Category: Business Models and Technology

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Indiana Jones in the age of analytics

By Kishore Jethanandani

Drilling engineers navigate hazardous oil wells in earth’s dark hollows not in the manner of the swashbuckling Indiana Jones but collaboratively with staid geophysicists and geologists who parse terabytes of data to calculate the risk of the next cascade of rocks or an explosion. 3D visuals of seismological data, superimposed with sensor fed real-time data, help offsite professionals to collaborate with engineers working at well-sites.

The drilling machines also generate streams of data with an array of sensors used for well logging. The data is transmitted to remote sites where it is aggregated and is accessible to geologists and geophysicists.  These sensors can read geological data such as hydrocarbon bearing capacity of rocks as well as the data related to the rig operations such as the borehole pressure, vibrations, weight on the drill and its direction and much more all in the context of the well environment.

A major breakthrough has been achieved with the ability to pool data coming from a variety of sources in a single repository with help from standards under the rubric of Wellsite Information Transfer Specification (WITS).  The availability of a storehouse of well data opens the way for a bevy of firms, specialized in reading the geological and operations data, to find patterns and guide engineers to find the most optimal ways to explore and produce oil in complex wells in the depths of the earth and the oceans.

A typical case of oil and exploration companies encountering Catch-22 situations is that of PEMEX which ran into the dead end of a salt dome underground. The alternative was to circumvent the dome.  The rub was the risk of getting into a quagmire of mud. A game plan was crafted over eight months in collaboration with a multidisciplinary staff that included preliminary testing, 3D modeling and simulation and contingency planning. The entire exercise determined that exceptional pressures were likely to be encountered due to the presence of the salt dome in the vicinity of the alternative route compounded by a host of other probable risks.

For managing the risks, a predictive model was written based on the available geological data and its performance was monitored by comparing it with the actual performance data, generated during drilling. The variance between the predicted values and actuals revealed unanticipated hazards and informed action plans that engineers could use to deal with risks.

The oilfields today range from the icy Artic with its shifting icebergs and thawing permafrost to the raging storms at the deeper ends of oceans with their easily ignited submarine methane and the cavernous rocks of shale oil. Oil companies look to protect their multi-billion dollar investments in the projects and their staff from certain death if any of the risks are misjudged.

Fortunately, oil companies have accumulated multidimensional data now available on a standard platform. 3D video collaboration brings together the human talent from distant locations to crack the codes that help to improve the standards of safety and effectiveness.

A variant of this post was published in the now defunct Collaborative Planet hosted by UBM Techweb

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YouTube competes with commercial TV

By Kishore Jethanandani

Youtube’s harum-scarum expansion of goofy user-generated content is giving way to first steps towards professional content on premium TV channels. Sports content is the linchpin for commercial TV and will likely light the blaze of the trail to its long anticipated disruption by online social TV.

Youtube’s spending on premium channels has more than doubled in 2013 over 2012. The “grants” received by producers of content for premium channels increased from $100 million dollars in 2012 to $250 dollars in 2013 according to the numbers cited by a Needham Insights report. Content producers set aside all their revenues up to the amount of the grant to payback YouTube.

YouTube has not yet purchased broadcasting rights from mainstream sports clubs but it is able to gain the rights for broadcasting niche sports or a geography outside the main centers of the game. Skydiving is largely unknown outside small groups of hobbyists but found an audience of 8 million on Youtube when Felix Baumgartner did a sound barrier breaking jump. Professional Bull Riders Association (PBR), a game known to few people, saw an advantage in an all-digital strategy, in collaboration with YouTube, in order to expand its reach. Major League Baseball streams games on Youtube outside of the USA, NBA streams its minor league sports and the London Olympics expanded its reach to Asia.

The future of broadcasting rights for major league games is caught in a limbo as conflicting forces drive them in opposite directions. Cable companies need exclusive broadcasting rights to retain their customers and they are bidding at a higher rate to keep them. On the other hand, the hold of cable companies on broadcasting rights is tenuous as the audience shifts online to access content on mobile devices or any device. The number of households without any television jumped to 5 million in 2012 compared to 2 million in 2007.

Meanwhile, Youtube is able to cater to the demand by sports clubs to keep fans engaged with highlights of the game, interviews with sports men and women and peeks into the backrooms. One such Youtube channel is Love Football that has snippets of the game with captivating content like the footage on the goals scored, moments of suspense and moments of skillful maneuvering and reviews of the news.

Some of the more successful and competitive sports broadcasters supplement their live programming with partnerships with Youtube. ESPN, the leading sports broadcaster, has 1.2 million subscribers to its Youtube channel. Fox Sports, the upcoming challenger, has over 69,000 subscribers and sees their growth as a priority. They are looking to gain an edge with the interaction of fans with the content.

The demand for streaming media will only grow as 30 percent of cable subscribers have expressed their willingness to switch to streaming media. Youtube will be able to tip the balance of forces in the broadcasting industry in its favor when a high speed broadband network like the one Google is making available in Kansas is more widely available across the USA for superior quality programming.

Youtube’s premium channels will bring some of the benefits of commercial TV, such as ease of discovery, while keeping the fun of personalization of the Internet world. Not all of the freewheeling ways of the Internet world will be lost as fans will still be able to contribute their content in conversations, within the communities created by sports clubs, with the added benefit of convenient cataloging. A tough battle over broadcasting rights looms as the numbers of fans participating on Internet channels rises rapidly.

A version of this post was published in Digital Canvas Retail hosted by UBM Techweb

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Is Video Analytics an answer to Google Analytics for retail stores?

By Kishore Jethanandani

The competitive battle between brick-and-mortar stores and on-line stores seemed like a no contest. E-commerce stores have the clinching advantage in analytics. Video analytics may well help stores disprove that presumption.

E-commerce sites learn so much from the footprints of visitors on their sites with the analytics tools. Video analytics will potentially capture not only the quantitative data on shoppers but also the demographics such as ethnicity and even suggestive psychographic data, from the unguarded expressions of shoppers engaging with products and services, advertising and content, for better targeting.

Accepted notions of display, store planning and merchandising begin to change with the insights received from the analysis of video and related data. Tim Callan, the CMO of RetailNext, a leading video analytics company based in San Francisco, related the story of a retail store that wanted to position its signature products so that they would be conspicuous to shoppers. The conventional wisdom was that those products should be placed at the entry of the store. “Video analytics revealed that there are dead zones near the door entry where shoppers make way for people so they have enough space to enter the shop and miss the products placed there,” Mr. Tim Callan recounted.

Another case led to a substantial redesign of the store as a result of findings from video analytics. Like most lifestyle retail stores, it had a section for shoes. Typically, shoes are displayed on walls for customers to scan before they choose. Most stores place benches next to the wall where customers try out the shoes. “Video analytics revealed that the benches discouraged the shoppers from spending enough time looking at shoes on the wall,” Mr. Callan revealed. “The store decided to reserve separate spaces for the wall and the benches and increased the dwell time on shoes by five times,” Mr. Callan added.

Insights on customer behavior revealed by the qualitative data proved to be especially useful for Gordmans (Mr. Callan disputes the name of the store), a mid-western department store, as a guide to customer service decisions according to a report by the Economist. A camera embedded in Mannequins helped to spot a pattern—the tendency of Asian customers to visit at the same hours of the day. The store responded by placing Asian employees to serve them.

Merchandising decisions can be fine-tuned to increase conversions and improve outcomes from cross-selling. Retailers like Urban Outfitters draw on insights uncovered from correlations between the data on time spent eyeing products and sales realized at the counters. Customers, for example, could have entered the store to buy custom jewelry and may well be in the mood to buy perfumes. If they spot perfumes in an adjacent display, they are more likely to buy them. Today’s cameras take a 360 degree view of stores and will capture behavior of this nature to provide pointers to cross-selling opportunities.

The critical advantage of video analytics tools for stores is the ability to use analytical reports in real-time and feed advertisements, content and offers to customers while they are still in the store. Immersive Software’s Cara software, for example, processes data, in real-time, from face detection cameras to determine the gender and age of shoppers and change the advertisements that are more likely to appeal to the observed profile of visitors to the stores. “The data helps to personalize the experience for customers such as by placing customers in the advertisements they see,” said Jason Sosa, the CEO of Immersive Software.

Early adopter American Apparel recovered from a near death experience after it restructured its stores and deployed video analytics among other technologies. A store that faced the prospect of bankruptcy in mid-2012 is now profitable.

Stores have a chance to make shopping fun as they understand the shoppers’ behavior a lot better with video analytics. Shoppers could well end up loving it more than the yawn of executing commands on-line.

A version of this post was published in the now defunct Digital Canvas Retail hosted by UBM Techweb