Tag: data

XKCD’s Big Data Survey

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XKCD is running a survey of pointless questions to generate a big data set. That data set will go public when it is all over and then Randall Munroe is hoping that creative people will be able to do interesting things with the anonymized (but public) data. For example… … Fill this text box with gibberish by mashing random keyboard keys … When you think about stuff on the internet, where do you picture it being physically located? Even if you know it’s not really how things work, is there a place you imagine websites and social media posts sitting before

A/B Testing Booth Babes

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Delightful guest post by Spencer Chen (Head of Marketing at Frontback) on Techcrunch. Through circumstances he had two booths in different areas at an SAP show, so he decided to do some experiment to get some actual data. My theory from years of being a part of trade show staffs is that the booth babes we hired were actually a drag on lead-gen. Up to that time, it was all empirical evidence based on being at shows where we had money to hire booth babes and events where we didn’t. I noticed that we had always done better without the

The 404’ing of our cultural memories

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Doug Haslam, on the big black hole of missing data. If we can;t keep all this around for a few years, what hope have we for a decade, a century, or longer? With every celebration of the popular social network, the faint Cassandran winds howl “What will you do when it’s gone?” I say faint, because nobody seems to see an imminent demise for Facebook or Twitter, and conventional wisdom tilts to Google Plus getting bigger rather than failing to gain traction. We shouldn’t have to worry, right? Yeah, we should: I was reminded of Jaiku recently when someone brought it

When you need a SIM, go local

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Local SIM or Roaming/International SIM while travelling? One of these options is going to be for “a real emergency” while another will allow me to stay connected, to reply to Twitter messages, to keep up to data on Facebook, post to my blog, moderate comments…and let me upload my podcasts. More of my thoughts on the BlogWorld Blog.

The shocking disparity of data roaming and Pay as you Go while abroad

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I’m in Armenia, and I was planning on relying on Wi-fi hotspots to keep me connected, but as the group i was having dinner with were heading to buy some prepaid SIM cards, I thought “why not” and checked the price. 500 Armenian Dram picked up a SIM card with 400 Dram on the card. At a metered rate of 5 dram per megabyte, that gives me 80MB to play with. On previous experience Windows Phone pulls down 15-20MB a week for my regular usage, so I’m set (or at least will be when the SIM is activated in the

Facebook’s 16 year old mistake?

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Arthur Le Meur, via his Dad, Loic: My 16 years old son Arthur first told me “I will delete my entire Facebook profile and create a new empty one when they launch Timeline.” He got so scared that his current friends would see all his posts and pics since 2009 that he somehow managed to activate his account as developer (by creating a fake app I think, I guess it’s a start), activate timeline and then he found he could hide it all. Here is Facebook’s mistake: considering that everybody will want to expose all his past by default. Isn’t it…