What are Insight Platforms-as-a-Service and why do they matter?

Are biometrics hackable? Is Bitcoin a "fraud" that will eventually blow up? Whats the current state of the developer ecosystem?

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What are Insight Platforms-as-a-Service (IPaaS) and why do they matter?

Following the recent Forrester report, George Anadiotis discusses how "the convergence of cloud, automation and collaboration" has led the way for a "new class" of "data-driven insights". 🔮 Anadiotis explains:

Solutions for empowering intra and inter team collaboration are flourishing. From collaborative exploration among data scientists, to productizing solutions and managing infrastructure working with data engineers and ops, to serving insights for business users, data-driven analysis is a team sport and needs software that supports this.

Managed cloud big data services are becoming established as a realistic path by which big data analytics and machine learning will make it out to the mainstream.

Reportedly, the Equifax hack has put 400,000 UK customers at risk. 👀 Earlier in the week, I sat down with the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones to discuss how this breadth and depth of a data breach would not be possible under a decentralised storage model. 💡 Furthermore:

The big data revolution has been endlessly hyped with companies convinced that the more of this oil of the information era they acquire, the richer the insights they will garner, enabling them to outpace their rivals.

But as Mr Halstead points out, while our capacity to pool and store data has grown rapidly, we have not learned much about keeping it secure.

Listen to the full Tech Tent podcast here. -- InfoSum is creating a new and better way for all companies, regardless of size, to collaborate over consumer insight and become smarter together — without the privacy or security risks that come with centralising data or sharing it with third parties. 📈

Are biometrics hackable?

Apple's announcement of the iPhone X's Face ID sparked numerous data privacy and security debates -> such as whether FaceID will "make it easier for police to unlock phones", if the facial recognition data could be leaked or stolen, and whether Apple will ever use FaceID for anything else. 🙈

Writing for the New Scientist, Timothy Revell provides an EXCELLENT overview of the implications of the growth in facial recognition software.

In light of the UK police having a "worryingly" huge database with "19 million custody photographs on it" (thousands of who are innocent), Revell explores how the "temptation to track everyone" might become "too great for states to resist". 🕵

Is Bitcoin a "fraud" that will eventually blow up?

According to JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon, the cryptocurrency is "only fit for use by drug dealers, murderers and people living in places such as North Korea". 🌝

Bitcoin crashed as much as 10% on a single day on Thursday as BTCChina, China’s second-largest bitcoin exchange, "announced it will stop trading the cryptocurrency at the end of September". 💸 💸

Miscellaneous

✅ The state of developer ecosystem 2017.

🤖 OpenAI created a new AI algorithm that shapes the learning of other AI agents.

💯 How The Economist does data-driven journalism.

🏥 Can 23andMe cure Parkinson's by digging data?

🙌 Elior Cohen - reducing dimensionality from dimensionality reduction techniques: