Krzana – Realising the value in the information food chain
“Information is Power”
(Sir Francis Bacon 1561 –1626)
In the Broadcast Media world, there is a regularly used maxim that underpins that business; ‘Content is King’ when it comes to the creation of significant value and driving revenue.
In relation to the Information Economy and that includes specialist news and media providers, ‘Context is King’*. Adding context to data is the key step that differentiates a pure data set from it becoming valuable, actionable information. Context informs data and is derived from multiple factors including timeliness, subject relevance, content dependencies and other adjacencies. Verification is also a key feedback requirement, but in our real-time data rich world, there are always examples of money being made on less than reliable sources. Verification is a key step, but the value chain is initiated when taking the first step – data collation.
Creating order out of the growing mountain of data in this digital era is a significant and growing challenge. Data mining, the ‘90’s originated buzz word, remains a useful term to apply to the process of discovering those seams and sources of important data; but context still provides the necessary differentiation, from what is real or just ‘fool’s’ gold.
It is in this context that the core Krzana engine has taken data mining and turned into an industrialised, scalable, real-time process: from ingestion and processing through to presentation. But it consciously leaves room for human intervention, to add that invaluable and subtle ingredient - context. Data processed through any of the growing number of Krzana’s sector-specific smart modules does not preclude taking that output and then providing it as a real-time feed into other algorithmic/analytic engines, but today, most value is being achieved by humans acting on Krzana’s results.
Krzana has not just mastered that art of ingesting and processing masses of data but is also ensuring that information is delivered in real-time. We are solving a problem where you can prepare your position based on the first signs of pre-information or be ready to respond as the news hits the Wires from an official source. The idea of enabling users to receive real-time information is certainly enticing – including managing powerful sector moves, IP protection and speed-to-scale are critical as we all experience the pace of business accelerating.
Formally published information is plentiful, but so also is the growth of informal sources – ranging from inadvertent Tweets to Bloggers releasing PR information ahead of time. Navigating and making sense of all these opportunities in real-time is where Krzana’s users win. It’s at this point that it is appropriate to refer to our headline’s key phrase ‘Realising the value in the information food chain’.
Data supply and its conversion to valuable information has useful parallels in Nature. It is not surprising to see that some of the biggest natural entities that have ever existed on the planet, be they Blue Whales or Giant Redwoods, achieve their scale, in part due to where they sit in their respective food chains. – as close as possible to the start. Essentially, the closer they sit to the basic ingredients, provides the biggest conversion ratio:value. In our data-rich world, early access to useful information significantly influences the outcome – the closer to the data source, the greater the opportunity to make a decision and realise full value. And that is where Krzana puts our users. Many other systems are looking for the ideal purely software-driven process, where algorithms rule and results are simply a reflection of how much has been invested in the technology. Krzana provides the best of all worlds; scalable data ingestion and processing through custom AI- informed algorithms that in turn provide clear results that our users can assimilate to make better decisions.
Geof Todd – CMO Krzana
*Courtesy of Fergus Bell – Dig Deeper Media