The war for hearts and minds online and offline is won by one thing and one thing only: data. Whatever label you care to slap on a business: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, Walmart, without data they are empty shells.
Data not only becomes the fuel that drives everything, it also turns a business into a platform and becomes the currency that determines power and success. At the most crude level the more data you have the more powerful you are and the bigger the things you can do with it. But possession lone isn’t enough, otherwise this would long have been a (shudder) Facebook world.
What you need also is the ability to use that data in a way that makes sense for the individuals you want to attract to your platform and on this front everyone seems to have the drop on Facebook (which focuses solely on what’s good for Facebook).
Because data is how we navigate the world, through our devices, its granularity is important. This is something Google gets really well and its new initiative of hyper-local reporting turns its massive trove of data into information that has a direct impact on the quality of lives of those who use its services. That is the lesson to take away here.
In California street-view level on Google Maps now comes with air-quality reports.
Check out the video below:
And start thinking about how you use data in your business.
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