The fanciest tools and biggest datasets don’t mean much without smart people and a data-driven culture. Wise reminder from @infoarbitrage

informationarbitrage:

As usual, the Defrag Conference has brought together a disparate group of amazing people to discuss innovation, technology, community - and data. I was flattered to ask to deliver a keynote this year, and the topic I chose was near and dear to my heart: using data to create competitive advantage. As I lay out in my slides, building a successful - and sustainable - data-driven enterprise is so much more than simply having better algorithms or a more performant box: It takes great people with data DNA and a model that creates competitive moats around the business. It is so seductive to focus on “the algorithms” as being the “there there” in creating competitive advantage. In my experience, they are a necessary but insufficient criterion for success.

In any event, take a read and share your thoughts. This is merely the beginning of a conversation that we’ll be having for a long, long time.

Creating Competitive Advantage Through Data (IA Ventures) View more presentations from Ben Siscovick

“The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.

Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.”

—From an excellent post on the future of interaction (and the limitations of the current ‘Picture Under Glass’ visions) by Bret Victor.  The future is tactile.  The future is hands…

Been thinking of teaching tools lately and how mobile can be used to improve learning. Codify looks really cool and could be an important step to making development more engaging, tactile and intuitive.  And, in the process, open it up to a much larger audience.

Despite advances in languages, IDEs and other tools, coding a mobile app is tough. It requires a good deal of specialized coding skills, knowledge of languages and interfaces, special dev tools and simulators, etc.  It scares normals. Codify isn’t the panaeca that’s going to instantly make app development truly intuitive, (you still need to specialized knowledge), but it seems like an excellent start to making the process more accessible.

It’s incredibly empowering to code something and immediately see the result running on a mobile device. Combine that with touch and the experience is all the more impactful.  Combine that with games and it’s all the more engaging. By making it super easy for them to customize and create their own games, Codify could get kids excited about development and help them understand how complex systems get created. More importantly, it could demystify technology and encourage kids to see themselves as creators able to make their own ideas come to life.

Extrapolate this way out (way out…) and I could see a huge benefit for a super intuitive development environment to service the bottom of the pyramid. ($35 Aakash tablet, OLPC, etc.)  Imagine not only making mobile computing but also mobile development accessible to the bottom of the pyramid. It’s great to get these devices into populations that couldn’t previously afford them. It’s even better to give these populations the ability to experiment, tinker and transform their devices into tools that meet their own unique needs.

MIT TechReview on CDR mining

I’ve often argued that the data inside the carriers’ networks could become as valuable as the data they carry over their networks.  To date, carriers have been less aggressive/creative about analyzing and making this data available, mostly, and appropriately, due to privacy concerns.   Meanwhile, 3^rd parties like Sense Networks, and to a certain extent startups like foursquare, twitter, whrrl, brightkite, loopt, geodelic and geoapi, etc., find ways to go over the top to collect and profit from this data.

I expect to see more movement on the part of carriers to open up their data stores in secure fashions that ensure privacy (Vodaphone and VZW providing developer access to “network enablers” is a start).  Whether it’s advertising, traffic planning, social networking or any application that benefits from real-time and non real-time aggregated location information, the opportunity for carriers to be the authoritative, low-cost, secure and trusted provider of such information is too great.