Recently with my consulting, I’ve been delving into Google Cloud, and the wide array of offering they have. Getting started with Deep Learning on the cloud is a cost-efficient method way to utilise GPUs. But there are a few gotchas with cloud providers. This post I wrote here, goes through how to set up a Google Compute instance for deep learning toolkits such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc. Read the full post here ...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) Governor, Adrian Orr, signaled this week that the central bank may soon be looking at the prospect of re-introducing Loan to Value ratio (LVR) limits in New New Zealand. This is a reversal to the decision back in May when the central bank removed the limits on high loan to value ratio that had been in place since 2013. The removal of the LVRs were an attempt to keep spending high in very uncertain, COVID times. ...

There is a lot happening in New Zealand’s economy currently. New Zealand is officially in a recession with new GDP figures that came out yesterday, a monetary policy update is due next week and an election is taking place mid next month. Thursday’s numbers from Statistics New Zealand represented a -12.2% reduction in GDP for the June 2020 quarter - the largest quarterly fall in GDP on record. Which, unlike the previous quarter’s figures only captured a week or two of New Zealand’s nationwide 4-week lock down, June 2020 figures captures the lion’s share of the lock down. ...

In email marketing, there are a lot of metrics that can potentially be tracked - it’s hard to tell the wood from the trees. When it comes to tracking it’s important to know what metrics to track, what these metrics mean, and most importantly how the metrics can be influenced. In this post, I’m going to break down the ‘vanity’ metrics in email marketing, more specifically: Open Rate Click through rate. Open and Click-through rates are often referred to as vanity metrics as they’re metrics that measure success of a campaign, without actually measuring the business objective. And, let’s be honest they’re satisfying. ...

In one of my recent posts on creating a lead score model, I mentioned that lead scoring can decrease Account Value. Whilst lead scoring can bring in higher Sales Volume it may do this at the cost of Account Value. I want to quickly explore this idea a bit more today. What is a valued lead? For this, we want need to define value. For all businesses, this will be a combination of: ...