Google Analytics, the super dominant free web analytics platform, has to date offered analytics that were roughly 24 hours behind. The wait to stop waiting has come to an end and today the company announced that Google Analytics is now rolling out real-time reporting to its users. Update: Just when you thought that was a big deal, Google Analytics also rolled out a premium offering today. Details below.
This is something that many people are going to be very happy about. Real-time analytics startups like Chartbeat and Woopra (whom we use here) may not be among that group of happy people, but publishers and marketers are likely going to love it. You can sign up to request priority access here.
Online content is published so fast and furious these days that no one can read it all. Ears are burning at corporate brands, too, because much of that Web content is talking about them. What are people saying? One part of answering that question is to ask how people seem to be feeling about the things they are talking about. Scalable, automated, accurate, sophisticated sentiment analysis is a much sought-after technology that almost no one has really nailed yet.
Jennifer Zeszut was the founder and CEO of Scout Labs, a social media monitoring service acquired by social CRM company Lithium in 2010. ScoutLabs does sentiment analysis, among other things, and Zeszut spoke at the O'Reilly Strata Summit on Big Data this week about the things her company has done that she believes point toward the future of this red hot tech trend.
At Facebook's developer conference F8 today, a number of trends that Web watchers predicted would be defining characteristics of the future suddenly became parts of mainstream discourse. The Facebook megalith learns fast from its R&D department, what the rest of us call the rest of the Web.
Specifically: data as platform, the real-time/synchronous Web and pre-cognitive discovery. Those are things that Web nerds have said would be big and in one fell swoop today, Facebook made its move on them all. Below, some thoughts on data as a platform, and the new Timeline feature in particular. It's like a grown-up version of the much-criticized Facebook Beacon, which the company had to remove after a backlash several years ago. It will be interesting to see how people react to this - I suspect that this time it may be less a question of privacy and more a question of creepy.
With quadrillions of dollars on the line, banks and financial institutions pay close attention to the emerging exaflood of available data about their customers and the world around them. Here at the O'Reilly Strata conference on big data, the panel on big data in the banking world was fascinating. It's likely an indication of the way the rest of the world is likely to move in the near future - at least if you believe the predictions of the people on the panel.
Huge opaque markets are about to become transparent because of new regulations and that means a whole lot of new data available for analysis. Scalable processing of that data will require outsourcing, giving birth to new industries. Millions of people will need to be trained to deal with all this. Below, my notes from this fascinating panel discussion.
Amazon threw down the gauntlet against terrestrial competitors today by announcing that Kindle and Kindle app customers can borrow and purchase Kindle books from more than 11,000 local libraries in the United States.
In essence, these first 11,000 local libraries just became a chain of local bookstores for Amazon's catalog of virtual books.
"Big data enables new ways to create value, it's going to change the basis of competition," Michael Chui of the McKinsey Global Institute said this morning to kick off O'Reilly's big data conference, the Strata Summit. The next two days are all about the rise of information that has to be dealt with on scale, big data, and its consequences. "It will change the way companies, sectors and economies compete," says Chui.
McKinsey published an exhaustive 150 page report on big data this Spring, which argued that data will soon become an economic input as important as labor and capital. It's not just about pure economics, though. As Edd Dumbill, chair of Strata, put it today, our relationship with big data needs to serve humans - not turn humans into the servants of machines and information overload. "We know that big data can help us, it may be the case that big data has to help us." Below, a live video stream of the next two days' proceedings addressing this mega-opportunity and trend.
Medical, financial and contract documents are hard to keep track of, keep updated and share easily with trusted professionals like new doctors but a new startup called OwnYourInfo launched today that provides a unified dashboard with alerts, permissions and a mobile interface for managing all those assets for just $5 per month.
The service also creates reports dynamically that illustrate the changes to categories like cash flow, medical history and permutations between different categories. It's a handy little system that could point toward the future of user-centric ownership over the giant cloud of data created by living in the modern world.
What do you get when you collect and categorize the reading interests and intentions of millions of people exploring around the web? Fans of social bookmarking service Delicious have always believed you get a big win-win: bookmarkers are able to access links of interest them later, from any computer, and the rest of us get to watch from the outside and discover interesting new links in the wake of all that saving.
Delicious didn't really work out that well in the long run, though, and, five years after it was acquired, then neglected, by Yahoo, it was bought this spring by a team led by Youtube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Jenna Wortham of the New York Times caught up with the new company this weekend and reported on some of the thinking behind the forthcoming rebirth of Delicious. What it needs, I believe, is to be easier to use, more relevant and more attractive in design.
Yossy Mendolovich CEO of IMGuest, the world's only hotel management social network, has launched a service that flips the script on how marketing people interact with guests at prominent chains.
IMGuest is a premium marketing tool launched three days ago that enables marketing and guest relations staff to use the social graph to interact with hotel guests at check-in. From that moment on, staff can push out discounts and other offers to them instantaneously based on their interests.
The UK government has published 5 years of nation-wide road safety and casualty data freely online on a map that anyone can view in a web browser. It's a remarkable instance of data-driven public accountability; presumably citizens will use this newly accessible data to apply pressure on government agencies regarding safety improvements. Citizens and researchers will also be able to cross-reference the location of troubled roadways with race and class demographic analysis to illuminate any inequitable allocation of infrastructure resources. It's a bold and enabling action to take online.
The statistics were gathered by independent researchers and put online using eSpatial OnDemand GIS and Open Street Map. Open Street Map is like the Wikipedia of world and local maps, but it's also a popular data platform that many other applications make use of. Map nerds should watch the OpenStreetMap annual conference, State of the Map, for more exciting map and geodata news. The conference opened this morning in Denver, Colorado.
