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Forbes
11 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why Unstructured Data Is Sorting Itself Out
Lego pieces for sale at a Lego Store in Annapolis, Maryland, on April 7, 2025. Earlier in March ... More 2025, Lego's CEO told AFP that US President Donald Trump's tariff threats do not keep him up at night, as the world's largest toymaker on Tuesday posted record earnings for 2024. Sales rose 13 percent to 74.3 billion kroner ($10.8 billion) last year, while net profit grew five percent to 13.8 billion kroner. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) Information, without order, is chaotic. Attempting to work with data without structure and form is rather like watching white noise fuzz on an un-cabled television set, where shapes are almost familiar, but devoid of any recognizable manifestation. Unstructured data inside organizations appears to be full of energy, but it is weighed down by an inertia which precludes it from being useful, primarily because it doesn't know which home (application) it belongs to. To define the term, let's first say that structured data includes spreadsheets with their formalized rows and columns, 'form-based' data resources where we know the fields in a document and so we know what values to expect… and of course relational databases, the purest form of an ordered and structured data repository. Unstructured data, therefore, includes non-tabular data spanning records of phone calls and voicemails, it is raw video that has yet to get meta-tagged to explain its contents, it is blogs and web pages, it's emails and also social media posts in all their forms. Some data that may appear structured (such as sensor data from surveillance and internet of things devices) is still essentially unstructured i.e. 6,000 temperature readings and gyroscope movement records aren't necessarily structured just because they are numbered by sequence; they need to be extracted, parsed, deduplicated and manipulated to become structured for productive use. In so many cases, unstructured data is regarded as an untapped source of real business context, but it is often the hardest to bring in line, the hardest to govern and the toughest to operationalize. Technology analyst house IDC refers to the unclassified morass of information as the 'unseen data conundrum' and estimates that unsiloed reserves of unstructured data now make up 'the majority of enterprise information' today. IDC also suggests that it is more than doubling (growing 55%) each year. These data blind spots are thought to create operational risk and to potentially undermine the value of AI. This is important now because organizations are using unstructured data to power large language models and retrieval-augmented generation applications. There's a whole marketplace structure of unstructured technology toolset vendors today. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers an entire menu of functions in this space. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing and machine learning service capable of extracting metadata, extracting key phrases and determining sentiment from text in multiple languages. AWS positions this service alongside the Amazon Transcribe speech-to-text tools, the quirkily named Amazon Rekognition image and video analysis service… and there's also Amazon Textract, which extracts metadata from scanned documents and images. Given the breadth of AWS services in this market, it would be reasonable to expect similar-but-skewed proprietary versions of these functions in the major cloud service provider hyperscalers. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database with enough intelligence to be able to manage structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. This cloud-native database might be used alongside the playfully named Microsoft Blob Storage service, an object storage service designed for storing large amounts of unstructured data that might exist in images, videos, documents and other binary data. Also from Microsoft, AI Document Intelligence uses machine learning to extract text, key-value pairs, tables and structures from documents automatically. Not to be left out, Google Cloud Platform also works at this level. The cloud and search giant points to its BigQuery brand and the object tables function within it. 'Object tables provides a structured record interface for unstructured data stored in Google Cloud Storage. This enables [users] Given the services that exist as fairly prominent functions in the major cloud providers and from the toolsets that exist from more specialized players, working with unstructured data is clearly now a more pressing need. Often referred to as enterprise content management, ECM is certainly growing in the combined shadow of big data analytics and and rise of artificial intelligence. The natural evolution for a data market like this is the arrival of industry-specific services aligned to industry verticals. Known for its work in unstructured data management across the healthcare industry, Hyland treads a careful line with its messaging as the company clearly wants to be seen as applicable to all use cases. The company says Hyland Content Intelligence turn unstructured data into actionable, AI-ready content with the 2025 arrival of its Knowledge Enrichment (currently in Beta) service being among its star players. Related technologies are also present at IBM in the form of Watson Discovery for unstructured search and AI; Elastic for indexing and querying of unstructured text and logs; Cloudera for Hadoop-based data lake services across unstructured and semi-structured data; Databricks, Collibra, Alation, Palantir and Varonis, to name but a mouthful, there is a lot of structure being applied to the unstructured data space. 'Unstructured data remains a black box for most organizations, [especially] as it becomes critical for AI and business operations,' said Jay Limburn, chief product officer at Ataccama. 'Without a way to structure, govern and trust that information, enterprises risk missing the full value of their data.' Limburn points to his firm's Ataccama One platform as a means to combine data quality, governance, observability, lineage and master data management. Ataccama One is now available on Snowflake Marketplace as a new integration with Document AI, a Snowflake AI feature that uses Arctic-TILT, a proprietary large language model used to extract data from documents. This fusion of data structuring services is billed as a means of turning unstructured content, such as contracts, invoices and PDFs, into structured data by running models directly within Snowflake. Businesspeople can use natural language prompts, such as 'What is the effective date of the contract?', which are then processed by Snowflake to create structured outputs written directly into Snowflake tables. Where does the unstructured marketplace go next? If we accept the proposition that AI services are partly responsible for the surge in this sector (or let's at least call it a sub-surge in a sub-sector), then we might actually see AI services themselves starting to shoulder the responsibility for structuring our unstructuredness. Given the current debate over whether chat-based AI services will take over browser search - and the fact that OpenAI offers GPT-based APIs for text extraction, summarization, semantic intent analysis and classification - that might be exactly what happens.
CTV News
04-06-2025
- Business
- CTV News
Toy maker Spin Master cuts jobs as it contends with tariff uncertainty
Spin Master signage is pictured on King St. in Toronto, Friday, Sept. 8, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Lahodynskyj TORONTO — Toy maker Spin Master Corp. says it has cut jobs across the company as it tries to weather the impact of global tariffs on its business. In an emailed statement, spokeswoman Tammy Smitham did not say how many employees were affected. She says the layoffs were one part of a multi-pronged plan to deal with the effect of tariffs, which also includes diversifying its supply chains and cutting costs. Spin Master said last month that U.S. tariffs on countries where it produces toys, especially China, have made forecasts so challenging that it withdrew its guidance for the remainder of the year. The company behind the Hatchimals, Gabby's Dollhouse and Monster Jam brands has said it aims to drastically reduce its reliance on China for production over the next two years. In February, Spin Master said it had decided to wind down a games studio in Sweden as the cost to acquire new users weighed too heavily on revenue. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 3, 2025.
The Independent
16-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Peppa Pig toy maker pauses US-China shipments over Trump's tariffs
British toymaker Character Group, known for its Peppa Pig and Fireman Sam lines, is facing continued uncertainty in the US market after halting shipments of Chinese-made products due to tariff concerns. The company, which withdrew its financial targets for the year last month, cited both the tariffs and resulting consumer caution as factors impacting global sales. Character Group paused US shipments in October following President Trump's announcement of increased tariffs on Chinese goods. The tariffs, which initially rose to 145 per cent on some Chinese imports, were met with retaliatory tariffs from China on certain US goods, reaching as high as 125 per cent. Earlier this week, President Trump subsequently announced a 90-day tariff reduction, bringing the rate down to 30 per cent. Character said sales to the US amounted to around 20 per cent of group revenues last year, with 'substantially all' of these being made in China. It said the tariff reduction 'gives hope for a negotiated resolution, although this remains uncertain at this time'. The Surrey -based group said uncertainty linked to tariffs has been felt in other markets, as 'customers have become increasingly cautious and are not committing to orders to our expectations'. It said sales in all key territories have been impacted as a result. However, the company said it still expects to be profitable for the current financial year as a whole. It came as the company reported that group revenues dropped by 8 per cent to £53 million for the six months to February, compared with a year earlier. The company saw pre-tax profits stay roughly flat at £2.1 million for the period despite weaker sales. Shares were 3.5 per cent lower in early trading.
Irish Times
16-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Lego Ireland grew revenue by 16% after opening second store here
The Irish arm of Lego grew its revenue by 16 per cent last year after the world's largest toymaker opened a second store here. Lego Ireland generated €9.4 million for the year ended December 31st, 2024, which was up from €8 million the year before. Gross profit was up 36 per cent to €3.9 million, compared with €2.9 million in 2023, driven primarily by higher revenues and a full year of trading from the second store. A second Lego store opened in Dublin in October 2023 in Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, a little more than a year after the brand opened its first store in the Republic on Grafton Street . READ MORE The company recorded a profit after tax of €100,112 for the year compared to a profit of €3,962 in 2023. The group's net assets were €807,264, up from €707,152. The directors said they were 'satisfied' with the financial performance for the year, but did not propose to pay a dividend. The group described Ireland as a 'new market', and said the outlook for 2025 was for single-digit revenue growth. It said it plans to invest in initiatives which address 'evolving trends and are designed to deliver growth in the long-term'. It said its most significant risks relate to the 'volatility in the toy market' and 'uncertainties' in relation to the launch of the new product concepts. The overall risk exposure was described as 'moderate'. The monthly average number of people employed by the company during the year was 66, which was up from 50. The group spent €1.7 million on staff, up from €1 million. Lego is paying up to 60 per cent more for plastic resin made mostly from renewable or recycled material after the Danish giant intensified efforts last year to become fossil-free, a move financed by big increases in sales and profitability. Niels Christiansen, chief executive, said 30 per cent of all the resin the toymaker bought in the first half came from so-called mass-balance sources, meaning it used a blend of fossil-fuel material and recycled or renewable sources, such as used cooking oil. 'It is 40 to 50 to 60 per cent more expensive in material terms,' he said. 'We don't pass that on to the consumer. It comes out of our Ebit [operating profit] line.' He added that Lego was trying to stimulate demand among plastics producers to increase the supply of greener raw materials by buying significant volumes of the resin made from mass-balance sources, up from 18 per cent the year before.
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Small Toymaker - Whose Business Was Blown Up By Tariffs
David Levi, the owner of MikroKits, a small toymaker, joined a suit against the Trump ... More Administration's tariffs David Levi began designing an educational electronic musical toy kit in 2020. Initially, he made batches of a few hundred at a time and sold them on Amazon. As sales grew, he rented a workshop and small warehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia, bought some light production machines, and hired his first worker. Because of the lag between buying components and selling his products, his family agreed to loan him money to help with cash flow. He ploughed all the money earned back into the business until last year, when he finally started to take a salary for himself. This year, 'I was just starting to get to the payoff zone, where all the investment that I put in of my own money, and all the money I could have been making from a corporate job, was paying off. Now everything's really slowed down because of the tariffs,' Mr. Levi exclaimed. Last year, the business shipped 16,000 units. Mr. Levi's business – MikroKits - was looking to make 20,000 units this year. But with rush orders because of the looming tariffs, MikroKits was only able to buy the components for 11,000 units. But Mr. Levi was not willing to take this lying down. He joined a lawsuit with four other small owner-operated businesses to challenge the tariffs. The case - V.O.S. Selections v. Trump – went before the U.S. Court of International Trade. on Wednesday. An independent observer doesn't think things went well for the Trump administration. Mr. Levi got into electronics as a sophomore in high school. 'I found this weird musical instrument called the theremin,' Mr. Levi explained. 'I saw a video of someone waving their hands in the air, then as you move your hands near the antenna, it changes the volume and the pitch., I thought, oh, this video is fake. They're just putting audio over it. There's no way that you can just get a little circuit with a little antenna,' and use it to create music. It is, Mr. Levi added, 'very difficult to play.' Mr. Levi decided to build his own circuit to see if 'this thing is real. That's what got me really interested in electronics. This is 'really cool from a physics standpoint.' 'So yeah, as a high schooler, I tried to build my own. It was really complicated. I had to order a circuit board from one place, then order components from another place. Eventually, I did get it working. But that's sparked my interest in electronics.' 'I kept building circuits. I got a degree in electrical engineering' from CalPoly in San Luis Obispo. CalPoly's motto is 'learn by doing.' This was just the kind of education Mr. Levi was looking for. Mr. Levi ended up working at some big toy companies. He was part of a design team working on Barbie and another team that worked on Transformers. 'I had experience making toys light up and play noises.' Mr. Levi was laid off in 2020 during the pandemic, which gave him time to design my own Theremin kit. There was an upside to being laid off during the pandemic. 'I,' Mr. Levi said, 'had time to design it right.' PCWorld reviewed the product in 2023. The subtitle of the article was 'This is a Lot of Fun!' The author added 'it's wonderfully easy to assemble' and 'ridiculously fun to play.' It was also educational. The author - Ashley Biancuzzo - added 'I have a better understanding of circuitry.' Since then, Mr. Levi has designed the Synth-a-Sette, a cassette-sized synthesizer. It is a circuit board shaped like a cassette. This device turns everyday objects into musical keys by clipping them to the device. It can be connected to virtually anything conductive, even items you would not think were conductive, like bananas, and play notes. 'I haven't yet figured out if I'm tricking electrical people to get interested in music,' Mr. Levi said. 'Or if I'm tricking music people to get interested in electronics. It's a little bit of both.' But Mr. Levi does want to help inspire the next generation of electrical engineers. Mr. Levi said it took years to develop the MikroKits supply chain. These electrical kits are assembled with imported parts from a number of different countries, including China, Mexico, and Thailand. 60% of the parts do come from China. According to the suit, these parts 'are not readily available from United States suppliers at all, without substantial additional costs, or without having to redesign its products.' For a startup business, getting the right employees – employee in this case – and keeping them happy is critical. 'I've designed my business,' Mr. Levi explained, around the worker who assembles the kits. 'My goal has always been to have Debbie work constantly throughout the year.' The business planning is based on working backwards to keep her working. This determines when and how many parts are ordered and when and how hard to run marketing campaigns. Products are built all year long and stored. Most get sold during the holiday season. Before the tariffs, Mr. Levi was considering adding a new employee. Now he can't keep the employee he has fully employed. Even though tariffs on Chinese goods have now been lowered to 30% from 125%, this is still barely tenable. Mr. Levi had stopped buying components when prices soared. His warehouse is empty. Usually, it takes 10 weeks to get goods from China. But with everyone now placing rush orders, it is apt to take considerably longer. This limits his ability to build his finished goods inventory for the Christmas selling season. 'I am only going to have a couple of months of real production time before September and October, when I need to ship things out.' There is a cutoff because of the time it takes retailers to get goods into their stores for the holiday. Mr. Levi has been forced to raise prices. The Theremin kit was $40, the Synth-a-Sette used to be $50. $10 added to the price of both products. It is not just higher production costs driving the price increase. Higher production costs ripple through the sales and marketing value chain in ways one would not expect. 'When you sell in a retail store, the price you sell the product to the retail store is typically half of what the actual price the customer pays. So, if I have to pay an extra $5 in tariffs,' the final price ends up being $10 more. Marketing costs associated with Amazon sales also increase. An ad placed higher in the Amazon search queue generates much higher sales. While the exact algorithms Amazon uses for ordering ads are not known, the more revenue a product generates is undoubtedly part of the math. If higher production costs lead to lower sales, then prices must be raised even more to generate the same revenues as before. Small businesses have fewer options in dealing with tariffs. Cash flow can be improved by using bonded warehouses. If MikroKits had a bonded warehouse in the U.S., the company could delay payments of the duties until the goods were released from the warehouse. 'I don't have the bandwidth to figure out how to set up a bonded warehouse,' Mr. Levi said. And higher shipping costs are coming as well. Jena Santoro, Senior Manager of Global Risk Intelligence at Everstream Analytics, says that one main impact to anticipate with the 90-day tariff pause will be higher maritime shipping rates. 'While the tariffs are relaxed, we'll see a surge of advanced shipments to restock & replenish inventories, and thus a spike in freight costs.' Higher costs, of course, lead to less demand. 'We're going to have fewer units to sell, which means that there are going to be kids this Christmas season who, instead of getting a cool science kit for Christmas, they're going to spend more time on their iPad. That's kind of sad, because I'm trying to get kids and students interested in electronics,' Mr. Levi bemoaned. One of the goals of the new tariffs is to boost manufacturing in the U.S. For MikroKits, the better solution might be to do light assembly in the U.K. The U.K. has low tariffs on Chinese electronic components. If goods were assembled in the U.K. and then exported to the U.S., the tariffs would be significantly lower than those associated with building the goods in the U.S. While Mr. Levi was initially dismayed and discouraged by the tariffs, that did not stop him from acting. He became one of the plaintiffs in the V.O.S. Selections v. Trump lawsuit. On April 14, the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's authority to unilaterally issue the 'Liberation Day' tariffs, which are 'devastating small businesses across the country. The lawsuit argues that the Administration has no authority to issue across-the-board worldwide tariffs without congressional approval.' The President invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to justify the 'Liberation Day' tariffs. But under that law, the President may invoke emergency economic powers only after declaring a national emergency in response to an 'unusual and extraordinary threat' to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy originating outside the United States. The lawsuit argues that the Administration's justification— a trade deficit in goods—is neither an emergency nor an unusual or extraordinary threat. Trade deficits have existed for decades, and do not constitute a national emergency or threat to security. Ian Millhiser, a senior correspondent at Vox, focuses on the Supreme Court and Legal Issues. He reports that while it is unclear how the three-judge panel will rule, 'it appears somewhat more likely than not that they will rule that the tariffs are unlawful. All three of the judges, who sit on the U.S. Court of International Trade, appeared troubled by the Trump administration's claim that the judiciary may not review the legality of the tariffs at all. But the lawyer representing several small businesses challenging the tariffs also faced many skeptical questions.' One judge pushed the plaintiff's lawyer to define a standard that the court could use to decide whether Trump's emergency declaration was lawful, but the lawyer argued that a definition was unnecessary considering the unprecedented nature of the case. 'I'm asking the court to be an umpire and call a strike, and you're asking me, 'What's the strike zone, is it at the knees or slightly below the knees?'' Jeffrey Schwab said. 'I'm saying it's a wild pitch, it's on the other side of the batter and hit the backstop. So we don't need to debate the difference between the strike zone.' Some of the judges sounded offended when the lawyer for the Trump administration claimed that the question of what constitutes an extraordinary threat is a 'political question' — a legal term meaning that the courts aren't allowed to decide that matter. As Judge Jane Restani, a Reagan appointee, told Hamilton, his argument suggests that there is 'no limit' to the president's power to impose tariffs, even if the president claims that a peanut butter shortage is a national emergency. The overall picture presented by the argument is that all three judges (the third is Judge Timothy Reif, a Trump appointee) are troubled by the broad power Trump claims in this case. But they were also frustrated by a lack of guidance — both from existing case law and from Schwab and Hamilton's arguments — on whether Trump can legally claim the power to issue such sweeping tariffs. If the Trump administration loses, they are sure to appeal. However, Riley Stephens with the Liberty Justice Center says the appeals process may be faster because the case appeared before the Court of International Trade. The Court of International Trade is a specialty court that deals specifically with trade issues. In other tariff cases appearing in federal courts, the government is filing motions to move the case to this court.
