eMetrics San Francisco: Industry Insight

I thought entitling this post "Continental airlines: redux" to reference my horror story from a few weeks ago. Here's another one (yeah... I should have known better!) or skip that part and jump to the Industry Insights.

Continental airlines: strike two

It was supposed to be a smooth traveling day: leaving Quebec city toward Detroit, then San Francisco. Turned out this time the plane was late 4 hours because of the bad weather in central US.

The plane from Detroit to SF would be at 7:00pm, basically wasting my whole day... So I asked to reschedule trough New York to take a plane around 12:30, another half hour later than planned. I knew it would be short in New York, where I had to go trough customs. Of course, I got a pretty stiff custom guy who was very friendly... too friendly... making jokes and wasting even more of the little time I had. Then it was security after picking my bags, another check to put back the bags on the next plane... one last security check...

I ran for nothing... the plane was late another 30 minutes. Finally got on the plane... taxied for several minutes and waited on the tarmac even more. Then we saw the maintenance trucks come in... bad news. "Mechanics told us they now know what is the problem and it will take 20 minutes to fix".

20 minutes turned to 2 hours, having us back to the gate and getting off the plane. Then I realized I was actually exactly at the same gate where I got stuck the last time! Could it be Ground Hog Day? Or maybe one of those hidden camera prank?

I finally got to the hotel around midnight... roughly 12 hours later than I was supposed to.

Industry Insights

There were two pre-conference events on Sunday: WAA basecamp and Industry Insight. I was very glad to present some of the web analytics vendor market share insights I gained trough WASP data. Morning was spent filling our brain with lots of data and bringing us in the mindset for the afternoon: what do we want our industry to be? Where is it headed? I found the discussions from the Industry Insight event to be amazingly interesting: people were very experienced analysts, great subjects and challenging ideas.

I don't want to go into too many details about what was discussed and what were the outcomes as this will be presented here on Tuesday under the very appropriate title of "Insights from Industry Insights Day". Stay tuned!

Davenport: Competing on Analytics

I read Thomas Davenport's book "The Attention Economy" a while back and it changed the way I think. I wanted to read "Competing on Analytics" for a while and with all the time I had at the airport and on my way in I'm already half-way through. Thomas Davenport is Monday morning's keynote and I'm sure it will reinforce my opinion that web analytics as we know it today; very marketing centric; is going to lead way to business analytics that will drive strategy and process optimization way beyond the limits of the web.