By 2050, 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. This brings up some interesting questions around privacy in public spaces. What happens when, under the guise of public safety, we decide that everyone with a smartphone ought to have their movements monitored? In Russia, you might get away with identifying criminals […]
Some people are into the red carpet spectacles at self-congratulatory award shows where underfed actresses showcase costumes that we last saw in the 1960s movie Barbarella. We get our celebrity fix when Forbes publishes its annual list of the 400 richest Americans. It doesn’t hurt to dream, right? The methodology that goes into putting together […]
Based on some cursory demographic analysis of our reader base, most of you won’t remember when optical character recognition (OCR) first made its debut. That would have been in 1976 when Kurzweil Computer Products developed the first OCR program that could recognize any style of print. Called The Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), the device used flat-bed scanners, and text-to-speech synthesis […]
In the past year, we’ve looked at various ways alternative data can be used for investing, from satellite imagery that forecasts metal prices to predicting geopolitical risk between the world’s countries. If you’re a large company of any kind, it’s likely that you have your own valuable alternative data laying around. A company called Eagle Alpha […]
Pundits were recently fawning over the proclamation by 180 companies – including some of our favorite dividend growth investing names like Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), 3M (MMM), and The Coca-Cola Company (KO) – that maximizing shareholder value is no longer the raison d’etre for these companies. This slap in the face of fiduciary responsibility should […]
While ICOs have come and gone leaving a bunch of broke suckers in their wake, artificial intelligence has gained so much steam now that it’s practically a commodity. Anyone can download a free artificial intelligence software framework, hire a few engineers, and begin coding away to solve some problem. Artificial intelligence itself is not a competitive […]
There is a term that we often use at Nanalyze to describe how our online activities leave behind a breadcrumb trail that companies use to track our behavior: data exhaust. It refers not only to every mouse click or swipe left on our devices but where we go and when, not to mention every social […]
One important thing you learn during your MBA is that your newly acquired ability to conjure up value from nothing is referred to by the finance community as “the ability to generate alpha.” Loosely speaking, generating alpha means putting money into the markets and getting back more than if you would have simply invested in […]
A machine learning algorithm is only as good as the data you use to train it with. That’s why any company that has a large proprietary data set can now start to extract exclusive insights from it, something that in the olden days we used to call “data mining.” Nowadays, it’s all about trying to predict the […]
When you work in sales, one of the things you’ll learn is how to handle objections. While we simply see objections as legitimate reasons for why we may not want to buy a product, the salesperson sees objections as hurdles they need to get through before your John Hancock inevitably adorns the contract. Some objections […]