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Schibsted Tech Talk: Empowering the next generation of engineers

The future is in need of smart engineers who will design and build devices, robots and software that will improve our lives. Computational thinking, which includes problem decomposition, data representation, abstraction and algorithmic skills,will be a fundamental skill set that these engineers will have, and, in fact, not only them but any person whose job involves problems solving.

Despite the importance of computational thinking, this skill set is still not widespread in the education of the children and youth of today. In this session different speakers will talk to us about how they are empowering the kids of today to become the engineers of the future.

We are very happy to announce that Linda Liukas from HelloRuby will be the keynote speaker of this exciting Schibsted evening. Linda is a Finnish developer and educator who has co-founded Rails Girls and who has written Hello Ruby: Adventures in Coding, a book to teach kids how to program in a fun way.

Accompanying Linda we will also have two educational organisations, CodeLearn and Girls in Lab, who will talk about how to bring computer programming and technology to kids.

WHEN
Thursday, May 26, 2016 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (CEST) – Add to Calendar
WHERE
Betahaus – Carrer de Vilafranca, 7, 08024 Barcelona – View Map

How analytics can improve marketing: event take aways

Our event on Measurement & Marketing Effectiveness brought together three speakers from industry that shared their experiences and use cases in marketing and analytics. (See the a summary video here)


The evening started with a report on the hackathon we organised together with Social Point back in November last year. The goal of the hackathon was to build a churn predictor, predicting which users will stop playing one of the games from Social Point. The hackathon was a great success and we hope to do another one this year. So far no date has been decided.

mauricio
Our first speaker of the evening was Bosco Aranguren, Head of Media Buying Solutions at Google Spain & Portugal. He explained us that one of the classic wisdom in getting a competitive advantage still holds. The ability to learn more about your customer faster than your competition and the ability to turn that learning into action. Only now we have more data to learn from.

bosco

He took us through four challenges in creating a data driven customer centric organization: Technical Infrastructure, Right Skillset and Organizational Structure, Creating Customer centric insights and Data Activation. For example, in terms of technical infrastructure it is important to avoid data silos and to allow a holistic view of your campaigns and customer data.

Finally, he presented four use cases in which Google worked together with the Boston Consulting Group, TalkTalk, L’Oreal and Peugeot and used different technologies to improve the impact of marketing campaigns.
Our second speaker of the evening was Eva López, Client Service Director at Ipsos Connect Barcelona. She explained to us a study that they did to measure the  performance of a marketing campaign shown only on television versus a campaign running on both television and digital. They created a controlled setup in which subjects were asked to watch television or use a youtube-like application while they recorded the subject’s behavior. The study was performed in 7 countries with 5200 subjects.

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The results of the study showed that running a campaign on both television and digital results in a higher brand and ad awareness as well as a higher purchase intent than when running it on television alone. Due to the nature of the study, many aspects of the effects of the campaign could be studied. For example, people are less likely to skip an ad on youtube with stronger brands and having an entertaining and engaging creative has a very big impact on effect of the advertisement. Overall, the study provides some concrete evidence and answers to questions many of us have asked in the marketing industry.
Our third and final speaker of the evening was René Dechamps, Data Science & Analytics Director at Neo@Ogilvy Spain. René shared with us some valuable lessons learned when doing business in the analytics industry. He explained the importance of talking to the right people in an organisation and the impact of when you do not. He shared an example in which the lack of standardisation and documentation turned a six month project into a three year project. Such lessons learned can be painful, but are extremely valuable in making analytics projects succeed.

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He took us step-by-step through a use case in which his company had to define KPIs based on business questions for a major media company in Finland. The example showed some of the finer details of how to implement analytics in an organisation and make KPIs actionable.
After the presentations the audience got the opportunity to ask questions, allowing the speakers to address some further details of their approaches. The session closed with drinks and a chance for visitors to do some networking and discuss the topics presented.

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Next BCNAnalytics event: Measurement & Marketing Effectiveness

Join us and our great speakers in this new BCNAnalytics event where we will explore how data can help us measuring and improving marketing strategies.

This time we have the honour to have with us:
Bosco Aranguren – Head of Media Buying Solutions at Google Spain & Portugal
Eva López – Client Service Director at Ipsos Connect Barcelona
René Dechamps – Data Science & Analytics Director at Neo@Ogilvy Spain

WHEN
Monday, April 18, 2016 at 7:00 PM
WHERE
Mobile World Centre – fontanella 2, 08002 Barcelona, Spain – View Map

REGISTER HERE

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Save your date! Barcelona Data Science Meeting

Join Barcelona GSE for the first edition of the Barcelona Data Science Meeting, taking placeMarch 21-22, 2016 at UPF’s Ciutadella Campus.

Organized by the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics with participation of the Ramón Areces Foundation, this two-day meeting will bring together international Data Science experts from academia and industry:

DAY 1: RESEARCH IN DATA SCIENCE
Alberto Cavallo (MIT)
“The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Data for Inflation Measurement and Research”
Costantinos Daskalakis (MIT)
“Testing and Learning Distributions in Sublinear Time”
Andrew Gelman (Columbia University)
“Little Data: How Traditional Statistical Ideas Remain Relevant in a Big-Data World; or, The Statistical Crisis in Science; or, Open Problems in Bayesian Data Analysis”
Alexandros Karatzoglou (Telefonica)
“Deep Learning”
Modesto Orozco (IRB)
“Flops and Bytes in Biology”

DAY 2: DATA SCIENCE APPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS AND INSTITUTIONS
Speakers from companies will be announced shortly.
The conference aims to create an open environment for debate and exchange of knowledge, ideas, and views among researchers, professional experts, and students. We hope you will join us for the inaugural edition!

REGISTRATION AND MEETING DETAILS
Registration deadline: March 14, 2016

Video and highlights of the event From Customer to Revenue

From Customer to Revenue, the theme of our third event, brought together two speakers from industry to address challenges in revenue management.

We started the evening with a series of updates: 1) The BCNanalytics job board is a success and can be found on our homepage. 2) On 14th and 15th of November we will organize a Hackathon in collaboration with Social Point, further details can be found here. 3) We supported an intern named Enrico Kunz in analyzing twitter feeds to identify deals from tweets. Finally, our two industry speakers,  Sharon Biggar from Social Point and Francesc Paloma from Vueling, took the stage to share their experiences in revenue management.

Sharon from Social Point

Sharon started by explaining Social Point’s business model of free to play and how their games should not be seen as finalized products, but rather their games are continuously updated with content and feature updates. She went over various examples of how analytics helped Social Point identify points of improvement in their games. Analysing at which point in the gaming experience users drop out. Examining correlations between high transactions and high use of game features. Understanding the best use of bundled offers of in-game purchases to help convince users to make their first transaction. A general good rule of thumb that has shown to work well in Social Point’s free-to-play approach is “If the game is fun, the money will come”.

Francesc from Vueling

Francesc explained how Vueling has evolved in being data-driven since 2007. At Vueling it is important to identify periods that will result in a high number of bookings early on and have ticket prices that correspond to high demand. This means accounting for the different holiday periods in different countries, but also special events such as the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In recent years, however, revenue management for airlines has mainly developed in the area of ancillary revenues, or revenues from non-ticket sources, such as seat reservation or on-board food services. Francesc gave several examples on how data helped in deciding on the pricing strategy such as fixing a ticket price for 24 hours before booking or using a dynamic price system for seat reservations.

Sharon and Francesc

After the presentations the audience got the opportunity to ask questions, allowing the speakers to address some further details of their approaches. The session closed with drinks and a chance for visitors to do some networking and discuss the topics presented.

Barcelona Gaming Data Hackathon. Ready?

 

Logo SocialPoint

BCNAnalytics

 

 

 

BCNAnalytics and SocialPoint are pleased to invite you to the first Barcelona Gaming Data Hackathon.  40 participants. 10 teams. +€1.5k euros in prizes. 24 hours. Food, t-shirts, great views and awesome people. R, Python, ML, … Ready?

The competition will focus on analyzing the data about the Dragon City Game (iOS and Android). Teams will participate in 2 different tracks: the accuracy track about churn detection and the business insights track, about finding actionable insights from the given datasets.

Register!

Social Point Offices

 


Competitions

The hackathon has two tracks to compete for. They are both about the Dragon City (iOS and Android).

  • Accuracy track: given data about how online players behave in Dragon City game, you will need to predict when players are likely to abandon the game using data from the players first 48hrs in the game (churn model).  As in Kaggle competitions,  teams will have 3 data sets: the training set, the test set1 and the test set2.  The training set  will have feature variables and a target variable to train the models. Once a model is trained, you can use test set (provided without the target variable) to submit your results and get instant feedback of the performance of the model.  Whenever you feel confident with your result, you will have to use test2 to make the final submission. Only results from test set2 will be used to determine the winners of this track. Each team will have 24 hours to build and submit their models (from Saturday 14th November to Sunday 15th November).
  • Business Insights track: participants will need to present actionable insights from the dataset provided (e.g. increasing the difficulty in level 12 will decrease 13% the drop out on that level). Each team will have 8 minutes to expose the finded results to the jury.  The results will be evaluated based on the impact of the insights, the actionability, the understandability of its communication and the novelty of the results. Each team will have one hour to prepare the presentation after the accuracy competition closes, although we encourage to be thinking about those insights while analyzing the data for the Accuracy track.

Prizes

  • Accuracy track: 1st prize 750€, 2nd prize 500€
  • Business insights track: unique prize 500€

Schedule

Saturday 14th November

  • 9:00 Opening and participants check in.
  • 9:30 Presentation by BCNAnalytics and SocialPoint. Team Formation
  • 10:00 Competition start. Data sets are released and submission platform begins accepting submissions.
  • 14:00 Lunch all together to a cool place 🙂
  • 20:00 SocialPoint offices closes

Sunday 15th November

  • 9:00 SocialPoint offices reopen
  • 10:00 Accuracy competition closes. Submission platform stops accepting submissions. Teams can prepare the presentation for the business track.
  • 11:00 Begin presentations
  • 13:00 Jury delivery
  • 13:30 Prizes
  • 14:30 Closing and optional lunch.

Participants and registration process

40 participants, 4 members per team.

To participate to the hackathon, start registering here, providing your Linkedin and Github profiles. If you already have a team formed, indicated the name of it in the registration form. If you don’t have a team, register and we will assign you a team.

The deadline for registering is Monday 9th November. The acceptance process is based on the public profiles provided. Once you or your team has been accepted, you will be notified about it.


Rules

  • Each participant can only participate in one team.
  • In order to opt to prizes, all teams must participate in both competitions.

This competition would not be possible without the help of SocialPoint. Thanks!

Logo SocialPoint

 

 

Upcoming event: From Customer to Revenue

We are very pleased to announce an upcoming event at BCNAnalytics. In this occasion we will be honoured with Sharon Biggar, head of Analytics at Social Point and Francesc Paloma, head of revenue management at Vueling. The format will be similar to the previous events: small presentations of the speakers, Q&A and finally networking time.

When: 21st September, at 19:00 (doors open at 18:30)

Where: Mobile World Center (next to Plaça Catalunya).
Fontanella, 2. Barcelona.

You can register here!

sharon-headSharon Biggar is the Head of Analytics at Social Point, one of the world’s leading developers of games for mobile, with more than 50 million active monthly players generating terabytes of data daily. There, she ensures that SP has the Big Data architecture ready to support the user base, analyses game play and user comments to improve the games and analyses user behavior to help customize user experience with predictive models.

Prior to that, Sharon was the CEO of Path Intelligence, a technology that provides online analytics to the offline world, analyzing customer behavior in shopping malls, retailers and entertainment arenas.

Sharon is a kiwi (from New Zeland). She holds a degree in Music and a degree in Economics, from the University of Auckland, and an MBA from the MIT  – Sloan School of Management.

Francesc PalomaFrancesc Paloma is the Director of Revenue Management & Pricing  at Vueling, where he has held various positions related to revenue management and pricing. He is responsible for dynamic flight price setting and other revenue management initiatives. Revenue management has become a more sophisticated analysis in recent years as competition has increased and data is more readily available. Vueling has also been innovative in terms of revenue strategies.

Prior to that, Francesc has lead analytics projects applied to social exclusion in Barcelona and was an auditor of lotteries at Loto Catalunya. He has also been a professor of Mathematics at the School of Engineering at UPC.

Francesc hold a degree in Math from UPC and an MBA from UPF, as well as a PDD from IESE.

Personalization in CRM event review

On March 9th, 2015 BCNanalytics was proud to host its second conference, “Personalisation in CRM”.

  • 198 people registered
  • 165 people atteneded
  • 83 empty beer bottles by the end of the event

The event was hosted at the Mobile World Centre and was attended by people representing  industries like banking, e-commerce, consulting, gaming, fashion, telecom, as well as academia and independent entrepreneurs.

To start off the event we had Manuel Bruscas, co-founder of BCNanalytics, present some of the key news of our organisation, like the creation of a job board on our site and some of the potential events we would like to organise like a hackathon or workshops.

Manuel presenting

We had Pau Agulló, also co-founder of BCNanalytics, introduce our two keynote speakers and later serve as moderator during the Q&A session.

Pau  presenting speakers

Our first speaker was Pier Paolo Rossi, current director of Business Intelligence at Banc Sabadell. Pier Paolo’s presentation covered a wide range of examples coming from his multi-industry experience having worked in telecomms (Movistar), retail (Caprabo) and lately banking (Banc Sabadell). He showed how personalisation can be applied to pricing, product, information layout and other areas of your business to expand the lifetime engagement and experience of your customers. His talk highlighted two points we would all do well to remember: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and “your customer is the most important thing”.

Pier Paolo Rossi

Our second speaker was Llorenç Solà, Director of CRM and Customer Strategy for Vistaprint Europe. Llorenç explained us that using personal content in communication wins over non-personalised approaches because it allows a business or organization to become more relevant to their users. He also reminded us that appropriate personalisation is by no means easy to achieve, since it always involves: data storage, analysis, statistical modelling and a user friendly strategy around frequency of touch points. There was particular emphasis given on the last point applied to email practices. In his opinion if long term performance is desired then email campaigns should not be measured simply by gross revenue. That would only lead to the controversial practice of mass emailing, which can arguably degrade your ability to communicate and influence your customers. Instead performance should be measured by the efficiency by which you get customers to interact with your communication.

Llorenç Solà

After the presentations our keynote speakers formed a panel and we discussed what had been presented. The audience was actively engaged with many questions for our presentors. Regarding the role of privacy in personalisation, one opinion was that if done right, personalisation is welcomed by customers. When asked which channel to use for communication the answer was that you should make your customer choose the channel for communication that they want. Other questions addressed the role of people and technology, as well as further discussion on the impact of limiting the amount of emails sent to customers in favor of more personalised content.

The conference closed with a networking event with free beers provided by our sponser Estrella Damm. People took this opportunity to ask further personal questions to our keynote speakers as well as meet fellow members of Barcelona’s analytics community. Thank you all for making this event a success. Please help us decide on our next event as well as ideas for other events by filling out this survey.

Beer time!!

 

Upcoming event: 9th March Personalisation applied to CRM

We are pleased to announce our upcoming BcnAnalytics meeting. The focus will be on: “Personalisation applied to CRM”. In other words we address one of the key topics for many organisations: ‘how to better manage the relationship with your customers’.We will have a panel with Pier Paolo Rossi (Director Inteligencia y Desarrollo de Negocio at Banco Sabadell), Llorenç Sola (CRM Director – Vistaprint Europe) and Inés Urés (CMO at Groupalia).

If you want to attend, please register at the following link.

When:

9th March, at 19:00 (doors open at 18:30)

Where:

Mobile World Center (next to Plaça Catalunya).

Fontanella, 2. Barcelona.

Who:

Pier Paolo RossiPier Paolo Rossi  is the Business Intelligence Director at Banc Sabadell since September 2014. Previous to that, he was the Customer Marketing Director at Caprabo. He has a broad range of experience applying data analysis in such different industries as retail and banking . He holds an MBA from IE and a degree in Industrial Engineering from UPC with the specialization in nuclear energy.

 

Llorenç SolàLlorenç Solà  is Head of CRM and Customer Strategy at Vistaprint Europe (Nasdaq: VPRT). More than 15 years developing data driven marketing strategies and CRM. International career in strategy consulting advising multinationals in Europe, America and Middle East. He is also one of the cofounders of BCNAnalytics.

 

inesInés Ures is the CMO at Groupalia, e-commerce leader in health & beauty, leisure and retail discounts. She’s a mathematician and an engineer, and a lover of data based marketing. In the past, Inés has held different positions in marketing and project management in Atrapalo.com and she has also worked at Deloitte and Sara Lee.