Web advertising spend tops £4bn for first time

By Ramy Ghaly

Online advertisers in the UK took their annual spend to more than £4bn for the first time last year as the digital market share hit a record high.

Research published today by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the accountant PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that online advertising grew by 12.8 per cent, from £3.5bn in 2009 to £4.1bn a year later. 

The digital share of the UK's total advertising spend of £16.6bn last year rose to 25 per cent. 

The consensus expectation for online advertising for this year is growth of 7.7 per cent, although the IAB said its internal predictions were more optimistic.

Much of 2010's online growth was driven by display advertising, which increased by 27.5 per cent from a year earlier to £945.1m, as more and more companies shifted spending on to the web. 

Search advertising continues to dominate online advertising spending in the UK, which rose 8 per cent in 2010 to £2.3bn.

By THE INDPENDENT via Ctrl-News

Is Mobile BI Worth the Hype?

By Ramy Ghaly

 

If yours is like the average business, chances are your need for mobile analytics is, frankly, limited. Most companies are toward the wide end of the funnel shown in the graphic below, with many employees using mobile devices for mundane matters like email access (the classic "BlackBerry use case"); perhaps a few of them benefit from high-end functions like alerts, and even fewer from interactive mobile analytics. 

For users to benefit from mobile BI, they must be able to navigate dashboards and guided analytics comfortably -- or as comfortably as the mobile device will allow, which is where devices with high-resolution screens and touch interfaces (like the iPhone and Android-based phones) have a clear edge over, say, earlier editions of BlackBerry.

The next time your BI vendors touts its mobile business intelligence capabilities, invite them to present use cases that demonstrate these capabilities as implemented at other customers.

 

Read More: "InformationWeek" Via ctrl-News

HP To Acquire Analytics Specialist Vertica

By Ramy Ghaly 

The buyout will help HP counter IBM's recent acquisition of Netezza as analytics sector heats up.

Hewlett-Packard said Monday it agreed to acquire Vertica, a privately-held developer of software that lets businesses analyze and interpret information stored in enterprise databases. The move should help HP keep pace with rival IBM, which recently bolstered its analytics portfolio with the buyout of Netezza. 

HP officials said the deal will help enterprise customers cope with vastly increasing amounts of information coming into their organizations—through the Web, mobile phones, smart devices, and other sources.

IBM enhanced its analytics portfolio late last year with the $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza, which bundles analytics software with specialized hardware.

HP said it expects the deal to close in the second quarter.

Read More "Information Week" Via ctrl-News

2011: A Big Year for Big Data

Posted by Ramy Ghaly February 03, 2011

During the 2011 NFL playoff TV broadcasts, amid commercials featuring Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales and auto-racing driver Danica Patrick, one ad features an IBM researcher talking about data analytics.

With data volumes moving past terabytes to tens of petabytes and more, business and IT leaders across the board face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. For a large company, big data may be in the petabytes or more; for a small or mid-size enterprise, data volumes that grow into tens of terabytes become "big data". 

In the financial services industry, Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), which sells risk management and fraud detection services to credit card issuers, uses big data analytics to better detect credit card fraud.

Nonetheless, 2011 is shaping up to be a big year for big data.

This summary was made possible by ctrl-news Via The New York Times

Does Social Media Sets “New World Order” in building Revolutions throughout the Middle East?

BY consultramy

While the uprising started in Tunisia requesting from a long dictator to step down, Egypt is following suite of the recent Tunisian's Jasmine Revolution seeking reform, freedom, and respect by using social media to organize, communicate, and express their feelings not only to the world, but to say to their dictators "this is the end of your rule, and now is our time to make the change weather you like it or not".

The young catalysts of Twitter, Facebook, and social media are behind the driving force of the revolution not only in Tunisia and Egypt, but also in Jordan and Yemen where the role of social media has proven a new world order in digital social communications to bring down totalitarian regimes all over the Middle East. Nonstop-able young embryonic youth, the educated elite of the Arab world are speaking out seeking freedom. Yes, freedom is a high commodity especially in the Arab world where no real democracies exists; yet decades of totalitarian regimes that took the power of their people and turned them into modern slaves. Moreover, the blocked elite of Egypt are speaking out after thirty years of unprecedented selfish rule that stole their dignities by keeping them away from engaging in decision making, take responsibilities of their future are now fighting for their pride in setting the road map to gain freedom, the right to speak out, needless to say, gain respect by re-writing history that makes them proud citizens of their forced change to set a better example not only to Egypt, but to other dictators in the Middle East and the world. Now, social media set fear in dictatorships throughout the Arab world where Egypt's dictatorships shut down all social networks and communications to put more pressure on the young youth to stop their uprising, but that not only turned against the totalitarian regime, instead, it sparked more anger and gave the youth more reason not to give up that easily; yet embrace the fight for freedom to the end while Mr. Mubarak is witnessing his last moments of the 30 years old rule.

Going social in the digital world is building a new world order by driving change and bringing down dictators at least in the Arab world. The young blocked elite of Egypt are seeking change from regime reform, free elections, and the ability to choose their own leaders, to requesting their basic civil rights to be heard and respected; yet achieving it is even more challenging when chaos takes over in the streets and sets a whole new ball game. Social media is playing a vital role to make change possible and give these young rebels a tool that it was unprecedented before having the ability to bring down dictators and set a new world order in social digital communications.

Important facts about Egypt according to CIA FactBook's latest figures: 2010

Population: 80 Million

Median age: 24 years

GDP: Approximately $216.8 billion (2009)

Per capita income: $6,200 (GDP/year-PPP 2010)

Unemployment: 9.7% (est.)

Poverty: 40%

Strategic interests to the world:

• Israeli/Egyptian Peace Treaty signed In 1979.
• It is estimated that 10 percent of the global crude oil demand passes through the Suez Canal.
• The biggest population in the Middle East
• Egypt receives nearly $2-$3 billion in aid per year from the United States.
• Egypt holds ancient treasures and artifacts.
• The Pyramids are one of the top wonders of the world.
• A global destination for tourists making it one of the top tourist markets in the world.

Popular Hash Tags used for the "uprising in Egypt" on Twitter:

#liberation technology

#social freedom

#twitter revolution

#SM revolution

#Egypt

#jan25

#freedom

#Tahrir

#Cairo

#reform

#protest

#democracy

#support

#liberty

#civil liberty

#uprising

#Mona Altahawy

Latest Sentiment analysis of Egypt's uprising since it started six days ago on January 25, 2011

Link here: Egypt's Uprising Sentiment Analysis

About the Author:

Ramy Ghaly is a Marketing Strategist with more than ten years in international markets experience. He held professional and managerial positions in multiple global markets in various industries ranging from retail, wholesale, consumer goods, to technology product management with concentration in channel development. In addition, He holds a degree in International Marketing Management with a minor in International Relations and Middle Eastern studies from Daytona State College. He is interested in social media developments, next generation search technologies, semantic search engines, and text analytics; needless to say, strategies in geopolitics, Middle Eastern Studies, and Environmental factors that affect global business growth are general interests that keen to always monitor and encourage writing about.

What are the most challenging issues in Sentiment Analysis(opinion mining)?

Ramy Ghaly January 28, 2011

Hossein Said:

Opinion Mining/Sentiment Analysis is a somewhat recent subtask of Natural Language processing.Some compare it to text classification,some take a more deep stance towards it. What do you think about the most challenging issues in Sentiment Analysis(opinion mining)? Can you name a few?

 

Hightechrider Said:

The key challenges for sentiment analysis are:-

1) Named Entity Recognition - What is the person actually talking about, e.g. is 300 Spartans a group of Greeks or a movie?

2) Anaphora Resolution - the problem of resolving what a pronoun, or a noun phrase refers to. "We watched the movie and went to dinner; it was awful." What does "It" refer to?

3) Parsing - What is the subject and object of the sentence, which one does the verb and/or adjective actually refer to?

4) Sarcasm - If you don't know the author you have no idea whether 'bad' means bad or good.

5) Twitter - abbreviations, lack of capitals, poor spelling, poor punctuation, poor grammar, ...

 

ealdent Said:

I agree with Hightechrider that those are areas where Sentiment Analysis accuracy can see improvement. I would also add that sentiment analysis tends to be done on closed-domain text for the most part. Attempts to do it on open domain text usually winds up having very bad accuracy/F1 measure/what have you or else it is pseudo-open-domain because it only looks at certain grammatical constructions. So I would say topic-sensitive sentiment analysis that can identify context and make decisions based on that is an exciting area for research (and industry products).

I'd also expand his 5th point from Twitter to other social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Youtube), where short, ungrammatical utterances are commonplace.

 

Skarab Said:

I think the answer is the language complexity, mistakes in grammar, and spelling. There is vast of ways people expresses there opinions, e.g., sarcasms could be wrongly interpreted as extremely positive sentiment.

 

What do you think? Do you agree? Would you like to ask a question and get an answer? Try out: Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers 

 

 

Social commerce to surge

NEW YORK: Social commerce sales will rise dramatically during the next five years, encouraging brands and retailers to enhance their presence on sites like Facebook, Booz & Co has argued.

In a new report, the consultancy stated marketers must shift the terms of engagement with consumers using Web 2.0 properties from "like" to "buy".

"The market for social commerce has been embryonic to date, but that will change over the next five years as companies race to establish stores," it said.

"Trendsetting companies are focused on products and services that benefit from the unique characteristics of social media, including the opportunity to get quick feedback from multiple friends and family members."

The study praised 1-800-Flowers, which boasts a fully-functioning Facebook store allowing customers to complete purchases without leaving the network's pages.

It has also implemented other innovative strategies, for example linking Facebook's calendar and "group gifting" features to its Mother's Day campaign.

"We are going to continue to invest in certain areas to help drive future growth," Bill Shea, 1-800-Flowers' chief financial officer, said in late 2010.

"Whether it be franchising efforts for both the consumer floral and our food group, investments in mobile and social commerce [or] floral supply chain in Celebrations.com, we are going to continue to invest."

Dell was cited as another pioneering early-adopter, having earned millions of dollars in revenue through Twitter.

The IT specialist is becoming increasingly active in the smartphone and tablet segments, which the organisation believes will transform the retail sector.

"It used to be 'We're going to tell you how you're going to experience our store,'" said Brian Slaughter, Dell's director, end-user solutions, large enterprises.

"Now the consumer is walking in and saying: 'No, I'm going to tell you how I'm going to use your store to give me more information.' The tools they have at their disposal are very cool."

Similarly, Quidsi, owned by Amazon, recently set up Facebook outlets for its Soap.com and Diapers.com platforms, although the ability to make purchases is limited to members of these two portals.

"No one has yet cracked the nut on Facebook e-commerce," said Josh Himwich, Quidsi's vp, ecommerce.

Overall, Booz estimated sales of physical goods via social channels would hit $5bn (€3.7bn; £3.1bn) globally in 2011, with the US contributing 20% of this total.

Revenues were pegged to reach $9bn by the close of 2012, incorporating $3bn generated by American internet users.

Such figures should achieve $14bn and $5bn respectively for 2013, while US customers deliver nearly half of the $20bn returns yielded in 2014.

By 2015, the worldwide expenditure attributable to this medium is anticipated to come in at $30bn, housing $14bn from the world's biggest economy.

A previous Booz survey of netizens dedicating one hour or more a month to social networks, and who bought at least one product online in the last year, found 20% proved willing to pay for items through these sites.

Elsewhere, 10% suggested this spending would be incremental to their current outlay, but 71% added "liking" a brand on Facebook did not improve the probability of buying it.

The consultancy predicted that social media will have the greatest impact on consideration, conversion, loyalty and customer service.

Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerburg certainly supported such as optimistic reading when rolling out the Places geo-location system last year.

"If I had to guess, social commerce is the next area to really blow up," he said in August. 

Data sourced from Booz & Co, Seeking Alpha, Daily Finance; additional content by Warc staff, 21 January 2011

Via: WARC