Forget big data – prepare for Big Tags

Ever since the first mobile devices got GPS capabilities there‘s been a lot of visionary talk about how services will soon react to the user’s situation and customize their content based on it. You’ve all heard the classic examples: shops advertising umbrellas when it’s raining, news sites offering content based on location and mobile operators offering upgrades to existing devices. All pretty valid use cases and certainly possible to implement right now.

Why is it then that the only ones actually doing those things are the big companies like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon? Could it be that the large amount of information available is actually part of the problem itself?

While we have more data about the users than ever before, it is exceedingly complex and expensive to actually use it. Getting location from a mobile device is a simple operation but doing anything with the coordinates requires additional integrations which result in even more data, which in turn needs to be refined. In addition, most of the CMS systems, webshops and other platforms don’t even support more complex operations, leaving things like geolocation to expensive custom built services. Or that’s how it used to be at least.

From complex data to usable tags

The concept of tagging, or describing an object by adding a simple text based metadata, was introduced to the web a little over ten years ago. Simply put, tags are literally about labeling things for us to understand them better. Since those early days tags been making their way from blogging platforms to enterprise applications and even operating systems. Twitter hashtags brought tags to wider use, solidifying their place as the de facto way of describing things.

In a way, tags have become the lowest common denominator of the internet information infrastructure, used in all applications and understood by even the least tech savvy users. Given their ubiquitous nature, tags are the ideal way of linking content and ads to the target audience, with one simple text.

This is where Big Tags come to play.

Are you near-restaurant at time-lunch?

Big Tags takes out all the heavy lifting from targeting content and ads, making it really easy to do all those complex things like geotargeting and varying content by user’s surroundings. We take in a lot of data from various sources and turn it into simple and usable tags. This means that an article about tourist attractions in Manhattan can be targeted by simply tagging it “location-manhattan” or a breakfast offer by tagging it “time-breakfast”. Simple and effective, both in terms of the technical implementation and user friendliness.

How tags are assigned also changes as time goes by, so if you use a site on an iPhone 6 at the time of writing in November 2014 you get content tagged “mobile-new” but in a year that same tag doesn’t apply any more. In addition we use various other services and databases to create new tags like “weather-rainy” or “income-high” based on location or even information from a custom CRM system.

And this is only barely scratching the surface of what you can do with Big Tags. Did we mention that it works on all platforms from Java to PHP, Python, Ruby and .NET and can be used with various applications like WordPress, OpenCart and Google Analytics?

Stay tuned for more information about Big Tags in the near future by following us in Twitter and at bigtags.com. This will be big.