Going Smarter

One of the most interesting articles I’ve read today is “Turning Math into Cash” by W.Bulkeley in MIT TechReview.

“The mathematicians collected several years' worth of data about every sale IBM made around the world. They compared the results with the sales quotas set at the beginning of the year, most of which were developed by district sales managers who negotiated them with sales teams on the basis of past experience. To spot opportunities the sales teams didn't recognize, the researchers collected external data on IT spending patterns by industry and combined that information with the internal sales data. Then they used a technique called high-quantile modeling--which tries to predict, say, the 90th percentile of a distribution rather than the mean--to estimate potential spending by each customer and calculate how much of that demand IBM could fulfill.”

I’ve already found articles regarding the High-Quantile method application.

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Vladislav Galkin 1972-2010

Troubles with Venture Capital

Probably you’ve already noticed that startups are not what they were. For the last decade there were few if any successful stories. According to editorial article in MIT TechReview: “Funds launched in 1996 and 1997 have seen returns of 80 to 100 percent on average, according to Cambridge Associates; those launched in 1999 and 2000 have lost money. Since then, many have returned less than zero, and only recently has the industry showed signs of life.”

You’ll ask what’s wrong with it? I don’t know, probably the market is waiting for the next “big jump” or the world’s fed up with all the @innovations that are actually not. I believe startups should be smarter than facebook and twitter clones.

Another Point of View

In 2006 Vladimir Pozner together with a famous show man Ivan Urgant made remarkable journalist series abut States. I believe it is still the most thorough overview of contemporary life in US. For those who had no chance to watch all series the following videos might be  comprehensive.

Going Cloud

Looking through the latest issue of MIT Technological Review magazine I found an interesting statistics regarding the cloud market. Obviously it is growing. Nowadays cloud is much more realistic than SaaS, S+S and etc were two years ago.