Good Bye Microsoft!

After nearly 7 years at Microsoft, I have decided to leave the company.  I’m moving back to the Silicon Valley to pursue my lifelong passion: “Make Business Intelligence a Reality for Everyone”.

The Valley has changed a lot since I left it after my stints at Business Objects, Apple and a few other Software Start-Ups. And, I will miss my Microsoft friends dearly.

The company I’ve decided to join focuses on helping organizations take advantage of the latest advances in Software AND Hardware for Business Intelligence and Analytics.

The space has evolved quickly, new opportunities have risen, and start-ups are well position to take advantage of the below 3 trends:

• Big Data – Not a new issue…but the mainstream market is now paying attention: WikiBon’s predicts that the Big Data market to hit the $50 billion mark worldwide within the next five years (see more here).
• Talent Gap – Our system cannot produce Data Scientists fast enough: see Doug Henschen’s piece on this here.  The Wall Street Journal pointed it at it again last week here.  Point is new solutions are required here.  These new solutions need to be smarter than anything available today in architecture and in approach.
• BI and IT is a four-letter word: the last 30 years have been punctuated by ownership discussions.  We need to evolve: Should IT own “BI”?  Should The business own “Business Analytics”?  I won’t pretend I have the answer, but after 30 years, results speak for themselves: 70% deployment failure rates and sub-30% adoption rate.  The space needs a new approach.  One that empowers Business Users, Data Scientists and IT to work better together to build and deploy solutions faster…without having to set up a large infrastructure.

I am delighted and honored to be able to work on the above!

I’ll also be continuing my videos so Ping me at future-bi.tv if you want to be part of this new adventure!

Silicon Valley Forum on Big Data

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to keynote the “Silicon Valley Big Data Analytics Conference” in San Francisco.

The event is brilliantly organized by SVForum, an organization which gathers technologists, entrepreneurs and start-up leaders in the Bay Area.  The session was recorded and last 38mins.  To avoid you the hassle to watch the entire keynote, I thought I’d highlight a few sections you might find interesting:

• How a European Railroad leader comes upon the Big Data challenge here
• Why “Data” in “Big Data” isn’t the point here (the story of Klout).
• How the AC Milan Football Club finds out about Big Data here.
• Why Data is the cheapest commodity on Earth here.
• Why the “Data Scientist Issue” is not about scarcity but rather about accessibility here.
• Why Marketing matters in the world of Data – I’m not just talking infographics here.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.  Let me know!

 

Data to Kill Death

There is no doubt the Quantified Self movement is growing and gathering mainstream attention.  In this post, I talk about how the data movement will allow us to lead better lives.  Below a quick preview of the first paragraph.  Read more directly on Forbes.com and let me know what you think!

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“I’m sitting at the doctor’s office the other day for yet another visit.  The facility is equipped with the latest technology: my check-in is processed via an automated kiosk, and my surgeon flips through medical records via a browser.  He explains that looking at MRIs is faster via “the Cloud” than from a CD: “server processing is more appropriate here”, he says.  When did doctors understand so much about technology?

To be fair, my doctor will need all the technology available if he is to extend my “soccer career”: over the past 24 months, I’ve fractured my pelvis, sustained a double sports hernia and broke my left ankle”.

More on Forbes here

Ready For Facebook?

Ahead of Facebook’s IPO, I thought I’d republish two of the Forbes posts I posted over the last year covering Facebook.

I hope these can help – feel free to go straight to Forbes.com to get the full articles and comment!

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Facebook Changes Everything

Facebook is expected to reach 1 billion users this summer and the company is assumed to be getting ready for a $100B IPO.  While it’s hard to imagine that, 10 years ago, the social network didn’t exist, its growth (from 1 million to 1 billion users in 8 years) is not only a sign of what “has been” but more importantly of what “will be” in the tech industry over the next 10 years.

 

Video: Social Media As Strategy

 

More @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/01/19/facebook-changes-everything/

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Why LinkedIn is More Valuable than Facebook

Investors started the year excited, then disappointed, about the potential of a Facebook IPO and a $50B valuation.   But fortunately, the upcoming LinkedIn IPO and its $2B valuation gives them an opportunity to get in the game and cash in on the much talked-about “social network” trend.

The LinkedIn IPO is indeed exciting, but if you are an executive, you should spend more than just your money on LinkedIn – you should spend time understanding how the social network works, and how its model can help you build better applications for your organization.

LinkedIn offers many practices that organizations should follow when building internal applications.  In this post, I’ll focus on two: how LinkedIn thinks about productivity, and its approach to data.

“Time In App”

Most productivity applications measure success by the number of hours its users spend in it.  For example, we know that Facebook represents about 12% of your internet time.  According to Nielsen Research, internet users spend close to 5X more time on Facebook than YouTube.  So Facebook wins, right?  Wrong!  While “time in app” might appear to be a great gauge for stickiness, LinkedIn’s CEO argues that it might not be the right measurement (see Jeff Wiener’s explanation at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference here).

While Facebook’s drive towards advertising dollars might justify the importance of the ‘time in app’ metric (you might have noticed Facebook’s recent advertising addition to your photos?) – LinkedIn focuses on productivity for its members (LinkedIn makes money via ads, but member services and enterprise hiring services are also part of its business model).

More @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/02/16/why-linkedin-is-more-valuable-than-facebook/

Half A Million Views And Increasing… Is This Show Hot Or What?

We’re more than a little thrilled to give you a quick recap of our successful first season of Bizintelligence TV.  In this video, I highlight just a few of the many great episodes we had the pleasure of bringing to you…. watch the video all the way through and catch some bloopers we collected along the way….:)

Preview of our Twitter Analytics Solution (via @Scobleizer)

I had the honor of being interviewed by Robert Scoble on the work our team has done to let anyone get access to great analytics from twitter. Check it out below and let us know what you think!

 

 

What Does MC Hammer Have To Do With Analytics?

In this special episode of BITV, I share thoughts on the upcoming trends in information management and their adoption into mainstream thinking.

I talk about Cloud, Social Media and Data Mashups….and of course M.C. Hammer!

Gary Wolf from the Quantified Self…on Personal Analytics

You probably did not notice if your right eye twitched this morning. And you might not have attached any meaning to it, if you did notice. However, Gary Wolf, a contributing editor for Wired Magazine, sees such subtle observations as a pathway to self-illumination.

“It turns out involuntary movement of the muscles in your face is associated with moods and emotions,” he says. “Awareness of your facial muscles gives you an access point to your moods and emotions you wouldn’t otherwise have.”

 

Your #1 Resource is your Time -> Manage it through better Analytics!

Your Time is YOUR #1 Resource! So, manage it better….and use Analytics and Data to do so. In this relaxed, and *I hope* funny video, we talk about a great software product we just released and that you can take advantage of to manage your time better!

John Hollinger, the ultimate entrepreneur of Basketball Analytics!

Starting as a hobby, John Hollinger parlayed his love of sports and analytics into a career in sports analytics, and has had a major influence on basketball analytics.

One of his major contributions is the Player Efficiency Rating (PER), which takes many different factors and parlays it into a single number.

Here, John shares his passion for sports analytics and breaks down the difference between perceived performance and measured performance into a new methodology: Game Score.