Commentary on the proposed telescreens

You may have read something about the Samsung 7500 and 8000 series televisions, the ones with a camera installed in them, over the past few days. The tl;dr summary: “For Samsung’s 7500 and 8000 series TVs, all you have to do is say “Hi, TV,” when you walk into a room for the TV to [...]

Jan

15

Web Analytics Wednesday – October 26 – Wellington

Web Analytics Wednesday is tonight at The Wellington, in downtown Toronto’s analytics alley. It’s generously supported by AT Internet. There are some 40 people – representing among the best of the best, who will be in attendance. It’s a great opportunity for web analysts, social analysts, marketing scientists, data scientists, hackers, developers, and usability professionals [...]

Oct

26

eMetrics New York 2011

I’ll be at eMetrics next week. I hope you will be too. It’ll be great to be back in New York. There are a few people that I’m looking forward to seeing: John Lovett on social media, Melinda Driscoll on web analytics, Shari Cleary on media, Joseph Stanhope on mobile, Alex Langshur on government. And [...]

Oct

16

Our Mobile Planet – Select statistics for International Smartphone Penetration

Have you seen this site, put out by Google for their “Our Mobile Planet” study? It’s an excellent way to present data in a very accessible, very explorable way. I found it inspiring. The call to action is “create your chart now”. A very good, honest, call to action. The technology adoption S-curve can be [...]

Oct

10

Moneyball and Analytics

The plot of Moneyball is fairly well known among analytics folks. It’s a relatable example of how to  compete on analytics. Many statisticians love baseball. It’s a natural extension. And it’s been written to death about in the pop-analytics literature. It’s good stuff. It’s a nice case study. John Lovett predicts that Moneyball will put [...]

Oct

02

Analytics in Toronto

Analytics is alive and growing in Toronto. This post summarizes what I know I know. If you define analytics as being ‘the scientific method applied to data to generate sustainable advantage’, then there are three major concentrations of practitioners: finance, marketing and operations. The financial sector breaks out into the risk management and the speculation [...]

Sep

11

Analytics At Scale

Two trends, an exponential increase in data produced, and a linear increase in the number of analysts produced per quarter, continue pose a massive challenge to businesses and analytics practices alike. We need both physical technology and social technology to practice analytics at scale.   There are three grouping of physical technologies: First, there’s instrumentation [...]

Aug

21

Congrats to PostRank

Join me in congratulating Carol Leaman, Ilya Grigorik, and the PostRank Team for their acquisition by Google. They’re incredibly talented, work very hard, and I’ve been very pleased with what they’ve done for years. This is great for them, great for Google, and, if they’re able to be effective in their new environment, good for [...]

Jun

03

Information Deprivation in the Age of Data

For thirty minutes Monday night, when a federal statute prevented me from accessing information I wanted, I raged. Then I had empathy. There was an election in Canada. The federal statute is an Elections Canada law that prohibits anybody from transmitting results to regions of the country where the polls are still open. That includes [...]

May

05

Abstraction is the price of brevity

Communities create their own jargon because they need brevity in their conversation. The price of that brevity is abstraction. Jargon unites people in as much as it alienates them from each other. I’ve experienced this first hand – visiting data miners, market researchers, marketing scientists, entrepreneurial developers, and brand managers. It becomes very easy for [...]

Apr

13

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