SigmaWay Blog

Keeping tabs on products just got easier for manufacturers and retailers. Smart sensors, a part of IOT has enabled tracking of products from manufacturing till the time it gets sold. This technology has drastically reduced waste. Not only that, usage data could be collected throwing light on usage patterns and thereby helping improve the product from a consumer perspective. Interestingly it would help optimize product revenue and collect specific information related to individual consumers that might be used to expand sales or even invalidate warranty.  This sort of monitoring does not go down well with a section of consumers who believe this is an invasion of privacy. In this age of IOT, clear boundaries should be set demarcating what is acceptable in consideration of the benefits. To know more, please follow: http://www.dataversity.net/are-smart-products-getting-too-smart/

Starting off as a small time entrepreneur it might be difficult to see the use of Big Data for your company’s growth. After all Big Data seems to be a term befitting multi million dollars firms, not for start-ups. In reality this isn’t true. Your small start-up can grow exponentially at a affordable cost using data resources which can be availed online by almost anyone.
Here are a couple of ways how it can work for you.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM):
A very important resource for any business is CRM software. Owners can set up a simple CRM spreadsheet, even if it’s just one single webpage, lets you to grab your customer’s feedback which helps towards your company’s growth.
Marketing:
As a small business owner you cannot afford to waste your valuable resources on a  misplaced advertisement or trying to market your product when there is no demand for it. You can use Big Data to analyze the market trends to key in on when and where buying habits are highest.
Big Data is everywhere and you can make use of it easily as long as you keep it simple & streamlined and not overdo it.

Read more at: http://www.smartdatacollective.com/keithtullyy/322521/how-small-business-can-use-big-data

The first step in applying analytics to healthcare data is to create a centralized repository of all the available information extracted from EHRs, health information exchanges, claims data, etc. The main motive remains in interpreting the data to derive valuable insights, which will not only benefit health management, but also fuel business growth. This methodology is also being used to tackle mental healthcare data. Analytics is being used on community data, available in a centralized manner, to identify patients, with more vulnerability to certain mental illnesses. However, since complete information of patients is not always available in such centralized data platforms, inconsistencies in analyses remain. Read more at: http://healthitanalytics.com/news/mental-healthcare-big-data-warehouse-illuminates-care-trends

The first step in effective implementation of a health management initiative is stratifying patients according to the costs incurred by them, in order to properly target the healthcare programmes. It has been observed that the majority of healthcare costs are concentrated in a small fraction of the total patient population. Focusing on the healthcare of this fraction of patients, can greatly reduce costs for the entire population, while providing the appropriate care, valued by the patients and their families. Risk analytics incorporates claims and EHR data into risk scores, in order for health care providers to target their services efficiently. Read more at: http://healthitanalytics.com/news/population-health-management-starts-with-flagging-high-costs

An effective way to communicate is to visualize the rightful information.  The trending problem is to properly present a data than just collecting it. The ‘infographics’ is the most widely used tool to communicate and avoid ‘chartjunk’ ,which leads to less loss of data. The visual way should be easily interpretable and easily communicable. The visual data should have the quality of explaining the business information. The visual communication is most widely used and is more acceptable to human brain. The data should be simple enough to reach and communicate the masses for better and efficient business. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/business-intelligence/business-intelligence-insights-present-visual-data-team-understands-01263960

There have always been a problem of balance between life and work but with the advancement of technology we can actually manage our time from our daily life. There are few simple ways by which we can steadily maintain our work-life balance. The key is to actually figure out the desire and want of life and then analyze what is actually achieved. The social life marks an important component to live and so needs a separate allotted time to keep life in order. The determination to achieve the target should be strong enough to achieve the desired success. In between the start and the end point there should be no obstacles that may distract one. The passion to achieve the goal combined with a strong supporting network will lead to ultimate aim. Read more at:http://www.business2community.com/human-resources/7-tips-achieving-worklife-balance-01265160

Hadoop works on extracting voluminous unstructured data to interpret business performance, customer relationship management etc. Large business houses are at a distinct advantage in handling big data, but with features like Excel reporting in Hadoop, small businesses can also take advantage. Some salient features are:
1. Hadoop is being used with cloud storage platforms to expand storage capabilities.
2. Third party tools and add-ons help tighten up big data security, as big data security is vital.
3. Allowing big data processing through integration with IT systems.
4. Hadoop allows modifications, to extend functionality and accessibility.

To know more: http://www.business2community.com/big-data/hadoop-keeps-even-small-businesses-loop-big-data-analytics-01257559

Our computational capabilities required to handle human genome data will rapidly exceed those of Twitter and YouTube. Computer scientists are realizing that they are not equipped with the growing flood of genomics. Almost 2 Billion human genomes would have been sequenced by the year 2025 according to a journal - PLoS Biology. The data-storage demands for such data could add up to around to 2-40 Exabyte (1 Exabyte is 1018 bytes).  The journal states that Genomic data would outstrip YouTube's projected annual storage needs of 1-2 Exabyte of video by 2025. Storage however would only be a small part of the problem. The computational requirements for acquisition, distribution and analysis of genomics data could be even more demanding. Genomics furthermore lack the standards for conversion of raw sequence data into processed data. Read more at: http://www.nature.com/news/genome-researchers-raise-alarm-over-big-data-1.17912

Vendors intent to make big data analytics accessible because although it is relatively cheaper to work in Hadoop and NoSQL but practically it is costlier in the sense that it is hard and there is a lack of talent.  The following ways to make big data available are featured below:

• Developers love Couchbase mobile - Couchbase mobile has acquired importance lately due to the creation of mobile apps that may work with or without internet connection.
• Can datawatch make everyone big data expert?                                       
•  Platfora remedies big data disillusionment - Introduction of Platfora 4.5 helps data scientists to derive big data insights in remarkable time.
• Cubes on Hadoop?                                   
•  Wrapping up the pieces - Companies takes maximum advantage of big data but is also apprehensive of the challenges to overcome                                                                                                                                                                                                                      For further details on this study, please follow the link: http://www.cmswire.com/big-data/big-data-bits-big-data-for-all-edition/

Employment of analytics professionals into the marketing world goes far behind the usage of visualization techniques and data processing. Marketing enterprises are keen on hiring data and analytics professionals. It's a well-recognized fact that analytics not only help companies to take profitable decisions but also provides them with opportunities to build strong relationship with customers, increase sales volume etc.  Daniel Kehrar (VP Marketing, MarketShare) in his article on Forbes listed out the five ways in which brand marketers can innovate with analytics and they are as follows:

1. Use insights to enrich what you offer.

2. Perfect your programme.

3. Eliminate digital and channel silos.

4. Be predictive.

5. Merge brand measures with direct response.

Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2015/06/29/5-ways-brand-marketers-can-innovate-with-analytics/

ITOA or IT operations analytics is a recent entry to the field of analytics. ITOA automates the process of collecting, organizing, and identifying patterns in highly distributed, diverse and fast-changing service and application data to identify problems faster and improve IT system performance. IT Operations Analytics can be applied to the modern IT Infrastructure and Operations environment. What it exactly does is that it Collects, index and monitor logs and events for abnormalities, perform ad-hoc searches of all log data across the entire IT environment from a single console and correlate log data with events and service models, or application groups. This helps in detecting and resolving service issues more quickly than ever before. Read more at: http://insidebigdata.com/2015/06/09/it-operations-analytics/

Cloud providers are striving hard to earn profits. Some are comparing this situation to the infamous dot-com bubble of the 2000s which was characterized by the growth of various internet companies despite suffering from huge losses. There are multiple reasons behind these struggles like few believe that it is the result of over emphasizing on investments in sales and marketing while others argue that cloud providers cut down prices due to constant price wars. It is always necessary for IT workers to have an exit strategy so that they can get their data out of cloud whenever the need arises. Therefore, backups of critical apps and data should be kept at secured locations as they are crucial for running businesses.

Read more at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/lack-of-profits-a-troubling-sign-for-cloud-providers

Healthcare is perhaps the most valuable and personal data. The risk of data breach is growing as there have been millions of data breach cases. Health data stores are mostly held in on-site software solutions, or, at cloud services, where the data stores are managed by third party hosting providers. But since cloud is not immune to such attacks, this may not be the perfect solution. A recent report by sky-high networks shows that around 93 % of these cloud services pose a security breach threat to the healthcare organizations. Since it is an open source, the origin of the threat is sometimes hard to detect. Read more at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2015/07/06/healthcare-moves-to-the-cloud-but-is-the-cloud-ready-for-healthcare/

It depends on the enterprises' ability to find value in IOT generated data and come up with metadata fabric that enables efficient data analysis. Metadata fabric works in sync with IOT to benefit the enterprise. It can be viewed as the storehouse of business intellectual property. It makes data driven decisions a lot easier. Metadata fabric transforms unified interpretation of data and analytics into layman format and interface easily understood by businesses. IOT ecosystem often throws challenges as the number of unique data sets collected is smaller than the number of applications that need it. Introduction of an intermediate curation layer can solve this governance problem. The aim of the governance system should be to reduce onboarding cost with increasing chances of success. Optimization should also check for homogeneity in the collected data. To know more, please follow:

http://www.dataversity.net/data-governance-the-metadata-fabric-and-the-internet-of-things/

One of the ways to track what a customer sees is with product impression- keeping an account of the products displayed on the page that the customer visits. While this is an easy way of extracting data it has one major problem. A page usually contains multiple products and it is not necessary that just because a person lands on a particular page he is interested in all the displayed products. The more obvious outcome maybe that he might not be actually be viewing all the products displayed at one go- limited screen space- the reason we scroll.
The solution: Scroll based impression tracking.
Instead of automatically assuming all items to be desirable we segregate the page in accordance to the customer’s view- we only track the products visible to the customer. Once the customer starts scrolling we track only the products for which the customer stops scrolling and rank items according to the time spent viewing them. Double counting of products is avoided.
Scroll based impression tracking gives a much more accurate measure of a customer’s propensity of buying a particular product than the traditional product impression method.
For more information visit:
http://content.infotrustllc.com/infotrust-blog/how-to-setup-enhanced-ecommerce-impression-the-right-way-using-scroll-tracking

The process involving social media marketing is the amalgamation of both art and science. Let us have a look at what it takes to develop and maintain content for social media marketing.                                                                                        

• Creativity in content is crucial. Group brainstorming sessions are held including writers, marketers, sales managers to develop new and creative ideas.                                              
• Content prepared by writers is then edited for spelling, grammar, accuracy and creativity by team of experts.                
• A visually enriched content is created by inclusion of images without violating copyright laws.                                        
• Marketing copy is generated so as to ensure that clients’ goals are achieved be it selling a product or branding.          
• Targeting specific audience so that message reaches the right bunch of people.  
•  Lastly, social media sites are monitored and analytics tools are used to identify which campaigns perform well and which don’t. This learning can be put to use while developing content in future.

Read more at:http://www.business2community.com/social-media/behind-the-scenes-the-many-facets-of-social-strategy-01264443

The process to educate, inspire and reveal is the prime motive of video in social media . The diversification of the video usage aims to connect and share useful information with the target audience. The proper outlook can be reached with the right psychology and the specifications of the video. The social learners look for information and entertainment which facilitates skillful branding. The application of better social video can motivate the target audience if it can connect the people. To communicate and to connect have always been the key role of the social media.

Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/top-3-ways-use-video-social-media-01257449

Big Data may be relatively new but data has been a hot topic of discussion for over a 100 years. Interesting to note, the challenges in fetching and understanding it remain fundamentally the same. We are told that this is the era of Big Data but its roots go back to 1914. Willard Brinton wrote the first book on communicating data, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. He had stated that those who possessed cutting-edge data technologies would be the pioneers in their field. Processing and visual representation of data as information would allow us to give just the required information and facts to allow those who aren't proficient in data, actionable insights into their problems. In 100 years more, we would hopefully understand analytics and effective data visualization. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2942728/big-data/big-data-the-100-year-old-buzzword.html

Although most modern enterprises run on data, it becomes useless if we cannot derive intelligence from it. Data includes all the information that is available including raw facts about companies and individuals. Intelligence is when we look at the data and try to find a relation to better interpret challenges and opportunities in the market. Insight with data and intelligence deals in adjusting strategies in response to the market. To develop predictive models about the market, we need intelligence and insight alongside data. Raw data is often mistaken for insights. For smarter decisions, internal and external data sets should be used as starting points and then create intelligence to draw sensible insights. To know more:  http://www.smartdatacollective.com/ray-renteria/327508/data-does-not-equal-intelligence-predictive-analytics-enterprise

There is an indirect effect on the rupee from the Greece crisis, even though India has less direct exposure. Dr. Raghuram Rajan (RBI Chief) in his article says that India is well guarded with good macro-policies and a healthy economy. Amidst the turmoil, the rupee has remained stable against the dollar and euro. Thanks to the foreign exchange reserves India is projected to fend off any impact from the crisis. Analysts have put the same claim that stronger economic fundamentals and comfortable foreign reserves are enough to see off any impact. Also amidst stimulus programme, the Greece crisis is said to be grounded. To know more:  http://profit.ndtv.com/news/greece-crisis/article-greece-crisis-may-impact-rupee-raghuram-rajan-777442