What makes South Africa so interesting is that some 52 million people call it home. What makes it difficult is that there are 11 different languages, and there’s a history of division between the diverse population. Masingita Mazibuko, a director of marketing for skincare brand Pond’s, stated that “the trick is to know your customers.” With over 91% of B2B companies engaged in content marketing in the United States, it’s clear that brands have been trying to know their customers by creating content that is appealing to that specific audience. While some would argue that South Africa is behind in […]
PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia, Dec 31 (Reuters) – Rescue planes and helicopters sat grounded near the coast of the Indonesian island of Borneo on Wednesday as bad weather hampered the search for victims in the crashed AirAsia jet.
Reports that Islamic State militants in Mosul have contracted Ebola swirled though Iraqi media sources on Wednesday. World Health Organization officials said they haven’t confirmed the cases, but the organization has reached out to offer assistance
Three outlets reported that Ebola showed up at a hospital in Mosul, a city 250 miles north of Baghdad that’s been under ISIS control since June 2014. The reports, however, have perpetuated mostly in pro-government and Kurdish media.
“We have no official notification from [the Iraqi government] that it is Ebola,” Christy Feig, WHO’s director of communications told MashableRead more…
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Argentina’s dollar reserves and the country’s notoriously spoiled lapdogs will both be flying high as 2015 gets underway, according to President Cristina Fernandez, even if…
We’re still fixating on all the wrong Big Data startups. Hortonworks, one of the primary companies behind Hadoop, recently went public to great fanfare and a $1.2 billion valuation. But Hortonworks and the rest of the so-called Big Data startups are actually some of the least interesting Big Data companies.
As consultant Peter Goldmacher declared back in 2013, the biggest winners in Big Data are the “business people that have identified opportunities to use data to create new opportunities or disrupt legacy business models.” As we enter 2015, expect to see data double the number of billion-dollar startups even as public companies learn to grow through data, as well.
Do-It-Yourself Software Loses Its Luster
It used to be enough for a vendor to ship software and abandon the customer to figure it out (or pay hefty sums of money in consulting fees). SAP, for example, has made billions in revenue by shipping complex software and having customers shell out multiples of the software license fee for high-priced consultants to make sense of its Byzantine software.
That sort of strategy doesn’t work very well anymore.
Forget startups for a moment. If we look at the stock prices of various data-related companies, investors are paying a premium for companies like Tableau and Qlik that make data easy to consume:
The companies rising the most include Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy, which provide tools to visualize data, while companies that tend to sell infrastructure like IBM and Teradata largely skidded through the year. (In fact, IBM is on its second year as one of the Dow Jones worst performers.)
Data Begets Billions
The analysis isn’t perfect, of course. For example, though IBM sells a lot of core infrastructure it also has a Business Intelligence business. Oracle, for its part, plays in many camps, with a strong applications business to make up for its stalling database business.
But where the shift to Big Data really becomes apparent is in the Wall Street Journal’s burgeoning billion-dollar startup club. As the Journal’s Christopher Mims points out, “2014 was the year tech startup valuations went on a tear without precedent.”
It was also the year that tech startups put data to use at unprecedented levels.
No, not in the old-school Big Data way. When you review most lists of the “top 10 Big Data companies” they focus on those that sell Big Data technology. Among the top-15 most valuable startups, only Cloudera (and maybe Palantir) counts as a Big Data startup in this old sense of the word.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Comb through the rest of the top-40 most valuable startups and you add MongoDB and Good Data. At face value this seems to suggest that Big Data really isn’t that big of a deal.
Back to Goldmacher.
In Goldmacher’s world, the “Big winners” in Big Data are “infrastructure providers like the Hadoop vendors and the NoSQL vendors,” the “Bigger winners” are “the Apps and Analytics vendors that abstract the complexity of working with very complicated underlying technologies into a user friendly front end.”
There’s An App For That
But the “Biggest winners,” as noted above, are companies like Uber, Stripe and Airbnb that have figured out how to “leverage data as an asset,” thereby up-ending old industries and setting themselves apart. Look through the list of the top-40 most valuable startups and nearly all of them have this in common: they understand and leverage Big Data.
As we enter 2015, data will become more important than ever. It won’t, however, be easy to track, because there’s no meaningful “Big Data” category of vendors. Instead, data will transform industries as diverse as retail and healthcare, crowning multitudes of billion-dollar startups and billion-dollar revenue streams along the way.
(Reuters) – A forecasting tool developed by the Federal Reserve recommends that U.S. interest rates should be hiked immediately to keep pace with the improving economy, according to a paper by the soon-to-retire Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser.
You’ve probably heard a lot of things about dogs, cats, and other typical pets, but some things are exaggerated or untrue. This video clears up 10 popular myths and old wives’ tales so you can be the best pet owner you can be.
Every day, we make decisions about how to spend our time and resources. To get better at making the most of those choices, consider each decision a chance to trade up.
The basics of good content haven’t changed in the last ten years, but 2014 did bring a renewed focus on developing great content. As we look into 2015, many businesses are planning to focus on content marketing in the coming year. Perhaps Stephanie Miller said it best: Content is King. Again. Still. But what is ‘good content’ and what is the best way to go about creating it? Each month, we will try to answer that question by looking at the top news and articles in content marketing. In December, content marketing experts covered everything from predictions for 2015 to how […]
Kenneth Jones 