SigmaWay Blog

In today`s world, data has become a comparative advantage and an integral part of product development. It is a vital component when it comes to enhancing business performance. The most crucial role played in this context is the role played by the data scientists. The data scientists are shaping and building the future of business through modern techniques for data analysis and forecasting. An important reason in such remarkable progression in this field of data analytics is due to the accessibility of the data. The rise of online community, e-commerce, mobile and overall digitization of the society has contributed enormously. According to industry experts, companies are realizing the potential benefits of data analytics and are using it as a powerful tool for business development. To know more read: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/11/23/data-scientists-changing-face-business-intelligence

The key to successful digital marketing lies in its content. Original, interesting and varied content will catch customer’s attention. Digital marketing campaigns should be both written and visual, rich in information, images, videos etc. One should keep an eye on metrics to make a note of most attracted posts so as to improve one’s content. As almost every individual now possesses a smartphone, marketers should make sure their advertisements are mobile friendly. Social media, with its rising popularity, can be used as a platform for marketing to specific demographics. Customer’s trust might show up the brand loyalty, increasing the chance of sharing and promoting their marketing on social platform. Read more about this interesting article by Maria Maguire (International Events Director) at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/5-ways-to-improve-your-digital-marketing

With the rising importance of big data, organizations are now collecting and storing data, but many don't put it to good use. Retailers can leverage customer data to make personalized recommendations about offers and promotions thus providing a shopping experience customized to individuals. Analyzing customer data can help companies to identify customer preferences for products and the prices they are willing to pay. Customer data can be used to identify the most relevant users to ask for feedback, create new products or services and provide better customer services. By analyzing customer data, companies can identify patterns of behavior of customer data and thus formulate targeted marketing strategies, improve organizational effectiveness and reduce risk and fraud. Read more at: http://www.cio.in/feature/8-ways-to-make-the-most-out-of-your-customer-data

Content is king, when you try to get connected with the public. - Rachel Wolfson (Content Marketing Manager at Moogsoft). Content can help you in generating leads, increase ROI and brand awareness. One thing that distinguishes between good content marketers from exceptional one is the ability to notice their content. 5 keys takeaways as to how a content marketer can get their content noticed: • Start with a clear content marketing strategy.
• Understand your target audience.
• Practice the “3 C’s” – Create, Content, Consistently.
• Know how to correctly promote content via social media.
• Recognize the value in repurposing content.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/5-best-practices-ensure-content-gets-noticed-01251751#WdvE0oR3cCZs4h2p.99

According to Sushant Saini (An owner of Eyewear), branding is one of the most important functions of the marketing team. And to make branding effectiveness, marketing team need to connect with their target customers.  Essentials to make brand effective are:
• Story
• Content Marketing
• Brand association
• Creative communication
• Influential outreach
To know more about these essential, follow this link:  http://yourstory.com/2015/06/brand-building/

According to KC Claveria (Marketer from Vancouver, B.C.), if social media used rightly, can help you in maintaining better relationships with customers. According to the Mckinsey & Company report, “email conversion rates are 40times higher as compared to Facebook and Twitter combined.” This shows that for generating leads, email marketing is very important. Email marketing is better than other marketing channels because:
• With email, you’re reaching an audience that already knows you.
• There’s too much noise on social.
• People are more likely to see (and click on) your email.
• You get to say more on email.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/why-email-marketing-beats-social-media-in-lead-generation-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-01246702#5FUji2OQheQ8LXzA.99

According to the Eyal Hilzenrat (Vice president of products and partnerships at YouAppi), mobile marketing is the future of marketing and installing the app is the beginning of this journey. And to the performance of your mobile marketing, use the Engagement metrics, Revenue metrics and Interest Metrics. KPI to mobile marketing are:
• Number of times the mobile app was accessed during the first 24 hours / first week (after installation)
• Permission granted to the app
• Time spent in-app
• Number of screens/pages accessed during in-app visit
• Number of subscriptions / registration
• Purchases
• Number of items placed in a shopping cart
• Number of articles read
• Number of pages visited
• Social Shares
• Retention rates
• Brand awareness
Read more at: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/top-12-key-performance-indicators-for-maximizing-mobile-app-revenue/621659

Focused market research is imperative for building of brands and foundation for market research is laid down by market intelligence. In broad terms, market intelligence collates three types of information- business, market and competitive. For distribution of information, social media is playing a huge role. Thus integration of marketing intelligence with social media monitoring and digital space opens up many channels of opportunities to address specific business issues and enhance performance significantly. However, this requires intense understanding and customization of data. Also, digitization of field resources poses certain challenges. On a concluding note, the authors, Stephen Dale and Melissa Chue are of opinion that market intelligence should ultimately serve as be the backbone of any organization and more investment should be made to expand digital resources and data. Read more:- http://www.marketing-interactive.com/events/intelligence-bedrock-good-market-research/

Faced with challenges of bureaucratic vices and realities, government agencies often let things slip through the cracks, including fraud. It is disheartening to learn that huge losses are incurred by many public facing agencies due to fraud and such losses are regarded as expected operating costs. Yet, no measures are being employed. Thankfully, investments are being made in predictive analytics tools by agencies and some progress has been achieved in detecting preventing and prosecuting fraud. However, to tackle crimes effectively the tools need to be comprehensive, flexible and affordable. For example, dynamic case management solutions can be applied to tackle the mammoth challenges faced by the agencies. Read more: http://gcn.com/articles/2015/06/10/fraud-control.aspx

Companies can use data scientists to prepare data sets, business analysts to develop models using both statistical and machine learning algorithms, application developers can be used to deploy and manage predictive analytics life-cycles, and tools. There are many vendors in the categories of customer analytics, cross-selling, smarter logistics, e-commerce etc. Open source software community is driving predictive analytics into the mainstream. Many Business Intelligence platforms also offer “some predictive analytics capabilities."  Rapid Miner’s predictive analytics platform can also be integrated into the cloud. Read more about this article at: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/big-data/3-vendors-lead-the-wave-for-big-data-predictive-analytics-028684.php?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRomrfCcI63Em2iQPJWpsrB0B/DC18kX3RUnJb6Wfkz6htBZF5s8TM3DVlJGXqlI4UEKTLE%3D 

From Software and Platform as a service to data as a service, the trend has always been to evolve to the requirements of the current generation. The next step is mixing them all together and mass upscaling of the data in the system to provide Big Data solutions as a service (or BDaaS). Multiple businesses in the past have sprung up and are offering cloud based Big Data solutions. Big Data refers to the large, mostly unstructured information created and stored, and the analysis and use of this data is called Big Data Analytics. BDaaS is a term used to describe the outsourcing of Big Data functions to the cloud. It includes the supply of data, providing the analytical tools and the actual analysis of the data. BDaaS can also include consulting and advisory services. Read more at : http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/04/27/big-data-as-a-service-is-next-big-thing/

Analytics is being widely used in many areas and sports is no exclusion. Data analytics has successfully scripted victories for many teams, already. Data analytics can be applied to any sport be it tennis, baseball or cricket. But, sports analytics is a completely new concept in India. Sports analytics is the amalgamation of sports and information technology. Sports teams are now hiring data analysts who feed data in their algorithms, which then process the data fed and perform numerical calculation to figure out the strategy for the next match. The analyst then informs the coach and the team players about the prescriptive strategies. Read more at: http://www.cio.in/feature/big-data-is-here-to-have-a-good-innings

Social media is no more just the place to catch up on old school friends and college buddies; it is now being used for diverse activities. People, nowadays, are using social media to look for products and services, research and review companies and ask for recommendation from friends. Social media has now become the place for branding, opening channels of communication with customers, building loyalty, being transparent and establishing goodwill. Reaching out to customers is far less expensive on social media enabling marketers to achieve higher marketing ROI. Digital marketing has replaced traditional marketing techniques as consumers these days are more tech savvy and active on social media. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/social-media-advertising-roi-01247591

A recent study has revealed that there is a growing gap between the amount of data that firms are gathering and their staff's ability to analyze it. A major difficulty that the companies are facing is that as the value of data analytics is being recognized the competition for capable analysts is also increasing. Employees are more attracted to companies with a pre-established analytics framework than to newly established ones. To mitigate this problem several companies are outsourcing their analytics work. But having data analysts internally is beneficial as it allows for easier transformation of analytical insights into business actions. Companies should partner with higher education institutes to initiate analytics courses to meet their needs. Firms should also recruit multi-talented analysts and also offer training to existing staff. Read more at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-analytics-skills-gap

A chunk of healthcare information is being generated through electronic medical records, wearable devices and centralized databases leading to improvement in care, lowering of costs and driving efficiency. Healthcare, in recent times, is characterized by data-driven technologies thus leading to betterment of treatment, quality, safety and efficiency. These modern data-driven techniques also raise serious privacy and security questions as pointed out by Chris Boone, executive director of the Health Data Consortium. Concern over security arises when organizations pile sensitive consumer data. To mitigate the problem of data privacy, researchers recommend encrypting health data both in transition and at rest as healthcare companies are the popular targets of cyber criminals. Read more at: http://www.cio.com/article/2914170/healthcare/how-to-balance-data-privacy-and-healthcare-improvements.html

Companies now are emphasizing on converting data into action as quickly as possible. This is being done by unifying the databases used for operational applications with those used by analysts. This leads to continuous up gradation of models and adjustment of business functions as things are happening. Information is essential in a number of areas, targeted marketing being one of them. Due to the advent of online shopping and real-time processing of data, retailers are now being able to sell their goods at unadvertised low prices, without loss of profits, to customers who leave their website without purchasing the goods in their cart. In these cases, data handling and extracting data to deliver real-time actionable analytics is a challenge. Read more at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/driving-real-time-decision-making-with-business-analytics

With plenty of big data on its hands, the healthcare industry will be able to improve quality and patient outcomes only if it is able to extract meaningful, actionable insights from this bounty of raw information. To reap the benefits of healthcare big data analytics, organizations should bring about cultural and leadership changes to promote analytical approach to the practice of medicine. Research puts it that to achieve improvement, multiple types of data are required which can identify opportunities, measure progress, and help users understand what works. Using predictive analytics to identify high-risk patients, reducing infections and adverse cases through implementing evidence based protocols and realizing the importance of patient-centred care are some of the measures that have been reported to have made an impact. Read more at: http://healthitanalytics.com/news/healthcare-big-data-analytics-plays-critical-role-in-quality

Organizations usually direct their data analysis efforts on transactional data i.e. the information generated when a customer purchases a product or service. In the process of collecting transactional data, large amounts of additional information are also generated commonly referred to as dark data. Dark data when approached in a correct way can reveal all kinds of patterns and insights that would have been otherwise missed. The key to unlocking dark data lies in the ability to understand the relation between unrelated pieces of information. With several databases offering completely new ways of reading traditional datasets, discovering the business value of dark data is becoming straightforward. Monetizing dark data requires analyzing it to discover hidden patterns, developing hypotheses and then putting the insights to use. Read more at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/7407-tapping-into-dark-data

Getting around in big cities without facing traffic jams is almost impossible. After the businesses, it's the city planners and transportation experts now who are resorting to Big Data when making improvements to city transportation. Commuters have certain patterns they like to keep to while travelling. By analyzing these actions and the factors responsible for them, transportation experts understand why certain routes and modes of transportation are preferred over others. Gathering call data records help provide access to data about travelers, which data scientists can use to decode the transport pattern of travelers. Countries like Australia and Brazil have already implemented Big Data to upgrade public transportation to keep up with the current demand of metropolitan cities. Read more at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/big-data-s-impact-on-public-transportation

“Starting from today i.e. 15^th June, 2015, Zimbabwe will phase out its official currency Zimbabwean Dollar and adopt US Dollar as its official currency”

This may be shocking news to some because a country is completely doing away with its own currency but actually, this is rather a late move by Zimbabwe as this country has been facing hyperinflation for the past few years. Hyperinflation is not just a theoretical concept, in the last century, it has two such instances had been observed. They are:

• Germany in the 1920s
• Hungary post WWII

Both of them were consequences of World Wars but such was not the case with Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, the main reason was an ineffective monetary policy managed by the ruling government rather than its Central Bank.

Reckless printing of currency notes was done, while ignoring the quantity, cost and time constraints. The heights of printing were reached when they even issued notes of $100 trillion. This reduced the status of the currency to just that of token with not much buying power and thus this currency was ruined by 2009.

Since then, US Dollar has already been in use for day to day transactions. The Zimbabwean currency has been left as a memory or in old bank accounts. This move of completely phasing out this currency is just an attempt to clean up the banking system.

As a result of this move, Zimbabwe will lose its rights to control its own monetary policy but this also has been seen as a welcome move by some economists, hoping that this would improve the situation.

To know more, please read the following article by Tim Worstall, Author of the book, “The No Breakfast Fallacy, why the Club of Rome was wrong about us running out of resources”, at Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/13/this-isnt-the-death-of-the-zimbabwe-dollar-this-is-the-long-overdue-burial-of-it/