What Does Watching TV Mean Today?

In the WSJ:  " ...  In Digital Era, What Does 'Watching TV' Even Mean? ... 
Study Suggests More Time Spent on Smartphones, Computers, Tablets Than Television.  .. ".   With the usual registration warnings.

Center for Business Analytics Short Courses

The Center for Business Analytics in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati is introducing a set of short courses on specialized business analytics topics. These courses are open to the public, and are taught by subject-matter experts from the University of Cincinnati and leading business analytics companies. Each course is two days in length and will be held on the University of Cincinnati Main Campus. Course descriptions and links to register for individual courses can be found here: http://business.uc.edu/analyticstraining.

Two classes will be offered this fall, one on data visualization techniques and one on data mining.

On November 7 and 8, the course “High Visibility: Using Data Visualization to Transform Data into Meaningful Insights” will be offered. This course will teach attendees a set of techniques, principles and tools to transform data at its most basic form into charts and tables that can be analyzed and presented to generate insights and spur actions. To register, see: https://www.regonline.com/UCDataVisualization. Cost to register: $595, includes all meals, parking and trial software downloads.

On November 21 and 22 the course “Data Mining in the Real World” will be offered. This course introduces data mining tools and techniques that can take messy data sets and generate surprising insights. This two-day class focuses on the challenges of building predictive models in the real world and the techniques that experienced practitioners apply when developing their models. To register, see: https://www.regonline.com/UCDataMining. Cost to register: $595, includes all meals, parking and trial software downloads.

For more information, please see http://business.uc.edu/analyticstraining or contact Mike Fry, Assistant Director for the Center for Business Analytics, at mike.fry@uc.edu or 513-556-0404.

Neuromarketing Cautions

Comments and cautions from the corporate counsel blog Lexology with criticisms of Neuromarketing technologies.  " ... an unprecedented insight into the buying brain or an expensive scam? .. "

Small Data Mashups

In TechCrunch: Have played with this kind of visual, non programming data mashup before.  It seems convenient, but only for the simplest requirements.  With caution.

Wal-Mart CMO on Measuring Innovation

In Adage:  A video.    " How Walmart Knows When Innovation Works ... Chief marketing officers should also be chief innovation officers, Walmart Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Quinn said this weekend at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference in Phoenix. That also means answering some new questions, like how to judge when innovation works and how to divide up the new work. ... " 

Urban World App Examined

Came upon the visually impressive Urban World App by McKinsey.   Free and readily downloadable for IOS or Android. The front end interface is a globe you can move around and zoom into.   You can access a large economic database by city, population segment,  study year, and region/city locations.  You can also compare regions in 2010 or 2025.   Another interface lets you look at GDP and economic center of gravity as it changed from early history to 2025.  Easy to use and impressive on a tablet.

I liked the design.  Attractive.  Comparisions can be done readily between locations.  The use of the pie chart format made it difficult to do segment comparisons.  Though it would not have looked as sexy, a set of simple bar charts would have been clearer.  You can share any displays you create, which I did on Twitter.  I have not explored it, but I assume the data is downloadable to other visualization engines?  Perhaps not, it is described as proprietary.

Well worth taking a look at.  Free, and you can be exploring in a few minutes.  Hope they continue creating other data examination tools based on this one.  A standard of visual interaction would be useful for enterprise economists.  They write:

" ... The growth of cities in emerging markets is driving the most significant economic transformation in history. The McKinsey Global Institute’s first ever app, Urban World, offers a sense of how economic power will move as this urban expansion takes place. Now available for iPad, iPhone, and Android, the app offers previously unavailable data from a proprietary MGI database of more than 2,600 cities around the world.

The app also places urbanization in a historical context, using a view from space of the global nighttime distribution of light as a proxy for the global distribution of economic activity. Users can visualize the world’s shifting center of economic gravity during the past two millennia, to 2025. The app serves a purpose similar to a 16th-century map—a rough but helpful tool to help navigate the evolving urban world. ... " 

Mathematical Shape of Things to Come

New challenges on how to deal with bigger, more complex, dynamic and disorganized data.  Some great nontechnical examples here that can give you an appreciation  of the problems being addressed. Will the mathematics of topology point the way?  See   my recent posts on GePhi as one way to explore these problems. Visualization is always the place to start doing analytics.

" ... Scientific data sets are becoming more dynamic, requiring new mathematical techniques on par with the invention of calculus.... 

In Quanta:

 ... DeDeo is not the only researcher grappling with these challenges. Across every discipline, data sets are getting bigger and more complex, whether one is dealing with medical records, genomic sequencing, neural networks in the brain, astrophysics, historical archives or social networks. Alessandro Vespignani, a physicist at Northeastern University who specializes in harnessing the power of social networking to model disease outbreaks, stock market behavior, collective social dynamics, and election outcomes, has collected many terabytes of data from social networks such as Twitter, nearly all of it raw and unstructured. “We didn’t define the conditions of the experiments, so we don’t know what we are capturing,” he said. ... " 

Serious Games for Learning

In Serious Games Market:    " ... Mecanika is a physics-based puzzle Serious Game designed by François Boucher-Genesse to help players intuitively learn classical mechanics concepts -- kinematics and dynamics. The game is the result of collaboration between the Montreal game studio CREO and the University of Quebec At Montreal

Intended for students aged 15-17, Mecanika is based on 30 years of research in the didactics of science and aims to make abstract concepts of mechanical physics, like gravity and inertia, accessible. Rather than teaching formulas, the game allows players to immediately jump into these concepts by experimenting and visualizing the effects of forces in space. .... " 

The Serious Games Market blog covers other related applications.   Note the use of virtual simulation spaces to understand the outcome of choices.    Available free and to be adapted for tablet use.

Cloud Changing Business Culture and Strategy

An interesting view.  Or has a new business culture created the need for cheap, fast and accurate sharing in new ways that have created the Cloud?

Big Science Driving Big Data

In Quanta:  How big science has created and continues to drive Big Data. This is my background so I follow it carefully.  We are finally seeing a time where the sensors of business will approach the volume of the sensors of science.

Augmented Pixels Reality Hoops Game

This continues my conversations with developers in the Augmented reality space. Here with the Ukranian firm Augmented Pixels. A new free game developed and then updated this fall is called Reality Hoops. I confirmed it will run on iPad and iPhone running IOS7.

The idea is very simple.  A moving basketball hoop is displayed in front of whatever your phone is pointed at, which provides a 'reality' background.  You flick the basketball with your finger, adjust that until it makes a hoop.  Motion and physics are smooth.   Scoring and a leader board, a challenge architecture is provided. Scoring compatible with the Apple Game Center.   It is easy to learn, and fun to play, but hardly addictive to me. Still a useful demonstration of AR and gaming.

I have been thinking about ways to integrate games and the 'augmenting' aspects of games to real spaces.   Here the integration is loose.  The local background reality is amusing, but is not augmented in any way.  It made me think about how the background could interact with the game while still being playable.

Video Demo
Free on Apple Store here
Full Press release

See also my previous description of their 3D augmented reality architectural insertion App.   Which is not a game, but more of a 3D integration and display App.

Connection via Daria Gaioshko

Shifting Urban Landscape Report

Most interesting and timely report from McKinsey: Urban world: The shifting global business landscape.  With lots of interesting graphics and statistics.

" ... Emerging markets are changing where and how the world does business. For the last three decades, they have been a source of low-cost but increasingly skilled labor. Their fast-growing cities are filled with millions of new and increasingly prosperous consumers, who provide a new growth market for global corporations at a time when much of the developed world faces slower growth as a result of aging. But the number of large companies from the emerging world will rise, as well, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). This powerful wave of new companies could profoundly alter long-established competitive dynamics around the world. ... " 

Data Scientist Code of Professional Conduct

I still have my doubts over the longevity of the term 'Data Scientist',  and now they are creating a professional society and a code of conduct.

" ... Data Scientists Create Code Of Professional Conduct
Big data practitioners develop data science guidelines for a profession where, they say, ethics are often lacking.  ... Concerned about big data's potential for misuse, a new organization of data scientists has created a set of rules for their profession..... " 

Alex Sopko Now Writing for the Washington Times

Have always been a journalist at heart.  There are useful news stories lined up in my head waiting to emerge.  I particularly love to see examples of how young journalists are advancing the use of online.   Want to help a budding journalist?  Read the below two articles, and link them in your own media to help her out.   Blogs, online, Twitter, Google+ ,  do what you can.   Its all about the links and hits.   Thanks.

Was glad to see that Alex Sopko, daughter of my friend and colleague John Sopko, has started to write for the Washington Times.  Short excerpts of two of her recent articles below with links to the full article.

" ... A video directed, filmed, and produced by the leadership team at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD has gone viral. The film, entered into Good Morning America’s “ROAR with Katy Perry” nationwide contest, is one of the top trends on Twitter and Facebook in the DC-metro area ... "  Read the whole thing.

" ... Frank Burns and his son, Cormac, made their way to the starting line. All around them runners stretched and began to warm-up. Some took a last minute sip of water. Some fixed their prosthetic legs.   ..... Burns, an active duty serviceman, and his son joined over 900 other local runners, athletes, veterans, current servicemen, and Wounded Warriors to run in the third ever McLean 5k Run with the Warriors at McLean Square on October 5.  ... "    Read the whole thing 

UPDATE 10/17/2013 :  And now also on the front page.

Health Care Innovation

HBR establishes a health care innovation center site.  " ...  Leading Health Care Innovation, a collaboration of the editors of the Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine, is an eight-week online forum devoted to helping leaders, managers, and others in health care increase value by improving patient outcomes and reducing costs. ... "

Effectiveness of Analytics

A good piece on the problem.  But ultimately it is ROI that talks.   And making sure that decision makers get the word of what is happening.    Before, during and after the work is done. Surprisingly that is often not done well.  Segmentation is useful, but not the ultimate tool. Mentions a Bloomberg study on the topic.  Of course every company uses analytics in some form, a spreadsheet or accounting report,  its the depth and careful scope of application that is in question. Most are not using it in sufficient ways.

" ... According to a survey conducted by Bloomberg in 2011 (on companies exceeding $100 Mn in revenues), 97% of these companies have embraced Analytics in some form. However, only one in four organizations believes its use of business analytics has been “very effective” in helping to make decisions.

This gap in investment and desired results might be higher in developing markets like India. While, there are bunch of reasons which contribute to this gap, one of the key reason contributing to this gap is effective customer management. ... " 

Consumer Products and Robotics

Consumer products taking cues from robotics. We did this early on.  But the economics ultimately did not make sense.  " ... Smart thermostats, drones and other consumer goods have to take complex, traditionally expensive components and make them appeal to the average buyer. TechCrunch Disrupt panelists explained their strategy. ... " 

Quoting in My Blog Posts

I was asked about how I do quotes in blog posts.    Quotes are always placed in italics, and then embedded in quote marks.  Ellipses are usually included to indicate changes in the source material. " ... Here is an example ... Final part of the quote ... "    Anything that is not in italics is my responsibility.  All quotes have a link to original material,  if available.   If there is any place I have not followed this approach, inform me and I will correct it.

Data Science for Business

Recommended to me, now scanning and and considering for further use: Data Science for Business: What you need to know about data mining and data-analytic thinking by  Foster Provost , Tom Fawcett

Book's site.  This includes a link to course notes at NYU/Stern.  Also available here.

Paper based on first chapter.

" ... This broad, deep, but not-too-technical guide introduces you to the fundamental principles of data science and walks you through the "data-analytic thinking" necessary for extracting useful knowledge and business value from the data you collect. By learning data science principles, you will understand the many data-mining techniques in use today. More importantly, these principles underpin the processes and strategies necessary to solve business problems through data mining techniques. ... " 

Tableau and Lavastorm

Tableau is meant to be easy to use.  So they have resisted adding analytics directly to their approach.   Their work with Lavastorm adds analytics, which should bring interest from some clients.

" .. Lavastorm provides the necessary tools for easy, self-service, analytics that result in a TDE file being created for Tableau users to explore. This is a marriage of the analytic process and the visual discovery process that help our users become smarter with their data.... "