Alternative Data Weekly #167
Happy New Year!
The Alternative Data Weekly is Powered by Vertical Knowledge
Announcement(s):
Vertical Knowledge will have a presence at two upcoming conferences:
- Eagle Alpha’s January 18th data conference in NY
- BattleFin’s January 24-26th data conference in Miami
Let me know if you plan to be in attendance.
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … data has value and that value needs to be accounted for.
QUOTES
“There is a clear distinction between creating value from data and realizing that value in the form of some type of financial gain.” - Barbara H. Wixom, Cynthia M. Beath, and Leslie Owens, who are affiliated with MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research.
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Real Estate Refined)
#1 – Snowflake Big Data Industry Predictions for 2024. December 2023.
My Take: Listing of predictions from Snowflake executives. Most are optimistic and I tend to agree with the idea that the initial models (“AI products”) that get traction will level-up the business user … the real sign of broad acceptance will be when people are using these tools without calling them LLMs or AI … just using them because they obviously make their lives better.
Just like we don’t worry about the impact of ATM machines on the bank teller industry, we’ll see some of these early tools get used by more & more people, it will be so obviously better than what was previously available.
#2 – Laura Veldcamp’s Valuing Data as an Asset. January 2023.
My Take: This 18-page document addresses the idea that data is valuable and needs to be accounted for. Of most interest to me was Section 3: Measuring & Valuing Data (Page 10). The answer is largely still worthy of debate, but there is common agreement that the world has sufficiently changed to the point where the accounting world should be assigning some balance sheet value to data.
#3 – Beth Stackpole’s What everybody should know about data monetization. October 2023.
My Take: The author makes the distinction between monetizing data for money and creating value from data that is perhaps less measurable. The author offers us three ways to monetize data:
Improving work (reducing costs/ making people more productive)
Wrapping products (improving customer experience)
Selling information offerings (selling your exhaust data)
BONUS: Vin Vashishta’s Is Generative AI The Next Tech Bubble?. December 2023. “…generative AI winners won’t be decided by benchmarks. That’s how models win Kaggle, not how products win over customers. Users don’t care about a 3% increase in this benchmark or an 8% boost on that one. If they don’t see the difference, they don’t know there is one.”
What else I am reading:
Rebellion Research’s 2023 Research Papers Of The Year. December 2023.
Ben Lorica of Gradient Flow’s The AI Conversations That Shaped 2023. December 2023.
Saeed Amen’s Hundreds of quant papers from #QuantLinkADay in 2023. December 2023.
Paul Bilokon’s A Compendium of Data Sources for Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. September 2023.
Alex Izydorczyk’s Measuring Web Traffic is Very Hard. December 2023.
CyberSyn announced the Knoema data sunset as the data is transitioning to Cybersyn. December 2023.
Barbara Wixom, Cynthia Beath, and Leslie Owens Data Is Everybody’s Business: The Fundamentals of Data Monetization. September 2023.
Source: The Data Cloud Podcast interviews Madhav Kondle of Janie and Jack. Big Data Strategies for Mid-Size Companies with Madhav Kondle, CIO at Janie and Jack. December 2023.
My Take: Interesting hear Madhav’s perspective on his strategy around big data and effectively incorporating the benefits of big data into a mid-sized business. Working for PE-owned company introduces other important issues as the PE firms want to take best practices across all portfolio companies. Importance of having the right data platform than can scale for the size of the business(es).
Two recurring Alt Data Weekly themes were mentioned here. First is the idea that the tools to work with data are improving so dramatically that it will usher is a “golden age of data”. Second is the importance of domain knowledge (minute 23:00). Madhav comes from a retail family, this experience gives him the ability to understand bot the technology & the day-to-day retail business.
Highlights (27-minute run time):
Minute 01:30 – background on Janie & Jack (originally part of Gymboree Brand)
Minute 03:30 – Madhav’s career journey (most recently was managing data for The Gap)
Minute 07:00 – working for a private-equity-owned firm
Minute 11:30 – benefits of using Snowflake; working with data application vendors like Robling
Minute 17:30 – thought process on using LLMs & AI (Janie & Jack not using yet)
Minute 19:00 – how will data technologies transforming business and society over the next 5-years?
Minute 22:00 – Madhav’s retail family background & resulting domain knowledge
Source: Some cool charts & resources from the Snowflake/Streamlit team.
My take: Trust will improve with good products.
My take: Yes…apparently chatbots are the future.
BONUS: Laura Veldcamp’s Valuing Data as an Asset. January 2023.
The Story of Real Estate is the Story of America
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