Meet me in San Jose
The time is fast approaching for eMetrics San Jose – the South Bay version of what I have always thought of as eMetrics San Francisco. If you haven’t registered for eMetrics and can (I know how tough travel budgets are), I’d urge you to go. Year-in and year-out it’s a great conference and Jim Sterne works hard to keep it fresh and interesting. I thought the 2008 DC speakers – particularly the keynoters – were the best I’ve ever seen at eMetrics. In San Jose, I’m going to be talking at the Monday “eMetrics Analytics Symposium” and then on Wednesday I’m presenting with Nokia’s Greg Dowling on “Going Mobile.”
My Wednesday presentation is the more traditional of the two and should be a lot of fun. Mobile is one of the most interesting and one of the most challenging topics in current web measurement. Semphonic has been working with Greg and Nokia on a bunch of sites in the last year and all of them involve a significant mobile component – in most cases both mobile sites and mobile applications.
One thing I can say is that measuring mobile is very difficult. The technology and measurement infrastructure have not caught up with the need. But Nokia is at the absolute cutting edge of working on, thinking about, and deploying mobile solutions and mobile measurement across a wide range of applications. We've put together a presentation that walks through the various approaches to mobile measurement, the decisions Nokia has made about those approaches, and why we made those decisions. I also think Greg and I will have a lot of fun with this presentation - I've done many co-presentations and they almost always end up feeling like two separate presentations. But I think the two of use will really be able to "share" most of the talk.
If you are interested in mobile measurement this year but haven’t tackled it yet, I really think this session will be worth quite a bit more than its weight in mere gold (it’s not that long a presentation after all).
I should also mention that Greg is delivering one of the eMetrics’ Keynotes. His presentation is on Standardizing the Enterprise at Nokia. Nokia is a true global company – one of the great brands of the world. The measurement challenges they face are paradigmatic for any large organization and for the last 12-18 months they’ve been engaged in an ongoing project to dramatically transform their approach to customer data and online measurement. Semphonic has been working on pieces of this project as well so I have a pretty good sense of what’s been involved and I think anyone concerned with enterprise measurement should make sure they catch Greg’s talk.
It seems like every year Jim comes up with something that feels unduly hard - and this year the Analytics Symposium presentation is a real challenge. Jim has designed a format where sixteen speakers will present in two groups of eight with each group followed by roundtable discussion. Think about that for a minute and you’ll see that with sixteen speakers the presentations must be rather short – and, in fact, they are targeted for 10 minutes each.
Readers of my blog can probably imagine that at the 10 minute mark I am more likely to be settling in to my introduction than producing any deep insight. The presentations are “themed” not topic specific and the broad theme is “what is analysis?” This kind of topic is deeply appealing to an ex-philosophy student like myself (perhaps next year’s topic will move from epistemology to metaphysics and we can tackle a subject like ‘Finding god in data.’) but not the sort of stuff for which I have off-the-shelf material. And how do I get anything down to 10 minutes? I’ve been working on it and can only say that I hope my fellow presenters are finding it as hard as I am.
As always, eMetrics is a great opportunity to touch-base, meet new people and talk over analytics. If you’re going to be there and would like chat, drop me a line and we’ll set something up. See you there!
Comments