How Lyza stole the show at TDWI Las Vegas
Lyzasoft wasn’t among the 38 exhibitors in TDWI’s Las Vegas exhibit hall. They sponsored no part of the lunch, and they hired no stage magician. But their buzz was the loudest I heard over the event’s five days.
Others may have heard different buzz because buzz varies. Business intelligence elites gather every year at TDWI’s big [...]
Tableau Public launches visual analysis for the masses
I’m sorry to tell you serious types out there, but visual analysis is often a game — in fact, one of the best games in town with Tableau Software’s visual analysis tool. Now Tableau Public is going to bring it to the masses.
In the same way that YouTube spawned a surge of new filmmakers, Tableau [...]
Mapping the many faces of “retention”
Everybody knows what “retention” means until they have to design a metric. Ken Rudin, once of LucidEra and now general manager of analytics at the games site Zynga, thought that he and his team could “put something together” quickly — but it actually took “four solid weeks of discussion and debate.”
About 50 million people play [...]
Be a strategist, not a “geek”
Data analysts who simply explain the data and ignore managers’ real needs risk losing “strategist” status &mdash: and become just a “geek.”
No wizard, just you and the data
What’s the hardest part of training a new data analyst? Resetting the trainee’s mindset.
“They start out with the idea that there’s a right answer,” says Joe Mako.
Joe’s leaving his job — where about one year ago he began analyzing data — to go work for the producer of Lyza. Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis sees him [...]
Stalking the why: selling visual analysis
How do you show the value of visual analysis to business people? Dan Murray can show it in demos, but he keeps looking for the “magic dust” that explains in a snap.
He sees visual analysis as a key part of low-cost business intelligence at small- and medium-sized organizations — and he’s set out with evangelical [...]
Spam barely pays, says spamalytics
With all that email that piles in for vi*gra and unlucky Nigerian princes, we assume that someone, somewhere, makes tons of money on it all. But some stealthy University of California researchers at Berkeley and San Diego concluded that spammers may be easier to thwart than we thought.
Data analysts and journalists
“Heroic analysts” and journalists keep running into each other, at least in my mind. I realized that two scribbles from last Sunday about journalism can also be about data analysis:
• “… the most precious gems gathered in any journalistic journey are frequently those found around the edges of a story.”
• ” … the secret to [...]
Denial of access explained
The week before last, I told about the young data analyst who got the door slammed in his data-seeking face, and I asked “why?” This week, a veteran of the data business answered.
Denial of access
I hear a story like the one I heard this week and I want to ask the apparent villain why. There must be a reasonable explanation.
At first glance, he’s like other managers I’ve known of who throttle promising work for what seems like a personal need for control. “So tell me,” I’d like to say [...]
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