It’s time for the wrap up you’ve all been waiting for – what happened on Twitter with BI and data analytics pros in the last month.
Let’s kick off this party with a few awards and then dive into this month’s featured content and theme – data analytics for good. (Note: This is not our theme, but a theme we found in the stories shared on Twitter this month.)
Twitter Awards
Each month, we issue a few awards on Twitter names, Retweets and Spotfire mentions. Here are the awards for June.
Best Twitter Handle
@LifeAnalytics or Themos Kalafatis, a predictive analytics consultant, wins our award for best Twitter handle. Kalafatis also gets a nod for his Life Analytics blog and this cool post – Food Data – The Next Target of Massive Analytics.
Most ReTweeted
We have two awards in this category – most retweeted Spotfire blog post and most retweeted data analytics piece in June. The former award goes to two posts – our recap of the Forrester Wave report that gave Spotfire the “highest current offering score” in self-service BI and this one about how gold lies in the piles of big data.
The most retweeted analytics piece goes to this piece from Alex Howard on how predictive analytics is helping save lives and tax dollars in the city that never sleeps. See our next section on this article.
New York City – Utilizing “Money Ball” Talent for Social Good
Howard (mentioned above) interviews Mike Flowers, the director of analytics for the Office of Policy and Strategic Planning in the Office of the Mayor in NYC. Flowers, who is considered a “pioneer in the field of urban predictive analytics” gives us a peek inside his workshop to learn about the team behind Big Apple crackdowns powered by predictive analytics.
Flowers credits his team of data scientists for their econ degrees and creative sides. His chief analyst is a fantasy baseball geek. Read more about the pros who play “moneyball” for social good.
Howard also shares information about a new data analytics partnership among four major cities called G-Analytics to share “ideas and tools for leveraging data and to encourage other municipalities to use analytics more effectively.” Really, really cool.
Multi-Platform Analytics = Gold for Media Company
This month’s journey starts across the pond. Emily Gibbs, corporate communications manager at the Financial Times in London, alerted us to this gem – how the media company uses “DNA” or the way digital customers read their content. The article discusses how, by tracking what readers are reading, when they are reading it, and on what devices, the company is able to connect over “20% of its subscription growth to marketing activity that was directly linked to consumer behavior.”
Feeding the Data Poor Lending Companies
ZestCash, a startup that originally had a mission to “use big data to save the under-banked (Americans with poor credit scores) billions of dollars in high fees” is now ZestFinance. The guys behind this company have changed their strategy to sell their analysis to the established lenders who are “data poor.” This NY Times feature is well worth a read and brought to your attention by Bernard Marr, founder and CEO of the Advanced Performance Institute. Marr tweets commentary on big data often and he’s just launched a newsletter on business performance and big data.
Data Analytics & Kids = Shaky Ground
The New Jersey attorney general has filed a lawsuit against a kid’s iPhone app maker for collecting data on kids without parental permission and sending it to a data analytics company, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. It looks like the matter has been handled by the app maker, but the mishandling of data can make consumers wary. So much so that the WSJ has a tech section on “What They Know” that explores digital privacy. You can keep up with this increasingly important subject at the Twitter account – @WhatTheyKnow.
Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team
