Being a high-value top notch CEO does not mean that you have the gift of predicting the future. Here is a sample of some assertions that does not need any comments 😉 « I think there is a world market for maybe five computers » (but there are no confirmation that the quote is real) Thomas Watson, president of International Business Machines (IBM), 1943. « There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. » Ken Olsen, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977. « No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. » Bill […]

Today I’m going to talk to you about an interesting Marketing Concept: Customer Loyalty.  You might ask:” Why bother about a customer’s loyalty if all that counts is how much we can make off him, in short, profitability?”…you would be both wrong and right. Wrong because a barely profitable client who is loyal yields more in the long term, and you would be right because loyalty and profitability are correlated (on this subject read: ’Beyond Customer satisfaction to Customer Loyalty’ by Bhote). So, acting in favour of Customer Loyalty gives us every chance of increasing our profits, which is our […]

SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the broad field of information retrieval (IR). The Conference and Program Chairs invite all those working in areas related to IR to submit original papers, posters, and proposals for tutorials, workshops, and demonstrations of systems. SIGIR 2010 welcomes contributions related to any aspect of IR theory and foundation, techniques, and applications. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to: Document Representation and Content Analysis (e.g., text representation, document structure, linguistic analysis, non-English IR, cross-lingual IR, information extraction, […]

This is a picture I always partly draw myself on the blackboard during my lectures, but the complete one is much more impressive. I found it on a Cambridge web page that describes Tim Gowers’ lecture on computational complexity and quantum computation.

It’s definitely fashionable to talk about Bounce Rate these days. If I’m to do some bad-mouthing here I’d say that this is because it happens to be the only metric people understand (and it’s handed out to them by Google Analytics)! Jakob Nielsen seems to reflect what the majority of people think. I shall comment after I’ve quoted him: 1. “Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using “unique visitors” as a metric for site success”. Ok…but I’d like to know why? And what’s the connection between the first part of the sentence and the second?  In fact, saying that […]

This is the call for papers for ICALP 2010, a pleasant conference in a nice venue, specially if you love wine, hu, good science… 😉 The website for the conference can be found here. The 37th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), will take place from the 5th to the 12th of July 2010 in Bordeaux, France. The main conference will be preceded and followed by a series of Workshops. Papers presenting original research on all aspects of theoretical computer science are sought. Typical […]

From this good post:

Our friends operating Search Engines have to cope with finding techniques to eliminate spam polluting their Search Engine results. There is a lot of very active research going on in this field , some by the Operators themselves, such as the ineffable Matt Cutts but also by Academics (although the difference between the two isn’t always clear cut).   Researchers working in Stanford’s Infolab (where Brin and Page come from) have written the following article.  As its title shows, it summarises the various and main strategies used to counter unwanted Spam on the web (particularly spam invading online communities): Paul Heymann, […]

In this post I give my point of view about the different types of customers that can be used by marketers, I also adress the problem of defining metrics to qualify these customers. Customer Profile A person with whom the company/website is in contact can be: A Potential Customer (Also called Prospect): This is, typically, a person who is the target for a publicity campaign and who has responded positively (i.e. who has actively looked for further information). A First-time Buyer:  He has just made a purchase unaware that things are about to snowball! A New Customer:  This customer has […]

I find this one on a french blog (http://www.chrogeek.com), but I don’t know where the guy find it. Anyway, a short history of hacking (I know, the term is not the good one).