Data is the new oil. It’s a phrase that regular readers will recognize, but we can’t take credit for coining it. The credit actually goes to a British data scientist named Clive Humby. Of course, it took a marketing guy to point out that raw oil must be turned into a product like gas or […]
In a sign of the times: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported an 8% decline in quarterly profits for Q1-2022. Don’t worry: We don’t have to start a GoFundMe campaign or anything. The titan of the tech giants still had net profits of more than $16 billion on about $68 billion for the most recent quarter. […]
The headlines for data breaches are becoming more and more over-the-top each year. From the Swedish Transport Agency that leaked the sensitive details of undercover agents, military vehicles, and pretty much everything else under the sun in 2015, to the Equifax data leak that led to the exposure of sensitive information (like social security numbers, […]
Data isn’t just increasing in quantity; it’s also growing in complexity. Data lakes are now replacing data warehouses. All your online activities now generate unstructured “data exhaust” that’s being mined by sophisticated machine learning algorithms for insights. However, due to increasing data breaches and privacy concerns, regulators have adopted stringent rules and regulations on how […]
Travelers who wander the banana pancake trail through Southeast Asia will all get roughly the same experience. They’ll eat crummy food on one of fifty boats floating around Ha Long Bay, then head up to the highlands of Sa Pa for a faux cultural experience with hill tribes that grow dreadful cannabis. After that, it’s […]
The idea of backing up your data is as old as computing itself. Remember autosave? That was what you hoped would happen while typing away in Corel WordPerfect just in case you encountered the blue screen of death (BSOD). Back in the late 90s at the peak of dot-com mania, hard drive space was still […]
Remember the days when marketing was simply getting a plastic Made-in-China toy in your Happy Meal or watching a busty supermodel and an unshaven dude with a six-pack sell soft drinks, beer or whatever? Sure, advertising has grown more sophisticated over the years, often involving the study of such things as demographics (like age or […]
Before the dawn of the Digital Age, there was an oft-used expression, “I’m an open book,” meaning it’s easy to know what someone is feeling or thinking because they hide nothing. These are also the same people who probably drive windowless cargo vans filled with shiny toys. The rise of social media empires like Facebook […]
For most of the articles we write, we don’t consult with the companies beforehand. This helps keep things objective and saves us a great deal of time not having to do the whole “back and forth” thing with some public relations firm that’s getting paid good money while we do free work for them. Speaking directly to founders is almost […]
There was an article published by the Scientific American earlier this year titled Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?, and it’s probably worth a read if you have 45 minutes (yes, it’s that long). We gave up about halfway through when we came across the following specimen which CB Insights affectionately refers to as “bad data viz”: […]