Ask, Measure, Learn

Acknowledgments

The more we know, the faster we know more.

—José-Marie Griffiths^[12]

We are creating data and knowledge at an incredible speed. The more we know, the faster we know more. The attempt to consolidate and condense knowledge into a book might at times seem like an uphill battle if we did not have support from people who encouraged us, helped us, and gave us interesting insights.

A big thanks to Ashwin Reddy, our cofounder at Fisheye Analytics. Together with a great team of engineers, we have built a social media data mining company. We focused on collecting and processing massive amounts of data. At the time of writing, all textual data stored in our storage systems amount to a whopping 37 TB.  Additionally, 69 TB of textual data is downloaded from the Internet every month. On a typical day, our programs and databases handle over 100 million news articles and social media posts collectively. But our algorithms melt down those data amounts to a few kilobytes to answer the relevant question. With Ashwin, we learned to detect the fourth “V” of data. It was a rollercoaster ride, and we thank him for this journey.

Also we want to send a big thanks to Melvin Lee, a.k.a., “the commander,” and Jasleen Dhingra. Both have lead the operational teams at Fisheye Analytics. Their data visualization skills helped more then once to detect insights we would have not seen otherwise.

The main aim of this book is to uncover the fourth “V” of data, the value. We explain why it is harder to create actionable insights out of data. The important part in any data discussion is the right business question. Thanks to numerous discussions with Sebastian Knief, Deepanshu Bagchee, John Timothee, and Lydia Ng, we learned how to query our client for the right questions and how to find this most important fourth “V.”

To guide the reader throughout and shape a good understanding of data measurements, the book is full of anecdotes and small stories we heard from others. Thanks to Bjoern Lasse Herrmann from Compass.co as well as Michel Rogero from 2Style4You. We are honored to advise both of those startups on data questions. Their fresh approach toward data has excited us and brough many new aspects into our thinking. Thank you as well to Björn Ognibeni, Luke Brynley-Jones, Lasse Clausen, Kasper Skou, and Michael Liebmann. All of them are inspiring entrepreneurs who have given us insights into data, measurement, or social media.

This book wouldn’t exist without peer reviews. Thank you to Kord Davis, who has reviewed the book in detail. It was his idea to add workbook questions at the end. Thank you as well to Frederik Fischer and to Uwe Weiss for their long and in-depth review. Both have helped to “de-buzz” some of the concepts. Thank you to Abdi Scheybani and Thomas Stoeckle for their reviews and input.

Our final thank goes to Ann Spencer and Melanie Yarbrough from the incredible O’Reilly team and to Magdalena Sołowianiuk, who created all of the comic strips throughout the book.

Thanks to all of you!

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^[12] José-Marie Griffiths, “Scholarly Communications Challenges for Research Universities,” CRPGE Summer Forum, https://www.aplu.org/document.doc?id=4048