"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
If you’re like me, and have succumbed to the unpardonably bourgeois luxury of hiring a cleaner, then you may also have found yourself running around your house before the cleaner comes, picking up stray items of laundry and frantically doing the dishes. Much of this is motivated by “cleaner guilt”, but there is a more … Read more
Congratulations! You just got the call – you’ve been asked to start a data team to extract valuable customer insights from your product usage, improve your company’s marketing effectiveness, or make your boss look all “data-savvy” (hopefully not just the last one of these). And even better, you’ve been given carte blanche to go hire … Read more
As the final season of Mad Men came to a close this weekend, one of my favorite memories from Season 7 is the appearance of the IBM 360 mainframe in the Sterling Cooper & Partners offices, much to the chagrin of the creative team (whose lounge was removed to make space for the beast), especially … Read more
It’s been a busy couple of years here at Microsoft. For the dwindling few of you who are keeping track, at the beginning of 2012 I took a new job, running our “Big Data” platform for Microsoft’s Online Services Division (OSD) – the division that owns the Bing search engine and MSN, as well as … Read more
Some interesting news today: Google has fully launched the cloud-based BigQuery service that it first previewed last November. From the website: Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets—up to billions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics … Read more
Five years ago, my worldly possessions gathered together in a knotted handkerchief on the end of a stick, I set off from the shire of Web Analytics to seek my fortune among the bright lights of online advertising. I didn’t exactly become Lord Mayor of London, but the move has been a good one for … Read more
My eye was caught the other day by a question posed to the “Big Data, Low Latency” group on LinkedIn. The question was as follows: “I’ve customer looking for low latency data injection to hadoop . Customer wants to inject 1million records per/sec. Can someone guide me which tools or technology can be used for … Read more
Welcome to the second installment in my Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard series (Note to self: pick a shorter title for the next series). In the first installment, we looked at an overarching framework for thinking about ad monetization performance, comprised of a set of key measures and dimensions. In this post, we’ll … Read more
It’s that time of year again. The nights are drawing in, snow is starting to fall in the mountains, our minds turn to thoughts of turkey and Christmas pudding, and familiar faces appear: Santa, Len and Bruno, and of course, Jimmy Wales. If you are a user of Wikipedia (which, if you’re a user of … Read more
There is no shortage of pontification available about how to measure your online marketing campaigns: how to integrate social media measurement, landing page optimization, ensuring your site has the right feng shui to deliver optimal conversions, etc. But there is very little writing about the other side of the coin: if you’re the one selling … Read more