#cloud of data

Today is my first day as Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, doing cloudy stuff for the team focused on CIO Professionals.

Cloud of Data-specific things like this daily Tumblr post are going to take a rest.

But I’ll still be tweeting (of course), and I’m sure I’ll be blogging for Forrester soon enough.

This, reported by The Verge, is a nice example of the way in which data - and connectedness - make everyday tasks a little simpler.

Audi cars with the company's internet connectivity option installed can now direct drivers to the closest parking. Not only that, but the car is also aware of the number of free spaces, and the rates charged for parking.

Data on availability comes from Inrix which (according to The Verge)

says it has data on 18,000 North American parking lots (covering "every major city"), and 42,000 in Europe.

So, although the feature's useful, there will be far more parking options it doesn't know about than it does, at least for now.

Here in Europe and elsewhere, various Smarter Cities initiatives are very keen to focus attention on the intelligent management of parking resources. With better data on availability and usage, local authorities could easily (and justifiably) implement surge pricing to manage demand. Even more significantly, numbers I've seen (in confidence, I think... so no link) on fuel usage, emissions, and contributions to congestion whilst circling a city centre in search of a space suggest real opportunities for environmental benefit if drivers and spaces are matched more efficiently. Both off-street parking (which Inrix tracks) and on-street spaces are increasingly being monitored in a real-time fashion.

I am reliably informed that my daughter is too old to be walked to school, effectively removing my most pressing excuse for exercise when working from home. Partly in response to this, I recently began wearing a Fitbit One to track my levels of activity. With a self-imposed target of 10,000 steps each day, I do find myself consciously attempting to walk far more regularly than before. I also find, I think, that the time 'wasted' on a daily walk translates into more productive use of the remaining hours. My working day is, notionally, shorter, but my effectiveness appears to have increased.

The data about my activity is gathered without my direct intervention (if I remember to charge and wear the device!), and it is then made available in a variety of charts and other metrics on an iPhone app and the Fitbit website. I gain the daily data and the ongoing health/lifestyle improvement without further active intervention.

The app also offers to log information on water consumption, food intake, and various other activities (cycling, swimming, etc). Although I imagine that I could benefit from studying this data about myself, the barrier to entry is too high. I would have to actively record data about myself too often, in too much detail, and for too long to justify even beginning. I imagine that I am not alone, and that the majority of those adopting an increasingly quantified lifestyle are passive adopters rather than active engagers.

There is clearly value (for individuals, for product manufacturers, for advertisers, and for public policy makers and healthcare providers) in building a better picture of our individual behaviours. But far more must be done, either to lower the barriers to participation or to increase the short-term benefits of us actively recording more information about ourselves. Fitbit, for example, also offers a wifi-connected set of bathroom scales (which I do not own). These lower the barrier to collecting weight information and integrating it with Fitbit's existing data on my daily activity.

In which other areas might existing barriers to data collection and analysis be lowered, significantly increasing the pool of data and the viable set of use cases for its exploitation?

I passed though Eurostar's business lounge at London's St. Pancras station yesterday evening, en route to Brussels (if you visit, upstairs is much nicer). In amongst the complementary newspapers and magazines, the latest (24-30 May) issue of the New Statesman caught my eye. ’How Big Data took over our lives,’ screamed the front cover, above a smattering of logos representing several of tech's better-known giants.

Steven Poole's piece succeeds in providing quite an accessible introduction to aspects of Big Data's potential, leavened with a healthy dose of scepticism around some of the wilder claims of the technology's more unquestioning adherents.

Sadly, the full text of the article does not appear to be available online. However, I did find that downloading the New Statesman's free iOS app entitled me to a free download of the current issue. Whether that will work for those of you outside Europe I do not know, but it's worth a look if you can get hold of it. You’re unlikely to learn much that's new, but I always find it fascinating - and enlightening - to see how topics I know are (mis)-represented in the more mainstream organs of the media.

Back in 2011, I spent a year curating GigaOM Pro's Cloud Computing channel. The 'Today in Cloud' piece was something I really enjoyed doing, and valued; 100 words or thereabouts, on a topical issue, trend, news release, or whatever.

As the Cloud channel's pool of long-form content broadened and deepened, a site redesign saw the 'Today in...' piece retired. There are plenty of sound reasons for that, and possibly it had outlived its usefulness on that particular site. 

But I miss it.

So I'm bringing it back. Sort of.

Starting tomorrow I'm going to do it myself, here.

100-ish words on something that matters in and around cloud computing or big data (and related areas), right now. Out of all the blog posts, all the newspaper articles, all the tweets, all the press releases, all the in-person chats, all the presentations, all the Hangouts and Skypes and emails. A single thing (or a theme) that resonates with me, today.

Hopefully, that will be of some use to some of you, too.

So, there will be no more than one post each day.

Each post will be published here, at cloudofdata.tumblr.com.

If I've got my IFTTT recipe right, a single tweet each day to my Twitter feed will announce that a post has been published here.

If I've got my MailChimp campaign configuration right, a single email each day will deliver the full text of the post that has been published here. You can sign up to receive that email by clicking on the 'Newsletter' button you should be able to see in the top right hand corner of this Tumblr page.

You can also sign up for the MailChimp email here.

The full text of every post published here is also available in an RSS feed.

In a few days, once all the technology is doing what it should, I'll also add this feed and the newsletter sign-up option to the sidebar of my long-form blog over at cloudofdata.com.

This is an experiment. I've every reason to believe it will work, and be useful. But it will also evolve. Please do let me know if you find it useful, or point out ways in which it should improve.