Mobtown Labs

Birthday Cake! (Taken with Instagram at LIRR - Merillon Ave...

Sun, 27 May 2012 14:12:55 -0400

Birthday Cake! (Taken with Instagram at LIRR - Merillon Ave Station)

Birthday Boy! (Taken with Instagram at LIRR - Merillon Ave...

Sun, 27 May 2012 13:55:18 -0400

Birthday Boy! (Taken with Instagram at LIRR - Merillon Ave Station)

"People. They’re what makes life worth living. I was just in CVS and saw kids with neck tattoos and..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:46:40 -0400

“

People. They’re what makes life worth living. I was just in CVS and saw kids with neck tattoos and pants below their butt. And my driver is itching to move back to the Dominican Republic, where he’s a famous bassist and can get paid to play all night long.

These are the stories we’re interested in. What makes people tick. How do you function in today’s society.

But Carole King issues platitudes and rather than retire, Counting Crows hide behind P2P to gain publicity.

Zuckerberg’s got it right. Be true to yourself.

That’s all you’ve got.

And I HATE Facebook!

”

- - The Lefsetz Letter

Apparently I have a pet cow. (Taken with Instagram at Historic...

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:12:40 -0400

Apparently I have a pet cow. (Taken with Instagram at Historic Ellicott City)

This filter I call “The Barbara Walters Soft Focus” ...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:29:17 -0400

This filter I call “The Barbara Walters Soft Focus” (Taken with Instagram at Del Boca Vista)

Beach House - Myth New song!!!

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:09:28 -0500

Beach House - Myth

New song!!!

attictv: Frank Zappa Explains the Decline of the Music Industry...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:43:11 -0500

attictv:

Frank Zappa Explains the Decline of the Music Industry (Hillarious)

Quant v. Audience: The Real Challenge and Opportunity is Using Both

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:58:00 -0500

Guest Post by: Matt Patton Esq. Director of Optimization and R&D at DoublePositive

Image via Wikipedia

Among the many nuances in the debate about which optimization algorithm represents the best RTB media buying strategy, the most prominent might be the audience retargeting v. audience agnostic approach. Although exclusive to our business, this dichotomy is conceptually no different than two Wall Street analysts debating about whether a pure qualitative approach is better than a numbers-only quantitative method in purchasing securities. My engineering training tells me that the only inferences that should ever be drawn as a basis for any decision should originate with the story told by what was actually measured. But my legal training tells me what I think is the more correct approach, which is, as every law school professor professed so eloquently, “It depends!”

The truth is that measured performance numbers, i.e. impressions, clicks, conversions, and audience data, i.e. categorical audience profiling, both have their own benefits and drawbacks, and will almost always provide you different oscillating returns on your media investment. On the surface, the only real difference between the two is that one is instinctual while the other is empirical. With audience data, we infer that a group of users with certain online buying habits will purchase what our clients are selling based on the categorical distance between things previously purchased and what we are currently selling. With fundamental performance data, we just care about which pieces of inventory have already yielded a statistically significant number of conversions regardless of who actually converted. Thus it is blatantly clear under the surface that both methods offer the same benefit, which is a calculated a priori probability of a conversion from which we can derive an expected value of an impression, or what my mentor at Advertising.com used to call the “Crown Jewel”, of DR advertising.

The obvious drawback of both approaches is and will always be the cost of learning. Because of the random nature of Internet advertising, we need to survey the biddable landscape before we can make any type of calculation, qual or quant. In the quant world, it probably takes more time and thus requires a longer discovery period, while in the audience buying game, those “selective” impressions can get quite expensive when we are still learning which audience represents our sweet spot. Since there is no such thing as a free lunch in this business, both are going to require some upfront cash that will initially skew our calculated CPAs.

Instead of simply accepting this as truth, I want to treat this as an opportunity to thwart the economic black hole of overcoming a campaign’s inertia when starting from rest. I see opportunity to utilize both approaches as a function of time and campaign maturity in order to get campaigns running more quickly and performing better long term. I see complex regression analysis and time series plots that will tell us on a campaign by campaign basis of when and how to use audience targeting and when the stats tell us that the audience is worthless. I see recurring real time cost benefit analysis algorithms telling us that we are paying too much for an audience or that an audience is underpriced. I see this as a first step towards creating a RTB marketplace where being smarter actually translates to being more successful. For the first time, I see a scientific approach to an age-old art and an artistic approach to centuries-old mathematics.

Will this be accomplished and will it even make a difference? I leave you as a lawyer by saying “it depends”.

The Rise of Media Quants (adweek.com)
Hey Quants! Hedge Funds And Banks Will Fight For You In Bidding Wars And The Winner Will Be… (businessinsider.com)
New Survey Reveals Increased Focus on Risk Management in Wake of Financial Crisis (prweb.com)
Peter Muller’s Quants Find a New Home (blogs.wsj.com)

Complex UI - There's a Time and a Place

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:38:43 -0500

Linkedin maps data visualization (Photo credit: luc legay)

I am currently working on a advertising and marketing reporting interface that is mostly grid driven and we are adding some data visualization to it because quite frankly the thought is that most users just don’t have that ‘ah-ha’ moment when data is presented to them in a grid. Even if they are somewhat simple stats grids can be daunting to look at. That said, a well paginated grid (or better yet infinitely scrolling grid) can be the most powerful tool.

To decide whether to go more complex on a grid or to pop out data visualization you need to consider time spent on that particular part of the application. You also need to decide whether the visualization of the data is just to show off and be fancy or if it really has a use.

For example when presented with a grid of data from an online advertising campaign, it’s easy to go through and see how much money you spent on a particular campaign for…say 30 days or even 90 days but once you get above about 100 rows you really need a trend chart to see where the spikes and troughs in spend are.

Another good use of a data visualization are nested trees or what the javascript d3 library calls a Dendogram. To zero in on, or drill down into data expandable rows in a grid are useful but if you want to come over many layers of nested data to see what is really driving value, a visualization is probably a better choice. That said, as a rule of thumb, I would always present the grid option so you can see precision in numbers once you have identified your ‘significant’ data points.

Data Visualization Resources (secviz.org)
Visual Data Tools, Inc. Announces the Mac App Store Release of DataGraph, an Innovative and Powerful Graphing Application for Mac OSX (prweb.com)
Data Visualization - Is it Important? (mobtownlabs.com)
Cascades: Rich UI Development for BlackBerry Apps (devblog.blackberry.com)

Data Visualization - Is it Important?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:44:51 -0500

I recently came across this tweet from the founder of Posterous (sorry I’m a tumblr fan).

Cutting features is hard post.ly/4RfNf
— Sachin Agarwal (@a4agarwal) January 6, 2012

We are in the midst of brining one of our key products out of beta to it’s ready-for-prime-time v1.0 and like any technology project we need to do it profitably, we wish we had more engineers, and we wish we had more time to include or perfect every feature we have dreamt of in the planning process. That said we need to make cuts. One recurring debate is whether or not charts and graphs and creative ways to visualize data is a bell/whistle or is it a core component that could propel the product into being a wild success.

Like many other companies that deal with online media we get millions or even hundreds of millions of events and logs to parse through each day and run in massive data warehouses and are rolled up into useable statistics each hour. There are the standard stats that we need to watch on a regular basis as well as report out to our clients but when we dig into a campaign or try to figure out how to increase performance we are always downloading out to excel or writing a Hive/SQL query to get a deeper look or a different dimension of the data and then graphing it for a nice friendly viewable representation.

And it never fails that the data representation that wins the business, gets the next round of funding, or wins over an executive’s good graces to allow a budget/project/initiative to move forward is inevitably a very simple graphical representation of possibly billions of data points.

So if this is so important, how can it be looked over? And a better question is why?

azspot: Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:05:45 -0400

azspot:

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

pitchfork: R.I.P.

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:05:10 -0400

pitchfork:

R.I.P.

[Tornado] ImportError: No module named ioloop

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:47:23 -0400

yes, i did the same thing….duh…

alanhogan:

In case anyone is as dumb as I am:

If you are trying to run a Tornado server and keep getting the error ImportError: No module named ioloop, it means you shouldn’t have named your own file tornado.py. There can only be one tornado, and yours ain’t got ioloop. Rename your file to something like serve.py and get on with it.

Introducing Brom.ly

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:36:00 -0400

A good friend of mine and former Ad.com and AOL colleague, Greg Skipper, has been working on a startup. It’s a really cool app that they describe as a personal concierge service. Basically you find yourself in a new city (or even your own neighborhood) and you open the app on your mobile device and it recommends things that are going on around you and as you choose things it learns more of what you like i.e. I don’t care for sports so the more I pick non-sports related events the less it recommends sporting events.

Obviously, the success of this depends on the accuracy of the app learning what you like but so far I’ve been impressed. I also think the business model around this to possibly integrate with the daily deal world or start connecting individuals and start mobile tribes of recommendations for like minded people could be really cool and lucrative for the Brom.ly team

Here are links so you can try out the app:

o http://brom.ly

o http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brom-ly/id444067080

o https://market.android.com/details?id=ly.brom

Here is some great press about them:

wohamusic: Yeasayer-Madder Red Kristin Bell stars in Yeasayer’s...

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:08:03 -0400

wohamusic:

Yeasayer-Madder Red

Kristin Bell stars in Yeasayer’s “Madder Red” alongside a creepy freaky creature. Great song, weird music video. What do you guys think?

-Stephanie

sooo weird….

Local Natives - Airplanes

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:02:12 -0400

Local Natives - Airplanes

No Alternative

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 16:28:53 -0400

No Alternative

bijan: Cold War Kids - Hospital Beds via daytrotter sessions.

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 11:46:26 -0400

bijan:

Cold War Kids - Hospital Beds

via daytrotter sessions.

DOM - Living in America Yesssssssssssss…..heard this on...

Fri, 27 May 2011 12:06:21 -0400

DOM - Living in America

Yesssssssssssss…..heard this on the radio driving in to work, didn’t know who it was and finally found it by typing in random lyrics to google.

Thank you, google for search, the internet for inventing itself and making this possible, python for text scan search, whoever invented the mp3 and everyone else who worked to make this moment possible.

bijan: The Strokes - I’ll Try Anything Once love this demo...

Sat, 14 May 2011 10:19:47 -0400

bijan:

The Strokes - I’ll Try Anything Once

love this demo version.