Cloud-based data can be interesting...

...especially when it's not mapped or indexed properly. Surely, someone wise in the ways of data at Facebook would have seen this one coming long before the feature got implemented. To get to this drop-down list, pick one of your friends that has a viewable Friends list, and then change the category selector to filter the list. It doesn't matter what category you choose (other than by Name), all other categories will result in the same un-targeted category results.

Example. A search by "hometown" yields these sample selections, where the match is based on any letter match, say "*a*" versus "a*". It makes a big world of difference to start the match based on criteria that comes after the first letter that a user keys in than what it is today, a match based on any placement in a phrase or word. See image below:

Magazine Technology

While pulp-based paper is not that expensive and a lot of Pacific Northwest lumber is shipped overseas to developing economies, print has gotten rather pricey and not just for advertisers. And, with new(er) media in play, this opens up a largely untapped digital space for consumers to get information about your products and services. NPR had mentioned today that direct mail catalog publishers are making their content friendlier to tablets and other mobile devices. HTML5 is on the right track but it is hardly the end destination to how digital content consumers will be viewing the Internet in the near future.

Beyond all the pretty pictures and color-rich graphics, what remains the constant is the requirement of increased bandwidth and storage. For consumers to readily adopt such a technology and use it in their daily lives, content has to stream as fast as a plain text email. 

There are a few approaches to how customers can view catalogs:

• as a physical mailer (pros: can customize pre-filled order forms with a customer's past purchases or giftees; cons: ultra-old school circa 1774, seen as junk mail, customers who shop online don't actually want a printed catalog since the catalog is the merchant's website, lead time requires a lot of planning and all your publishing components being on-time)

• with a web-friendly viewer (html or Flash, pros: a content standard; cons: limited to bandwidth contracts, Flash content can't be shared in the same way of just clipping out the content that a user wants to share rather than sending the entire presentation, requires specialized knowledge and software to look good)

• as a PDF (delivered as a web download or email attachment; pros: easy to use, many complementary "PDF" services to Adobe's standard from 3rd party vendors; cons: device manufacturers are slow to bring PDF-compatibility on-board due to licensing, software, and privacy concerns, limited or nil tracking capabilities for links embedded within PDFs)

• served up as email or web content (old school method circa 1995, pros/cons: easy to use, anyone can do it, an industry standard, not all email service providers allow rich-content to be served within an email, bandwidth/hosting limitations)

• within a rich-media, portable device-friendly reader (iPad, e-reader, smartphone, tablet, etc.; pros: new digital space, no standards for how or how much ad content should display; cons: closed ad networks with exorbitant pricing, few established software content builders, dual-payment system for advertisers and consumers--advertisers pay for ad content to be hosted/delivered to portable devices, consumers pay for the device, bandwidth, and hosting fees to get content, consumer mobile devices are not ad-free)

What is surprising is that all these methods still survive in conjunction with each other. Although, advertisers and publishers of different media standards will tell you that global revenue share has shifted from print to digital to 24/7 streaming.

Here are a few examples of sites using online magazine technology:

Edible Portland
Visit Vancouver USA - 2011 Regional Visitor's Guide
eDrive Magazine (an industry publication for electric motor and drive technology)

Lightning May Be Hazardous to Your Cloud

Typically data centers are in places where the land and facilities are cheaper than say in a windowless building in downtown metropolis. You'll find yottabytes data centers twiddling away in remote places like Fargo ND (Microsoft), The Dalles OR (Google), Allen TX (Cisco), and internationally in locations such as Ireland, China, India, or Japan. Remember virtualization? Well, it's more or less the same to marketers as cloud computing. Regardless of what you call your online data storage method or how your firm accesses it, that data still resides on a physical machine plugged into an electrical grid.

A lot of data bits we use in our daily lives are making their way to the cloud. Name any online service (Flickr, Google Docs, Amazon AWS, Office Live, Adobe AIR) and some or all of its data is hosted virtually. Businessweek notes these two primary risks of using cloud computing: 

• Risk #1 - your data could be exposed to third parties
• Risk #2 - data and apps may only be available when you are connected to the Internet AND when that service is up and running

A simple act of nature can blow up backup generators, disrupt electricity, and take entire systems offline and require manual operations (actual human technicians) to bring those systems back online.

With that in mind, is your business ready for the cloud?

The cloud, it poked me in the eye

Is there any data that isn't compromised by the US Patriot Act? 

I thought about writing an intro series for marketers to the Cloud (as in cloud-based apps and marketing), but I'll jump right in here. Imagine if you would, your personal hard drive (from a computing device: say, an iPad, laptop, netbook, desktop monstrosity, server, etc.) with documents (e.g., text, photos, presentations, spreadsheets, notes) that you share with your colleagues or clients in an online platform where you presumably control access privileges and file privacy rights. On zdnet.com, Zack Whittaker highlights an interesting perspective on how Microsoft is dealing with privacy with respect to law enforcement requests for documents shared on a cloud.

The Microsoft statement: "Any data which is housed, stored or processed by a company, which is a U.S. based company or is wholly owned by a U.S. parent company, is vulnerable to interception and inspection by U.S. authorities." 

Not only do companies have to worry about hackers breaching a cloud platform like what happened to Epsilon and its customers in March 2011 (Kroger, JPM Chase, and a long list of others), but now your data could be seized at any moment without due process by the US government, regardless of where that data is if it is managed by a US-based company.

Read more?

Microsoft's whitepaper on the data protection policies of Office Live 365
PC Mag's article on "Epsilon Data Breach: What Can You Do to Protect Yourself?"