Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Sailing in Data Tsunami - Part I

It was interesting to watch developments at Google in the last couple of weeks. Recently, Google released an offering that is exclusively targeted for Small and Medium Enterprises in India called - Google Global MarketFinder. The tool is designed to help those indian businesses reach Global markets. When I read this statement - I said 'Wow!' what a valuable initiative by Google!. I was also curious to understand how exactly Google implements this service to its audience.

Google basically achieves the purpose by matching the demand from Global markets to Supply from Indian Small/Medium Businesses. During the course of mediating the connections, it also helps to overcome the complexities in International markets (e.g. currencies/languages). Google does all of these by connecting the 'keywords' that are being offered by the Indian businesses to 'keywords' that are being searched by overseas markets. I myself tried using the tool for certain products like coffee, Google's response was almost immediate with list of countries that has the maximum demand and offer price as well.

Its amazing to see how a simple keyword search can be a biggest influencer in International business. When this service gets traction among the businesses, what is going to happen?. Google is going to accumulate more and more data, in terms of what products/services are being imported/exported in which countries. And Google for sure can perform analytics on top of those data. It doesn't matter how Google would use those analytic insights in their future offerings. But, it would certainly influence their Ad Sense business to fine tune and optimize their advertisements for targeted segments. Google can also price the most wanted keywords in suitable regions/countries at a premium price. I see that's the power of Data!.

In the second offering, it sounds casual - not as serious as the first one!. Google Correlate - It aims to find search queries that has similar patterns over a time series. For example, if we search for 'Swine flu' keyword in correlate, it can get correlated with other keywords such as 'Sore Throat'. In this example, it indicates, Sore Throat has been associated with Swine Flu and both searches have occured in the same time series. This tool can generate interesting perspectives to different data sets. Don't forget to check out the comic book in the website that explains the tool.

I strongly believe the core competence of next generation enterprises is going to be the ability to manage and generate useful insights out of large amount of data sets!. The market developments confirm this inference to a large extent. Today, Google has acquired the social analytics company called PostRank - that has the capability to perform analytics on blogs/wikis/RSS/forums, etc.

More on this topic in next post ...

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