Can social gaming influence the presidential election?

Big data needs data scientists, or quants, or Excel jockeys
No wonder big data is hot in venture capital this year. Forbes has been running a series on big data, and many of the business leaders it has interviewed say “people underestimate the degree to which big data can fundamentally change their business.”

What was especially interesting is that while technology has made storing and aggregating data much faster and more affordable, some of these experts say “keeping the data in its raw form can provide insights into long tails, allowing firms to identify and target relatively small cohorts that fall outside the normal distribution… when you get down to the everyday work of data scientists and analysts, in a very quiet average work-a-day way, they are finding a lot of insights that are becoming increasingly critical to the way companies are doing their business.” Read full article.

We’ve seen this firsthand. At Kontagent, our data scientists have been instrumental in providing insights to our hundreds of social customers. (We process millions of messages daily.) We believe, while data is awesome, you need domain expertise to make sense of it all. That’s Moneyball lesson #3: Look at the data that really matters; it may not be obvious at first. Continue Reading…