Algorithmic Selling on Amazon Spells Buyer Beware
December 12, 2016
The article on Science Daily titled Amazon Might Not Always Be Pitching You the Best Prices, Researchers Find unveils the stacked deck that Amazon has created for sellers. Amazon rewards sellers who use automated algorithmic pricing by more often featuring those seller’s items in the buy box, the more prominent and visible display. So what is algorithmic pricing, exactly? The article explains,
For a fee, any one of Amazon’s more than 2 million third-party sellers can easily subscribe to an automated pricing service…They then set up a pricing strategy by choosing from a menu of options like these: Find the lowest price offered and go above it (or below it) by X dollars or Y percentage, find Amazon’s own price for the item and adjust up or down relative to it, and so on. The service does the rest.
For the consumer, this means that searching on Amazon won’t necessarily produce the best value (at first click, anyway.) It may be a mere dollar difference, but it could also be a more significant price increase between $20 and $60. What is really startling is that even though less than 10% of “algo sellers,” these sellers account for close to a third of the best-selling products. If you take anything away from this article, let it be that what Amazon is showing you first might not be the best price, so always do your research!
Chelsea Kerwin, December 12, 2016
The Decline of Free Software As a Failure of Leadership and Relevance
August 18, 2016
The article on Datamation titled 7 Reasons Why Free Software Is Losing Influence investigates some of the causes for the major slowdown in FOSS (free and open software software). The article lays much of the blame at the feet of the leader of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman. In spite of his major contributions to the free software movement, he is prickly and occasionally drops Joe Biden-esque gaffes detrimental to his cause. He also has an issue when it comes to sticking to his message and making his cause relevant. The article explains,
“Over the last few years, Richard Stallman has denounced cloud computing, e-books, cell phones in general, and Android in particular. In each case, Stallman has raised issues of privacy and consumer rights that others all too often fail to mention. The trouble is, going on to ignore these new technologies solves nothing, and makes the free software movement more irrelevant in people’s lives. Many people are attracted to new technologies, and others are forced to use them because others are.”
In addition to Stallman’s difficult personality, which only accounts for a small part of the decline in the FSF’s influence, the article also has other suggestions. Perhaps most importantly, the FSF is a tiny company without the resources to achieve its numerous goals like sponsoring the GNU Project, promoting social activism, and running campaigns against DRM and Windows.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
Meet the Company Selling Our Medical Data
July 22, 2016
A company with a long history is getting fresh scrutiny. An article at Fortune reports, “This Little-Known Firm Is Getting Rich Off Your Medical Data.” Writer Adam Tanner informs us:
“A global company based in Danbury, Connecticut, IMS buys bulk data from pharmacy chains such as CVS , doctor’s electronic record systems such as Allscripts, claims from insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and from others who handle your health information. The data is anonymized—stripped from the identifiers that identify individuals. In turn, IMS sells insights from its more than half a billion patient dossiers mainly to drug companies.
“So-called health care data mining is a growing market—and one largely dominated by IMS. Last week, the company reported 2015 net income of $417 million on revenue of $2.9 billion, compared with a loss of $189 million in 2014 (an acquisition also boosted revenue over the year). ‘The outlook for this business remains strong,’ CEO Ari Bousbib said in announcing the earnings.”
IMS Health dates back to the 1950s, when a medical ad man sought to make a buck on drug-sales marketing reports. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the company thrived selling profiles of specific doctors’ proscribing patterns to pharmaceutical marketing folks. Later, they moved into aggregating information on individual patients—anonymized, of course, in accordance with HIPAA rules.
Despite those rules, some are concerned about patient privacy. IMS does not disclose how it compiles their patient dossiers, and it may be possible that records could, somehow someday, become identifiable. One solution would be to allow patients to opt out of contributing their records to the collection, anonymized or not, as marketing data firm Acxiom began doing in 2013.
Of course, it isn’t quite so simple for the consumer. Each health record system makes its own decisions about data sharing, so opting out could require changing doctors. On the other hand, many of us have little choice in our insurance provider, and a lot of those firms also share patient information. Will IMS move toward transparency, or continue to keep patients in the dark about the paths of their own medical data?
Cynthia Murrell, July 22, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark
Web meet up on July 26, 2016.
Information is at this link: http://bit.ly/29tVKpx.
Advice for Marketers, Not Consumers, on the Present and Future States of Location Data Technology
January 14, 2016
The article on Mashable titled Location Data’s Dirty Secret: How Accuracy is Getting Lost in Today’s Data Shuffle relates the bad news for marketers, and hugely relieving news for paranoid consumers, that location data quality is far from precise. The money being funneled into location-targeted mobile ad revenues is only part of the picture, but it does illustrate the potential power of this technology for marketers, who want to know everything they can about shopping habits and habits in general. But they may be spending on useless data. In fact, the article states,
“Studies indicate that more than half of mobile location data is inaccurate. In fact, a report from the MMA offers a laundry list of variables that negatively impact location data quality. Culprits include a “lack of accuracy standards and market education,” “urban density,” “inaccurate interpretations” of location data that have been translated into a latitude/longitude coordinate and poor “data freshness.”
The article is largely optimistic that if marketers do a little research into the source of their locating data, they will know whether it can be trusted or not. That, and an objective third party will help marketers avoid big money-wasting mistakes. Must be nice to be a marketer instead of a consumer, the latter has little chance to avoid being a pawn followed around the chess board by her cell phone.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Data Analytics Is More Than Simple Emotion
November 6, 2015
Hopes and Fears posted the article, “Are You Happy Now? The Uncertain Future Of Emotion Analytics” discusses the possible implications of technology capable of reading emotions. The article opens with a scenario from David Collingridge explaining that the only way to truly gauge technology’s impact is when it has become so ingrained into society that it would be hard to change. Many computing labs are designing software capable of reading emotions using an array of different sensors.
The biggest problem ahead is not how to integrate emotion reading technology into our lives, but what are the ethical concerns associated with it?
Emotion reading technology is also known as affective computing and the possible ethical concerns are more than likely to come from corporation to consumer relationships over consumer-to-consumer relationships. Companies are already able to track a consumer’s spending habits by reading their Internet data and credit cards, then sending targeted ads.
Consumers should be given the option to have their emotions read:
“Affective computing has the potential to intimately affect the inner workings of society and shape individual lives. Access, an international digital rights organization, emphasizes the need for informed consent, and the right for users to choose not to have their data collected. ‘All users should be fully informed about what information a company seeks to collect,’ says Drew Mitnick, Policy Counsel with Access, ‘The invasive nature of emotion analysis means that users should have as much information as possible before being asked to subject [themselves] to it.’”
While the article’s topic touches on fear, it ends on a high note that we should not be afraid of the future of technology. It is important to discuss ethical issues right now, so groundwork will already be in place to handle affective computing.
Whitney Grace, November 6, 2015
Pew Report Compares News Sources: Twitter and Facebook
November 6, 2015
As newspapers fall, what is rising to take their place? Why, social media, of course. The Pew Research Center discusses its recent findings on the subject in, “The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook.” The number of Americans getting their news from these platforms continues to rise, across almost all demographic groups. The article informs us:
“The new study, conducted by Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, finds that clear majorities of Twitter (63%) and Facebook users (63%) now say each platform serves as a source for news about events and issues outside the realm of friends and family. That share has increased substantially from 2013, when about half of users (52% of Twitter users, 47% of Facebook users) said they got news from the social platforms.”
The write-up describes some ways the platforms differ in their news delivery. For example, more users turn to Twitter for breaking news, while Facebook now features a “Trending” sidebar, filterable by subject. The article notes that these trends can have an important impact on our society:
“As more social networking sites recognize and adapt to their role in the news environment, each will offer unique features for news users, and these features may foster shifts in news use. Those different uses around news features have implications for how Americans learn about the world and their communities, and for how they take part in the democratic process.”
Indeed. See the article for more differences between Facebook and Twitter news consumers, complete with some percentages. You can also see the data’s barebones results in the report’s final topline. Most of the data comes from a survey conducted across two weekends last March, among 2,035 Americans aged 18 and up.
Cynthia Murrell, November 6, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Where’s the Finish Line Enterprise Search?
September 16, 2015
What never ceases to amaze me is that people are always perplexed when goals for technology change. It always comes with a big hullabaloo and rather than complaining about the changes, time would be better spent learning ways to adapt and learn from the changes. Enterprise search is one of those technology topics that sees slow growth, but when changes occur they are huge. Digital Workplace Group tracks the newest changes in enterprise search, explains why they happened, and how to adapt: “7 Ways The Goal Posts On Enterprise Search Have Moved.”
After spending an inordinate amount of explaining how the author arrived at the seven ways enterprise search has changed, we are finally treated to the bulk of the article. Among the seven reasons are obvious insights that have been discussed in prior articles on Beyond Search, but there are new ideas to ruminate about. Among the obvious are that users want direct answers, they expect search to do more than find information, and understanding a user’s intent. While the obvious insights are already implemented in search engines, enterprise search lags behind.
Enterprise search should work on a more personalized level due it being part of a closed network and how people rely on it to fulfill an immediate need. A social filter could be applied to display a user’s personal data in search results and also users rely on the search filter as a quick shortcut feature. Enterprise search is way behind in taking advantage of search analytics and how users consume and manipulate data.
“To summarize everything above: Search isn’t about search; it’s about finding, connecting, answers, behaviors and productivity. Some of the above changes are already here within enterprises. Some are still just being tested in the consumer space. But all of them point to a new phase in the life of the Internet, intranets, computer technology and the experience of modern, digital work.”
As always there is a lot of room for enterprise search improvement, but these changes need to made for an updated and better work experience.
Whitney Grace, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Watson Speaks Naturally
September 3, 2015
While there are many companies that offer accurate natural language comprehension software, completely understanding the complexities of human language still eludes computers. IBM reports that it is close to overcoming the natural language barriers with IBM Watson Content Analytics as described in “Discover And Use Real-World Terminology With IBM Watson Content Analytics.”
The tutorial points out that any analytics program that only relies on structured data loses about four fifths of information, which is a big disadvantage in the big data era, especially when insights are supposed to be hidden in the unstructured. The Watson Content Analytics is a search and analytics platform and it uses rich-text analysis to find extract actionable insights from new sources, such as email, social media, Web content, and databases.
The Watson Content Analytics can be used in two ways:
- “Immediately use WCA analytics views to derive quick insights from sizeable collections of contents. These views often operate on facets. Facets are significant aspects of the documents that are derived from either metadata that is already structured (for example, date, author, tags) or from concepts that are extracted from textual content.
- Extracting entities or concepts, for use by WCA analytics view or other downstream solutions. Typical examples include mining physician or lab analysis reports to populate patient records, extracting named entities and relationships to feed investigation software, or defining a typology of sentiments that are expressed on social networks to improve statistical analysis of consumer behavior.”
The tutorial runs through a domain specific terminology application for the Watson Content Analytics. The application gets very intensive, but it teaches how Watson Content Analytics is possibly beyond the regular big data application.
Whitney Grace, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Online Shopping Is Too Hard
June 10, 2015
Online shopping is supposed to drive physical stores out of business, but that might not be the case if online shopping is too difficult. The Ragtrader article, “Why They Abandon” explains that 45 percent of Australian consumers will not make an online purchase if they experience Web site difficulties. The consumers, instead, are returning to physical stores to make the purchase. The article mentions that 44 percent believe that traditional shopping is quicker if they know what to look for and 43 percent as prefer in-store service.
The research comes from a Rackspace survey to determine shopping habits in New Zealand and Australia. The survey also asked participants what other problems they experienced shopping online:
“42 percent said that there were too many pop-up advertisements, 34 percent said that online service is not the same as in-store and 28 percent said it was too time consuming to narrow down options available.”
These are understandable issues. People don’t want to be hounded to purchase other products when they have a specific item in mind and thousands of options are overwhelming to search through. Then a digital wall is often daunting if people prefer interpersonal relationships when they shop. The survey may pinpoint online shopping weaknesses, but it also helps online stores determine the best ways for improvement.
“ ‘This survey shows that not enough retailers are leveraging powerful and available site search and navigation solutions that give consumers a rewarding shopping experience.’ ”
People shop online for convenience, variety, lower prices, and deals. Search is vital for consumers to narrow down their needs, but if they can’t navigate a Web site then search proves as useless as an expired coupon.
Whitney Grace, June 10, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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