An inch closer than guessing...that's analytics

I have been away some time from writing. If you have had a chance to read any of my previous blogs, I talked a lot about Mobile, some programming stuff for finance and then few random thoughts. Driven by the necessity of the task at hand my interests have changed along the way. But I am starting again, and that is a good thing. A bit scary and a bit work like, but I shall say I have picked few skills along the way which I will share with some practical examples. There is a lot to talk about in world of marketing, data analysis, and business in general.

I am a big fan of open source and forums. While blogging is a nice medium to share ideas and knowledge there is something magical about finding a solution to the problem one is facing. And stack overflow does just that. There is probably a stack over flow for almost all popular software. There are many other sites and forums that give one answers to many a perplexing questions, and I deeply admire the people that lend their subject matter expertise for good of others.

I will not claim such a victory of altruistic ways on my natural self, but I do like the feeling of accomplishment. Achievement is executing on an idea and sharing it. Execution is key here so after much thought I feel compelled to write something that is accompanied by at least some practical snippet. It can be a Google Analytics tip, SPSS modeler recipe, Google Adwords script, R code, SQL based mining, text analytics, practical angle of a theoretical strand, more personal successes and failures with few projects or just plain my feelings about a book I have recently read.

My next blog will be how to use excel for some simple tasks. We will build few simple excel macros and then dive into some more complex stuff like grabbing data from the web and formatting it. In between depending upon my mood we will delve into pivots and slicers, SPSS, R, SQL and mood enhancing customer analytics, cheers!