If you asked me 2 years ago if I’d be working in Sales at a high tech startup, I’d say you were nuts! Fast forward to today and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Today I’m a Sales Engineer at an advanced analytic startup. What exactly is a Sales Engineer? Wikipedia defines it as a hybrid between Sales and Engineering, an interesting combination indeed. I live in a Goldilocks world of solving problems and selling the solution. This suits me just fine. Coming from the engineering world, solving problems is in my blood. Couple this with learned public speaking skills (i.e. Toastmasters), making presentations in a Sales environment makes me happy. I’m in my sweet spot. ...

The one thing that is as important as your product is your messaging about it. In some ways, messaging is more powerful because if no one knows how great your product is, you’re toast. To illustrate my point, let’s investigate the phrase “the medium is the message.” Originally coined by Marshall McLuhan, Marshall tells us the the medium (product) and message are one of the same. Your message becomes your product and your product becomes your message. Your success depends on your product (medium) and message saying the same thing at all times. ...

Just a quick post. I’m experimenting with adding a D3js type of dashboard to this site. I wrote a simple process to pull the closing prices of the S&P500 in RapidMiner Studio and saved a CSV file to my Dropbox. From there it uploads it to the S3 folders and renders a nice chart, using a sample javascript from Techan.js. The chart uses both the Techan.js and D3js libraries which provides for a pretty interface and cool chart. Try zooming and panning around, it’s slick! ...

Back in middle school we learned about log tables. We learned how to look them up in a table, interpolate them, and then use the result in our equations. Later on they allowed us to use calculators, which made our lives easier and faster. Fast forward many years to a Sunday morning this October. I was at my dining table with my laptop open, fooling with Pandas and iPython Notebooks (aka Juypter). I wanted to see how long it would take me to transform a customer data set (i.e. ETL and generate new attributes) and then do a simple K-nn cross validation. This is a routine and fast task in RapidMiner, but I wanted to code it the hard way and see how long it would take me. ...

In today’s Advanced Analytic landscape we often hear about the mythical Data Scientist that can cure all our problems and unearth value hidden deep in our data. He/she needs to know Math and Statistics, be able to Hack, and have deep Domain knowledge about a given problem. Drew Conway famously put together a Venn Diagram to show you what I mean. Yet, I always found this Venn Diagram a bit lacking for the softer skills. Sure you need to know all those hard skills, but what about having the ability to effectively communicate your results? You have yet another language to learn young (or old) Data Scientist! ...

The world right now is awash in Predictive Analytics, the mystery of Big Data, and the rise of the glorious and magical Data Scientist. Most of the time we hear these buzz words in relation to some marketing campaign, election, or credit score application process, but what about applying these tools and people to a project that can benefit the welfare of humanity? Well, one group of data scientists and a healthcare provider in Washington State are doing just that. ...

Do you know what you’re doing with your Big Data? Based on my experience, only a small group of companies really do. There’s just one little problem, as Intel cloud platforms group vice president and general manager Jason Waxman, told investors in a webcast last week. “This is the dirty little secret about big data: No one actually knows what to do with it,” said Waxman, as ComputerWorld reported. Link (emphasis mine) ...

I first started out with the #RaPi project, installing and configuring RapidAnalytics on a 2 Pi cluster successfully. The experiment came to a grinding halt after I tried to initialize RapidAnalytics. The 2 Pi cluster was ridiculously underpowered and I couldn’t get it to run successfully. I theorize that that problem could be solved by adding a 3rd or even 4th Pi to the cluster and trying again. Today, I have two Pi’s in production running my media center (Raspbmc) and another uploading my weather station (WeWxx) data to the Internet. The Pi that’s attached to my TV is quite a capable media center, and considering that we’ve cut the Cable TV cord, it’s quite a cool system. Just this past weekend I hooked up my 2TB external HD with our photos, music, and movies to it. ...

Churn models are not new in the analytics world, they’re heavily used by mobile telcos and other corporations that want to keep their loyal customers happy, and bring back customers from the brink of “about to churn.” In some cases, these models will help classify a group of customers that are such a pain in the butt to keep, it’s better to let them go. Makes business sense, right? Keep the best customers happy, group the customers that are about to leave into the ones you can save or not. I can’t help but wonder if the ones that you think are better off churning, aren’t the ones that are really telling you something valuable about your business. Like my wife. ...

I’ve been meaning to give you an update on what’s been happening at my local coin show (Feb 2014). The short of it is that general attendance is down, the regulars Numismatics are back, and the majority of dealers are buying silver and gold back. This is an interesting change of sentiment because the last time I was there (about a year ago), gold and silver were at higher levels and lots of noobs were there buying coins. Dealers were selling to the public like crazy and all the transactions were done in cash. Now that the price of gold and silver is a lot lower, my guess is that the noobs are either holding or out of the market completely. ...