The word "analytics" is correct and usable in written English.
It is most commonly used in the context of data analysis and technological analysis. For example: "The analytics team used sophisticated algorithms to identify and solve the problem."
It is based on analytics looking at all the tweets about David Cameron and Ed Miliband posted during the exchanges, and assessing them on the basis of whether they were positive or negative.
Research firms IDC and Strategy analytics both now place Xiaomi in overall third place for smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2014, more than tripling shipments year-on-year overtaking South Korea's LG by between 0.4m and 1.2m smartphones.
Sales people, quantitative experts from the operations research team, data experts from the business intelligence team and some external analytics experts work together to gain deeper insights into customer needs and to roll out new initiatives.
Facebook, Blogger and Twitter regularly invite us to study the analytics for our posts and pages.
The data scientist's skills – advanced analytics, data integration, software development, creativity, good communications skills and business acumen – often already exist in an organisation.
The first clear clues emerged with a study in January 2014 by analytics company Flurry, which found Xiaomi users spend more time on their devices than those of any other brand – including Apple's iPhone.
Opower, a data-analytics firm, crunches figures on size, occupancy, location and energy bills to find trends and make suggestions to 50m, mostly American, households.
Strategy Analytics places Samsung first with 79.2m smartphones, Apple in second with 39.3m, Xiaomi in third with 18m and LG in fourth 16.8m out of a total 320.4m smartphones sold in the third quarter.
From selling its first smartphone in 2011, Xiaomi became the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer in October with 6% of global shipments according to data from research firm Strategy Analytics and IDC.
Xiaomi is valued at $10bn, sold 7m devices last year and is on track to sell 20m in 2013; for comparison Apple sold 125m phones in the 2012 financial year, and Samsung 700m, according to Strategy Analytics.
"The Apple Watch is the catalyst to ignite the global smartwatch market," said Neil Mawston of research firm Strategy Analytics, which is predicting that Apple will ship 15.4m Apple Watches by the end of 2015.
