Josh Harthorne, CEO of startup accelerator MassChallenge gives a generational and decidedly national twist to the innovator’s dilemma. “America has lost its creative edge,” Harthorne says. “How do we restore it? It’s created by startups. All recent net job growth has been created by companies under five years of age.” Harthorne’s plan to ignite a… [read more]
Government Computer News‘ Rutrell Yasin points out a huge challenge in the big data warehouse space: the lack of workers capable of providing insight from big data. Even as organizations are trying to define the role of those tasked with analyzing and managing the new phenomenon of big data, people capable of that job are… [read more]
Reid Hoffman writing for Forbes says we’re at the early stages of a massive wave of innovation in the payment industry, which will have a direct impact on loyalty marketing: The ads and offers that you receive today via the Web and mobile are mostly blind to how you’re actually spending your money in the… [read more]
A decade ago retailers were reacting to digital retailing with fear, uncertainty and doubt. As is often the case, widespread adoption of any technology is predicated on widespread familiarity by the adopters. As shoppers took a longer time to become familiar with digital shopping and adopting this new medium, the Chicken Little’s of the time felt confused, then… [read more]
Brian Christian, writing for Venture Beat, dives into the significant competitive advantages and levels of insight companies can obtain by embracing Big Data in general and using Hadoop in specific. With an elephant-sized caveat. While Hadoop is an open-source platform, the process of developing and deploying it is far from free. Hadoop’s sheer complexity makes… [read more]
Well, this is interesting — if entirely unsurprising. Gartner’s Dennis Gaughan recently gave a talk in Australia and exposed a few secrets about the true intentions of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP — you know, the stuff they don’t tell customers. Business Insider sums it up (emphasis mine): Microsoft mainly wants to protect Windows and… [read more]
It is well known that Oracle’s Larry Ellison insists on stating they have all the features of the competition. Instead of making a best-of-breed product, they bolt ever-increasing layers of crud onto their product line. The result is that Oracle’s product line is morbidly obese. Big Data’s Mr. Creosote. For those that remember the Meaning… [read more]
From grocery stores to electronic retail stores, loyalty programs are in the process of getting a facelift with the realisation that they are more effective… without the cards. How many times do customers go to the shop, pick up what they wanted, arrive at the point of sale, and realise that their loyalty card is… [read more]
The future of loyalty marketing combines Big Data being delivered to Big User populations with Mobile access. How do these elements come together into a single, extremely focused solution? Not with traditional loyalty programs or card schemes. It’s not about blindly blasting offers to customers in the hopes of a few more sales. It has… [read more]
I recently wondered aloud about Hadoop and its place in the modern enterprise. I received a lot of feedback on that post, and it brought a few other questions to mind. Hadoop is an Apache project based on some papers Google released on their Map Reduce and Google File System (GFS) technologies. Google is an… [read more]
