23 Oct 08 About Nick Arnett

Nick has an unusual, if not unique, combination of talents (especially for a guy with a liberal arts degree):

• Technical expertise to uncover actionable insights in large data sets,
• Marketing, market research and customer experience to package technology for customer needs and
• Communications ability and experience to tell great stories that connect data-driven insights to customers and markets.

His last two startups focused on extracting actionable insights from large social media data sets. Senti-Metrics Partners tracked thousands of communities and millions of messages in the open-source software movement to deliver monthly dashboards to Sun Microsystems, showing project and technology trends and attitudes. Senti-Metrics was acquired by LiveWorld Inc., where Nick was the director of business intelligence services and designed the company’s terabyte-scale data warehouse and customer-facing reports for dozens of clients including eBay, TV Guide, the NBA and QVC.

Previously, Nick was a founder of Opion Inc., where he designed a highly scalable, distributed system for gathering data from on-line communities to forecast markets. He has four patents and five pending applications for his work there, all of which were acquired by BuzzMetrics/A.C. Nielsen.

Nick was vice president of marketing at Invisible Worlds, which developed an XML-based federated search system. As senior product manager/evangelist at Verity Inc., he managed web products from zero to $50 million and market dominance. At Verity, he joined the W3C’s original Industry Advisory board and presented a widely acclaimed essay, “The Internet and the Anti-net,” at the Second World Wide Web Conference.

Previously, Nick was CEO and chief analyst at Multimedia Computing Corp., the leading market research and publishing company focused on the emerging market for multimedia computing in the late 1980s through the mid ’90s.

LinkedIn Profile.

He reviewed the Web Analytics Report 2008 for the Web Analytics Association.

As a journalist, Nick’s work appeared in Rolling Stone, CBS News, ABC News, Newsweek, United Press International, InfoWorld, American City Business Journals (syndicated), KQV/WDVE, WWSW, Business Marketing and more. He has been a speaker at the World Wide Web Conference, AusWeb (keynote), the UCLA Roundtable on Multimedia (co-founder), Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Computer Science Department, MacWorld, Siggraph, Nicograph, ACM HyperText, the Microsoft CD-ROM/Interactive Media Conference, the White House Conference on Leveraging Cyberspace and many others. His clients have included senior management at Microsoft, Intel, Apple, IBM, Simon & Schuster, NTT, GTE Government Systems and more.