Going Global With Social Media Analytics

Going Global
With Social Media Analytics
Iraklis Varlamis
Assistant Professor
Harokopio University of Athens, Dept. of Informatics & Telematics
[email protected]
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
Startup Safari
Athens 2015
Thinking of going global?
• Going global is the worldwide movement
toward economic, financial, trade, and
communications integration.
• Going global is a composite
and hard task
• You must consider
– The product
– The market
– The competitors, and many more
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Stategies
Start global
• Radical Innovation - you
have a technology that will
revolutionize the market
• Disruptive Innovation– a
new product in an existing
market that disrupts the
market path
Grow global
• Sustaining innovation - a
better product for existing
market – niche or low cost
alternative
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Starting global - Radical Innovation
• Good news:
– Investors love it
– the returns are potentially
huge
– the competition may not
be established or even well
defined.
• The bad news:
– success is rare
– as soon as you get the
market to pay attention,
someone develops the
Disruptive Tech to compete
with you.
This is the ideal technology to
take to a global market –
especially if the largest
market is overseas
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Starting global - Disruptive Innovation
• You offer a cheaper or
simpler or convenient
alternative to something
that is already popular
• Opportunity:
– A significant market
segment does not need or
desire the optimal
technology – they are very
happy with a product that
meets their minimum
requirements
A forgotten or neglected area
of innovation, because the
innovator is focused on the
optimal benefit or
performance of the
innovation
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Consider “startup accelerators”
• http://www.startupfactories.eu/
• http://www.alphagamma.eu/entrepreneurshi
p/best-startup-accelerator-programs-ineurope/
• https://www.fiware.org/accelerators/
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Grow global – Sustaining Innovation
• You improve your product
performance and increase
customer satisfaction
• Opportunity:
– You can fuel the short-term
growth of your company
– Established market leaders
are extremely good at
dealing with and exploiting
sustaining innovations
The technology is mature but
there is always place for
improvement
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Before going global
• How do you stand in your local market?
– Assess the competition
– Assess the market
• How stable is your position?
– Is it capable to support mid or long-term
expansion plans
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Readiness check
• Are you ready to go global?
– Is there a customer base in the countries you want
to enter?
– Is the foreign market compatible to your market?
– Do you have resources and staff to focus on both
expansion and established business?
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Challenges of going international
•
•
•
•
Language and cultural barriers
Tax codes and compliance issues
Slower (or faster) pace
Local competition
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Key elements
• Team: Hire a great team, find the right partner(s),
diversify roles
• The product: Remain consistent in branding
• The market: Consider the impact of any new
ideas, perform a market validation
• The competition: Always do your due diligence on
business strategy
• The money: Check your capital management
skills, make sure that you can handle funds and
tax issues arising from global business plans
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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10 steps for expanding globally
• Perform a “Deep Dive” Due
Diligence
• Develop a Strategy and
Business Plan
• Establish a Strong Team
• Product Readiness
• Organizational Readiness
• Establish a Go-to-Market
Strategy
• Legal Readiness
• Tax and Finance Readiness
• Prepare Your Final Budget
Preparation
• Establish Close
Relationships with Local
Businesses
D. Day, M. Evans, 10 Key Steps To Expanding Your Business Globally. Forbes, March 4th 2015
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Enough about business
• Let’s focus on technology
• How technology can help you go/grow global?
• We will examine this through the prism of a
Greek company: Palo Ltd
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Challenges when you go global
•
•
•
•
•
Global vs. Localized Processes
Deployment strategy (and cycle)
Multilingual content
Scalability
Collaboration and Communication between
the Global Team
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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About Palo Ltd
• Currently manages and operates:
• two innovative online/mobile services
– palo news aggregator websites and
– Palo news digest (mob app)
– in Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Turkey and Romania
• an innovative online service
– paloPro online reputation management
monitoring system
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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www.palo.gr
22 ads (in palo.gr)
>45 ads in all sites
8 free widgets for your site
Public Open data reports
1 editorial per day
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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digest.palo.gr
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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pro.palo.gr
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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In the backend
• A focused crawler that collects news articles from
sites, blogs and social media
• A text clustering module that groups similar
articles together
• A text summarization module that creates a
unique summary for each group of articles
• A named entity extraction module that detects
Named Entities (people, places, companies etc) in
any text
• A sentiment analysis module that assigns
sentiment to each named entity separately
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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And what is so special?
• Crawler: A new palo.?? site can be launched in 2 months
• Content is collected from news sites even when they do not
offer RSS. Page wrappers are automatically created
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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What else?
• Clustering: You can have all the articles (and media)
written for the same subject in a single point
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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What else?
• Summarization: You can read a summary of
the event when you don’t have time
• In Palo Digest
summaries come
first!
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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And what about businesses?
• An interactive, customizable dashboard,
with all mentions for your Entity (brand
name, products, campaigns)
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Real time monitoring
• Custom dashboards can be build in a few hours
for the Sept 2015 political debate
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Some numbers
Countries
Volume
Precision
5: Greece, Serbia, Cyprus, Romania, Turkey
>85.000 texts/hour (at peek time for Greece only)
>200.000 news articles per day
>1.5 million sources
> 20 million records per month from social media
>1 million entities
>3 million entity terms
Sentiment
>87% in sentence level
>70% in entity level
Named Entity Recognition
>70% (at 60% recall)
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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The processing pipeline
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Infrastracture
Rack #1
3 Database Servers
- MySQL Cluster
- ElasticSearch Cluster
- Palo Services
2 Web Servers (Varnich)
1 Back-back Server
1 Load balancer Server
1 Mail/Alerting Server
Rack #2
2 Database Servers
- MySQL
- Palo Services
2 Web Servers
2 SQL Servers (cluster)
2 Storage Servers (backup)
1 Server (Palo Services)
1 Caching Server (Varnish)
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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And how you manage to go global?
• All text processing algorithms are language
independent
• Machine learning proves to be better than rules
and templates
• Yes, we use (open) language resources to
improve performance
• Yes, we train our algorithms to further improve
performance
– We do this, only when it is needed
– We create tools (annotators etc) to do it faster
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
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Sources
•
Books
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–
•
Articles
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–
–
–
•
The Innovator’s Solution – Christensen/Raynor, 2003, Harvard Univ. Press
Innovation Overseas - Christensen, Anthony and Roth, 2009, Harvard Univ. Press.
N. Tsirakis, I. Varlamis, V. Poulopoulos, P. Tsantilas, “PaloPro: monitoring the public opinion in social
media and news streams”. Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier. 2016 , submitted.
I. Varlamis, P. Tsantilas, V. Vassalos, et al, “PaloPro: A platform for knowledge extraction from big
social data and the news”, International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, Inderscience 2016, to
appear.
N. Tsirakis, V. Poulopoulos, P. Tsantilas, I. Varlamis", A platform for real-time opinion mining from
social media and news streams", in Proc. of the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Real Time Data
Stream Analytics, in conjunction with IEEE BigDataSE-15, 2015, Helsinki, Finland.
I. Varlamis, N. Tsirakis, V. Poulopoulos, P. Tsantilas, "An Automatic Wrapper Generation Process for
Large Scale Crawling of News Websites", In 18th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI 2014), 24 Oct, 2014, Athens, Greece.
Links
–
–
http://www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/2015/03/04/10-key-steps-to-expanding-your-businessglobally/
www.paloservices.com
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
Startup Safari
Athens 2015 29
Iraklis Varlamis
Harokopio University of Athens, Dept. of Informatics & Telematics
[email protected]
© Iraklis Varlamis – Harokopio University of Athens
Startup Safari
Athens 2015