By Harsimrat Parmar:
Have you ever imagined the amount of data that is rendered and fetched every single minute on the internet? We spend a lot of our time online… from communication to shopping … entertainment to reading… business to networking… so many things, right at your desk. On an average, in a minute’s time around 3 million emails are sent across the world, Google processes approximately 24 petabytes of information per day!! 20 million tweets are generated in 24 hours and 700 billion minutes are spend worldwide on Facebook each month. This is nothing but to and fro of information and data. We are drowned in information around us in one form or another.
Recently, Tropicana Products owned by PepsiCo Inc. faced a problem of drop in sales of their famous Orange juice due to some unknown reason. And with the help of discrete sources of information on the web the researchers reached to a conclusion that due to a change in the packaging of the product the customer was not able to descry the same when they went to the supermarkets. It was difficult to figure out the unusual reason of drop in sales, since it was not at all related to the quality of the product. Thus, scientists and researchers are trying to find methods to further use all this data that is available on the internet. Techniques and tools are developed for unification of information. This consolidated form of data can be a great source for making inferences, decisions and conclusions in various domains.
Feedback data
While surfing the net, usually we come across the feedback forms the website requests to fill. The multi national companies use this information to make their websites more user friendly and interactive. This technique has been used for a long time now. Scientists are now taking it one step further. Combination of data from multiple sources and gathering the information in order to achieve inferences is more efficient and potentially more accurate than that achieved by means of a single source. It is generally known as Data Fusion.
Nidhi Raj working as an Information Technology researcher with a MNC is developing a tool which fetches data from various sources on the internet like the numerous blogs posted by the common man, the tweets and networking sites, to gather information which helps in collecting feedbacks and thus finding solutions to various problems. She says the tool if successfully developed will be of much help. It will automatically, select the most important information from a source and collect similar data to give us a consolidated form of data. If the feedbacks are reducing for a product then it is an alarming situation for a product since the customer is reducing too.
Twitter and networking sites like Facebook and Orkut can be of great help in the process of data fusion. The status messages and the tweets help to know more about the current trend of likings of the customer. For instance, people watching Big Boss Season 4 on there television sets gave a huge response to Pamela Anderson entering the show through tweets! And if you wish to know about a particular car for example, just visit it’s page or community on Facebook and through the number of people following it and their posts, the feedback for that particular car can be fetched and can be compared with other cars as well. Blogs are yet another gigantic source of random information which ranges from anywhere to anywhere. Thus to find out the reaction of a nation or the globe these websites are an amazing source of information!!
“The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again.” Â Â -AL Goodman
Indeed!
Image courtesy: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/tag/customer+feedback+management