Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. This article was written for business readers. Due to an outcry from the responsive design community, I added the word "web" to the term "adaptive design" to avoid confusion with progressive enhancement, and updated the text to read that Facebook uses "a precursor to" responsive design, even though very techie trades like RWW say that Facebook uses responsive design . Obviously, the outcry has more to do with the content than the terminology, but it's always good to be pedantic. Read on! Analysts commenting on Facebook’s IPO have highlighted a major issue in mobile computing: that it’s incredibly difficult to monetize on mobile devices . Like many other engineering-led cultures, Facebook has embraced adaptive web design, a precursor to also known as responsive design, where essentially the same code can render itself down from a desktop browser to a tablet to a diminutive mobile screen. Adaptive web

This post was also published on CNET. Big Data is in vogue, with a glut of startups and numerous large installations appearing in corporations. At CBS Interactive, we process almost one billion events a day that flow from our Web and application servers over message queues to a cluster of 80 twelve core Hadoop nodes that then feed a Teradata data warehouse. Processing and analyzing such a large volume of data helps us ask important questions: Which pages on which properties are most profitable? Who goes where across our various sites? What types of content generates the greatest number of advertising conversions? But here's the thing: Most of our conversations with product and business managers are spent discussing what I like to call "little data." Little data constitutes the nuts and bolts metrics of running a business. For a Web property, that means getting a handle on issues such as the bounce rate, SEO session starts, social session starts, funnels of how users