Company opens a treasure trove of digital information
Luca Candela, Treasure Data director
Treasure Data - a California-based data analysis company which opened an office in Korea in July - offers tools to help companies make better use of information for business.
The Korea JoongAng Daily sat down with Luca Candela, director of the product management and user experience division at Treasure Data, to discuss the company’s role in the business world and how its can benefit customers.
Q. What does Treasure Data basically do, and why is the service needed?
A. What we do is help our clients figure out how to compete better, how to make more money and how to become more efficient. With this goal, we use a lot of digital tools. There is a big data record out there. If we talk on KakaoTalk, there is actually a big record on when we talked, what we talked about and how many people I talked to. So there is a lot more data and a lot more contexts. You can get data from social networks, mobile applications and video games. It is now much easier for businesses to understand what their customers do.
By 2020, there will be 40,000 exabytes of data produced, or 40 trillion gigabytes, according to Cisco. When you have this amount of data, the traditional ways of analyzing data are not fit for this scale. So we had to reinvent the industry to deal with the vast amount of data.
What does Treasure Data offer?
We basically provide tools and engineering support to analyze data. Let’s say that a company wants to know where my most successful customers are coming from. So what you need to do is define what the most successful customers are. Then you need to take data from different types of sources - from accounting systems to marketing systems. The problem here is that you have data in different places. To generate meaningful results, you need to bring them into one place. So we help companies connect all these different data systems. When somebody is going to do the analysis, they don’t have to spend time going to accounting or marketing teams to ask for data and combine them.
Would the service depend on the type of industry?
Every company is different. We have to consider the strategy that each company has. We have to be flexible to be able to adapt to the strategy. If you look at the mobile commerce app Wish, who is our customer, the company wants to analyze what its users look at. The goal is to figure out what products they should recommend to each user based on the clicks by users. The company was started by one person from Google and one person from Yahoo in 2011. The mobile commerce platform started with us because they don’t have enough people to analyze the system. So they collect all the information about how Wish’s customers behave and then use our system to analyze the data. Based on Treasure Data’s service, they can figure out the best time to suggest products and what type of items to be recommended.
What is the advantage of a company using Treasure Data instead of developing its own system?
In order for a company to conduct data analysis on their own, the company has to spend a lot of money and time. The companies have to hire a team consisting of data scientists and analysts and buy the supporting system. Instead of having to hire the team, they could use our service. It could save a lot more cost than hiring all the experts.
BY PARK EUN-JEE [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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