Retail & Consumer
Speed is crucial in the consumer goods space. Big Data helps companies be more responsive to rapidly-changing trends, allowing market players to increase revenue and reduce wasted expenditure.

With Micro Strategy, SAP Hana, Adidas Utilizes Big Data to Improve Costumer Relations
In an effort to improve its response to buying trends and costumer preferences, sportswear giant Adidas is now starting to use the MicrosStrategy’s analytics platform which is based on SAP’s cloud-based in- memory computing platform HANA. Michael Voegele, Vice President of Global IT and Head of Enterprise Architecture at Adidas

Bol.com- The Science Behind the Finding the Perfect Product
Bol.com is an online retail portal based out of the Netherlands. They sell over 8 million products, stocking everything from entertainment to electronics, from books to jewellery. Recommending the perfect product from this vast range can be like finding a needle in a haystack; we caught up with Barrie Kersbergen,

Avansera Takes Home EU Idea ‘Smart Spaces’ Prize
Avansera, a Finnish consumer analytics startup, just won the 3rd place in the EU Idea “Smart Spaces” Challenge, a series of pitching competitions organised by EIT ICT labs with over 800 entrants from across Europe. They won €15,000, as well as coaching and mentoring from experts of the EIT ICT

Uber: Mapping Prostitution and “The Walk of Shame”
With the recent furore among cab drivers about the growing prominence of Uber in London, Paris, Milan, Madrid and Berlin, we thought it would be interesting to see how the mobile-app, car-for-hire company uses big data to better its services. Below are 2 ways Uber has used data to understand

IBM Technology Arranging Marriages in India
IBM recently announced that Matrimony.com, one of India’s leading marriage matchmaking conglomerates, has begun using IBM Big Data and Analytics technology in order to create better matches for their subscribers. With over 3 million users across hundreds of micro-sites, Matrimony.com has no shortage data points with which to pair up

Data Science: Building Better Bras
Tailored retail experiences are one of the most well-known applications of big data. We have premium streaming sites that know what you want to watch next better than you do; book vendors which can accurately map your literary tastes; and now, an e-commerce lingerie startup which knows if you suffer

5 Lessons from Amazon Ratings
When it comes to marketing a product, Amazon ratings can make or break a business. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been talked in to (or out of) buying a product based on a passionate review or a high or low rating. Nithyanand Kota spent alot of time contemplating

Posiq: Using Big Data To Disrupt The Restaurant Industry
Posiq, a company that aims to help restaurants enhance customer relationship through big data, announced yesterday that it received $3.2 dollars in Series A investment. Thayer Ventures led the round, with additional participation from SVG Partners and select angel investors. “The restaurant industry is inundated with loyalty gimmicks, email or text

Netflix Creating TV Shows with Big Data
In 2012, Americans watched more legally-delivered video content via the Internet than on physical formats such as DVDs. This shift in format also allows online content providers to gather large amounts of data on viewer habits. Recommendation engine Netflix is the de facto iTunes for online video content. It collects

GPredictive – Data Driven Decisions for Marketing & Sales
We met up with founders of GPredictive. GPredictive ´s mission is to provide customers with solutions that make decisions based upon data as easy as possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aqZX8kFBXU Who are you and what are you doing? We are G-Predictive, a big data start-up. We want to give access to everyone to the