Data

Companies invest 4x more in M&A than R&D in the USA

I’ve been zooming out to gain a broader perspective of how finance and innovation interact in the economy for my work with the #FounderFriendlyStandard.

I asked the question: How much more money do companies invest in mergers & acquisitions (M&A) than in research and development (R&D)?

Here is the statistic that I found:

Graph showing corporate investments in R&D vs. M&A from 2008 to 2016
This graph shows that between years 2008 and 2016, companies invested 4x more money in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) than in research and development (R&D) in the United States.

The above stat comes from merging two data sources.

The first data source is Mergers & Acquisitions United States from the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions, and Alliances (IMAA).

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Duplicate Data: Performing quantitative risk analysis for lead generation

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Duplicates in your Salesforce.com CRM cause mirky lead attribution, poor results.

As I blogged on on February 28, I met a gentleman whose lead generation agency is tasked with generating leads for a healthcare services company.

I asked him, “Does your client have a master data management strategy?” The answer was no.

The client is a large organization. They have millions of records of legacy data in Siebel and they are migrating to Salesforce CRM and Pardot. This legacy data could be a great asset if the client had a master data management system in place. The client does not, and this poses a risk for the lead generation agency.

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How many phone numbers does the average person have in the USA? 1.65

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The average consumer in the United States has 1.65 phone numbers. Here is how I crunched the numbers:

Landlines for every 100 U.S. people  38
Population of U.S.  319,000,000
My calculated landlines in the U.S.  121,220,000
Mobile subscribers in U.S. by top 7 carriers  406,375,000
Mobile + landlines divided by population  1.65

This 1.65 figure is valuable for forecasting the impact of duplicate data in a customer relationship management system (CRM) like Salesforce.com.

Why did I calculate this?

Today, in a co-working office called GeniusDen, I met a gentleman whose lead generation agency is tasked with generating leads for a healthcare services company.

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How 6 mCommerce sites changed since Black Friday 2010

How have mobile commerce websites changed since 2010?
How 6 mobile websites have traveled through time. Image: Jordandemuth

Black Friday 2010 brought e-commerce sales of $648 million (Comscore). In 2016, that figure rose to $3.34 billion (Adobe), a 415% increase. Mobile has played an increasing role on Black Friday. It accounted for 36% of this year’s online sales.

Back in 2010, I was impressed when a retailer had a mobile website. I led a study with Luth Research that revealed only 22.8% of top retailers had them.

I kept some screenshots from my 2010 study. I have put them side-by-side with screenshots from today. Oh, how mobile commerce has changed!

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OpenAPIMasher Spec

These drawings are for an early tool Aleksander Nowak and I developed at Company Data Trees. The tool allowed us to enrich a CSV list with our mobile website detection API. It used a client-side HTML5 database and deleted the data when the user confirmed the mash was complete. Below is a chart of the tool’s process flow.