Technology as a whole has become an extremely important part of both business development and companies’ growth in the past couple of years. With many new applications and programming languages being applied to a vast variety of business spheres, in order to assess their power, we should break down the most popular ones. 2019 has definitely been the year of personalization and data-tailored applications, let’s analyse why in more detail.
What’s “Personalization”?
In order to understand the technology itself, it’s important to break through the terminology which led to its creation. For “personalization”, we intend the usage of automatically-learning tools which are reshaping a piece of content (i.e. a web page, an application or an entire website’s architecture) depending on the user’s preferences. With this in mind, given how data-driven the eCommerce world is nowadays, it’s already quite easy to understand why this technology has become so popular, especially within financial sectors like mezzanine finance.
Why eCommerce? Why Big Data?
eCommerce as a whole, especially when related to the fast fashion industry, has definitely been an extremely big subject within the business sphere. Examples like dropshipping and drop surfing have created and built the fortune of many young entrepreneurs worldwide and when big data started being used within the digital marketing side of things, personalization started to grow. Web personalization, in particular, is the process which relies on automatically tailoring eCommerce catalogues towards big data, which is being acquired via users’ interaction on the portal.
How Does It Work?
We’ve basically analysed the overall concept but let’s now dive deeper into what actually is personalization from a technological perspective. Every personalization-related software operates in 3 steps: acquisition, processing and delivery. Acquisition is related to the process which happens when big data is being prompted into the software or, essentially, the moment when the user “x” approached the site/application/software’s content. Following this, the processing part is related to an automatic understanding of such data, which is then delivered in a customised piece of content (aka, “delivery”).
The Market Value
Complicated and data-driven technologies are falling into the so-called “startup world”. This is related to the “microcosmos” of startups which build complex architectures but can’t seem to leave an “underground” market due to the lack of both interests in their application and, ultimately, funds. The usage of personalization is a good exception of what said above since it has been used in all his forms from companies like Zara to Amazon to Apple, for both their catalogues and their display ads on both social media and Google. Currently, the personalization industry fluctuates on the market with a net value of $1billion.
The Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Since it’s very much related to personalization as a whole, covering how the Cambridge Analytica scandal has impacted the world of data associated with the business is borderline mandatory. In 2018, the infamous British company bought 75% of Facebook’s data points (algorithmic values which associate user preferences to a specific keyword) and this resulted in a specific section of GDPR. Data is still an extremely delicate subject and, whenever any form of big data is acquired passively, it must now be stated for transparency reasons.