Tag: Predictive Analytics

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Improving the Fan Experience through Big Data and Analytics

As consumer electronics companies produce bigger and better HD televisions, sports fans have enjoyed the ability to feel the excitement of the stadium from the comfort of their own homes. Broadcast companies like NBC, FOX, CBS and ESPN have further enhanced the viewing experience by engaging fans on social media platforms and producing bingeworthy content. The downside of high ratings are stagnating stadium attendance levels.

With the convenience of the at-home viewing experience, how can professional sport leagues bring fans back to the stadium? In a 1998 poll conducted by ESPN, 54% of fans revealed that they would rather be at a game than at home. However, when that poll was taken again in 2012, only 29% of fans wanted to be at the game.

Now, professional football teams are betting big data can provide insights that will help them get fans back in the seats. For instance, The New England Patriots have partnered with data science experts to better understand the needs of their fanbase. By investing in big data and high-power analytics tools, the New England Patriots are uncovering new insights on consumer behavior such as in-store purchases, ticket purchase information, and click rates – information that will help them optimize marketing and sales tactics.

While most Patriot games do sellout, there are instances where season ticket holders do not show up. With tools from Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR), The New England Patriots can access data from every seat in the stadium to see who will be attending and how many season ticket holders came to the game. By tracking all of this data the New England Patriots are able to uncover insights into their fanbase that were previously unknown. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, was asked about fan turnout and how valuable it was for the team.

“If somebody misses a game, they get a communication from us and we start to aggregate the reasons why people miss one, two, or three games. At the end of the year, I can know everything that took place with our ticket-holders during that season. It’s incredibly valuable to adjust your strategy going forward depending on what your goals are.“-Robert Kraft, Owner of the New England Patriots

Many teams are also turning to IoT (Internet of Things) solutions to optimize their fan experience. With IoT solutions, devices can be connected to the internet with a click of a button. Professional sports teams have taken advantage of these opportunities by using platforms such as iBeacon. This app uses bluetooth connections in order to connect with mobile devices to create a new type of stadium experience. With this technology connecting to concession stands and areas around the ballpark, fans can find the closest pizza discount and the shortest bathroom line.

Beacon Stadium App
Beacon Stadium App-Courtesy of Umbel

IoT stadiums will eventually become the new norm. The San Fransisco Giants have become leaders in the revolution. Bill Schlough CIO of the San Fransisco Giants commented on this trend,

“Mobile and digital experiences are paramount to our fan experience,” according to Schlough, “and they have played a role in the fact that we’ve had 246 straight sellouts.”

Schlough and the Giants organization have taken an active role to offer their fans a unique viewing experience. Cell phone coverage was introduced in the early 2000s, and in 2004 they introduced a plan to make AT&T Park a mobile hotspot. With WiFi antennas across the stadium, fans have the ability to watch videos and use social media to interact with other fans in the stadium.

As owners and cities continue to spend billions of dollars for new stadiums, meeting consumer demand will be crucially important in a digital world. Teams like the New England Patriots and the San Fransisco Giants have already started using technological tools like analytics and the Internet of Things in order to cater to the needs of their fans. With more innovators in the tech industry, other sports teams will likely follow the path of the Patriots and Giants in order to provide a memorable experience at the game for their customers.

With Synaptik’s social listening tools and easy data management integration, companies have the advantage to track conversations and data around secific topics and trends. Sign up for a 30 minute consultation.

Contributors:

Joe Sticca, Chief Operating Officer at True Interaction

Kiran Prakash, Content Marketing at True Interaction

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Real Estate: Climate-proof your Portfolio

The real estate industry is built on the power to predict property values. With sea levels on the rise, smart investors are thinking about how to integrate climate science into real estate projections. Complex algorithms and regression models are nothing new to developers and brokerage firms but the rapidly evolving data ecosystem offers breakthrough opportunities in resiliency marketing, valuation and forecasting.

In Miami, investors are starting to look inland for property deals on higher ground. According to a New York Times article by Ian Urbina, “home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25% less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood.” To get in front of the wave, real estate investors and appraisers need to regularly update their forecasting models and integrate new environmental and quality of life data sets. Third party data can be expensive but as municipal governments embrace open data policies, costs may go down.

Today, no fewer than 85 cities across the U.S. have developed open data portals that include data on everything from traffic speed to air quality to SAT results. Real estate professionals are using data to do more than just climate-proof their portfolios. With high-powered business intelligence tools, businesses can turn this rich raw data into better insights on:

Home Valuation

Zillow, an online real estate marketplace is leading the charge on better home valuation data models. The company’s ‘zestimate’ tool is a one-click home value estimator based on 7.5 million statistical and machine learning models that analyze hundreds of data points on each property. Now, they’ve launched a $1 million dollar prize competition calling on data scientists to create models that outperform the current Zestimate algorithm.

Design

According to the Census Bureau, in 1960, single-person households made up about 13% of all American households. Now, that number has jumped to 28% of all American households. Additionally, a survey by ATUS cited in a Fast Company article by Lydia Dishman revealed that the number of people working from home increased from 19% in 2003 to 24% in 2015. The rapid rate of technological change means a constant shift in social and cultural norms. The micro-apartment trend and the new WeLive residential project from WeWork are signs of changing times. For developers, the deluge of data being created by millennials provides incredible insight into the needs and desires of tomorrow’s homebuyers.

Marketing

Brokerage firms spend exorbitant amounts of money on marketing but with big data in their pocket, real estate agents can narrow in on clients ready to move and cut their marketing spend in half. According to this Wall Street journal article by Stefanos Chen, saavy real estate agents use data sources like grocery purchases, obituaries and the age of children in the household to predict when a person might be ready to upsize or downsize. This laser-sharp focus allows them to spend their marketing budget wisely and improve conversion rates across the board.

In today’s competitive marketplace, real estate professionals need a self-service data management and analytics platform that can be applied to any use case and doesn’t require advanced IT skills. Synaptik is designed to adapt to your needs and can easily integrate quantitative and qualitative data from websites, social media channels, government databases, video content sites, APIs and SQL databases. Real estate is big business and better intelligence mean better returns. Sign up for a demo and find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask.

By Nina Robbins

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Big Data – The Hot Commodity on Wall Street

Imagine – The fluorescent stock ticker tape speeding through your company stats – a 20% increase in likes, 15% decrease in retail foot traffic and 600 retweets. In the new economy, net worth alone doesn’t determine the value of an individual or a business. Social sentiment, central bank communications, retail sentiment, technical factors, foot traffic and event based signals contribute to the atmospheric influence encasing you company’s revenue.

NASDAQ recently announced the launch of the “NASDAQ Analytics Hub” – a new platform that provides the buy side with investment signals that are derived from structured and unstructured data, and unique to Nasdaq. Big Data is the new oil and Wall Street is starting to transform our crude data material into a very valuable commodity.

What does this mean for the future of business intelligence?

It means that businesses that have been holding on to traditional analytics as the backbone of boardroom decisions must evolve. Nasdaq has pushed big data BI tech squarely into the mainstream. Now, it’s survival of the bittest.

An early majority of businesses have already jumped onto the Big Data bandwagon, but transformation hasn’t been easy. According to Thoughtworks, businesses are suffering from “transformation fatigue – the sinking feeling that the new change program presented by management will result in as little change as the one that failed in the previous fiscal year.” Many companies are in a vicious cycle of adopting a sexy new data analytics tool, investing an exorbitant amount of time in data prep, forcing employees to endure a cumbersome onboarding process, getting overwhelmed by the complexity of the tool, and finally, giving up and reverting to spreadsheets.


“There is a gap and struggle with business operations between spreadsheets, enterprise applications and traditional BI tools that leave people exhausted and overwhelmed, never mind the opportunities with incorporating alternative data to enhance your business intelligence processes.” – Joe Sticca COO TrueInteraction.com – Synaptik.co

Now, the challenge for data management platforms is to democratize data science and provide self-service capabilities to the masses. Luckily, data management platforms are hitting the mark. In April, Harvard Business Review published results of an ongoing survey of Fortune 1000 companies about their data investments since 2012, “and for the first time a near majority – 48.4% – report that their firms are achieving measurable results for their big data investments, with 80.7% of executives characterizing their big data investments as successful.”

As alternative data like foot traffic and social sentiment become entrenched in the valuation process, companies will have to keep pace with NASDAQ and other industry titans on insights, trends and forecasting. Synaptik is helping lead the charge on self-service data analytics. Management will no longer depend on IT teams to translate data into knowledge.

“Now, with the progression of cloud computing and easy to use data management interfaces with tools like Synaptik, your able to bring enterprise control of your data analytics processes and scale into new data science revenue opportunities.” – Joe Sticca COO TrueInteraction.com – Synaptik.co

Synaptik’s fully-managed infrastructure of tools makes big-data in the cloud is fast, auto-scalable, secure and on-demand when you need it. With auto-ingestion data-transfer agents, and web-based interfaces similar to spreadsheets you can parse and calculate new metadata to increase dimensionality and insights, using server-side computing, which is a challenge for user-side spreadsheet tools.

By Nina Robbins

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Securing The Future Of ROI With Simulation Decision Support

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Decision Simulation. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

EXCERPT

Simulation is simply the idea of imitating human or other environmental behaviors to test possible outcomes. It is obvious a business will want to take advantage of such Simulation technologies in order to maximize profits, reduce risks and/or reduce costs.

Simulation decision support is the backbone of many cutting edge companies these days. Such simulations are used to predict financial climates, marketing trends, purchasing behavior and other tidbits using historical and current market and environmental data.

Managing ROI

Data management is a daunting task that is not to be trusted in the hands of lose and unruly processes and technology platforms. Maximizing profit and/or reducing risks using simulated information will not be an automatic process but rather a managed task. Your business resources should be leveraged for each project needing long term ROI planning; computer simulations are just some pieces to the overall puzzle. Simulation decision support companies and platforms are not exactly a dime a dozen but should still be evaluated thoroughly before engaging.

Scaling Your Business

Modern software platforms exist to assist in the linear growth of your business initiatives. Algorithms have been produced thanks to years of market data and simulations in order to give a clear picture to your expectations and theories. Machine learning has also been rapidly improving over that past several years, making market simulations even more accurate when it comes to short and long-term growth. There is no lack of Algorithms or libraries of Data science modules, it is the ability to easily scale your core and alternative data sets into and easy to use platform that is configured to your business environment. Over the last several years these Data Science platforms, such as Synaptik.co, has allowed companies with limited resources to scale their operations to take advantage of decisions simulation processes that were once too expensive and required specialized, separate resources to manage.

Non-tech Based Departments Can No Longer Hide

All branches of companies are now so immersed in software and data that it is difficult to distinguish the IT and non-IT departments. Employees will plug away at their company designated computing resources in order to keep records for the greater good of the corporation. These various data pools and processes are rich in opportunities to enable accurate business simulations. In turn, simulation findings can be shared with different departments and partners to enrich a collaborative environment to amplify further knowledge for a greater propensity for success. It is no joking matter that big or small companies will need simulation decision support processes to ensure they not only stay competitive but excel in their growth initiatives.

Data and Knowledge Never Sleeps

In 2016, the Domo research group produced data visualizing the extent of data outputted by the world. By 2020, the group predicts that we will have a data capacity of over 44 trillion gigabytes. This overwhelming amount of data available to the average human has companies on their toes in order to grasp the wild change in our modern world. The data produced is neutral to the truth, meaning accurate and inaccurate ideas are influencing the minds of your customers, partners and stakeholders. Scaling profits and reducing risk will become an increasingly involved activity, which gives us another reason to embark on Decision Simulation processes to deal with the overwhelming amount of data and decisions needed in this fluid data rich world.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Decision Simulation. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

By Joe Sticca

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Shocking? Predictive Analytics Might Be Right For Your Future

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is about how to approach and think about Predictive Analytics. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design

EXCERPT

“What is marketing?” Isn’t it the attempt to sell products and services to people who are most likely to buy them? Would you be shocked to learn that Predictive Analytics is useful for completing sales? We have a tendency to think of our processes/departments and data in silo-ed terms. Though, with today’s platforms it is critical to harness insights across silos as well as bring in “alternative data”.

How is your Data Management? Can your sales and marketing staff use your data sets to up-sell products or services?” Data management is the biggest barrier as well as the biggest opportunity to surpassing internal KPIs.

Know Your Customer.

“Have you ever heard of someone lamenting about things they should have done as youth to be successful adults?” They might read a good book and suggest “they could have written that themselves.” They think that the path to success is “obvious.” Simply know everything about your customer and provide him or her with valuable products or services. That is the secret to success. “But how do you get to know your customer?” The answer is Data Management and Predictive Analytics.

What Do You Know?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become very popular because it allows you to accumulate, manage and act upon client data. This can be an automatic data management system. You could even review past buying habits and automatically send an email for a hot new product, which might be appealing. Up Selling can increase your profits per customer. CRM is Business Analytics – giving you a deeper understanding of who your customer is, what he wants and where he is going. “Why do you think so many websites want to place cookies on your computer?” They want to track your behavior and anticipate your next buying action.

When Did You Know It?

“If you don’t know what your customer bought yesterday, how will you know what they will buy tomorrow?” The most agile business understands their customer in real-time. The Twitter world is about immediate gratification. People want to say “Hi,” see your pictures and plan your future together within the first 3 seconds, you meet. The profitable business knows the answers before the customer asks them. Predictive Analytics might be right for your future because it gives you the power to anticipate consumer buying trends and or behaviors across channels (Social, video, mobile, etc.). Your competitor might already be using these Business Analytics; you might be leaving “money on the table.” Sign up for a discussion, demo or strategy session today Hello@TrueInteraction.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE:This article is about how to approach and think about Predictive Analytics. True Interaction built SYNAPTIK, our Data Management, Analytics, and Data Science Simulation Platform, specifically to make it easy to collect and manage core and alternative data for more meaningful data discovery. For more information or a demo, please visit us at https://synaptik.co/ or email us at hello@www.true.design