Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

While I agree that the democratization of data is important, there are still significant hurdles surrounding privacy and security. For example, if my small business is in competition with someone else in a similar market space, how much do I trust the cloud with this data? How much can I share without a competitor deducing what I am doing?

While the initial "snooping" concept is simple ... The data is secure therefore they can't see it, what about the in the cracks data. Imagine we are collaborating on a Google document internally for a new partnership in my product space. We have a determined competitor who really wants to find out how to beat us to market. What is they can watch the ad's being served up to me and my employees in some way. What if the information gleaned from those ads (targeted at document content maybe) reveals our super-secret market partnership? Sound far fetched? Maybe not.

I think that the true power of this data comes from aggregating it, smashing it up against other data and then analyzing it. The problem is that doing this kind of data analysis often requires something more than a human mind. Scientists are already struggling with this concept as more and more raw scientific data is made available on the web. What we need is an automated way to look for patterns, clusters, interesting hypotheses in these data.

However, on the flip side, the setup of a business that is not tied to physical location any more. Cloud services like google docs, grandcentral, skype, and zimbra allow people to create a company without a physical office. A globally extended supply chain and global reach for shipping means companies can be created, operate, and grow in a completely virtual way. What will countries do to tax such an entity? How will we deal with this?

Dean McRobie