Week 4 of CEDO 540

This past week in class were were to learn about Bill Tancer.  Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence services company.  He studies Internet trends based on the searches that people do on the Internet.  One of the really interesting things that I learned was the pattern of when people start searching for prom dresses.  It turns out that January is actually the biggest months for prom dress searches.  Who knew?  The reason that information like that is important is because companies, either online or brick and mortar, can use that information to start marketing and selling the their prom dresses.  This technique can be use for countless other products.  This method of data research can be useful most of the time, but sometimes it does have errors.  Bill Tancer spoke about the excitement he got when he thought he could predict the winner of "Dancing with the Stars."  It turns out that the number of searches spiked for one of the contestants not because of her popularity on the show, but because of her attractiveness to men.  This caused  a false prediction that she would win the show, but she came in 3rd.  After learning more about Bill Tancer's data studying methods, I think it is very useful for companies that want to market something they are selling, but I wouldn't use it for trying to win bets on reality show contests!

Week 3 of CeDO 540

This week we had to make a survey that we could collect data on, analyze that data and eventually make a report.  When my group got together, we made a list of possible topics that we could make a survey on.  After discussing for a while, we came up with the idea of making a survey on pet ownership.  We felt that this would be a survey that could generate a lot of data because everyone can share their experience or lack of experience of owning a pet.  We are planning on sending this survey to many people on Facebook as well as on email.  We are hoping for a lot of good data that we can make a good report with.   I am very curious to see what numbers come out of this project!  

Week 2 of CeDO 540

For the past couple weeks we were investigating how to use mean, median and mode as well as learning about different surveys that are available for use.  Though I'm not thrilled about averages, I did learn a few new things the past few weeks.  I think it was useful to think about what numbers to look at depending on what topic your are talking about.  For example, for a group assignment we had to explain what group of numbers we would look at if we were assessing the value of our home.  It would be a good idea to take the mean for the most part because that tends to give an accurate number of where our home would be priced.  However, if there are a few homes that are on the higher or lower end of the spectrum, that can skew it a little.    When looking at surveys, our group felt you really need to have a pay per month plan if you were going to truly benefit from the survey site.  The free plans usually do not offer you as many questions to send out or have a limited number of surveys that you can send.   I felt it was really hard to say exactly which survey sites to use since there are so many of them, but Survey Monkey does seem like a popular and reliable service.