Upon introducing her "Treading Water" panel panelists, moderator Joanna O'Connell, noted how many of them had previously worked at - or in the case of Jason Leigh, currently work at - Razorfish (or its precursor Avenue A/Razorfish).

I could practically hear OMMA Data & Behavioral chair and emcee Steve Smith drowning as he introduced the "Treading Water" panel this morning. "Obviously data is not a pond anymore. It feels as if it is closing in on our upper lip," Smith dribbled. "There's so much data," he continued, noting, "If I had a nickel for every time that someone has said to me, "We have so much data that we don't even know what's in there yet."

A self-professed "outsider" among big data professionals, Tom Morton, Chief Strategy Officer at Euro RSCG New York says the industry is now divided into two groups: poets and quants. "I'm a poet," said Morgan, and "it's an increasingly quant world."

OMMA's Data & Behavior conference is barely underway, and we're already knee-deep in privacy issues...

Raj Aggarwal, CEO of mobile app analytics firm Localytics, wraps up OMMA Metrics with insights into mobile app trends and metrics. Android and iOS have obviously outstripped other app platforms in growth, with the latter still the dominant player. Android tablets are converging around 7-inch screen size regardless of manufacturer, a positive development for developers. Aggarwal says Android fragmentation is overstated—if developers focus on most pervasive Android devices, their apps will reach the vast majority of users. When it comes to HTML5, he says pure HTML5 apps are still far off, though hybrid apps are growing. You need to use …

Aleck Schleider, VP of vertical development at Videology says the ad platform can't connect the data it users to individual consumers. OMMA Metrics MC Judah Phillips doesn't believe him.

Probably upsetting every editor in the room, Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen is stirring up OMMA Metrics with talk of his headline predicting technology. The company's "Bloomberg terminal of the newsroom," so-called...

How can we expect predictive modelling to change over the next few years? Hardly at all, according to Claudia Perlich, Chief Scientist at m6d. "Very little will change, at least on the level of perception," according to Perhlich.

Actually, it seems like former ARF Chief Research Officer Joel Rubinson had some news to make at OMMA Metrics & Research, and guess what, it's a new ad industry research organization: ARO. Not to be confused with the ARF, ARO stands for Analytics Research Organization.

Throwing a grenade into a crowd of online researchers, Joel Rubinson -- CEO of marketing and consulting firm Rubinson Partners - says they need to completely rethink brand marketing...