Bill Rice

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  Bill Rice 1:11 pm on November 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: analysis, counts, Data, Data Mining, Data structure, lists, nodes, twitter (10)   

  List, Counts, and Nodes the Power Tools of Analysis 

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  I’m really tired of line graphs, pie charts, and other analytical eye candy. I can’t do anything with the questions they present. It is always impossible to drill into the data that creates these confusing images.

  I have been analyzing complex data for years. I have have crunched data to understand everything from signals intelligence to sales performance. Ironically, the most useful methodology always boils down to three distinct concepts that work beautifully together.

  1. Lists-Discrete elements neatly listed. These could be URLs, Twitter users, contacts, songs, keywords, or any of an infinite number of data items. By breaking data into its discrete element we can see patterns and trends more easily. Simple, easy to scan and sort, lists become  agile frameworks to manipulate and analyze.

  2. Counts-Frequency, scale, reputation are all potential revelations from the simplicity of counting occurrences. Counts make it easy to reveal what is most relevant in data sets. What’s more counts create relevant lists of associated elements.

  3. Nodes-Where is the data coming from, going to, or inter-related? This is a powerful way to gauge the quality and accuracy of information. There is a tendency for associates to exchange data and that exchange tends to be consistent. Therefore, following nodes and relationships can help you locate the right data.

  These three data structures give you all the elements quickly and powerfully analyze very large data sets. Next time you are building an analytics dashboard start here and don’t necessarily go beyond.

  Everything else is pretty, but probably far less useful and ultimately frustrating.

  (Hat tip to Dave Winer. Most of this revelation came from 40-Twits.)

  

   

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  Bill Rice 10:48 am on July 31, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dave winer (5), Social Media (3), Software (13), twitter (10), users, Web 2.0   

  Software Engineers Learning to Listen to Users 

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  Another software gem from Dave Winer–be a user and listen to users. Hopefully, he will continue to build out this advice, but I thought it was valuable to pull it out and highlight here:

  1. Be a user. Develop apps you yourself have a use for. If you don’t have a feeling for what it’s like to be a user, you’ll never know how to evolve the products, and the stuff you learn in #2 will never make sense.

  2. Listen to users. Learning how to code is straightforward, it takes time to perfect your skills, but it’s relatively easy compared to the skill of listening. I recently suggested to a VC friend that we start a company whose sole differentiator is that it strives to perfect the art of listening to users.

  I think social media and Web 2.0 are making it easier for us to listen to users–trying to use our software as well as get things done. Unfortunately, we often don’t put the effort into making it easy to hear and listen for our users.

  We just added GetSatisfaction.com and the Feedback tab (widget) into all of our applications. Hopefully, that will make it easier for them to talk to us. In addition, we are becoming more active in energizing and engaging our user community.

  Still, the methodology for listening is not perfected. More thought and innovation is needed…

  Ideas? What are you doing to listen better to your users?

  

   
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  Bill Rice 2:50 pm on July 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Software (13)   

  Tools for Eavesdropping and Taking Action 

  
  Stowe Boyd, of /message trickled into my RSS stream and tickled one of my ongoing projects.

  You see, Stowe is thinking about appliances and applications that “eavesdrop” on our streams and take action. His idea swirls around travel and event planning. Mine, around sales.

  Let’s take a look at what one of these applications might look like:

  1. Tap into “microsyntax” and keywords to trigger capture
  2. Default display would be a “river of news”
  3. Interesting items (potential sales opportunities) can be:
  4. • Flagged
     • Identified
     • Engaged
     • Tracked
     • Captured (into CRM)
  5. Provide Social Graph explorer
  6. Selectively capture microformats meta-data (i.e., contacts, tags)
  7. Have API to simplify Social CRM implementation

  I am really enjoying this project. More to come…

  (photo: Milanella)

  jual_rumah, Bill Rice, and paulknag are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    paulknag 5:00 pm on July 23, 2009 Permalink

    Aren't there already keyword notifier programs like Google Alerts and TwitterBeep which are doing something of this ?

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    Bill Rice 7:54 pm on July 23, 2009 Permalink

    Yes, there are certainly early tools and feature sets that are implemented.

    Some savvy sales people are leveraging these to produce results, which is demonstrating the value. However, try to manage or implement on an enterprise level (even scaling to 10-15 sales people).

    Probably the biggest hole is in the identity piece. Here's an exercise: Try taking one of those alerts you get from Google Alerts or any other social search and try to efficiently track it down to contact information.

    Are you finding those tools to be efficient sales lead generators?

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    jual_rumah 7:55 am on July 29, 2009 Permalink

    Thank you for the valuable lesson.

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  Bill Rice 6:36 am on February 7, 2006 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ideas (73), mortgage (31), rss (4), Software (13), technology (41)   

  Secure RSS for Financial Services 

  Ask and you shall receive.

  A couple of days ago as the MicroPersuasion Blog talked about AOL charging a fee to ensure email delivery to their clients and Dave Winer and Fred Wilson talked about making RSS simple enough to become mainstream–I pondered if this was an answer to a major problem I run into with Financial Service clients:

  Email is one of the primary means that financial service companies communicate with their clients. However, terms like mortgage, loans, bank, dollar amounts, and other important terms that banks and mortgage companies need to use in email are red flags for most spam blockers. So, often the clients get bad communication experiences because of their spam box catches these emails.

  My though was if we could devise a way to secure and personalize these individual RSS feeds it would a great way to tune into your financial status–it seems someone is working on it.

  Wouldn’t it be great to get real-time feed on transactions from your checking accounts and credit cards, reminders to pay your mortgage online, alerts when you CD is due to roll-over, or daily quotes on your 401K, or other stock, bond, and/or mutual fund portfolio. How about a feed from your credit report!

  An added benefit, this would complete obliterate identity theft!

  Rice’s Link Blog » RSS the New Communication Tool for Financial Services is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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  Bill Rice 11:56 am on November 25, 2005 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dave winer (5), editor, opml, wordpress   

  Dave Winer’s New OPML Editor Wordpress Tool 

  This is a post using Dave’s new Wordpress tool for his OPML Editor. I had to use Cori Schlegel’s xmlrpc.php hack, but after that it work splendidly.

  I also decided to load and run the OPML Editor from a memory stick, which also worked. I am increasingly trying to free my data and my applications from a single computer. This solves to potential issues: data security (protecting my various clients’ information) and ubiquity/mobility (protecting my sanity from worrying about what computer I am using).

  I am doing a similar thing with TiddlyWiki.