-songs; Product Camp is none of those things. Well, maybe the last one will be true later on. I'm blogging live from the 3rd PCampLDN in Smithfield and so far my experiences are that everyone is happy to share experiences and that Product Managers are a diverse group. The Twitter feed for the day (#pcampldn) features a great breakdown of the key points. I'll also summarize my thoughts here later. Later on I'll be giving a talk on my earlier post about Hack Days. Should be interesting to find out other Product Managers experiences of these. In the meantime, keep an eye on Twitter! Ging, gang, gooley gooley....