The Seattle Direct Marketing Association will be hosting a panel and dinner next Wednesday, January 7th at 5:30PM. Panelists include Alison Jeske, Director of Product Management, drugstore.com, Jimmy Healey, Product Manager, OnlineShoes.com and Jason Lohr-Johnson, Video Art Director for REI.
This panel will be moderated by Justin Foster, Founder of the Video Commerce Consortium and co-founder of Liveclicker. This should be very interesting and something to check out if you are in the Seattle area.
Lewis Hamilton is the new Formula One champion. I was personally rooting for Felipe Massa, the Brazilian pilot for Ferrari, but I was quite happy to see Lewis clinch the title. What an incredible race, where Hamilton was losing, then winning, then losing again till the very last turn… Unbelievable.
SpeedTV did a pretty nice job covering the race. Viewers got to see Hamilton’s and Massa’s family and friends, which reminded everybody that these pilots aren’t robots - they are real people with real sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers. It was touching to see Hamilton younger brother, who sits on a wheel chair, praying for Lewis and crying at the end. Lewis has been hardly criticized for the last couple of months for his driving style, etc - and this was a nice reset for both fans and critics. He’s human.
Business is a little like that. There’s always stress at work, sometimes confrontation, and it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture. Your employees, customers, partners and even competitors are “real” people too. Treat them like you’d like to be treated, which of course doesn’t take anything away from the fact that it’s a tough world out there and you have to fight, fight and fight.
Just got this… interesting. Why send an unsolicited email like this?
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Google AdSense
Date: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:22 PM
Subject: A note from Google AdSense
To: xxx
Dear Publisher,
We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.
We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.
We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.
Sincerely,
Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations
I’ve been hooked to FiveThirtyEight.com since Brett Hurt told me about it a few weeks ago. And not only because Nate Silver, a successful baseball statistician is predicting Obama’s victory’s next week — but also because it reminded me that statistics can help you accurately predict the outcome of just about anything.
And he’s got a good sense of humour. Watch him on the Colbert Report:
I am going to join a panel tomorrow Thursday Sept 28 at 10AM to discuss video for ecommerce with Jon Nordmark from eBags, Alison Jeske from drugstore.com and Justin Foster from the Video Commerce Consortium. I look forward to sharing thoughts and learning from what others are doing. The conference happens to be less than 10 minutes from the Liveclicker offices, which is nice too! 
I’m excited to be presenting a segment on video commerce at the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver this upcoming week. I am scheduled to give a presentation at 10:30 on Thursday (”Using Video for e-Retail Success”), then participate to a panel on Online advertising the next day at 9AM.
Prior to that I’m going to be in Seattle for a day to consult with a client and present some of the latest Liveclicker features. It’s going to be an exciting end of the week, that’s for sure. Also nice to catch up with Eric Peterson, whom I haven’t seen for a year or so, and the other great people presenting or attending. This event was put together by Lars Johansson and is part of a series of Internet Marketing conferences around the globe.
Is it just me or the games are a great motivator to get out and run? It’s great to see the athletes compete, some win, others just participate. In general, sports play a huge part in my life. I don’t really follow professional sports (with the exception perhaps of Formula 1 racing and soccer), so for me, sport is more than anything a personal experience.
I’ve learned a lot while running, windsurfing, biking or playing soccer. Sports is good for the body, but it also tells you tiny little life lessons - many of them apply to my entrepreneurial life. Persistence, hard work, and patience to see results. Motivation and drive to surpass your natural capibilities. Class in defeat or victory. And of course the burning desire to be the number one.
For quite some time now I’ve been using analytical tools to slice and dice user data on “small sites” (Wambo gets about 50K visits a month roughly, and I have 2 other small B2C service sites that I’m managing on the side). In doing so, I’ve realized that the kinds of metrics you look at for these sites that need to grow fast are very different from traditional analytics.
While traditional sites look at “improving” existing business processes (increasing conversion rates, enhancing the customer experience, etc etc ), startup sites are laser-focused on finding the right formula for their site or service. Startups are always building. And speed is what matters.
For us early stage sites, we look at a completely different set of numbers. And, we compare data ALL the time. Month-over-month, week-over-week, even sometimes, hour-over-hour. So I’m thinking of another kind of analytics that’d be useful for me, let’s call that growth analytics. In an ideal interface, I’d like everything presented in the context of velocity. Velocity been the uber measure, similar to a session or a page view in traditional web analytics.
I’d want to see user acquisition velocity by hour, day, week and month. I’d like to be able to compare velocities for different time ranges (this week vs last week). I want to be able to track acquisition velocity for different segments. I want to A/B test my site and see what the impact is on the velocity metrics. And I want to project in the future what my KPIs will look like if I can sustain the current velocity levels (i.e. if I keep growing my users by 3% a week, that will get me to the 1Million user mark by ___). A new calendar type but with dates in the future too, not just in the past.
Yes, you see where I’m going now. I think what’s a little broken with the state of analytics today is the fact that we spend 90% of our time trying to answer the “what happened” question. And that’s soooo yesterday 
