Is Thompson Moving The Deck Chairs Around, Or Pointing Yahoo In A New Direction?

Scott Thompson has reorganized the company around three ‘groups’: consumer, regions, and technology. But his long term plan is totally unclear, despite having taken three months to get set. My sense is that he’s moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic, rather than addressing the gaping hole in the side of the boat.

However, trying to centralize the business on capturing user information exhaust does at least line up with what others — Facebook and Google, for example — are planning, so at least he’s looking in the right direction.

Yahoo C.E.O. Hints at a Strategy - Nicole Perlroth via NYTimes.com

With 700 million visitors, Yahoo still maintains one of the largest audiences on the Web, but has been unable to increase revenue. The company continues to cede advertising market share to competitors, notably Facebook and Google, and has frustrated shareholders with its reliance on cost-cutting rather than new areas for innovation and growth.

Based on the restructuring, it appears Mr. Thompson plans to hedge much of Yahoo’s future on the media and content properties it hopes will tether visitors to its site and lure back advertisers, as well as on the data it has on its users.

Mr. Thompson has yet to elaborate on how Yahoo plans to use that data. Sources inside the company, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak, said that it was still unclear how, or even whether, the company could leverage the information to its advantage.

There is certainly room in the marketplace for a large media player to innovate in media based on mining big data from social exhaust. We’ll have to see if Thompson is trying for that, since he’s been fairly silent on strategy, but it looks like a viable option for Yahoo, at least.

Doing a presentation next week in San Francisco, Data Is The New Oil: The Journey From Privacy To Publicy.I will be sharing the podium with Gerd Leonhard, Andreas Weigend, and Jamais Cascio.

I am likely to use some of the slides in the deck above, Big And Small Data.

I’ve heard we are going to have a packed house, so If you want to attend you should sign up right away.

This is the year things get weird.

- Bryce Roberts, Web 2.0 Ends With Data Monopolies

Bryce is referring to the profound changes in the technological infrastructure our culture sits on, as we start to create nearly unimaginable amounts of data — both personalized and anonymized — through the streams of our existence.

The proximate cause to this insight is the new demo video of Google glasses (or goggles), and Bryce’s realization that Google might be in a position to track literally everything we see (at least with the glasses on). Every product you reject and put back on the shelf, every plate of food, every friend (and stranger) you pass in the street, every store you enter, every breath you take, every move you make, they’ll be watching you.

But I still want them. Which is weird.

Data is the New Oil: The Journey from Privacy to Publicy — swissnex

I will be speaking with Gerd Leonhard, Andreas Wiegand, and (hopefully) Jamais Cascio at an event in San Francisco, 10 April 2012, sponsored by Swissex.

The theme is Data is the New Oil: The Journey from Privacy to Publicy. As every web page we visit is logged, and every comment and tweet analyzed for sentiment and intention, more data is being logged weekly than existed on earth a few years ago, prior to the rise of the social web. We will explore the connections between our connected world and the complexities and challenges of a data economy.

If you are interested in attending, please register quickly, since there are only 150 or so seats.

Duhigg notes the efforts Target must make not to “spook” customers with obvious behavioral-based targeting. Since the company wanted to target pregnant women who haven’t explicitly notified Target about their pregnancy, they had to use informational camouflage:
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons…. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.” … As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

As with political scandal, what’s so bothersome about this less the targeting itself — though that is bad for reasons Turow details, more on that below — but the cover-up. Retailers don’t want transparency in their attempts to manipulate your behavior; they want to control how your habits evolve. They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be. And they try to justify themselves with the idea that they know better than us what we really want and their marketing techniques allow us to get out of our way to indulge ourselves how we really want and become who we really want to be. Thus Duhigg concludes with this quote from Target’s targeting guru: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.” We’re supposed to think that is a good thing. We’re not supposed to think that the company is using the data it has collected on us to shape the possibilities of what we can become, to control the context in which we make our lives and understand ourselves.

- Nathan Jurgenson, Predictive analytics and information camouflage – The New Inquiry

Jurgenson coins the term ‘information camouflage’: companies that mine data about us, discern a pattern they can exploit, and then conceal that knowledge by randomizing the torrent of ads and promotions they send our way so they can conceal that they are on to us, since if we knew we’d change our mental filters.

Big Data in the Dirt (and the Cloud) - Quentin Hardy

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Except the folks at Climate Corporation are crunching huge data about weather patterns, and packaging predictions into crop insurance:

Quentin Hardy via NY Times

A company called the Climate Corporation was formed in 2006 by two former Google employees who wanted to make use of the vast amount of free data published by the National Weather Service on heat and precipitation patterns around the country. At first they called the company WeatherBill, and used the data to sell insurance to businesses that depended heavily on the weather, from ski resorts and miniature golf courses to house painters and farmers.

It did pretty well, raising more than $50 million from the likes of Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Allen & Company. The problem was, it was hard to sell insurance policies to so many little businesses, even using an online shopping model. People like having their insurance explained. The answer was to get even more data, and focus on the agriculture market through the same sales force that sells federal crop insurance.

“We took 60 years of crop yield data, and 14 terabytes of information on soil types, every two square miles for the United States, from the Department of Agriculture,” says David Friedberg, chief executive of the Climate Corporation, a name WeatherBill started using Tuesday. “We match that with the weather information for one million points the government scans with Doppler radar — this huge national infrastructure for storm warnings — and make predictions for the effect on corn, soybeans and winter wheat.”

The product, insurance against things like drought, too much rain at the planting or the harvest, or an early freeze, is sold through 10,000 agents nationwide. The Climate Corporation, which also added Byron Dorgan, the former senator from North Dakota, to its board on Tuesday, will very likely get into insurance for specialty crops like tomatoes and grapes, which do not have federal insurance.

Like the weather information, the data on soils was free for the taking. The hard and expensive part is turning the data into a product.

The future of every kind of insurance is big data.

(via Food+Tech+Connect)

Our data, ourselves - The Boston Globe

Leon Neyfakh via

Taken together, the information that millions of us are generating about ourselves amounts to a data set of unimaginable size and growing complexity: a vast, swirling cloud of information about all of us and none of us at once, covering everything from the kind of car we drive to the movies we’ve rented on Netflix to the prescription drugs we take.

Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies and the government, and consumer advocates instructing us on how to prevent our information from being collected and misused.

But a small group of thinkers is suggesting an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with the data we generate. Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy, they say, we should be imagining data as a public resource: a bountiful trove of information about our society which, if properly managed and cared for, can help us set better policy, more effectively run our institutions, promote public health, and generally give us a more accurate understanding of who we are. This growing pool of data should be public and anonymous, they say — and each of us should feel a civic responsibility to contribute to it.

In a paper forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Brooklyn Law School professor Jane Yakowitz introduces the concept of a “data commons” — a sort of public garden where everyone brings their data to be anonymized and made available to researchers working in the public interest. In the paper, she argues that the societal benefits of a thriving data commons outweigh the potential risks from the crooks and hackers who might use it for harm.

Yakowitz’s paper has found support among a wider movement of thinkers who believe that, while protecting people’s privacy is certainly important, it should not be our only priority when it comes to managing information. This position might be a hard sell at a time when consumers are increasingly worried about mass data leaks and identity theft, but Yakowitz and others argue that we shouldn’t let fear of such inevitable accidents cloud our ability to see just how necessary data collection is to our progress as a society.

“There are patterns and trends that none of us can discern by looking at our own individual experiences,” Yakowitz said. “But if we pooled our information, then these patterns can emerge very quickly and irrefutably. So, we should want that sort of knowledge to be made publicly available.”

The power of publicy.

Steven Johnson, What A Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York New Yorkers are accustomed to strong odors, but several years ago a new aroma began wafting through the city’s streets, a smell that was more unnerving than the usual offenders (trash, sweat, urine) precisely because it was so delightful: the sweet, unmistakable scent of maple syrup. It was a fickle miasma, though, draping itself over Morningside Heights one afternoon, disappearing for weeks, reemerging in Chelsea for a few passing hours before vanishing again. Fearing a chemical warfare attack, perhaps from the Aunt Jemima wing of al Qaeda, hundreds of New Yorkers reported the smell to authorities. The New York Times first wrote about it in October 2005; local blogs covered each outbreak, augmented by firsthand reports in their comment threads. The city quickly determined that the odor was harmless, but the mystery of its origin persisted for four years. During maple syrup events, as they came to be called, operators at the city’s popular NYC311 call center—set up to field complaints and provide information on school closings and the like—were instructed to reassure callers that they could go about their business as usual. But then city officials had an idea. Those calls into the 311 line, they realized, weren’t simply queries from an edgy populace. They were clues. On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity. Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes. This piece reminds me of the fantastic presentation Paul Kedrosky gave at Defrag a few weeks back on his ‘Ladder Index’ — the frequency of ladders found on southern California’s highways — as a leading indicator of the housing market. Big data is everywhere, and can be tapped in mysterious — and smelly — ways.
Zoom

Steven Johnson, What A Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York

New Yorkers are accustomed to strong odors, but several years ago a new aroma began wafting through the city’s streets, a smell that was more unnerving than the usual offenders (trash, sweat, urine) precisely because it was so delightful: the sweet, unmistakable scent of maple syrup. It was a fickle miasma, though, draping itself over Morningside Heights one afternoon, disappearing for weeks, reemerging in Chelsea for a few passing hours before vanishing again. Fearing a chemical warfare attack, perhaps from the Aunt Jemima wing of al Qaeda, hundreds of New Yorkers reported the smell to authorities. The New York Times first wrote about it in October 2005; local blogs covered each outbreak, augmented by firsthand reports in their comment threads.

The city quickly determined that the odor was harmless, but the mystery of its origin persisted for four years. During maple syrup events, as they came to be called, operators at the city’s popular NYC311 call center—set up to field complaints and provide information on school closings and the like—were instructed to reassure callers that they could go about their business as usual.

But then city officials had an idea. Those calls into the 311 line, they realized, weren’t simply queries from an edgy populace. They were clues.

On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity.

Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes.

This piece reminds me of the fantastic presentation Paul Kedrosky gave at Defrag a few weeks back on his ‘Ladder Index’ — the frequency of ladders found on southern California’s highways — as a leading indicator of the housing market.

Big data is everywhere, and can be tapped in mysterious — and smelly — ways.

(Source: underpaidgenius)