I was at Defrag 2008 yesterday and it was a wonderful, refreshing experience. A diverse group of Web 2.0 veterans and newcomers came together to accelerate the “Aha!” moment in today’s online world. The conference was very well organized and there were interesting conversations on and off the stage.

The key observation was that individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on, and gather feedback from data. Data itself is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace. We as individuals feel overwhelmed by the slew of data (messages, emails, news, posts) in the microcosm, and we as organizations feel overwhelmed in the macrocosm.

The very real danger is that an individual or organization’s feeling of being constantly overwhelmed could result in the reduction of their “Aha!” moments – our resources will be so focused on merely keeping pace with new information that we won’t have the time or energy to connect the dots.

The goal then is to find tools and best practices to enable the “Aha!” moments – to connect the dots even as information piles up on our fingertips.

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It is really remarkable how many companies today view data analytics as the cornerstone of their businesses.aCerno is an advertising network that uses powerful analytics to predict which advertisements to deliver to which person at what time. Their analytics are performed on completely anonymous consumer shopping data of 140M users obtained from an association of 450+ product manufacturers and multi-channel retailers. There is a strong appetite at aCerno to perform analytics that they have not done before because each 1% uplift in the click-through rates is a significant revenue stream for them and their customers.

Aggregate Knowledge powers a discovery network (The Pique Discoveryâ„¢ Network) that delivers recommendations of products and content based on what was previously purchased and viewed by an individual using the collective behavior of the crowds that had behaved similarly in the past. Again, each 1% increase of engagement is a significant revenue stream for them and their customers.

ShareThis provides a sharing network via a widget that makes it simple for people to share things they find online with their friends. In a short period of time since their launch, ShareThis has reached over 150M unique monthly users. The amazing insight is that ShareThis knows which content users actually engage with, and want to tell their friends about! And in its sheer genius, ShareThis gives away its service to publishers and consumers free; relying on delivering targeted advertising for its revenue: by delivering relevant ad messages while knowing the characteristics of that thing being shared. Again, the better their analytics, the better their revenue.

Which brings me to my point: data analytics is a direct contributor of revenue gains in these companies. Read the rest of this entry »

I had the opportunity to work closely with Anand Rajaraman while at Stanford University and now at our company. Anand teaches the Data Mining class at Stanford as well, and recently he did a very instructive post on the observation that efficient algorithms on more data usually beat complex algorithms on small data. He followed it up with an elaboration post. Google also seems to believe in a similar philosophy.

I want to build upon that observation here. If you haven’t read the posts, do read them first. It is well-worth the time!

I propose that there are 2 forces in action that help simple algorithms on big data beat complex algorithms on small data:

1. The freedom of big data allows us to bring in related datasets that provide contextual richness.
2. Simple algorithms allow us to identify small nuances by leveraging contextual richness in the data.

Let me expand my proposal using Internet Advertising Networks as an example.

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