You Calc. We Analyze ;-)

The LucidEra demise brought me to this article. Rasmus compares Good Data with YouCalc. He claims that the key benefit of YouCalc is that it is directly accessing SalesForce, HighRise or Google data instead uploading them to a syndicated storage. The YouCalc approach is called REPORTING. It is not good or bad, it is just different from what we do. Rasmus should rather compare his company to BIRT, JasperSoft or others. The comparison with LucidEra, PivotLink or Good Data just doesn't stick.

Let me explain why on a simple example. We found that trending is one of the most interesting analyses (not only in the CRM area). Pipeline keeps changing. Average sales rep tends to be optimistic the first month of each quarter. The optimism is going down as the end of quarter approaches. To analyze the attitude of individual salesman or a sales team, analytical vendor needs to collect data snapshots on regular basis and analyze the pipeline changes in between these snapshots. Reporting applications like YouCalc can't do trending analysis (unless very few cases when the original data provider has decided to snapshot their data and give YouCalc access to the snapshots) as well as many others.

Rasmus is right, the direct access to data is something what differentiates Good Data from YouCalc. This is what puts Good Data to analysis and YouCalc to reporting categories. I'm sure that the primary reason why LucidEra is gone is very different.

The MLB 2008 Strikeout Leaders

Is baseball your passion? If yes, you'll love our MLB project. See the embedded report below as a preview what you can discover there. Note that the report is interactive! You can right click on values, sort etc.



Click on the link below the report and enter your e-mail address if you want to slice & dice the long-term MLB stats and create your own reports!

Play it again Sam!

Our marketing has scored few home-runs in April.



Success or failure come way faster in our world. I would never dream about that we are going to have more unique visitors at our site than Microstrategy or QlikView who have spent millions of dollars on marketing. This is proof that few dollars can beat millions if we spent them right.

Play it again in May, Sam! :-)

CloudExpo Slides

Here are the slides that I presented together with Jakub on the CloudExpo Europe.

Good Data hits TechCrunch homepage!

The article comments are very interesting! We are getting huge attention from the whole world. This feels great !

All Girls are the Same

I recently talked to our neighbor's three years old son. Not expecting much from the conversation, I asked him about girls in the kindergarten he had recently started attending. Here is his answer: "They are all the same. They just have different heads." I have been thinking about his answer since then. Most men need three times more time and couple of divorces to get to the same conclusion.

Good Data App Redressed!

Our app has got a new sexy outfit. Check it out.

Trying to Walk

I almost forgot how hard it is to learn things :-) My poor daughter in law.

This is how it looks like when one of your Flickr photos makes it :-)

3295 views in one day :-)

Czech Phrases You Might Need

How romantic ;-)

"Oranzova vznikne kdyz se nachcije do rudy."

Czech proverb very pertinent to the current Czech Democratic party leaders - dr. Rath & mr. Paroubek (not your average Obama). They are recalling Hitler's way to get out of the economic crisis. Unbelievable! I feel really ashamed for them and only hope that Czechs can't be so stupid to let them back to our government.

P.S.: I still can't believe I blogged Czech politics.

Setting Amazon S3 ACLs Programatically

I recently wrote a simple Python script for setting Amazon S3 ACLs. You might find it useful.

Usage:

setS3acl.py -a $AWS_ACCESS_KEY -s $AWS_SECURE_KEY -b "myBucket" -f myfile.txt -o $OWNER_AWS_ID "$USR1_AWS_ID:FULL_CONTROL" "$USR2_AWS_ID:READ"

Options

-a - your AWS access key
-s - your AWS secure access key
-b - AWS bucket name (no s3:// nor any other slashes)
-f - file name (no s3:// nor bucket prefixes, just the filename)
-o file owner (AWS ID)

Parameters:

[AWS_ID:FULL_CONTROL|READ|WRITE]

You'll need to use the AWS IDs to identify the user (the long and ugly Amazon account identifiers - e.g. a382d287d4d58222758254ddebac103f70e6f5b).

There are two Python files that you'll need:

* setS3acl.py
* S3.py

Look at the URL to find out where I store the scripts ($0.15 / GB / month) ;-)

Enjoy!

Collaborative Analytics - An Emerging Practice

Dave Wells published Collaborative Analytics - An Emerging Practice article. I like the data/analysis/action loops (collaboration layers).

And he mentions Good Data as leader in the emerging space.