Sharing emotion-driven narratives that resonate with other people is something humans are quite good at. We've been sitting around campfires telling stories for tens of thousands of years, and we still do it. One reason why is because it's an effective way to communicate: We remember stories. But what makes for good storytelling? Mark Magellan, a writer and designer at Ideo U, puts it this way: "To tell a story that someone will remember, it helps to understand his or her needs. The art of storytelling requires creativity, critical-thinking skills, self-awareness, and empathy."

All businesses need to have a tracking & feedback mechanism to measure their progress and make iterations when and where required. Now when firms are investing in digital marketing, analytics is one of the first steps they focus on, to measure the ROI. At the same time, Digital Marketing Stats 2015 by research firm Smartinsights mentions that "63% of companies did not agree with the statement'we have a good infrastructure in place to collect the data we need'". The right analytics tracking set up can help you gather meaningful data. When we think of analytics softwares, it is less likely that our minds would give Google Analytics a skip, given its unbeatable popularity.

Players in Dear Leader’s Happy Story Time are placed in the role of contestants in a reality TV show where they are forced to audition for roles in the upcoming film of the host, a deranged billionaire who has inexplicably been elected president.  The stories are produced by a story generator that combines stock plots and characters to produce kitsch story outlines.  The players then collaborate to improvise a camp performance of the outline.  The game design provides a context for experimenting with automatic story generation within a narrative game, as well as an opportunity for experimenting with knowledge representation schemes for expressing the tropes of popular narrative.  The story generator uses a higher-order logic for describing tropes, and an HTN planning algorithm based on Nau et al.’s SHOP.

An example of a web analytics application that will benefit from statistical technology is estimating the value (CPC, or cost-per-click) and volume of a search keyword depending on market, position, and match type--a critical problem for Google and Bing advertisers, as well as publishers. Currently, if you use the Google API to get CPC estimates, Google will return no value more than 50% of the time. This is a classic example of a problem that was addressed by smart engineers and computer scientists, but truly lacks a statistical component--even as simple as naïve Bayes--to provide a CPC estimate for any keyword, even those that are brand new. Statisticians with experience in imputation methods should solve this problem easily and help their companies sell CPC and volume estimates (with confidence intervals, which Google does not offer) for all keywords. Another example is spam detection in social networks.

Advances in cloud computing, along with the big data movement, have transformed the business IT landscape. Leveraging the cloud, companies are now afforded on demand capacity and mobile accessibility to their business-critical systems and information. At the same time, the amount of structured and unstructured data created by, and available to, organizational users is a constantly moving target, with IDC estimating that the digital universe will grow by a factor of 10 between 2013 and 2020. But while both of these IT megatrends can be the catalysts for innovation and growth, organizations are facing significant new challenges when trying to seize upon their opportunities. Corporate datasets are growing more diverse, complex and massive in size.