Computing – Page 4

The Big Question About Big Data

May 12, 2014

Predicting the future isn’t quite a mug’s game anymore. It was once the province of futurists who talked like evangelists and fortune-tellers who paradoxically could never seem to leverage their predictive abilities with a lottery ticket at their local convenience store. Today, lots of folks are into the prediction racket these days – “predictive analysis”, anyway, with an eerie degree of accuracy. It’s all thanks to Big Data – that ambiguous little term every vendor is using to sell their…

Facebank

April 28, 2014

Thought Leadership

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Facebook, the place where you can find everything about your friends, is applying for permission from the Ireland’s central bank to allow its users to store and exchange money. There are few details to be worked out, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they manage to satisfy the regulator requirements. It will mean that Facebook will know: who your friends are; your favourite things; your sentiment about causes you care; and provide you with an offer you won’t…

The search – can we find the truth?

April 21, 2014

Thought Leadership

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Mathias Dopfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, raised the issue about the uneasy relationship between Google and publishing companies. Axel Springer, a German media powerhouse, publishes over 200 newspapers and magazines; and derives 62% of their profits from their digital business. As you can imagine, Axel Springer depends heavily on the traffic supplied by search engines, most notably Google. Mathias (quite rightly) points out that the search results and ads serving algorithms are not transparent; and anyone with a business…