Siim Viidu

Forbes: The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:01:26 +0100

Forbes: The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula

Puzzling outcomes in A/B testing

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:17:40 +0100

Interesting post and paper on AB goals and targets.

Few quick points on the subject

Understand that long-term goals do not always align with short-term metrics.
“Success” in your test may be just an instrumentation difference.
Primacy effect occurs when you change the navigation on a web site, and experienced users may be less efficient until they get used to the new navigation, thus giving an inherent advantage to the Control. Conversely, when a new design or feature is introduced, some users will investigate the new feature, click everywhere, and thus introduce a “novelty” bias that dies quickly if the feature is not truly useful.
Devil is in the details - generating numbers is easy, generating numbers you should trust is hard!

Why face time at work matters more than you think.

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:01:35 +0100

Why face time at work matters more than you think.:

From MITSloan. Things to consider next time WFH or working remotely.

2012 Internet Trends - KPCB/Mary Meeker

Wed, 30 May 2012 17:18:56 +0100

KPCB Internet Trends 2012

Revolutionary User Interfaces

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:46:48 +0100

Revolutionary User Interfaces

Graphic of social marketing products and services - it sure is busy out there

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:06:55 +0100

Graphic of social marketing products and services - it sure is busy out there:

Its actually missing quite a few others - Pinterest, Fancy etc.

Infographic on current state and future for mobile payments and commerce

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:49:24 +0100

Infographic on current state and future for mobile payments and commerce

Secrets to lighting fast mobile user experience - Instagram

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:38:34 +0100

Secrets to lighting fast mobile user experience - Instagram

What happens when you give Kindles to kids in Ghana?

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:22:48 +0100

What happens when you give Kindles to kids in Ghana?:

Primary school students with access to e-readers showed significant improvement in reading skills and in time spent reading, and the program is cost-effective. The theft rate was “near-zero,” but nearly half the e-readers broke.

Patent art is much better in the video game industry - Art from...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:25:00 +0100

Patent art is much better in the video game industry - Art from people who aren’t artists, randomly culled from a wealth of video game-related patents. Link

Scaling Instagram - solid tips on building and scaling right with a small team

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:35:11 +0100

Scaling Instagram - solid tips on building and scaling right with a small team

This is how design works

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:46:10 +0100

This is how design works

Amazing example of CSS and JS in a modern browser - moving 3d clouds

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:00:50 +0100

Amazing example of CSS and JS in a modern browser - moving 3d clouds

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar 2012 - what is hot in tech world

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:23:25 +0000

ThoughtWorks continues to map the latest technology trends.

Quick look what is hot and what is not. The overall theme appears to be around addressing scale and also massively growing mobile/web/tablet applications.

Techniques

Increasing use of agile in DWH, BI and Analytics - real time data transfer over batch based approach
Continuous Delivery, single command deploy, improved testing and performance testing becoming norm
Simple application health status pages and systems at each app/node level with key metrics embedded

Tools

Polyglot persistence - basically store data in various data stores based on use (eg no longer rely on a single RDBMS)
Infrastructure change and config treated as code (release practices, source control)

Platforms

Single threaded servers with asynchronous I/O - like node.js
Hybrid cloud solutions (mix of public cloud and private data center). AWS gets thumbs up as a general recommendation.
RIA tech (eg Flash) falling out of favour more and more.

Languages

JavaScript is now established as a powerful, mainstream language with a vibrant community and lots of tools being made available

UX of signup and login simplified

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:45:19 +0000

UX of signup and login simplified

Visa invests $40M in TrialPay

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:50:53 +0000

Visa invests $40M in TrialPay:

Mountain View, Calif.-based TrialPay will use the money to expand into new markets and innovate in “transactional advertising.”

Microsoft to discontinue its virtual currency system Microsoft Points

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:28:39 +0000

Microsoft to discontinue its virtual currency system Microsoft Points

SVPG: Product Management Then and Now

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:16:48 +0000

SVPG: Product Management Then and Now

Amazon releases DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:20:54 +0000

Amazon releases DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications

Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:16:35 +0000

Great infographic from Business Insider on what happens on the Internet during 60 seconds.

The biggest chunk is consumed by the following services

164 million emails
11 million IM-s
694,445 Google searches
695,000 Facebook status updates
510,040 Facebook comments
370,000 Skype voice calls (actually I think that with paid calls comes around 506k as per latest published stats)
98,000 Tweets
$219,000 PayPal payments
13,000 iPhone apps downloaded
950 purchases on eBay
925 iPhone 4s-s sold

Facebook statuses are slightly above Google searches. Skype is pretty big (consider about 25-30% IM market share also). There are more iPhones sold then Twitter and LinkedIn accounts created combined. Wow.