One innovation the freemium model brings to bear is analytics as a fundamental component of the product development lifecycle: since distribution (and thus customer adoption costs) are 0, behavioral customer data is available with enough volume to develop new streams of revenue from it. The freemium model accords an analytics team the opportunity to conceptualize [...]
(Dashboard template can be found here; source code on GitHub here) In freemium mobile, my experience has been that the principles of the Minimum Viable Product as a product strategy are respected but sometimes necessarily abandoned because the concept isn’t perfectly transferable to mobile platforms. The MVP approach was designed for a platform (the web) that allows [...]
Today I gave a presentation called “Big Data in Mobile Gaming: Optimizing the User Experience” at IGExpo in Tallinn, Estonia. The aim of the presentation was to provide a general overview of how an analytics system can (should?) inform the development process, with some attention paid to defining various metrics and the process of data-driven [...]
Part 1: MBAs shouldn’t do data analysis In Part 1 of this series, I argued that a centrally-hosted analytics system built on d3.js is superior to a Tableau-based (or some other proprietary tool — I use Tableau in the example because it’s probably the most prominent in the gaming industry) system because it allows for [...]
Part 2: Access and allies I’ve written before of the practical advantages a d3.js-based analytics system boasts over Tableau, which I view as the best commercial solution. The most prominent advantage is cost: Tableau is exorbitantly expensive, and its learning curve is so steep (and free instructional materials are so meager) that training an analyst [...]
I read this piece on GigaOM the other day about what VCs look for when investing in gaming start-ups, and this bit caught my eye: Hyatt’s number one metric for games that interest him as investment prospects: Day-one retention, i.e. whether new users come back the next day to play. This is an especially important way [...]
Inspired by this Quora thread, I decided to create an Infographic about the different job titles associated with Big Data. Because the Silicon Valley buzzword machine spits out more phrases than most humans can (or care to) comprehend, “Big Data” is still a mystery to the general tech-public. What’s clear to most data wranglers is a [...]
Part 1 Part 2 (The full sourcecode for the below example can be found here, and an interactive example can be found here. Click Open in a new Window to see all graphs in their pre-determined sizes) The riveting conclusion! The last two posts in this series introduced D3.js and established the structure of a D3.js dashboard. [...]
Part 1 Part 3 (You can find the complete sourcecode for the below example here and an interactive example here. Click open in new window to see everything in its pre-determined size). The first post in this series introduced the D3.js library and walked through the steps necessary to produce a very simple line graph. This post will build upon that tutorial [...]
Part 2 Part 3 (You can find the complete sourcecode for the below example here and an interactive version here) I’ve written before that I think Tableau is the best data exploration / visualization tool on the market. I still think that, but Tableau does suffer a few drawbacks:
