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Showing posts from February, 2015

Why Spark is a game changer in Big Data and Data Science

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This second part of this post is technical and requires an understanding of a classification algorithm. The Business Part: Hadoop was born in 2004 and conquered the world of top-end software engineering in the Valley. Used primarily to process logs, it had to be reinvented in order to attract business users. In 2014, I noticed a shift in the industry with the ascent of “Hadoop 2.0”: More approachable for business users (e.g.  Cloudera Impala) and faster, it is bound to overtake Hadoop as we know it. Spark has been at the forefront this revolution and has provided a general purpose Big Data environment.   Hadoop Spark comes with a strong value proposition: It's fast (10-100X vs. Map Reduce) It's scalable (I would venture in saying that it can scale for 99.99% of the companies out there) It's integrated (for instance, it's possible to run SQL / ML algorithms in the same script) It's flexible Spark's Components- ( Credit: spark.apache.org ) The flexib

Marketing and the rule of the 1% improvement

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Do you happen to know this man? Credit: Wikipedia His name is Dave Brailsford , a coach rendered famous for overhauling the British national Cycling Team  and, in only 6 years, bringing his team to victory at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and starting a tidal wave sweeping the 2 subsequent Olympic gatherings. Being the first Briton to win The Tour de France in 2012 made a legend of the man. What is the magic sauce behind this success story? His secret was to take a holistic approach (Nutrition, Training, Lifestyle even psychology), then break down the training process into elementary steps and seek small incremental improvement for each with an expectation for it to snowball. Quite naturally, one can apply the same concept to Marketing by breaking the Customer Lifecycle into small "bits" and looking at incremental improvement at each stage.  To illustrate the point: Simplified Customer Lifecyle Each customer evolves over time. Let&#