I recently read a great article about Data Urgency and how that relates to Data Value by Robin Bloor.

Robin’s writes “Data is urgent if it loses value while the receiver is waiting for it”.

Just think about the following analogy.

When you go to the supermarket to buy an apple, the price you’re willing to pay is directly related to how closely the apple looks like one you’d pick off a tree yourself, like this:

On the other if that apple isn’t fresh and tasty looking, it has no value at all.

This apple loses all its value between the time it was picked fresh and delicious from the tree and when it rotted and was delivered to you completely worthless.

Today I presented at the Corda Visual Evolution conference in Las Vegas.  I presented on “Using Kapow to enhance Corda CenterView with real-time Web data” where I discussed data urgency and how it relates to value.

One of the customer examples I presented was Fiserv and how they use Kapow to automatically aggregate financial account information from more than 300 banks in 10 countries and display the data in Corda’s CenterView dashboard for point in time regulatory compliance.

Previously, the treasury department had no other way to collect the bank data than to manually login to each of the 300 banks and cut and paste (i.e. pick) their financial transaction data into a spreadsheet. Due to the time it took to manually collect the data, not only was the data inaccurate, and thus out of compliance, but errors often arose due to the error-prone methods of manual data collection.

Thomas W. Warsop, Group President at Fiserv, wrote a detailed white paper about how “technology supports the work of corporate treasury” which you can download here to learn more.

Within Kapow’s customer base of almost 500 customers we see more and more examples of how “flawless data” is now “picked” 100% automatically, delivering critical real-time value to our customers.

The urgency of valuable data requires real-time automated data collection.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

More and more people raise the question: “What is the next big thing on the web? Is it web 3.0? When does it come?”

This week I was part of great debate on exactly this topic on the Information Management DM Radio show. You can find the recording here: Web 3.0 — Are We There Yet? (I am on about 40 minutes into the recording).

It was a great panel of industry thought leaders including Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters who talked about the OpenCalais initiative, Jim Kobielus from Forrester, Robin Bloor from Bloor Group and of course the always inspiring DM Radio hosts Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson.

Eric Kavanagh opened up by referring to a presentation by Eric Schmidt from Google on Web 3.0.

In the heated debate on a topic like Web 3.0 we certainly heard a lot of opinions, but I think everybody agreed that Web 3.0 includes features like:

• Programmatic/automated access to any information or process on the web, often referred to as the “semantic web” or the “API enabled web”.
• A personal robot that knows what you want, provides alerts and advice on time critical matters, performs automated shopping for you based on your purchase behavior, and even balances your bank account. Scary, but very useful.

The way I see it, there are almost 200 million active websites (not including web applications inside company firewalls) based on the standards HTTP(S), HTML and JavaScript/AJAX. So for Web 3.0 to deliver on the promise anytime soon it needs to leverage these existing standards to access all web information and perform all web processes on these 200 mill websites.

Luckily this is exactly what the Kapow Web Data Server does and this is exactly what almost 500 customers of Kapow Technologies are increasingly using Web Data Services for. They turn the web into a database of programmatic interfaces to data and automate all off those processes everyone is doing both in their professional and personal lives on the internet.

If you want a more background information, here is a great article I recommend you read: How Web 3.0 Will Work.

Web 3.0 is indeed an interesting topic, let’s keep the discussion going.

By:  Stefan Andreasen