This post will be the first in a series on effective enterprise technology demos. I will share tips, tricks, and lessons I have learned over 5 years giving demos to everyone from analysts to C-Levels execs. Each post will contain a specific and actionable way to improve your demos immediately. Today, we will talk about how to use the first 2 sentences to capture the audience’s attention. The Problem: Like it or not, these days every person walking into a meeting can easily zone you out (with computer/tablet/phone) to do work they deem more important than listen to you....

Recently I found myself planning a bachelor party. I was aiming to rent a house for 19 friends strewn across the northeastern United States. I wanted to pick a a central location easy for everyone to get to. So, like any normal person (at least one who works in analytics), I wanted to quantitatively determine the most fair location. “In the Middle” Very often, when you want to meet someone who lives elsewhere, we pick a point halfway between....

Recently, at a family gathering I made an off-hand comment to my parents that on some flights during the week it seems like 50%+ people are on Wifi doing work. I expressed how important it was to me in particular, given that I work at a cloud-based analytics company for me, to have access to the internet when preparing to meet with customers. And my Mom told me a great story about one of her first jobs....

I teach a class on Data Mining at Stanford. Students in my class are expected to do a project that does some non-trivial data mining. Many students opted to try their hand at the Netflix Challenge: to design a movie… One of my favorite blog posts ever. A very simple idea: it’s easier to win by creatively combining data than by using ever more sophisticated algorithms. This is especially important today due to two major trends in the analytics world:...

A topic that has come up for me multiple times recently is how to best measure affinity in retail or eCommerce. In working with customers, I have seen that many different organizations measure affinity differently, and I wanted to take the time to explore the various models and why they may make sense or not. In the end, affinity comes down to probabilities. Before I dive into this, some background (if you already know about affinity analysis, skip below):...

Update on this post in 2022… This is a cool post to read later. I had forgotten I wrote this and also forgotten that the iPad ever had the numeric moniker. According to this article on iPad history there was an iPad 3 and iPad 4 but then they dropped the numbers. And Apple actually started the differentiation I advocated by introducing the iPad Mini the following year (2012), and iPad Air (2013) and finally an iPad Pro 4 years (2015)....

My dad had a great quote for me growing up. It was “the most successful people are lazy.” He meant a particular kind of lazy- the kind that finds ways to optimize their life. For example, my dad is too lazy to solve the same types of mathematic problems again and again, so he codes up a solution to automate it. In school, I was too lazy to study more than I needed....