one of the buildings on the SAS Campus – Cary, NC
On Wednesday I made the trip from the Triad to the Triangle for Web Analytics Wednesday – Cary, NC hosted by SAS. I arrived a bit early… Mingling with a crowd of ~ 15 was great!
The host Richard Foley and guest of honor Eric Peterson where gracious and generous with their time.
I will attempt to summarize five of the ten points from Eric’s presentation… (from memory)
1. A large scale analytics data loss event
2. Consolidation of the available Analytics Tools. More activity like Google acquiring Urchin.
3. (For the U.S) Lawmakers attempting to legislate use of 3rd party cookies.
4. The rise of what Eric calls Web 3.0 made possible by iPhone (version 2) geospatial/global positioning. Allowing advertisers, search engines and others to target locally. (e.g. displaying searches for cafes within walking distance as opposed to the user having to specifying a location first in their search.
5. The commoditization of analytics services. First, with Google offering Urchin for free and second, the possibility that Yahoo might do the same with their recent purchase of IndexTools. In Eric’s opinion IndexTools is equal in functionality to CoreMetrics. If Yahoo gives away IndexTools to compete with Google we may all have a better (and Free) option with Yahoo. This will be bad news for the smaller and less popular analytics
and log file analyzer tools.