IBM IOD 2010: Emerging tech, predicting the future and getting it right

What we focus on is insight. I found a guy and the only thing he'd ever voted on in his life was energy. Now I don't know if that's good or bad. All I know is it's worth looking at.

This is a different kind of insight analytics. We put it in line of business users' hands. This works like a spreadsheet. If you are a spreadsheet user I can teach you to use this if you give me half an hour.

I just showed some Twitter analysis this morning. I grabbed 1.4 million tweets about the iPhone in 24 hours. The iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and HTC. I did sentiment analysis on do people like, dislike, hate, love? I found out how many people had interest in buying which device.

Now, there's noise in that. There's always noise in unstructured data on the web. There's a lot of spam in Twitter too so we can learn to filter some of that.

After the iPhone 4 announcement, I went out and got people's sentiment to find out what they did and didn't like. Put that in the hands of some company or politician. By the way, I saw that Tony Blair had spinmeister attached to his name more than anything when I did the analysis because it came up real big. All I had to do was look.

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.