Business and Marketing

Statistics expert Edo Airoldi says data must be paired with predictive analytics before marketers can truly forecast customer behavior.

Airoldi in his Nanigans team picture.

Marketers need to get more clinical to fully realize the benefits of their investments in data and technology, says Harvard statistics professor Edo Airoldi, one of the developers of the Nanigans ad automation platform that allows companies to do their media buying in-house. Brands that use social graph marketing to track people's social media behavior and inform their future campaigns can have some luck in predicting their future behavior, he says, but luck it may well be.

“It's making predictions based on correlations and not causal effects. Drug companies could never get away with that. They have to undergo clinical trials,” Airoldi says. “For instance, a baby products marketer can observe a huge stork migration and assume that a lot of babies will be born. But one day the stork becomes extinct and there are still babies. It's the same thing with the circle of correlations on Facebook. You can use them to predict forward, but it's problematic.”

Two years ago Airoldi teamed with brothers Ian and Jeremi Karnell to found Offergraph, a company that provides marketers with a predictive analytics tool to inform future campaigns by accounting for cause and effect. Offergraph was acquired today by social media data company Polygraph Media, and Airoldi, who will serve as the merged entity's technical adviser, thinks that such combinations of data and predictive analytics platforms will make machine learning accessible to all marketers.

“We're at the early stages of helping marketers become truly data-driven,” Airoldi says. “There are a lot of tools out there that help marketers do things—like text mining—to analyze social media feedback, but these tools are immature relative to what is possible.”

Business Breaking News: HTC One M8 for Windows vs. Nokia Lumia Icon: Which is Better for Business?

Looking for a premium Windows Phone device? Buyers in the United States have two primary options: HTC's new One M8 for Windows, and Nokia's flagship Lumia Icon smartphone. Both phones sport premium metal designs, fast processors and large, sharp displays. And they're both solid business phones that run the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft's mobile operating system. But there are a few notable differences between these two juggernaut smartphones. So which one is better for business? Read on for a feature-for-feature comparison of the HTC One M8 for Windows and the Nokia Lumia Icon.

HTC One M8 for Windows: The awkwardly named HTC One M8 for Windows is physically identical to the original HTC One M8, an Android smartphone that launched this summer. That's a good thing: the original One M8 might be the sexiest Android phone ever made, and it's certainly one of the best-looking Windows Phone devices yet. Its sleek shell is 90 percent metal, which gives it a premium look and feel when stacked up against the colorful plastic Windows Phone devices from Nokia that dominate the platform. And the One M8's rounded corners and subtle accent lines add an extra touch of sophistication.

Nokia Lumia Icon: It's not as flashy as the One M8, but the Lumia Icon has plenty of appeal. The phone comes in black or white, with a soft-touch polycarbonate rear panel that's easy to grip compared with Nokia's other plastic phones. An aluminum band around the sides of the device adds a premium look and feel that's similar to Apple's iPhone 5s. The front display's curved slides wrap smoothly around the surrounding bezel, eliminating some of the device's sharp edges, but overall the Lumia Icon is much squarer than the One M8.

Commodity Online News: Nat Gas to witness high volatility ahead of EIA storage data