Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation


Book Description

Get unprecedented access to thousands of databases. It's called Open Data, and it's revolutionizing business. The business leader’s guide to using Open Data to analyze patterns and trends, manage risk, solve problems—and seize the competitive edge Two major trends—the exponential growth of digital data and an emerging culture of disclosure and transparency—have converged to create a world where voluminous information about businesses, government, and the population is becoming visible, accessible, and usable. It’s called Open Data, and this book helps leaders harness its power to market and grow their companies. Open Data Now gives you the knowledge and tools to take advantage of this phenomenon in its early stages—and beat the competition to leveraging its many benefits. Joel Gurin is an expert on making complex data sets useful in solving consumer problems, analyzing corporate information, and addressing social issues. He has collaborated with leaders in data, technology, and policy in the U.S. and UK governments, including officials in the White House and 10 Downing Street and at more than 20 U.S. federal agencies.




Unleashing the Innovators


Book Description

Today's established companies must find new ways to reignite their entrepreneurial DNA and jumpstart revenues--or risk losing their way. By working with startup companies, Jim Stengel, renowned consultant to Fortune 500 companies and the former global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, says that legacy companies can renew themselves: by acquiring new technology and creating new business lines; relearning the need for speed; sparking innovation; and learning from failures. At P&G, Stengel saw the importance of establishing partnerships with the startup world in order to learn how to better innovate. Relying on extensive interviews with innovation leaders at enterprise companies and startups, Stengel’s Unleashing the Innovators takes readers inside such storied companies as GE and Wells Fargo, IBM and Target, Motorola Solutions and Toyota to see what they are learning from their alliances with entrepreneurs. Stengel also explores how even 20- and 30-year-old "startups" like Amazon, Google, and Facebook can reinvent themselves--and what managers at legacy companies everywhere can learn from them. Drawing on a specially commissioned global study of over 200 established corporations and startups, conducted by research consultancy OgilvyRED, Stengel found that companies with successful startup partnerships are three times more likely to change their culture to be more innovative. Filled with indepth stories from the front lines of today’s most forward-looking companies, Unleashing the Innovators shows how companies of all sizes can better navigate today’s changing landscape, accelerate innovation, increase revenues, and improve their customer relationships.




Beyond Transparency


Book Description

The rise of open data in the public sector has sparked innovation, driven efficiency, and fueled economic development. While still emerging, we are seeing evidence of the transformative potential of open data in shaping the future of our civic life, and the opportunity to use open data to reimagine the relationship between residents and government, especially at the local level. As we look ahead, what have we learned so far from open data in practice and how we can apply those lessons to realize a more promising future for America's cities and communities? Edited by Brett Goldstein, former Chief Data Officer for the City of Chicago, with Code for America, this book features essays from over twenty of the world's leading experts in a first-of-its-kind instructive anthology about how open data is changing the face of our public institutions. Contributors include: Michael Flowers, Chief Analytics Officer, New York City Beth Blauer, former director of Maryland StateStat Jonathan Feldman, CIO, City of Asheville Tim O'Reilly, founder & CEO, O'Reilly Media Eric Gordon, Director of Engagement Game Lab, Emerson College Beth Niblock, CIO, Louisville Metro Government Ryan & Mike Alfred, Co-Founders, Brightscope Emer Coleman, former director of the London Datastore Mark Headd, Chief Data Officer, City of Philadelphia "As an essential volume for anyone interested in the future of governance, urban policy, design, data-driven policymaking, journalism, or civic engagement, "Beyond Transparency" combines the inspirational glow and political grit of Profiles in Courage with the clarity of an engineer's calm explanation of how something technical actually works. Here are the detailed how-to stories of many members of the first generation of open government pioneers, written in a generous, accessible style; this compilation presents us with a great deal to admire, ample provocation, and wise guidance from a group of remarkable individuals." -Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience "Just as he did during his time in my administration, Goldstein has brought together industry leaders to discuss issues of relevance in the open data movement and the practical implications of implementing these policies... This book will help continue the work to make open government a reality across the country." - Mayor Rahm Emanuel, City of Chicago "A must-read for anyone who is passionate about what open data can do to transform city living." - Boris Johnson, Mayor of London




Agile Analytics For Startups


Book Description

While you work hard building your startup, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face will be around your product’s ability to solve a big enough problem and its success in the market. Agile Analytics for Startups will help you navigate the complexity of early-stage business analytics, performance measurement, and the metrics that matter to your company. You can use the proven frameworks in this book to validate your product idea and the product/market fit, and understand your customers more granularly while you scale your business for automation. You can test and use many tools and solutions provided in the book and interact with different features of those solutions as you engage with other users of those products. This book will provide you with a step-by-step framework, examples and powerful solutions, from ideation to growth and all the way to scaling your business as you build your company with the power of analytics. -Agility is your advantage over large companies -Understand business analytics essentials and define how you will measure the success of your business early -Once you define your solution for “the problem” you tackle, validate your customer -Keep a short list of KPIs for the success of your product -Engage your customers throughout the development cycle -Product/market fit should happen before you go to market big -Keep testing your product, reiterate continuously -Know when to pivot as you modify and optimize your roadmap Be ready to speed up and maximize your output before the significant funding milestone(s)




The Lean Startup


Book Description

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.




The State of Open Data


Book Description

Its been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.




Open Cities | Open Data


Book Description

Today the world’s largest economies and corporations trade in data and its products to generate value in new disruptive markets. Within these markets vast streams of data are often inaccessible or untapped and controlled by powerful monopolies. Counter to this exclusive use of data is a promising world-wide “open-data” movement, promoting freely accessible information to share, reuse and redistribute. The provision and application of open data has enormous potential to transform exclusive, technocratic “smart cities” into inclusive and responsive “open-cities”. This book argues that those who contribute urban data should benefit from its production. Like the city itself, the information landscape is a public asset produced through collective effort, attention, and resources. People produce data through their engagement with the city, creating digital footprints through social medial, mobility applications, and city sensors. By opening up data there is potential to generate greater value by supporting unforeseen collaborations, spontaneous urban innovations and solutions, and improved decision-making insights. Yet achieving more open cities is made challenging by conflicting desires for urban anonymity, sociability, privacy and transparency. This book engages with these issues through a variety of critical perspectives, and presents strategies, tools and case studies that enable this transformation.




Open Data Politics


Book Description

This book offers a cross-national comparison of open data policies in Estonia and Kazakhstan. By analyzing a broad range of open data-driven projects and startups in both countries, it reveals the potential that open data phenomena hold with regard to promoting public sector innovations. The book addresses various political and socioeconomic contexts in these two transitional societies, and reviews the strategies and tactics adopted by policymakers and stakeholders to identify drivers of and obstacles to the implementation of open data innovations. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars, policymakers, e-government practitioners and open data entrepreneurs interested in implementing and evaluating open data-driven public sector projects.




The Truth Machine


Book Description

"Views differ on bitcoin, but few doubt the transformative potential of Blockchain technology. The Truth Machine is the best book so far on what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of anyone concerned with our economic future." —Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard, Former Treasury Secretary From Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, comes the definitive work on the Internet’s Next Big Thing: The Blockchain. Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the “legacy systems” once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this—a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain. In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping. Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we’ve relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes—moving humanity forward, not backward.




Federal Data Science


Book Description

Federal Data Science serves as a guide for federal software engineers, government analysts, economists, researchers, data scientists, and engineering managers in deploying data analytics methods to governmental processes. Driven by open government (2009) and big data (2012) initiatives, federal agencies have a serious need to implement intelligent data management methods, share their data, and deploy advanced analytics to their processes. Using federal data for reactive decision making is not sufficient anymore, intelligent data systems allow for proactive activities that lead to benefits such as: improved citizen services, higher accountability, reduced delivery inefficiencies, lower costs, enhanced national insights, and better policy making. No other government-dedicated work has been found in literature that addresses this broad topic. This book provides multiple use-cases, describes federal data science benefits, and fills the gap in this critical and timely area. Written and reviewed by academics, industry experts, and federal analysts, the problems and challenges of developing data systems for government agencies is presented by actual developers, designers, and users of those systems, providing a unique and valuable real-world perspective. - Offers a range of data science models, engineering tools, and federal use-cases - Provides foundational observations into government data resources and requirements - Introduces experiences and examples of data openness from the US and other countries - A step-by-step guide for the conversion of government towards data-driven policy making - Focuses on presenting data models that work within the constraints of the US government - Presents the why, the what, and the how of injecting AI into federal culture and software systems