I’ve been thinking a lot about data lately. Big data has been quite the buzzword the past few years, with unimaginably more ways to collect and track more pieces of information. Technology has allowed the tracking of things we’ve been used to for awhile — where we go online, what we think is interesting enough to click on, what we buy from the Internet. Mobile devices that we take everywhere with us have really turned the dial on what can be tracked — where we go in person, how many steps a day we take, what our resting heart rates are, what stores we’re in the vicinity of or might drive by on our commute home, how long our REM sleep cycles are. AV-ish technology is in the data tracking business too — data can be kept on meeting rooms and how often they’re booked vs. how often those meetings actually take place, how many people are in a room or building and how that affect building energy use and ambient temperatures or even eye-tracking tech that can tell what thing on a video wall drew the most attention of passers-by. But now that we have all this data, what do we actually do with it? With so much available, how do we actually use it to make better business decisions? Large companies use business intelligence software and analysts to help parse and analyze the data, but small businesses don’t always have access to such resources.
I’m not the only one thinking about this — Anthony Coppedge talks about using data to make marketing decisions today, and Joel Rollins, who has been waxing philosophically, and humorously, about artificial intelligence for the last few months, addresses how AI will help the rental and staging industries in years to come.
I’m also at DSE right now, writing this from my tethered iPhone (I hate you, convention center Internet), where NEC Display announced ALP Pro, which adds artifical intelligence-based machine learning to data collected (such as audience demographics, mainly for retail applications) to make suggestions or provide actionable conclusions, such as which content is most successful or how long customer wait time is. The demo is pretty nifty, so if you’re not at DSE 2019, definitely make plans to check it out at InfoComm in June.
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