Data is a Product

As part of my on-going quest to find out everything I can about Open Data, I've decided to dedicate 3 weeks of my annual leave to researching sources of Open Data in the Far East. I'll be slogging around Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam to locate the best Open transport stats, postal address files and maps that I can to bring back to the UK to build new products with. Actually, that's partly a lie. I am going to the Far East but I'm actually heading to beaches, temples and bars to find cultural enlightenment and cheap Pad Thai. So while I'm off, I thought I'd leave you with some interesting links to Open Data sources and stories from around the World. To start with, some interesting thoughts on why Open Data should be about more than transparency. This article also features detail on how UK Doctors have improved survival rates in heart surgery using Open data over seven years to the point that the UK is now leading Europe. The Doctor heading this up (Sir ...

Now, bear with me on this one! The whole analogy piece has been done before, so apologies if this one has already been done. I'm not plagiarising, it just occurred to me that this made sense. For some nice examples of stretching an analogy, check out Darth Vader as a Project Manager and Leadership Lessons from Captain Kirk . And yes, I do enjoy the odd Sci Fi movie now and again! Google Maps & Product Management It's all about scale. As a Product Manager, you need to be able to think about things on the macro and micro level. Now for the analogy... StreetView If you search for a location on Google Maps and use the StreetView application, you get a great look at where you actually want to be. Just in the same way that a Product Manager will focus on one task at a time. For example, I may need to write a presentation for an event: Great, let's focus on that. However, I'll also need to be thinking about the wider piece and how my presentation will fit in wit...

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...

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...

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...