Introduction:
Data Science and analytics are changing every industry as you read this article! If you have been following Analytics Vidhya lately, I am sure you would know how strongly I believe in it. You can look at some exciting start-ups coming out, which are using analytics and data science to solve problems more efficiently than ever before.
However, finding the right talent and tools is still difficult for a lot of companies wanting to use analytics. For example, how many SMEs can use dashboards to make real time decisions? or how many bloggers across the world know reading habits of their readers?
This week I bring you a collection of products / companies, which are making anaytics more accessible to an end user. They are taking the data from customers, doing the heavy lifting and delivering results in simple and impactful manner – what else would a business owner ask for! Check them out below:
Hotjar
Most organizations rely on Google Analytics, Omniture or MixPanel to understand their customers, while they are on the company’s website. But, all of them feel restrictive in some way or the other. Hotjar aims to solve this problem. Hotjar is a new and easy way to truly understand your web and mobile site visitors. Identify your hottest opportunities for improvement using Heatmaps, visitor recordings, funnels, forms, polls, surveys & user testers. If you just wat one take away from this article – check them out.
PredictionIO:
PredictionIO bring predictive models for developers, ready to deploy out of box. It is an open-source machine learning server for developers and data scientists to create predictive engines for production environments, with zero downtime training and deployment. It is built on top of Apache Spark, HBase and Spray.
Grow
Simple BI dashboards for small and medium businesses. The interfaces of the product looks really intuitive. I think Grow has actually understood their customer well and have designed the product to take care of a lot of inherent needs of the customer. I definitely feel compelled to recommend the product to a lot of SMEs who don’t own a lot of data expertise in house.
Proximus
Analytics for the retailers and real world. Proximus allows retailers to accurately understand the behaviour of their shoppers in-store. Their technology is based on two things: a unique indoor location and navigation engine and a great BigData architecture that analyse the behaviour of thousands of shoppers every day. Check out their site for a nice visual story about how it is delivered.
Smarking
Big Data meets parking problem. Smarking allows parking managers to optimize pricing and staffing based on historical and predicted demand, improving revenue and reducing costs. They aim to combine parking data with traffic data, weather data and other data sources to create a prediction for parking managers. This should then help these managers price optimally for parking space.
Prayas Analytics
A Y combinator company, which is enabling A/B testing based on computer vision. The best part is that they use existing CCTV camera, so the store owners can start seeing the benefits before investing any thing in hardware. They are enabling brick and mortar business test in similar way as an e-Commerce company does.
SumoMe
SumoMe provides content Analytics for blogs. With an integration in less than 37 seconds and reasonably priced plan, you get insights into reading behaviour and engagement of your customers. The primary application of SumoMe being Heatmaps of your content, which would help you decide your content strategy. They integrate with almost every blogging platform and are being used by more than 150,000 websites! How did I miss them before?
Insights Web Analytics
Insights web analytics acts as a layer above Google Analytics and convert the data from Google Analytics to actionable insights. For example, they convert the effect of higher bounce rate on a page to the impact on traffic, customer and ultimately sales! Insights Web analytics changes the way people use Google Analytics, which happens to be the most commonly used product for web analytics.
Neuron
Neuron aims to apply machine learning to create segmentation of customers. they aim to drive personalization for customers to solve problems like customer attrition and life cycle management.
Data Stories
Create data stories on click of the button. DataStories wants to crunch the time taken to convert an excel sheet with data to a story. The end user can select the kind of story he is looking from the data and get data stories on click of a button.
End Notes:
Here was a collection of startups which are making data science and analytics more accessible to common people. Some of them are trying to change the data science industry itself – exciting times, as I said!
Have you come across products / services which are making Data Science more accessible? If yes, I would love to hear more about them from you.
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Kunal is a post graduate from IIT Bombay in Aerospace Engineering. He has spent more than 10 years in field of Data Science. His work experience ranges from mature markets like UK to a developing market like India. During this period he has lead teams of various sizes and has worked on various tools like SAS, SPSS, Qlikview, R, Python and Matlab.
