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!