Bling Nation receives $8M for mobile payments

Palo Alto-based mobile payment platform Bling Nation received $8M funding from investors led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Bling Nation enables pay-by-cell phone transactions in the U.S. for the purchase of physical goods at stores. While new technology often moves from early adopter crowds in urban areas out to the rest of the country, Bling Nation builds its system in small towns first.

Me See MECE

One of the most fundamental concepts in analytics is known as "Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE).

MECE is a property of categorizations, classifications and hierarchies. We say, "this categorization is MECE", or "that hieararchy is not MECE" to indicate whether summing all values at a given level will sum to 100%.

For instance, if I had three pets, a dog, a budge, and a budgee, the following categorization of my pets is non-MECE:

	Mammal	Lays Eggs
Dog	1	0
Budgie	0	1
Platypus	1	1
Total	2	2

In contrast, the following alternative categorization is MECE:

	Mammal	Bird
Dog	1	0
Budgie	0	1
Platypus	1	0
Total	2	1

Non-MECE categorizations can lead to inaccurate decision making in business contexts, because one cannot compare metrics at different levels of categorization. This issue can become harmful when organizations use non-MECE categorizations for goal setting.

In practice, non-MECE categorization appear more often that one might think. Specifically, when using multiple, separate flag-attributes as in the tables above. In contrast, when we use a single column or attribute to categorize items, the categorization will typically be MECE, because each field in that column can only have one specific value.

For instance, consider an organization setting goals to increase consumer sales and business sales respectively for the consumer and business sales units. If the organization does not enforce MECE categorization both units may meet their goals without increasing overall sales, simply by categorizing more customers as both "consumer" and "business". This non-MECE categorizations may appear "defensible" when we consider that consumers may sell items so that they could be considered a "business".

AnalytixTrix

Welcome to AnalytixTrix,

My goal for this blog is to share useful and thought-provoking information about analytics with fellow professionals. From time to time, I will also talk about developments in industries that use analytics heavily.

I have practiced analytics at PayPal, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Numetrics Management Systems, and several startups. I am particularly interested in connecting real-world business needs to practical analytics techniques and tools.

The overriding design principle of this blog is to keep posts short, to the point and visually appealing. I chose "AnalytixTrix" as this blog's name because it conveys practicality, and because I found zero hits on Google for this search term.

I am always interested in hearing from you at: Tilmann.Bruckhaus@gmail.com

Tilmann