JMP 9 releasing on Oct 12

JMP 9 releases on Oct 12- it is a very good reliable data visualization and analytical tool ( AND available on Mac as well)

AND IT is advertising R Graphics as well (lol- I can visualize the look on some ahem SAS fans in the R Project)

Updated Pricing- note I am not sure why they are charging US academics 495$ when SAS On Demand is free for academics. Shouldnt JMP be free to students- maybe John Sall and his people can do a tradeoff analysis for this given JMP’s graphics are better than Base SAS (which is under some pressure from WPS and R)

http://www.sas.com/govedu/edu/programs/soda-account-setup.html

and http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/sas-delivers-free-data-management-and-analytics-solutions-academe

*Offer good in the U.S. only.

OFFER PRICING DETAILS
New Corporate Customer

$1,595

Save $300.

No special requirements.
ORDER NOW (WIN) ORDER NOW (MAC)
Corporate Upgrade

$795

Save $155.

Complete the form below or call 1-877-594-6567. Requires valid JMP® 8 serial number.
New Academic

$495

Save $100.

Complete the form below or call 1-877-594-6567. Requires campus street address and campus e-mail address.
Academic Upgrade

$250

Save $45.

Complete the form below or call 1-877-594-6567. Requires campus street address and campus e-mail address.

From- the mailer-

Be First in Line for JMP® 9
Save up to $300 when you pre-order a
single-user license by Oct. 11

Pre-Order JMP 9

Make JMP your analytic hub for visual data discovery with this special offer, good through Oct. 11, 2010. Pre-order a single-user license of JMP 9 – for a discount of up to $300 – and get ready for a leap in data interactivity.

Order now and enjoy the compelling new features of JMP 9 when the software is released Oct. 12. New capabilities in JMP 9 let you:

  • Optimize and simulate using your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
  • Use maps to find patterns in your geographic data.
  • Enjoy the updated look and flexibility of JMP 9 on Microsoft Windows.
  • Create and share custom add-ins that extend JMP.
  • Leverage an expanded array of advanced statistical methodologies.
  • Display analytic results from R using interactive graphics.

PRE-ORDER JMP 9

What if I already have a JMP 8 single-user license?
Great news! You can upgrade to JMP 9 for less than half the regular price.

What if I’m an annual license customer?
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Annual license customers enjoy priority access to all the latest JMP releases as soon as they become available. JMP 9 will be shipped to you automatically.

What if I work or study in the academic world?
Call 1-877-594-6567 to learn about significant discounts for students and professors through the JMP Academic Program.

Please feel free to forward this offer to interested colleagues.


Got two or more users?
A JMP® annual license is the way to go. Call for details.
1-877-594-6567

Remember: Act by Oct. 11!

JMP runs on Macintosh and Windows

Google moving on from MapReduce: rest of world still catching up

Apparently it is true as per the Register, but details in a paper next month- It is called Google Caffeine.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_caffeine_explained/

Caffeine expands on BigTable to create a kind of database programming model that lets the company make changes to its web index without rebuilding the entire index from scratch. “[Caffeine] is a database-driven, Big Table–variety indexing system,” Lipkovitz tells The Reg, saying that Google will soon publish a paper discussing the system. The paper, he says, will be delivered next month at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).

and interestingly

MapReduce, he says, isn’t suited to calculations that need to occur in near real-time.

MapReduce is a sequence of batch operations, and generally, Lipkovits explains, you can’t start your next phase of operations until you finish the first. It suffers from “stragglers,” he says. If you want to build a system that’s based on series of map-reduces, there’s a certain probability that something will go wrong, and this gets larger as you increase the number of operations. “You can’t do anything that takes a relatively short amount of time,” Lipkovitz says, “so we got rid of it.”

With Caffeine, Google can update its index by making direct changes to the web map already stored in BigTable. This includes a kind of framework that sits atop BigTable, and Lipkovitz compares it to old-school database programming and the use of “database triggers.”

but most importantly

In 2004, Google published research papers on GFS and MapReduce that became the basis for the open source Hadoop platform now used by Yahoo!, Facebook, and — yes — Microsoft. But as Google moves beyond GFS and MapReduce, Lipokovitz stresses that he is “not claiming that the rest of the world is behind us.”

But oh no!

“We’re in business of making searches useful,” he says. “We’re not in the business of selling infrastructure

But I say why not- Search is good and advertising is okay

There is more (not evil) money in infrastructure (of big data) as there is in advertising. But the advertising guys disagree

Open Source and Software Strategy

Curt Monash at Monash Research pointed out some ongoing open source GPL issues for WordPress and the Thesis issue (Also see http://ma.tt/2009/04/oracle-and-open-source/ and  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/switching-things-around/).

As a user of both going upwards of 2 years- I believe open source and GPL license enforcement are general parts of software strategy of most software companies nowadays. Some thoughts on  open source and software strategy-Thesis remains a very very popular theme and has earned upwards of 100,000 $ for its creator (estimate based on 20k plus installs and 60$ avg price)

  • Little guys like to give away code to get some satisfaction/ recognition, big guys give away free code only when its necessary or when they are not making money in that product segment anyway.
  • As Ethan Hunt said, ” Every Hero needs a Villian”. Every software (market share) war between players needs One Big Company Holding more market share and Open Source Strategy between other player who is not able to create in house code, so effectively out sources by creating open source project. But same open source propent rarely gives away the secret to its own money making project.
    • Examples- Google creates open source Android, but wont reveal its secret algorithm for search which drives its main profits,
    • Google again puts a paper for MapReduce but it’s Yahoo that champions Hadoop,
    • Apple creates open source projects (http://www.apple.com/opensource/) but wont give away its Operating Source codes (why?) which help people buys its more expensive hardware,
    • IBM who helped kickstart the whole proprietary code thing (remember MS DOS) is the new champion of open source (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/) and
    • Microsoft continues to spark open source debate but read http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/07/02/a-perspective-on-openness.aspx and  also http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
    • SAS gives away a lot of open source code (Read Jim Davis , CMO SAS here , but will stick to Base SAS code (even though it seems to be making more money by verticals focus and data mining).
    • SPSS was the first big analytics company that helps supports R (open source stats software) but will cling to its own code on its softwares.
    • WordPress.org gives away its software (and I like Akismet just as well as blogging) for open source, but hey as anyone who is on WordPress.com knows how locked in you can get by its (pricy) platform.
    • Vendor Lock-in (wink wink price escalation) is the elephant in the room for Big Software Proprietary Companies.
    • SLA Quality, Maintenance and IP safety is the uh-oh for going in for open source software mostly.
  • Lack of IP protection for revenue models for open source code is the big bottleneck  for a lot of companies- as very few software users know what to do with source code if you give it to them anyways.
    • If companies were confident that they would still be earning same revenue and there would be less leakage or theft, they would gladly give away the source code.
    • Derivative softwares or extensions help popularize the original softwares.
      • Half Way Steps like Facebook Applications  the original big company to create a platform for third party creators),
      • IPhone Apps and Android Applications show success of creating APIs to help protect IP and software control while still giving some freedom to developers or alternate
      • User Interfaces to R in both SAS/IML and JMP is a similar example
  • Basically open source is mostly done by under dog while top dog mostly rakes in money ( and envy)
  • There is yet to a big commercial success in open source software, though they are very good open source softwares. Just as Google’s success helped establish advertising as an alternate ( and now dominant) revenue source for online companies , Open Source needs a big example of a company that made billions while giving source code away and still retaining control and direction of software strategy.
  • Open source people love to hate proprietary packages, yet there are more shades of grey (than black and white) and hypocrisy (read lies) within  the open source software movement than the regulated world of big software. People will be still people. Software is just a piece of code.  😉

(Art citation-http://gapingvoid.com/about/ and http://gapingvoidgallery.com/

Monday Video: Party in the USA

Apart from the fact that Miley Cyrus really seems grown up (she is still a KID),

this is also a great example of video advertising as done by Yahoo on

their new site http://new.music.yahoo.com/

making it like You Tube but maybe with more embeddable videos for open sharing

PS the Video is here

http://new.music.yahoo.com/Miley-Cyrus/videos/view/Party-In-The-U-S-A—218591175

Statistics: Code and Poetry

Dstats

As you can see, my poem on Michael Jackson got more page views

than any code I wrote or any interview I did. which reminds me to be

more humble than be humbled :)) More Details are on Advertise page above.

Advertisements @ Decisionstats

Decision Stats will soon run advertisements to cover expenses.

It costs a flat fee of XXX$ per month with a minimum 3 month contract but I am looking at other advertisers.

Advertising will be on first come first served basis but only non competing advertisers are allowed.

Non open source supporting companies may not be welcome at all.

For exclusive advertising on the blog picture it will be YYY$ a month with no other commercial advertisers with a minimum 3 month contract. For a bigger duration exclusive contract- the price can be adjusted further.

Advertisements will be pictures of the size of the images on www.decisionstats.com and would need a minimum of three separate graphic pictures for advertisers ( as they rotate).

I would work with the creative team to ensure size as well as clarity of pictures. It will also be in the form of Videos in the same space. Contact me at www.twitter.com/decisionstats to get special discounted rates on XXX and YYY above

Credentials-

Recommended by KD Nuggets.

Twice Winner of Contributor of Month by Analyticbridge-
Once winner of Blogger of the Week by Smart Data Collective-

Also see some numbers for size of Decisionstats Community

Twitter Followers-1052 (RSS)
Linkedin Group Members: 794
Facebook Fans: 52
Google Analytics Monthly Count: 3,147 Visits 5,565 Pageviews

Some Charts for Transparent Statistics is what this site is all about

NOTE FROM AJAY-

( As you can see Google Adsense ads on right margin seem to be quite very relevant already to the content :)) Goggle named it AD SENSE , but sometimes it is AD HOC SENSE

Advertising Feed back Loop: Facebook and Adwords

In Systems design a feedback loop is something that measures the difference between expected and actual output and adds it back to the system to enhance it’s performance

For a better more accurate definition see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback

Here is how Facebook measures the satisfaction whether I got for an ad on my page- note fraudelent or systematic cheaters would be eliminated by the law of averages.

It places a very small thumbs up or thumbs down on an ad on right hand corner.

When I place a thumbs down on an ad ( note it shows only graphical ads)-it asks me why i didnt like the ad

Was it

1) Misleading
2) Offensive
3) Uninteresting
4) Irrelevant
5) Repetitive
6) Other- allows text mining of free form allowing subjective feedback.

However if I type say Business Intelligence on Google – I get the following

http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=business+intelligence&meta=&aq=0&oq=business+intell

Open Source Ad on Pentaho at prime spot just above the results. Makes me wonder how much open source will spend.

Search Results-
Wikepedia entry usually at the top ( but no ads there*)

Search Optimization means SAS Business Intelligence is now fifth from top- which is the first mention of a BI vendor there ( Note cost to SAS is zero as you can see below). In the remaining top 4, two are similar http://www.businessintelligence.com and http://www.businessintelligence.co.uk as the title page tag remains more important than sheer consumer behaviour to Pagerank.

Right Column Sponsored Links ( These guys spend more money than SAS to be on the sponsored links and still end up in a less favourable ad page than in top vendor on search results page)-

1 http://www.brgglobal.com
2 SAP.com/India
3 IBM.com/cognos
4 http://www.BusinessObjects-India.com
5 http://www.softsmith.com
6 http://www.syncfusion.com/BizIntell
7 http://www.intelligententerprise.com/

(Note from Ajay*- A senior IIM Alumnus CK Prahlad (the first batch in fact) – first expounded the concept of core competence-

Now-what is Google’s core competence.
I believe that Google should simply donate all its information on wikipedia, and offer Google Knol to it- rather than just wallow in sunk cost theory or expect an immediate return from this transaction. It will get lots of goodwill- and maybe the Google Wikipedia Knol will take off.

Similarly sell Orkut to Facebook and just take the advertising and search functions to be combined in a seperate spin off called Google Search before Microsoft forces the Europeans and Justice department to do so.

Or continue to moon the giant.)

I didnt like the Adwords ads or the order they were in. But there is no way in Adwords for me to give feedback to it. Facebook listens. Will Adwords listen.