Four short links: 12 November 2009

CRM on Rails, Data Mining on Hadoop, Disappointing Keynotes, The Teapot Effect

1. Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system.
2. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets)
3. Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I loved Andy's book How We Got Here about the intersecting histories of economics, finance, and technology. Read the book instead of reading about the disappointing keynote.
4. The Teapot Effect -- the thing I love about geeks is how their passion causes them to explore, ruthlessly and quantitatively, the everyday phenomena that the rest of us take for granted. Such as dribbling teapots: “Previous studies have shown that dribbling is the result of flow separation where the layer of fluid closest to the boundary becomes detached from it. When that happens, the fluid flows smoothly over the lip. But as the flow rate decreases, the boundary layer re-attaches to the surface causing dribbling.” Read the post and the research it talks about to learn how to prevent Dribbling Teapot Syndrome ....

Vendor Relationship Management workshop

Nobody knows you as well as you do. Or do they? Let's run a test. Do you know what percentage of your food bill went to processed products? Or what type of coupons (store coupons, newspaper coupons, etc.) is most likely to get you to switch brands? I bet someone out there knows.

This kind of data mining is the modern companion to Customer Relations Management, which is the science of understanding customers and trying to get repeat business. CRM can offer many valuable benefits, but ultimately the control lies with the vendor, not the customer.

This bothers long-time marketing maverick and Cluetrain Manifesto coauthor Doc Searls. Several years ago he thought up an alternative that would put the data and the control back in the hands of customers, and called it Vendor Relationship Management. He's been pursuing that dream for two years as a Berkman Center fellow at Harvard, and this week he ran the second workshop hosted by Harvard on the topic.

I dropped in and out for a few hours and picked up some ideas, annotating them (as always) with ideas of my own.

(continue reading)