The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data
Interpreting corporate data can help us understand a huge range of subjects including political impact, environmental concerns, investment decisions, ethical issues, and improving sales processes. Previously the time and energy required to collect and interpret this data was beyond the reach of most individuals and even corporations found it difficult to justify the investment in a data-driven approach.
There are now many sources of cool data from the government, non-profit organizations, and even companies themselves that can be downloaded, combined, and mined. Unfortunately, these data sources aren’t well advertised and can be hard to interpret. In this talk, Segaran will give you some ideas of what’s out there and some ideas of how you can use it to do interesting things.
We’ll explore:
Politicians and their relationships with various companies
Data from SEC filings, NAICS codes, and the U.S. Census Bureau
Automatically finding the “buzz” about different companies
Ways to visualize different sources to know the right questions to ask
Generating implied social networks
Specialized data from other agencies like the FDA and the USPTO
Combining data from many sources to learn new things
comments
Good examples of how you see data in different lights. Also gave me a perspective on how much free data there is out there, you just have to go look for it. It would be nice to see a more in-depth look at this.
Interesting insight but was too specific to the States. Good conceptually though.
This presentation was a highly visual, inspiring walk-through of how data can address finding the 'truth,' Toby takes the simple story of few liberal San Franciscans telling a friend not to drink a popular softdrink because of pollution, health effects, and ostensible support by the makes and retailers of odious political groups. Toby walks through how freely available data can address an initially vague set of negative comments with real data--and does so in an interesting, visually compelling way. While the metaphor is from daily life, the implications for politics, business and social life hold true: facts, not oft-recyled sentiments are critical in the search for the truth. Toby puts forth an example of how developers can combine facts in visually compact and intitive ways to connect people to the truth (or falsehood) behind sentiments.