A novel service from Swan Island Networks crunches through and filters, then combines and aggregates information from a broad variety of big data sources to produce targeted alerts for cities.  First rolled out in 2004, the technology is currently in use by over 250 commercial customers to connect different agencies and information sources.

“Trusted Information Exchange Service [TIES] promises to allow city managers to create and share real-time common operating pictures of their cities,” said Charles Jennings, CEO of Swan, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of situational intelligence software and services. “There is everyday value and the ability to use this in a crisis to stay on top of what is happening.”

Offering both detailed dashboards to privately collect and assess data from a certain city, as well as a more general view providing information to the general public, TIES has already seen use during several recent emergencies, including at Fukushima after the tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdown, the shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit.   Collaboration across cities using this technology is also a possibility, allowing them to learn from one another’s experiences.

Robert Dodge, president of Dodge Global, an international risk management consultancy, was an early adopter of TIES, calling it “intelligence-led risk management.”  He went on to say:  “I saw a ton of potential to aggregate data and visualize it… With TIES, all this information could be presented on one screen.”   TIES uses CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), a data format used for sharing critical data between agencies, which is also used by all 50 states and 19 federal agencies in the form of NIEM (National Information Exchange Model).

Microsoft’s CityNext initiative, which is offered in conjunction with TIES, is now looking forward to how to help cities connect to the cloud better, and reap the benefits economically and developmentally.  As Jennings puts it, without the cloud trawling through this quantity of data would be unfeasible, but using the cloud based services, the options are limitless.

(Image Credit:  Richie Diesterheft)

We caught up with Jim Sterne at Digital Analytics Day in Hamburg. Jim shared his insights on Big Data and gave his advice for Global Big Data start-ups. Jim is an internationally known speaker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies and Internet entrepreneurs. He was  named one of the 50 most influential people in digital marketing and is identified as one of the top 25 Hot Speakers by the National Speakers Association. He is famously known as the “Godfather of Web Analytics“, who has simplified complexities of online marketing for major corporations since 1994.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Sgm9tyWRaA

SMEs which have risen to leveraging the value of Big Data are using services such as cloud computing and open-source software to realise various goals. At the same time, they are keeping in loop with the new cheaper ways to learn from data that are emerging with time. Phil Simon cites example of Kaggle, Acxiom and DataLogix as companies which are already  offering valued inexpensive Big Data services to SMEs.

Kaggle – a company which seeks to make data science an affordable fun sport. It offers crowdsourcing , social network, wiki, and job board opportuities on one portal, easy to be eased by SMEs lacking tech and data savvy talent.

Acxiom and DataLogix – are data brokers which provide SMEs with highly valuable data at reasonable prices. For example these data brokers obtain names of expectant parents and families with newborns from Experian (a marketing-services unit of credit reporting giant ) and sell it to relevant SMEs.

Phil notes that a lot of new ventures are jumping on the bandwagon to provide valuable Big Data services to SMEs. Not that these small big data ventures would replace the bigger corporations but they would offer the affordable to the ones who need it – the SMEs.