"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
So, I haven’t posted on this blog in a while – must try harder. My only excuse is that I’ve been away on holiday for a few weeks (after finishing at Foviance) and then running around a little getting new laptops etc up and running now that I’m on board at Microsoft. Or maybe it’s … Read more
So here’s some news. After spending the first 36 years of my life in the UK, and the past six working for Foviance (formerly WebAbacus) in London, in October I (and my family) will be off to Seattle for a few years. The reason? A great job opportunity with MSN, as Director of Customer Intelligence. … Read more
I have just finished reading the final volume of the majestic Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson is one of my favourite writers – although generally known as an SF writer, his interests encompass commerce, cryptography, the history of science, and a whole lot else. This wide-ranging set of interests is exemplified by the scope … Read more
In a move that should generate no surprise whatsoever, Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring DeepMetrix, a Canadian web analytics firm. It’s an obvious (and sensible) move to counter the activities of Google, whose own product, Google Analytics, is a useful adjunct to Google Adwords – as well as having caused the biggest shake-down … Read more
Want to know what Web 2.0 will look like? This great collection of Web 2.0 logos is a good place to start. Seems that ‘friendly’ fonts, and the colours orange and green are the very thing for the aspiring Web 2.0 logo designers. Glad to see that the Foviance logo conforms.
As part of our research to find ways to improve the WebAbacus interface, we’ve been taking a look at some of our competitors’ latest offerings. Today, my colleague Sebastien took us through Omniture SiteCatalyst 12. Here’s a (fairly unstructured) summary of his findings. I’ll probably write this up as a proper document in due course. … Read more
Interesting article in Business Week entitled 8 Myths about Software as a Service (SaaS). It’s certainly the case that the bulk of the web analytics industry delivers its software as a service – we certainly do – and I think this trend is set to continue, with security and data privacy issues being addressed along … Read more
It’s just come to my attention (on account of installing the latest security patches for Windows from Microsoft) that a small but profound change has been made to the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX plugins (such as Flash, PDF, Quicktime and Java). Owing to a patent dispute with a no-name company called Eolas, who licensed … Read more
Found this cool experiment on the Bio Motion Lab website, which demonstrates our ability to interpret a collection of moving dots as a human (or, indeed, animal) in motion.
Nice little JS library to do nice-looking tooltips for websites. (via SwissMiss)