Analytics to keep love life fresh and fun!

Analytics takes a foray into the relationships management domain with a newly launched niche social network – The Ice Break. This online service helps users track, analyze, and enjoy their romantic relationships. Co-founded and seed-funded by YouTube’s first UI Designer, Christina Brodbeck; and former head of YouTube Mobile Dwipal Desai, TheIceBreak is designed to stay with users through all stages of their relationships, whether they are single or not. Brodbeck says that “TheIceBreak will fill a gap that is taking place in the online dating space, which is fraught with high membership churn and low return engagement”.

The site allows for status updates, asks users to rate how satisfied they are with their partner in a variety of areas and then serves up activities based on the answers given, such as answering “Icebreaker Questions” (“What is your ideal Friday night?”) and “Capturing Moments” to send to your partner. Activities like these garner you “Date Night Coins,” which can be used for deals in later iterations of the site. TheIcebreak features an analytics dashboard that shows the user’s happiness over time, and how it compares to the relative bliss of other couples. For those of you who feel that the idea of measuring one’s happiness against that of others goes against the advice of any therapist, note that they do have a fairly experienced clinical psychologist on the team.

A lot of behavioral science has gone into the development of algorithms to calculate couple compatibility and happiness quotient in relationships. This company’s business model will revolve around

• Redeeming Date Night coins for movie nights, etc. The company is currently working on creating these partnerships
• Providing gifting services on occasions like birthdays and anniversaries. They can help your partner find you a gift and you can even put in your sizes
• Rolling out subscription based relationship counseling solutions

Meanwhile, "Whether you're newly together, engaged, married or somewhere in between”, visit TheIceBreak to “keep your love life fresh and fun."

 

Indus Insights is a specialized consulting firm that assists organization in leveraging analytics to drive business performance. They use state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical techniques to unlock game-changing insights hidden in data; and then translate these insights into actionable strategies.

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Big Brother and Big Data

Bloomberg Businessweek reports that US government intelligence agencies are putting big money into social media and big data analytics in order to track people’s online behavior.

Not surprisingly, the federal government is interested in low-cost methods for tracking people’s every move on the Internet. The intelligence agencies have jumped in to fund analytics startups. They are also building their own analytics tools. Two years ago the National Security Agency talked publicly about creating a new type of technology that would grab “essentially every kind of data there is.” In July, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s R&D arm, issued a Social Media in Strategic Communication proposal that called for $42 million to go toward better social networking analysis. The idea is to track the spread of ideas on networks such as Facebook, find people participating in “persuasion campaigns,” and develop countermeasures. “We must eliminate our current reliance on a combination of luck and unsophisticated manual methods,” the agency said.

In the decade since the 9/11 attacks, various attempts to leverage analytics in the service of national security have been reported. There was a US Senate Judiciary committee hearing in 2007 entitled “Balancing Privacy and Security: The Privacy Implications of Government Data Mining Programs”. Some people remain skeptical about the viability of predictive modeling to predict outcomes such as terrorist incidents given the lack of historical data. The committee noted consensus as to the value of methods such as link analysis and ‘predicate-based analytics’.

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Indus Insights is a specialized consulting firm that assists organization in leveraging analytics to drive business performance. They use state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical techniques to unlock game-changing insights hidden in data; and then translate these insights into actionable strategies.