Signed up for Academia.edu

By Vasudev Ram

Academia.edu.

Excerpt from their about page:

[ Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research.

Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 2,436,810 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 1,651,656 papers and 715,875 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 5 million unique visitors a month. ]

They have funding of around $6 million from VCs, including:

- Spark Capital

- True Ventures

- Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Thawte - one of the first companies to provide a service of SSL certificates; I remember using Thawte at a startup I worked for years ago, and also founder of Ubuntu Linux)

- Rupert Pennant-Rea, Chairman of The Economist magazine

- Thomas Lehrman, Co-founder of Gerson Lehrman Group

Here is my web page on Academia.edu. I'm going to add some of my software articles and posts to my account there, once in a while, mainly the more research-y kind of articles or posts. Added a few already. Good fun ...

Apart from the Academia.edu site serving as a platform for researchers to share their research more easily than via the traditional and slow peer review method, they also have an analytics feature, which researchers can use to see who is commenting on their research, and a job board, which may be of interest to people who are into research as a full-time career.

That does not include me (I only do research part-time as a hobby, and also as part of my work, as and when required - okay, also sometimes when not required :-), but I've seen that it often pays off in the medium term, not only long term). Anyway, I think their site's concept is a good one, so I'm blogging about it.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Cirro lets non-technical people analyse big data

http://www.cirro.com/about-us/

Seen via this GigaOm article about Cirro:

http://gigaom.com/2012/06/25/cirro-makes-big-data-manageable-with-smart-set-of-tools/

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com

Google BigQuery for big data now available to all

http://googledevelopers.blogspot.in/2012/05/google-bigquery-brings-big-data.html

DigMyData analytics starts, free trial till end 2011

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

DigMyData, a startup in the analytics space, launched this week.

They have a free trial going until the end of 2011. It has what looks like a novel and interesting approach to analytics. Some ways of describing them are as "the online dashboard for CEOs" and "the analytics dashboard for those who don't have time for analytics".

They support Google Analytics, Google AdWords, PayPal, Gmail, AWeber, Twitter and Facebook as sources of input for analytics. They can and will try to add other sources too, either on their own or on request from users.

Peldi of Balsamiq Mockups is an advisor to them. Balsamiq Mockups is a pretty successful startup that has been in the (Hacker and suit :) news off and on over the last few years, not only for the good traction of its products, but also for their approach to business.

DigMyData was founded by a team of two guys who had earlier practically done the entire spec/design (speaking loosely, see Peldi's blog for details) for the JIRA integration of Balsamiq Mockups - as wannabe future users of it. Peldi has a blog post up in which he says what their product DigMyData is about, including how he uses DigMyData for Balsamiq business.

And BTW, Balsamiq also has a series of 30-second videos on what they make for dinner (when they are in a hurry and don't know what to make :). Anyone can contribute to it, too.

Balsamiq dinner video series

More about DigMyData below:

DigMyData features

About DigMyData

The DigMyData blog

- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison

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Beta: Google In-Page Analytics

By Vasudev Ram - www.dancingbison.com

In-Page Analytics is a new beta feature of Google Analytics - www.google.com/analytics

I checked it out a bit recently. Seems interesting.

If you run Google Analytics (GA) on your site or blog, you can check out this feature by opening GA in a new browser window or tab, and then:

In the left pane, click on Content, then click on In-Page Analytics below Content.

This will display the In-Page Analytics screen.

It basically displays your blog or site (within the GA page), with some percentages (indicating traffic) balloons overlaid on various links - something roughly (in meaning, not exactly in appearance) like a heat map - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_map

I'm not sure, but it seems to have a bug: after doing the above, I also opened my site in a different browser tab, and part of the In-Page info appeared there as well, which should not happen.

Anyway, hope Google fixes that soon. Other than that bug, it seems to be a useful tool.

Posted via email

UPDATE: It does seem to have that bug. Even after I logged out of my Google account, and refreshed my site's page, it still had that issue. I had to close the browser (Chrome) and then reload my site to make the problem go away.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Using Google Analytics to filter for visitors on mobiles

By Vasudev Ram - www.dancingbison.com

As a side effect of commenting on this post by "A VC" Fred Wilson:

Mobile Reading Trends At AVC

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/mobile-reading-trends-at-avc.html

, I figured out how to use Google Analytics (GA) to filter for mobile devices, i.e. filter for visitors to your Analytics-enabled site who are coming to it from a mobile device (such as an Android, iPhone or iPad):

Go to left pane of GA -> Visitors -> Mobile -> Mobile Devices

That's it. It will show you statistics on mobile device-using visitors, with the break up by type of device such as Android, iPhone, etc.

Can be useful ...

Posted via email
- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises