Open Source Analytics

This is a 2003 article titled Top Ten Mistakes Made by Entrepreneurs by Constance Bagley, an Associate Professor in Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and a staff writer for HBS Working Knowledge. In this article, Constance discusses the most frequent flops made by entrepreneurs, everything from hiring the wrong lawyer to puffing up the business plan.
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On Friday we released DecisionStudio Professional - a comprehensive and free desktop BI Platform that gives you all the tools needed for analytics under a single package licensed under GNU Public License (GPL).

DecisionStudio Professional (DSP) is an advanced graphical data mining, reporting, modeling, and analysis environment built on top of the best-of-breed open source projects. Some of these include:
— Optimized MySQL database as data warehouse platform
— SQL Workbench (MySQL Query Browser and DBDesigner) for Data Analysts
— R environment for statistical analysis and modeling
— iReport Reporting GUI and JasperReport reporting library
— Python with Boa Constructor IDE for application and GUI development

DecisionStudio Professional is the only end-to-end open source analytics platform that provides comprehensive capabilities to each role. Data Analysts get to store, process, and publish data on a standard MySQL platform; Reporting Analysts would like iReport and the integration with Office tools; and Modelers would love the excellent R Environment. It also includes Python along with a drag-n-drop GUI building environment for analytics Application Developers.

You can find out more about DecisionStudio Professional at decisionstudio.com, and can download your copy at Sourceforge.net. Click here to download the product brochure (PDF).

Go ahead, it’s completely free and will always stay so.

One month, 3 hours, and 10 minutes since I last posted.

Down. But not out.

Tomorrow IS another day. Catch you then.

“I am a bootstrapper. I have initiative and insight and guts, but not much money. I will succeed because my efforts
and my focus will defeat bigger and better-funded competitors. I am fearless. I keep my focus on growing the business—
not on politics, career advancement, or other wasteful distractions.” — Seth Godin’s The Bootstrapper’s Bible.

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Big-bang is dead. And its awfully obvious these days that Less can be a competitive advantage.

I have had a tough time explaining this. And it’s a pleasant surprise to see today that the guys at 37signals.com do get it.

Times have changed. All other people’s money gets you these days is into debt. And that’s not a great place to start anything from. You don’t need money for hardware — hardware is cheap. You don’t need money for software — software is free. You don’t need money for marketing — there are a variety of ways get your message out online to a huge audience for next to free. Money doesn’t buy you time and money doesn’t buy you passion (and passion is something you need a boatload of).

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When you are bootstrapping your way towards developing your dream software product, you have to be extra careful with your first few customers. You have to make sure they get all the benefits you had to offer. And you have to make sure that your upcoming product meets their custom requirements. After all, they are paying you for it, and are helping in the actualization of the vision, right?

Ummm… Not so simple really.
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