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Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’? - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Innovation The top marketing executive at a sizable US retailer recently found herself perplexed by the sales reports she was getting. A major competitor was steadily gaining market share across a range of profitable segments. Despite a counterpunch that combined online promotions with merchandizing improvements, her company kept losing ground. When the executive convened a group of senior leaders to dig into the competitor’s practices, they found that the challenge ran deeper than they had imagined. What this executive team had witnessed first hand was the game-changing effects of big data. But over the last few years, the volume of data has exploded. All of this new information is laden with implications for leaders and their enterprises. Over time, we believe big data may well become a new type of corporate asset that will cut across business units and function much as a powerful brand does, representing a key basis for competition. Five big questions about big data 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

2011-09-08 IBM Global Commuter Pain Survey: Traffic Congestion Down, Pain Way Up ARMONK, N.Y., - 08 Sep 2011: • 8,042 commuters in 20 cities on six continents surveyed • Drivers report more stress and frustration related to commuting worldwide • Forty one percent of commuters globally said improved public transportation would help reduce stress • Perception of traffic in emerging economies vs. more developed economies is improving A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) survey of the daily commute in a cross-section of some of the most economically important international cities reveals a startling dichotomy: while the commute has become a lot more bearable over the past year, drivers’ complaints are going through the roof. The annual global Commuter Pain Survey, which IBM released today, reveals that in a number of cities more people are taking public transportation rather than driving, when compared with last year’s survey. To better understand consumer attitudes around traffic congestion as the issue continues to grow around the world, IBM conducted the 2011 Commuter Pain survey.

Comment le web de données change-t-il la nature de la toile ? En rendant les contenus du web lisibles par les machines, le web sémantique bouleverse notre univers informationnel et ouvre de nouvelles opportunités propres à redéfinir la nature du Web : d’un web de document à un web de données. (ce billet est issue d’une note de synthèse, réalisée dans le cadre de mes activités universitaires. Il s’agit d’un bilan de lecture autour du web de données. 1. A peine avons-nous commencé à explorer les nouveaux modèles d’affaires du Web 2.0 que déjà se profile un nouveau paradigme prometteur : le web de données. Les applications du Web 2.0 reposent de plus en plus sur la gestion, l’analyse et l’exploitation des massives quantités de données issues des UGC. Nos historiques de navigation sont enregistrés, tous comme nos requêtes sur des applications tierces, et l’immense champ des flux de données plus ou moins bien structurés. 2. information overload ("seven months" by dylanroscover) 3. Le web sémantique a été proposé en 2001 par Tim Berners Lee. 4. 5. 6.

Strata NY 2011 [Data Visualizations] - The Subjectivity of Fact This post was written by Mimi Rojanasakul. She is an artist and designer based in New York, currently pursuing her MFA in Communications Design at Pratt Institute. Say hello or follow her @mimiosity. Last but not least, here's a round-up of talks that were focused on data visualization at Strata. Most of the presentations covered the standard do's and don'ts, parading humorously incomprehensible examples around of those who would forget to label their axis, or use a pie chart to show change over time. Naomi Robbins, the consummate modernist, spends her presentation extolling clarity, objectivity, and a form follows function philosophy that comes with a number of simple guidelines to follow. Robbins makes a point of distinguishing more technical graphics from art. Noah Iliinsky, of Complex Diagrams and Designing Data Visualizations, takes our focus from the clear and factual to good storytelling. Even Lundry admits that there are certain boundaries that shouldn't be crossed.

I.B.M. Study Quantifies the Pain of the Commuting Motorist I.B.M.A speedometer graphic represents “the emotional and economic toll” of commuting in 20 international cities. Mexico City, with a score of 108, ranked as the most onerous. I.B.M. knows your pain. And there is plenty of pain to go around in cities from New York to Nairobi, according to I.B.M.’s fourth annual Global Commuter Pain survey, which looks at the connection between traffic congestion and commuters’ emotional response to it in some of the world’s largest cities on six continents. The survey, which began in 2008 and surveyed only residents of cities in the United States, has been expanded worldwide. The index suggests a big disparity in the pain of the daily commute, with Mexico City, at a score of 108, outranking all other cities surveyed and Montreal, at 21, reporting the lowest level. Cities near the top included Beijing with 95, Nairobi with 88 and Moscow with a score of 65. For more information on the survey, click here.

Intelligence ambiante Un article de Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. L'évolution des ordinateurs : la course à la miniaturisation et à la diffusion dans le milieu ambiant L'intelligence ambiante est ce que pourrait devenir l'informatique dans la première moitié du XXIe siècle en repoussant les limites technologiques qu'elle avait à la fin du XXe siècle [réf. nécessaire]. Ce concept semble pouvoir tenir lieu de traduction non littérale aux concepts nés en Amérique du Nord sous le vocable initial d'informatique ubiquitaire, systèmes pervasifs ou encore ordinateur évanescent [réf. nécessaire]. Dans cette approche, le concept même de système d’information ou d'ordinateur change : d’une activité de traitement exclusivement centrée sur l’utilisateur, l'informatique devient interface entre objets communicants et personnes, et entre personnes [réf. nécessaire]. Facteurs en jeu[modifier | modifier le code] Vers une informatique diffuse[modifier | modifier le code] Perspectives économiques[modifier | modifier le code]

An Open Data Ecosystem Rufus Pollock recently shared his thoughts on scaling what he sees as the current open data ecosystem. He writes, “The last several decades the world has seen an explosion of digital technologies which have the potential to transform the way knowledge is disseminated. This world is rapidly evolving and one of its more striking possibilities is the creation of an open data ecosystem in which information is freely used, extended and built on. The resulting open data ‘commons’ is valuable in and of itself, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, because the social and commercial benefits it generates — whether in helping us to understand climate change; speeding the development of life-saving drugs; or improving governance and public services.” Pollock continues, “In developing this open data ecosystem there are three key things are needed: material, tools and people. Read more here. Image: Courtesy Flickr/ okfn

House & Home - Liveable v lovable Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it is also, well ... a little dull. Who would want to watch a film set in Vancouver? To see its skyscrapers destroyed by aliens or tidal waves, its streets populated by cops and junkies, its public buildings hosting romantic reunions? No. The big cities it seems, the established megacities of the US, Europe and Asia are just too big, too dangerous, too inefficient. All the surveys use an index. So that’s the mountains, lakes and huge cups of generic coffee accounted for. To even begin to understand how these slightly unsettling results are arrived at, we need to understand who compiles them and who they are for. Joel Garreau, the US urban academic and author, agrees. New York Rio de Janeiro London

Un signal qui nous vient d’IBM Certains disent qu’il y a en économie des méthodes simples pour savoir où l’on se trouve par rapport aux autres dans son domaine d’activité. Celles qui s’apparentent au « tir au journal » chers aux artilleurs : on tire un coup de canon, on achète le journal du lendemain, on voit où l’obus est tombé et on en déduit l’endroit où on se trouve. Cette méthode s’apparente à celle du « ballon d’essai ». Puis il y a ceux qui cherchent à « apprivoiser l’avenir » en recourant aux méthodologies de l’intelligence économique et ceux enfin qui regardent du côté d’IBM. Regardons donc cette fois-ci ce que nous dit IBM. Le CEO d’IBM Samuel J. De cette décision, on peut d’abord en déduire qu’IBM continue depuis dix ans sa politique de retrait des marchés encombrés par la concurrence où la compétition se fait sur les prix. Les « Analytics » brevetés Vigilint implantée à Sophia Antipolis est spécialisée dans l’acquisition et le traitement de l’information brevet.

MongoDB 2.0 Should Have Been 1.0 | Luigi Montanez No open source project has received more criticism in recent years than MongoDB. Most of the flak has revolved around technical implementation decisions made for the project, and perceptions of how the company behind MongoDB, 10gen, has used advantages gained from those design decisions in marketing their product. It seems that more blog posts have been written on why one should not use MongoDB than on why one should use it. In a now-404ed July 2010 entry (mirror), Mikael Rogers, at the time an employee of the company behind CouchDB, wrote a highly-trafficked critique of MongoDB’s asynchronous writes and lack of single-server durability. A few months later, Ethan Gunderson wrote a post titled “Two Reasons You Shouldn’t Use MongoDB”. Being document-based datastores, Riak and CouchDB are the most direct competitors to MongoDB. A week later, in a weird self-congratulatory blog post, Basho COO Antony Falco laid into the marketing of MongoDB by 10gen. Configurable fsync time in 1.2.

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