Tech insights

Mahesh Murthy recently  tweeted : Now a proud owner of Audi R8, Tesla S & Ferrari 308. Found this from Google Play: my 2-yr old bought them on Asphalt 8 This might sound like a pardonable innocent act; some might find it cute too. But your HomeOS doing the same - analyzing a vacant parking space in your car, a certain amount of bank balance, based on car your neighbour recently bought, the car pic your cousin recently posted on FB or some darn algorithm that the developer in Google, Apple or MS came up with - can be a terrible nightmare, possibly even leading to a lawsuit. Companies are already shirking off their responsibility blaming the algorithm creating a scene of mistrust with customers. The recent issues with  Uber  is a case in point: We are not setting the price. The market is setting the price. We have algorithms to determine what that market is. My point is IoT is never going to be a master decision maker. At b...

Statistics is boring but computationally intensive. Hence for a long time, data warehousing and business intelligence (DWH & BI) was a specialized job. The contradiction being - folks who could understand pattern in data (business users) didn't know how to mine it; on the other hand, folks who could crunch data (engineers) didn't know what to look for.  Needless to say, anybody who could do both were looked up as wizards (Excel wizard!!). People learnt to live with it by compromising on a standard set of reports. IBM Watson Analytics aims to change this. It's a cloud based predictive analytics application. The cloud platform gives it the number crunching prowess resulting in instantaneous feedback. The beautifully designed application brings out the most important information out of humungous data at once. Further analysis can be done using drag-n-drop making analytics a playful exercise. After spending a couple of hours on the beta application, I must admit an...