example

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/VXZVXiFgV6Y/tableau-public-brings-your-boring-data-to-life

Windows only: Free application Tableau Public creates beautiful visualizations from your data and lets you publish them to the web, where users can interact with your charts and graphs with live updates.

The video above provides a great overview of how the tool works. Essentially, you import your data into the desktop Windows application, then play around with different charts, graphs, or other options until you find the visualization or visualizations that best fit your data. When you’re happy with what you’ve put together, you can save the outcome to the web, which uploads the charts to the Tableau Public servers. From there you can embed it on any web page YouTube-style), and users can drill down into the data to their heart’s content.

Here’s an example of Tableau Public in action from a post on the Wall Street Journal:

Dashboard at 570
Dashboard at 570

Tableau Public is a free download for Windows, and looks like a great tool to try out next time you’re looking to make your otherwise boring data come to life. Update: Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Tableau Public is only free on a trial basis; its actual price tag is extremely hefty. (Though if you’re a student you can get it for as little as $69.)

Double Update: Actually, looks like Tableau Public is free after all! Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“People can download the free tool and publish their visualizations of their data for free. Tableau Public includes a free desktop product that you can download and use to publish interactive data visualizations to the web. The Tableau Public desktop saves work to the Tableau Public web servers – nothing is saved locally on your computer. All data saved to Tableau Public will be accessible by everyone on the internet, so be sure to work only with [publicly] available (and appropriate) data.

When people want to analyze their private or confidential data (particularly data in data warehouses and other large databases), then they may want to consider our commercial products.”

Tableau Public [via MakeUseOf]

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Monday, March 8th, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

The iPod Touch Is This Generation’s Tamagotchi

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/SM6HjEBs9Ok/the-ipod-touch-is-this-generations-tamagotchi

All these wonderful things we’re learning today, from data! First, we find out that Android is a guy thing. Now, we discover that the iPod Touch shares more demographics with glittering vampires than smartphones. iPod Touch: Kid stuff.

The age distribution makes a lot of sense, especially with the direct available comparison of the iPhone: the iPod Touch is a good gift, a plausible purchase, and a good investment for a young person right now. An iPhone with a $70-a-month minimum contract is a tougher sell, either to parents, or to kids mostly supported by their parents.

And these kids don’t just buy different gadgets than adults—they use them differently, too. For example, they looooove apps:
But they’re stingy little bastards, these kids:
Buying an app can be tough without a credit card, so again, this isn’t shocking. But it does poke a little hole in the idea of the iPod Touch as a massive moneymaker for Apple. Hardware sales are tremendous and highly profitable, sure, but once the devices are in users’ soft little baby hands, they don’t keep raking it in like the iPhone does. [AdMob]

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Thursday, February 25th, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

"We Are Not Prepared"

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/washington-war-games-simulate-crippling-cyber-attack-us

Washington insiders recently sweated out a real-time war game where a cyberattack crippled cell phone service, Internet and even electrical grids across the U.S. The unscripted, dynamic simulation allowed former White House officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center to study the problems that might arise during a real cyberattack emergency, according to Aviation Week’s Ares Defense Blog.

The Policy Center’s vice-president reports “”The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks.”

The nightmarish scenario that unfolded represented a worst-case example. As former secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff noted, many cyberattacks can be stopped if individual cell phone or Internet users simply follow the best practices and use the right tools. Similarly, another participant pointed out that private Internet companies would not sit idly by as a virus ran amok.

A collapse of power across the U.S. also only took place when the simulation brought in factors such as high demand during the summer, a hurricane that had damaged power supply lines, and coordinated bombings that accompanied the cyberattack and subsequent failure of the Internet.

Still, the war game highlighted crucial issues about the government’s own reliance upon communications that might go down during a real-life scenario. One of the biggest problems was how the President ought to respond to a situation that caused damage like warfare but lacked an immediately identifiable foreign adversary. Smaller-scale cyberattacks have already complicated real-world diplomacy, such as the alleged Chinese cyberattacks on Google and other U.S. companies.

Ares Defense Blog questioned a curious missing element from the simulation, in that there was no mention of what happened to phone or Internet service in the rest of the world. Surely a nation that decided to launch cyberattacks against the U.S. would take safeguards to protect its own crucial communication services, which would possibly help U.S. officials narrow down the list of suspects.

Another question seemed more mundane but equally important — how would the government activate the National Guard with cell phone service down?

The Pentagon’s DARPA science lab recently pushed for a “Cyber Genome Program” that could trace digital fingerprints to cyberattack culprits. But identifying whether a cyber attack came from individual civilians, shadowy hacker associations or government cyber-warriors has proven tricky in the meantime.

[via Ares Defense Blog]

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Friday, February 19th, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

The numbers vary depending on who you ask or whose data you use

Bing search volume continues to drop despite tons of ads and cheating — redirecting traffic from live.com, msn.com, microsoft.com, and windows search (see also – http://bit.ly/7qDBEz) .

January 13, 2010

The Nielsen Company today reported December 2009 data for the top U.S. Search Providers.

MegaView Search data – including total searches, unique searchers, search share, and all other search figures – cannot be trended with search results prior to October 2009 due to recent methodology changes.

search-volumes-comparison

Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider. Example:  An estimated 6.7 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 67.3 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.

versus Oct 2009 numbers from hitwise

experian-hitwise-percentage-us-searches-leading-search-engine-provider-september-2009

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Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 analytics, search No Comments

Facebook is going down – pageviews, average stay, pages per visit – why?

From the Compete charts below, it is clear that Facebook is seeing a decline in pageviews, average stay, and pages per visit.  But why?

I know that I have reduced the time I spend on Facebook and I have also reduced the number of messages and other social actions as well.  And I have deleted virtually all of my personal and family photos and will not upload any more. These may be the first signs of a waning of Facebook due to a number of factors.

I can’t get my stuff back out

For example, Facebook has stated that it will not participate in OpenSocial because they do not want people to be able to export their content, conversations, photos, etc, out of Facebook and use on another social network. I am concerned that I will not be able to retrieve or back up content which I believe is mine. I like to have control over my family photos, conversations with friends, etc. I am willing to accept as a “cost” of using the Facebook system the fact that they know who my friends are.  But I am less willing or unwilling to continue putting my content where I cannot get it back, in its entirety.  (Google Docs, for example, just launched a feature where you can back up everything back out of Google Docs into Microsoft Office formats).

Ads in the stream, erosion of trust

A second issue mentioned in a previous post is the increase in advertising on Facebook and also the more unscrupulous practice of injecting ads “into the stream” — ads masquerading as status updates. These are harmful to the overall trust built up in the community and I have un-friended quite a few people whose accounts were clearly used to promote events, products, etc.

Ad-effectiveness sucks

From a prior post – http://bit.ly/EhiW9 – Facebook advertising metric are absolutely abysmal. They keep trying to sell advertisers on the hundreds of billions of pageviews they throw off. But advertisers are getting smarter and more and more of them will buy ads on a cost-per-click basis (instead of CPM, cost per thousand impressions basis).  This means that the ad revenues that Facebook enjoyed from gross INefficiencies will be decimated.


facebook-pageviews

facebook-average-stay

facebook-pages-per-visit

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Friday, October 30th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

What viral videos look like; what non-viral videos look like — by the stats

The first 2 are viral videos – notice the shape of the “total views curve” (quick rise and approaches the max asymptotically). The last 2 videos are not viral, and supported by paid advertising and promotion. It is a straight line that grows steadily over time. The 2 examples of non-viral videos were chosen simply to have similar view counts as the first and second examples.

Viral video examples – notice the asymptotic curve towards the max on the total views chart.

Frozen Grand Central ImprovEverywhere viral video – 18 million views – added on Jan 31, 2009.  ”Other/viral” gave it its first big boost and embedded views gave it another big push.
frozen-grand-central-improveverywhere-viral

No Pants Subway Ride ImprovEverywhere viral video – 9 million views – uploaded January 13, 2009; got onto YouTube homepage and got a major boost from it.

no-pants-subway-ride-improveverywhere-viral

NON-viral video examples – notice the straight line of the total views chart.

corbin-bleu-non-viral-video

ashley-tisdale-non-viral-video

Perfect example of NON-viral video that had help with paid media – in this case, GoDaddy supported these videos with costly Superbowl ads — which led to nice bumps-up in total views.

godaddy-viral-non-viral-videos

In the case of Smirnoff’s Tea Partay, it was not supported by paid media so it took longer to grow and the shape of the curve is a nice blend between the straight line of a non-viral video and the asymptotic line of a viral video.

tea-partay-partially-viral-video

Finally, blatant ads don’t go viral – Sony’s grand central product demo stunt. And even if they are discussed in dozens of blogs it is not enough to get past the first tipping point.

sony-grand-central-stunt-video

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Friday, July 31st, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Lift in search volume indicates that customers …

… saw the ad, recalled it, and thought it relevant enough at the time to make the effort to take action — search for more information about it (beyond the tidbit of info contained in the 30 second ad, print ad, radio spot, or banner ad).

But traditional ads are still very very costly and inefficient due to the extremely large media cost.

For example, at the extreme cost of a Superbowl ad, the following advertisers were able to drive fleeting (short-lived) lift in search volume: godaddy, etrade, sobe lifewater, dennys.

godaddy-search-volume

etrade-baby-search-volume

sobe-lifewater-search-volume

dennys-superbowl-search-volume

related: http://go-digital.net/blog/2009/03/lift-in-search-due-to-paid-tv-advertising/

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Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Branding is still a useful activity? Reach and frequency is still a useful metric?

Source: http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/analytics/archive/2009/07/06/getting-back-to-basics-why-web-advertising-needs-traditional-media-metrics.aspx

Getting Back to Basics – Why Web Advertising Needs Traditional Media Metrics

posted Mon, Jul 06 2009

by Young Bean Song MSFT

Trying to build a brand marketing campaign without traditional target reach and Gross Rating Points (GRP) estimates is like trying to diet without the concept of calories. The analogy of dieting and advertising works on many levels.

continue reading Young Bean Song…

My response…

RE: “Patty Wakeling, an industry veteran who leads Unilever’s Global Media Insights Group, recently reminded me that in today’s retail environment, the choice between the branded versus the generic option are separated by less than an inch on the shelf. It was a sobering reminder of the power of branding, and why so many companies are willing to spend so much to build their brand equity.” But in the case of Whole Foods’ own store brand, 365, many people perceive it to be better than branded options (or at least equivalent). So they tend to choose to buy the 365 product instead. In other cases, what used to be brand equity/value is now perceived as an undesirable premium. Take another example — the rise and popularity of Trader Joe’s where 80% of the products sold are house brands. Consumers care about the product and its quality and value; consumers no longer care (as much) about the brand that is slapped on the package if the contents inside suck.

A brand used to be a mark or symbol burned onto a cow’s butt to signify what ranch it came from. And if people knew the ranch had a good reputation for raising healthy cows, they would buy the cow. The brand helped simplify the purchase decision. These days, advertisers carefully manicure “brand messages” and shout them at target consumers using various one-way channels such as TV, print, radio, and banner ads. But like Scott Cook, Intuit, said, “A brand is no longer wht we tell the consumer its – its what the consumers tell each other it is.” So branding as we know it (advertisers shouting claims at target customers) is less relevant or even unwanted entirely by modern consumers. And brand equity, which used to be a large, fungible item on the balance sheet (technically known as “good will”) may be far less valuable today. Consumers don’t just take the advertisers’ word for it; they will do their own research and buy what is actually valuable and useful.

Companies that actually develop useful and valueable products or services that consistently deliver on their promise — Apple, Drobo, Zappos, JetBlue, etc. — can even cut out their brand advertsing entirely because their brand IS their consistent delivery on the promise of value and usefulness. For example, has Apple EVER claimed they have awesome design and are easy to use? NEVER! But their products consistently deliver on those 2 attributes. So that’s how modern users would describe Apple’s brand to their friends.

A “brand” is earned over time. “Branding” is no longer a useful activity (and furthermore it is damned expensive — media costs — and ineffective — because it is the advertiser making claims that modern consumers don’t believe, assuming they saw the ad in the first place).

From AdAge — people buying private label, generics, or store brands (quality of which are pretty comparable to name brands)

Private Labels winning the battle of the brands
http://adage.com/article?article_id=134791

What do you think?

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Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 Uncategorized 3 Comments