February 2011
2 posts
Predictive Power
Predictive Policing hopefully does not turn into Predictive Arresting
What is data science? →
old* but good essay on the essence of data science
* ‘old’ in internet terms
January 2011
2 posts
2 tags
December 2010
1 post
Nokia in the News - Sentiment Analysis by Textmap →
November 2010
2 posts
WatchNetwork Visualizations with Gephi. Absolutely amazing.
October 2010
5 posts
Windows Azure DataMarket launched →
It partners with many popular data providers, such as data.gov and un.org, and seems to start well with its mission to become a “one stop shop for data”.
And quite conveniently, Tableau is well integrated, so it is a one-click action to load a data set within Tableau.
Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using... →
very very very [did I already say very?] interesting read: with respect to the outcome of the conducted experiments, as well as to the approach of using Mechanical Turk for A/B testing
“All the sudden, Facebook is a place to have deep topical conversations, not just...”
– Implications of Facebook Groups
Are Nokia's OVI services gaining momentum? →
September 2010
6 posts
The King is dead. Long live the King.
Stephen Elop is the new president and CEO of Nokia. So, after month-long rumors, OPK steps down (with a 4.6M € golden handshake), and is replaced by an American.
Formerly, Stephen was appointed as president of Microsoft’s business division (key words: Microsoft, Business), and before that CEO of Macromedia. There will be a press conference at 13:00 Finish Time, broadcasted live via WebCast...
Chart Format Guide →
The UK parliament (!) educates on how to properly create ‘statistical’ charts. More material on basic statistics can be found here.
August 2010
4 posts
“Use a decent camera. Go easy on the flash. Own the foreground. Take your picture...”
– http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/
Indiemapper: "Create beautiful maps. Fast" →
online application for plotting data onto (static) maps
the Stickiness of a Mobile OS
According to a recent Nielsen study 89% of iPhone owners in the US expressed their intent to remain on the iPhone OS platform for their next smartphone purchase. And since Apple is the only one offering devices with iPhone OS, this practically translates to a staggeringly high retention rate for Apple.
On the other hand, the shooting star of the year, the Android platform, can report that 71% of...
July 2010
2 posts
Job Postings
I know, I got terribly lazy with keeping my blog up-to-date. In particular I am (so far?) not sharing any of the inside secrets from within Nokia, that would really boost my site traffic :-)
However, here is an announcement. After (successfully) developing a new allocation tool for Nokia’s global marketing budget, I will from now on focus on squeezing all kind of insights out of...
May 2010
3 posts
Interesting Study of iPhone impact for T-Mobile in... →
Google Prediction API →
“The Prediction API enables access to Google’s machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes”
I.e. the darkest of the darkest black boxes that you can imagine. One doesn’t even know what algorithm is being applied, or what kind of super intelligence is applied. Like most of the Google stuff: Damn cool, and a bit scary.
But...
Simpson's Paradox
In 1995, as well as in 1996 baseball player David Justice had a higher Batting Average than Derek Jeter (0.253 vs 0.250, and 0.321 vs 0.314). But, combining the statistics of both years to a single aggregate number will show Derek Jeter as the clearly better hitter (0.310 vs 0.270). Weird, isn’t it?
Read more at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson’s_paradox
April 2010
4 posts
Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining →
Visualizing Traffic
Actually I wanted to post a link to Flight Radar 24 already a while ago, but the current eruption of a icelandic volcano makes it even more interesting to look at the live air traffic situation, as the all planes remain on the ground in UK and whole of Scandinavia.
The map features detailed information of each major airplane currently in the air, with complete path history, altitude, etc. So,...
March 2010
8 posts
Opinion Space - by the US Goverment →
OkTrends: a fact-based blog on dating behaviour
Not that I’ve got any business hanging out on online dating platforms, but OkCupid.com seems to be quite determined on finding a perfect match for you and they use quite some number crunching to improve their matches. I am lucky to be in a great relationship, so that I don’t need to rely on some algorithm to find me a partner, as this just feels a bit unnatural to do....
Fanpage Analytics
Yet another public source for information on a particular business/subject/whatever: Fan Page Analytics. It currently only analyzes Facebook Pages, but it seems that there are plans for Twitter and MySpace as well.
Here is a world map of the relative popularity of the NOKIA Fanpage (which is quite consistent with the world map that Google Insight draws for Nokia)
Note: I adjusted the contrast...
UNdata - A World of Information →
“UNSD’s core mission is to advance the development of the global statistical system and promote the dissemination of statistical information. This database service is part of a project launched by UNSD in 2005, called “Statistics as a Public Good”, whose objectives are to provide free access to global statistics, to educate users about the importance of statistics for...
“…and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who...”
– from The Economist
I am feeling really sexy today :-)
Implementations of Stochastic CLV Models
A couple of days ago I finally made my implementations of some common stochastic models for non-contractual consumer relationships available under the Apache 2.0 Open Source license: http://code.google.com/p/clv-master-thesis/
The code provides methods for estimating the according model parameters (via maximum likelihood), for calculating the likelihood of defection as well as forecasting future...
February 2010
7 posts
Online Maps - going off road
On the occasion of the Winter Olympics Google Maps “Street View” went off-road and introduced “Ski Slope View” (at least for the ski resorts in Vancouver). Shooting these images must have been a bit more exciting than driving up and down every single road on this planet.
Microsoft, on the other hand, just recently revealed a new iteration of Bing Maps. And surprised many...
Google Streetview - now for Helsinki
But somehow I have difficulties matching the images from streetview with the current scenes here in Helsinki. See for yourself:
As seen on Google Streetview:
Currently in Helsinki:
Notice a difference?
Here is another comparison:
versus
I already forgot that sometimes trees are green, and roads are grey :-)
Ovi Maps - 1.4 million downloads in 1 week →
Finally, some really impressive numbers from Nokia’s services. I must say repeat myself, that giving it away for free was a great strategic move. And after heavily using Ovi Maps now for a week, I quite fancy that friendly German navi voice trying its best to pronounce the finish street names :-)
January 2010
10 posts
Data Dashboards
I am planning on demoing some best-of-class web-based interactive data dashboards to my colleagues here at Nokia next week. But all I can come up with are Google Services: Google Insight, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Finance, heck even Gapminder and Youtube Insights (see image) is nowadays owned Google. Isn’t any other company at least in one or another aspect a tiny bit better...
Ovi Maps
So, yesterday’s news conference by Nokia contained some very good news (good for the consumer, but just as good for the company I would say):
The Ovi Maps Navigator will be free of charge! When I got my E72, and for the first time actually saw Ovi Maps in action, I was rather surprised to find out that they try to charge for the service. I got so annoyed by the user interface as well as by...
R goes Web2.0
I was positively surprised to read that there is a useR meetup in San Francisco that is being sponsored by twitter. So, it seems that some of the top web service companies in the States are seeing the potential of R.
The topic of the meetup is R-powered Web Apps. In particular Jeroen Ooms will be presenting his super slick javascripted (ext.js) web frontend for the visualization package ggplot2.
...