Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Social Media Week Top Outreacher

Dennis Crowley: FBI Background Check

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 18:  Foursquare co...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI knew there was something special about this guy. Now I know.

Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
FourSquare Should Rent A Stadium
Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?

Business Insider: The $600 Million Social Life Of Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley
..... his success didn't happen overnight .... a series of failures and disappointments .... Crowley convinced the school to let him blog for the remaining credits. Teendrama, where Crowley was already writing about his college antics, became his independent study...... "People flocked to Dennis. He wasn’t up in the front of the room saying, ‘Hey, follow me.’ He just did stuff that was fun and people wanted to be with him. He’s always been that way, and that has never changed.” ....... “I remember thinking, what a cool life this guy lives,” says Jonathan (J) Crowley of his brother. “He was working at a hot tech company, going out all the time, he had lots of friends … and then it all disappeared.” ....... In 2001, the week Crowley turned 25, Vindigo went through a series of layoffs and Crowley was let go. That same week he was evicted from his apartment. .... Crowley spent the summer trying to line up interviews, but jobs were scarce. ...... On September 11, Crowley watched the twin towers crumble before his eyes. ..... Crowley's life, it seemed, followed suit. ...... In a matter of months he lost his job, his girlfriend, his home, his direction and eventually New York City and all the friends it held. Crowley was forced to move home to New Hampshire. He hadn’t a clue where life would take him next....... Crowley remained in New Hampshire for the next seven months. It was a tough transition and his spirits were down. ...... “He went from living in New York to living in a tiny little ski house in New Hampshire, and from making a good amount of money to making about $6 per hour teaching kids to snowboard,” says J.......... Dodgeball had continued to transform as Crowley’s side project, but up in New Hampshire he didn’t have the heart to work on it. ....... Bored, alone and broke, Crowley survived by making a few ground rules. From his blog:

Note to fellow unemployed kids: (aka Rules to Live By)
1. Leave your apt before noon every day.
2. No drinking before 5pm.
3. No watching TV before 5pm (except during lunch).
4. No taking taxis.
5. No eating meals when drunk.

Resilient, Crowley turned the bad times into jokes and wrote haikus for his troubles:

unemployment check.
you never showed up this week.
please come again soon.

every month i throw
eighty dollars towards this gym.
towels should be free.

atm machine
i already know i'm poor
keep your damn receipt

hello girl from nerve
i wish you were half as cute
as you looked online

99 cent nugs,
junior bacon cheeseburger
and a frosty, please.

ex-girlfriend. birthday.
send a card - or just "forget"?
my heart she broke. twice.

...... Crowley introduced the game to other NYU students and worked with a professor, Clay Shirkey, to develop it during an independent study. Rainert and Crowley refer to Shirkey as the Patron Saint of Social Media. With his help they tested out social and mobile features for Dodgeball, like Shouting, where messages were sent within a 15 block radius. ......... That summer Crowley learned about finance and angel investing. Their pursuit of capital led them to Google’s doors in September........ Google was fresh out of its IPO and it wasn't in the habit of investing in startups. When Crowley and Rainert met with Google they were told, according to Dennis, "We don't really finance companies but maybe you guys should just come and work here."
That moment was one of the high points in Crowley’s career........ He wrote about it on his blog, of course......... “Hey kids, my grad school thesis project (and what seems like my life's work), dodgeball.com, was acquired by Google today!........“Special shoutouts to everyone that's helped out. Tallboys for everyone. Forever!”..... But the high didn’t last, and selling to Google ultimately put Crowley at another low point....... “Everyone sees this side of Dennis that's so electric but there was a phase when he was in a rut. He was in a tough position. I don't think he could find the energy to get himself excited.” ..... Selvadurai had a desk around the corner from Crowley....... “He was the one guy who knew how to make iPhone stuff. He liked hacking city apps,” recalls Crowley. “I was doing a lot of mobile work and I also liked city stuff and we just started working together. We were experimenting for four to five months. It wasn't until January 2009 when we said, ‘Let's get serious about this and launch it for SXSW.’”....... The ordinarily social Crowley became reclusive.......“When Dennis stops socializing, you know he’s working on something really big,” says J. ......One week in January, a rare event occurred: A Friday and Saturday night passed with no sign of Crowley. ......An entire week passed and J still hadn’t heard from his brother.......“Then a group of us got an email that said, ‘Hey guys, I built this, what do you think?’ It was the first version of Foursquare; it was originally called Jimmy Disco,” says J. ...... Foursquare wasn’t always smooth sailing for Crowley. ..... “Everyone thinks the Foursquare experience is this rocket ship that started at SXSW 2009 and it hasn't let up, when in reality it was a little spike and then a summer of nothing,” says Crowley...... It took him and Selvadurai about nine months to raise the first round of capital for Foursquare. ...... “Then it spiked back up and it plateaued, and it spiked back up and it plateaued,” he says. “Of course if you average it out [the Foursquare experience] looks like a nice hockey stick curve. If you zoom in a little bit it is super, super rocky.” ....... “My whole career is a bunch of sizzles and spikes,” says Crowley. “I'm still trying to make sense of all of it, but when you look back it all starts to connect. Everything connects in hindsight. Of course you don't realize any of that going forward, you only realize that when you look back.” ...... last month he traveled across the country with five ridiculous-looking corn cob pipes to surprise his friends in Lake Tahoe. ...... "I've been trying to solve the same problems for many years and build software that helps optimize downtime. Of course the problem set keeps evolving and changing."....... Perhaps Crowley’s life-long wrestle with Foursquare stems from the fact that he so deeply embodies the product. Life, for him, is a constant game of checking in with people he loves. The personal reward he gets from being with friends and discovering new ways to have fun is what he wants every Foursquare user to experience.

Body Doubles



Social Media Week: The Social Media Way





The Bourne Legacy







Like Bourne

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Mike Bloomberg Wants Me Here

Social Media Week: Day 2: 120 Tweets

















Social Media Week: 100 Tweets Later

Monday, February 13, 2012

Social Media Week: 100 Tweets Later

Social Media Week: The Social Media Way








It has been a good feeling, but I also have this lingering feeling that I want to show up in person. And so I am headed to this event in a few hours.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Social Media Week: The Social Media Way

Image representing Livestream as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBaseI just revisited the Social Media Week schedule page to prepare for the events I have said I will go to tomorrow and the rest of the week.

And it's amazing to me how many of the events will be on LiveStream, and each event has its own hashtag. And so I am tempted to stay home for quite a few of the events and consume them from my laptop. Tweeting is so much easier on the laptop.

This event by Sree at Columbia comes to mind.

Twitter Blocks Me: Sree's Loss
Social Media Weekend: Columbia Journalism School: Sree Srinivasan

I guess I can "go" to even more events than I was planning to if I go the LiveStream way. Nice.

Social Media Week: Registration Now Open

Does Twitter have limits to how many times you can tweet per hour, per day?

Know Your Limits: How Many Tweets Can You Post Per Day?
How many Tweets can you send Twitter per hour?

1,000 tweets per day, 100 per hour? Twitter blocked me way before that when I was trying to "cover" the Sree event. Maybe it was my rate. If you are tweeting two times a minute, five minutes in a row, the Twitter servers think you are going to end up with 120 tweets for the hour, or something like that.

Of course I am going to show up in person, for at least one event per day. But now I think I am in mind to attend many of the Social Media Week events over LiveStream.

Me: Top Internet Week Influencer?

Wow, there are so many more events since I last checked, like so many, many more.

If it is about absorbing knowledge, the LiveStream way might be the better way. It is you and the speakers, and that's it. But would you be paying a social price because you are not there in person? Some of that can be offset by actively tweeting. You will be found. If you tweet.

But then, it is not like I am not going to show up in person. It is just that all plans I made a few weeks ago about which of the Social Media Week events I will go to are now out the window. I am having to start from scratch.

I am guessing the fact an event is going to be on LiveStream also says to its importance.

Heck, over LiveStream you could be attending events in Miami. Why only New York?

By now I know Social Media Week is primarily going to be a LiveStream and Twitter experience for me. And then I get to make guest/cameo appearances at some select events. I am thinking one per day.

An event that is on LiveStream and has its own hashtag earns major points from me. I am most likely to view those events.

Livestream + Twitter Hashtag = Great Way To Experience An Event

Another Ode To Big Data


New York Times: The Age of Big Data
an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales ...... the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired ...... The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution” ...... the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched ...... Welcome to the Age of Big Data. ...... data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold ...... Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing. ........ a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years ....... It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. ....... there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air. ........ the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. ....... Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases. ........ the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning ....... The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri ....... The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement. ....... Data measurement.... is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens. ....... decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific” ........ the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt. ...... Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing. ....... Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance. ....... data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. ...... studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain. ...... The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so). ....... sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty. ...... trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists ....... social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not. ...... Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. ...... Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” ...... “many bits of straw look like needles.” ...... Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. ..... Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered ...... Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. .... “The culture has changed” .... “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

Big Data Democratization By Wolfram Alpha
Big Data
Facebook And Big Data
Big Data + Smartphone = New Generation Smartphone
Big Data: Big News

Every Google Search Is Like A Tweet, A Facebook Update

Google 的貼牌冰箱(Google refrigerator)Google 的貼牌冰箱(Google refrigerator) (Photo credit: Aray Chen)Google has had it this entire time.

Granted they publish the top words and phrases for the year and all that. And every search makes the search engine even smarter. But much of what Google does with our search queries stays in the background.

If Google were to figure out a way to publicly display all our searches in real time they might give Twitter a run for the money. What they are sitting on is huge.

And I don't mean literally list the searches. Things more interesting than that can be imagined.

Google allows you to search the web. What if Google made it possible for you to also be able to search through searches made through the Google search engine? That would take the lid off. And there is no telling.

And to think Google has had this the entire time.

Twitter Integration Into Google's Search Plus
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

For example, Google would tell me how many times people have conducted a search on my name today.

Kickstarter

2011/06 Yancey Strickler from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.


Fred Wilson: Understanding Kickstarter
Now This Is What I Call A Blog Post

Apple Doing Well

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBaseDaily Mail: Apple is now bigger than Microsoft and Google combined - and worth more than the gross domestic product of Sweden
- The tech giant's stock is worth more than the market capitalisations of rivals Google ($196.8bn) and Microsoft ($256.1bn) combined.
- Apple's profits recently passed $1 billion a week and the company now sells a million iPhones a day.
- Apple's stock is worth more than the gross domestic product of Sweden - $458 billion.
- Apple is worth more than all the gold in the American Federal Reserve - $350 billion
- and all the illegal drugs in the world, $321 billion
- sold 37.04million iPhones - its flagship product - and 15.43million iPad tablets, doubling from a year earlier.
- its war chest of cash and securities to almost $100billion - more than enough to plug December's U.S. budget deficit.
- Apple's iPhone business is now bigger than the whole of Microsoft .... The company's smartphone division generated $24.4 billion of revenue in the quarter up until December, whereas the whole of Microsoft generated $20.9 billion in the same quarter.
Clearly Apple is an iPhone, iPad company like Microsoft used to be a Windows, Office company.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Apple Is Being Unreasonable

Apple Inc.Apple Inc. (Photo credit: marcopako )FOSS Patents: Apple requests U.S. preliminary injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus based on four high-power patents
The Verge: Apple seeks to ban Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, but it's really going after Android 4.0
CNet: Apple seeks U.S. ban on Galaxy Nexus
The Next Web: Apple moves to ban the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the U.S., attacking Android 4.0 with 4 tough patents
Electronista: Apple's new Samsung lawsuit targets Siri-like search, more
Phandroid: Apple at it again, file injunction request against Galaxy Nexus

This reminds me of the Cold War. The Soviets would threaten to obliterate America. The Americans would threaten to obliterate the Soviet Union. They went back and forth for decades. Finally they came to their senses and started talks to dismantle their nuclear weapons, much of them. But first they achieved Mutually Assured Destruction. As in, both would disappear if either carried out the threat.

Instead of the big companies engaging in such Cold War style drama it would make sense for them to come together and take the lead on software patent reform. Things in that department have been crazy for a while. And the big companies themselves have suffered much. Patent trolls have milked the big companies over long years.

For Apple to get offended by Siri like services would be equal to Google saying the search box is theirs and theirs alone. No, it isn't.

Apple right now is acting Soviet.

Software patent wars are energy that needs to go into innovation. There is plenty of work for the industry to do.