If the maxim “where California leads, the nation follows” is still true, we shouldn’t be expecting any positive movement on tougher privacy laws at the federal level any time soon. The L.A. Times reported on Friday that “a powerful coalition of technology companies and business lobbies” — including Facebook and Google — quashed a digital privacy bill that would have made California “the first state to take direct aim at an online industry that stockpiles and trades in a wide range of personal data about nearly every adult in the United States.”

At this stage of the game we probably don’t need any more reminders that the last thing online services want to see happen is for their users to gain any meaningful control about how their personal information is exploited. Or, for that matter, about how lobbying money routinely skews public policy against the public interest. The new money of Silicon Valley is just the same as the old money of Wall Street or the fossil fuel industry.

Or is it? The L.A. Times’ excellent story includes an intriguing quote from Dan Schnur, a longtime Republican political strategist and campaign consultant, arguing that it’s harder to pass laws against the interests of Silicon Valley companies, because people just love ‘em so darn much.

“It’s not just that Silicon Valley has a lot of money and a lot of lobbyists, but they wear a halo too,” Schnur said. “Most voters tend to think of technology companies in an entirely different context than most other businesses.

“It’s not that difficult to pass a bill to make life hard on oil companies, but when you take on Apple or Google, you’re running a bigger risk. Not only do voters enjoy their products but they have an intuitive sense that Silicon Valley is a critical component of the state’s economy.”

It’s not that difficult to pass a bill to make life hard on oil companies?! Thank you Dan, for my first belly laugh of the week. As we have seen at the federal level, specialist interest lobbying has made it practically impossible to pass any meaningful laws cracking down on oil companies. California’s landmark global warming laws certainly did not pass with ease, and their implementation has been fought ferociously at every juncture, via both the courts and the state’s public referendum initiative process.

Personally, I hate government by initiative process, but I’d be fascinated to see what might happen if California voters ever got a chance to weigh in on digital privacy via the ballot. Way back in 1972, voters passed Proposition 11, which added a Right to Privacy to the state constitution. Virtually every survey or poll I’ve seen in recent years indicate Americans have strongly negative feelings about online tracking and the current state of digital privacy. I’m betting that they would carry those views right into the ballot box.

The lack of progress on privacy in Sacramento has nothing to do with any “halo” effect, and everything to do with Silicon Valley’s lobbying success at circumventing the will of the voters.

National Day of Civic Hacking is a national event that will take place June 1-2, 2013, in cities across the nation. The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country. National Day of Civic Hacking will provide citizens an opportunity to do what is most quintessentially American: roll up our sleeves, get involved and work together to improve our society.

The event will leverage the expertise and entrepreneurial spirit of those outside federal, state and local government to drive meaningful, technology-based solutions for federal, state and local government. It demonstrates what’s possible when we all work together to strengthen our society and our lives. YOU can make a difference no matter where you live.

Learn more here.

There is nowhere like Nashville in September, if you are trying to save money on flights that is.

Kayak just released the results of a massive data pull where it analyzed more than a billion search queries to uncover insights on the best flight deals, busiest airports, and most popular destinations, and to provide tips on how to save money on travel.

The overall airfare increased to all popular destinations in 2012, with the one exception of Toronto, Canada. Las Vegas was the most popular destination in 2012, along with Orlando, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, and Denver.

Kayak found that September is the cheapest month for domestic travel with an average fare of $296.97. January and October follow closely behind with average airfares of $305.70 ad $310.62 respectively. If you want to travel during the summer, August is the least expensive month for domestic trips. To get for cheapest fares, travelers should book between 21 and 3 days before departure.

For those internationally bound, February and March are the cheapest months to fly, but will still cost travelers around $950. Airfare increases in April and May. For both international and domestic queries, January and February are the least busy times to fly.

Another interesting metric are destinations that are growing in popularity. Punta Cana, Santo Domingo, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Nashville all went up in terms of bookings while their prices stayed the same. London, Anchorage, New Orleans and Beijing also rose in popularity, but also in terms of cost. Airfare to Lima, Peru increased by thirty-three percent, despite the fact that its popularity dropped by sixteen percent.

Photo Credit: Dennis Wong/Flickr 

Forrester has put out a new digital marketing report, off the back of a survey of more than 58,000 online consumers, looking at how brands can better sell themselves and create content that flies in the digital age. One interesting takeaway is a chart (see below) which shows how U.S. and European consumers react to different types of advertising/marketing content.

While the finding that trust in ‘traditional’ push marketing techniques (such as banner ads) is at rock bottom in the online world isn’t a surprise, the chart doesn’t make hugely encouraging reading for proponents of social marketing which also languishes near the bottom of the trust index, just above the mobile apps channel. Text message communications were the least trusted, while online banner ads barely rated above spammy SMS in the trust stakes.

The relatively low trust in social marketing tallies with a recent Gartner report that found US marketers ranked spending on the corporate website as more likely to result in “marketing success” than spending on social media sites such as Facebook.

Despite SMS, banner ads, mobile apps and social marketing methods being similarly (and lowly) ranked in the consumer trust stakes, the chart in Forrester’s report actually shows large variation in the effectiveness of different marketing methods — with the most positively ranked promotions (namely: recommendations from friends and family) up to around 8x more trusted than the least trusted methods.

One amusing result highlighted by the chart is that Europeans are shown living up to their cynical reputation, with Forrester finding for every type of advertising content it asked about in the survey Europeans consistently trusted it less than their U.S. counterparts (including, it has to be said, their own friends and family).

Also interesting to note that “professionally written online reviews” still carry a huge caché — at least with US consumers. European consumers are far less trusting of the publishing industry, however (55% vs 33% split on that category).

The report notes that traditional ‘one-way’ marketing techniques like banner ads are clearly ineffective in a landscape of “perpetually connected consumers”. Web users are tuning out this old school type of marketing or failing to notice it in the first place or forgetting they ever saw it — which may also partially explain why personal recommendations from people they know well are so much more trusted. With so many sources of information to filter, better the devil you know and all that.

“Brand-led advertising online and offline has lost its allure,” notes report author Tracy Stokes. ”Today’s consumers decide where, when, and how they want to engage with brands. With multiple interconnected devices at their fingertips at any one time, these perpetually connected consumers can opt in or out of content as they choose… Marketers face a higher bar to engage consumers, who have more media options than ever before.”

The survey also indicates there is still considerable trust in natural search engine results, and also in consumer written reviews, such as Amazon’s user reviews — which were both ranked around 3x more trusted than social marketing.

The North American portion of the survey polled 58,068 US and 5,635 Canadian online adults ages 18 to 88 in Q2 2012, while the European poll was conducted in Q3 2012, polling 20,778 European individuals in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. The European survey was based on an online population of ages 12+ (16+ in Poland) who were members of the Ipsos-MORI online panel.

For all our talk about big data saving the world and changing lives, it so far has had more impact and gotten more press for lessor achievements, according to Sean Gourley of Quid. Gourley spoke in New York City Wednesday at the Structure:Data 2013 conference on the difference between data science and data intelligence.

Gourley illustrated this difference with children’s cereal. He pointed out that data science is used today for improving advertising, such as making better packaging and pricing strategies. Meanwhile, data intelligence could try to address the issue of child obesity.

“The naive empiricism of data science goes for the low-hanging fruit: it measures what can be easily measured and changed,” Gourley said.

Part of this is because of where the ideas of data science came from: Facebook and LinkedIn (lnkd). He noted that Facebook is the largest quantification society has ever seen, but it’s designed to put people in a pre-defined vector and test how to best advertise to them.

However, data intelligence will solve big problems, such as how the number of troops we send to Iraq might change the nature of the conflict. Or it could solve strategic problems that don’t require a prediction, but rather require insights.

He outlined the differences between data intelligence and data science for the audience. For example, data intelligence asks bigger questions and builds models to solve for them, as opposed to asking for predictions and equations. Data intelligence deals with messy, small data while data science handles big data.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video of the session follows below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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image via App de Film

App from Dutch director Bobby Boermans is an appropriately titled horror film that encourages viewers to download a free app that delivers second screen content during the movie. The film follows psychology student Anna Rijnders, who becomes addicted to apps, social media, and her smartphone. Rijnders finds a mysterious app called IRIS that begins sending cryptic texts as people around her die in mysterious ways. The second screen app for viewers — which looks like a cross between Apple’s Siri voice assistant and Hal 9000 — is available for iOS and Android, has information about the movie and its cast, and will deliver related content at select points throughout the film. App will hit Dutch theaters on April 4th, and enterprising filmmakers around the world will likely be watching to see how audiences react to the unique second screen tactic.

image by App de Film via iTunes App Store

via PSFK, The Webby Awards

The World Economic Forum just released it’s official report from Davos 2013: “Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage”

This video of our collective problem mapping approach was screened at Davos at the session on Personal Data to help focus the Global Agenda on Access, Trust, Data Literacy, and Openness – the 4 Grand Challenge Areas that emerged from our network analysis of expert input. The goal was to convince world leaders that, yes, this problem is complex, but we’ve defined it. Let’s act.

If you want to learn more, here is a more detailed, interactive infographic of this network analysis .

“Whether we know it or not, data – big, small or otherwise – is becoming a central component to the way we live our lives,” says GigaOM writer Derrick Harris in his big data predictions for 2013.

At Structure:Data we’ll delve into what lies ahead for big data, as we explore the technical and business opportunities that the growth of big data has created. Topics include case studies of big data implementations, the future of Hadoop, machine learning, the looming data scientist crisis and the top trends in big data technologies. (complete schedule here).

This year’s Structure:Data speakers include:

• Kevin Dallas, GM Windows Embedded, Microsoft
• Jeff Hammerbacher, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Cloudera
• Denise Hatzidakis, CTO, Premier Healthcare Alliance
• Ira “Gus” Hunt, CTO, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Grant Ingersoll, Chief Scientist, LucidWorks
• Robert Jenkins, Co-Founder and CTO, CloudSigma
• Heather Marquez, Manager, Asset Strategy and Optimization, Facebook
• Douglas Merrill, Founder and CEO, ZestFinance
• Mohan Namboodiri ,VP, Customer Analytics, Williams-Sonoma
• DJ Patil ,Data Scientist in Residence, Greylock Partners
• Samantha Ravich, Co-Chair of the National Commission for Review of R&D Programs, United States Intelligence Community
• Amaya Souarez, Director, Datacenter Services, Microsoft
• Sean Gourley, CTO, Quid
• Eric Berlow, Vibrant Data Labs, WeTheData.com