Correlation does not imply causation 12-09

Correlation does not imply causation

Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing "look over there." xkcd

Correlation does not imply causation is a quip that events or statistics that happen to coincide with each other are not necessarily causally related. The reality is that cause and effect can be indirect and due to a third factor known as confounding variables, or entirely coincidental and random. The assumption of causation is false when the only evidence available is simple correlation. To prove causation, a controlled experiment must be performed.

The form of fallacy that it addresses is known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc or "affirming the consequent."

Simple example

Two events can consistently correlate with each other but not have any causal relationship. An example is the relationship between reading ability and shoe size across the whole population of the United States. If someone performed such a survey, they would find that the larger shoe sizes correlate with better reading ability, but this does not mean large feet cause good reading skills. Instead it's caused by the fact that young children have small feet and have not yet (or only recently) been taught to read. In this case, the two variables are more accurately correlated with a third: age.

The part age plays in this example is known as a "confounding variable" or "confounding factor," and is something that is not being controlled for in the experiment. In this case, age influences both reading ability and shoe size quite directly. A confounding variable can be what the actual cause of a correlation is, hence any studies must take these into account and find ways of dealing with them, usually by searching them out and trying to alter this variable directly.

The most common method to control confounding variables is with controlled studies. In these studies, the differences between the observations and the control group are minimised as best as possible, so that one can be more confident that a correlation is a valid indicator of causation. This is extremely important in compensating for the placebo effect in medical trials, but it is also important in other branches of science. In the age/shoe-size/reading-ability example, a controlled experiment would look for a correlation between reading ability and shoe size given a sample of people all the same age - or alternatively thehypothesis could be further tested by correlating age and reading ability given a sample of similar shoe size.

Risk factor

The term "risk factor" is used in medicine to mean "something that is positively correlated." For instance, obesity is a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes. The term is often incorrectly understood to mean "cause" (e.g. "I'm at risk for diabetes? But I'm not fat!"). Alternatively, a clear risk factor can be disputed on the basis that it's not a definitive cause - a classic use of the uncertainty tactic (e.g. "I smoke three packs a day and I don't have cancer!").]

In science

In science, correlation studies are often used to test for the existence of interesting patterns, but they are never used exclusively to claim a cause. In order to make a causal claim you must run an experiment or series of experiments and further studies using the scientific method— i.e., test to see if it really is a cause by altering parameters and performing more experiments, making predictions and testing them. This is in order to validate that one event is indeed directly influencing the other and is the reason behind the detected correlation.

Many woo and pseudoscience pushers conflate correlation with causation in order to make a claim of validity but forget to attempt the later scientific steps of compensating for confounding variables and thoroughly testing the causal relationship. For example, if someone gets acold, but takes vitamin C, their cold will go away in 5-7 days. The claim is then made that the vitamin C caused the cold to go away. However, the cold would have gone away anyway, whether or not the vitamin C was taken, and so the validity claim is false. The placebo effect is another correlation with "treatment" that quacks use to create false validity.

Correlations seem to tap into a deep part of human psychology. As pattern recognition machines, we are hyper-responsive to any potentialsignal in our environment. People will often take two completely unrelated events and decide that they must cause each other because they seem to correlate. Someone may decide that when they wear a given shirt they have good luck; this is often combined with a powerfulconfirmation bias to create magical thinking.

In parody

In the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster", a key "belief" is that global warming is caused by a lack of pirates sailing the oceans. This is shown by a graph correlating increasing surface temperatures of the earth with a decline in the number of pirates. While it is certainly true that piracy has decreased and temperatures have gone up, there is nothing directly connecting the two trends.

Fallacy engineering

Care should be taken not to assume the opposite (that correlation never implies causation). Woo spinners and quacks may try to walk around sound science or statistical analysis by citing this fallacy.Anti-vaccine proponents often discount all evidence that shows the use of vaccine followed by a reduction in the infection rate by claiming "correlation does not imply causation" as though "correlation cannot imply causation". Ironically they may then cite their own statistics showing the increase of cases of autism when a new vaccine is introduced. In such cases, their evidence is flawed; such correlations absolutely and utterly do not imply causation. Be very wary of climate change deniers and fanatical free market economists when they throw this fallacy on the table.

View at the original source

104 Fascinating Social Media and Marketing Statistics for 2014 (and 2015) 12-08

104 Fascinating Social Media and Marketing Statistics for 2014 (and 2015)

Looking at marketing surveys and studies from the past year, a few trends are clear, among them that buyers are firmly (and increasingly) in control of the purchase cycle. They prefer searching to being found, and will often be close to their final decision point before talking to a salesperson.

In response, marketers are producing an increasing amount and variety of content to support all stages of the decision process. They’re distributing and promoting this content through all channels in the web presence optimization (WPO) model, to maximize their opportunities to be “found” online when buyers are looking.

And although digital is taking an increasing share of marketing budgets, the move to online is paradoxically making some old-school tactics even more valuable.

What do buyers say is the most important signal of vendor credibility? What type of content is most effective? What do marketers rate as the single most valuable SEO tactic? What are the top barriers to adopting social business practices?

Find the answers to these questions and many others in more than 100 social and online marketing stats from 20+ different sources.

1. People want to be in control of the content they receive:

• • 86% of people skip TV commercials.
• • 44% of direct mail is never opened.
• • 91% of people have unsubscribed from company emails they previously opted into.

(NewsCred)

2. 72% of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine; 69% say it is superior to direct mail and PR. (NewsCred)

3. Nearly half (46%) of people say a website’s design is their number one criterion for determining the credibility of a company. (NewsCred)

4. 71% of companies planned to increase their digital marketing budgets this year, by an average of 27%. (Econsultancy)

5. 67 percent of marketers say increasing sales directly attributable to digital marketing campaigns is a top priority this year. (Forbes)

6. Internet advertising will make up 25% of the entire ad market in 2015. (Social Fresh)

7. Despite all the hype about online, 67% of B2B content marketers consider event marketing to be their most effective strategy. (Social Fresh)

8. Videos on landing pages increase conversions by 86%. (Social Fresh)

9. As one would suspect, Facebook is the most popular method for sharing interesting content. Surprisingly though, the fifth-most popular sharing method is offline (print) shares. (Heidi Cohen)

5 Online Demographics Stats

10. The Google+ platform has 67 percent male users. (Rocket Post)

11. There are 76 million millennials (born between 1981 and 2000) in the U.S. — 27% of the total population. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)

12. 63% of millennials have at least a bachelors degree. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)

13. 63% of millennials say they stay updated on brands through social networks; 51% say social opinions influence their purchase decisions; and 46% “count on social media” when buying online. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)

14. 89% of 18-29 year-olds are active on social media, as are 43% of adults 65 and older. (Jeff Bullas)

13 Content Marketing Stats

15. B2B content matters. 57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier. (Corporate Executive Board)

16. By 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. (Target Marketing)

17. Not all content has to be original. 48% of marketers curate noteworthy content from third-party sources weekly (this post is an example). (Design & Promote)

18. 62% of companies outsource their content marketing. (Iconsive)

19. $118 billion was spend on content marketing last year. (NewsCred)

20. 70% of consumers say they prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads. (NewsCred)

21. 90% of organizations market with content. 86% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing. (NewsCred)

22. Or maybe 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. (Iconsive)

23. And yet…54% of brands don’t have an onsite, dedicated content director. (NewsCred)

24. There are 27 million pieces of content shared each day. (NewsCred)

25. Companies will spend $135 billion on digital marketing collateral this year. (Social Fresh)

26. Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at 89%. (Social Fresh)

27. 17% of marketers plan to increase efforts on SlideShare this year. (Forbes)

7 Blogging Stats

28. 34% of Fortune 500 companies now maintain active blogs – the largest share since 2008. (Forbes)

29. Each month, 329 million people read blogs. (NewsCred)

30. 37% of marketers say blogs are the most valuable content type for marketing. (NewsCred)

31. Companies that publish new blog posts 15+ times per month (3-4 posts per week) generate five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all. (NewsCred)

32. 17% of marketers plan to increase blogging efforts this year. (Forbes)

33. Blogging increases web traffic by 55% for brands. (Rocket Post)

34. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those without blogs. (Social Fresh)

7 Visual and Video Marketing Stats

35. Pinterest grabs 41% of the ecommerce traffic compared to Facebook’s 37%. Food is the top category of content on Pinterest with 57% of its user base sharing food-related content. (Rocket Post)

36. 16% of marketers plan to increase efforts on Pinterest this year. (Forbes)

37. The use of video content for marketing increased 73% this year; use of infographics grew 51%. (Digital Marketing Philippines)

38. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without. (NewsCred)

39. Posts with videos attract three times as many inbound links as plain text posts. (NewsCred)

40. 62% of marketers use video in their content marketing. (NewsCred)

41. Two-thirds of firms plan to increase spending on video marketing in the coming year. (Heidi Cohen)

5 SEO Stats

42. 81% of B2B purchase cycles start with web search, and 90% of buyers say when they are ready to buy, “they’ll find you.” (Earnest Agency)

43. More than half (53%) of marketers rank content creation as the single most effective SEO tactic. (NewsCred)

44. 57% of B2B marketers say SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation. (NewsCred)

45. Organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate, compared to 1.7% for outbound marketing leads. (NewsCred)

46. 33% of clicks from organic search results go to the top listing on Google. (Social Fresh)

15 Social Media Marketing Stats

47. 85% of B2B buyers believe companies should present information via social networks. (Iconsive)

48. And yet – only 20% of CMOs leverage social networks to engage with customers. (Marketing Land)

49. Marketers will spend $8.3 billion on social media advertising in 2015. (NewsCred)

50. “Interesting content” is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media. (NewsCred)

51. 87% of B2B marketers use social media to distribute content. (NewsCred)

52. 17% of marketers plan to increase podcasting efforts this year. (Forbes)

53. As consumer use of social media for brand comments and complaints continues to increase, brands are having a hard time keeping up. Only about 20% of consumer comments generate brand responses, and the average response time is over 11 hours. (eMarketer)

54. Nearly three-quarters of US marketers believe customer response management on digital channels is important (so…25% think it’s okay to ignore consumers?); however, just one-third say their company does a good job at this. (eMarketer)

55. Social media marketing budgets are projected to double over the next five years (Social Fresh)

56. 66% of marketers claim that social indirectly impacts their business performance but only 9%t claim that it can be directly linked to revenue. (Forbes)

57. Over 70% of US online adults use some form of social media networking. (Heidi Cohen)

58. 72% of all internet users are now active on social media. (Jeff Bullas)

59. The top two barriers impeding adoption of social business within organizations are lack of overall strategy and competing priorities. Just 11% of marketers cite legal or regulatory concerns. (i-SCOOP)

60. 78% of companies now say they have dedicated social media teams, up from 67% in 2012. (i-SCOOP)

61. By department, companies most often have dedicated social media staff (not surprisingly) in marketing (73%), communications/PR (66%) and customer support (40%). At the other end of the scale are legal (9%) and market research (8%). (i-SCOOP)

7 Facebook Marketing stats

62. Facebook accounts for 15.8% of total time spent on the Internet. (Rocket Post)

63. 71% of online adults use Facebook. 63% of Facebook users visit daily and 40% visit multiple times per day. (Heidi Cohen)

64. More than a third (36%) of online adults use only one social networking site. Of these, 83% use Facebook. 8% use LinkedIn. (Heidi Cohen)

65. One million web pages are accessed using the “Login with Facebook” feature. (Jeff Bullas)

66. Nearly a quarter (232%) of Facebook users login at least five times per day. (Jeff Bullas)

67. 47% of Americans say Facebook is their #1 influencer of purchases. (Jeff Bullas)

68. 70% of marketers used Facebook to gain new customers. (Jeff Bullas)

3 LinkedIn Marketing Stats

69. LinkedIn is the top social network for B2B marketing (not a shock). 83% of marketers say they prefer to use LinkedIn for distributing B2B content, and more than half of vendors say they have generated sales through LinkedIn. (Real Business Rescue)

70. The average time spent on LinkedIn per month is 17 minutes. (Rocket Post)

71. 91 of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn for candidate searches. (Rocket Post)

7 Twitter Marketing Stats

72. The average time per month spent by users on Twitter is 170 minutes. (Rocket Post)

73. Only about half of the people who log in to Twitter once a month are actually taking the time to tweet. The rest are lurkers. (Rocket Post)

74. Ironically, the most-followed brand on Twitter is…Facebook, with more than 13 million followers. Google is #3. (AllTwitter)

75. eBay is the most engaging brand on Twitter. Starbucks is the fourth-most-engaging, and also has the fourth highest number of followers of any major brand. (AllTwitter)

76. Not a shock: retailers and restaurants are the most engaging industries on Twtitter. Surprising: apparel brands are the least engaging. (AllTwitter)

77. Twitter now has over 550 million registered users, and 215 million active monthly users. (Jeff Bullas)

78. 34% of marketers use Twitter to successfully generate leads. (Jeff Bullas)

3 Google+ Stats

79. 18% of marketers plan to increase efforts on Google+ this year. (Forbes)

80. There are now over 1 billion Google+ accounts, and that figure is growing 33% per year. (Jeff Bullas)

81. Google+ has 359 million monthly active users. (Jeff Bullas)

13 Email Marketing Stats

82. There are nine times as many marketing emails sent each year as direct mail pieces delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. (Mark the Marketer)

83. Email marketing delivers the highest ROI (about $44 per dollar spent, on average) of any digital marketing tactic. SEO is #2. Banner ads have the lowest ROI. (Mark the Marketer)

84. 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an e-mail marketing message. (Mark the Marketer)

85. Email subject lines matter. Really. 64% of people say they open an e-mail because of the subject line. (Mark the Marketer)

86. Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. For B2C emails, the words “Alert,” “New,” “News,” “Bulletin,” “Sale,” “Video,” “Daily,” or “Weekly” (though not “Monthly”) all increase open and click-through rates. (Mark the Marketer)

87. For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” performed the best. (Mark the Marketer)

88. Timing is important too. 76% of e-mail opens occur in the first two days after an e-mail is sent. E-mail open rates are noticeably lower on weekends than on weekdays. (Mark the Marketer)

89. Only 8% of companies and agencies have an e-mail marketing team. E-mail marketing responsibilities usually fall on one person as a part of her wider range of marketing responsibilities. (Mark the Marketer)

90. 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via e-mail. (Mark the Marketer)

91. Still, the average click-through rate for B2B marketing e-mails is just 1.7%. (Mark the Marketer)

92. Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by 158%. (Social Fresh)

93. 64 percent of marketers say increasing email click-throughs and open rates is among their top priorities this year. (Forbes)

94. 67 percent of marketers say that email is ke3y for attracting and engaging prospects, and the best path to increase marketing ROI. (Forbes)

10 Mobile Marketing Stats

95. 94% of CMOs plan to use mobile applications within the next 3-5 years. (Marketing Land)

96. 75% of smartphone owners watch videos on their phones; 26% at least once per day. (NewsCred)

97. Over half of all mobile searches lead to a purchase. (Rocket Post)

98. 78% of Facebook users are mobile-only. (Rocket Post)

99. E-mail is the most popular activity on smartphones among users ages 18-44. (Mark the Marketer)

100. 64% of decision-makers read their e-mail via mobile devices. (Mark the Marketer)

101. Almost half–48%–of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Yet 39% of marketers say they have no strategy for mobile email, and only 11% of e-mails are optimized for mobile. (Mark the Marketer)

102. Mobile is the channel of choice for keep relationships with existing customers alive because it cuts through the clutter of email and social. (Forbes)

103. 71% of users access social media from a mobile device. (Jeff Bullas)

104. 50% of millennials use their smartphones to research products or services while shopping, and 41% have made purchases using their phones. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)

View at the original source

How much data is generated every minute? 12-08

How much data is generated every minute?

Data never sleeps.

It's generated every minute across different platforms as you can see in the infographic below 

Having a hard time catching up with mail after a long weekend?

 No wonder, as 204,166,667 e-mail messages are sent very minute. Some of these will land in your mailbox.

Do you think people are turning to social media to ask for information? 

Well, think again as Google is receiving over 2,000,000 searches a minute. It's not a matter of choices, people search and share everywhere! On Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and look at how much they shop online: every minute 272,070 US dollars are spent on web shopping alone.

BuzzTalk enables data mining and big data marketing

Imagine having to sift through all this data to get to something valuable.

A lot of data is generated, republished or just of bad quality. No wonder we sometimes feel overwhelmed with data. It's actionable information, not data, that we need to make better decisions in our work.

As such we need better filters to categorize these huge amounts of data.

We need to be able to look at the quality sources only and to have categories and filters that enable interpretation and analysis.

At Byelex we now scan 53,000 websites on a daily basis and we capture 150,000 tweets. 

These are 19,000 news sites, 16,000 blogs and 18,000 scientific journals. All of these publications are first translated to English and then tagged tagged using Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais and our own OpenDover tagging engines so analysis can be done on a live basis. This way about 125,000 documents are processed on a daily basis.

Do you know how much data this is?

 If we would print these publications on regular paper this would be a pile of 1.3 meter every day. This is almost 9 meters of piled paper every week!

All of these publications are stored in a large database which now holds over 46 million documents and 44 milion tweets which can be searched and analyzed using BuzzTalk. 

This way you can run reports to discover trends in your industry. In an early stage you can prepare your production facilities and marketing campaigns for trends that you otherwise would have missed.

View at the original source

How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights 12-08

How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights

If you believe in the Mayan Calendar our world is going to end this year. 

However, if you believe we will still be there you may want to have some better means of predicting the future.

The web has come to reflect the world

Twitter has become very popular in the marketing world because of the potential it provides for viral marketing and webcare.

 Because of it's enormous reach, Twitter is increasingly used by PR and news organizations to filter news updates through the community. Also Twitter is used to advertise products and services and to communicate news to stakeholders.

However, while monitoring of social media is not new, seeing into the future using social media is sizzling hot.

It takes social media from the marketing department upwards to the executive level where business intelligence is needed to support decisions.

Several scientists have conducted research into how we can use big data such as the massive amounts of Tweets and other publications to make reliable predictions about the future. 

Their thought is that social media can be construed as a form of collective wisdom.

Earlier we mentioned the article by Johan Bollen et al. in which he and his team used Twitter to predict the stock market. In this blogpost we'll feature the research done by Asur & Huberman of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs who, just like Bollen, used social media conversations as market predictor, only this time for box-office revenues.

The economics of attention: Predicting the future with social media

Asur & Huberman used the chatter from Twitter to forecast box-office revenues for movies. 

The reason for this is that the topic of movies is of considerable interest among Twitter users and real-world outcomes can easily be observed. Their hypothesis was that movies that are well-talked about will also be well-watched. As attention is scarce it's logical to assume that the movie getting attention online will get attention and consumption offline.

They looked at 24 movies and considered 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million different users. 

Using this data they constructed a linear regression model based on the tweet rate. Tweet rate is defined as the number of tweets for a specific movie divided by the time in hours. On basis of the rate at which people are tweeting they were able to project the revenue the movie was going to make two weeks ahead.

Once the movie opened they did a sentiment analysis of how people reacted with movies they saw to make even more accurate predictions. For this they used the P/N ratio which is the ratio of positive tweets to negative tweets.

Now why is HP studying social media?

Bernardo Huberman explains it in this video by Social Media Examiner:

Companies that use social media for business intelligence

What these scientific research teams are doing is all very sophisticated. 

But now businesses can tap into the wealth of online data and forward-looking insights.

Another example to inspire you is IBM. IBM used big data, specifically social media analysis, to predict women's heel heights. Independent technology analyst Carmi Levy says: "I'm surprised more companies haven't jumped the social media bandwagon. It's ripe for the picking. All this unstructured data is social media intelligence". IBM thinks the same logic could be applied to other industries.

In general from the way people are paying attention you can actually predict the success of your ideas. 

This has a wide range of applications from businesses (predicting product success) to even political (predicting elections).

View at the original source

How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights 12-08

How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights

If you believe in the Mayan Calendar our world is going to end this year. 

However, if you believe we will still be there you may want to have some better means of predicting the future.

The web has come to reflect the world

Twitter has become very popular in the marketing world because of the potential it provides for viral marketing and webcare.

 Because of it's enormous reach, Twitter is increasingly used by PR and news organizations to filter news updates through the community. Also Twitter is used to advertise products and services and to communicate news to stakeholders.

However, while monitoring of social media is not new, seeing into the future using social media is sizzling hot.

It takes social media from the marketing department upwards to the executive level where business intelligence is needed to support decisions.

Several scientists have conducted research into how we can use big data such as the massive amounts of Tweets and other publications to make reliable predictions about the future. 

Their thought is that social media can be construed as a form of collective wisdom.

Earlier we mentioned the article by Johan Bollen et al. in which he and his team used Twitter to predict the stock market. In this blogpost we'll feature the research done by Asur & Huberman of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs who, just like Bollen, used social media conversations as market predictor, only this time for box-office revenues.

The economics of attention: Predicting the future with social media

Asur & Huberman used the chatter from Twitter to forecast box-office revenues for movies. 

The reason for this is that the topic of movies is of considerable interest among Twitter users and real-world outcomes can easily be observed. Their hypothesis was that movies that are well-talked about will also be well-watched. As attention is scarce it's logical to assume that the movie getting attention online will get attention and consumption offline.

They looked at 24 movies and considered 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million different users. 

Using this data they constructed a linear regression model based on the tweet rate. Tweet rate is defined as the number of tweets for a specific movie divided by the time in hours. On basis of the rate at which people are tweeting they were able to project the revenue the movie was going to make two weeks ahead.

Once the movie opened they did a sentiment analysis of how people reacted with movies they saw to make even more accurate predictions. For this they used the P/N ratio which is the ratio of positive tweets to negative tweets.

Now why is HP studying social media?

Bernardo Huberman explains it in this video by Social Media Examiner:

Companies that use social media for business intelligence

What these scientific research teams are doing is all very sophisticated. 

But now businesses can tap into the wealth of online data and forward-looking insights.

Another example to inspire you is IBM. IBM used big data, specifically social media analysis, to predict women's heel heights. Independent technology analyst Carmi Levy says: "I'm surprised more companies haven't jumped the social media bandwagon. It's ripe for the picking. All this unstructured data is social media intelligence". IBM thinks the same logic could be applied to other industries.

In general from the way people are paying attention you can actually predict the success of your ideas. 

This has a wide range of applications from businesses (predicting product success) to even political (predicting elections).

View at the original source

This App Knows Your Drink Preference Better Than You Do 12-08

This App Knows Your Drink Preference Better Than You Do

It's no big secret that the craft beer scene has e xploded in recent years, which means consumers are sometimes faced with an intimidating selection on store shelves. The choice is no longer "Sam Adams or Sierra Nevada," but "Allagash Curieux or Stone Ruination or Zombie Dust or Old Heathen Imperial Stout..."

A new app called NextGlass wants to help you manage all of your beer (and wine) options by personally crafting recommendations based on your tastes. You tell the app what you like, then hold your phone up to a drink's label in a store to receive its estimation of how much you'll like it:

You tell NextGlass what you like, then it uses your phone's camera to scan drink labels and let you know how much you'll like them.

What makes NextGlass stand out is how it makes those recommendations. Unlike other recommendation apps, it's not predicting what you'll like based on similar brands or what other people say. Rather, it uses the actual chemical makeup of the drink. Trace Smith, the company's chief operating officer, said that around 30,000 bottles of beer and wine have been tested for the app using a high-resolution mass spectrometer -- a device that measures chemicals in a substance.

"Each bottle that we run through the mass-spec, we get over 20,000 individual chemical attributes. We're looking at each of these bottles at a molecular level," Smith told The Huffington Post during a phone interview. "We see the data of what they do and don't like, and based on that info, we see what other bottles they'll like."

NextGlass also tells you how much alcohol, calories, and carbs are in a given drink.

Once you try a beverage, you can rate it on a four-star scale in the app. NextGlass looks for trends in the chemical makeups of the brands you like, and uses that information to predict how much you'll like something else. To make sure they had a good handle on how to use the data, the NextGlass team worked with Sean Owen, a former senior software engineer at Google and current director of data science at Cloudera.

NextGlass also has a social networking component, so you can add friends and cross-reference tastes -- if you're planning for a party, say.

Smith told HuffPost that moving forward, NextGlass may be available on desktops so you can network and look drinks up without your phone. He also said that, big-picture, the team would like to expand the data they look at beyond wine and beer.

"We'd love to be able to have our users walk into a Safeway or a Public or a Costco and scan a box of cereal or a jar of peanut butter or an Odwalla drink and be able to see a score and say, will I like this? Will my wife like this?" Smith said.

The app is free and available on iOS and Google Play. Smith said the app will always be free for users, but starting in 2015, NextGlass hopes to offer analytics from the app to retailers and breweries to help companies reach users based on their tastes.

View at the original source