Ask me Starbucks

I love Starbucks and I tend to spend a lot of my time there painting and writing music. It offers a great environment and it has a lot of potential to get smarter. The marketing team at Starbucks did a wonderful job creating a platform to reward its customers. So what is the bridge between them and us. The Starbucks membership card which is given out practically for free to us. With it alone, Starbucks now knows how often we visit them, especially which branches we favor and not forgetting what drinks we love. This is all fine and dandy because they can now go ahead and reward us based on how much they know about our spending habits.

That is great but there is one simple experience that I am not getting as a customer. They now know what I love to drink but why aren't they asking me whether I would like to have my usual. Having someone know what I love to drink in Starbucks could have been an experience of a life time because it shows that this company cares about my drink. They have the capability to do so with this card but unfortunately there are challenges in doing it, as I would like to assume. It could be the process of how they engage their customers at Starbucks. Having customers to hand out their Starbucks card first could be intimidating or having someone suggest your usual drink could dieter your from trying out the new season special. It is time to put some analytics into that thought.

Saving the world

Cars, mobile phones and other electronic devices are becoming more interconnected with the Internet which brings me to this thought. Before computers, our only connection to our planet is what Mother Earth tells us. Most of the time she bounces on you when it is too late. It does not have to be natural disasters instead it could even be a simple conflict in the middle east which eventually blew itself out of proportions. Today with all of the electronic gadgets connecting to the Internet, we are creating an artificial nervous system for our planet. A nervous system, with the right analytical tools, will be able to provide us insights taken from the infinite amounts of data that we produce each day. For example, crowd sourcing is gaining popularity. It takes postings from Internet users of an event (for example Egypt crisis) and correlate them into intelligence, ultimately describing the exact situation of that area at any one point of time. It is going to be an exciting future for us where humans get smarter.

The Internet of things

Oh yes, this is excellent. This is the future of analytics and I am totally supportive of what IBM is pursuing hence I have created this blog. Of course the benefits are tremendous but there are other huge dependencies that organizations have to consider in the future. Until then, mankind and their day to day operations will begin to tightly integrate themselves with these systems of systems (support systems). For example, what if the traffic systems malfunctions and it is unable to interpret the flow of water ways beneath it. Maybe the public transportation systems are unable to function because of the traffic systems. To simplify, what if the internet connection breaks down due to solar flares. With this note, a whole new other set of backup parameters and contingency plans have to be in place for these systems of systems and that alone may spawn out another industry for IBM to differentiate itself.

Instrumented world

The world is becoming increasingly interconnected. It is morphing into an instrumented world, as IBM suggests. The fact that data can be leveraged from both our mobile devices and other transistor based devices is a far fetch idea from IBM that makes total sense. The possibilities of this so called higher intelligence interests me and I am convinced that world leaders today needs facts to make this world a better place. Society ultimately needs to participate indirectly or directly to support the greater needs of analytics.

Are we birds under the observation of scientists?

Had a great conversation with a SAS expert one day and he shared something interesting with me regarding telecommunication cell sites. Organizations today have the ability to locate the position of individuals just by the determining the triangulation of their mobile devices. With the telco cell sites tracking their exact location, organizations such as governments are now able to use it to track human traffic on the road, therefore using this input to control the flow of traffic. "Hmmm, this is interesting...what if we could use this method to track human migration; like birds". Now that would be awesome.