UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?
Image courtesy of http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/
By Linda Broughton
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.
Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.
In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.
Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.
Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.
The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.
Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.
Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.
Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?
http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/
Google Exec: We’re Here to Help Newspapers
By: adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Devices like Apple’s iPad may help newspapers and traditional publishers, but only significant evolution will save them, Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, said in a talk with journalism students at UC Berkeley.
Mobile Credit Card Payments: Fad or Future?
Image courtesy of VeriFone
By Sheila Shayon
According to Ross Howe, sales and product development director for mStation/Mophie, “Mobile credit card transactions are the first big innovation since PayPal, and the biggest innovation in the credit card industry in 50 years. Plastic is old news.”
Mophie, a leader in creating iPhone accessories, is releasing a new product called the Mophie Marketplace. It’s a magnetic Strip Reader for iPhone 3G and 3GS. It enables the phone as a mobile payment solution that is fast, secure, completely transportable, light-weight and form-fitting. It’s an intelligent case solution for any merchant looking to drive sales at point-of-purchase, with assurance to customers that their card data is encrypted as it is swiped.
Encryption is ensured at the iPhone entry point by a tiny circuit board that bypasses the HH device completely. The iPhone never actually sees the credit card information - but sends it to a server in cyberspace where it is decrypted. Mophie is working on the next level of security, another layer at the swipe-head level, and the company is passionate about the issue.
The particular expertise at Mophie comes from its experience on the consumer side, rather than the payment side. Howe refers reverently to “making accessories for Apple customers that are beautiful, sexy products. The biggest challenge in developing Mophie Marketplace was to keep it as small and thin as possible. We are driven by a commitment to ergonomic design.”
Competitor VeriFone recently announced PayWare Mobile, which turns the iPhone into a card reader. A combination of an iPhone/iPod touch app, with a swipe card reader, it allows merchants to accept and process credit cards on the go. VeriFone’s product is aimed at small business merchants who need a mobile card reader for enterprises like home repair, small cafes and door-to-door sales.
Paul Rasori, senior vice president of marketing, considers his company the granddaddy in the payment business, with a 30-year track record and penetration in more than 100 countries. “In addition to the PayWare payment App, the card reader and the hardware device, the VeriFone gateway adds a fourth crucial component - connectivity. Our proprietary gateway allows the merchant to manage payment devices and credit card transactions seamlessly. It has built-in features that help merchants manage and update security and safety, provide extra reporting, and the ability to turn your device off and deactivate it remotely,” Rasori says.
The average consumer uses the VeriFone gateway in drugstores and supermarkets at check-out, but the company is striving to raise consumer awareness of its mobile brand with commercials now running in 10,000 taxis in New York City.
The PayWare Mobile card reader slips over the iPhone to accommodate card swipes and uses the secure magnetic stripe read head and certified firmware. “With the VeriFone gateway, the swipe read head is already secure even before the data gets to the phone. There’s no chance of rogue data capture,” Rasori says. “Our gateway gives PayWare a pedigree for quick adoption by iPhone users. When you buy online, making manual key entries is tedious, and the merchant pays a higher fee. PayWare is an alternative that bypasses large transaction fees.”
Both Mophie and VeriFone would like to enter the Blackberry and Android markets with their mobile Apps, but for now, Apple’s standardized ecosystem wins hands-down for ease in development and deployment.
Both companies would also like to enter global territories outside the US. “Everybody is ahead of America,” Mophie’s Howe says. “In the Asian markets, particularly Japan, they’re making big purchases on mobile as well as micro-payments for bus fare or a stick of gum. Cash is out. The younger you are the less cash you carry and ATM’s are considered an inconvenience.”
“But it’s five times more complicated outside the US with smart card chips and individual PIN’s - it’s much more complex,” Rasori says. “VeriFone is working with big bank customers in Europe to launch something later this year. It’s a solid business, but still in biz dev mode. There’s great interest in it - but how it all develops remains to be seen. Our US experience is successful so far - we’ve embraced the banks and their issues with fraud and come up with solutions that suit everybody.”
Howe agrees it’s an innovation that’s here to stay. “The greatest challenge going forward is paying attention to what’s possible tomorrow, making connections and thinking in advance.”
And then of course there’s Apple - who may outmaneuver them all with its recently announced EasyPay touch. This change to an iPod touch with Apple software would bring the entire point-of-sale (POS) system under Apple’s control.
Sheila Shayon is president/founder of Third Eye Media, third-eyemedia.com, multimedia production with core competencies in broadband production, creative design and execution, and social media. Shayon has several decades of multimedia experience working for companies like Time Warner Cable and Home Box Office.
U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2
By: techcrunch.com
The mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews, according to a new Quantcast Mobile Trends report (embedded below). Even so, the mobile Web accounted for only 1.26 percent of Web consumption in the U.S. (and 0.99 percent worldwide).
How Integrated is Your Web Analytics Package and is That a Good Thing?
By: cmswire.com
According to BtoB Magazine the web analytics market is expected to hit US$ 953 mil by 2014, and suggesting that the pickings might be even juicier Adobe recently acquired Omniture for the tidy sum of about US$1.8 billion.
Top Digital Trends For 2010
By Nuri Djavit and Paul Newnes
In 2009, digital marketing experienced some major shifts in marketing opportunities, budgets and attitude. 2010 will see the hype calming around Facebook apps and Twitter campaigns and the development of ROI models around social media marketing. The following trends are based on thoughts we have shared with our clients and now share with DMB’s readers.
Facebook replaces personal email
Google has it; Hoover has it (in the U.K. anyway); TiVo had it, lost it, and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it?
It’s when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching for something online, you Google it. Or you TiVo, rather than digitally recording a television show. Arguably, an even more powerful phenomenon is when a brand becomes a noun, such as using the word Polaroid to represent all instantly developed photography (although that didn’t end so well).
The newest one would seem to Facebook, although it has two meanings: “I Facebooked you” could mean that the person has added you as a Facebook friend, or that they sent you a private message though Facebook. The latter would seem to be of more interest, as no one has really owned this type of communication before. No brand ever became synonymous with email. To Hotmail or to Gmail someone just never happened.
So the interesting and overlooked disruption of Facebook is its displacement of personal email as a communication tool. Completely permission based, no spam (yet) and no address book required - your friends are already there.
Open source software starts making money (thanks to the cloud)
There’s something starting to happen within the open source software world. Projects that were typically for the purview of programmers, or at least technophiles, are now available to the masses.
An example is Beanstalk, a fully hosted, version-controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open source project. The big deal is that to set up and maintain a Subversion repository can be a pain - plus you need a server if you want to give access to anyone. Beanstalk has created a subscription-based service that, for a small fee, removes the hassle. Services like this can only really exist with cloud computing infrastructure - so companies such as Beanstalk don’t have the huge upfront capital outlay for servers; they only pay for what their customers use. With the right skills any open source project can be commercialized in this manner.
Mobile commerce - The promise that has never delivered, yet
As annoyingly tantalizing yet esoteric as the word “convergence” has been over the last 10 years, mobile commerce has promised much but hasn’t delivered. However, mobile phones have delivered real benefits to societies worldwide, and in developing nations they are used commonly as devices for the transfer of money.
Yet, it’s only recently that the nations that invented and first adopted mobile technologies have extended the use of these precious devices to pay for goods and services. With the advanced browsers of iPhone and the Android platforms, one could pay for goods through full e-commerce sites, but who really wants to fiddle around with a phone in one hand and a credit card in another?
The game changer is the iPhone/iTunes platform. App purchases on the iPhone can tempt users to buy small items, upgrades, updates, etc., while iTunes holds their precious credit card information. All, of course, is done in seamless fashion - easily and reliably enough to promote impulse purchases. It would seem like an easy task for this to be extended to other platforms with PayPal or Google Checkout.
Fewer registrations — one sign-in fits all
I use a great application on the Mac platform that securely holds my login details for upwards of 50 different sites. It means that I don’t have to use the same password for each site and that I don’t have to search around for Post-it notes (my 1998 method) to log into a site I joined a week ago.
However, I’m starting to resent having to register for anything ever again. I don’t see why, if I want to leave a particularly pithy comment on a blog or news site, I have to register all over again. I’m sure I’m not the only one, and that’s why services like Facebook Connect and OpenID are particularly useful and will continue to be adopted at great speed through 2010. Who knows where these might go? Perhaps next year I’ll be able to pay for something using my Facebook login.
Disruption vs. continuity - alternatives to the “big idea”
As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses are investing more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent “Tribalization of Business” study released by Deloitte, 94 percent of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media and, for the majority of these companies, their marketing function will drive this investment. At the same time, as evidenced by Google’s recent release of “free floating” social tools, such as Google Wave and Sidewiki, there is an increasing shift toward online identity and social activity being an integrated part of the network as a whole, rather than concentrated within discrete platforms such as Facebook.
With the increasing emphasis on marketing and advertising through social networks and the increasing pervasiveness of social tools, marketing objectives come into conflict with advertising techniques. While advertising has often sought to distinguish itself and stop consumers in their tracks with a disruptive “big idea,” the emphasis is shifting toward persuasion through fitting organically into the consumer’s social sphere. It will always be the objective of marketing to provide creativity and novelty, but the way will increasingly be through persistence and continuity.
The continuing evolution of Web-driven, open source DIY culture
Much has been said about the power and potential of collective intelligence. From solving complex problems through crowd sourcing, to reconfiguring industries to be leaner and more innovative by harnessing the expertise of a network of independent suppliers, many of the breakthrough solutions of tomorrow appear to lie in pooling the resources and intelligence of our increasingly networked world.
On the other side of the equation, the power of pooled intelligence and networked resources has empowered individuals to tackle more complex undertakings themselves. From drawing on the collective intelligence of blogs and university open courseware to educate themselves, and services like Ponoko, Spoonflower and CafePress that facilitate small-scale production, to offline resource pooling like pop-up retail and collective office spaces, individuals are discovering that it has never been easier to try doing it themselves.
While we find new ways to thrive in a still struggling economy, expect to see lasting changes coming from empowering individuals to work together to become more ever more self-sufficient.
Info-art
Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have pop-statisticians and pop-economists. The growing wealth of data and the access to rich and diverse data sources that are significant byproducts of information networks have made the art of data analysis a defining skill of our time.
By the same token, the skill of elegantly visualizing those data has become a defining art of our time. The art of the infographic is becoming increasingly pervasive as people look more and more to the growing amount of data at our disposal for insight, and more refined as the interactions of those data becomes more complex.
With an ever-increasing need for real-time analysis of a growing torrent of raw data, expect to see greater innovation spurred by more elegant ways of capturing and visualizing information by a growing number of info-artists. See http://www.visualcomplexity.com for examples.
Crowd sourcing
Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special interest groups to not only carry a message but, even more importantly perhaps, to lead and take part in activities on their behalf.
Predictions for 2010 are not as rosy as we all hoped, and budgets for just about everything continue to be cut, encouraging creative thinking regarding getting things done and done well.
From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, we will see huge growth in crowd-sourcing models provoked and led, largely, by digital social media strategies.
More Flash, not less
Outside of the obvious brand sites, micro-sites and media sites (video, games, etc.), Flash has often been looked down upon, if not completely discounted by techies and search engine optimizers alike. It seemed to face an uncertain future as a viable tool for serious websites and applications such as e-commerce tools and corporate websites. As it is, Adobe’s rich media tool has enjoyed the grit and determination of its advocates and external development community. Several tricks, authoring tools and server-side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash-built websites no longer serve up a single, impenetrable page. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization.
As websites continue to increase in their importance as a company’s storefront, the demand for rich, brand-extending experiences will also increase. Further proliferation of (lightning speed) broadband will reduce download issues, while the adoption of Flash on mobile devices will dramatically increase and fuel reach and the desire for highly usable, brand transporting, conversion-oriented experiences.
Nuri Djavit is a founding partner and creative director of Last Exit lastexit.tv, a digital marketing and design company based in New York City and London, UK. With more than 14 years experience in interactive media and technologies, Djavit is considered among the first movers in the field. Having begun his career in the early development of digital user interface design, he moved quickly into positions where early iterations of Web-based technologies could be exploited for consumer-based marketing opportunities.
Paul Newnes is a founding partner and commercial director of Last Exit. Newnes has been involved with commercial applications of digital communications and technologies since 1997. He is obsessed with the impact that new technologies have upon human behavior and is published frequently on this and related topics.
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