My #BigData iPhone Visions

Maybe it was the chance meeting with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, at Starbucks (see photo). Maybe it was the eggnog latte. Maybe it’s the season that brings on visions of sugarplums dancing in my head… but I digress[1].

The Dean of Big Data has a vision for the next Apple iPhone—the #BigData iPhone! The #BigData iPhone would change the way that consumers interact with companies, putting consumers in charge of their data and letting the consumers decide with whom and when they are willing to share their data, and at what price. In my vision, the iPhone aggregates the wealth of data that exists about the consumer’s purchases and social interactions to uncover product and service promotions, as well as travel, entertainment, dining, financial, and healthcare recommendations. How would the #BigData iPhone do this?

• The #BigData iPhone captures the consumer’s most current product and services purchase history and social interactions, with access to the consumer’s entire history of product and services purchases, travel, entertainment, financial, healthcare, social, and other engagement data on a highly-secure cloud platform. Much like you can authorize Mint to aggregate your financial transactions (e.g., credit cards, checking, savings, retirement accounts), or TripIt to aggregate your travel plans (e.g., flights, hotels, car rentals), the #BigData iPhone would provide a similar data aggregation capability across credit card, loyalty programs, call records, web browsing, mobile apps usage and other sources of consumer interactions and transactions.
• The cloud, managed by Apple or the cloud provider of your choice, stores a complete history of a consumer’s product and service purchases (via credit cards, micro-payments, bitcoin, and even old fashioned checks), web browsing, keyword searches, locations traveled, loyalty programs, and social media contacts, posts and interactions (Likes, Retweets, Favorites) coupled with the consumer’s educational, employment, demographic, financial, healthcare, and other personal history to calculate/score the consumer’s areas of interests, passions, affiliations, and associations by product and service categories. Products might include things such as electronics, apparel, grocery, automotive, sporting goods, etc., while services categories may cover things like travel, entertainment, dining, financial, and healthcare.
• The #BigData iPhone constantly scours the web, news outlets, and social media sites looking for product and service promotions, events, and the activities that are most relevant to the consumer, based upon the detailed profiles about their interests, passions, affiliations, and associations by product and service categories.
• The iPhone creates propensity and association models to benchmark the consumer’s purchase, travel, and entertainment behaviors against similar consumers to find and recommend other items and activities of interests.
• The iPhone uses all of the consumer’s data to create predictive models to make product and service recommendations in areas such as:

• Promotions and sales that offer especially attractive discounts for your most commonly purchased products and services
• Entertainment, dining, travel, and vacation recommendations based upon stated entertainment or travel plans, or extremely attractive offers that seem most relevant given your history of entertainment and travel (imagine never missing a Chipotle offer again!!)
• Financial investment recommendations including credit card promotions and offers, and mutual fund and savings recommendations based upon life stage objectives (for example:  saving for a home, new car, college, or retirement)
• Searches across the multitude of different social media sites to find and deliver “Friend” recommendations
• Identifies upcoming dental or healthcare needs, and automatically compares your calendar to the calendar of your doctor or dentist to find and schedule a time that is optimal for both parties

#BigData iPhone Puts Consumers In Control Of Their Data!

One of the biggest benefits to consumers is that the #BigData iPhone puts them in control of their own data. Consumers own their data and decide when, where, and how this data will be shared with merchants and service providers. Consumers can decide to share portions of their data with a specific merchant or provider in exchange for a special promotion or pricing. After the interaction, the consumer can request that the history of the transactions and interactions are erased from the merchant and provider sites and apps unless the consumer has entered into an explicit agreement with the provider (for example, a loyalty program) which allows sharing their purchase and demographic data.

Let’s look at an example. Consumers can decide when they download an app whether or not the app vendor can save their personal data. Today, consumers agree to share their personal data when they click yes on the app agreement, but nothing says that consumers can’t also keep their own app usage data (MapMyRun results).

#BigData iPhone Architecture

To store, manage, and analyze this vast amount and wide variety of consumer data, the #BigData iPhone combines a real-time analytics environment, coupled with a cloud-enabled, big data environment that stores and analyzes the consumer’s data looking for purchase and service trends, propensities, and recommendations. The iPhone has the ability to combine the consumer’s location data and recent purchase and engagement transactions with the consumer’s behavioral models to uncover and deliver real-time product and service promotions and recommendations.

The cloud-based analytic environment is the key enabler, constantly gathering and aggregating the consumer’s purchase and engagement data in order to test, refine, and update the consumer’s behavioral and product/service recommendation models. The cloud provides modern, scale-out technologies leveraging open source software including an MPP Postgres-based RDBMS, Hadoop and all of its open source brethren (e.g., MapReduce, Pig, ZooKeeper, Yarn, Tez), advanced data management algorithms to transform and enrich the data, and advanced analytic packages including R, Mahout and MADlib. The cloud provides a highly secure environment to safeguard the consumer’s purchase and interaction data.

iNegotiate: A Consumer’s Best Friend

Probably the single biggest feature of the new #BigData iPhone is the iNegotiate app. Consumers enter what they are interested in buying (product, services, travel, dining, etc.) into the iNegotiate app, and iNegotiate scours the web for the best offers (leveraging your purchase loyalty, travel, entertainment, financial, and dining preferences). iNegotiate then proactively contacts relevant vendors to see if they are willing to provide an even better deal in exchange for more data about the consumer. iNegotiate will share select data with the selected merchant (already authorized by the consumer) in exchange for a subset of the consumer’s data.

Summary

While this is a bit of a “tongue in cheek” example, the capabilities and the benefits of a #BigData iPhone aren’t that far from reality. The technologies exist and the data exists, it’s just a matter of pulling it all together in an app environment that is easy-to-use and truly benefits the consumers.

The biggest challenges to this “vision” are the privacy and security concerns. However Mint is making this work today on a smaller scale.

By the way, I’ll take 2% of revenue from the “productization” of this idea!!