Thursday is a _HUGE_ night at bars (and restaurants with bars) for college students. A lot of kids will take advantage of happy hour pricing on Thursday night and lax attendance policy on Friday morning.
This is anecdotal and I don't have data to support my claim (although someone can probably find something on Google).
Can you please tell us a little bit about the data/population that served as the basis of this analysis (ex: how big is total population of data set, how big is the subset of users who went to both gym and park, etc). It would help us better provide feedback and understand the your results.
The data is from March 15th to May 1st (~45 days). It is a noisy estimation based on foursquare and twitter location check-ins (estimated samples from a population of about 100k users in San Francisco, CA with a technology bias). I haven't analyzed user-specific data, such as who went to both venues. I am open to suggestions on future analysis.
To be fair, their marketing spend compared to their competitors was WAY higher than Apple's was compared to MS.
Google did spend a lot of dough trying to roll this out.
Which probably plain and simply does explain their success to date. IMHO this launch still isn't a flop though. I know Google is an outlier among most companies, but they're still in a completely unfamiliar market at this point. Consumer selling is a different beast compared to B2B--Google has never truly convinced consumers to pay up before. Would you use an HTC search engine, or hell even an Apple one?
Google's ability to reach into so many distinct markets is pretty remarkable to me. I think we can't ignore the mountains of data they have on consumer buying patterns though. They've probably collected more business intelligence than any other company prior. That's quite the competitive advantage to be allowed.
"Google did spend a lot of dough trying to roll this out."
Where exactly did Google spend all this money? I see DRIOD and iPhone commercials nightly and have yet to see Nexus One commercial. I also don't see any Nexus One advertising in stores or anywhere else a typical consumer might go looking for a phone.
Google did some web advertising and had some business news sites cover the phone because well they are Google. I have yet to see any sort of advertising from them that even comes close to the iPhone or DROID (which incidentally has also done very well).
I don't watch TV so I don't know if they are advertising there. However if you are referring to marketing and advertising expense online by google. Good news, Google pretty much owns the online advertising field (~70% with Doubleclick + google). Are they really "spending" a lot of money to market Nexus One compare to other phone manufacturers?
Can we agree that it (according to the depth of the article) that this decision wasn't made based on statistical analysis, but rather just ratings? "ohhh... a bunch of people judged our video and liked it! Statistically we can't NOT do it!"
Please stop attributing everything "scientists" do as hyper-analytical. It's not like the analysis they did was more complex than what takes place in any focus group - it was just scaled by a few orders of magnitude.
Was it a success? Yes. Was it a success because of statistical analysis? No. It was a success because it was a good fucking ad.
This is why I couldn't handle working in the hard sciences. While there are breakthroughs every day, there is little time for institutions to go through and verify these findings before they become commonly accepted.
It is astonishingly easy to find examples of people basing years of research off of faulty premises from other papers who wind up losing those years of research.
Basic premise: Unless you win the lottery, doing what you love isn't an option. In lieu of that, force yourself to work as hard as possible so that you can be successful at what you must do (and learn to love the success).
A very good point about the disruptive innovator being compared to incremental changes. That being said, Yelp is in a much better position than Netscape was in terms of revenue generation ability/potential and ultimately that is what IPO's focus on.
"Mr. Bierfeldt, it turns out, was carrying the money because he was returning home from a regional conference of Campaign for Liberty, a group that supports Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate. "
It totally makes sense to me that it was a Ron Paul evangelist who made this bruhaha. I have known a few in my life and this seems like something I could see most of them doing.
I hope you're not being sarcastic. It's a tragedy that these airport screeners feel themselves to be the representatives of the police. It's just like the security guards and retail managers that think they have a right to detain you if they think you've stolen something [They don't have any such right, unless they are holding you for the cops to get there and sort the situation out].
The reason that most people just put up with this stuff is because it's easier to just 'go with the flow' than to resist and have to go through this whole process. Personally, I have respect for the people that are willing to stand up against this crap and push back instead of just bending over.
This is anecdotal and I don't have data to support my claim (although someone can probably find something on Google).