Girl whose wish inspired mass Christmas carol celebration dies

• “Our little angel on earth earned her pink glittery angel wings in heaven,” the family says


• Laney Brown, 8, had asked to meet Taylor Swift and to hear Christmas carols


• On Friday she had a video chat with the music star


• Saturday night, for one hour, people packed the street and serenaded her

(CNN) — A little girl whose Christmas wish inspired thousands of people to sing in the streets died overnight.

Laney Brown, 8, suffered from leukemia.

“Our little angel on earth earned her pink glittery angel wings in heaven,” a post on an official Facebook page about her said. “She took her last breath at home in her bed at 3:10 surrounded by all her family and friends. I miss her so much already.”

Delaney Brown of West Reading, Pennsylvania, “inspired a community and touched hearts across the world,” as CNN affiliate WFMZ put it.

She loved music and dancing.

Her dying wishes were to meet country music superstar Taylor Swift and for some people to come by her house for a night of caroling.

10,000 carolers respond to girl’s wish

On Friday — her birthday — Laney and Swift video-chatted through FaceTime, a software application that allows callers to see each other on Apple products.

Then, Saturday night, the singers came. At first it was hundreds of people, then thousands. Then it was about 10,000, CNN affiliate WFMZ reported.

She was too weak to go to the window, but heard the wonderful music.

“I can hear you now!!! Love you!” she said in a Facebook post that showed a photo of her lying in bed with a breathing mask — and two thumbs up.

Laney was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia seven months ago. Last week doctors told her family that she had 70% cancer cells in her blood. She came home from the hospital Thursday.

The Christmas carol celebration outside her home attracted people from all over. Her dance team was there to honor her. Even Santa showed up.

Many of the singers held back tears.

“I can’t even express how I feel,” Krysta Rebe, who has a daughter Laney’s age, told WFMZ.

It was only an hour of singing, but it lifted the spirits of everyone who jammed the block.

“As much as I want that miracle to be saving the life of an 8-year-old little girl, Laney, the miracle was an 8-year-old little girl teaching an entire community, town, city and the whole country the true meaning of Christmas,” one participant, Marianne Franken, wrote on Facebook.”

On Wednesday, thousands of people liked and commented on the Facebook post announcing the little girl’s death.

“I do not cry for Laney, who lives on in peace and happiness with our Lord,” wrote Cornell Stornbergh. “I mourn for us, who now have to live in a world without her.”

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Girl whose wish inspired mass Christmas carol celebration dies

Transactional Big Data Startup ERN Bolsters Its Analytics By Acquiring Elucidata, Inspired Analytics

ERN, the London-headquartered startup that’s planning to use Big Data to enable banks and merchants to create loyalty-based offers for cardholders, has acquired two U.K. companies to bolster the analytics side of its platform.

In a transaction consisting of “undisclosed fees and stock”, the company has purchased Inspired Analytics, which offers analytical consultancy services — specifically to help design and build production analytics solutions — and Elucidata, which also provides consultancy and specialises in “data strategy and high-complexity, regulated data implementations”.

As a result, Jim Jeffrey, Inspired Analytics’ Director of Analytics, will become ERN’s Analytics Director, and James Baldwin, Managing Director of Elucidata, will become Managing Director of ERN’s Analytical Consulting Division. If it smells like an acqui-hire, it probably is an acqu-hire, though a spokesperson for ERN stressed that the acquisitions are for both the tech and the teams of the respective companies.

Meanwhile, ERN is announcing yet another round of seed funding. This time it amounts to a further $ 1 million, once again from unnamed high-net worth individuals, all of whom have previously helped finance the startup to the tune of $ 3.6 million. This brings the total raised by the company before it’s shipped a commercial product to $ 4.6 million. As we’ve noted before, Big Data costs big money, not least when you’re gunning to be a major player in the FinTech/transactional data space. However, my understanding is that ERN is on the cusp of announcing its first commercial customer after trials with a number of “household names”. More on that should follow shortly.

ERP’s analytics platform, dubbed “Looop”, enables banks (or more specifically, card issuers) and participating merchants to boost customer loyalty by creating new products and offers based on the analysis of their card transactions. The idea is that by drilling into the Big Data around a customer’s transactional history — after they’ve opted in, of course — individually-tailored offers can be pushed to their smartphone via the Looop app, in the form of an e-coupon redeemable in-store.

In addition to insights gained through mining customers’ transactional Big Data, the targeting of offers can also be geo-fenced e.g. only push an offer when a customer who has previously bought a dress is within a certain radius of the participating store.

The new management personnel picked up via the two acquisitions being announced today are definitely a good fit for ERN’s mission, and presumably should provide in-roads to exactly the type of B2B customers that the young startup is hoping to sign up.

Inspired Analytics’ Jeffrey is the former Head of Data Innovation at Barclaycard Freedom, where he developed “market basket analysis algorithms” for retailers, and was also a Business Partner within Lloyds Banking Group’s Customer Insight area.

Elucidata’s Baldwin also has ties with Barlaycard as former Head of B2B Targeting where he developed the analytics platform for the bank’s cardholder offers programme.

ERN is a pioneering big data technology company, committed to enabling all parties of the payment eco-system to analyse transactional Big Data in order to turn data into insights and insights into action. ERN’s high performance big data analytics platform “LOOOP” enables clients to more fully utilise transactional Big Data to provide insights into consumer lifestyles and behaviours, central to the evolution of lifetime consumer value models, acquisition, retention and loyalty strategies and business development. As a high performance…

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Transactional Big Data Startup ERN Bolsters Its Analytics By Acquiring Elucidata, Inspired Analytics