Yesterday the UK government announced that it might force supermarkets and internet companies to release the personal data they hold on individual customers, in a shake-up of Britain’s data protection laws. The move is part of a new initiative called Midata which has some pretty ambitious aims. It proposes to make it possible for consumers […]
Earlier this week, Google gave us a fascinating insight into how the search giant sees its future when it announced it would be buying the US travel guide publisher, Frommer’s, from Wiley. The price tag on the deal is tiny by tech standards at only $25m (compare this to the $1bn that Facebook paid for […]
Pew Research Center has just released a new research study – Younger Americans’ Reading and Library Habits. It provides a fascinating look at the behaviours of young adults and their attitudes towards reading and libraries. On the face of it, this research may seem to be of little relevance to the UK publishing market, but […]
For more than a decade, the big players in Business Intelligence have leaned heavily on their software’s ability to provide analysts with accurate data about a business’s performance. But despite all their data crunching techniques and raw processing power, they all too often lack the tools that would allow users to leap from data to […]
Last week the publishing industry was rocked by news of the class action lawsuit that three authors are filing against Harlequin for digital royalty depravation. But this is not the first time that digital royalties have come into the limelight in this way, and it most certainly won’t be the last. In this particular case, […]
The thinktank Policy Exchange has waded into the Big Data debate with a headline grabbing report claiming that greater use of big data analytics could save the UK government £33bn. Its report, which was launched at Computing magazine’s Big Data Summit, makes the valid point that while the public sector devotes considerable time and resource […]
According to a report published this week by the software giant SAP, while just 25 percent of SME executives agreed on a definition for Big Data, they still expect it to have a massive impact on their businesses. No less than 70 per-cent of the US based businesses questions said that they would expect a […]
The “IT glitch” which downed the systems of Royal Bank Of Scotland, Natwest and Ulster Bank at the end of last week is drawing to a close, but the blame game is just beginning. On Monday morning, BBC Business Editor, Robert Peston, claimed during an appearance on Radio 4’s Today Programme that while the problem […]
Beyond the much publicised e-book royalty payment war lies a much bigger problem. Much has been made of piracy, pricing, merchandising and the never ending power struggle between publishers and the likes of Amazon and Apple. But at the heart of the great e-book debate is the subject of royalties. With print and production costs […]
In a report published earlier this week, business consultancy Cap Gemini commissioned The Economist’s Intelligence Unit to find out what the leaders of 600 companies worldwide really thought about big data. You can see an overview of the data on Cap Gemini’s website, which includes a nice infographic of the headline results, but it was […]