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Big Data’s Impact on 2013 Holiday Sales

The holiday season has ended and the analysis has begun to understand what worked and what did not for ecommerce merchants. Cyber Monday became the biggest online shopping day in history with a 20.6 percent increase in sales over 2012, according to the IBM 2013 Holiday Benchmark Report.
Retailers are increasingly tapping into the avalanche of data from their own sites and from third-party sites to drive sales and better serve their customers. This article will address five key ways Big Data impacted the 2013 holiday shopping season.

1. Contextual Promotions
2. Gift Selection
3. Personalized Customer Experience
4. Improved Customer Service
5. Integrated Analytics

8 Effective Data Visualization Methods For Security Teams

Just as a picture says 1,000 words, a good data visualization can offer far more information about a large data set than raw numbers or outputs ever could. As security teams advance their security analytics practices, data visualization will play an important role in their day-to-day analysis. The following are some of the most effective ways organizations today are graphically crunching the numbers to gain a better understanding of their security postures.

1) Hierarchical Tree Map
2) Link Charts
3) Graph Pattern Matching
4) 3D Visualizations
5) Timelines
6) Geographic Visualizations
7) Parallel Coordinate Plots
8) Standard Charting

 What the Frack: U.S. Energy Prowess With Shale, Big Data Analytics

The rumbling you hear underground isn’t just oil. It’s gushers of data that if analyzed properly can yield new insights to producing more shale oil while reducing negative effects on the environment. According to McKinsey, Energy and Big Data are two of the top-five game-changers for the U.S. economy and can together add up to $1 trillion to the GDP of U.S. by 2020 — and the interesting thing is this analysis doesn’t even take into account the effect of Big Data Analytics in Energy.

Big Data Analytics is taking on a new role in the oil and gas industry, where companies are combining the findings from geoscientists with those from data scientists.  The data is complex, varied and massive. But by taking a look into different data sources and data types, Big Data Analytics can help oil and gas companies predict where to drill (sometimes called ‘sweet spotting’) and frack, plus prescribe how to frack for maximum production with minimum environmental effect.

How Big Data Analytics Will Affect Your Company Culture

Whether your company builds software, provides marketing services or sells life-sized posters of Fred Flintstone, big data analytics will affect your company culture. Why? It’s simple: analytics offer information, and once information has been learned, it changes everything around it. Just as our Stone Age ancestors underwent incredible cultural changes with the discovery of controlled fire, so too do our modern businesses change culturally when exposed to the advanced, specific information available in the form of Big Data. More to the point, if big data isn’t affecting your company culture, you aren’t using it correctly.

The specific ways in which big data are going to affect your own company culture are dependent on the type of data you have, and what you intend to do with it. Take, for example, a company whose primary income comes from clothing sales. Their compiled data should be comprised of detailed demographic information about their customers; a proper big data analysis will reveal certain consumer trends. The way the company decides to pursue these trends affects its overall culture.