Analytics on my mind

"It is way past midnight.
And I couldn't get any sleep. 
Cause Analytics was on top of my mind."
Sleep caused that pithy poem. But it is really true. It all started about 4 weeks back when someone asked me to suggest a topic for presenting in a conference. I suggested "Analytics for media devices" and was promptly asked to present it at an embedded developer's conference. The topic was relevant to my work of course. But I hadn't really thought through when I suggested it. By the time I prepared my material for it,  I realized that 40 minutes was too short to cover the topic at any depth.
I did try my best.  But I think I may have fell short of really helping everyone understand what it really means. Hence this blog post.  I may not share this poat with a vast audience.  But I need to write this down somewhere.
"Smart devices", "intelligent devices", "Self healing networks", etc are terms that you hear every where now. But most of the explanation around this so called "smartness" revolves around a lot of hype about Android,  smart phones, cloud computing, big data, etc. Every one seems to have forgotten "analytics" in the midst of that. That is what actually brings intelligence to these devices. Almost all the devices that are termed as smart and intelligent actually has this statistical science as the centre piece.
A question that was asked their was how is it relevant to embedded developers? It is... very!   When you are building smart devices, it is important to understand the science behind it. And to utilize it for building smarter devices, over the entire product life cycle. I am not sure whether it is really obvious only to me. So if you do come across this post and you have an opinion, do post! For details on my presentation,  you can always go to the embedded developer's conference,  bangalore may 2013, website.