It was International Workers’ Day on Saturday and the official release day of Lyzasoft’s latest product: its foray into “free.” It’s a good way to say “power to the people.”

Some people associate that slogan with protests and even violence. But I think the best paths to power usually involve well-analyzed data, whether in public life or at work. Now the Little Guy has a potent new tool to deploy.

Lyzasoft founder Scott Davis calls Lyza on Lyza Commons “the YouTube of data.” This fully functional cloud-based version of Lyza is a strong tool for office-based, home-based, cubbyhole-based, dorm-based, or public library wifi-based users and groups. Import your data from whatever sources you have, refine it, share it with to whomever you like, and even charge toll over Paypal if you want to.

“Obviously,” Scott says, “what we’re doing is saying, ‘This thing can scale.’ But instead of going for the uber-enterprise as our leading play, we’re saying that what’s unique about this technology is it can make it to everybody within a small and medium business without having to have a big IT team around.”

Lyzasoft’s second, paid tier serves customers who need private clouds. That version starts at “small” for $150 a month, seating up to 10 users and providing “plenty” of storage. Go upward through “medium” and into “large,” and you pay $2500 a month for up to 200 users.

Wait, you say. You’ve heard this “YouTube of data” thing before. Yes, just three months ago another YouTube of data launched, Tableau Public. (I wrote about it here.) Tableau, Lyza, and YouTube itself all say “power to the people” by popularizing a medium with free, easy-to-use tools and a venue. Each one’s growing crowd of Little Guys and their audiences turns into a movement that the those in executive suites can’t help but notice. At some point, YouTube and those who follow its model hope that “free” leads enough customers to “ka-ching” to yield a profit.

YouTube seems to be well on the way. Its ready-to-roll movie theater had fired the imaginations in a waiting mob. These filmmakers-to-be had been trained over years of TV and movies to understand film and crave a chance to do their own.

Is there a waiting mob of would-be data analysts? One pioneer of free analytics is skeptical. LucidEra founder Ken Rudin, now vice president of analytics at Zynga, says you need more than free tools, no matter how easy the tools are to use. He says, “Tools are only as valuable as the questions you ask.” One of his biggest hurdles was getting customers to appreciate the possibilities of analytics.

But the YouTube idea is more than tools. It’s a game and a self-reinforcing mob. The tiny films YouTube users make don’t just play as if on a jukebox, they’re scored, they’re answered, and commented on. It’s like the difference between voting in a little booth and going out on a street march. It reinforces and stimulates. Unlike most business environments, it asks people to play, which is how Lyza Commons and Tableau Public users will break out into creative and incisive data analysis.

I also hope there’s a new supply of analysts. Ken Rudin and others are hungry for them. (In fact, if you’re a data analyst and you want to work with cutting-edge technology and data in one of the world’s largest databases, email Ken today at krudin@zynga.com.)

Power to the data analysts!

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 Zynga games every day. It’s the leading online social gaming platform, according to Ken, and it’s grown from zero in 2007 to revenues of “a few” hundred million dollars annual revenue. Every day, the company captures 20 to 30 billion records of data, and Ken and his team use that data to improve revenue, viral marketing — and customer retention.

Zynga players play free. The revenue comes in a few dollars at a time for “virtual goods.” In the popular game FarmVille, for example, a player might get tired of the old-fashioned plow. The tractor upgrade costs $2.

“There are tons of different ways you can think about retention,” he laughs, “and which one should we use?”

How do you know when a customer has left? “Unless we don’t get a note saying, ‘Hi, we’re no longer playing,’ how do we know?”

Of course, no player’s going to make it that easy, so how long should Zynga wait before considering the player gone? A week? A man could have dropped his virtual pitchfork for a real vacation — or he could have plowed the last row.

Ken dealt with analytics all the time at LucidEra, but games were new to him. He’s learned a few things.

“It turns out, as you might imagine, that it depends on the game,” he says. The average simulation-game player tends to visit frequently, for example. Poker players, though, are much more likely to come back after, say, a three-month gap.

The retention curve also varies by the length of each player’s tenure. A new player who stays away 30 days is much less likely to return than a player who’s been at Zynga for years. Ken now puts users in three basic tenure buckets: “new,” “mature,” and “elder.”

Whatever question you try to answer, it has to be actionable. “There are metrics, and there are metrics that matter,” he says. If volume plunges, were the missing players mostly new ones? If so, it could indicate frustration; perhaps the games need better tutorials or less functionality at the beginning. Or were most of the missing the long-term customers? If so, perhaps the games haven’t offered enough challenge.

Ken expects growth when the economy improves. “When we look at what happens over holidays, such as July Fourth and Thanksgiving, usage really drops. Then it picks up as people go back to work,” he says. “[The games] are part of their routine. On vacation, players break their routines. They sleep late and spend more time with family. They don’t play the game.”

“It’s fascinating,” says Ken. “In analytics, so much of the problem is figuring out what the question really is.”

I think he means that it’s a great game.

Here are two tips from LucidEra veterans Ken Rudin and Darren Cunningham about BI in the mid-market: Forget “freemium” — the new term for free service leading to paid service — and be wary of users’ ability to analyze data.

Rudin co-founded the company and in June saw it fold for lack of renewed funding — in spite of what he described as “extremely happy customers” and a rapidly growing base. At the end, Rudin was chief marketing officer and Cunningham was vice president of marketing.

Unlike in sales to enterprises, the mid-market customers LucidEra pitched typically lacked skill in data analysis and had little time to learn.

At first, LucidEra offered a 90-day free trial of its SaaS analytics — the “free” model, which assumes non-paying customers are completely self-service. That failed. Half the prospects said it was great, said Rudin, but the other half balked.

“We asked them, ‘Well, didn’t it meet your needs?’” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘No, we just don’t see any value there.’” His voice rose as he recalled his surprise and exasperation. These customers had been using nothing more than spreadsheets. “It made no sense to me. How could they get no value?”

When he questioned further, he found they’d been doing “essentially nothing interesting” with the service. They had been running the simplest reports, not asking new questions or reaching for new insight in any way.

“We were offering a powerful tool,” he said, “and they were saying they didn’t know what to do with this thing.” He compared it to installing an MRI machine in someone’s living room and expecting the person to diagnose themselves.

“Free” has worked for some BI-related vendors — he mentioned Salesforce.com and Jaspersoft — but never to untrained users who must be convinced of the value.

LucidEra dropped free trials and instead offered the free Pipeline Healthcheck. It was a cookie-cutter approach, said Rudin, to demonstrate the value. He compared it to a routine medical checkup. Any doctor knows if the patient’s blood pressure is too high, as any analyst can tell if salespeople should let go of dead prospects sooner.

Customers liked it. Many came away with pages of notes from the discussion about what to do. For example, LucidEra found a significant opportunity for a cable company in the Northeast.

At first, Pipeline Healthcheck seemed to work. Then usage fell off. When LucidEra called to ask why, customers explained, “When you came out here and told us all that stuff, that was great. But we can’t remember what you did. We just aren’t as good a this as you are, so we can’t use it.”

Several customers asked if they could simply buy the analysis service. They wanted LucidEra to come in once a quarter and do a health check. “Instead of having an MRI machine,” said Rudin, “they just wanted a doctor.”

Cunningham said, “Don’t overestimate people’s ability to interpret data.”

That’s why we have professional data analysts.

In the film “Night on Earth,” Italian comic Roberto Benigni plays a taxi driver tooling around Rome one August morning at four. His flag’s up, he’s bored, and the streets are empty. “Dove sono i romani?” he asks himself, “Where are all the Romans?”

Where were all the BI people last week? Did they all go to Munich or Tehran? Or were they just resting up for the recovery?

Then I checked Twitter. Many of them had been there all the time. Still, I was bored.

Then on Saturday, Ken Rudin’s email came in announcing his new address. On Monday, LucidEra’s sad news.

At 4 on recent mornings, I suppose LucidEra execs were wide awake and staring into the dark. Mark Madsen emailed that he had an inkling, but I was surprised. This wasn’t supposed to happen. LucidEra was one of the interesting companies, one of the bright lights. In January, I had written a column for TDWI about possible expansion of the Pipeline Healthcheck. Others would go down, but not them.

On the other hand, it was a startup. They often fail, especially now. And I’m sure that chief marketing officer and co-founder Rudin and vice president of marketing Darren Cunningham will land well.

The movie is more fun. Someone finally hails the cab, a priest. The driver feels no reverence. He invents a long “confession” to amuse himself, and it works so well on the drive across town that he doesn’t notice the priest’s fatal heart attack.

Swap out a few terms in a recent New York Times story about farmers’ attempt to split California, and you might see the IT vs. business saga.

A quote halfway through caught my eye: “The agricultural industry is in this mode that says, ‘You will eat what’s put in front of you,’ and that’s a very condescending view of consumers and eaters. If customers are changing their preferences, the industry needs to change its ways.” Earlier in the story, an old farmer complains, “Those Hollywood types don’t have any idea what’s going on out here on the farms.”

Big Agriculture — affectionately shortened to Big Ag — seems analogous to the enigmatic Big BI. We can map food shoppers to business users, and back again.

The vast, quietly desperate majority settle for pre-packaged solutions, whether frozen dinners or standard reports. Most see little reason to change, or else they hate it all but see no way out. Locally grown produce? New ways of looking at the data? Yeah, right.

Some turn to alternatives like LucidEra, DataSelf and Birst, the on-demand chefs. They’re for people with food in the kitchen, of any origin, who don’t know what to do with it all or don’t have time.

Then we have the do-it-yourselfers. Those who insist they “need nothing fancy” prefer Excel, perhaps with the Veg-O-Matic add-in for slicing and dicing.

What to some food users is “fancy” is to others a cause to celebrate, and tools like Tableau Desktop and Lyza stay as close as the chef’s knife.

Tableau users are the Alice Waters of the data crowd: foraging local and remote sources, tasting, combining and trying out new concepts every day on friends in the kitchen and often at dinner parties. To them, data’s more than food, it’s the fire, too.

Lyza users also forage for eventual presentation, but at heart they may be more like old-time homesteaders. They thrash, mill and grind to extract the best they can get. They’ll wallow in muddy data if it means finding something better there. They’d rather do that than let someone else do it for them.

Meanwhile, back at Big Ag, the old farmer’s been out at shopping malls testing support for his initiative to split the state in two. He says, “I’m an old hound dog. If I’m barking up a tree, I want to know how many squirrels are up there.” I think he’s barking at data, not food.