Tag: Organizations

Public Opinion Quarterly

If you are interested in

SURVEY METHODOLOGY FOR PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCHERS

There is a free virtual issue, Survey Methodology for Public Health Researchers: Selected Readings from 20 years of PublicOpinion Quarterly. The virtual issue’s 18 articles illustrate the range of survey methods material that can be found in POQ and include conclusions that are still valid today. Specially chosen by guest editor Floyd J. Fowler, the articles will be of interest to those who work and research in public health and health services more broadly

IBM SPSS 19: Marketing Analytics and RFM

What is RFM Analysis?

Recency Frequency Monetization is basically a technique to classify your entire customer list. You may be a retail player with thousands of customers or a enterprise software seller with only two dozen customers.

RFM Analysis can help you cut through and focus on the real customer that drives your profit.

As per Wikipedia–

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFM

RFM is a method used for analyzing customer behavior and defining market segments. It is commonly used in database marketing and direct marketing and has received particular attention in retail.

RFM stands for

  • Recency – How recently a customer has purchased?
  • Frequency – How often he purchases?
  • Monetary Value – How much does he spend?

To create an RFM analysis, one creates categories for each attribute. For instance, the Recency attribute might be broken into three categories: customers with purchases within the last 90 days; between 91 and 365 days; and longer than 365 days. Such categories may be arrived at by applying business rules, or using a data mining technique, such asCHAID, to find meaningful breaks.

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Even if you dont know what or how to do a RFM, see below for an easy to do way.

I just got myself an evaluation copy of a fully loaded IBM SPSS 19 Module and did some RFM Analysis on some data- the way SPSS recent version is it makes it very very useful even to non statistical tool- but an extremely useful one to a business or marketing user.

Here are some screenshots to describe the features.

1) A simple dashboard to show functionality (with room for improvement for visual appeal)

2) Simple Intuitive design to inputting data3) Some options in creating marketing scorecards4) Easy to understand features for a business audiences

rather than pseudo techie jargon5) Note the clean design of the GUI in specifying data input type6) Again multiple options to export results in a very user friendly manner with options to customize business report7) Graphical output conveniently pasted inside a word document rather than a jumble of images. Auto generated options for customized standard graphs.8) An attractive heatmap to represent monetization for customers. Note the effect that a scale of color shades have in visual representation of data.9) Comparative plots placed side by side with easy to understand explanation (in the output word doc not shown here)10) Auto generated scores attached to data table to enhance usage. 

Note here I am evaluating RFM as a marketing technique (which is well known) but also the GUI of IBM SPSS 19 Marketing Analytics. It is simple, and yet powerful into turning what used to be a purely statistical software for nerds into a beautiful easy to implement tool for business users.

So what else can you do in Marketing Analytics with SPSS 19.

IBM SPSS Direct Marketing

The Direct Marketing add-on option allows organizations to ensure their marketing programs are as effective as possible, through techniques specifically designed for direct marketing, including:

• RFM Analysis. This technique identifies existing customers who are most likely to respond to a new offer.

• Cluster Analysis. This is an exploratory tool designed to reveal natural groupings (or clusters) within your data. For example, it can identify different groups of customers based on various demographic and purchasing characteristics.

• Prospect Profiles. This technique uses results from a previous or test campaign to create descriptive profiles. You can use the profiles to target specific groups of contacts in future campaigns.

• Postal Code Response Rates. This technique uses results from a previous campaign to calculate postal code response rates. Those rates can be used to target specific postal codes in future campaigns.

• Propensity to Purchase. This technique uses results from a test mailing or previous campaign to generate propensity scores. The scores indicate which contacts are most likely to respond.

• Control Package Test. This technique compares marketing campaigns to see if there is a significant difference in effectiveness for different packages or offers.

Click here to find out more about Direct Marketing.

PAW Reception and R Meetup

New DC meetup for R Users-

source- http://www.meetup.com/R-users-DC/calendar/14236478/

October’s R meet-up will be co-located with the Predictive Analytics World Conference (http://www.predictive…) taking place in Washington DC October 19-20. PAW is the premiere business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners.

Agenda:

6:30 – 7:30 PAW Reception (open to meet-up attendees)
7:30 – 9:00 DC-R Meetup

Talks:
“How to speak ggplot2 like a native”
Harlan D. Harris, PhD @HarlanH

“Saving the world with R”
Michael Milton @michaelmilton

Important Registration Instructions:
You are welcome to RSVP here at meetup. The PAW organizers have requested that we register in the PAW site for the R meetup so they can provide badges to members which will give you access to the reception. There is no charge to register using the PAW site. Please click here to register.


Speaker Bios

Harlan D. Harris, PhD, is a statistical data scientist working for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions in New York City. He has degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to turning to the private sector, he worked as a researcher and lecturer in various areas of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the University of Illinois, Columbia University, the University of Connecticut, and New York University.

Harlan’s talk is titled “How to speak ggplot2 like a native.”. One of the most innovative ideas in data visualization in recent years is that graphical images can be described using a grammar. Just as a fluent speaker of a language can talk more precisely and clearly than someone using a tourist phrasebook, graphics based on a grammar can yield more insights than graphics based on a limited set of templates (bar chart, pie graph, etc.). There are at least two implementations of the Grammar of Graphics idea in R, of which the most popular is the ggplot2 package written by Prof. Hadley Wickham. Just as with natural languages, ggplot2 has a surface structure made up of R vocabulary elements, as well as a deep structure that mediates the link between the vocabulary and the “semantic” representation of the data shown on a computer screen. In this introductory presentation, the links among these levels of representation are demonstrated, so that new ggplot2 users can build the mental models necessary for fluent and creative visualization of their data.

Michael Milton is a Client Manager at Blue State Digital. When he’s not saving the world by designing interactive marketing strategies that connect passionate users with causes and organizations, he writes about data and analytics. For O’Reilly Media, he wrote Head First Data Analysis and Head First Excel and has created the videos Great R: Level 1 and Getting the Most Out of Google Apps for Business.

Michael’s talk is called “How to Save the World Using R.” In this wide-ranging discussion, Michael will highlight individuals and organizations who are using R to help others as well as ways in which R can be used to promote good statistical thinking.

AsterData gets $30 mill in funding

From the press release, the maker of Map Reduce based BI software gets 30 mill $ as Series C funding. Given the valuation recently by IBM to Netezza, AsterData seems set to cross the Billion Dollar valuation within the next 18-24 months IMO

Aster Data Closes $30 Million Series C Financing

Explosive Growth and Market Leadership Attracts New and Existing Investors

San Carlos, CA – September 22, 2010 – Aster Data, a market leader in big data management and advanced analytics, today announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C round of financing led by both new and existing investors. The company will use the new funding to accelerate growth, scale operations, and expand its global market share in the $20 billion database market – a market that is experiencing rapid growth as a result of both the explosion in data volumes across organizations and the urgent need to deliver a new class of analytics and data-driven applications. The Series C round of funding includes previous investors Sequoia Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Cambrian Ventures, as well as an additional new strategic investor.  Also investing in this round is early investor David Cheriton, who previously backed high-growth companies including Google and VMware, and co-founded several successful technology companies.

Today’s Series C funding announcement underscores a year of strong innovation, execution, and overall momentum for the analytic database company. Key milestones include:

Strong sales growth: Since 2008, Aster Data has doubled revenue year-over-year and secured key customers that leverage Aster Data’s platform to address the big data management problem including MySpace, comScore, Barnes & Noble, and Akamai. Like so many organizations today,
Aster Data’s customers are experiencing explosive data growth across their organizations and recognize the need for rich, advanced analytics that give them deeper insights from their data.

Key executive hires: Quentin Gallivan, former CEO of both PivotLink and Postini and EVP of worldwide sales at Verisign, recently joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. In addition, earlier this year, John Calonico, previously at Interwoven, BEA, and Autodesk, joined as Chief Financial Officer; and Nitin Donde, formerly an executive at EMC and 3PAR, joined as Executive Vice President Engineering.  The strength and experience of Aster Data’s management team helps further establish a strong operational foundation for growth in 2010 and beyond.

Industry recognition: Aster Data was positioned in the “Visionaries” Quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s

Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant, published 2010 *; was recently named 2011 Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum; was named “Company to Watch” in the Information Management category of TechWeb’s Intelligent Enterprise 2010 Editors’ Choice Awards; and was awarded the 2010 San Francisco Business Times Technology and Innovation Award in the Best Product and Services Category.

Product Innovation: Aster Data continues to deliver ground-breaking capabilities to address the big data management and advanced analytics market need. Its recent announcement of
Aster Data nCluster 4.6 includes a column data store, making it the first hybrid row and column MPP DBMS with a unified SQL and MapReduce analytic framework for advanced analytics on large data sets. This year, Aster Data also delivered the most extensive library of pre-packaged MapReduce analytics totaling over 1000 functions, to ease and accelerate delivery of highly advanced analytic applications.

Aster Data’s analytic database, also called a ‘Data-Analytics Server’ is specifically designed to enable organizations to cost effectively store and analyze massive volumes of data. Aster Data leverages the power of commodity, general-purpose hardware, to reduce the cost to scale to support large data volumes and uniquely allows analysis of all data ‘in-database’ enabling richer and faster processing of large data sets. Aster Data’s in-database analytics engine uses the power of MapReduce, a parallel processing framework created by Google.

”The funding we received in our Series C round is a strong endorsement of Aster Data’s market leadership position and the high growth potential of the big data market,” said Quentin Gallivan, Chief Executive Officer, Aster Data. “The Aster Data team has executed exceptionally well to-date and I am excited to have the resources to accelerate the growth of the company as we expand our operations and execute aggressively across all fronts.”

More PAWS

Dr Eric Siegel  (interviewed here at https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/interview_eric-siege/ )

continues his series of excellent analytical conferences-

Oct 19-20 – WASHINGTON DC: PAW Conference & Workshops (pawcon.com/dc)

Oct 28-29 – SAN FRANCISCO: Workshop (businessprediction.com)

Nov 15-16 – LONDON: PAW Conference & Workshop (pawcon.com/london)

March 14-15, 2011 – SAN FRANCISCO: PAW Conference & Workshops

* Register by Sep 30 for PAW London Early-Bird – Save £200
* http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

* For the Oct 28-29 workshop, see http://businessprediction.com

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INFORMATION ABOUT THE PAW CONFERENCES:

Predictive Analytics World ( http://pawcon.com ) is the business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors.

PAW delivers the best case studies, expertise, keynotes, sessions, workshops, exposition, expert panel, live demos, networking coffee breaks, reception, birds-of-a-feather lunches, brand-name enterprise leaders, and industry heavyweights in the business.

Case study presentations cover campaign targeting, churn modeling, next-best-offer, selecting marketing channels, global analytics deployment, email marketing, HR candidate search, and other innovative applications. The Conference agendas cover hot topics such as social data, text mining, search marketing, risk management, uplift (incremental lift) modeling, survey analysis, consumer privacy, sales force optimization and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

PAW delivers two rich conference programs in Oct./Nov. with very little content overlap featuring a wealth of speakers with front-line experience. See which one is best for you:

PAW’s DC 2010 (Oct 19-20) program includes over 25 sessions across two tracks – an “All Audiences” and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive analytics is applied at 1-800-FLOWERS, CIBC, Corporate Executive Board, Forrester, LifeLine, Macy’s, MetLife, Miles Kimball, Monster, Paychex, PayPal (eBay), SunTrust, Target, UPMC Health Plan, Xerox, YMCA, and Yahoo!, plus special examples from the U.S. government agencies DoD, DHS, and SSA.

Sign up for event updates in the US http://pawcon.com/signup-us.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/dc/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/dc
Register: http://pawcon.com/dc/register.php

PAW London 2010 (Nov 15-16) will feature over 20 speakers from 10 countries with case studies from leading enterprises in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, retail, and telecom such as Canadian Automobile Association, Chessmetrics, e-Dialog, Hamburger Sparkasse, Jeevansathi.com (India’s 2nd-largest matrimony portal), Life Line Screening, Lloyds TSB, Naukri.com (India’s number 1 job portal), Overtoom, SABMiller, Univ. of Melbourne, and US Bank, plus special examples from Anheuser-Busch, Disney, HP, HSBC, Pfizer, U.S. SSA, WestWind Foundation and others.

Sign up for event updates in the UK http://pawcon.com/signup-uk.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/london/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/london
Register: http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

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PAW San Francisco Save-the-Date and Call-for-Speakers:

March 14-15, 2011
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, CA

PAW call-for-speakers information and submission form: (Due Oct 8)
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/submit.php

If you wish to receive periodic call-for-speakers notifications regarding Predictive Analytics World, email chair@predictiveanalyticsworld.com with the subject line “call-for-speakers notifications”.

Predictive Analytics World
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com
Washington DC – London – San Francisco

Big Data Management and Advanced Analytics

Here is a new list for the top 10 considerations for Big Data Management and using Advanced Analytics -courtesy AsterData.

Source-

http://www.asterdata.com/wp_10_considerations/index.php?ref=decisionstats

“There are ten strong reasons why competitive organizations are turning to new data management solutions to handle their growing data volumes and evolving analytic needs. This new platform – a ‘data-analytics server’ – merges data storage and data analytics into one single system to conquer the big data challenge.

“Big data storage is handled by a massively parallel database architecture; big data analytics is handled by an integrated analytics engine, so that analytics run fully in-database yielding ultra high performance on large data sets. The analytics engine leverages the powerful analytics framework MapReduce. The results are cost-effective, scalable data storage, ultra high performance and richer data analysis.”
Major considerations include:
Cost-effective, scalable data management – what are the requirements?
Advanced analytic queries – what’s meant by advanced analytics & how easy is it?
Running rich, diverse workloads – key factors for high concurrency & performance

Aster Data hires Quentin Gallivan as CEO

AsterData formally marked phase 2 of it’s rapid growth story by getting as new CEO Quentin Gallivan (of Postini before it was sold to Google and also Pivotlink).

Founders (and Stanfordians) Mayan Bawa stays as Chief Customer Officer and Tasso Argyros as CTO. It has a very deja vu feel -like Eric Schmidt coming in CEO of Google in the glory days past.  Indeed the investment team in Google and AsterData is quite similar and so are the backgrounds of the founders.

AsterData of course creates the leading MapReduce (also created by Google) solution for providing BI infrastructure for big data and has been rapidly been expanding into new frontiers for Big Data.

Aster Data Appoints New Chief Executive Officer

Quentin Gallivan Joins Aster Data as CEO to Lead Company to Next Level of Growth

San Carlos, CA – September 9, 2010– Aster Data, a proven leader dedicated to providing the best data management and data processing platform for big data management and analytics, today announced the appointment of Quentin Gallivan as President and CEO. Gallivan brings more than 20 years of senior executive experience to the leading analytics and database company. With Aster Data achieving tremendous growth in the past year, Gallivan will take Aster Data to the next level, further accelerating its market leadership, sales, channel partnerships and international expansion.  Founding CEO Mayank Bawa, who grew the company from its inception based on the founders’ research at Stanford University, and whose passion for helping customers uniquely unlock the value of their data, will take on the role of Chief Customer Officer.  Bawa, in his new role, will lead the Company’s organization devoted to ensuring the success, longevity and innovation of its fast-growing customer base. Together, Gallivan and Bawa, along with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Tasso Argyros, will deliver on the the Company’s mission to help customers discover more value from their data, achieve deep insights through rich analytics and do more with their massive data volumes than has ever been possible.

Gallivan joins Aster Data with over 20 years of leadership experience in the high-tech industry and has held a variety of CEO and senior executive positions with leading technology companies. Before joining Aster Data, Gallivan served as CEO at PivotLink, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), where he rapidly grew the company to over 15,000 business users, from mid-sized companies to Fortune 1000 companies, across key industries including financial services, retail, CPG manufacturing and high technology. Prior to Pivotlink, Gallivan served as CEO of Postini where he scaled the company to 35,000 customers and over 10 million users until its eventual acquisition by Google in 2007.  Gallivan also served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and services at VeriSign where he was instrumental in growing the business from $20 million to $1.2 billion and was responsible for the design and execution of the global distribution strategy for the company’s security and services business. Gallivan also held a number of key executive and leadership positions at Netscape Communications and GE Information Services.

“We are delighted to have someone of Quentin’s caliber, who is a veteran of both emerging and established technology companies, lead Aster Data through our next stage of growth,” said Mayank Bawa, Chief Customer Officer and co-founder, Aster Data. “His significant experience around growing organizations and driving operational excellence will be invaluable as he takes Aster Data forward. I’m excited to shift my focus to customers and their success; to bring our innovations to our customers worldwide to help them unlock deep value from their growing data volumes.”

“I am very excited to be joining Aster Data and taking on the challenge of augmenting its already impressive level of growth and success.  Aster Data is very well respected and established in the marketplace, has an enviable solution for big data management that uniquely addresses both big data storage and data processing, an impressive client list and a very talented team,” said Quentin Gallivan, President and CEO, Aster Data. “My task will be to leverage these assets, help shape a new market and provide operational guidance and strategic direction to drive even greater value for shareholders, customers and employees alike.”