EveryBlock.com shuts down

Hyper local news and social media site EveryBlock.com has shut down, the company said Thursday. The company was founded in 2007 by Naperville native Adrian Holovaty and acquired by MSNBC.com in 2009. NBC News acquired MSNBC.com last year. NBC News Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller said EveryBlock's financial losses "were considerable," although she declined to offer specific financial results.

Hyper local sites in general have surged in popularity in recent years... AOL's Patch has had a rough time, with one investor estimating last year that the national collection of hyperlocal sites, including dozens in Illinois, lost $147 million in 2011.

Read more at the Chicago Tribune

Small business takes on big data

A group of startups are helping smaller businesses find cost-effective ways to use their data to serve customers and improve their bottom line. Recently, Jetpac, a free iPad app that turns your friends' photos into a customized travel magazine, wanted a way to find its users' best images, said founder and chief technology officer Pete Warden. But instead of saddling its team with the project, Jetpac wanted to hire data experts to help. So they sponsored a contest on Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions. Within three weeks, the competition's top three teams had more than 85 percent accuracy in finding the best photos, and Jetpac had a solution to its photo quality problem.

While Kaggle mostly works with larger companies that have accumulated more data, it's the smaller businesses that often don't need - or can't afford - a full-time data scientist, said Kaggle founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom. While some small businesses might balk at the expense of data - and hiring an in-house data scientist is certainly costly - business owners said the price of online data tools was worthwhile.

Read more at Reuters

Data Mining and Analysis Aren't Always the Answer

What sorts of real-world situations defy data mining? The most obvious would be problems featuring data that is too small, too narrow, too noisy or of too little relevance to allow effective modeling. Organizations which have not maintained good records, which still rely on non-computer procedures and those with too little history are good examples. Even within very large organizations which collect and store enormous databases, there may be no relevant data for the problem at hand (for instance, when a new line of business is being opened, or new products introduced). It is surprising how often business people expect to extract value from a situation when they have failed to invest in appropriate data gathering.

Another large area with minimal data mining potential is organizations whose basic business process is so fundamentally broken that the usual decision making procedures have failed to do the usual "heavy lifting". Any of us can easily recall experiences in retail establishments whose operation was so flawed that it was obvious that the profit potential was not nearly being exploited. Data mining cannot fine tune a process which is so far gone. No amount of quantitative analysis will fix unkept shelves, weak product offering or poor employee behavior.

Read more here

Why Facebook's Graph Search Really Does Matter:

Ever since Facebook unveiled its Graph Search last month, pundits have opined that it’s everything from a “killer app” that will crush companies ranging from Google to Yelp to a powerful new ad targeting technology to nothing more than a glorified extension of the “like.” In reality, it is none of these things.

What Facebook Graph search really signifies is that it is entering the race to marry natural language processing with big data. The list is getting to be a long one and now includes:

Apple Siri: Probably the simplest (but most popular) version is Apple’s Siri which is available on iPhones and iPads. It’s still a bit buggy, but works reasonably well if you speak slowly and clearly.

Microsoft Kinect: While best known as a gesture interface for the Xbox, Kinect also takes voice commands in natural language. Microsoft has now integrated Kinect with Windows 8 and, with a research budget of nearly $10 billion – most of it dedicated to cloud services – we can expect Kinect to become an impressive marriage of voice, gesture and data.

Google Now: Without much fanfare, Google has integrated its natural language processing platform directly into its searchbox. Its Google Now service aims to not only search, but actually predict what you might want to know.

IBM Watson: While it became famous for beating humans in the game show Jeopardy!, IBM’s Watson is being geared up to tackle industries ranging from medicine to finance.
So what’s really notable about Facebook Graph Search isn’t that it’s so new and different, but that Facebook is willing to throw their hat in the ring against well entrenched rivals that are far better capitalized (Google spent a $1 billion on infrastructure just last quarter!). This truly is the future of computing.

While the marriage of big data and natural language processing is exciting, it’s also frightening, because Facebook Graph Search and the other platforms aren’t just search algorithms, they are learning algorithms.

Read more at Forbes

Billboards are not as dull as they look

The business he is cutting adrift is more exciting than it sounds. Outdoor (or what adepts call “out of home”) advertising “is one of the few traditional media channels forecast to grow over the next few years,” says Anastasia Kourovskaia of Millward Brown Optimor, a consultancy. America’s $6.5 billion market grew by more than 4% last year and is expected to top that rate in 2013. Global spending is rising faster. People may fast-forward through television ads and dispense with newspapers, but they still drive and take the train, where outdoor messengers can get to them.

Much of the growth comes from a switch away from paper and neon to digital billboards and posters, which makes signage almost sexy. Screens are being fitted with cameras to determine the age and sex of people drawn to them and tailor messages accordingly. With WiFi they can zing ads to the mobile phones of passersby. Soon shoppers may buy things by touching phones to digital displays.

In Britain about 20% of outdoor ad revenue comes from digital screens. America is behind: only 1% of roadside signs are digital.

Read more at The Economist

The next tech battleground may be your wrist

Pebble, a maker of smartwatches, begs to differ. On January 23rd it started shipping digital devices that strap to your wrist but are nonetheless rather neat. There are rumours that both Apple and Google have smartwatch prototypes under development. Last year Google filed a patent for a watch with what looked like a small, flip-up display screen.Smartwatch start-ups have borrowed ideas from smartphone-makers. They have packed their watches with tiny sensors that can be exploited by various apps.

Read more at The Economist

The decline of spam

In 2004 at Davos, Bill Gates predicted the death of spam. His prophecy may finally be coming true. Since a peak in 2008, the share of e-mails that are junk has steadily declined. In the past year it has fallen from around 80% to 67% of the global total, according to Kaspersky Lab, a cyber-security firm. Spam filters are doing their job. Sophisticated technology is authenticating senders. Police are cracking down on spammers. And web users are ignoring the spam that gets through. Many spammers have switched to peddling fake handbags and baldness cures via online ads, which are often cheaper and more likely to be clicked on.

From The Economist

Growing Mounds of Electronic Scrap

Poor countries have long been a popular destination for the rich world’s toxic trash. Waste consisting of dead electronic goods, or e-waste, is growing at three times the rate of other kinds of rubbish, fuelled by gadgets’ diminishing lifespan and the appetite for consumer electronics among the developing world’s burgeoning middle classes. In 1998 America discarded 20m computers; by 2009 that number had climbed to 47.4m. China alone retired 160m appliances in 2011, 40% of America’s haul. A 2011 report by Pike Research, a consultancy, estimates that the volume and weight of global e-scrap will more than double in the next 15 years. In the Guiyu area of southern China 100,000 people work in e-waste recycling.

Poorer countries already produce a quarter of the world’s e-waste pile; they could overtake rich ones as early as 2018. Choking off the trade will not stop the acid cauldrons bubbling.

Read more at The Economist

Only the digital dies

Innovation tends to create new niches, rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become marginal, but they rarely go extinct. And today the little niches in which old technologies take refuge are ever more viable and accessible, thanks to the internet and the fact that production no longer needs to be so mass; making small numbers of obscure items is growing easier.

Digital technologies may prove to be more ephemeral than their predecessors. They are based on the idea that the medium on which a file’s constituent 0s and 1s are stored doesn’t matter, and on Alan Turing’s insight that any computer can mimic any other, given memory enough and time. This suggests that new digital technologies should be able to wipe out their predecessors completely. And early digital technologies do seem to be vanishing. The music cassette is enjoying a little hipster renaissance, its very infidelity apparently part of its charm; but digital audio tape seems doomed.

Read more at The Economist