economy

Mapping the many faces of “retention”

January 15, 2010

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 [...]

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San Francisco cab driver’s dashboard

July 13, 2009

I asked a San Francisco taxi driver I happened to sit next to about indicators he sees. I didn’t mean “low oil,” I meant big things. Whether the economy is still falling or not, for one. Figure out how to collect tip data from cabbies and waiters and you’ve have a good early indicator of [...]

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“Going through the roof” at Corda

October 31, 2008

Evidence came in yesterday afternoon that, so far, BI is doing well in the new economy. Greg Turman, director of sales for the Western Region at Corda, phoned to say, “I’m going through the roof,” by which he means sales are good. “I’m seeing tremendous startup activity. People are saying, ‘I can no longer guess. [...]

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Craving value: sparks for a new economic engine

October 30, 2008

It’s hard to see through the smoke as our financial house burns down, I know. But what I’ve noticed is more interesting: the first signs of rebuilding. This month, three experts I read—visual analytics expert Stephen Few, Competing on Analytics author Tom Davenport and digital-media economy specialist Umair Haque—all seem to have knit recent blog [...]

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A proto-dashboard that worked

March 29, 2008

Back in 1971 Chile’s newly elected socialists dreamed of what today we’d call a dashboard, and it was to run the country. They actually did build it, and just 15 months after conception it was good enough to thwart a nationwide strike.

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When economists say “slowdown”

March 23, 2008

If there’s one reliable sign that a recession is coming, it’s when the experts say they see none coming. I’ve survived four. “Oh, maybe a slowdown, yes…” they say. Now, in today’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg argues that what’s unlikely is a “full blown depression.” Quoth Duhigg: Why? Because so many of them have [...]

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