Facebook’s Graph Search and the Data Card

Jan 17, 2013 by Phil Simon

“It’s the kind of product we love to build at Facebook: A big technology problem and big social problem.”

So said Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday when Facebook announced Graph Search.

What Does the Future of Big Data Have in Store?

Dec 20, 2012 by Phil Simon

Where do we store all of this data?

It’s a question that many CIOs are asking themselves these days. Relational databases just aren’t built to store petabytes of unstructured data. Today, the usual suspects include Hadoop and columnar, NoSQL and NewSQL databases. Yes, data storage costs have plummeted over the last fifteen years, but do we really need to store historical information?

5 Things I Know About Big Data

Nov 15, 2012 by Phil Simon

I’ve written before on my own site about the difficulty in defining Big Data. Long story short, precisely defining the term isn’t terribly easy to do. Over the past few months, I have been extensively researching Big Data. It’s been a fun ride and I have discovered that it’s much easier to list the characteristics of Big Data rather than try to settle on a “perfect” definition.

So, in this post, I’ll discuss a few of my findings and observations. Ironically, I have no data on the first two assertions. Call them hunches.

Self-Quantification

Aug 16, 2012 by Phil Simon

A frequent topic of this blog these days is data tracking. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook,  Google, and others are able to extensively log what we’re doing online so they can predict what we will do (or, perhaps more accurately, what we might buy.)

Facebook, User Trust and Effective Data Management

Aug 02, 2012 by Phil Simon

In my latest book, I write extensively about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (a.k.a., the Gang of Four). It turns out that these companies share many common characteristics, not the least of which is their use of the platform as a business model.

Facebook and the Future of Personal Data

Jul 12, 2012 by Phil Simon

Jim Harris’ recent post “Is Social MDM Going the Wrong Way?” got me thinking. In it, Jim writes:

Right now, users give away valuable information about themselves, but I fully expect to see services pop up that act as personal data brokers, giving users a cut of the money made from their personal information – the data users explicitly choose to share, not what is gathered about them sneakily. Again, this business model has long existed, but not in a way that allows individuals to participate in the proceeds.

I’d like to expand upon the business model of personal data in today’s post, particularly with respect to Facebook.

Will Social MDM be the New Spam?

Jun 13, 2012 by Jim Harris

In my previous post, I briefly examined what I see as the three biggest challenges for Social MDM (Identity, Relevancy, and Privacy) from the perspective of organizations looking to integrate social media data into their master data management (MDM) implementations. In this post, I want to shift the perspective to how customers of these organizations will perceive Social MDM.

Fast Times and the Great Data Ownership Debate

Jun 07, 2012 by Phil Simon

ZDNet recently held an online data ownership debate. To be sure, much of the debate concerned consumer technologies and websites. Core philosophical questions centered around whether Facebook or Twitter “owned” its users’ photos, status updates, relationships, and “the data” at large.

How Social can MDM get?

Jun 06, 2012 by Jim Harris

I recently joined the new LinkedIn Group for Social MDM created by Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen for promoting vendor-neutral discussions about the integration of social media data into master data management (MDM) implementations. In this blog post, I would like to ponder just how social MDM can get by briefly examining what I see as its three biggest challenges.