Interop Las Vegas 2012
Posted by Mark McEachran in Working On It on May 9, 2012
Interop gives you a report of your activities on the show floor. Each log entry is generated when your badge gets scanned at a exhibitor booth. This can be used to let your boss know that you weren’t playing hooky the entire time.
Exhibitor Booth Scans
| Scan Date | Exhibiting Company | URL |
|---|---|---|
| 5/8/2012 11:56:00 AM | Pagerduty | www.pagerduty.com |
| 5/8/2012 12:21:00 PM | Tripwire | www.tripwire.com |
| 5/8/2012 12:56:00 PM | Citrix Systems | www.citrix.com |
| 5/8/2012 1:23:00 PM | New Horizons Computer Learning Centers | |
| 5/8/2012 1:25:00 PM | Omnitron Systems | http://www.omnitron-systems.com |
| 5/8/2012 1:28:00 PM | F5 Networks | http://www.f5.com |
| 5/8/2012 4:12:00 PM | Esri | http://www.esri.com |
Tomb Locator
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas on April 17, 2012
Inspiration
I was driving by a cemetery last week and it occurred to me that I never visited the grave of a dear friend I lost several years ago. I knew he was buried near a particular city, but I didn’t even know which cemetery he was in. After a tiny bit of research I found an existing service that might be able to help me. It’s called ‘Find a Grave‘. But their system seems very manual and is not taking advantage of any new technology. Maybe the caretakers of that service could take on the challenge of upgrading their operation. I’m offering this post as a free idea. If you like it and you want to make it real, go for it.
This new service would offer users the ability to locate the gravesite of friends, loved ones, famous people and complete strangers. The service is utilized via web page or mobile application.
The Web Site
The web page offers search functionality with results delivered with the name of the deceased, the dates from the tombstone, any inscribed epitaph, the name of the cemetery or morgue, and the geographic coordinates of the site along with a photo of the grave and a map pinpointing the location.
Additionally, the results will also list who is entombed nearby using the ‘entombed neighbors’ function, which takes the form of a link that expands on the page. The map will be a simple Google maps or open map and the user will be able to get directions to the location.
Other basic site functions will be available, but its primary purpose will be the search feature. Searches can be narrowed by adding birth or death date and a city or state.
The Mobile App
The mobile app will have all the same features of the web site. In addition it will allow users to take photos of gravestones. The photos will be automatically uploaded to the central servers along with their geographic coordinates. OCR will be performed on the stones inscribed lettering and a light pattern matching system will identify the words and dates that make sense. This will quickly be presented back to the user for correction. Once the user verifies the accuracy, they can submit it to the service.
Initially a small cadre of enthusiasts should be contacted to build up the database. After a short period, beta testing can begin via referrals. Once the bugs are worked out a wider launch can commence, one platform at a time. The latest craze is soft launching on Windows phones first.
Monetary Considerations
This service is very simple and would require minimal capital for start up. I anticipate the start up costs to be less than $300,000 for the first year and, without any further ambition, the subsequent cost could drop to under $150,000 which would allow for hosting of the database, web site and paying a single, talented engineer to maintain the code base and create new applications for any subsequent, widely used application platforms. Of course, stretching the timeline out could turn this project into a hobby, rather than a startup.
On the other hand, a more ambition plan would require more money. After a successful launch in the US, the European market would be next. With the thousands of famous historical figures buried in Europe there’s an interesting opportunity involving the tourism industry.
The app should be free of charge with ads and $0.99 for an ad free version.
Retargeting Primer
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas on March 27, 2012
What is retargeting?
Retargeting means showing a user advertising for a product that they’ve looked at in the recent past. Retargeting, from a users perspective, is broken down into two stages: In the first stage they’re looking at a product or service at the product’s web site. In the second stage they see ads on (possibly unrelated) web properties for the product or service they were looking at previously.
How is retargeting technically implemented? Read the rest of this entry »
Day Parting Primer
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas on March 20, 2012
This is the third part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks – or maybe I’ll just keep goin’!
What is day parting?
Day parting a campaign restricts the campaign to serving only during certain times of the day. Day parting typically takes the form of a serving window between particular hours; a setting may have a starting hour and a stopping hour. The campaign serves normally between the hours, but doesn’t serve at all outside of them. Day parting is not the same as a start and stop time for a campaign. When a campaign is day-parted it will serve during the “on” hours every day the campaign is scheduled to run.
Why use day parting? Read the rest of this entry »
Daily and Global Cap Primer
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas on March 13, 2012
This is the second part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks.
What are the Daily and Global Caps?
The Daily Cap is the limit of the number times an ad is shown throughout the day. With branded campaigns these are usually in the 10s or 100s of thousands. When used on a performance campaign it can vary based on the confidence in performance for the given targeting parameters. When the cap is achieved the ad stops serving. The next day the ad starts serving again until it reaches the daily cap once more.
The Global Cap is a bit of a misnomer. It behaves as the limiter for the entire campaigns impressions from beginning to end. Once the global the ad stops serving, period. It doesn’t start up again the next day. In ideal circumstances the global and daily cap are harmonious so that the daily cap was restrictive enough, but not overly restrictive such that the global cap was reached or nearly reached on the end date of the campaign. Mathematically speaking – an ideal daily cap is equal to the global cap divided by the number of days in the campaign.
What happens if a campaign falls behind as a result of the daily cap? Read the rest of this entry »
Proportional control pacing
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas on March 12, 2012
Neal, JZ and I worked on this document last year with the hope that companies in the online ad space might benefit, and the “ecosystem” as a whole would be improved. Originally, we were calling it Toilet Ball Pacing, but a more professional title won out. Internally we still refer to the algorithm by the original name.
So pop on over to Rubicon’s blog and read up on using a proportional control algorithm for better campaign pacing.
UPDATE! A link to this post graced the pages of AdExchanger.com! Scroll to the bottom, you’ll see it in the list. I know, it’s not a headline, but it’s still kinda cool.
Frequency Cap Primer
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas on March 7, 2012
This is the first part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks.
What is Frequency Capping?
Frequency capping is the act of placing a restriction on an advertising campaign that mandates that are particular user only see an ad a fixed number of times over a given period. This usually takes the form of impressions/day/user (or impressions/hour/user). In an ad serving system this will show up in two ways:
- Frequency Cap: X Impressions / Y Hours
- Frequency Cap: X Impressions / Y Days
The X and Y in these settings are usually variables. The Y tends to have predefined drop downs in the interface like 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours or 1 day, 2 days, 3 days.
It is common to refer to frequency caps at one per day as the “tightest” cap. Increasing the frequency is referred to as “loosening” the frequency cap. These phrases are common in the industry.
Why choose to apply Frequency Capping? Read the rest of this entry »
In a world without cookies
Posted by Mark McEachran in Free Ideas, Working On It on February 29, 2012
I’m hoping your mental audio kicked in with an interpretation of a movie trailer with a Don LaFontaine voiceover when you read the title. I wrote this post in response to a lot of articles written from a position of fear from the advertising industry at the prospect of web browsers shipping with 3rd party cookies disabled. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and should not be construed as the opinions of my employer, associations or other groups I happen to belong to.
There’s a lot of highly visible worry in the news lately about online advertising losing the ability to set 3rd party cookies in a web browser. This technology is used to perform a variety of seemingly critical tasks: retargeting, audience targeting, frequency capping, user identification for RTB and probably a hundred other things – most of which I try not to know in detail. The biggest concern seems to be that this growing part of the industry gets turned upside down if more browser companies decide to ship their products with 3rd party cookie disabled by default. Apple did this with their Safari browser which has been one component responsible for slowing down advertiser adoption of iOS devices. But advertisers have alternatives (like: display ads in other browsers, keywords, and online video ads) that they’re more comfortable with anyway, so there’s no telling how much of an impact the lack of 3rd party cookies on iPhones and iPads really has on the growth of the mobile ad revenue stream. Read the rest of this entry »
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I just ordered the most expensive cable internet package you can get. With 75Mbps you can download a movie before they start filming it.
Oddly specific warning sticker. (Taken with instagram)
Frederick Lowe: Klout, Kred and The Future of Social Measurement
A few weeks ago, I read an interesting article on Wired about a Social Media measurement service called Klout. The article details the experience of a qualified job seeker who was passed over for a job because of Klout’s proprietary metric, called a “Klout score”. It then explains how the…
