Blippy, the social media service that broadcasts your card purchases, has officially launched. It is less than a month ago that MACAW research wrote about Blippy being tested in beta by 5,000 users and shared our thoughts in the MACAW Card Bulletin. Now it's gone live.
While the key question Twitter answers is "What’s happening?" Blippy answers the question "What are your friends buying?" Users link a credit or debit card to a Blippy account, and when they make a transaction on the chosen card, the information is broadcasted in the form of a "blip."
Every "blip" uses the format "X spent Y dollars at Z", i.e. "Jon spent 20.99 dollars at Sport Club." For select merchants, such as iTunes and Amazon, a list of purchased items appears in the Blip as well. In other words, people can see other users’ purchases down to the product level – such as a song or book title.
People following a given user can comment on transactions. They can also see which other users purchased something at "place Z" and what other purchases user "X" has performed. Those who jump on the latest technology inventions, and especially those who already blog or micro blog about their purchases, could find Blippy appealing. Instead of manually typing an update on what they have bought, they can now automatically generate a message instead, thus saving time.
Blippy is controversial. The average user probably has transactions they want to keep private. In an article from the New York Times, co-founder Philip Kaplan was cited, saying that most cardholders have two or more cards. Only one card is intended to be linked to Blippy. In other words, users would only make their transactions known on a select card - a public card.
It remains to be seen whether Blippy will be a success or failure. If it does fail, it would be somewhat ironic as co-founder Philip Kaplan himself once operated a website that ridiculed the many failed web concepts back in the dot com era.
For social media enthusiasts who blog about their everyday purchases, Blippy might be just the thing to speed up their micro blogging. Be careful if buying a gift, though, as someone will see what you are buying - and you could risk being hounded if the price is too low or the gift is bought at "the wrong shop." Then again, maybe you don't want to buy those people gifts in the first place...
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Thursday, October 15, 2009
MACAW Card Bulletin Update
MACAW research has great news for everyone with a stake in the Nordic cards industry. We just shaved the price off our unique industry publication, the MACAW Card Bulletin, meaning more value for your money!
Effective immediately, group subscriptions have become cheaper. The change benefits both existing clients and new clients.
"We want the MACAW Card Bulletin to reach the largest audience possible. Business developers, product managers, marketers and channel managers can all benefit greatly from our unique service. We want as many as possible to have access, as innovation is fueled by spreading knowledge and ideas. Now our clients will get larger subscriptions at a lower cost," says Jon Østmoe, editor of the MACAW Card Bulletin.
"It's key to understand what the MACAW Card Bulletin really is," the editor explains. "It's not a news service, it's an innovation service. Think of it as part industry bulletin, part workshop. Local experts provide you with concrete ideas, inspiration and timely insights that can improve your business. The potential return on investment is big, and no one else offers a similar service."
TIP: You can get 12 months (12 issues) of the MACAW Card Bulletin for as little as 180 € if you want to try it out with a single recipient. You can then upgrade to a Group or Enterprise level subscription at any time.
Want to subscribe or have questions?
Call us at +47 412 69 669 or e-mail sales [at] macawresearch.com
Read more:
MACAW Card Bulletin information pack
Get free sample issues
Effective immediately, group subscriptions have become cheaper. The change benefits both existing clients and new clients.
"We want the MACAW Card Bulletin to reach the largest audience possible. Business developers, product managers, marketers and channel managers can all benefit greatly from our unique service. We want as many as possible to have access, as innovation is fueled by spreading knowledge and ideas. Now our clients will get larger subscriptions at a lower cost," says Jon Østmoe, editor of the MACAW Card Bulletin.
"It's key to understand what the MACAW Card Bulletin really is," the editor explains. "It's not a news service, it's an innovation service. Think of it as part industry bulletin, part workshop. Local experts provide you with concrete ideas, inspiration and timely insights that can improve your business. The potential return on investment is big, and no one else offers a similar service."
TIP: You can get 12 months (12 issues) of the MACAW Card Bulletin for as little as 180 € if you want to try it out with a single recipient. You can then upgrade to a Group or Enterprise level subscription at any time.
Want to subscribe or have questions?
Call us at +47 412 69 669 or e-mail sales [at] macawresearch.com
Read more:
MACAW Card Bulletin information pack
Get free sample issues
Friday, September 25, 2009
The personal conference
As the economy is trying to get back on its feet, the conference market faces rough times. Reductions in training and travel budgets mean fewer delegates, in the worst case canceled conferences. Though it need not be all doom and gloom. These developments could actually be a win-win situation for speakers and delegates.
Let’s face it. Not all conferences, and certainly not all speakers, are a great experience. For many delegates, it is a matter of wanting to hear one or two great speakers on subjects of high interest and the rest are of secondary interest. Some conferences also tend to be vendor dominated – if a large portion of the delegates and speakers are vendors, no one is particularly enthusiastic – neither vendors nor remaining delegates. This is not to say all conferences fall into this category, but we have all experienced those that do.
Sending delegates to conferences can also be quite expensive. There is usually a conference fee, transportation costs and hotel costs, not to mention work hours that could be spent on other tasks. Sending multiple delegates can thus be very costly for companies. For speakers, unless they are gurus that draw in lots of delegates, many only get the costs of transportation and stay covered, and if lucky a modest fee.
So, what if a company rather than sending a number of delegates to a conferenc, hired the speakers of highest interest to come to them and present their material? Call it personal conferencing. It is arguably not a new concept, but one that is very relevant in today’s business climate. The companies would only have to cover the transportation costs and potential costs of staying for the one or two speakers, rather than for all their delegates. The conference fees, partially or in full, could be paid to the speakers – and the company would gain a competitive advantage from having access to the speaker without everyone else in the industry hearing the same speech. The presentation could also be custom-tailored to the specific priorities of the organization, thus increasing its overall value.
It is evident there are win-win opportunities for speakers and delegates to get together in personal conferences – especially while the conference market remains rough.
At MACAW research we are happy to send speakers to both regular conferences AND personal conferences, whichever you prefer. If you want to hire one of our consultants as a speaker, please contact us via www.macawresearch.com
Let’s face it. Not all conferences, and certainly not all speakers, are a great experience. For many delegates, it is a matter of wanting to hear one or two great speakers on subjects of high interest and the rest are of secondary interest. Some conferences also tend to be vendor dominated – if a large portion of the delegates and speakers are vendors, no one is particularly enthusiastic – neither vendors nor remaining delegates. This is not to say all conferences fall into this category, but we have all experienced those that do.
Sending delegates to conferences can also be quite expensive. There is usually a conference fee, transportation costs and hotel costs, not to mention work hours that could be spent on other tasks. Sending multiple delegates can thus be very costly for companies. For speakers, unless they are gurus that draw in lots of delegates, many only get the costs of transportation and stay covered, and if lucky a modest fee.
So, what if a company rather than sending a number of delegates to a conferenc, hired the speakers of highest interest to come to them and present their material? Call it personal conferencing. It is arguably not a new concept, but one that is very relevant in today’s business climate. The companies would only have to cover the transportation costs and potential costs of staying for the one or two speakers, rather than for all their delegates. The conference fees, partially or in full, could be paid to the speakers – and the company would gain a competitive advantage from having access to the speaker without everyone else in the industry hearing the same speech. The presentation could also be custom-tailored to the specific priorities of the organization, thus increasing its overall value.
It is evident there are win-win opportunities for speakers and delegates to get together in personal conferences – especially while the conference market remains rough.
At MACAW research we are happy to send speakers to both regular conferences AND personal conferences, whichever you prefer. If you want to hire one of our consultants as a speaker, please contact us via www.macawresearch.com
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Testing Bing
MACAW research gave Wolfram Alpha a test drive earlier this year. This time we take a look at Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, which was launched worldwide in the beginning of June. Bing is promoted as a Decision Engine, which implies it is more than just a search engine.
To quote Microsoft, “Bing takes a new approach to helping customers use search to make better decisions, focusing initially on four key user tasks and related areas: making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”
In addition to these specialized task-oriented features, Bing is also a general purpose search engine. As international business consultants, we do travel a bit, however we are more often performing searches as part of research projects. Thus we will limit our testing of Bing to general purpose searches where Google to this day reigns supreme.
If we’re going to be using Bing, it needs to perform as well as – or better – than Google. Our first test query “macaw research” run on both engines gave us slightly different results. Our website, www.macawresearch.com, is the top pick on both engines, and they both return the Wikipedia entry on Macaw, as well as the Tambopata Macaw Research project on the first search result page. Google returns links both to the MACAW Card Bulletin, published by us, and to our Twitter profile. Bing doesn’t bring back anything else related to our company on the first search result page, so it is a better option if your primary interest is bird research links. Our second query, “EU population”, also returns some shared results, including Wikipedia entries and links to optimumpopulation.org, but then there are some differences. Google returns what we would say is the most relevant for a market researcher – a link to Eurostat, the EU central statistics agency. After a bit more testing, in general, it seems like you get a different mix of results with Google and Bing, and the relevancy is fairly high for both engines, with a slightly higher utility in favor of Google for our test queries.
However, Bing has some nice features. For instance you can hover over a link and Bing will retrieve some basic information from the site the link leads to, allowing you a preview. Using this feature can be faster than clicking and then going back if the page doesn’t give you what you were looking for, according to Microsoft something that occurs in 24% of cases with clicks on search result links.
Bing also uses what Microsoft terms an Explore Panel, which contains Related Searches and Quick Tabs. The former is suggested other search strings related to your current search, whereas tabs are somewhat more sophisticated with dynamic categories that depend on the search. Searches for a certain city name yield Quick Tabs for tours, travel and images; searches for a car model generate categories on reviews, accessories and videos.
So, what’s the verdict? We’ll have to use Bing a bit more before we can conclude on anything, but it definitely looks promising. Search results tend to overlap with Google, but there are some differences, which suggest it can be worthwhile to do a search on both engines in some cases. With regards to features, Microsoft is on to something, particularly with preview, however it will probably not be long before Google or someone else copies it. All in all, we are pleasantly surprised.
To quote Microsoft, “Bing takes a new approach to helping customers use search to make better decisions, focusing initially on four key user tasks and related areas: making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”
In addition to these specialized task-oriented features, Bing is also a general purpose search engine. As international business consultants, we do travel a bit, however we are more often performing searches as part of research projects. Thus we will limit our testing of Bing to general purpose searches where Google to this day reigns supreme.
If we’re going to be using Bing, it needs to perform as well as – or better – than Google. Our first test query “macaw research” run on both engines gave us slightly different results. Our website, www.macawresearch.com, is the top pick on both engines, and they both return the Wikipedia entry on Macaw, as well as the Tambopata Macaw Research project on the first search result page. Google returns links both to the MACAW Card Bulletin, published by us, and to our Twitter profile. Bing doesn’t bring back anything else related to our company on the first search result page, so it is a better option if your primary interest is bird research links. Our second query, “EU population”, also returns some shared results, including Wikipedia entries and links to optimumpopulation.org, but then there are some differences. Google returns what we would say is the most relevant for a market researcher – a link to Eurostat, the EU central statistics agency. After a bit more testing, in general, it seems like you get a different mix of results with Google and Bing, and the relevancy is fairly high for both engines, with a slightly higher utility in favor of Google for our test queries.
However, Bing has some nice features. For instance you can hover over a link and Bing will retrieve some basic information from the site the link leads to, allowing you a preview. Using this feature can be faster than clicking and then going back if the page doesn’t give you what you were looking for, according to Microsoft something that occurs in 24% of cases with clicks on search result links.
Bing also uses what Microsoft terms an Explore Panel, which contains Related Searches and Quick Tabs. The former is suggested other search strings related to your current search, whereas tabs are somewhat more sophisticated with dynamic categories that depend on the search. Searches for a certain city name yield Quick Tabs for tours, travel and images; searches for a car model generate categories on reviews, accessories and videos.
So, what’s the verdict? We’ll have to use Bing a bit more before we can conclude on anything, but it definitely looks promising. Search results tend to overlap with Google, but there are some differences, which suggest it can be worthwhile to do a search on both engines in some cases. With regards to features, Microsoft is on to something, particularly with preview, however it will probably not be long before Google or someone else copies it. All in all, we are pleasantly surprised.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Introduction to Market Intelligence
When people make decisions they rely on gathering and analyzing information. If you plan on buying a new stereo, you want to make sure you make a good purchase. You want to compare product features on different models, prices in different stores, available support and warranty, what other customers have experienced using the product, and a host of other information. In short, the more information you can base your decision on, the less likely that your purchase will be a bad one.
For small decisions people can get by with less information. The bigger the decision, the more informed you want to be. Big decisions typically involve a higher level of risk, and you want to minimize that risk. So you gather relevant data and analyze it to improve the odds of a successful decision. For businesses, whose decisions have much larger impact than individual consumers’, this is even more important. Companies need not only information, but information put together in a manner that makes sense in the context of their decisions. They need Market Intelligence.
Market Intelligence is a collective term for information about a company’s environment, which is gathered, structured, analyzed and presented to decision-makers. In this environment we find competitors and their products, customers and their experiences, strategies, websites, regulations, innovation, and a host of other factors that influence the market- and ultimately business decisions.
Companies need to be aware of their surroundings to reduce risks and improve their likelihood of success. They need to know when competitors launch new products or change their strategies, when and how government regulations will affect the industry, how customers and other groups experience interacting with the company, how the company’s new website compares to the old one and to competitors’ websites, and the list goes on.
Why do companies need to know these things? Because if they don’t they are running their businesses based on random decision-making. That doesn’t sound good at all, but the truth is that many decisions are made on gut-feeling or very limited information. This might come as a surprise in an era when information is more available than ever before.
In fact some managers would argue that they don’t use Market Intelligence because they are too busy (too busy to make good decisions?). Or they say they don’t know where to start looking, and they could waste days without finding what they are looking for. And even if they do find something, they don’t have the proper systems and the continuity required to optimize the value of the information. In short, their Market Intelligence efforts are performed ad hoc, require a lot of resources, and the results can vary.
At the same time, these managers all realize the value of good information. They need to be able to provide the necessary data and analysis to back their decisions. This is especially important when businesses are facing reduced sales revenue and they can’t afford to make mistakes. That is when the value of Market Intelligence is truly appreciated.
So, if Market Intelligence is a requirement for good decisions, and it’s difficult to get it right for companies on their own… then what should they do? Here’s an idea. Maybe someone else can do it for them. Specifically, maybe we at MACAW research can do it. We work with Market Intelligence all the time and we know how to get it right. Go ahead, check out our website and drop us a line. We won’t bite.
http://www.macawresearch.com
For small decisions people can get by with less information. The bigger the decision, the more informed you want to be. Big decisions typically involve a higher level of risk, and you want to minimize that risk. So you gather relevant data and analyze it to improve the odds of a successful decision. For businesses, whose decisions have much larger impact than individual consumers’, this is even more important. Companies need not only information, but information put together in a manner that makes sense in the context of their decisions. They need Market Intelligence.
Market Intelligence is a collective term for information about a company’s environment, which is gathered, structured, analyzed and presented to decision-makers. In this environment we find competitors and their products, customers and their experiences, strategies, websites, regulations, innovation, and a host of other factors that influence the market- and ultimately business decisions.
Companies need to be aware of their surroundings to reduce risks and improve their likelihood of success. They need to know when competitors launch new products or change their strategies, when and how government regulations will affect the industry, how customers and other groups experience interacting with the company, how the company’s new website compares to the old one and to competitors’ websites, and the list goes on.
Why do companies need to know these things? Because if they don’t they are running their businesses based on random decision-making. That doesn’t sound good at all, but the truth is that many decisions are made on gut-feeling or very limited information. This might come as a surprise in an era when information is more available than ever before.
In fact some managers would argue that they don’t use Market Intelligence because they are too busy (too busy to make good decisions?). Or they say they don’t know where to start looking, and they could waste days without finding what they are looking for. And even if they do find something, they don’t have the proper systems and the continuity required to optimize the value of the information. In short, their Market Intelligence efforts are performed ad hoc, require a lot of resources, and the results can vary.
At the same time, these managers all realize the value of good information. They need to be able to provide the necessary data and analysis to back their decisions. This is especially important when businesses are facing reduced sales revenue and they can’t afford to make mistakes. That is when the value of Market Intelligence is truly appreciated.
So, if Market Intelligence is a requirement for good decisions, and it’s difficult to get it right for companies on their own… then what should they do? Here’s an idea. Maybe someone else can do it for them. Specifically, maybe we at MACAW research can do it. We work with Market Intelligence all the time and we know how to get it right. Go ahead, check out our website and drop us a line. We won’t bite.
http://www.macawresearch.com
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Journalism quality
There is an ongoing global debate concerning the quality of journalism, or rather its decline. The reduction in printed media, online advertising models, reduced government funding, increased demands for speedy delivery, an increase in tabloidization, and even Google and Wikipedia have been mentioned as reasons for the perceived decline in journalism quality.
This certainly isn’t a new debate. It goes all the way back to the advent of online newspapers and probably all new media. However, an interesting development is that it’s not just journalists who are waving the red flag. An increasing number of non-journalist bloggers vent their frustrations. It would appear journalism quality might have reached an all-time low in the recession, with the crisis eating into advertising income and more cost cuts finding their way to the editorial boards.
Market researchers who turn to news articles as a source of information continually face the challenges of journalism quality. While the average news consumer might be annoyed by spelling mistakes, casual stories being treated like “the latest scoop” in terms of headlining (which can even be directly misleading to attract clicks), and celebrity gossip and sports news finding their way into other content categories, market researchers face other challenges.
For example, the widespread use of cut+paste journalism, which eventually leads to articles becoming less than a stub – in some instances an article was only a stub to begin with. Unfortunately, this not only removes what can be important contextual or additional information, but it also can lead to extensive hunting in search of the original source due to a lack of or incomplete quoting practices. As a policy, market researchers should always go to the original source, which can involve following a surprisingly long trail of bread crumbs which might abruptly result in a dead-end.
Another concern for market researchers is the use of Wikipedia and Google as sources by journalists. Wikipedia is not an objective, quality-assured source, despite how intriguing it is and practical for instant look-up for less professional occasions, such as when discussing at a party whether the CD or LaserDisc came first, or who won the 2004 Eurovision song contest. Google uses a number of algorithms for determining search engine results, some of which are based on external references. Thus sites that fulfill certain criteria will get a higher rating, and thus come up early in journalist’s search results. This can create biased results, which are transferred to media sites and magnified by journalists who reference the found pages in their articles, thus creating further bias towards their sources. Popularity does not by itself determine truth. Google doesn’t separate right from wrong, that’s the time-pressed journalist’s job.
This leads to the question “who is the author of a given article?” In a number of countries, journalist is not a protected title. Even if it is, news articles can be written by “unlicensed” news desk workers, who aren’t specifically trained in critical journalism. Some newspapers only list an article sponsor, for instance “This article was sponsored by Company X”. All this makes it difficult to trust a growing number of online media sites in a professional research context. Market researchers need to choose their sources carefully in today’s online media jungle.
We await the day when new incentives surface which will encourage the rise of journalism quality again. And, as the critical reader will have determined, this post can easily be picked apart with regards to elements required to qualify as high quality journalism. That is because it is not meant to be such, rather an informal blog post on a topic of interest to us – and hopefully to other market research professionals as well.
This certainly isn’t a new debate. It goes all the way back to the advent of online newspapers and probably all new media. However, an interesting development is that it’s not just journalists who are waving the red flag. An increasing number of non-journalist bloggers vent their frustrations. It would appear journalism quality might have reached an all-time low in the recession, with the crisis eating into advertising income and more cost cuts finding their way to the editorial boards.
Market researchers who turn to news articles as a source of information continually face the challenges of journalism quality. While the average news consumer might be annoyed by spelling mistakes, casual stories being treated like “the latest scoop” in terms of headlining (which can even be directly misleading to attract clicks), and celebrity gossip and sports news finding their way into other content categories, market researchers face other challenges.
For example, the widespread use of cut+paste journalism, which eventually leads to articles becoming less than a stub – in some instances an article was only a stub to begin with. Unfortunately, this not only removes what can be important contextual or additional information, but it also can lead to extensive hunting in search of the original source due to a lack of or incomplete quoting practices. As a policy, market researchers should always go to the original source, which can involve following a surprisingly long trail of bread crumbs which might abruptly result in a dead-end.
Another concern for market researchers is the use of Wikipedia and Google as sources by journalists. Wikipedia is not an objective, quality-assured source, despite how intriguing it is and practical for instant look-up for less professional occasions, such as when discussing at a party whether the CD or LaserDisc came first, or who won the 2004 Eurovision song contest. Google uses a number of algorithms for determining search engine results, some of which are based on external references. Thus sites that fulfill certain criteria will get a higher rating, and thus come up early in journalist’s search results. This can create biased results, which are transferred to media sites and magnified by journalists who reference the found pages in their articles, thus creating further bias towards their sources. Popularity does not by itself determine truth. Google doesn’t separate right from wrong, that’s the time-pressed journalist’s job.
This leads to the question “who is the author of a given article?” In a number of countries, journalist is not a protected title. Even if it is, news articles can be written by “unlicensed” news desk workers, who aren’t specifically trained in critical journalism. Some newspapers only list an article sponsor, for instance “This article was sponsored by Company X”. All this makes it difficult to trust a growing number of online media sites in a professional research context. Market researchers need to choose their sources carefully in today’s online media jungle.
We await the day when new incentives surface which will encourage the rise of journalism quality again. And, as the critical reader will have determined, this post can easily be picked apart with regards to elements required to qualify as high quality journalism. That is because it is not meant to be such, rather an informal blog post on a topic of interest to us – and hopefully to other market research professionals as well.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Testing Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is Stephen Wolfram’s much hyped search engine project. We decided to give it a little test run to see how it can be of use in market research, and wanted to share our experiences with you. We are probably not the only ones in the market intelligence community that are curious about Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com
It is important to distinguish Wolfram Alpha from Google and other text-based search engines. From the hype one might almost be led to believe Alpha has artificial intelligence (AI) and can compute an answer to almost anything. It’s definitely not an AI, but uses a series of engineered scripts to provide some interesting results in select areas. The scripting is based on Wolfram’s Mathematica software, and numbers is what Alpha is good at.
Alpha is not a universal search engine. It does not return information on for example “EU regulations” or “Adam Smith’s invisible hand”, giving you the quickly annoying null result message “Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input”. Alpha excels at numeric data and performing calculations, though, and it can conjure up useful tables and charts in instants, but only based on facts it has stored in its databases. In some instances, Alpha utilizes external sources too, typically for frequently updated data such as stocks.
For instance, we entered “DnB NOR”, which is the largest financial institution in Norway, and Alpha returned latest trade data and returns, a chart with price history, performance comparisons and correlations with various indices in table and various chart formats, projections for future pricing and alpha, beta and R Square values for daily returns for DnB NOR compared to S&P 500. Wow. Impressive, assuming the information is correct. To verify some of the data, we went to the Oslo Stock Exchange website and checked the latest trade value and weekly, monthly and year-to-date returns. The latest trade value was identical, but the return values were a bit off, as in Alpha reported an additional +5% on 30 day-return and -10% on year-to-date return. Hmm. That’s a lot.
This led us to check out the Source data link provided on Alpha’s search result page. It gave a long list of finance-related sources ranging from academic books to sites such as Morning Star, with a disclaimer that not necessarily all sources were used in the results. This can make quoting a source for particular data difficult, as the source list seems to apply for the search result page as a whole rather than for individual elements on the page. The Oslo Stock Exchange was not on the list, by the way, but several sources for aggregated financial data were.
We decided to try one of the recommended searches Alpha provides on its front page, and thus entered “EU populations.” Alpha returned a summary with the total EU population, the country with the highest population and the lowest, a chart with historical developments for the total EU population (does not say whether it includes ascension member states), a list of top 5 and bottom 5 countries ranked by population size – which can be expanded to a full list with a few clicks, a distribution plot with unspecified data (what does it show?), along with some demographic data measures for the countries that have the highest, lowest and median values for the population, population density, population growth, life expectancy and median age. This part didn’t strike us as intuitively very practically organized. A few clicks at a More option for yielded some additional demographic variables, such as annual deaths and birthrate fractions.
Of high importance, we were unable to find references to which years the various population data stem from – in fact there seems to be hardly any meta data available. We could be comparing years-old figures for some parameters and countries with very recent data for others without knowing. The source list doesn’t provide us much help in this case either. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed if Alpha is to be used by market intelligence professionals.
Summarizing briefly, Wolfram Alpha currently can produce substantial amounts of data on select subject matters of quantitative nature. For market researchers looking for quick access to on-the-fly generated charts and tables on data otherwise obtained and structured via other sources, Alpha could be a low-cost solution. However, seeing the source references are vague and Alpha seems to lack very important meta data, it seems more like a tool for a) the general public with simple data requirements, b) students and specialists in certain fields with a need to perform mathematical and statistical computations without using desktop applications.
We’ll definitely keep tabs on Alpha and play around with it some more, but currently it doesn’t strike us as something that will revolutionize the market intelligence industry. If anything, it is a supplement to other search engines and tools. As far as search engines go, Wolfram Alpha is certainly not a replacement for Google, but then again, it doesn’t intend to be either. We look forward to seeing Alpha evolve.
It is important to distinguish Wolfram Alpha from Google and other text-based search engines. From the hype one might almost be led to believe Alpha has artificial intelligence (AI) and can compute an answer to almost anything. It’s definitely not an AI, but uses a series of engineered scripts to provide some interesting results in select areas. The scripting is based on Wolfram’s Mathematica software, and numbers is what Alpha is good at.
Alpha is not a universal search engine. It does not return information on for example “EU regulations” or “Adam Smith’s invisible hand”, giving you the quickly annoying null result message “Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input”. Alpha excels at numeric data and performing calculations, though, and it can conjure up useful tables and charts in instants, but only based on facts it has stored in its databases. In some instances, Alpha utilizes external sources too, typically for frequently updated data such as stocks.
For instance, we entered “DnB NOR”, which is the largest financial institution in Norway, and Alpha returned latest trade data and returns, a chart with price history, performance comparisons and correlations with various indices in table and various chart formats, projections for future pricing and alpha, beta and R Square values for daily returns for DnB NOR compared to S&P 500. Wow. Impressive, assuming the information is correct. To verify some of the data, we went to the Oslo Stock Exchange website and checked the latest trade value and weekly, monthly and year-to-date returns. The latest trade value was identical, but the return values were a bit off, as in Alpha reported an additional +5% on 30 day-return and -10% on year-to-date return. Hmm. That’s a lot.
This led us to check out the Source data link provided on Alpha’s search result page. It gave a long list of finance-related sources ranging from academic books to sites such as Morning Star, with a disclaimer that not necessarily all sources were used in the results. This can make quoting a source for particular data difficult, as the source list seems to apply for the search result page as a whole rather than for individual elements on the page. The Oslo Stock Exchange was not on the list, by the way, but several sources for aggregated financial data were.
We decided to try one of the recommended searches Alpha provides on its front page, and thus entered “EU populations.” Alpha returned a summary with the total EU population, the country with the highest population and the lowest, a chart with historical developments for the total EU population (does not say whether it includes ascension member states), a list of top 5 and bottom 5 countries ranked by population size – which can be expanded to a full list with a few clicks, a distribution plot with unspecified data (what does it show?), along with some demographic data measures for the countries that have the highest, lowest and median values for the population, population density, population growth, life expectancy and median age. This part didn’t strike us as intuitively very practically organized. A few clicks at a More option for yielded some additional demographic variables, such as annual deaths and birthrate fractions.
Of high importance, we were unable to find references to which years the various population data stem from – in fact there seems to be hardly any meta data available. We could be comparing years-old figures for some parameters and countries with very recent data for others without knowing. The source list doesn’t provide us much help in this case either. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed if Alpha is to be used by market intelligence professionals.
Summarizing briefly, Wolfram Alpha currently can produce substantial amounts of data on select subject matters of quantitative nature. For market researchers looking for quick access to on-the-fly generated charts and tables on data otherwise obtained and structured via other sources, Alpha could be a low-cost solution. However, seeing the source references are vague and Alpha seems to lack very important meta data, it seems more like a tool for a) the general public with simple data requirements, b) students and specialists in certain fields with a need to perform mathematical and statistical computations without using desktop applications.
We’ll definitely keep tabs on Alpha and play around with it some more, but currently it doesn’t strike us as something that will revolutionize the market intelligence industry. If anything, it is a supplement to other search engines and tools. As far as search engines go, Wolfram Alpha is certainly not a replacement for Google, but then again, it doesn’t intend to be either. We look forward to seeing Alpha evolve.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)