It was 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and the 10^th floor of Los Angeles City Hall was filled with more than 450 people gathered to spend their day off of work with their noses buried in their laptops. They were data scientists, and they had come to innovate new technologies to solve complex social problems using the city’s newly open data.

Marketing automation's time has finally come, but it's been a long, tortuous road.

I’m a big fan of marketing automation. My experience goes back a few years. I was just getting settled at a new company when our CFO received a renewal invoice from a marketing automation vendor. She didn’t know how we were using the software, and neither did I. 

The Hadoop Summit conference, hosted by Hortonworks and Yahoo, has become a must-see Big Data event. The Hadoop distributed computing architecture is now an integral part of what it means to be a data scientist, and a few days of concentrated effort each year is enough to get a vision for where the industry is headed. The Hadoop Summit serves this purpose well by providing thought-provoking technical sessions, keynote addresses, and a vendor exhibition that brings many of the major players in the Hadoop ecosystem together under one roof.

Edited by Yan Zhang

Healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) are national problems that affect all of us either directly or indirectly. National estimates project that hundreds of billions of dollars are lost to healthcare FWA on an annual basis. These losses lead to increased healthcare costs and subsequently increased insurance premiums. 

Ever wonder how services like Netflix or Pandora choose media to suggest to you? If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re familiar — at least a little bit — with recommender engines. In our post “How Machine Learning Will Affect Your Next Vacation,” we talked about the impact machine-learning recommender engines have on regular consumers. But here, we want to dive deeper and talk about the math and science behind recommender engines.

Corporate executives make dozens of business decisions every day — most of which are invisible to the general population. But one business decision of late stands out as a stark exception: CNN’s decision to focus on missing Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) long after other news sources moved on. Some CNN watchers grew tired of the endless coverage, especially as other big stories fought for attention elsewhere. Yet CNN seemed to be stubbornly obsessed with the missing flight. For the first time in a long time — possibly ever — people were questioning why an entire network was ignoring major human interest stories — including a sunken ferry with nearly 300 teenage casualties in South Korea and 200 kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria — in favor of one human interest story that was no longer news. CNN even became the butt of jokes for its coverage.

As a relatively new term, “data science” can mean different things to different people due in part to all the hype surrounding the field. Often used in the same breath, we also hear a lot about “big data” and how it is changing the way that companies interact with their customers. This begs the question — how are these two technologies related? Unfortunately, the hype often masks reality and worsens the Signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to our increasingly data-driven society. Rest assured, there truly is something deep and profound representing a paradigm shift in our society surrounding data, but the hype isn’t helping to clarify data science’s exact role in Big Data. In this article, we strive to put to rest many of the misunderstandings surrounding data science.

Conversion rates for online retailers are generally considered pretty dismal by most common measures. Imagine if only 1–3 percent of shoppers entering your store ended up making a purchase. Maybe you’d think of trying a new strategy. The new strategy employed by many online retailers is called retargeting — the use of search and display campaigns to target the 97 percent of visitors who came to your e-commerce site but didn’t convert, meaning they did not make a purchase, fill out a form, or request a demo or call. Retargeting works by keeping track of people who visit your site and displaying your retargeting ads to them as they visit other sites online.

Be careful what you wish for. Most of us probably heard that phrase at some point during our childhood, or perhaps even more recently. The point is valid. When wishing for something we tend to focus on the positives while ignoring the potential negatives. After all, who would wish for something that had a downside?

With the help of technology and a hankering for local Big Data, Hyperlocal Data lets you be there without going there.

In a world where most things are only a click away, humans have a newfound appreciation for local knowledge. Farmers congregate at the local grain elevator to talk corn prices. Local growers and bakers gather to sell their goods (and eye the competition) at local farmers’ markets. You can judge a melon’s quality by the sound it makes when you tap it or a pineapple’s ripeness by how easy it is to pluck out a top leaf. There’s a lot of value in being in a place, in person, using all your senses.