BANKING STARTUP USES SOCIAL INFLUENCE TO CALCULATE CREDIT SCORE

Around a third of US adults use social media as a health resource, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers – whether seeking out medical info, sharing symptoms and experiences or rating drugs, devices, doctors, hospitals and health plans. The consulting giant surveyed 1,060 US adults and found that 42% have viewed health-related consumer reviews (more or less evenly split between reviews of treatments, doctors, hospitals and health insurers) through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. A third have read of friends’ or family members’ health experiences through social media, while 29% have read of other patients’ experience with a disease they have and 24% have viewed health-related videos and images posted by other patients. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those users skew young. Where more than four-fifths of 18-24-year olds said they’d share health information through social media, fewer than half (45%) of those 45-64 said the same. And across the board, users choose community sites over company-sponsored ones, which see hundreds of posts and comments per day where community sites see thousands. “In fact, community sites had 24 times more social media activity on average than any of the health industry companies” over the one-week timeframe studied, said the PwC report.

18 April 13 Permalink

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.

26 January 17 Permalink

In particular, a new report shows that Twitter provided an early account of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti. According to the study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Internet news and social media were faster transmitters of information in tracking the cholera epidemic in Haiti than health officials. The tweets provided information that health officials wouldn’t report until two weeks later.

11 January 39 Permalink

1.) Twitter Accurately Predicts Politician’s Victory at New Hampshire Primary

2.) Twitter knows how you will be feeling this Friday

3.) Did Twitter predict the revolution in Egypt?

4.) Predict the future yourself with Twitter and Timeu.se

5.) Hedgefund to make bets based on Tweets – beats the market

6.) Predicting and stopping the spread of diseases with Twitter

Note: All of these predictions are of the kind of collecting data early and seeing a pattern in that data in order to see what is currently emerging. That is just a small part of what we use the word “prediction” for… Not that it is unimportant but it might be problematic to call it predictions without to define what kind of predictions it is…

11 January 10 Permalink