Tag: people

Interview John F Moore CEO The Lab

Social Media Landscape

Here is an interview with John F Moore, social media adviser,technologist and founder and CEO of The Lab.

Ajay-  The internet seems to be crowded by social media experts with everyone who spends a lot of time on the internet claiming to be one? How  does a small business owner on a budget distinguish for the correct value proposition that social media can give them. 

John- You’re right.  It seems like everytime I turn around I bump into more social media “experts”.  The majority of these self-proclaimed experts are not adding a great deal of value.  When looking to spend money for help ask the person a few questions about their approach. Things you should be hearing include:

  • The expert should be seeking to fully understand your business, your goals, your available resources, etc..
  • The expert should be seeking to understand current management thinking about social media and related technologies.

If the expert is purely focused on tools they are the wrong person.  Your solution may require tools alone but they cannot know this without first understanding your business.

Ajay- Facebook has 600 million people, with people preferring to play games and connect to old acquaintances rather than use social media for tangible career or business benefit..

John- People are definitely spending time playing games, looking at photos, and catching up with old friends.  However, there are many businesses seeing real value from Facebook (primarily by tying it into their e-mail marketing and using coupons and other incentives).  For example, I recently shared a small case study (http://thejohnfmoore.com/2010/10/07/email-social-media-and-coupons-makes-the-cfo-smile/) where a small pet product company achieved a 22% bump in monthly revenue by combining Facebook and coupons together.  In fact,45% of this bump in revenue came from new clients.  Customer acquisition and increased revenue were accomplished by using Facebook for their business.
Ajay-  How does a new social media convert (individual) go on selecting communities to join (Facebook,Twitter,Linkedin,Ning, Ping,Orkut, Empire Avenue etc etc.
How does a small business owner take the same decision.

John- It always starts with taking the time to define your goals and then determine how much time and effort you are willing to invest.  For example:
  • LinkedIn. A must have for individuals as it is one of the key social networking communities for professional networking.  Individuals should join groups that are relevant to their career and invest an hour a week.  Businesses should ensure they have a business profile completed and up to date.
  • Facebook can be a challenge for anyone trying to walk the personal/professional line.  However, from a business standpoint you should be creating a Facebook page that you can use to compliment your other marketing channels.
  • Twitter.  It is a great network to learn of, to meet, and to interact with people from around the world.  I have met thousands of interesting people, many of which I have had the pleasure to meet with in real life.  Businesses need to invest in listening on twitter to determine if their customers (current or potential) or competitors are already there discussing them, their marketplace, or their offerings.
In all cases I would encourage businesses to setup social media accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.  You want to ensure your brand is protected by owning these accounts and ensuring at least the base information is accurate.
Ajay- Name the top 5 points that you think make a social media community successful.  What are the top 5 points for a business to succeed in their social media strategy.

John-
  • Define your goals up front.  Understand why you are building a community and keep this goal in mind.
  • Provide education.  Ideally you want to become a thought leader in your space, the trusted resource that people can turn to even if they are not using your product or services today.
  • Be honest.  We all make mistakes.  When you do, be honest with your community and engage them in any fall-out that may be coming out of your mistake.
  • Listen to them.  Use platforms like BubbleIdeas to gather feedback on what your community is looking for from the relationship.
  • Measure.  Are you on track with your goals?  Do your goals need to change?
Ajay- What is the unique value proposition that “The Lab” offers

John- The Lab understands the strategic importance of leveraging social media, management and leadership best practices, and our understanding of local government and small and medium business to help people in these areas achieve their goals.  Too many consultants come to the table with a predefined solution that really misses the mark as it lacks understanding of the client’s goals.
Ajay-  What is “CityCamp in Boston” all about.

John- CityCamp is a FREE unconference focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations (http://www.citycampboston.org/what-is-citycamp-boston/).  It brings together politicians, local municipal employees, citizens, vendors, developers, and journalist to build a common understanding of local government challenges and then works to deliver measurable outcomes following the event.  The key is the focus on change management, driving change as opposed to just in the moment education.
Biography-

John F Moore is the Founder and CEO of The Lab (http://thelabinboston.com).  John has experience working with local governments and small and medium business owners to achieve their goals.  His experience with social media strategies, CRM, and a plethora of other solutions provides immense value to all of our clients.   He has built engineering organizations, learned sales and marketing, run customer service teams, and built and executed strategies for social media thought leadership and branding.  He is also a prolific blogger as you can see by checking out his blog at http://thejohnfmoore.com.

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Enterprise Linux rises rapidly:New Report

Tux, as originally drawn by Larry Ewing
Image via Wikipedia

A new report from Linux Foundation found significant growth trends for enterprise usage of Linux- which should be welcome to software companies that have enabled Linux versions of software, service providers that provide Linux based consulting (note -lesser competition, lower overheads) and to application creators.

From –

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2010/10/new-linux-foundation-user-survey-shows-enterprise-linux-achieve-sig

Key Findings from the Report
• 79.4 percent of companies are adding more Linux relative to other operating systems in the next five years.

• More people are reporting that their Linux deployments are migrations from Windows than any other platform, including Unix migrations. 66 percent of users surveyed say that their Linux deployments are brand new (“Greenfield”) deployments.

• Among the early adopters who are operating in cloud environments, 70.3 percent use Linux as their primary platform, while only 18.3 percent use Windows.

• 60.2 percent of respondents say they will use Linux for more mission-critical workloads over the next 12 months.

• 86.5 percent of respondents report that Linux is improving and 58.4 percent say their CIOs see Linux as more strategic to the organization as compared to three years ago.

• Drivers for Linux adoption extend beyond cost: technical superiority is the primary driver, followed by cost and then security.

• The growth in Linux, as demonstrated by this report, is leading companies to increasingly seek Linux IT professionals, with 38.3 percent of respondents citing a lack of Linux talent as one of their main concerns related to the platform.

• Users participate in Linux development in three primary ways: testing and submitting bugs (37.5 percent), working with vendors (30.7 percent) and participating in The Linux Foundation activities (26.0 percent).

and from the report itself-

It is an interesting report (and for some reason in a blue font-making it more like a blue paper than a white paper)

download here-

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/lp/page/download-the-free-linux-adoption-trends-report

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Which software do we buy? -It depends

Software (novel)
Image via Wikipedia

Often I am asked by clients, friends and industry colleagues on the suitability or unsuitability of particular software for analytical needs.  My answer is mostly-

It depends on-

1) Cost of Type 1 error in purchase decision versus Type 2 error in Purchase Decision. (forgive me if I mix up Type 1 with Type 2 error- I do have some weird childhood learning disabilities which crop up now and then)

Here I define Type 1 error as paying more for a software when there were equivalent functionalities available at lower price, or buying components you do need , like SPSS Trends (when only SPSS Base is required) or SAS ETS, when only SAS/Stat would do.

The first kind is of course due to the presence of free tools with GUI like R, R Commander and Deducer (Rattle does have a 500$ commercial version).

The emergence of software vendors like WPS (for SAS language aficionados) which offer similar functionality as Base SAS, as well as the increasing convergence of business analytics (read predictive analytics), business intelligence (read reporting) has led to somewhat brand clutter in which all softwares promise to do everything at all different prices- though they all have specific strengths and weakness. To add to this, there are comparatively fewer business analytics independent analysts than say independent business intelligence analysts.

2) Type 2 Error- In this case the opportunity cost of delayed projects, business models , or lower accuracy – consequences of buying a lower priced software which had lesser functionality than you required.

To compound the magnitude of error 2, you are probably in some kind of vendor lock-in, your software budget is over because of buying too much or inappropriate software and hardware, and still you could do with some added help in business analytics. The fear of making a business critical error is a substantial reason why open source software have to work harder at proving them competent. This is because writing great software is not enough, we need great marketing to sell it, and great customer support to sustain it.

As Business Decisions are decisions made in the constraints of time, information and money- I will try to create a software purchase matrix based on my knowledge of known softwares (and unknown strengths and weakness), pricing (versus budgets), and ranges of data handling. I will add in basically an optimum approach based on known constraints, and add in flexibility for unknown operational constraints.

I will restrain this matrix to analytics software, though you could certainly extend it to other classes of enterprise software including big data databases, infrastructure and computing.

Noted Assumptions- 1) I am vendor neutral and do not suffer from subjective bias or affection for particular software (based on conferences, books, relationships,consulting etc)

2) All software have bugs so all need customer support.

3) All software have particular advantages , strengths and weakness in terms of functionality.

4) Cost includes total cost of ownership and opportunity cost of business analytics enabled decision.

5) All software marketing people will praise their own software- sometimes over-selling and mis-selling product bundles.

Software compared are SPSS, KXEN, R,SAS, WPS, Revolution R, SQL Server,  and various flavors and sub components within this. Optimized approach will include parallel programming, cloud computing, hardware costs, and dependent software costs.

To be continued-

 

 

 

 

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Libre Office

Some ambiguity about Libre Office and why it needed to change from Open Office- just when Open Office seemed so threatening on the desktop

FROM- http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/

Q: So is this a breakaway project?

A: Not at all. The Document Foundation will continue to be focused on developing, supporting, and promoting the same software, and it’s very much business as usual. We are simply moving to a new and more appropriate organisational model for the next decade – a logical development from Sun’s inspirational launch a decade ago.

Q: Why are you calling yourselves “The Document Foundation”?

A: For ten years we have used the same name – “OpenOffice.org” – for both the Community and the software. We’ve decided it removes ambiguity to have a different name for the two, so the Community is now “The Document Foundation”, and the software “LibreOffice”. Note: there are other examples of this usage in the free software community – e.g. the Mozilla Foundation with the Firefox browser.

Q: Does this mean you intend to develop other pieces of software?

A: We would like to have that possibility open to us in the future…

Q: And why are you calling the software “LibreOffice” instead of “OpenOffice.org”?

A: The OpenOffice.org trademark is owned by Oracle Corporation. Our hope is that Oracle will donate this to the Foundation, along with the other assets it holds in trust for the Community, in due course, once legal etc issues are resolved. However, we need to continue work in the meantime – hence “LibreOffice” (“free office”).

Q: Why are you building a new web infrastructure?

A: Since Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems, the Community has been under “notice to quit” from our previous Collabnet infrastructure. With today’s announcement of a Foundation, we now have an entity which can own our emerging new infrastructure.

Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?

A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.

Q: What difference will this make to the commercial products produced by Oracle Corporation, IBM, Novell, Red Flag, etc?

A: The Document Foundation cannot answer for other bodies. However, there is nothing in the licence arrangements to stop companies continuing to release commercial derivatives of LibreOffice. The new Foundation will also mean companies can contribute funds or resources without worries that they may be helping a commercial competitor.

Q: What difference will The Document Foundation make to developers?

A: The Document Foundation sets out deliberately to be as developer friendly as possible. We do not demand that contributors share their copyright with us. People will gain status in our community based on peer evaluation of their contributions – not by who their employer is.

Q: What difference will The Document Foundation make to users of LibreOffice?

A: LibreOffice is The Document Foundation’s reason for existence. We do not have and will not have a commercial product which receives preferential treatment. We only have one focus – delivering the best free office suite for our users – LibreOffice.

—————————————————————————————————-

Non Microsoft and Non Oracle vendors are indeed going to find it useful the possiblities of bundling a free Libre Office that reduces the total cost of ownership for analytics software. Right now, some of the best free advertising for Microsoft OS and Office is done by enterprise software vendors who create Windows Only Products and enable MS Office integration better than  Open Office integration. This is done citing user demand- but it is a chicken egg dilemma- as functionality leads to enhanced demand. Microsoft on the other hand is aware of this dependence and has made SQL Server and SQL Analytics (besides investing in analytics startups like Revolution Analytics) along with it’s own infrastructure -Azure Cloud Platform/EC2 instances.

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Going Deap : Algols in Python

Logo of PyPy
Image via Wikipedia

Here is an important new step in Python- the established statistical programming language (used to be really pushed by SPSS in pre-IBM days and the rPy package integrates R and Python).

Well the news  ( http://www.kdnuggets.com/2010/10/eap-evolutionary-algorithms-in-python.html ) is the release of Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python. If your understanding of modeling means running regression and iterating it- you may need to read some more.  If you have felt frustrated at lack of parallelization in statistical software as well as your own hardware constraints- well go DEAP (and for corporate types the licensing is

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html ).

http://code.google.com/p/deap/

DEAP

DEAP is intended to be an easy to use distributed evolutionary algorithm library in the Python language. Its two main components are modular and can be used separately. The first module is a Distributed Task Manager (DTM), which is intended to run on cluster of computers. The second part is the Evolutionary Algorithms in Python (EAP) framework.

DTM

DTM is a distributed task manager that is able to spread workload over a buch of computers using a TCP or a MPI connection.

DTM include the following features:

 

EAP

Features

EAP includes the following features:

  • Genetic algorithm using any imaginable representation
    • List, Array, Set, Dictionary, Tree, …
  • Genetic programing using prefix trees
    • Loosely typed, Strongly typed
    • Automatically defined functions (new v0.6)
  • Evolution strategies (including CMA-ES)
  • Multi-objective optimisation (NSGA-II, SPEA-II)
  • Parallelization of the evaluations (and maybe more) (requires python2.6 and preferably python2.7) (new v0.6)
  • Genealogy of an evolution (that is compatible with NetworkX) (new v0.6)
  • Hall of Fame of the best individuals that lived in the population (new v0.5)
  • Milestones that take snapshot of a system regularly (new v0.5)

 

Documentation

See the eap user’s guide for EAP 0.6 documentation.

Requirement

The most basic features of EAP requires Python2.5 (we simply do not offer support for 2.4). In order to use multiprocessing you will need Python2.6 and to be able to combine the toolbox and the multiprocessing module Python2.7 is needed for its support to pickle partial functions.

Projects using EAP

If you want your project listed here, simply send us a link and a brief description and we’ll be glad to add it.

and from the wordpress.com blog (funny how people like code.google.com but not blogger.google.com anymore) at http://deapdev.wordpress.com/

EAP is part of the DEAP project, that also includes some facilities for the automatic distribution and parallelization of tasks over a cluster of computers. The D part of DEAP, called DTM, is under intense development and currently available as an alpha version. DTM currently provides two and a half ways to distribute workload on a cluster or LAN of workstations, based on MPI and TCP communication managers.

This public release (version 0.6) is more complete and simpler than ever. It includes Genetic Algorithms using any imaginable representation, Genetic Programming with strongly and loosely typed trees in addition to automatically defined functions, Evolution Strategies (including Covariance Matrix Adaptation), multiobjective optimization techniques (NSGA-II and SPEA2), easy parallelization of algorithms and much more like milestones, genealogy, etc.

We are impatient to hear your feedback and comments on that system at .

Best,

François-Michel De Rainville
Félix-Antoine Fortin
Marc-André Gardner
Christian Gagné
Marc Parizeau

Laboratoire de vision et systèmes numériques
Département de génie électrique et génie informatique
Université Laval
Quebec City (Quebec), Canada

and if you are new to Python -sigh here are some statistical things (read ad-van-cED analytics using Python) by a slideshare from Visual numerics (pre Rogue Wave acquisition)

Also see,

http://code.google.com/p/deap/wiki/SimpleExample

 

 

 

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HP goes GPU, Will software people follow

A graphics processing unit on an Nvidia GeForc...
Image via Wikipedia

One more addition to the GPU stack that adds up power when combined with CPU and GPUs. For numeric computing, it may be essential to have GPU- CPU mixed software as almost all hardware people now have offered GPU-CPU products. Maybe software companies can get inspired for new kind of GPU-CPU blade server software again.

Source-

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/HP-Adds-New-HPC-Server-with-GPGPU-Option-104381494.html

But for “true” supercomputing applications, the SL390s G7 is the go-to server. Like its sibling, the SL390s comes with Xeon 5600 processors, but the option to pair the CPUs with up to three on-board NVIDIA “Fermi” 20-series GPUs puts a lot more floating point performance into this design. Customers can choose from either the M2050 or M2070 Tesla GPU modules, the only difference being the amount of graphics memory — 3 GB of GDDR5 for the M2050 versus 6 GB for the M2070. Each GPU module is served by its own PCIe Gen2 x16 channel in order to maximize bandwidth to the graphics chips. At the maximum configuration with all three Fermi GPUs and two Westmere CPUs, a single server delivers on the order of 1 teraflop of double precision performance. “So this is very much a server that has been designed for HPC,” said Turkel.

With GPUs on board, the SL390s fill out a 2U half-width tray, so up to four of these can be packed into a 4U SL6500 chassis. A CPU-only version is also available and takes up just half the space (half-width 1U), enabling twice as many Xeons to occupy the same chassis. This configuration will likely be the server of choice for the majority of HPC setups, given that GPGPU deployment is really just getting started. Pricing on the CPU-only model starts at $2,259.

And

, the ProLiant SL390s G7, provides more raw FLOPS per square inch than any server HP has delivered to date, and is the basis for the 2.4 petaflop TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer currently being deployed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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The SEO mess on joining blog aggregators

 

Mug shot of Paris Hilton.
Image via Wikipedia

 

If you are an analytics blogger who writes, and is aggregated on an analytical community- read on- Here’s how blog aggregation communities can help you lose 30% of all future traffic long term, while giving you a short term.

The problem is not created by Blogging Communities (like R-Bloggers, or PlanteR, or Smart Data Collective or AnalyticBridge or even BeyeBlogs )

It is created by the way Google Page Rank is structured- you see given exactly the same content on two different we pages- Google Page Rank will place the higher Page Rank results higher. This is counter intutive and quite simple to rectify- The Google Spider can just use the Time Stamp for choosing which article was published where first (Obviously on your blog, AND then later to the aggregator).

How bad is the mess? Well joining ANY blog aggregation will lead to an instant lift of upto 10-50 % of your current traffic as similar bloggers try and read about you. However you can lose the long term 30% proportion which is a benchmark of search engine created traffic for you.

So do you opt out of blog aggregation? No. It’s a SEO mess and it’s unfair to punish your blog aggregator, most of whom are running on ad-supported sponsors or their own funds on dry fumes to publish your content. Most of the fore mentioned communities are created by excellent people I interacted with heavily- and they are genuinely motivated to give readers an easy way to keep up with blogs. Especially Smart Data Collective, Analyticbridge and R-bloggers whose founders I have known personally.

You can do one thing- create manual summaries in the excerpt feature of your blog posts- it’s just below the WordPress page. And switch your RSS feed to summary rather than full. It avoids losing keyword rank to other websites, it prevents the Blog Aggregation from gaining too much influence in key word related searches, and it keeps your whole eco system happy, Best of All it helps readers of Blog Aggregators- since most of them use a summary on the front page anyways.

An additional thought on Google Page Rank- something I have sulked over but not spoken for a long long time.  It ignores the value of reader- If Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and 500 ceos from Fortune 500 companies read my blog but do not link to it- it will count daily traffic as 500. Probably it will give more weightage to Paris Hilton fans.

A suggestion-humbly- you can use IP Address lookup of visitors to see if traffic is coming from corporate sources or retail sources -Clicky from GetClicky does this. Use it as feedback in Google Analytics as well as Google Trends.

And maybe PageRank needs to add quantity and quality of visitors as additional variables . Do a A/B test guys some Chi Square juice- its not quite Mad Men Adverting but its still good fun.

 

PageRank
Image via Wikipedia

 

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and the world is one big community as per xkcd