Tag: mobile

Awesome new features in Doc Googles

I really liked some awesome new features in Google Docs, and I am mentioning just some of the features I like because they are not there in Windows Office mostly.

Sourcehttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html

List View and Mobile View Improvements
Now you can see your spreadsheets with all their formatting in List View and on your mobile device, this includes background/foreground colors, borders and text formatting!

Themes for forms
Add a splash of color to your surveys and questionnaires. When you create and edit a form, simply apply one of the 70 themes

  • Forms improvements
    We’ve added a new question type (grid), support for right-to-left languages in forms, and a new color scheme for the forms summary. Also, you can now pre-populate form fields with URL parameters, and if you use Google Apps, you can create forms which require sign-in to access. Learn more

  • Translate document
    You can now translate an entire document into over 40 languages.

    Translate and detect languages in Google spreadsheets
    =GoogleTranslate(“Hola, ¿cómo estás?”,”es”,”en”) gives “Hi, how are you?” (or leave out “en” and we’ll automatically choose the default language of your spreadsheet) What if you don’t know the language? =DetectLanguage(“Hola, ¿cómo estás?”) gives “es”.

    A new curve tool in drawings
    Create smooth curves based on a series of points with this new tool.

    Optical character recognition (OCR)
    You can now upload and convert PDF or image files to text.

     

    You can read the awesome new ones athttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html but these are the ones I felt were missing in Windows Office.

    Coming up- a Review of newly forked Libre Office

Google AppInventor -Android and Business Intelligence

Here is a great new tool for techies to start creating Android Apps right away- even if you have no knowledge of the platform. Of course there are existing great number of apps- including my favorite Android Data Mining App in R – called AnalyticDroid http://analyticdroid.togaware.com/

Basically it calls the Rattle (R Analytical Tool To Learn Easily) Data Mining GUI -enabling data mining from an Android Mobile using remote computing.

I dont know if any other statistical application is available on Android Mobiles- though SAS did have a presentation on using SAS on IPhone

http://www.wuss.org/proceedings09/09WUSSProceedings/papers/dpr/DPR-Truong.pdf



SAS Mobile -Iphone App

All you need to do is go to http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/index.html and request access (yes there is a 2 week approval waiting line)

Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can build an app to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum.
You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts “missing you” to your loved ones, or an app “No Text While Driving” that responds to all texts automatically with “sorry, I’m driving and will contact you later”. You can even have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you (though this might lure you into responding).
App Inventor provides a way for you to communicate with the web. If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter.

Here is a not so statistical Android App I am trying to create called Hang-Out

using the current GPS location of your phone to find nearest Pub, Movie or Diner and catch Bus- Train based on your location city, the GPS and time of request and schedule of those cities public transport- very much WIP

YouTube Features: Audio Swap, Mobile posts and Themes

Here are great features from the now formidable and always delightful Youtube, especially the Audio Swap feature.

[tweetmeme=”Decisionstats”]

YOU TUBE*

(*BECAUSE GOOGLE IS NOT A  MONOPOLY )

Basically it allows you to use a background song over your home videos.

If you have ever shot a baby video, or a pet video, or just a random nature is beautiful video- here is an example

The Heavy Rock ( California) vs The Country Song ( Tennessee) versions.

versus

They were both sent from my Iphone, and the audio added later. The Audio swap function is at-

My Videos >

http://www.youtube.com/my_videos#

Click on the Audio Swap Button below each video.

You can see the screenshot below for the functionality offered by Audio Swap.

The YouTube feature also has considerable refinements ( after 5 yrs of hard thinking by the most famous Standford alumni to drop out). An example is customizable skins and themes- see here a screenshot ( note the background color, font etc)-

You can also see it here at http://youtube.com/Decisionstats or just click the screenshot below.

Speaking of Stanford- I called up home in India to tell them how I am doing in San Fran. There was considerable confusion after I told them that I got admitted to Stanford. My father said- ” Just how did you get admitted to Stanford? ” Me- I just took the Caltrain to the station- I meant admitted to the campus not the college 😉

The declining market for Telecommunication Churn Models

[tweetmeme=”decisionstats”]

Users of Predictive Analytics within telecom sector can look into an interesting side effect of the iPhone – AT &T agreement. With Google also jumping into the market with it’s Droid – the new norms in Telecom agreements is lockedin contracts for consumers. While this is permitted by the telecom regulators as fair to competition- this also means that there is very little churn within these locked in contracts. This leads to further savings for the telecom provider allowing them to have higher profits and even share the profits by price decreases-

and thus the traditional bug bear of telecom analytics churn modeling is slowly losing importance to plain vanilla reporting or better data mining dashboard like solutions. Lower Churn , means also lower costs on analytics softwares to predict churn.

As competition within the 3G Mobile market ramps up due to Google’s entry and licensing with partners exclusively- the trend will likely increase for reduced churn due to locked in customers.Even existing mobile providers can offer discounts to lock in customers for not switching ( especially in Mobile Markets like India- where I have personally interacted with large players like Bharti) and China which has even bigger mobile market.

Ergo Lower need to buy softwares that predict churn-

See Below Image from TeraData’s Churn Model.