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Why Smart Data is Behind Pokémon Go’s Success
It seems like Pokémon decided to accompany me through my whole life. I used to play with the cards when they first came out in the 90’s and now I’m thinking about the huge amounts of data the game is gathering and how they can be analyzed with smart data discovery solutions. Who would have thought that after so many years it would make such a comeback! Even though it is only officially available in three countries, Pokémon Go already beat WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat in time spent on the app, and is fighting with Twitter for daily active users. To what does it owe its success?
Most people think that Pokémon Go is so successful because it uses the Augmented Reality camera; but the truth is, it’s successful because it harnessed data into a game. Pokémon Go offers the chance to pretend the world is filled with Pokémon, which we can see through the AR camera of our smartphones. This creates a sense of co-presence. The Pokémon are found in the places that fit them better, for example, a water-type Pokémon will be found near fountains or beaches. But this is not thanks to the AR camera. The real sense of co-presence comes from the perfect placing of Pokémon. The makers of the app did this by taking smart data and turning it into a game.
There is a lot of personalization involved in the game which produces what looks like a seamless integration of the virtual and the real worlds. This makes it look like the game designers custom-placed each Pokémon. But the game can be played worldwide, and there is only one way to generate that level of personalized and localized information: a great usage of smart data.
Pokémon Go’s creators, Niantic, Inc., are Google Earth and Google Maps veterans. In 2012 they created another location-based game called Ingress, which was also a method of data collection and actually provided most of the data for Pokémon Go’s creation. Ingress was based on users capturing “portals”, which were historical sites and public areas that were determined as such by using Google Earth photos. Originally, the sites were chosen by Niantic, but they later encouraged users to submit their own recommendations for sites. About 15 million sites were suggested. The data behind these portals determined the location of “PokéStops” later on. Niantic used data from Google Earth, weather, urban planning, Google Maps, and the data generated by Ingress and its users to determine where each Pokémon should appear. This is why it feels so real.
Smart Data was not just the material for creating the game, it is also the result of it. The app is generating huge amounts of data about its users—mainly their location and movement patterns, but also has access to a lot of information in a person’s phone. All this data is great for business. Forbes wrote an article on the huge business potential generated by Pokémon Go. There are restaurants and shops that ended up with a “PokéStops” status and are taking full advantage of it by attracting app users and potential customers. Others that were not as lucky to be “PokéStops” can buy “lures” and attract Pokémon to their location, therefore attracting users. Since users want to use the Wi-Fi there, businesses can request for them to log in and gather a lot of data on customers. The challenge will be to be able to analyze the data generated and turn it into actionable insights. That’s when Business Intelligence and Smart Data Discovery solutions jump in.
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FullContact raises $25M more to take on LinkedIn in contact management
By Ingrid Lunden as written on techcrunch.com
As LinkedIn inches closer to completing its $26 billion acquisition by Microsoft, smaller rivals have stepped up their game building viable alternatives for those who might want more independent products when it comes to managing contacts in their professional networks. FullContact — one such competitor — has now raised a further $25 million.
The funding brings the total raised by Denver-based FullContact to just under $45 million. Lorang said the company is not disclosing its valuation.
The big elephant in the room for FullContact is LinkedIn. Fast approaching 450 million users, the company is one of the bigger players in the area of online professional identity and has become the go-to place for people looking to connect with people in their professional networks. On its own it was already a competitive threat, and its acquisition by Microsoft may be even more so, as it speaks to the bigger company’s ambitions to leverage LinkedIn’s social networking in its own enterprise-focused products, from sales through to productivity services.
But rather than wilting under the obvious challenges that this poses to FullContact and others in the space, FullContact’s co-founder and CEO Bart Lorang has a more constructive view on the deal and what it means for his startup.
“The LinkedIn acquisition demonstrates the power of the single ID and a unified contact record in the ecosystem,” he said in an interview.
The key thing for him is that Microsoft remains a proprietary platform, and LinkedIn has not demonstrated itself to be particularly happy to share its data with the rest of that ecosystem, either. “FullContact’s strategy is to create an open platform that is owned by humanity. We allow and invite developers to integrate with our platform, unlike LinkedIn. It has been rather closed off. They very much want to build a wall,” he added a little mischievously, borrowing a phrase more commonly (and controversially) associated with something and someone else.
Led by Foundry Group with participation from Baird Capital, Shea Ventures and Blue Note, FullContact’s latest round will be used for acquisition — “I see a lot of distressed startups out there in our wider field unable to raise more money for sure,” said Lorang; and also hiring, business development, and adding in new features that will expand FullContact beyond contact management and into new areas.
One of those new features, Lorang said, sounds like a way to use your contact information in FullContact’s database as an identity card across the wider web.
“We have quietly been working on FullContact Connect, our next-generation platform capabilities where you will have your own ID, your own contact record, and you can use it to consume and control content online,” he said. “We are working on that. We do have ambitions.”
Founded in 2010 in Denver (where it is still based), FullContact has built itself out as one of a group of companies that is trying to tackle the issue of managing contacts that you make through your normal business life, as well as growing that list through intelligent searches based on the people you already know, and turning piecemeal contact info into more complete profiles.
The company has its own primary data that it augments with data from across the web, and using algorithms — both built in-house and also picked up by way of acquisition of competitors like Brewster — it merges all of it to create a database of some 40 billion contacts that its users can access. (FullContact does not disclose its actual user numbers, except to say that they are in the ‘millions.’)
FullContact today makes revenues from three categories of customers: individuals, businesses and software developers. It taps the first of these groups via freemium-style iPhone and Android apps that let you do things like scan and digitize business cards and then augment that information with more data about those people.
Meanwhile, the business and developer solutions let third parties tap into FullContact’s database by way of APIs to help create more complete customer profiles. The latter of these is a smart area for the company to develop to pick up developers and others who found themselves in a lurch when LinkedIn shut down similar API functionality in 2015.
Ironically, while FullContact has built its business on the concept of being able to enhance contact information, another area where Lorang also agreed it might move in years ahead might be in helping manage that info for those who don’t want it out in the open.
This is a trend that we see picking up some speed with the recent surge in interest in online privacy and data protection. For example, in Europe, you have the “right to be forgotten” development, where Google and other search engines are required to remove search links on people’s names when requested to do so by those individuals.
“I love the trend of being more transparent,” said Lorang. While Lorang said you can already claim and manage a profile on FullContact, it’s now working on ways of expanding that to other data repositories. “We are just starting to roll out that type of capability to remove yourself,” he said. “You’ll see more from us on this in the next year.”
For now, FullContact and its investors are happy to keep the startup in Denver and well outside the Valley bubble to grow.
“With over 40 billion contact records under management, FullContact was already on track to more than double recurring revenue for the fourth straight year,” said Brad Feld, MD of the Foundry Group, in a statement. “The funding will be used to support the company’s rapid growth by further expanding sales, marketing and engineering as well as pursuing strategic acquisitions that bolster our technology and data assets.”
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How Azure SQL Threat Detection acts as your built-in security expert
Azure SQL Database Threat Detection has been in preview for a few months now. We’ve on-boarded many customers and received some great feedback. We would like to share a couple of customer experiences that demonstrate how SQL Threat Detection helped to address their concerns about potential threats to their database.
What is SQL Threat Detection?
SQL Threat Detection is a new security intelligence feature built into the Azure SQL Database service. Working around the clock to learn, profile and detect anomalous database activities, SQL Threat Detection identifies potential threats to the database. Security officers or other designated administrators can get an immediate notification about suspicious database activities as they occur. Each notification provides details of the suspicious activity and recommends how to further investigate and mitigate the threat.
Currently, SQL Threat Detection on Azure SQL Database detects potential vulnerabilities and SQL injection attacks, as well as anomalous database access patterns. The following customer feedback attests to how SQL Threat Detection warned them about these threats as they occurred and helped them improve their database security.
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Case #1: Attempted database access by former employee
Borja Gómez, architect & development lead at YesEnglish
“SQL Threat Detection is a useful feature that allows us to detect and respond to anomalous database activities, which were not visible to us beforehand. As part of my role designing and building Azure-based solutions for global companies in the Information and Communication Technology field, we always turn on SQL Auditing and Threat Detection, which are built-in and operate independently of our code. A few months later, we received an email alert that “Anomalous database activities from unfamiliar IP (location) was detected”. The threat came from a former employee trying to access one of our customer’s databases, which contained sensitive data, using old credentials. Because SQL Threat Detection allowed us to detect this threat as it occurred, we were able to remediate the threat immediately by locking down the firewall rules and changing credentials, thereby preventing any damage. Such is the simplicity and power of Azure.
Case #2: Preventing SQL Injection attacks
Richard Priest, Architectural Software Engineer at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and head of the collective at Missing Widget:
“Thanks to SQL Threat Detection, we were able to detect and fix code vulnerabilities to SQL injection attacks and prevent potential threats to our database. I was extremely impressed how simple it was to enable threat detection policy using the Azure portal, which required no modifications to our SQL client applications. A while after enabling SQL Threat Detection, we received an email notification about ‘An application error that may indicate a vulnerability to SQL injection attacks’. The notification provided details of the suspicious activity and recommended concrete actions to further investigate and remediate the threat. The alert helped me to track down the source my error and pointed me to the Microsoft documentation that thoroughly explained how to fix my code. As the head of IT for an information technology and services company, I now guide my team to turn on SQL Auditing and Threat Detection on all our projects, because it gives us another layer of protection and is like having a free security expert on our team.”
Case #3: Anomalous access from home to production database
Manrique Logan, architect & technical lead at ASEBA:
“SQL Threat Detection is an incredible feature, super simple to use, empowering our small engineering team to protect our company data without the need to be security experts. Our non-profit company provides user-friendly tools for mental health professionals, storing health and sales data in the cloud. As such we need to be HIPAA and PCI compliant, and SQL Auditing and Threat Detection help us achieve this. These features are available out of the box, and simple to enable too, taking only a few minutes to configure. We saw the real value from these not long after enabling SQL Threat Detection, when we received an email notification that ‘Access from an unfamiliar IP address (location) was detected’. The alert was triggered as a result of my unusual access to our production database from home. Knowing that Microsoft is using its vast security expertise to protect my data gives me incredible peace of mind and allows us to focus our security budget on other issues. Furthermore, knowing the fact that every database activity is being monitored has increased security awareness among our engineers. SQL Threat Detection is now an important part of our incident response plan. I love that Azure SQL Database offers such powerful and easy-to-use security features.
How to turn on SQL Threat Detection
SQL Threat Detection is incredibly easy to enable. You simply navigate to the Auditing & Threat Detection configuration blade for your database in the Azure management portal. There you switch on Auditing and Threat Detection, and configure at least one email address for receiving alerts.
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We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
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