Stanford Online Courses Delayed Indefinitely

Message from Stanford –

Dear Ajay Ohri,

We’re very excited for the forthcoming launch of Course Name. We’re sorry not to have gotten in touch lately – we’ve been busy generating lots of content, and the system is working really well. Unfortunately, there are still a few administrative i’s to dot and t’s to cross. We’re still hopeful that we’ll go live very soon – we hope not more than a few weeks late.

But since we don’t have a firm timeline right now, we’d rather leave this open and get back to you with a definitive date soon (rather than just promise you a date that’s far enough in the future that we can feel confident about it). We’ll let you know a firm date as soon as we possibly can.

We realize that some of you will have made plans around expecting the course to start in January, and we apologize for any difficulties that this delay may cause.

The good news is that the course is looking great, and we’re thrilled that over X,000 of you have signed up – we can’t wait for the course to start!

See you soon online!

Course Name Course Staff

Some interesting stats (and note the relative numbers)-

67,000 signups for Technology Entrepreneurship

58,000 signups for Cryptography

44,000 signups for Machine Learning

50,000 signups for Design and Analysis of Algorithms

Also see-

http://see.stanford.edu/

and

Check out these other courses:

Entrepreneurship

Computer Science

Jim Kobielus on 2012

Jim Kobielus revisits the predictions he made in 2011 (and a summary of 2010) , and makes some fresh ones for 2012. For technology watchers, this is an article by one of the gurus of enterprise software.

All of those trends predictions (at http://www.decisionstats.com/brief-interview-with-james-g-kobielus/ ) came true in 2011, and are in full force in 2012 as well.Here are my predictions for 2012, and the links to the 3 blogposts in which I made them last month:

The Year Ahead in Next Best Action? Here’s the Next Best Thing to a Crystal Ball!

The next-best-action market will continue to coalesce around core solution capabilities.
Data scientists will become the principal application developers for next best action.
Real-world experiments will become the new development paradigm in next best action.

The Year Ahead in Advanced Analytics? Advances on All Fronts!

Open-source platforms will expand their footprint in advanced analytics.
Data science centers of excellence will spring up everywhere.
Predictive analytics and interactive exploration will enter the mainstream BI user experience:

The Year Ahead In Big Data? Big, Cool, New Stuff Looms Large!

Enterprise Hadoop deployments will expand at a rapid clip.
In-memory analytics platforms will grow their footprint.
Graph databases will come into vogue.

And in an exclusive and generous favor for DecisionStats, Jim does some crystal gazing for the cloud computing field in 2012-

Cloud/SaaS EDWs will cross the enterprise-adoption inflection point. In 2012, cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise data warehouses (EDWs), offered on a public subscription basis, will gain greater enterprise adoption as a complement or outright replacement for appliance- and software-based EDWs. A growing number of established and startup EDW vendors will roll out cloud/SaaS “Big Data” offerings. Many of these will supplement and extend RDBMS and columnar technologies with Hadoop, key-value, graph, document, and other new database architectures.

About-

http://www.forrester.com/rb/analyst/james_kobielus

James G. Kobielus
Senior Analyst

RESEARCH FOCUS

James serves Business Process & Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He is a leading expert on data warehousing, predictive analytics, data mining, and complex event processing. In addition to his core coverage areas, James contributes to Forrester’s research in business intelligence, data integration, data quality, and master data management.

PREVIOUS WORK EXPERIENCE

James has a long history in IT research and consulting and has worked for both vendors and research firms. Most recently, he was at Current Analysis, an IT research firm, where he was a principal analyst covering topics ranging from data warehousing to data integration and the Semantic Web. Prior to that position, James was a senior technical systems analyst at Exostar (a hosted supply chain management and eBusiness hub for the aerospace and defense industry). In this capacity, James was responsible for identifying and specifying product/service requirements for federated identity, PKI, and other products. He also worked as an analyst for the Burton Group and was previously employed by LCC International, DynCorp, ADEENA, International Center for Information Technologies, and the North American Telecommunications Association. He is both well versed and experienced in product and market assessments. James is a widely published business/technology author and has spoken at many industry events.

Contact –

Twitter: http://twitter.com/jameskobielus

SAS Institute Financials 2011

SAS Institute has release it’s financials for 2011 at http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/2011financials.html,

Revenue surged across all solution and industry categories. Software to detect fraud saw a triple-digit jump. Revenue from on-demand solutions grew almost 50 percent. Growth from analytics and information management solutions were double digit, as were gains from customer intelligence, retail, risk and supply chain solutions

AJAY- and as a private company it is quite nice that they are willing to share so much information every year.

The graphics are nice ( and the colors much better than in 2010) , but pie-charts- seriously dude there is no way to compare how much SAS revenue is shifting across geographies or even across industries. So my two cents is – lose the pie charts, and stick to line graphs please for the share of revenue by country /industry.

In 2011, SAS grew staff 9.2 percent and reinvested 24 percent of revenue into research and development

AJAY- So that means 654 million dollars spent in Research and Development. I wonder if SAS has considered investing in much smaller startups (than it’s traditional strategy of doing all research in-house and completely acquiring a smaller company)

Even a small investment of say 5-10 million USD in open source , or even Phd level research projects could greatly increase the ROI on that.

That means

Analyzing a private company’s financials are much more fun than a public company, and I remember the words of my finance professor ( “dig , dig”) to compare 2011 results with 2010 results.

http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/2010financials.html

The percentage invested in R and D is exactly the same (24%) and the percentages of revenue earned from each geography is exactly the same . So even though revenue growth increased from 5.2 % to 9% in 2011, both the geographic spread of revenues and share R&D costs remained EXACTLY the same.

The Americas accounted for 46 percent of total revenue; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 42 percent; and Asia Pacific 12 percent.

Overall, I think SAS remains a 35% market share (despite all that noise from IBM, SAS clones, open source) because they are good at providing solutions customized for industries (instead of just software products), the market for analytics is not saturated (it seems to be growing faster than 12% or is it) , and its ability to attract and retain the best analytical talent (which in a non -American tradition for a software company means no stock options, job security, and great benefits- SAS remains almost Japanese in HR practices).

In 2010, SAS grew staff by 2.4 percent, in 2011 SAS grew staff by 9 percent.

But I liked the directional statement made here-and I think that design interfaces, algorithmic and computational efficiencies should increase analytical time, time to think on business and reduce data management time further!

“What would you do with the extra time if your code ran in two minutes instead of five hours?” Goodnight challenged.

Adding / to robots. text again

So I tried to move without a search engine , and only social sharing, but for a small blog like mine, that means almost 75% of traffic comes via search engines.
Maybe the ratio of traffic from search to social will change in the future,

I have now enough data to conclude search is the ONLY statistically significant driver of traffic ( for a small blog)
If you are a blogger you should definitely try and give the tools at Google Webmaster a go,

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

URL Googlebot type Fetch Status Fetch date
https://decisionstats.com/ Web Denied by robots.txt 1/19/12 8:25 PM
https://decisionstats.com/ Web Success URL and linked pages submitted to index 12/27/11 9:55 PM

Also from Google Analytics, I see that denying search traffic doesnot increase direct/ referral traffic in any meaningful way.

So my hypothesis that some direct traffic was mis-counted as search traffic due to Chrome, toolbar search – well the hypothesis was wrong 🙂

Also Google seems to drop url quite quickly (within 18 hours) and I will test the rebound in SERPs in a few hours. I was using meta tags, blocked using robots.txt, and removal via webmasters ( a combination of the three may have helped)

To my surprise search traffic declined to 5-10, but it did not become 0. I wonder why that happens (I even got a few Google queries per day) and I was blocking the “/” fron robots.txt.

Net Net- The numbers below show- as of now , in a non SOPA, non Social world, Search Engines remain the webmasters only true friend (till they come up with another panda or whatever update 😉 )

Credits

513 individuals contributed to OpenOffice.org (and whose contributions were imported into LibreOffice) or LibreOffice until 2011-11-11 09:02:38.

Developers committing code since 2010-09-28

Ruediger Timm Commits: 89832 Joined: 2000-10-10	Kurt Zenker Commits: 32763 Joined: 2000-09-25	Oliver Bolte Commits: 31795 Joined: 2000-09-19	Vladimir Glazunov Commits: 30289 Joined: 2000-12-04
Jens-Heiner Rechtien [hr] Commits: 29314 Joined: 2000-09-18	Ivo Hinkelmann Commits: 10228 Joined: 2002-09-09	Caolán McNamara Commits: 5952 Joined: 2000-10-10	Frank Schoenheit [fs] Commits: 5019 Joined: 2000-09-19
Hans-Joachim Lankenau Commits: 3077 Joined: 2000-09-19	Ocke Janssen [oj] Commits: 2861 Joined: 2000-09-20	Mathias Bauer Commits: 2606 Joined: 2000-09-20	Oliver Specht Commits: 2458 Joined: 2000-09-21
Philipp Lohmann [pl] Commits: 2132 Joined: 2000-09-21	Tor Lillqvist Commits: 2035 Joined: 2010-03-23	Stephan Bergmann Commits: 1993 Joined: 2000-10-04	Christian Lippka ORACLE Commits: 1811 Joined: 2000-09-25

We do not distinguish between commits that were imported from the OOo code base and those that went directly into the LibreOffice code base as:
a) it is technically not possible to distinguish between commits that go directly into the LibreOffice code base and commits that were merged in from the OpenOffice.org code base, and
b) contributers to the OOo code base should also be credited for the excellent work they do.

Do note that LibreOffice is divided into 20 git repositories. Pushing a change into all repositories will be counted as 20 commits as there is no way to distinguish this from 20 separate commits.

Total contributions to the TDF Wiki

1223 individuals contributed:

Author: Ajay Ohri