This black friday I was shopping for a LCD TV Mount for our house. The next few days whichever website I happen to visit, CNN.com, Huffington Post or any of the other sites that had paid advertising, I began seeing ads for Wall Mounts!
Accidental? I don't think so. Behavioral Targeting that many online businesses do is keeping track of what I am interested in and sharing that information with ad servers who are happy to serve me those TV wall mount ads wherever I go!
There are quite a few online businesses that send me suddenly a deeper discount than what they have advertised to all. This seems to happen only when I leave some items in a shopping cart in their online website not having decided to go ahead with the purchase.
Two days ago, I saw the latest mashup the US Census Bureau has put together with data form their latest census - neighborhoods with income above something or neighborhoods where ethnic groups or foreign-born live!
So the BI explosion is not only coming from inside your own company - your own Point of Sale data but now you have the opportunity to combine them with your online website data along with publicly available data!
The data explosion is leading to a BI explosion or at least the range of possible BI you can extract and use from all these data!
The Data Analytics Boom is an interesting article in Forbes magazine that talks about many other new sources of the data and then following it the analytics boom. Josh Jordan in this article talks about many new sources of data like cell phones and many new techniques from biology making their way to financial and investment analysis needing additional data to work.
In another article columnist Om Malik writes about the record revenues and profits Oracle is making this quarter, all because of a data and a BI boom in the market - For Oracle, Big Data Translates Into Big Bucks . Om Malik traces this bump in good times in Oracle to increasing sales of servers, storage, storage appliances, and software!
Something is afoot in companies, even in this uncertain time of revenues and profits. For companies to spend this much money on data and Business Intelligence, the payoffs must be pretty convincing!
As for as Joe Public is concerned, I am not 100% sure that all this data boom bodes well for privacy! But I am wondering what other information about you is anyway NOT available online for a fee of $10? Not much, I am afraid!
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves - Tim-Berners Lee
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