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 a slow beast, and expectations of growth have persistently outstripped actual adoption, at least in North America, and especially in Canada. Adoption has a few drags on it in North America and Europe. No such drags exist in Asia. The chart below compares all the countries smartphone penetration. (Click to embiggen) That chart masks underlining maturity in each country. The chart below compares m-commerce ‘at[…]
Category: 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 analytics on the map. It’s likely. It’s just so damn relatable. Ideas have a long journey from conception to popularization. Nash had been known to game theorists and a sub-set of political scientists who don’t understand people, since the beginning. Most didn’t learn of it until ‘A Beautiful Mind’ came out. Moneyball is that movie. To extend the lesson from Moneyball – 1. Everybody has[…]
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 fields. There’s a higher self-referential graph amongst the risk management people in insurance than there are on the banking side. The speculation analytics folks are at severe disadvantage against their New York counterparts. If there’s a thriving hedge fund section in our community, I don’t know about it. Marketing is divided between startups, CRM vendors, agencies, and client side (which includes data mining and web[…]
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 technology that we use to measure and record the world around us. Second, there’s analysis technology that we use to understand the data that’s coming. Third, there’s presentation technology that we use to communicate a world view, and what to do next. On the instrumentation technology side, we’ve all had a few challenges with instrumentation as of late. Specifically, the understanding of definitions, their impacts,[…]
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 you. All the best to them.
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 all broadcasters and applies to online. For 30 minutes, between 9:30pm EST, when the polls closed in Ontario, and 10:00pm EST, when the polls finally closed in BC, I relied solely on twitter and a dashboard on CBC TV. It was horrible. That screencap shows a dashboard, populated with data from later on in the evening. You could see the seat totals for parliament, and[…]
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 people to dismiss entire modes of thought purely because the jargon doesn’t resonate. Deep within abstraction are generally understood understandings. For instance, the term ‘qualified traffic’ means something very fundamental to a search marketer. The same term, ‘traffic’, is perceived a fair bit differently among web analysts. And in terms of CRM people – well – they don’t view ‘response’ as a form of traffic.
I cut the cable on March 17. Cutting the cable means ‘to unsubscribe from cable and/or satellite TV”. First, a few words on the substitution. I face the CN Tower, with a clear line of sight. As a result, over-the-air for the live weather and idiotic fluff works nicely. It provides zombie noise for those 10 minutes between checking the pad for the hard news (because there is no hard news on in the morning…anywhere) and running out. Check. Netflix provides a lot of zombie noise. I prefer to work to reruns of ‘yes minister’ and ‘arrested development’. Yes Minister is nothing more than a university textbook on public policy dynamics and arrested development is benign background noise. Zombie viewing.[…]
I cut the cable tomorrow. For specific firm, I will go from being worth a stable $170/month subscriber, complete with PVR, to being worth nothing. I’m switching my Internet to a non-UBB restricted wholesaler. I will continue to spend $10/month for Netflix. I will get my live TV with the “free”, Over-The-Air broadcast signal from CN tower, which I have a clear view from. Dedicated ad impressions will take a pretty big hit, as the number of must-see, full attention shows are less than 5. I can’t anticipate myself suffering through TV without a PVR. I can’t imagine deliberately exposing myself to an abusive medium any longer. That attitude ought to concern broadcasters and marketers alike. I’m not alone in[…]
If you’re a web analyst or a data scientist, developer, or otherwise deeply involved with web analytics, you should strongly consider pledging to the Code of Ethics. This Code of Ethics is a social compact. Choices were made in authoring this code. Among the biggest challenges Lovett and Peterson had in steering this through a large group of people was balancing several of them – between specificity and generalization, one set of values and another set of values, and fending off the natural tendency of analysts to enumerate 55,000 technologies and their appropriate uses. It’s something that is relatively easy to internalize and has a timeless quality. Anything that is worth pledging has to stand for something. It doesn’t bind[…]