Data Central - Page 2

This entry was posted by Darren Gladstone, Blogger-in-Chief at HP’s thenextbench.com.

Hi, my name is Darren….but most people call me “Gizmo.” I’ve been digging into the guts of computers for….well…a long time. Let’s just go with that. 

Besides being a bit of nerd (#understatement) I also happen to be the blogger-in-chief for all the content you see over at HP’s TheNextBench.com. Now, if you’re not familiar with HP’s official consumer blog, allow me to break it down for you.

Our job at TheNextBench.com is to help people get the most out of their products. We do this by providing tons of useful how-to tips, give you insights into how (and why) some things are made – and chat directly with you about HP products. Think of HP’s blog as your pipeline to the latest HP intel and insights on consumer gear.

What you can’t see since you don’t walk around the halls here, is how proud we are of the innovative gear that we create at HP. Whether it’s being the first to think of encapsulating an entire laptop in Corning glass (The ENVY 14 Spectre) or building the sleekest all-in-one touch-screen (TouchSmart) PCs around, other companies just can’t compete with our unique designs. Yes, we’re a huge company with a long legacy of innovation…and my job is to tell you all about what’s coming next.

On the blog, HP gave me a mission: Be real with you, our customers. I take our products out of the labs and into the real world to show you how each one works. Besides, say, sneaking an ENVY 14 Spectre into a bar before you could buy it in stores, I’m looking for ways to make your computing experience even better.

When a hot, new game like Diablo III or Crysis 2 comes out, I’ll find ways for you to get your game up-and-running with minimal hassle. Or how to configure an ENVY 17 to kick even more tail than it already does.

And then, every so often, I’ll give a couple video reviews and walkthroughs to help show you what I’m doing. For instance, I recently walked people through how to install a graphics card in the new HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix.

If you have a couple minutes, click play and you’ll see what I mean.

All right, so that’s me – and what we do over at TheNextBench.com.  

Fair warning: The guys on the Data Central blog have agreed to let me come poke my head in every once in a while and let you guys know what we’re doing over at TheNextBench.com. But I’d love to hear from you. I’m always checking comments and keeping my ears peeled for your questions.

So? What’s on your mind with HP products? 

This entry was posted by Sumeer Chandra, Vice President for Worldwide Marketing and Strategy at HP’s Graphics Solutions Business 

In my last post I talked about book and magazine publishing, print preference, and the ways HP is addressing that market with HP Indigo Digital Presses and HP Inkjet Web Presses at the world’s largest printing trade show, drupa 2012.

In addition to the publishing industry, print has a significant presence in direct marketing, along with e-mail, mobile and social media. With all the customer relationship management data available today, direct marketers have the information they need to send consumers effective, personalized ads. In fact, it is relatively easy for a marketer to send you an e-mail with your name, touting an offer that reflects your interests. The problem is getting you to open it. In fact, direct marketing e-mail placement rates have been in decline, and direct marketing e-mail open rates remain relatively low.

When marketers take that easily personalized e-mail offer and create a personalized direct mail piece instead, open rates can increase. As a result, marketers are taking a closer look at the lists they work with, parsing data to reach people who may buy when they get a mailer but are less likely to respond to an e-mail, online or mobile message alone.

Getting back to publishing, there are even some groundbreaking campaigns applying these techniques in the magazine space. Magazine promotions using HP Indigo digital presses have won Cannes Lions advertising awards for Time Inc. and Billboard magazine. Project Match, a program developed by Hearst Magazines, HP and HP Inkjet Web Press customer Strategic Content Imaging, has developed high-response, personalized, QR Code insert and outsert advertising programs for Harper’s Bazaar and Popular Mechanics magazines.

In many cases, once PSPs’ customers see the strong advantages that come when integrating print with data, they no longer question print as a promotional medium. Instead, they often recognize print’s enduring ability to deliver a strong return on marketing investment and its unique value in creating a more personal connection with customers.

This entry was posted by Sumeer Chandra, Vice President for Worldwide Marketing and Strategy at HP’s Graphics Solutions Business 

It is not too difficult to see why, and how, print will thrive in the future: It will thrive with digital printing – an efficient alternative to analog offset, flexographic and screen printing process. For the HP Graphics Solutions Business (GSB) and its print service provider (PSP) customers, digital printing momentum has been exceptionally strong, with double-digit percentage growth in the number of pages printed each year. We are optimistic that there is even more growth to come based on the advances HP is bringing to market.

While HP is best known for home and office printers, Graphics Solutions provides print service providers with digital presses, large-format printers and related workflow technologies. And while most print comes from general commercial printing and publishing, our solutions portfolio also produces applications for photo merchandise, direct mail and transactional, label, packaging, sign and display and architecture, engineering and construction /technical design printing applications.

Our customers benefit from innovation that makes print in all forms more targeted and relevant to end consumers. At the world’s largest printing tradeshow, drupa, May 3-16 in Düsseldorf, Germany, HP is launching new technologies that make digital printing even better, including a new HP Indigo 10000 Digital Press and faster models of HP Inkjet Web Presses.

But is print better, or worse, as a medium for the future? While that depends on whom you ask, it is far too easy to underestimate why print endures and prospers. Look at print only as words and images on a surface, and print arguably does less than any electronic medium that incorporates sound, video, gaming and web connectivity on a single device. Look beyond the surface, though, and it is fair to say print does less, better.

Print is a complex medium, with different types of products – publications, marketing collateral, packaging, signage and more – available in any number of size and substrate options. But each type of print product is specifically designed simplify meaning and enhance a reader’s ability to receive and comprehend content. Data from companies such as Millward Brown, Miratech and Epsilon Targeting show how complex options available with e-readers or tablets potentially diminish our ability to comprehend a text.

E-readers have many strengths, of course, including the ability to go into the long tail of specialized content. Analog-printed books usually only make economic sense when produced in large quantities, which means publishers often cannot afford to keep low-volume selling titles in print. HP digital presses, however, overcome those economic limitations, meaning print can capture more of the appeal e-readers offer for the many people who prefer or can only access a hardcopy book.

For example, as HP’s Alon Bar-Shany recently wrote in GreensheetBIZ, there are many specialized and personalized publications that live online, but are printed one-off, on-demand using HP Indigo digital presses – the industry market leader in print quality. This includes thousands of magazines available through HP’s MagCloud service, as well as personalized children’s storybooks from Penwizard and Frecklebox, and self-published, color books from CreateSpace, Lulu and Blurb. Many mainstream book manufacturers use HP Inkjet Web Presses to affordably print small- and mid-volume titles that are just too expensive to print, store and distribute using offset production models, or customized books that can only be created using digital systems.

The new HP Indigo 10000, launching at drupa, is an especially important development in this space, as it is built in a larger, 29-inch format ideal for book printing applications.

HP made publishing industry news last year by introducing the world’s first 42-inch wide inkjet production solution, the HP T400 Color Inkjet Web Press. Received with broad acclaim, it is helping to redefine what the publishing industry can do with digital printing. In fact, new HP T400 installations include a press purchased by Australia’s leading book manufacturer, McPherson’s Printing Group.

The high-volume HP Inkjet Web Press portfolio gets even more productive with the recent unveiling of faster models and the introduction of new, coated media that can bring inkjet publication printing into new areas of publishing.

These opportunities are important because, when you set aside assumptions that print is going away and take a closer look, you see the real trend: print is changing. The more relevant, timely and personalized you can make a piece of print collateral, the more value it has to the end user. That has become the real momentum driver in the print industry.

My colleague Alon probably put it best: “As strange as it sounds, there are segments of print that are actually aligned with the transformation away from hardcopy communications. And where that alignment exists, the opportunities are tremendous.”

In my next post, I will talk about the role data play when capitalizing on these opportunities with HP Graphics Solutions.

How do corporations tackle some of the world’s toughest problems in a way that really benefits society? Through providing a platform for creative employees to collaborate both inside their organization and with outside organizations, according to Alan Nemeth, an HP Fellow and Chief Technologist for our Enterprise Cloud Services - Unified Communication offering. He was accepting the prestigious Justmeans Social Innovation Award for Most Strategic Use of Philanthropic Funds for our successful Early Infant Diagnosis program in Kenya at the 2012 Ceres conference in Boston, MA on April 25.

Nemeth stated that collaboration is “the most effective and sustainable way to solve problems.” He added that the Early Infant Diagnosis program with Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Kenyan Ministry of Public Health & Sanitation, and Strathmore University is a perfect example of collaboration in action, as it demonstrates the unique value that multiple stakeholders in public-private partnerships can bring to the table to create a positive impact on society and significantly benefit infant lives in Kenya.

Justmeans awards honor the global leaders that are tackling the world’s most pressing challenges through social innovation. Ceres is an NGO that mobilizes business leadership to ignite innovation and scale sustainability to build a healthy global economy. Together in Boston they showcased leadership and innovation in global citizenship.

Join the discussion at @hpglobalcitizen

Find out more:

Ceres 2012 Conference: http://www.ceres.org

Justmeans Social Innovation Awards: http://www.socialinnovationawards.com/ and http://www.justmeans.com/

It’s a fiscal touchstone of the Internet era: there’s enormous value to be found in the information we collectively share through our online likes, check-ins, searches, browsing and buying histories.

Companies of all kinds are keen to learn ever more about us, and are increasingly willing to pay for the privilege, notes Bernardo Huberman, HP Senior Fellow and director of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs.  Yet currently the people actually generating the data aren’t benefitting financially at all (even though, in many cases, they do receive free access to a useful

 service).

“There’s no reason, in principal, why individuals shouldn’t be paid in return for the data they create,” suggests Huberman. “If we can do that while taking into account the privacy attitudes of the participants, we can help people better control how their data is used and at the same time open up new possibilities for innovative social and technological research.”

That’s the argument behind a new paper, “A Market for Unbiased Private Data: Paying Individuals According to their Privacy Attitudes,” [pdf] written by Huberman and HP colleague Christina Aperjis.

For such a market to work, they argue, buyers need to be sure they’re receiving unbiased data and individual sellers must be confident they’re getting the best possible price for their information within their tolerance for sharing.

Existing research shows that people tend to want either a significant price for data they feel is revealing, or very little for data that’s liable to biases of various kinds. The result: buyers generally can’t afford the data sets that would be most useful to them.

What’s your appetite for risk?

The solution, say Aperjis and Huberman, is to create a market that lets sellers participate according to their specific attitudes about privacy and risk.

This results in smaller but statistically valid sets of data that can be made available to buyers. Because of the validity of that data, buyers need to purchase only a fraction of a larger data set to compute reliable statistics about that larger set – allowing them to pay relatively fewer individuals the higher sums it takes to get more valid data.

Trust, transparency, and choice as competitive advantages

Managing the process is an intermediary known as the market-maker. Taking a small cut of every trade, market-makers want to maximize market volume and thus have an incentive to act as an honest broker, enforcing transparency and choice with respect to privacy.

In fact, the better job the market-maker does to promote and protect individuals’ privacy, the more trust will exist within the market – and trust is a critical factor in consumer adoption of new business models.  For example, giving individuals the most choice about how and why their data is used can widen the appeal of opting-in, increasing the efficiency of the market and giving the market-maker a competitive advantage.

How to move beyond present-day data markets

Third party dealers of private data sets already exist, note Aperjis and Huberman. What’s been missing is the chance for individuals to participate in these transactions – whether by defining how the data may be used, or to get paid.  In particular, the inability to compensate sellers is in no small part due to the fact that prior models for private data markets don’t specify how to set appropriate prices.

For example, simply asking sellers to name a specific dollar value would result in biased datasets because people who value their private information the least would always offer the lowest prices.  Instead, Aperjis and Huberman set prices by asking sellers to make a series of choices between payment plans that trade off risk and reward.

That said, the researchers acknowledge that in many common scenarios, individuals do receive a service in return for sharing their private data – a free query from a search engine, for example, or a valuable connection with friends through a social network. But it’s not hard to imagine new markets where buyers would be willing to pay individuals directly for their personal information.

A pharmaceutical company, for example, might need a reliable sample of people with a particular disease and who use a specific drug. In a case like that, say the HP researchers, “it is of the utmost importance for the buyer of the data to obtain an unbiased sample of individuals with certain characteristics.”

The research value of unbiased, private data

Such data sets may cost more money to compile, but that actually makes them more likely to be available for peer review and verification. And that’s a positive change, suggests Huberman.

In a letter published in the Feb 16^th edition of Nature, Huberman drew attention to the research value of information produced by users of social media.  Yet analyses of such data, he wrote, are typically “not accessible to researchers beyond the authors of the work.”

“In some cases the source of the data itself remains hidden, leading not only to problems of verification but also about the generality of the results,” he added.

In contrast, Huberman and Aperjis’ new approach could create data sets that are both reliable and available to others to either confirm or challenge the research inferences drawn from them.

These sets could be used for commercial purposes, certainly. But they might also drive new insights across many fields of research – in education, for example, in urban planning or for medical applications such as the tracking of disease outbreaks.

“Overall, in a global economy where the proper handling of data is an increasing concern, there’s a lot to be said for creating markets where private data is traded openly,” Huberman suggests, “and for doing it in a way that benefits the people who actually generated it.”