Feed: Coffee, Sun & Technology - AggScore: 50.9

Lewis Hamilton is the new Formula One champion. I was personally rooting for Felipe Massa, the Brazilian pilot for Ferrari, but I was quite happy to see Lewis clinch the title. What an incredible race, where Hamilton was losing, then winning, then losing again till the very last turn& Unbelievable.

SpeedTV did a pretty nice job covering the race. Viewers got to see Hamiltons and Massas family and friends, which reminded everybody that these pilots arent robots - they are real people with real sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers. It was touching to see Hamilton younger brother, who sits on a wheel chair, praying for Lewis and crying at the end. Lewis has been hardly criticized for the last couple of months for his driving style, etc - and this was a nice reset for both fans and critics. Hes human.

Business is a little like that. Theres always stress at work, sometimes confrontation, and its easy to lose track of the bigger picture. Your employees, customers, partners and even competitors are real people too. Treat them like youd like to be treated, which of course doesnt take anything away from the fact that its a tough world out there and you have to fight, fight and fight.

Just got this& interesting. Why send an unsolicited email like this?

 - Forwarded message -
From: Google AdSense
Date: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Subject: A note from Google AdSense
To: xxx

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, were continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

Were focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. Were bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and well continue to launch new products and features. Were also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

Well keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Ive been hooked to FiveThirtyEight.com since Brett Hurt told me about it a few weeks ago. And not only because Nate Silver, a successful baseball statistician is predicting Obamas victorys next week  but also because it reminded me that statistics can help you accurately predict the outcome of just about anything.

And hes got a good sense of humour. Watch him on the Colbert Report:

I am going to join a panel tomorrow Thursday Sept 28 at 10AM to discuss video for ecommerce with Jon Nordmark from eBags, Alison Jeske from drugstore.com and Justin Foster from the Video Commerce Consortium. I look forward to sharing thoughts and learning from what others are doing. The conference happens to be less than 10 minutes from the Liveclicker offices, which is nice too!   

Im excited to be presenting a segment on video commerce at the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver this upcoming week. I am scheduled to give a presentation at 10:30 on Thursday (Using Video for e-Retail Success), then participate to a panel on Online advertising the next day at 9AM.

Prior to that Im going to be in Seattle for a day to consult with a client and present some of the latest Liveclicker features. Its going to be an exciting end of the week, thats for sure. Also nice to catch up with Eric Peterson, whom I havent seen for a year or so, and the other great people presenting or attending. This event was put together by Lars Johansson and is part of a series of Internet Marketing conferences around the globe.

Is it just me or the games are a great motivator to get out and run? Its great to see the athletes compete, some win, others just participate. In general, sports play a huge part in my life. I dont really follow professional sports (with the exception perhaps of Formula 1 racing and soccer), so for me, sport is more than anything a personal experience.

Ive learned a lot while running, windsurfing, biking or playing soccer. Sports is good for the body, but it also tells you tiny little life lessons - many of them apply to my entrepreneurial life. Persistence, hard work, and patience to see results. Motivation and drive to surpass your natural capibilities. Class in defeat or victory. And of course the burning desire to be the number one.

For quite some time now Ive been using analytical tools to slice and dice user data on small sites (Wambo gets about 50K visits a month roughly, and I have 2 other small B2C service sites that Im managing on the side). In doing so, Ive realized that the kinds of metrics you look at for these sites that need to grow fast are very different from traditional analytics.

While traditional sites look at improving existing business processes (increasing conversion rates, enhancing the customer experience, etc etc ), startup sites are laser-focused on finding the right formula for their site or service. Startups are always building. And speed is what matters.

For us early stage sites, we look at a completely different set of numbers. And, we compare data ALL the time. Month-over-month, week-over-week, even sometimes, hour-over-hour. So Im thinking of another kind of analytics thatd be useful for me, lets call that growth analytics. In an ideal interface, Id like everything presented in the context of velocity. Velocity been the uber measure, similar to a session or a page view in traditional web analytics.

Id want to see user acquisition velocity by hour, day, week and month. Id like to be able to compare velocities for different time ranges (this week vs last week). I want to be able to track acquisition velocity  for different segments. I want to A/B test my site and see what the impact is on the velocity metrics. And I want to project in the future what my KPIs will look like if I can sustain the current velocity levels (i.e. if I keep growing my users by 3% a week, that will get me to the 1Million user mark by ___). A new calendar type but with dates in the future too, not just in the past.

Yes, you see where Im going now. I think whats a little broken with the state of analytics today is the fact that we spend 90% of our time trying to answer the what happened question. And thats soooo yesterday

So I guess Im one of the lucky bloggers who got a preview of the big big big news from ClickTale. Looking at the email header (below) I was expecting something like a triple merger Omniture-WebTrends-Coremetrics, for $100billion dollars in cash, funded by the French government and with Carla Bruni as the CEO of the new entity.

Well, Im sorry to disappoint. It was an email from a PhD guy name Tal who happens to be the CEO of the company. Yes, thats right, this is where weve come down folks  take a feature of your product (anything will do, your new logo, a font change, or even form abandonment), put together an email to a few hundred bloggers, with the words ALERT,  You cant break the news,  Theres an embargo, and patiently wait for the busy bloggers to bite without doing the research.

And it works. TechCrunch covered the story.  And Im sure many others will too. Now ClickTale dudes: think twice before sending absurd emails like this to a crowd of people who might know what theyre talking about. Form abandonment was first released in 2003 and all respectable analytics vendors have that feature. I know nothing about your product but you dont seem to know anything about this market.