EU – The Small Data Forum Podcast

February 16, 2022February 15, 2022

Metaverse, Omniverse, diverse, averse, perverse?

Tired of partygate, the SmallDataForum takes measure of the mess surrounding Meta, where user numbers declined for the first time ever, followed by a rather dramatic share price dip, and Peter Thiel announcing that he would be leaving the Facebook board “to pursue Trump agenda”.

Oh well.

However, news of Meta’s impending demise would be awfully premature, as Sam reminds us.

For all our Schadenfreude at Meta losing several hundred billion (!) $$$ in market value – at present, their share price is down a cool 35% from the beginning of the year, suffering the ignominy to temporarily drop behind Nvidia on the list of largest US companies – the attention capitalist behemoths Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta now hold a share of 46% of global ad spend, as opposed to 33% pre-pandemic in figures released by the World Advertising Research Center (WARC).

And yes, that’s total as in everything, not just digital…

March 22, 2021March 21, 2021

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate – or, when Uschi met Jezza

From our very own version of Numberwang, to utilitarianism, the precautionary principle, the Plague of Athens 430 BC, to Gartner’s latest tech trends, the SmallDataForum serves up another mixed bag of goodies and smarties.

I kick off by offering a selection of ciphers for our very own SmallDataForum Numberwang from:

0.1 (Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s silly argument that 0.1 is “a real rise”), to
6 (the number of episodes of Adam Curtis’s latest take on the dark forces at play in our modern world), to
10 (the maximum prison sentence in the UK Government’s culture war inspired Crime Bill for violating a statue, which according to Labour’s David Lammy “makes protecting statues more important that punishing rape”), and related to 118 vs 1, (the number of women killed last year where a man was charged or convicted vs ‘statues killed’, as per the unrivalled Marina Hyde)
10 in 21 (the Top Ten data and analytics tech trends in 2021 according to Gartner) to
40 vs 12 (percentage of population COVID vaccinated in the UK vs EU average)
25,000 (excess UK COVID deaths due to the delayed winter lockdown, according to a new report)
and last but not least, $450m (the sum Cision paid for Brighton based social analytics firm Brandwatch, leaving the three of us a bit speechless, and NOT AT ALL ENVIOUS of founder CEO Giles Palmer…).

October 8, 2018October 7, 2018

Zucker time or time to take in Berners-Leesy?

The latest episode of the Small Data Forum podcast sees the founding trio of Neville, Thomas, and me striding confidently into our early 20s. Who knew that the fledgling born at an event in Covent Garden’s fashionable London in May 2016 – pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, pre-Cambridge Analytica farce – would endure to its twenty-second episode.

We start our latest offering with a look at Facebook’s latest, topical woes: a technical vulnerability leading to a breach of security for at least 50m European users last month. And probably 40m more.

Thanks to a favourite topic of the SDF Podcast, Facebook were required to report the breach to the EU within 72 hours under new GDPR rules. Playing by the book, Facebook did so, contacting the Irish Data Protection Commission.

Continue reading “Zucker time or time to take in Berners-Leesy?”