Tag: teams

Top 7 Business Strategy Models

UPDATED POST- Some Models I use for Business Strategy- to analyze the huge reams of qualitative and uncertain data that business generates. I have added a bonus the Business canvas Model (number 2)

  1. Porters 5 forces Model-To analyze industries
  2. Business Canvas
  3. BCG Matrix- To analyze Product Portfolios
  4. Porters Diamond Model- To analyze locations
  5. McKinsey 7 S Model-To analyze teams
  6. Gernier Theory- To analyze growth of organization
  7. Herzberg Hygiene Theory- To analyze soft aspects of individuals
  8. Marketing Mix Model- To analyze marketing mix.

Continue reading “Top 7 Business Strategy Models”

Hacker Alert- Darpa project 10$ K for summer

If you bleed red,white and blue and know some geo-spatial analysis ,social network analysis and some supervised and unsupervised learning (and unlearning)- here is a chance for you to put your skills for an awesome project

 

from wired-

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/hackathon-guinea-pig/

 

For this challenge, Darpa will lodge a selected six to eight teams at George Mason University and provide them with an initial $10,000 for equipment and access to unclassified data sets including “ground-level video of human activity in both urban and rural environments; high-resolution wide-area LiDAR of urban and mountainous terrain, wide-area airborne full motion video; and unstructured amateur photos and videos, such as would be taken from an adversary’s cell phone.” However, participants are encouraged to use any open sourced, legal data sets they want. (In the hackathon spirit, we would encourage the consumption of massive quantities of pizza and Red Bull, too.)

 

DARPA Innovation House Project

Home | Data Access | Awards | Team Composition | Logisitics | Deliverables | Proposals | Evaluation Criteria | FAQ

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Proposals must be one to three pages. Team resumes of any length must be attached and do not count against the page limit. Proposals must have 1-inch margins, use a font size of at least 11, and be delivered in Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format.

Proposals must be emailed to InnovationHouse@c4i.gmu.edu by 4:00PM ET on Tuesday, July 31, 2012.

Proposals must have a Title and contain at least the following sections with the following contents.

  1. Team Members

Each team member must be listed with name, email and phone.
The Lead Developer should be indicated.
The statement “All team members are proposed as Key Personnel.” must be included.

  1. Capability Description

The description should clearly explain what capability the software is designed to provide the user, how it is proposed to work, and what data it will process.

In addition, a clear argument should be made as to why it is a novel approach that is not incremental to existing methods in the field.

  1. Proposed Phase 1 Demonstration

This section should clearly explain what will be demonstrated at the end of Session I. The description should be expressive, and as concrete as possible about the nature of the designs and software the team intends to produce in Session I.

  1. Proposed Phase 2 Demonstration

This section should clearly explain how the final software capability will be demonstrated as quantitatively as possible (for example, positing the amount of data that will be processed during the demonstration), how much time that will take, and the nature of the results the processing aims to achieve.

In addition, the following sections are optional.

  1. Technical Approach

The technical approach section amplifies the Capability Description, explaining proposed algorithms, coding practices, architectural designs and/or other technical details.

  1. Team Qualifications

Team qualifications should be included if the team?s experience base does not make it obvious that it has the potential to do this level of software development. In that case, this section should make a credible argument as to why the team should be considered to have a reasonable chance of completing its goals, especially under the tight timelines described.

Other sections may be included at the proposers? discretion, provided the proposal does not exceed three pages.

[Top]

 

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/07/10.aspx

 

 

 

Facebook and R

Part 1 How do people at Facebook use R?

tamar Rosenn, Facebook

Itamar conveyed how Facebook’s Data Team used R in 2007 to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?

For the first question, Itamar’s team used recursive partitioning (via the rpartpackage) to infer that just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) having more than one session as a new user, and (ii) entering basic profile information.

For the second question, they fit the data to a logistic model using a least angle regression approach (via the lars package), and found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior: (i) how often a user was reached out to by others, (ii) frequency of third party application use, and (iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.

source-http://www.dataspora.com/2009/02/predictive-analytics-using-r/

and cute graphs like the famous

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/visualizing-friendships/469716398919

 

and

studying baseball on facebook

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/baseball-on-facebook/10150142265858859

by counting the number of posts that occurred the day after a team lost divided by the total number of wins, since losses for great teams are remarkable and since winning teams’ fans just post more.

 

But mostly at

https://www.facebook.com/data?sk=notes and https://www.facebook.com/data?v=app_4949752878

 

and creating new packages

1. jjplot (not much action here!)

https://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/viewvc.php/?root=jjplot

though

I liked the promise of JJplot at

http://pleasescoopme.com/2010/03/31/using-jjplot-to-explore-tipping-behavior/

2. ising models

https://github.com/slycoder/Rflim

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150359708746212

3. R pipe

https://github.com/slycoder/Rpipe

 

even the FB interns are cool

http://brenocon.com/blog/2009/02/comparison-of-data-analysis-packages-r-matlab-scipy-excel-sas-spss-stata/

 

Part 2 How do people with R use Facebook?

Using the API at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer

and code mashes from

 

http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2012/01/15/Crawling-facebook-with-R

http://applyr.blogspot.in/2012/01/mining-facebook-data-most-liked-status.html

but the wonderful troubleshooting code from http://www.brocktibert.com/blog/2012/01/19/358/

which needs to be added to the code first

 

and using network package

>access_token=”XXXXXXXXXXXX”

Annoyingly the Facebook token can expire after some time, this can lead to huge wait and NULL results with Oauth errors

If that happens you need to regenerate the token

What we need
> require(RCurl)
> require(rjson)
> download.file(url=”http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem”, destfile=”cacert.pem”)

Roman’s Famous Facebook Function (altered)

> facebook <- function( path = “me”, access_token , options){
+ if( !missing(options) ){
+ options <- sprintf( “?%s”, paste( names(options), “=”, unlist(options), collapse = “&”, sep = “” ) )
+ } else {
+ options <- “”
+ }
+ data <- getURL( sprintf( “https://graph.facebook.com/%s%s&access_token=%s&#8221;, path, options, access_token ), cainfo=”cacert.pem” )
+ fromJSON( data )
+ }

 

Now getting the friends list
> friends <- facebook( path=”me/friends” , access_token=access_token)
> # extract Facebook IDs
> friends.id <- sapply(friends$data, function(x) x$id)
> # extract names
> friends.name <- sapply(friends$data, function(x) iconv(x$name,”UTF-8″,”ASCII//TRANSLIT”))
> # short names to initials
> initials <- function(x) paste(substr(x,1,1), collapse=””)
> friends.initial <- sapply(strsplit(friends.name,” “), initials)

This matrix can take a long time to build, so you can change the value of N to say 40 to test your network. I needed to press the escape button to cut short the plotting of all 400 friends of mine.
> # friendship relation matrix
> N <- length(friends.id)
> friendship.matrix <- matrix(0,N,N)
> for (i in 1:N) {
+ tmp <- facebook( path=paste(“me/mutualfriends”, friends.id[i], sep=”/”) , access_token=access_token)
+ mutualfriends <- sapply(tmp$data, function(x) x$id)
+ friendship.matrix[i,friends.id %in% mutualfriends] <- 1
+ }

 

Plotting using Network package in R (with help from the  comments at http://applyr.blogspot.in/2012/01/mining-facebook-data-most-liked-status.html)

> require(network)

>net1<- as.network(friendship.matrix)

> plot(net1, label=friends.initial, arrowhead.cex=0)

(Rgraphviz is tough if you are on Windows 7 like me)

but there is an alternative igraph solution at https://github.com/sciruela/facebookFriends/blob/master/facebook.r

 

After all that-..talk.. a graph..of my Facebook Network with friends initials as labels..

 

Opinion piece-

I hope plans to make the Facebook R package get fulfilled (just as the twitteR  package led to many interesting analysis)

and also Linkedin has an API at http://developer.linkedin.com/apis

I think it would be interesting to plot professional relationships across social networks as well. But I hope to see a LinkedIn package (or blog code) soon.

As for jjplot, I had hoped ggplot and jjplot merged or atleast had some kind of inclusion in the Deducer GUI. Maybe a Google Summer of Code project if people are busy!!

Also the geeks at Facebook.com can think of giving something back to the R community, as Google generously does with funding packages like RUnit, Deducer and Summer of Code, besides sponsoring meet ups etc.

 

(note – this is part of the research for the upcoming book ” R for Business Analytics”)

 

ps-

but didnt get time to download all my posts using R code at

https://gist.github.com/1634662#

or do specific Facebook Page analysis using R at

http://tonybreyal.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/r-web-scraping-r-bloggers-facebook-page-to-gain-further-information-about-an-authors-r-blog-posts-e-g-number-of-likes-comments-shares-etc/

Updated-

 #access token from https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer
access_token="AAuFgaOcVaUZAssCvL9dPbZCjghTEwwhNxZAwpLdZCbw6xw7gARYoWnPHxihO1DcJgSSahd67LgZDZD"
require(RCurl)
 require(rjson)
# download the file needed for authentication http://www.brocktibert.com/blog/2012/01/19/358/
download.file(url="http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem", destfile="cacert.pem")
# http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2012/01/15/Crawling-facebook-with-R
facebook <- function( path = "me", access_token = token, options){
if( !missing(options) ){
options <- sprintf( "?%s", paste( names(options), "=", unlist(options), collapse = "&", sep = "" ) )
} else {
options <- ""
}
data <- getURL( sprintf( "https://graph.facebook.com/%s%s&access_token=%s", path, options, access_token ), cainfo="cacert.pem" )
fromJSON( data )
}

 # see http://applyr.blogspot.in/2012/01/mining-facebook-data-most-liked-status.html

# scrape the list of friends
friends <- facebook( path="me/friends" , access_token=access_token)
# extract Facebook IDs
friends.id <- sapply(friends$data, function(x) x$id)
# extract names 
friends.name <- sapply(friends$data, function(x)  iconv(x$name,"UTF-8","ASCII//TRANSLIT"))
# short names to initials 
initials <- function(x) paste(substr(x,1,1), collapse="")
friends.initial <- sapply(strsplit(friends.name," "), initials)

# friendship relation matrix
#N <- length(friends.id)
N <- 200
friendship.matrix <- matrix(0,N,N)
for (i in 1:N) {
  tmp <- facebook( path=paste("me/mutualfriends", friends.id[i], sep="/") , access_token=access_token)
  mutualfriends <- sapply(tmp$data, function(x) x$id)
  friendship.matrix[i,friends.id %in% mutualfriends] <- 1
}
require(network)
net1<- as.network(friendship.matrix)
plot(net1, label=friends.initial, arrowhead.cex=0)

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

Interview: Hjálmar Gíslason, CEO of DataMarket.com

Here is an interview with Hjálmar Gíslason, CEO of Datamarket.com  . DataMarket is an active marketplace for structured data and statistics. Through powerful search and visual data exploration, DataMarket connects data seekers with data providers.

 

Ajay-  Describe your journey as an entrepreneur and techie in Iceland. What are the 10 things that surprised you most as a tech entrepreneur.

HG- DataMarket is my fourth tech start-up since at age 20 in 1996. The previous ones have been in gaming, mobile and web search. I come from a technical background but have been moving more and more to the business side over the years. I can still prototype, but I hope there isn’t a single line of my code in production!

Funny you should ask about the 10 things that have surprised me the most on this journey, as I gave a presentation – literally yesterday – titled: “9 things nobody told me about the start-up business”

They are:
* Do NOT generalize – especially not to begin with
* Prioritize – and find a work-flow that works for you
* Meet people – face to face
* You are a sales person – whether you like it or not
* Technology is not a product – it’s the entire experience
* Sell the current version – no matter how amazing the next one is
* Learn from mistakes – preferably others’
* Pick the right people – good people is not enough
* Tell a good story – but don’t make them up

I obviously elaborate on each of these points in the talk, but the points illustrate roughly some of the things I believe I’ve learned … so far 😉

9 things nobody told me about the start-up business

Ajay-

Both Amazon  and Google  have entered the public datasets space. Infochimps  has 14,000+ public datasets. The US has http://www.data.gov/

So clearly the space is both competitive and yet the demand for public data repositories is clearly under served still. 

How does DataMarket intend to address this market in a unique way to differentiate itself from others.

HG- DataMarket is about delivering business data to decision makers. We help data seekers find the data they need for planning and informed decision making, and data publishers reaching this audience. DataMarket.com is the meeting point, where data seekers can come to find the best available data, and data publishers can make their data available whether for free or for a fee. We’ve populated the site with a wealth of data from public sources such as the UN, Eurostat, World Bank, IMF and others, but there is also premium data that is only available to those that subscribe to and pay for the access. For example we resell the entire data offering from the EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) (link: http://datamarket.com/data/list/?q=provider:eiu)

DataMarket.com allows all this data to be searched, visualized, compared and downloaded in a single place in a standard, unified manner.

We see many of these efforts not as competition, but as valuable potential sources of data for our offering, while others may be competing with parts of our proposition, such as easy access to the public data sets.

 

Ajay- What are your views on data confidentiality and access to data owned by Governments funded by tax payer money.

HG- My views are very simple: Any data that is gathered or created for taxpayers’ money should be open and free of charge unless higher priorities such as privacy or national security indicate otherwise.

Reflecting that, any data that is originally open and free of charge is still open and free of charge on DataMarket.com, just easier to find and work with.

Ajay-  How is the technology entrepreneurship and venture capital scene in Iceland. What things work and what things can be improved?

HG- The scene is quite vibrant, given the small community. Good teams with promising concepts have been able to get the funding they need to get started and test their footing internationally. When the rapid growth phase is reached outside funding may still be needed.

There are positive and negative things about any location. Among the good things about Iceland from the stand point of a technology start-up are highly skilled tech people and a relatively simple corporate environment. Among the bad things are a tiny local market, lack of skills in international sales and marketing and capital controls that were put in place after the crash of the Icelandic economy in 2008.

I’ve jokingly said that if a company is hot in the eyes of VCs it would get funding even if it was located in the jungles of Congo, while if they’re only lukewarm towards you, they will be looking for any excuse not to invest. Location can certainly be one of them, and in that case being close to the investor communities – physically – can be very important.

We’re opening up our sales and marketing offices in Boston as we speak. Not to be close to investors though, but to be close to our market and current customers.

Ajay- Describe your hobbies when you are not founding amazing tech startups.

HG- Most of my time is spent working – which happens to by my number one hobby.

It is still important to step away from it all every now and then to see things in perspective and come back with a clear mind.

I *love* traveling to exotic places. Me and my wife have done quite a lot of traveling in Africa and S-America: safari, scuba diving, skiing, enjoying nature. When at home I try to do some sports activities 3-4 times a week at least, and – recently – play with my now 8 month old son as much as I can.

About-

http://datamarket.com/p/about/team/

Management

Hjalmar GislasonHjálmar Gíslason, Founder and CEO: Hjalmar is a successful entrepreneur, founder of three startups in the gaming, mobile and web sectors since 1996. Prior to launching DataMarket, Hjalmar worked on new media and business development for companies in the Skipti Group (owners of Iceland Telecom) after their acquisition of his search startup – Spurl. Hjalmar offers a mix of business, strategy and technical expertise. DataMarket is based largely on his vision of the need for a global exchange for structured data.

hjalmar.gislason@datamarket.com

To know more, have a quick  look at  http://datamarket.com/

Interview Prof Benjamin Alamar , Sports Analytics

Here is an interview with Prof Benjamin Alamar, founding editor of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sport, a professor of sports management at Menlo College and the Director of Basketball Analytics and Research for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA.

Ajay – The movie Moneyball recently sparked out mainstream interest in analytics in sports.Describe the role of analytics in sports management

Benjamin- Analytics is impacting sports organizations on both the sport and business side.
On the Sport side, teams are using analytics, including advanced data management, predictive anlaytics, and information systems to gain a competitive edge. The use of analytics results in more accurate player valuations and projections, as well as determining effective strategies against specific opponents.
On the business side, teams are using the tools of analytics to increase revenue in a variety of ways including dynamic ticket pricing and optimizing of the placement of concession stands.
Ajay-  What are the ways analytics is used in specific sports that you have been part of?

Benjamin- A very typical first step for a team is to utilize the tools of predictive analytics to help inform their draft decisions.

Ajay- What are some of the tools, techniques and software that analytics in sports uses?
Benjamin- The tools of sports analytics do not differ much from the tools of business analytics. Regression analysis is fairly common as are other forms of data mining. In terms of software, R is a popular tool as is Excel and many of the other standard analysis tools.
Ajay- Describe your career journey and how you became involved in sports management. What are some of the tips you want to tell young students who wish to enter this field?

Benjamin- I got involved in sports through a company called Protrade Sports. Protrade initially was a fantasy sports company that was looking to develop a fantasy game based on advanced sports statistics and utilize a stock market concept instead of traditional drafting. I was hired due to my background in economics to develop the market aspect of the game.

There I met Roland Beech (who now works for the Mavericks) and Aaron Schatz (owner of footballoutsiders.com) and learned about the developing field of sports statistics. I then changed my research focus from economics to sports statistics and founded the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Through the journal and my published research, I was able to establish a reputation of doing quality, useable work.

For students, I recommend developing very strong data management skills (sql and the like) and thinking carefully about what sort of questions a general manager or coach would care about. Being able to demonstrate analytic skills around actionable research will generally attract the attention of pro teams.

About-

Benjamin Alamar, Professor of Sport Management, Menlo College

Benjamin Alamar

Professor Benjamin Alamar is the founding editor of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sport, a professor of sports management at Menlo College and the Director of Basketball Analytics and Research for the Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA. He has published academic research in football, basketball and baseball, has presented at numerous conferences on sports analytics. He is also a co-creator of ESPN’s Total Quarterback Rating and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He has consulted for teams in the NBA and NFL, provided statistical analysis for author Michael Lewis for his recent book The Blind Side, and worked with numerous startup companies in the field of sports analytics. Professor Alamar is also an award winning economist who has worked academically and professionally in intellectual property valuation, public finance and public health. He received his PhD in economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2001.

Prof Alamar is a speaker at Predictive Analytics World, San Fransisco and is doing a workshop there

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012/agenda.php#day2-17

2:55-3:15pm

All level tracks Track 1: Sports Analytics
Case Study: NFL, MLB, & NBA
Competing & Winning with Sports Analytics

The field of sports analytics ties together the tools of data management, predictive modeling and information systems to provide sports organization a competitive advantage. The field is rapidly developing based on new and expanded data sources, greater recognition of the value, and past success of a variety of sports organizations. Teams in the NFL, MLB, NBA, as well as other organizations have found a competitive edge with the application of sports analytics. The future of sports analytics can be seen through drawing on these past successes and the developments of new tools.

You can know more about Prof Alamar at his blog http://analyticfootball.blogspot.in/ or journal at http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jqas. His detailed background can be seen at http://menlo.academia.edu/BenjaminAlamar/CurriculumVitae

Statistical Theory for High Performance Analytics

A thing that strikes me when I was a student of statistics is that most theories of sampling, testing of hypothesis and modeling were built in an age where data was predominantly insufficient, computation was inherently manual and results of tests aimed at large enough differences.

I look now at the explosion of data, at the cloud computing enabled processing power on demand, and competitive dynamics of businesses to venture out my opinion-

1) We now have large , even excess data than we had before for statisticians a generation ago.

2) We now have extremely powerful computing devices, provided we can process our algorithms in parallel.

3) Even a slight uptick in modeling efficiency or mild uptick in business insight can provide huge monetary savings.

Call it High Performance Analytics or Big Data or Cloud Computing- are we sure statisticians are creating enough mathematical theory or are we just taking it easy in our statistics classrooms only to be subjected to something completely different when we hit the analytics workplace.

Do we  need more theorists as well? Is there ANY incentive for corporations with private R and D research teams to share their latest cutting edge theoretical work outside their corporate silo.

 

Related-

“a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”

Jill Dyche on 2012

In part 3 of the series for predictions for 2012, here is Jill Dyche, Baseline Consulting/DataFlux.

Part 2 was Timo Elliot, SAP at http://www.decisionstats.com/timo-elliott-on-2012/ and Part 1 was Jim Kobielus, Forrester at http://www.decisionstats.com/jim-kobielus-on-2012/

Ajay: What are the top trends you saw happening in 2011?

 

Well, I hate to say I saw them coming, but I did. A lot of managers committed some pretty predictable mistakes in 2011. Here are a few we witnessed in 2011 live and up close:

 

1.       In the spirit of “size matters,” data warehouse teams continued to trumpet the volumes of stored data on their enterprise data warehouses. But a peek under the covers of these warehouses reveals that the data isn’t integrated. Essentially this means a variety of heterogeneous virtual data marts co-located on a single server. Neat. Big. Maybe even worthy of a magazine article about how many petabytes you’ve got. But it’s not efficient, and hardly the example of data standardization and re-use that everyone expects from analytical platforms these days.

 

2.       Development teams still didn’t factor data integration and provisioning into their project plans in 2011. So we saw multiple projects spawn duplicate efforts around data profiling, cleansing, and standardization, not to mention conflicting policies and business rules for the same information. Bummer, since IT managers should know better by now. The problem is that no one owns the problem. Which brings me to the next mistake…

 

3.       No one’s accountable for data governance. Yeah, there’s a council. And they meet. And they talk. Sometimes there’s lunch. And then nothing happens because no one’s really rewarded—or penalized for that matter—on data quality improvements or new policies. And so the reports spewing from the data mart are still fraught and no one trusts the resulting decisions.

 

But all is not lost since we’re seeing some encouraging signs already in 2012. And yes, I’d classify some of them as bona-fide trends.

 

Ajay: What are some of those trends?

 

Job descriptions for data stewards, data architects, Chief Data Officers, and other information-enabling roles are becoming crisper, and the KPIs for these roles are becoming more specific. Data management organizations are being divorced from specific lines of business and from IT, becoming specialty organizations—okay, COEs if you must—in their own rights. The value proposition for master data management now includes not just the reconciliation of heterogeneous data elements but the support of key business strategies. And C-level executives are holding the data people accountable for improving speed to market and driving down costs—not just delivering cleaner data. In short, data is becoming a business enabler. Which, I have to just say editorially, is better late than never!

 

Ajay: Anything surprise you, Jill?

 

I have to say that Obama mentioning data management in his State of the Union speech was an unexpected but pretty powerful endorsement of the importance of information in both the private and public sector.

 

I’m also sort of surprised that data governance isn’t being driven more frequently by the need for internal and external privacy policies. Our clients are constantly asking us about how to tightly-couple privacy policies into their applications and data sources. The need to protect PCI data and other highly-sensitive data elements has made executives twitchy. But they’re still not linking that need to data governance.

 

I should also mention that I’ve been impressed with the people who call me who’ve had their “aha!” moment and realize that data transcends analytic systems. It’s operational, it’s pervasive, and it’s dynamic. I figured this epiphany would happen in a few years once data quality tools became a commodity (they’re far from it). But it’s happening now. And that’s good for all types of businesses.

 

About-

Jill Dyché has written three books and numerous articles on the business value of information technology. She advises clients and executive teams on leveraging technology and information to enable strategic business initiatives. Last year her company Baseline Consulting was acquired by DataFlux Corporation, where she is currently Vice President of Thought Leadership. Find her blog posts on www.dataroundtable.com.

%d bloggers like this: