Here are some tips to make people more likely to read your email. I’ve noticed that some people struggle to communicate effectively via email, so maybe sharing these tips will help someone. Tips: 1. include *one message* per email — when you include 2 or more, the others easily get ignored. It’s better to send […]
Medieval Game of Death (#bisnesidea)
korttipeli, jossa yritetään selvitä keskiajan kylän läpi. A plague – a rat bites you and infests you with plague death guillotine alchemist mermaid hellhound inquisition witchcraft burning at stake lonely knight harlequin B map: back alley market place castle tavern underworld gates of heaven A+B –> jokaisessa oma tarina “travel through a medieval town and […]
“No Startup Is an Island” – How to Use Network Pictures to Position Yourself in the Market
I got introduced to network pictures by Valtteri Kaartemo a few years back, and thought it was a cool idea. Since then, I’ve realized — after talking to many startups — that it’s more than a cool idea. It’s actually useful. That’s because startups routinely overlook their networks and just focus on competitors. They make […]
Use Cases for Personas
This is a joint piece by Dr. Joni Salminen and Professor Jim Jansen. The authors are working on a system for automatic persona generation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The system is available online at https://persona.qcri.org. Introduction Personas are fictive characterizations of the core audience or customers of a company, introduced into software development and […]
Web 3.0: The dark side of social media
Web 2.0 was about all the pretty, shiny things about social media, like user-generated content, blogs, customer participation, ”everyone has a voice,” etc. Now, Web 3.0 is all about the dark side: algorithmic bias, filter bubbles, group polarization, flame wars, cyberbullying, etc. We discovered that maybe everyone should not have a voice, after all. Or at least that […]
Tips on Data Imputation From Machine Learning Experts
Missing values are a critical issue in statistics and machine learning (which is “advanced statistics”). Data imputation deals with ways to fill those missing values. Andriy Burkov made this statement a few days ago [1]: “The best way to fill a missing value of an attribute is to build a classifier (if the attribute is […]
Creating Buyer Personas: Common Interview Questions
Introduction At Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), we are developing a system for automatic persona generation (APG). The demo is available online at https://persona.qcri.org As a part of this research, we’re interested in the information needs of end users of personas [1]. People working in different domains are interested in different information, after all. For example, […]
Google Analytics: 21 Questions to Get Started
I was teaching a course called “Web & Mobile Analytics” at Aalto University back in 2015. As a part of that course, the students conducted an analytics audit for their chosen website. I’m sharing the list of questions I made for that audit, as it’s a useful list for getting to know Google Analytics. The […]
Simple methods for anomaly detection in e-commerce
Anomaly is a deviation from the expected value. The main challenges are: (a) how much the deviation should be to be classified as an anomaly, and (b) what time frame or subset of data should we examine. The simplest way to answer those questions is to use your marketer’s intuition. As an e-commerce manager, you […]
Platform metrics: Some ideas
I was chatting with Lauri [1] about platform research. I claimed that the research has not that many implications for real-world companies apart from the basic constructs of network effects, two-sidedness, tipping, marquee users, strategies such as envelopment, and of course many challenges, including chicken-and-egg problems, monetization dilemma, and remora’s curse (see my dissertation on […]