Andreas Weigend was at SAP asking a phenomenally simple question:
Are you getting paid for "paying" attention?
He took the 'paying attention' portion apparently literally and emphasized how he saw the next data revolution.
Dr. Andreas Weigend is passionate about people and data. Until 2004, he was the chief scientist of Amazon.com where he helped create a customer-centric, measurement-focused culture and focused on understanding customer behavior. He now works as an independent consultant with exciting firms including Alibaba, Lufthansa, MySpace, and Nokia. He helps them leverage the principles of the new consumer data revolution for innovating products and business models. He also serves on boards and advisory boards of startups in the US, Europe and Asia. He is also a limited partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. He also teaches courses at Stanford (Data Mining and Electronic Business), UC Berkeley (Marketing in Web 2.0), and Tsinghua/INSEAD (The Digital Networked Economy).
According to Dr. Weigend, the production, aggregation, distribution, and consumption of data is changing. Traditionally, paid specialists actively collected data for a specific purpose. You had Mapquest with its thousands of employees traversing the streets in all kinds of places around the world sending out GPS signals of their locations, helping create maps. Now, all of us have that facility in our cars and mobiles.
We are flooded with data streams of intention, attention, situation, and location of individuals, plus data about relationships between individuals, ala Linkedin, Facebook, myspace.com etc. There are implicit traces of behavior as well as people contributing data explicitly.
Most firms believe in internal transparency, basing decisions on data they collect. Where the next revolution enters the fray is where companies get that they can benefit by extending this transparency to the outside. Today, a solid data strategy is central to most firms, and includes answers to questions such as: What data should the firm share with its customers so some of them can actually help the firm make the right moves and decisions?
With Infrastructure (A big barrier in the past) commodotized, the relevant questions in today’s marketplace include:
How can we set up a system (including incentives) so that people actually do contribute useful and truthful data?
What value can the firm create for the contributors?
It is their perception of this value that will decide whether they demand to be paid to contribute, or whether they are willing to pay themselves for the privilege? And what should be the currency of the payments: money, attention, or even more data?
The classic questions were raised during discussions around the presentation about privacy and the extent of the usefulness in this respect for Enterprise companies.
Dr. Weigend countered with real anecdotes and examples such as Nokia on one end, who in his opinion gets it more than most and United Airlines who does not. I will try and relate them in a later post.
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