Technologists and market research practitioners have long lived in parallel universes. In technology, we deal with tables, joins and the ETL process. In market research and analysis, we deal with datasets, merges and data preparation. When you think about it, these are the same things! The subtle difference is that technologists have had a data mining mindset and market researchers have had a hypothesis-driven mindset. Continue reading »

During the past month, I was able to attend two premier conferences dedicated to predictive analytics; these were the The Predictive Analytics Summit in San Diego, and Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco. In categories like this, it’s next to impossible to follow the notion of a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set. In spite of this classification issue, I will do my best to provide a bird’s eye view of the sector. I’ve broken it down into three types of predictive analytics and the three types of companies pursuing the predictive analytics market. Continue reading »