Data Guy

I'm Gerad Suyderhoud, and I recently joined the Swivel team as a developer and "data guy."

What does it mean to be a "data guy?"  It means that I'm the type of person who, instead of planning for a vacation like a normal person, will write a script to pull down airline data for all possible destinations and routes, load the data into R and perform a regression analysis to find the best time to buy.  Instead of using a real estate broker to look for apartments, I'm more inclined to write a script that monitors Craigslist, mine information from the postings and apartment locations, and load the data into an Excel file so that the best options can be quickly filtered and selected.

I became a data guy by studying Computer Science and Economics at college.  My professional background prior to Swivel has been in data analysis.  As a consultant at Cornerstone Research, I analyzed the data of dozens of companies on a large variety of economic consulting cases, including being one of 4 people to work on a case that was recently won in the Supreme Court.  Most recently, I was a marketing analyst at Apple where, among other things, I led Database Marketing's iPhone analysis.

I've always been the person that others have been forced go to when they want to actually use their data to answer questions.  This helped me realize that analyzing data is much too difficult, and made me passionate about creating tools that will enable non-experts to get to their answers without going through somebody like me.

At Swivel, I'll be helping to design and build these tools.  I couldn't be more excited.

Comments

[Huned Botee]

Woo, welcome!

[Dmitry Dimov]

Welcome. Glad to have you on board!

[Sara Wood]

We could not be happier about having our new data guy around. Stay tuned - many more big data ideas to come now that he is here. Welcome Gerad.

[marco.borgna]

I have written some visualition tool. One released as Open Source other under development. Feel free to check them at:

http://treepie.sf.net

Marco