Data runs our lives. We need to understand it.

September 27, 2018

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Why data visualization?

As a society, we have agreed to translate our thoughts, actions, needs and desires into data, and we have submitted that data for algorithmic inspection and processing.

In our healthcare system, data, code and algorithms now drive diagnosis, costs, coverage and outcomes.

In our public square, data, code and algorithms drive civil discourse.

Can you get credit to start a business? A loan to better yourself through education? Financial decisions are now determined by data, code, and algorithms.

Job applications are turned to data, and run through cohorts of similarities, determining who gets hired, and who ultimately ends up leaving the workforce.

When it comes to connecting to other humans – we’ve turned our desires and our hopes to data, swapping centuries of cultural norms for faith in the governance of code and algorithms built – in necessary secrecy – by private corporations.

What happens when decisions are taken by algorithms of governance that no one understands?

We need visibility on the data that increasingly is running our lives.

That’s why data visualization.

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Will whoever becomes the new CEO of ad giant WPP be able to do what Martin Sorrell could not? I doubt it.

June 5, 2018

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Will whoever becomes the new CEO of ad giant WPP be able to do what Martin Sorrell could not? That is, set about reversing a what looks like an industry in structural decline thanks to Facebook and Google?

Probably not.

Sorrell was unique in that he was both a financial whiz and a salesman. Replicating the Sorrell act in the current environment is not going to be easy.

As Ad contrarian Bob Hoffman recently said: “Whatever you think of Sorrell, thus far the world has produced only one. Good luck finding another.”

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Facebook board member Peter Thiel just donated $1m to the campaign of self-declared sexual predator Donald Trump

October 17, 2016

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Venture capitalist Peter Thiel made a last-minute donation of more than $1 million to the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

Thiel, you will recall, is the man who funded Hulk Hogan’s action against Gawker as an act of revenge, after the gossip site outed him as gay. Gawker was shuttered as a result of Thiel’s legal case.

Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and celebrated Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator  has in the past admitted he thinks democracy is overrated.

His decision to bank0roll Trump, a self-declared sexual predator, has sparked debate in Silicon Valley.

One critic tweeted: “Women applying to YCombinator, take a good look at their principled stand against a partner who supports a sexual predator.”

The fact that Thiel remains on the board at Facebook meanwhile seems a direct threat to Facebook’s mission statement.

“Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.”

In June, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg voted to keep Thiel on his company’s board, despite Thiel’s funding of a lawsuit that destroyed Gawker Media.

The Trump presidential campaign has endorsed banning Muslims, building a wall on the border with Mexico, and more recently locking up political opponents and threatening journalists.

Thiel’s support of Trump excludes him from any business that was serious about diversity.

As one critics wrote: “Let no person who claims to give a damn about diversity and inclusion in one breath even begin to support & apologize for Thiel in another.”

Note to Facebook: lean in to this. 

 

 

 

 

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Amazon to buy UK supermarket Morrisons?

June 8, 2016

Here is a one minute clip from Furthr’s new video, Refuel: what’s next for digital. Watch it and be enlightened.

From Thursday, Amazon Prime customers in central and east London will be able to order a full weekly shop and get it delivered the same day.

It plans to roll the deliveries out further across the UK, but has not set a specific date.

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Jeff Bezos made $18 billion in the last three months

May 20, 2016

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is winning.

Amazon’s stock closed at over $700 a share last week.

Bezos owns 17% of that stock. He has made $18billion in the last three months.

That is $8.3million an hour.

The average Amazon warehouse worker makes $13 an hour.

Bezos gets taxed at 20% on capital gains. Hourly workers in the US are taxed at a higher rate.

No wonder he is smiling. The US government effectively rewards those who win the lottery with healthy tax breaks, and penalises those who don’t.

 

 

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EU’s anti-trust case against Google won’t work

April 21, 2016

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The EU allege Google is rigging the mobile ad market by making sure handset companies who use their free Android operating system for their phones install Google as their partner for online search.

Well of course they are.  The idea is to drive traffic to your other properties. That’s the job of an ecosystem.

What’s going on here?

Is the EU just lashing out at a too-successful company who are disrupting industries and taking away jobs? Perhaps.

But it feels to me more profound. I believe we are on a collision course with tech gaints. A recent book claimed that as a society we  have boosted growth over prosperity and we are living with the consequences.

From 1990-1999, within a seven mile radius of SFO (San Francisco Airport), there was more market capitlization created than in the whole of Europe since World War II.

 

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The single thing that makes Alibaba so exceptional

April 13, 2016

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Alibaba is huge.

The Chinese answer to Amazon owns 75% of a market projected to expand 20 percent to 3.6 trillion yuan ($557 billion) next year.

China’s online consumers buy over $14 billion-worth of goods on Alibaba’s platforms on just one day last year (a promotion known as Singles’ Day).

But that is not what makes Alibaba really exceptional.

Alibaba CEO Mr Ma rejects Milton Friedman’s nostrum that “the business of business is business”, namely that companies exist only to make a profit and that philanthropy should be strictly personal.

He has set up a philanthropic fund, but uses Alibaba itself as a vehicle for social change, helping people book doctors’ visits, for example, or selling cheap water-testing devices and encouraging his customers to upload results for big-data analysis.

Will Amazon do the same?

 

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A Golden Rule for those working with Big Data

April 1, 2016

92415PradaC2585Do to others as you would have them do to you.

In the Christian religion this is known as the golden rule, a moral maxim or principle of altruism found in many human cultures and religions, suggesting it may be related to a fundamental human nature.

May I suggest a Golden Rule for the Big Data?

It’s this: that big data and the algorithms that interpret it are sound when there exchange of information is of mutual benefit.

Here is an example:

Waze is the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app.

It allows drivers to join other drivers in their area and share real-time traffic and road info, saving everyone time and gas money on their daily commute.

While you are getting info from Waze about the best way to get somewhere, you are giving it too.

If there is a traffic accident in front of you, the people two miles behind you are taken off the road and steered around you.

Instead of everyone making the same mistake over and over again, the map changes and people drive a different way – and traffic keeps moving. Everyone wins.

Waze is how data ought to work: we are aware we are donating the data, but we are getting a benefit from it too. It is a two-way exchange.

 

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Make no mistake: 2016 is the year of messaging

April 1, 2016

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The biggest win in technology in 2016 is messaging.

Three quarters of smartphone users used a mobile messaging app at least once in 2015.

It took windows a quarter of a century to reach a billion monthly active users, it’s taken WhatsApp six years.

Messaging Apps are also increasingly being used for shopping and payment, primarily in Asia but also the US with experimental services such as Facebook’s M.

Need social media training? Email Furthr’s Andy P now

 

 

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