The first question they wanted to address was the obvious one of how do they ensure privacy and security when dealing with such sensitive information? Everything is held in a secure data center, and no direct personally identifiable information is included in the histories - everything's anonymized. The team also takes further steps, like identifying and removing healthcare-related payments. I asked them though, doesn't it still make people a bit uncomfortable? Their response was that their whole business was based around helping consumers, and their investor Citi only shares the data on very strict conditions because they believe Bundle's work will make customers lives better.
CTO Phil Kim laid out their philosophy:
Bundle takes great pains to protect the privacy of users. First, we hold ourselves to strict, bank-level information security standards, which means that sensitive data is held in a secure data center and access is heavily restricted, and that the Bundle application is heavily scrutinized for vulnerabilities on a regular basis, to prevent accidental or malicious leakage of user data. Second, much of the data analysis and synthesis work we do relies on data that has been sampled, modeled, flattened, or otherwise transformed -- we rarely work with raw transaction data, and we never work with data that has a direct linkage back to a named customer. Last but not least, Bundle is very much focused on building tools to help consumers -- remember that this data is not new... large companies use data just like this to market products and make business decisions -- Bundle is simply trying to share this data with consumers.
Alex Hasha described how he'd worked in the finance industry as a quant, working in a team of over two hundred PhDs to analyze financial instruments. The attraction of Bundle.com for him was the chance to work on something that offered direct benefits to ordinary users, a refreshing change from the abstract world of high finance.
Users upload information from their own bank and credit card accounts onto the site, and in return they get back a score card showing how their spending compares to people like themselves. For example, you might discover that you're spending a lot more on groceries than other people in your neighborhood, and you'd be better off switching to a cheaper supermarket.
The key to all of their work is the value that they're able to extract from aggregate information, things like how much people in a particular zip code spend on particular categories such as eating out, groceries and transportation. Because this is the result of blending and averaging large numbers of different accounts, it helps reduce the risk that any sensitive information will leak out.
What's really impressive about the data they possess is its broad coverage. Almost every merchant in the U.S. will be represented, and it has the potential to offer the deep customer analytics that website publishers are used to. I could imagine it being used by restaurant owners to spot when they're losing previously loyal customers for example. Bundle.com won't speculate on where they will take their product in the future, but did want to emphasize how everything was driven by their mission to help consumers.
I spent a bit of time talking with them about the technical challenges of their work, too. Credit card systems are often 30 or 40 years old, and so the data they get back is often very messy. You know how you look at your statements and try to decipher what "MCDON 94117" could be? That's one of their biggest obstacles, the names of the merchants are often incomplete and unclear, so they have a whole system devoted to making sense of this unstructured data. "MCDON", "MCD" and "MCDONALDS" all likely to refer to the restaurant, which allows them to categorize any transactions as food purchases.
A large amount of their code is written in Perl, since they're big fans of CPAN's rich repository of libraries, and runs in-memory, so it's not a classic big data problem. They also rely on R for some of their analysis, thanks to its rich toolkit of statistical functions.
The data mining of billions of credit card transactions is bound to raise a lot of questions, but it was clear to me that Bundle.com is serious in its mission to help consumers. Its product certainly seems to offer a lot more value to the wider world than anything that Wall Street's quants have produced.
As a possible deal with Newser falls apart, the online news pioneer ramps up its cultural coverage. The result: an ailing stock price, but traffic’s on the rise.
Kerry Lauerman remembers the time, a decade ago, when he was Salon’s Washington bureau chief and the website had a budget three times larger than it subsists on today.
Now the Washington bureau is toast. “We’re leaner and meaner and we work a lot smarter,” says Lauerman, who took over in November as editor in chief.
Salon made its name as a politically aggressive, staunchly liberal online operation. But in recent months I’ve noticed a very different kind of story often leading the site. There was “Men: The New Romantics,” and “Literature’s Gender Gap.” There was “My Husband, the Convicted Murderer” and “My Son, The Pink Boy.” Not to mention “Grammys’ Most Memorable Red-Carpet Outfits” and “The Hardest Part About Quitting Drinking? Dating.”
So is there a personality transplant going on?
“The identity of Salon is as a political site,” Lauerman says, “but our entertainment coverage has always done pretty well.” Beyond politics, he says, “we are emphasizing everything else more. We’ve staffed up in entertainment. We listen to our readers.”
And are these stories about movies and marriages and sex designed to attract more advertising?
“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a consideration.”
Given Salon’s precarious financial state, it’s obviously a major consideration. The struggling site quietly put itself up for sale in recent months, and talks with Newser.com, an aggregation site founded by Michael Wolff, collapsed Monday. The New York Times Dealbook blog reported that Salon board members grew concerned that they might be selling for too low a price after AOL paid $315 million to buy The Huffington Post.
The publicly traded company reported a loss of $4.8 million in fiscal 2010, with two investors making up the gap through loans. Salon’s stock is trading for a dime, down from $1.30 in the summer of 2008.
“It’s not an easy space to make money in if you’re trying to do quality content,” says CEO Richard Gingras, who provided the original seed money for Salon’s launch. “We have beefed up the investment in culture and lifestyle… It is about growing the audience.”
The first duty of any website is survival, and most of the news business—from old-line newspapers and magazines to newer operations such as The Daily Beast—is grappling with how to turn a profit online. The overhauling of Salon’s editorial mix comes as its center of gravity has shifted from San Francisco, where it was born 15 years ago, to Midtown Manhattan. Founding editor David Talbot and Joan Walsh, who stepped down last year, ran the place from the Bay Area; Lauerman, 41, is the first editor to be based, with most of the staff, in New York.
“It’s not an easy space to make money in if you’re trying to do quality content,” says CEO Richard Gingras, who provided the original seed money for Salon’s launch. “We have beefed up the investment in culture and lifestyle… It is about growing the audience.”
Walsh, who had tapped Lauerman as her deputy, was part of the new direction before returning to reporting and a book project. “Our news team is as good as it’s ever been,” she says. “But the political cycle ebbs and flows, and people get more or less interested depending on whether it’s election season and what the crazy story of the week is… We’ve probably gotten deeper into the cultural realm.”
Iranian Video Says Mahdi is 'Near' - World - CBN <b>News</b> - Christian <b>...</b>
New evidence has emerged that the Iranian government sees the current unrest in the Middle East as a signal that the Mahdi--or Islamic messiah--is about to appear.
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I've been enjoying The Independent's individual Facebook feeds for journalists, football teams and other 'entities' of their news coverage. So much so that.
'Know Your Meme' Acquired By Cheezburger in Seven-Figure Deal
Cheezburger Networks has acquired online meme database (and popular web series) Know Your Meme from Rocketboom in a seven-figure deal.
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