Information - Man(agement) :: Data Mining :: Psychology :: Future

SPSS Directions. So many things to learn there in the coming days.

On Tuesday I attended a conference “Trendtag” which is hosted by “Trendbüro” a leading german trend (and future) research company. This years theme was “Karma-Capitalism _ Values instead of Prices”.

One of the speakers was Josephine Green - Head of the Trends and Strategy division at Philips Design. She spoke about the great impact that web 2.0 had on the industry. Since everybody can easily find information about products on the web and discuss them in an adequate community or network, the former consumer becomes a user of a product who gets involved into the production cycle and than becomes a co-producer.

Somewhere in the speech Ms. Green asked the audience to please come up with a better term for this new kind of “user co-producer” wich would not be burdened with the negative connotation which comes with the word consumer. In 1980 published book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler coined the term prosumer, but as you see it contains the unbeloved term consumer and can nowadays also be interpreted as professional consumer.
So I took the challange and after 5 minutes of thinking and writing I had the very simple but appealing idea of calling them us produser wich is apperantly a combination of producer and user and can not be confused with a professional user because of the “d” in between

In the 6th minute I got a little depressed because I recalled that we live in the age of google and sure there would be somebody who had the same idea before me. But anyway I thought the idea was good enough to go and speak about it with Ms. Green.
She liked it and maybe she’ll use it now in her speeches rather then such monstrous combinations like “user and co-producer”.

Here I’ve got to give credit to somebody who seems to be the first person who used the term produser on the net, Dr. Axel Bruns. Hm.. nice site. I’ll stay a little longer and explore ..

More then 2 weeks have passed since the beginning of the Data Mining Cup 2007 and I know you guys are pretty far by now. I guess many of you already assembled dozens of prediction rules and models and are finetuning their systems.
But as I know myself, we all tend to draw conclusions much too fast. Let’s see if we have spend enough time on understanding and restructuring the data.

This is the very first statistic you should look at. The frequency of customer respondings on coupon A or B or Not responding at all. Remember from the Scenario, that each person of the 50k recieved coupon A and B via mail and here we have the respondings:

After performing some simple grouping operations on the customers you can see groups with significantly different frequencies.

Shouldn’t we treat them different?
Next time more on simple and not so simple grouping.

Wow! Vistaprint did a damn good job. I ordered my Premium Business Cards on April 17th and got them today. Everything looks fine. Thick high-quality paper (265 g/m² or something like that) and luminous colours. Now I feel realy good about having that banner up there ^^

I have one hint for you. Don’t choose the more expensive 1 week delivery option.
I’ve choosen the cheaper standard 2 weeks delivery and got them in one week anyway

Vistaprint has got a very easy to understand and user friendly website and they have got great system to upload your own images for higher customization.

But?: Vistaprint growth, Something to be carefull about

Does anybody have a different experience with their service?

I guess you won’t need to watch your weight, if you play this kind of games in the future.