Google – DECISION STATS

Writing on APIs for Programmable Web

I have been writing free lance on APIs for Programmable Web. Here is an updated list of the articles, many of these would be of interest to analytics users. Note- some of these are interviews and they are in bold. Note to regular readers: I keep updating this list , and at each updation bring it to the front page, then allowing the blog postings to slide it down!

Scoreoid Aims to Gamify the World Using APIs January 27th, 2014

Plot.ly’s Plot to Visualize More Data January 22nd, 2014

LumenData’s Acquisition of Algorithms.io is a Win-Win January 8th, 2014

Yactraq API Sees Huge Growth in 2013 January 6th, 2014

Scrape.it Describes a Better Way to Extract Data December 20th, 2013

Exclusive Interview: App Store Analytics API December 4th, 2013

APIs Enter 3d Printing Industry November 29th, 2013

PW Interview: José Luis Martinez of Textalytics November 6th, 2013

PW Interview Simon Chan PredictionIO November 5th, 2013

PW Interview: Scott Gimpel Founder and CEO FantasyData.com October 23rd, 2013

PW Interview Brandon Levy, cofounder and CEO of Stitch Labs October 8th, 2013

PW Interview: Jolo Balbin Co-Founder Text Teaser September 18th, 2013

PW Interview:Bob Bickel CoFounder Redline13 July 29th, 2013

PW Interview : Brandon Wirtz CTO Stremor.com July 4th, 2013

PW Interview: Andy Bartley, CEO Algorithms.io June 4th, 2013

PW Interview: Francisco J Martin, CEO BigML.com 2013/05/30

PW Interview: Tal Rotbart Founder- CTO, SpringSense 2013/05/28

PW Interview: Jeh Daruwala CEO Yactraq API, Behavorial Targeting for videos 2013/05/13

PW Interview: Michael Schonfeld of Dwolla API on Innovation Meeting the Payment Web 2013/05/02

PW Interview: Stephen Balaban of Lamda Labs on the Face Recognition API 2013/04/29

PW Interview: Amber Feng, Stripe API, The Payment Web 2013/04/24

PW Interview: Greg Lamp and Austin Ogilvie of Yhat on Shipping Predictive Models via API 2013/04/22

Google Mirror API documentation is open for developers 2013/04/18

PW Interview: Ricky Robinett, Ordr.in API, Ordering Food meets API 2013/04/16

PW Interview: Jacob Perkins, Text Processing API, NLP meets API 2013/04/10

Amazon EC2 On Demand Windows Instances -Prices reduced by 20% 2013/04/08

Amazon S3 API Requests prices slashed by half 2013/04/02

PW Interview: Stuart Battersby, Chatterbox API, Machine Learning meets Social 2013/04/02

PW Interview: Karthik Ram, rOpenSci, Wrapping all science APIs 2013/03/20

Viralheat Human Intent API- To buy or not to buy 2013/03/13

Interview Tammer Kamel CEO and Founder Quandl 2013/03/07

YHatHQ API: Calling Hosted Statistical Models 2013/03/04

Quandl API: A Wikipedia for Numerical Data 2013/02/25

Amazon Redshift API is out of limited preview and available! 2013/02/18

Windows Azure Media Services REST API 2013/02/14

Data Science Toolkit Wraps Many Data Services in One API 2013/02/11

Diving into Codeacademy’s API Lessons 2013/01/31

Google APIs finetuning Cloud Storage JSON API 2013/01/29

Interview Hilary Mason Chief Scientist bitly 2013/01/28

Interview: Viralheat CEO Raj Kadam on API Growth 2013/01/22

Google Compute API – Affordable Computing at Google Scale 2013/01/17

2012

Ergast API Puts Car Racing Fans in the Driver’s Seat 2012/12/05
Springer APIs- Fostering Innovation via API Contests 2012/11/20
Statistically programming the web – Shiny,HttR and RevoDeploy API 2012/11/19
Google Cloud SQL API- Bigger ,Faster and now Free 2012/11/12
A Look at the Web’s Most Popular API -Google Maps API 2012/10/09
Cloud Storage APIs for the next generation Enterprise 2012/09/26
Last.fm API: Sultan of Musical APIs 2012/09/12
Socrata Data API: Keeping Government Open 2012/08/29
BigML API Gets Bigger 2012/08/22
Bing APIs: the Empire Strikes Back 2012/08/15
Google Cloud SQL: Relational Database on the Cloud 2012/08/13
Google BigQuery API Makes Big Data Analytics Easy 2012/08/05
Your Store in The Cloud -Google Cloud Storage API 2012/08/01
Predict the future with Google Prediction API 2012/07/30
The Romney vs Obama API 2012/07/27

API Evangelist (programmableweb.com) July 4th, 2013

How to help your government keep the world safe using statistics #rstats #python #sas

Big Data for Big Brother. Now playing. At a computer near you. How to help water the tree of liberty using statistics?

Use R

Use Python

or use SAS software

SAS/CIA from the last paragraph of

Click to access ET_CD_Mumbai_Jul12.pdf

Using Google Image search for OkCupid Profile Images

Suppose you like some one on OKCupid. Click to navigate to photos.
Click Save as to save the webpage completely. All Images are now in a folder on your laptop
Use Google Image Search Upload to one by one . The biggest privacy drawback, Google Image search doesn’t find Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn profile images so well, but does it extremely well for Google Plus Profile Image. Lolcat!
Solution- have two sets of photos that make you look good, one for friends, other for OKCupid or other online dating shenanigans!

I interview Stephen, awesome Face Recognition hacker here, and I think his solution is the best for privacy- use a robots.txt equivalent for images, just as you use it for websites.

I hope they find a solution, in time for wearable computing to take off properly.

In the meantime, I am telling people on OK Cupid that I am a fortune teller. It is really working awesome!

Dashboard Design: Google Activity

I quite like Google’s monthly email on account activity. It is the Google way to offer free services, as well as treat users as special, that continues to command loyalty despite occasional exasperation with corporate thingies.

See this dashboard-

Notice the use of Bigger Font for overall number of emails as well as smaller bar plots- I would say they are almost spark lines or spark bar plots if you excuse my Tufte.

The medium range font shows persons sent/from statistics, and the color shades are done to empahsize or de-emphasize the metric

Colors used are black/grey, green and blue coincident with the Corporate Logo.

However some of the JS for visualizations need to be tweaked. Clearly the hover script ( an integral part of Dashboard design ) needs better elucidiation or formatting)

I would also venture my neck and suggest that rather than just monthly snapshots, atleast some way of comparing snapshots across periods or even the total time period be enabled- rather than be in seperate views. This may give the user a bit more analytical value.

Overall, a nice and simple dashboard which may be of some use to the business user who makes or views a lot of reports on online properties. Minimal and effective- and in keeping with Open Data- Data Liberation Principles. I guess Google is secure in the knowledge that users do not view time spent on Google services as a total waste , unlike some of the other more social 😉 websites they spend time on.

Visual Guides to CRISP-DM ,KDD and SEMMA

UPDATED- Here are three great examples of a visualization making a process easy to understand. Please click on the images to read them clearly.

1) It visualizes CRISP-DM and is made by Nicole Leaper (http://exde.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/a-visual-guide-to-crisp-dm-methodology/)

2) KDD -Knowledge Discovery in Databases -visualization by Fayyad whom I have interviewed here at http://www.decisionstats.com/interview-dr-usama-fayyad-founder-open-insights-llc/

and work By Gregory Piatetsky Shapiro interviewed by this website here

https://decisionstats.com/2009/08/13/interview-gregory-piatetsky-kdnuggets-com/

3) I am also attaching a visual representation of SEMMA from http://www.dataprix.net/en/blogs/respinosamilla/theory-data-mining

Google’s Product Strategy

Copy an idea from existing product. Make worse interface, but give more freebies. Do not charge money ( or charge vastly reduced ). Launch without warning.
Write a blog post every three month on the launched product
Watch product lose money as they did not charge any/some money to begin with.
Close the product down without warning.
Repeat.

RGoogleAnalytics Package Updated! Works for OAuth 2.0 #rstats

Only the Linux version of the updated package is here , but for Windows users (like say 80% of the USERs) you can just source the 2 R files within the package sub structure after unzipping the downloaded tar.z file TWICE. The package takes care of taking you to the correct link for authentication after the line access_token <- query$authorize(), you need to

1) sign in to your Google account

2) click grant access (blue button)

3) click exchange tokens (blue button)

4) paste the access token at the prompt specified within the R console

access tokens stay active for 3600 seconds !



library(rjson)
library(RCurl)
source('C:\\Users\\KUs\\Desktop\\RGoogleAnalytics_1.2.tar\\RGoogleAnalytics\\R\\QueryBuilder.R')
source('C:\\Users\\KUs\\Desktop\\RGoogleAnalytics_1.2.tar\\RGoogleAnalytics\\R\\RGoogleAnalytics.R')
query <- QueryBuilder()
access_token <- query$authorize()

ga <- RGoogleAnalytics()
ga.profiles <- ga$GetProfileData(access_token)
ga.profiles
query$Init(start.date = "2012-06-18",
           end.date = "2012-12-18",
           dimensions = "ga:date,ga:pagePath",
           metrics = "ga:visits,ga:pageviews,ga:timeOnPage",
           sort = "ga:visits",
           #filters="",
           #segment="",
           max.results = 99,
           table.id = paste("ga:",ga.profiles$id[3],sep="",collapse=","),
           access_token=access_token)
# 4. Make a request to get the data from the API
ga.data <- ga$GetReportData(query)# 5. Look at the returned data
head(ga.data)

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

Interested in using R for Web Analytics? Use it from here http://code.google.com/p/r-google-analytics/

Great work by the Google team (Michael Pearmain et al) and Tatvic team working together!

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