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 Equivalent of a Brexit
August 31, 2016
Britain’s historical vote to leave the European Union has set a historical precedent. What is the precedent however? Is it the choice to leave an organization? The choice to maintain their independence? Or is it a basic example of the right to choose? The Brexit will be used as a metaphor for any major upheaval for the next century, so how can it be used in technology context? BA Insight gives us the answer with “Would Your Users Vote ‘Yes’ For Sharexit?”
SharePoint is Microsoft Office’s collaborative content management program. It can be used to organize projects, build Web sites, store files, and allow team members to communicate. Office workers also spurn it across the globe over due to its inefficiencies. To avoid a Sharexit in your organization, the article offers several ways to improve a user’s SharePoint experience. One of the easiest ways to keep SharePoint is to build an individual user interface that handles little tasks to make a user’s life easier. Personalizing the individual SharePoint user experience is another method, so the end user does not feel like another cog in the system but rather that SharePoint was designed for them. Two other suggestions are plain, simple advice: take user feedback and actually use it and make SharePoint the go information center for the organization by putting everything on it.
Perhaps the best advice is making information easy to find on SharePoint:
Documents are over here, discussions over there, people are that way, and then I don’t know who the experts really are. You can make your Intranet a whole lot smarter, or dare we say “intelligent”, if you take advantage of this information in an integrated fashion, exposing your users to connected, but different, information. You can connect documents to the person who wrote them, then to that person’s expertise and connected colleagues, enabling search for your hidden experts. The ones that can really be helpful often reduce chances for misinformation, repetition of work, or errors. To do this, expertise location capabilities can combine contributed expertise with stated expertise, allowing for easy searching and expert identification.
Developers love SharePoint because it is easy to manage and to roll out information or software to every user. End users hate it because it creates more problems than resolving anything. If developers take the time to listen to what the end users need from their SharePoint experience than can avoid an Sharexit.
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Can Analytics Be Cloud Friendly?
August 24, 2016
One of the problems with storing data in the cloud is that it is difficult to run analytics. Sure, you can run tests to determine the usage of the cloud, but analyzing the data stored in the cloud is another story. Program developers have been trying to find a solution to this problem and the open source community has developed some software that might be the ticket. Ideata wrote about the newest Apache software in “Apache Spark-Comparing RDD, Dataframe, and Dataset.”
Ideata is a data software company and they built many of the headlining products on the open source software Apache Spark. They have been using Apache Spark since 2013 and enjoy using it because it offers a rich abstraction, allows the developer to build complex workflows, and perform easy data analysis.
Apache Spark works like this:
Spark revolves around the concept of a resilient distributed dataset (RDD), which is a fault-tolerant collection of elements that can be operated on in parallel. An RDD is Spark’s representation of a set of data, spread across multiple machines in the cluster, with API to let you act on it. An RDD could come from any datasource, e.g. text files, a database via JDBC, etc. and can easily handle data with no predefined structure.
It can be used as the basis fort a user-friendly cloud analytics platform, especially if you are familiar with what can go wrong with a dataset.
Whitney Grace, August 24, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Finding Information Takes a Backseat to Providing a Comprehensive User Experience
July 20, 2016
The article titled An Intranet Success Story on BA Insight asserts that search is less about finding information than it is about user experience. In the context of Intranet networks and search, the article discusses what makes for an effective search engine. Nationwide Insurance, for example, forged a strong, award-winning intranet which was detailed in the article,
“Their “Find Anything” locator, navigation search bar, and extended refiners are all great examples of the proven patterns we preach at BA Insight…The focus for SPOT was clear. It’s expressed in three points: Simple consumer-like experience, One-stop shop for knowledge, Things to make our jobs easier… All three of these connect directly to search that actually works. The Nationwide project has generated clear, documented business results.”
The results include Engagement, Efficiency, and Cost Savings, in the form of $1.5M saved each year. What is most interesting about this article is the assumption that UX experience trumps search results, or at least, search results are merely one aspect of search, not the alpha and omega. Rather, providing an intuitive, user-friendly experience should be the target. For Nationwide, part of that targeting process included identifying user experience as a priority. SPOT, Nationwide’s social intranet, is built on Yammer and SharePoint, and it is still one of the few successful and engaging intranet platforms.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 20, 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.
The Guardian Adheres to Principles
May 20, 2016
In the 1930s, Britain’s newspaper the Guardian was founded, through a generous family’s endowment, on the ideas of an unfettered press and free access to information. In continued pursuit of these goals, the publication has maintained a paywall-free online presence, despite declining online-advertising revenue. That choice has cost them, we learn from the piece, ”Guardian Bet Shows Digital Risks” at USA Today. Writer Michael Wolff explains:
“In order to underwrite the costs of this transformation, most of the trust’s income-producing investments have been liquidated in recent years in order to keep cash on hand — more than a billion dollars.
“In effect, the Guardian saw itself as departing the newspaper business and competing with new digital news providers like BuzzFeed and Vox and Vice Media, each raising ever-more capital from investors with which to finance their growth. The Guardian — unlike most other newspapers that are struggling to make it in the digital world without benefit of access to outside capital — could use the interest generated by its massive trust to indefinitely deficit-finance its growth. At a mere 4% return, that would mean it could lose more than $40 million a year and be no worse for wear.
“But … the cost of digital growth mounted as digital advertising revenue declined. And with zero interest rates, there has been, practically speaking, no return on cash. Hence, the Guardian’s never-run-out endowment has plunged by more than 12% since the summer and, suddenly looking at a finite life cycle, the Guardian will now have to implement another transition: shrinking rather than expanding.”
The Guardian’s troubles point to a larger issue, writes Wolff; no one has been able to figure out a sustainable business model for digital news. For its part, the Guardian still plans to avoid a paywall, but will try to coax assorted fees from its users. We shall see how that works out.
Cynthia Murrell, May 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
ISIS Exploits User-Friendly Encryption Apps to Plan and Recruit
March 21, 2016
The article on Discovery News titled ISIS Taps Dark Web, Encryption Apps to Coordinate discusses the news that ISIS orchestrated the Paris terrorist attacks using encrypted messaging apps. The big social media companies like Google and Facebook enable an encryption method they call “perfect forward secrecy,” which lacks any sort of master key or backdoor. The article explains other systems,
“Extremist groups are even using messaging services found on Play Station 4 gaming consoles, a favorite of young male jihadis who particularly like “Call of Duty,” according to Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle Eastern Media Research Institute, a group that monitors social media by extremist groups…Of particular concern is Telegram, a relatively new instant messaging app designed in Russia that has recently been upgraded to allow more secure communications by groups.”
The article points out that most of these techniques are intuitive, designed for regular people. Their exploitation by ISIS is due to their user-friendliness and the difficulty of interception. Rather than trying to crack the codes, some analysts believe that reverting to good old-fashioned methods like spies and informants may be the best answer to ISIS’s use of Western technology.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 21, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
All You Can View Patents
November 18, 2015
Patent information is available to peruse via the USPTO Web site and Google has an accurate patent search (that is significantly easier to use than USPTO’s search), but this does not tell the complete story of US patents. GCN announced that the USPTO plans to remedy missing patent information in the article, “USPTO Opens The Door To Four Decades Of Patent Data.”
With the help of the Center of Science and Innovation Policy (CSSIP), the USPTO launched the new tool PatentsView:
“The new tool allows individuals to explore data on patenting activity in the United States dating back to 1976. Users can search patent titles, types, inventors, assignees, patent classes, locations and dates. The data also displays visualizations on trends and patent activity. In addition, searches include graphic illustrations and charts.”
People will be able to conduct the equivalent of an “advanced search” option of Google or an academic database. PatentsView allows people to identify trends, what technology is one the rise or dropping, search a company’s specific patents, and flexible application programming interface to search patent information.
The USPTO wants people to access and use important patent and trademark data. It faces the issue that many organizations are dealing with that they have the data available and even with the bonus of it being digital, but its user interface is not user-friendly and no one knows it is there. Borrowing a page from marketing, the USPTO is using PatentsView to rebrand itself and advertise its offerings. Shiny graphics are one way to reach people.
Whitney Grace, November 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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