“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding,”

“What’s ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data,” said Harian, who believes that the new power users of the dawning digital future are the statisticians, or what he calls “the datarati.” In the US, the digital statisticians are already earning $125,000 a year at top companies, freshly graduated from a master or doctoral program, a salary that doesn’t look at all bad for youngsters starting their careers.

Just think about the ideal world in which you know almost everything about your customer’s needs and desires, his behavior and mood, allowing you to be a pleasant and forever resourceful partner, while selling your wares and making a handsome profit. Alas, the real world is far from this beautiful picture.

Just think about the times you needed to make a decision and you did not have the necessary information to help you do it (i.e. a client needs to reach customers in city A and B who are interested in topic X, but you don’t really collect this type of data or if you do, no one is actually looking at it to help you with it – a very basic example that is a real problem for a lot of online publishing sites, at least in Romania).

Wouldn’t you wish to be able to sell very targeted products or services that would make your business profitable and your customers happy so that they keep coming to you and thus increase your profitability on the long run? If you do, you should start thinking about how you can put your data to its best use.

To give you a hand with this, Conversion Rate Experts have put up a short list of things your should be thinking of and act upon in order to come closer to that ideal reality:

• Start making decisions based on data, not on opinion.
• Get analytics set up well, so you really know which pages, products, acquisition sources, etc, your money is coming from. Knowledge really is power (and profit).
• Start carrying out split tests (A/B tests or multivariate tests) on different aspects of your business.
• Create a culture in which people are rewarded for carrying out tests, and not punished for making mistakes.

Via Conversion Rate Experts.

The reward for owning the oldest working laptop in Romania was a brand new laptop (Sony Vaio) awarded by Intel Romania and was won by Ioana Herbel from Baia Mare. The model was an Epson HX-20, designed in 1981 and produced in 1982, which is believed to be the oldest portable computer in the world (with self sufficient battery). Intel also rewarded another very old portable mini computer (1982 as well, but a few months later), a Radio Shack TRS-80 PC2 that was (and actually still is) allowing Assembler and Basic programming, as well as other scientific calculations.

Here are a few of pictures of the two computers (taken with my Nokia E71):

Epson HX-20

Epson HX-20

Radio Shack TRS-80 PC2

“History of the Internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project. You can see the credits for this movie on lonja.de/motion/mo_history_internet.html (source: thenextweb.org, vimeo.com/2696386).

Trip - The Movie 2008

Last night I went to see an original Romanian movie made by a handful of young people from Constanta, lead by Florina Titz. Played in a small cinema like hall, the movie experience creates an emotionally striking snapshot of a piece of Romania. I was highly impressed with the quality of the movie that was produced entirely through the efforts of the people involved in it.

“Trip voyeuristically takes you into the entangled lives of Dani, Yumi, Ovidiu, Ada and Cristi – youths addicted to one another, yet intent on escaping the pressure of their interconnectedness and frustrating realities. The characters’ sense of disenchantment with the world and themselves is reflected by the choices of background combining closed apartment spaces with post communist cityscapes and counteracted by the preference for flashy colors, intense rhythms and a post-pop-art feeling. TRIP explores the eidetic language of contemporary Constanta, penetrating into the lives of the characters which are bonded through pathological friendship, schizophrenia and imagination. The group feels they are losing their mental sanity in the dull socio-cultural space in which they live. They spend their time engaging in pointless discussions or linguistic debates without a real logical basis or using consciousness-altering tools such as drugs or alcohol. In their ghost town there is no other solution for authentic escapism. On one of their rare excursions outside their apartment – an enclosed, concentric space – Yumi, Ovidiu, Dani and Cristi meet Ada, an interesting girl who travels from town to town, leaving behind acquaintances and friends, and her integration into the group seems to be complete and absolute. During one of their role-playing sessions, when the five of them imagine progressively that they are somebody else in totally different circumstances, things start to crumble down when the distance between reality and dream becomes increasingly thinner, while the pathological conditions, maintained through a continuous vicious circle, seem to be aggravating.” (source: www.tripthemovie.ro)

Highly recommended (it will soon be available in Iasi, Cluj, Timisoara)!