Tag: Google

Happy $100 Billion to Mark Zuckerberg Productions !

Heres to an expected $100 billion market valuation to the latest Silicon Valley Legend, Facebook- A Mark Zuckerberg Production.

Some milestones that made FB what it is-

1) Beating up MySpace, Ibibo, Google Orkut combined

2) Smart timely acquisitions from Friend feed , to Instagram

3) Superb infrastructure for 900 million accounts, fast interface rollouts, and a policy of never deleting data. Some of this involved creating new technology like Cassandra. There have been no anti-trust complaints against FB’s behavior particularly as it simply stuck to being the cleanest interface offering a social network

4) Much envied and copied features like Newsfeed, App development on the FB platform, Social Gaming as revenue streams

5) Replacing Google as the hot techie employer, just like Google did to Microsoft.

6) An uncanny focus, including walking away from a billion dollars from Yahoo,resisting Google, Apple’s Ping, imposing design changes unilaterally, implementing data sharing only with flexible partners  and strategic investors (like Bing)

FB has made more money for more people than any other company in the past ten years. Here’s wishing it an even more interesting next ten years! With 900 million users if they could integrate a PayPal like system, or create an alternative to Adsense for content creators, they could create an all new internet economy – one which is more open than the Google dominated internet ; 0

 

Software Review- Google Drive versus Dropbox

Here are some notes from reviewing Google Drive  https://drive.google.com/ vs Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/.

1) Google Drive gives more free space upfront  than Dropbox.5GB versus 2GB

2) Dropbox has a referral system 500 mb per referral while there is no referral system for Google Drive

3) The sync facility with Google Docs makes Google Drive especially useful for prior users of Google Docs.

4) API access to Google Drive is only for Chrome apps which is intriguing!

https://developers.google.com/drive/apps_overview

Apps will not have any API access to files unless users have first installed the app in Chrome Web Store.

You can use the Dropbox API much more easily –

See the platforms at

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/start/core

Choose your platform:

iOS Android Python Ruby

But-

(though I wonder if you set the R working directory to the local shared drive for Google Drive it should sync up as well but of course be slower –http://scrogster.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/using-dropbox-with-r-2/)

5) Google Drive icon is ugly (seriously, dude!) , but the features in the Windows app is just the same as the Dropbox App. Too similar 😉

 

6) Upgrade space is much more cheaper to Google Drive than Dropbox ( by Google Drive prices being exactly  a quarter of prices on Dropbox and max storage being 16 times as much). This will affect power storage users. I expect to see some slowdown in Dropbox new business unless G Drive has outage (like Gmail) . Existing users at Dropbox probably wont shift for the small dollar amount- though it is quite easy to do so.

 

Install Google Drive on your local workstation and cut and paste your Dropbox local folder to the Google Drive local folder!!

7) Dropbox deserves credit for being first (like Hotmail and AOL) but Google Drive is almost better in all respects!

Google Drive

Free
5 GB of Drive (0% used)
10 GB of Gmail (48% used)
1 GB of Picasa (0% used)

Upgrade:

25 GB
2,49 $ / Month
+25 GB for Drive and Picasa
Bonus: Your Gmail storage will be upgraded to 25 GB.
Choose this plan

100 GB
4,99 $ / Month
+100 GB for Drive and Picasa
Bonus: Your Gmail storage will be upgraded to 25 GB.
Choose this plan

 Need more storage?

Up to 16 TB available

Dropbox–

Current account type

Large DropboxDropbox Badge greenFree
Free
Up to 18 GB (2 GB + 500 MB per referral)
 Account info 

Other account types

Large DropboxDropbox Badge orange50 GB +
Pro 50
+1 GB per referral, up to +32 GB
 $9.99/month or $99.00/year Upgrade to Pro 50
Large DropboxDropbox Badge purple100 GB +
Pro 100
+1 GB per referral, up to +32 GB
 $19.99/month or $199.00/year Upgrade to Pro 100
Triple DropboxDropbox For Teams Badge1 TB +
Teams
Plans starting at 1 TB
 Large shared quota, centralized admin and billing, and more!

 

 

 

Software Review- BigML.com – Machine Learning meets the Cloud

I had a chance to dekko the new startup BigML https://bigml.com/ and was suitably impressed by the briefing and my own puttering around the site. Here is my review-

1) The website is very intutively designed- You can create a dataset from an uploaded file in one click and you can create a Decision Tree model in one click as well. I wish other cloud computing websites like  Google Prediction API make design so intutive and easy to understand. Also unlike Google Prediction API, the models are not black box models, but have a description which can be understood.

2) It includes some well known data sources for people trying it out. They were kind enough to offer 5 invite codes for readers of Decisionstats ( if you want to check it yourself, use the codes below the post, note they are one time only , so the first five get the invites.

BigML is still invite only but plan to get into open release soon.

3) Data Sources can only be by uploading files (csv) but they plan to change this hopefully to get data from buckets (s3? or Google?) and from URLs.

4) The one click operation to convert data source into a dataset shows a histogram (distribution) of individual variables.The back end is clojure , because the team explained it made the easiest sense and fit with Java. The good news (?) is you would never see the clojure code at the back end. You can read about it from http://clojure.org/

As cloud computing takes off (someday) I expect clojure popularity to take off as well.

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR, and JavaScript). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language – it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp

 

5) As of now decision trees is the only distributed algol, but they expect to roll out other machine learning stuff soon. Hopefully this includes regression (as logit and linear) and k means clustering. The trees are created and pruned in real time which gives a slightly animated (and impressive effect). and yes model building is an one click operation.

The real time -live pruning is really impressive and I wonder why /how it can ever be replicated in other software based on desktop, because of the sheer interactive nature.

 

Making the model is just half the work. Creating predictions and scoring the model is what is really the money-earner. It is one click and customization is quite intuitive. It is not quite PMML compliant yet so I hope some Zemanta like functionality can be added so huge amounts of models can be applied to predictions or score data in real time.

 

If you are a developer/data hacker, you should check out this section too- it is quite impressive that the designers of BigML have planned for API access so early.

https://bigml.com/developers

BigML.io gives you:

  • Secure programmatic access to all your BigML resources.
  • Fully white-box access to your datasets and models.
  • Asynchronous creation of datasets and models.
  • Near real-time predictions.

 

Note: For your convenience, some of the snippets below include your real username and API key.

Please keep them secret.

REST API

BigML.io conforms to the design principles of Representational State Transfer (REST). BigML.io is enterely HTTP-based.

BigML.io gives you access to four basic resources: Source, Dataset, Model and Prediction. You cancreate, read, update, and delete resources using the respective standard HTTP methods: POST, GET,PUT and DELETE.

All communication with BigML.io is JSON formatted except for source creation. Source creation is handled with a HTTP PUT using the “multipart/form-data” content-type

HTTPS

All access to BigML.io must be performed over HTTPS

and https://bigml.com/developers/quick_start ( In think an R package which uses JSON ,RCurl  would further help in enhancing ease of usage).

 

Summary-

Overall a welcome addition to make software in the real of cloud computing and statistical computation/business analytics both easy to use and easy to deploy with fail safe mechanisms built in.

Check out https://bigml.com/ for yourself to see.

The invite codes are here -one time use only- first five get the invites- so click and try your luck, machine learning on the cloud.

If you dont get an invite (or it is already used, just leave your email there and wait a couple of days to get approval)

  1. https://bigml.com/accounts/register/?code=E1FE7
  2. https://bigml.com/accounts/register/?code=09991
  3. https://bigml.com/accounts/register/?code=5367D
  4. https://bigml.com/accounts/register/?code=76EEF
  5. https://bigml.com/accounts/register/?code=742FD

New Economics Theories for the new Tech World

When I was doing my MBA (a decade ago), one of the principal theories on why corporations exist was 1) Shareholder Value creation (grow wealth for investors) and a notable second was 2) Stakeholder Value creation- creating jobs for societies, providing tax to countries, providing employees with stable employment and incentives,  and of course creating monetary value for shareholders.

There were two ways you could raise money- debt or equity. Debt had the advantage of interest payments being tax deductible. Debt payments had to be met regularly. Equity had the advantage that equity holders were the last ones to be paid in case of closing the company down, which justified that rate of return on equity is generally higher than cost of debt.  Dividend payouts to stockholders could be deferred in a low revenue year or due to planning reasons.

Or in plain English, over the long term borrowing money from share holders in lieu of stocks was more expensive than selling bonds or borrowing from the banks.

Hybrid combinations of debt and equity were warrants and debentures that started off as one form of instrument and over a period of time gave much more flexibility and risk safety nets to both issuers and subscribers of capital. Another hybrid was stock options (now considered as a default option of rewarding employees in technology companies, but this was not always the case).

The use of call and put options in debentures, and the idea of vesting period in stock options was to promote lone term stability and minimize fluctuations in stock prices, employee attrition, besides of course to minimize the weighted average cost of capital. Venture capital was another class of capital known for both huge rates of return and risk taking (?)

But in today’s world where a Google has three classes of shares, companies trade shares before IPOs, and valuations of technology companies sink and rise by huge % over weeks (especially as they near IPO dates)- I wonder if traditional theories in finance need a much stronger overhaul.

or do markets need a regulatory overhaul, that would enable stock exchanges to have once more the credibility they had as the primary sources of raising capital.

 

Who will guard the guardians? Their conscience- the regulators or the news media?

There are ways of raising money that are not evil.

But they are not perfectly fair as well.

Facebook Search- The fall of the machines

Increasingly I am beginning to search more and more on Facebook. This is for the following reasons-

1) Facebook is walled off to Google (mostly). While within Facebook , I get both people results and content results (from Bing).

Bing is an okay alternative , though not as fast as Google Instant.

2) Cleaner Web Results When Facebook increases the number of results from 3 top links to say 10 top links, there should be more outbound traffic from FB search to websites.For some reason Google continues to show 14 pages of results… Why? Why not limit to just one page.

3) Better People Search than  Pipl and Google. But not much (or any) image search. This is curious and I am hoping the Instagram results would be added to search results.

4) I am hoping for any company Facebook or Microsoft to challenge Adsense . Adwords already has rivals. Adsense is a de facto monopoly and my experiences in advertising show that content creators can make much more money from a better Adsense (especially ) if Adsense and Adwords do not have a conflict of interest from same advertisers.

Adwords should have been a special case of Adsense for Google.com but it is not.

5) Machine learning can only get you from tau to delta tau. When ad click behavior is inherently dependent on humans who behave mostly on chaotic , or genetic models than linear CPC models. I find FB has an inherent advantage in the quantity and quality of data collected on people behavior rather than click behavior. They are also more aggressive and less apologetic about behavorially targeted  ads.

Additional point- Analytics for Google Analytics is not as rich as analytics from Facebook pages in terms of demographic variables. This can be tested by anyone.

 

send email by R

For automated report delivery I have often used send email options in BASE SAS. For R, for scheduling tasks and sending me automated mails on completion of tasks I have two R options and 1 Windows OS scheduling option. Note red font denotes the parameters that should be changed. Anything else should NOT be changed.

Option 1-

Use the mail package at

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mail/mail.pdf

> library(mail)

Attaching package: ‘mail’

The following object(s) are masked from ‘package:sendmailR’:

sendmail

>
> sendmail(“ohri2007@gmail.com“, subject=”Notification from R“,message=“Calculation finished!”, password=”rmail”)
[1] “Message was sent to ohri2007@gmail.com! You have 19 messages left.”

Disadvantage- Only 20 email messages by IP address per day. (but thats ok!)

Option 2-

use sendmailR package at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sendmailR/sendmailR.pdf

install.packages()
library(sendmailR)
from <- sprintf(“<sendmailR@%s>”, Sys.info()[4])
to <- “<ohri2007@gmail.com>”
subject <- “Hello from R”
body <- list(“It works!”, mime_part(iris))
sendmail(from, to, subject, body,control=list(smtpServer=”ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM”))

 

 

BiocInstaller version 1.2.1, ?biocLite for help
> install.packages(“sendmailR”)
Installing package(s) into ‘/home/ubuntu/R/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependency ‘base64’

trying URL ‘http://cran.at.r-project.org/src/contrib/base64_1.1.tar.gz&#8217;
Content type ‘application/x-gzip’ length 61109 bytes (59 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 59 Kb

trying URL ‘http://cran.at.r-project.org/src/contrib/sendmailR_1.1-1.tar.gz&#8217;
Content type ‘application/x-gzip’ length 6399 bytes
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 6399 bytes

BiocInstaller version 1.2.1, ?biocLite for help
* installing *source* package ‘base64’ …
** package ‘base64’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** libs
gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/local/lib64/R/include -I/usr/local/include -fpic -g -O2 -c base64.c -o base64.o
gcc -std=gnu99 -shared -L/usr/local/lib64 -o base64.so base64.o -L/usr/local/lib64/R/lib -lR
installing to /home/ubuntu/R/library/base64/libs
** R
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices …
** testing if installed package can be loaded
BiocInstaller version 1.2.1, ?biocLite for help

* DONE (base64)
BiocInstaller version 1.2.1, ?biocLite for help
* installing *source* package ‘sendmailR’ …
** package ‘sendmailR’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** R
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices …
** testing if installed package can be loaded
BiocInstaller version 1.2.1, ?biocLite for help

* DONE (sendmailR)

The downloaded packages are in
‘/tmp/RtmpsM222s/downloaded_packages’
> library(sendmailR)
Loading required package: base64
> from <- sprintf(“<sendmailR@%s>”, Sys.info()[4])
> to <- “<ohri2007@gmail.com>”
> subject <- “Hello from R”
> body <- list(“It works!”, mime_part(iris))
> sendmail(from, to, subject, body,
+ control=list(smtpServer=”ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM”))
$code
[1] “221”

$msg
[1] “2.0.0 closing connection ff2si17226764qab.40”

Disadvantage-This worked when I used the Amazon Cloud using the BioConductor AMI (for free 2 hours) at http://www.bioconductor.org/help/cloud/

It did NOT work when I tried it use it from my Windows 7 Home Premium PC from my Indian ISP (!!) .

It gave me this error

or in wait_for(250) :
SMTP Error: 5.7.1 [180.215.172.252] The IP you’re using to send mail is not authorized

 

PAUSE–

ps Why do this (send email by R)?

Note you can add either of the two programs of the end of the code that you want to be notified automatically. (like daily tasks)

This is mostly done for repeated business analytics tasks (like reports and analysis that need to be run at specific periods of time)

pps- What else can I do with this?

Can be modified to include sms or tweets  or even blog by email by modifying the   “to”  location appropriately.

3) Using Windows Task Scheduler to run R codes automatically (either the above)

or just sending an email

got to Start>  All Programs > Accessories >System Tools > Task Scheduler ( or by default C:Windowssystem32taskschd.msc)

Create a basic task

Now you can use this to run your daily/or scheduled R code  or you can send yourself email as well.

and modify the parameters- note the SMTP server (you can use the ones for google in example 2 at ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM)

and check if it works!

 

Related

 Geeky Things , Bro

–

Configuring IIS on your Windows 7 Home Edition-

note path to do this is-

Control Panel>All Control Panel Items> Program and Features>Turn Windows features on or off> Internet Information Services

and

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/709635/sending-mail-from-batch-file

 

Google introduces Google Play

Some nice new features from the big G men from Mountain view. Google Play- for movies, games, apps, music and books. Nice to see entertainment is back on Google’s priority.

 

See this to read more

https://play.google.com/about/

When will I get Google Play?

About Google Play

Q: What is Google Play?
A: Google Play is a new digital content experience from Google where you can find your favorite music, movies, books, and Android apps and games. It’s your entertainment hub: you can access it from the web or from your Android device or even TV, and all your content is instantly available across all of these devices.

Q: What is your strategy with Google Play?
A: Our goal with Google Play is to bring together all your favorite content in one place that you can access across your devices. Specifically, digital content is fundamental to the mobile experience, so bringing all of this content together in one place for users makes the Android platform even more compelling. We’re also simplifying digital content for Google users – you can go to the Google Play website on your desktop and purchase and experience the latest movies, music and books. With Google Play, we’re giving you a simpler way to get your digital content.

Q: What will the experience be for users? What will happen to my existing account?
A: All content and apps in your existing account will remain in your account, but will transition to Google Play. On your device, the Android Market app icon will become the Google Play store icon. You’ll see “Play Store.” For the movies, books and music apps, you’ll begin to see Play versions of these as well, such as “Play Music,” and “Play Movies.”

Q: When will I get Google Play? What markets is this available in?
A: We’ll be rolling out Google Play globally starting today. On the web, Google Play will be live today. On devices, it will take a few days for the Android Market app to update to the Google Play Store app. The music, books and movies apps will also receive an update today.
Around the globe, Google Play will include Android apps and games. In countries where we have already launched music, books or movies, you will see those categories available in Google Play, too.

Q: I live outside the US. When will I get the books, music or movies verticals? I only see Android apps and games?
A: We want to bring different content categories to as many countries as possible. We’ve already launched movies and books in several countries outside the U.S. and will continue to do so overtime, but we don’t have a specific timeline to share.

Q: What types of content are available in my country?

  • Paid Apps: Available in these countries
  • Movies: Available in US, UK, Canada, and Japan
  • eBooks: Available in US, UK, Canada, and Australia
  • Music: Available in US

 

Q: Does this mean Google Music and the Google eBookstore will cease to exist? What about my account?
A: Both Google Music and the Google eBookstore are now part of Google Play. Your music and your books, including anything you bought, are still there, available to you in Google Play and accessible through your Google account.

Q: Where did my Google eBooks books go? Will I still have access to them?
A: Your books are now part of Google Play. Your books are still there, available to you in your Google Play library and accessible through your Google account.

Q: I don’t use an Android phone, can I still use Google Play?
A: Yes. Google Play is available on any computer with a modern browser at play.google.com. On the web, you can browse and buy books, movies and music. You can read books on the Google Play web reader, listen to music on your computer or watch movies online. Your digital content is all stored in the cloud, so you can access from anywhere using your Google Account.
We’ve also created ways to experience your music and books on other platforms such as the Google Books iOS app.

Q: Why do I not see Google Play yet on my device?
A: Please see our help center article on this here.

Q: How can I contact Google Play consumer support?
A: You can call or email our team here.