Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Data & Analytics

I’ll Be Live-Blogging the ‘Pioneer Summit’ Again Next Week

pioneersummit-logodatesI’m heading out to the Bay Area in a few days to once again cover a great tech conference called the Pioneer Summit, put on by GSV Labs in Redwood City, CA. I loved reporting on it last year — as evidenced by my extensive liveblog. (They moved it up from October to September this year.)

I’m looking forward to the program, which is jam-packed. Is this enough speakers for you? Here’s one my data geek friends would like. And hearing what this Silicon Valley legend has to say will be pretty awesome as well.

What is GSV Labs, you ask? It’s “a campus of innovation” — I like that description! A very cool place indeed. It’s focused on accelerating high-growth, high-impact verticals in the areas of EdTech, Sustainability, Big Data, and Mobility. Utilizingpioneersummit-celebrate GSV Labs’ resources, founders and entrepreneurs join a global network of ecosystem partners, including corporations, international agencies, mentors, universities, investors, thought leaders, and non-profits. From its Silicon Valley campus, GSV Labs houses about 100 startups, provides acceleration programs, and hosts events.

My connection to GSV Labs is through my colleague Mark Moe (who lives here in the Twin Cities) — he’s VP of Global Business Development. Look forward to seeing you there, Mark, and I’m sure some other Minnesotans who’ll be in attendance, as there were last year.

I guess I’d better start getting my live-blogging fingers loosened up — which means not just providing commentary, but shooting a whole lot of iPhone pics to go along with it. This will be fun!

The State — or Lack of a State — of Marketing Analytics

©VentureBeat-MktgAnalytics

Image @VentureBeat

How does one assess the landscape for an exploding technology category like marketing analytics? There’s so much confusion and hype around the topic. You’ve heard it all — too much data, we’re drowning in it, woe is us. And, along with that, too many vendors trying to sell us the latest cure. First we were shocked to hear the number of vendors was 1000, now we’re told it’s 2000! The argument that all these vendors create too many data silos is now a refrain we’re hearing more often. Hard to argue with that.

With such high numbers of players comes confusion, and complexity.

But it begs the question: how in the world do you unify all your marketing data to understand it and gain a competitive edge for your organization? Will a platform or single vendor solution emerge? Some of the big players like Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are certainly trying, opting in a big way for buy vs. build. (These three have led a frenzy of acquisitions in the marketing technology space.)

Yet significant roadblocks still exist to widespread adoption of marketing analytics in business today — and for companies to extract real value from it. The lack of data science skills we’ve all heard about by now till we’re blue in the face — it’s the “sexiest job title in the country,” blah blah blah. Big shortages, universities scrambling to launch graduate programs, etc, etc. But should  this technology really require a PhD in every marketing department and agency in the land? That simply doesn’t compute! Why can’t there be more solutions, more tools, that marketers and general business folks — regular Joes and Janes — can use? Why does it all have to be so complex?  Continue reading

Mobile App Discovery Not Getting Easier; ‘Zombies’ Gaining

[Note: This post first appeared earlier today at Minnov8.com, where I am a contributor. Image credit: Telegraph UK.]

appsBasically, app discovery is a bitch, and the App Store is no longer the answer. That is the gist of a report on “2015 App Store Competition” published a couple days ago by an analytics firm in Berlin called Adjust. (PDF of the full report here.)

Minnesota developers are of course not strangers to this problem.  It’s especially painful for startups looking to get traction in today’s “mobile first” startup environment — and moreso if they don’t have Silicon Valley sized funding rounds.  I asked a couple of experienced mobile industry players here in Minnesota for their reaction to this news.  But first, more on the report.

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Quantifying the Hype: A Data Analysis of #CES2015

cesThink of it as the morning after. Actually, it was the Monday following the week when 2015 International CES ended, on a Friday. I was scrolling through my email, trying to decompress — feeling some pride in surviving multiple weeks of being blasted with hundreds (thousands?) of PR pitches from an absolutely cuh-razy variety of exhibiting companies, from all over the globe. The blisters on my feet weren’t hurting so bad anymore. Whew! Things were finally starting to… slow… down.

Part of this decompression process is always trying to form in my head my overall opinion of the show — this after writing a couple of posts (and shooting a ton of photos), but no one person can ever really write enough posts to describe their entire experience at this thing. Which begs the question, how the hell do I summarize yet another year of this massive tech-product sensory overload? It is not easy netting it out!

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