Interview

Jesus Mena is the founder and CEO of WebMiner, Inc. He is the author of the first book on web mining -- "Data Mining Your Website" and the forthcoming "Webmining for Profitability."

Jesus has 15 years experience in AI and has mined data sets from e-commerce, content providers, insurance, credit card, retail, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications companies.

He has conducted dozens of WebMining Camps attended by hundreds of e-business professionals, marketers, researchers, statisticians and data miners and has spoken at many business intelligence and data mining conferences in Canada, Europe and the US.

Jesus lives in the San Francisco bay area with his wife and one daughter. He pronounces his name "Hey Zeus". He says "It's a heck of a name to live up to, but in California it is becoming more common."

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro

GPS: 1) What attracted you to Data Mining in the first place?

Jesus Mena: Funny, when I got into this racket it wasn�t called data mining, back then it was AI. I have always been interested in data driven decisions. This got me interested in working with neural networks and machine learning, this is about 15 years ago. I have always looked at data mining as a technology for optimizing performance; it should always have a business goal for example, increasing sales, reducing fraud, improving customer retention, adjusting pricing, etc.

You set the stage for Web Mining with your 1999 book, Data Mining Your Website. How did you to decide to write this book?

I had been doing data mining consulting work with all types of retailers, financial services, catalogers, insurance firms, etc., and I began to see a subtle but definite migration of customer transactions toward the Web, this was in the mid 90s. Also, I had been asked to speak at a data mining submit back in 1997 on the topic of �Data Mining and the Web� in researching for the presentation I found to my surprise that no one was doing any mining of web data. That is when I saw a need to start looking at how the technology could be leverage to improve online sales and customer retention. However, back in 1999 Internet companies and start-ups that were flush with VC dollars had a problem understanding how data mining could help them with their bottom line. Some of those firms are no longer around and some are trading in single digits. I still believe data mining could have helped some of them make a profit and maybe outlast their competitors � as always, data mining is about competitive intelligence.

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