Digital Consumer: December 2011 Archives

December 28, 2011

Digital Consumerism starts early and how!

Experience 1:

I was travelling and had in the seats beside me, a couple with 6-month old twins -travelling to visit their family back home. As you can imagine, travelling with kids is tough and they had their share of diaper bags, baby food etc. The girl was fast asleep while the boy was wide awake and decided to play with me - it was good fun while it lasted but when I decided to gently touch his cheeks, he let go a noisy bawl.

I would have expected the mother to pull out a small rattler or something similar to distract the child. She calmly pulled out her iPhone, tapped on an application and some nice regional music came on with great colorful, moving images! The boy stopped crying, grabbed the phone and viewed it with a great deal of interest.

Experience 2:

My colleague, as is the case in many families, has multiple laptops at home. He also has a 2+ year old boy and constantly frets over the child's eating habits. One day, the boy kept repeating 'apple' and "you too" which was assumed to mean the fruit and a disposition to share. My colleague was ecstatic and rushed to peel and cut an apple into small pieces. The boy calmly pushed that away and pointed at the logo on the laptop, presumably wanting to tap on the keyboard. And what was "you too"? - it was YouTube which the kid had been watching a Barney cartoon on.

[This story almost sounds like it was made up, and I do think my colleague added some twist of his own - but that's not the pointJ]

Now, there is nothing earth-shattering about kids wanting to play with these devices - all kids want to play with the phone, listen to ring-tones and tap the keyboards. And yes, using Paintbrush to doodle.

But what amazes me is that these devices now are actually replacing some of the other de facto options - the omnipresent rattler and TV in the above cases.

I always have personally believed that exposure to computing/digital devices too early is not warranted. But I am beginning to wonder - there will be peer pressure pretty soon on what latest game was downloaded, what email /social account one is active on etc - should we prep our kids actively?

Public speaking was considered an important aspect of a child's development - will that become "public tweeting" pretty soon??

Posted by Ravikant Karra at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

December 2, 2011

Big Data : Making sense of Social Media Madness

Social media usage among consumers is growing at a humongous pace resulting in huge amount of data getting created every minute. The growth in usage of smartphones, location based apps and more "Internet of Things", the data is multiplying at a faster pace. The following statistics provides a glimpse of the amount of data we are talking here and no guesses that it is going to move in upward direction only. Few statistics on the social data growth,

· More than 250 million tweets are generated in a day and it is increasing at a tremendous speed.

· 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook on a monthly basis.

· 40% project growth in global data generated per year.

· Data will grow over 800% in the next 5 years and 80% of these data will be unstructured.

While handling such huge volumes of data pose a significant challenge, at the same time provide huge opportunities and competitive edge for the enterprises, which are ready with a strategy to handle them. Social Media data has tremendous wealth of information which analyzed properly can make significant impact to both the top line and bottom line. That is where BigData technology and Infrastructure is coming to the rescue.

Big Data processing can be defined in simple terms as fast and reliable analysis of complex and huge volumes of data in near real time with commodity hardward. Big data technologies helps in combining Social World data streams with Enterprise IT systems in a powerful way using which one can derive meaningful and actionable insights. Big data technology is not new, it has been adopted by technology companies like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Amazon and many more for quite some time now , it has come a long way in terms maturity and now it is ready for mainstream adoption.

Having a scalable BigData Processing Infrastructure to analyze Social Data will help enterprises in,

· Responding faster to a social outburst before negative sentiments go viral the in social world.

· Creating powerful Recommendation Engines for customers to enable cross-sell and up-sell.

· Providing a complete Personalization experience for users through data collected from across the channels.

· Taking key decisions on products and services based on consumer feedbacks.

· Identifying key influencers who are impacting the increase or decrease of sales of a particular product.

Mckinsey Quarterly has projected that there is 60% potential increase in retailers operating margins possible with big data analysis. Though it is too early to put definitive numbers on the impact of BigData, this is the next Big thing which enterprises need to be prepared to get an definitive edge among the competition.

Posted by Shanmugam Periasamy at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)