Advanced Analytics software companies like SAS have
been around for over 30 years now, helping corporations and governments analyse data and make better decisions, however it has been rare to have analytics
touching the lives of the end customers and helping them take their daily life decisions. With just about
every device which we carry and work with; from a cooking range to smart electricity meters capturing user data, analytics as a service will
increasingly change our lives without the end consumer ever knowing that
he is actually taking an analytically driven decision.
Take the case of the "Smartest Tennis Racket in the Planet"
Babolat is one of the leading tennis
racket manufacturer in the world and has just released the Babolat Play Pure Tennis Racket - The world’s first data capturing tennis racket (and btw the same is legally approved by the ITF). From Andy
Murray to Nadal, swearing by the power of the racket, it wont be long before
this becomes the de-facto standard of the future.
This smart tennis racket is revolutionizing the tennis world with just the addition of a few small additions (a small accelerometer and gyro-meter fitted at the edge of the handle, and some more paraphernalia to transmit the data) which can
record every stroke and volley done by you in the game. The data is sent to a
cloud, where a whole bunch of advanced analytics (from the best analytics company in the world :) runs on it, and the end
user can download the analytical insight on his performance on his iphone or android device, as to which strokes were
the best, a cluster analysis on what type of shots he placed and the outliers, which shots were
the weak ones, after what time did he start losing steam etc. The next version
of the rackets may even talk back to him saying “'Hey,
you have a weak backhand, and 75 percent of the shots you hit were backhands in the last 10 mins–
why do you think you're losing?" Dont believe me as yet, well, check out this link
Imagine the possibilities of embedding analytics into our daily life technologies:
- Imagine a health band as a patient engagement strategy or to revolutionize the way we handle disease management for patients with CVD risk, that can accurately measure your health indicators and give you back near real time trend or forecast on your health risks (Imagine the possibilities for the UAE, which ranks among the highest in cardio vascular disease risk population)
- Imagine your office chair telling you that its time to go and take a walk in the park or that you have not exercised enough today and have been just sitting around blogging or surfing the internet
Anything that moves and does not,
seem to be capturing data and sending it to a cloud. Imagine how much smarter
the world is headed to be into the future with analytics deployed on the cloud
working on this data. It is definitely the age of analytics and specifically big data analytics, but the
difference today is that in today’s world it would not just be corporations and
governments using analytics for decision making, it would be end users
seamlessly embedding analytics into their daily lives to take the most basic of
decisions. As Tom Davenport says in his latest book “Enterprise Analytics”, this is not the age of “software as a service (SaaS), it is the age of “decisions as
a service (DaaS)” enabled through software's like SAS.
Welcome to the world of
analytics with preaching health bands, gossiping office chairs, talking
tennis rackets and more...
Have a good week,
