Waqar Hasan, who in a past life was vp for data platforms at Yahoo, hasn’t lost his fascination with the power a business can gain when it knows what to do with its data – make that its Big Data. Now CEO of InsightsOne, Hasan and his company are focused on making predictive analytics accessible to the general B2C marketing organization via the cloud.

Among its early customers is online review site Angie’s List, which in mid-January selected the cloud-based predictive analytics solution to deliver a 1-to-1 consumer marketing experience to its members.

“We’re targeting B2C marketers to increase the relevance and profitability of their consumer interactions, by applying micro-segmentation on Big Data to extract all sorts of signals from the data and turn it to a more powerful predictor for the future – who will buy what and who is likely to churn,” Hasan says.

Read more

Charlie Neer of Co.Create recently shared his insights regarding the rise of predictive analytics and how humans stack up by comparison. He writes, “We all know the history behind the recent economic crisis. I wonder though, if most people know that trading algorithms predicted the fall from grace long before the actual traders? Check it out for yourself. When you consider this, it makes perfect sense. Given the amount of variables that abound and the speed at which they are changing, humans simply can’t keep up. In a more industry-specific example, look at the evolution of display ad serving optimization. As the number of variables increased, so did the speed of technology adoption. We went from spreadsheets to dynamic cost per thousand (dCPM) to RTB in less than five years.”

He goes on, “Let’s think beyond today. What happens when you break through the finite set of inferred third-party targeting attributes in display advertising to a point where one has the ability to adjust bids based on plethora of accurate first-party data curated by the end user? Read more

If you’ve redeemed points at the Chase Ultimate Rewards web site or booked business travel through American Express’ AXIOM service, you’ve already had some experience with Rearden Commerce’s Deem e-commerce services platform. In the not-too-distant future, such marketplace experiences may be even further informed by semantic technology to add even greater personalization.

VP of analytics Steve Bernstein’s duties include leading traditional quantitative analysis and predictive modeling – the kind of work that last week resulted in the company providing an analysis of ten years of big data on domestic flight performance to discover everything from the best day of the year to fly (Oct. 3, thanks to only7 in 1,000 arrivals or departures being late, cancelled or diverted to the worst arrival performance for a major airport (EWR, in Newark N.J.). But he spends the rest of his time working with other parts of his team to structure unstructured data with the help of semantics and natural language processing technology so that it can serve as input for predictive modeling purposes.

Today, structured information for traveler services that use the Deem platform come from third-party feeds, such as hotel information from providers like Orbitz that consist of a couple of hundred pieces of information on over 100,000 hotels. That’s helpful for pinpointing users to guest accommodations at their preferred location or price, for instance, but not so much for helping them book a quiet hotel room. That’s where his team’s work crawling and capturing over 5 million user-generated hotel reviews, loaded up into a Hadoop file system, can come into play to better serve users’ needs.

Read more

Chris Talbot recently argued that the semantic web is and will be instrumental to the effective analysis of Big Data. He writes, “As big data stores continue to grow and require additional management, enterprises are faced with the task of managing their explosive data growth while also trying to find the best way to analyze that data. According to the recent InformationWeek ‘Database Discontent’ report, a top item on IT departments’ 2012 to-do list is handling big data in a way that allows for change over time.” Read more