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  messel 7:38 am on August 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  Left a comment on Jason Cronkhite’s blog
  I got the chance to read up on some pretty radical social business concepts (Simon linked his ideas). But more than the concept of sustainable community driven businesses, are the people involved it it’s architecture. I trust that you’ll navigate a direction for Argo Ventures that leverages our most powerful assets towards defining a challenge, and collaborating on a solution.
  While many ideas are bouncing around within the friendfeed space, there are few plans of action. What can we do to differentiate our efforts and begin building milestones? Is a corporate framework a good start? That’s where myself, Vladimir Vukicevic, Brian Hendrickson, and Ryan Leland are headed with the contextual advertising and personalized search model.

  By focusing on short term achievable goals we can increase the probability of successful growth.

  I’d like to move quickly past the “hot air” phase. Who’s with me?

   

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  messel 11:36 am on August 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  Heyo just a heads up Brian was on Bad Hair Day (Dave Winer’s talk web radio). Cool hearing you in person Brian. Look forward to chatting soon. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Bad-Hair-Day/2009/08/14/Bad-Hair-Day-8

   
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  messel 6:27 am on August 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  It’s been a slow project week. But last we left off Brian suggested a php/web2py (python HTML framework?)
  Brian do you have an example you can drop in the shared dropbox folder I can dig into this weekend?

   
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  Works been killer this week, hopefully n...

  messel 5:17 pm on August 12, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  Works been busy this week, hopefully next week I can get a little more working time in at night. Been burnt out in the evenings this week.

   
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  messel 5:47 am on August 12, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  Brian just saw you called into a Dave Winer chat, the potential is there for a real public crowd sourced business. Looks like there’s some open directions, you know from my blog posts I’m all over this idea. Do we (any startups interested in a similar sustainable framework) need a formalized game plan of sorts to get public investment at such an early stage?

   
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  Friend and work said to check out websit...

  messel 8:15 am on August 10, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  Friend at work said to check out website magazine. It’s targeted to social media advertising

   
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  messel 4:03 am on August 10, 2009 | 1 Permalink
  

  Got some great focusing questions from Ryan this weekend. They’re a good reminder of what’s important and whether or not this concept is the right one. Only real user feedback & stats will tell.

  1) Are you solving a REAL problem?
  a) increasing click through rates for advertising b)making content
  more personalized to information available within social media

  2) Who is your ideal customer?
  a) any website that hosts ads (bloggers, online magazines) b)
  users, people that are actively share information with social media

  3) How much does the problem cost your ideal customer? **Very important Q for us**
  currently billions are earned in advertising revenue per year. Even
  a small increase to click through rates would make ad aggregators &
  web hosts substantial money. Hundreds of millions of users are active
  in social media, this number will only increase.

  4) How do you explain in 30 seconds what your solution is?
  Improve click through rates of ads by making them targeted and
  personalized to each users interests. These interests are extracted
  from social media historical data, with recent information being more
  heavily weighted.

  5) Is there a way to protect the solution/IP, and for how long?
  Multiple businesses are using different strategies for semantic
  extracted data. We can create a protected database (the system for
  storing/weighting keywords over time, it’s a statistical pattern
  recognition problem), the data itself is user owned (it’s their social
  media info after all).

   
  • 

    Vlad 6:31 pm on August 10, 2009 Permalink
    

    I like those five questions very much. Number 5 is probably the hardest to answer.

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  messel 12:53 pm on August 7, 2009 | 2 Permalink
  

  Contacted Ensemble, the winning team of the Netflix prize.
  My original message:
  Dear Ensemble,

  Fascinating experience, congratulations to the entire team. I’m
  curious what happens to the algorithm(s) now though? I’m working on
  loose pattern matching problem (semantic tags extracted from social
  media) in an attempt to help focus real time internet conversations
  topically, as well as provide advertisers with a chance at relevancy
  to the individual.

  Any chance your team is interested in reapplying the methodology to
  other spaces?

  Thanks for your time either way,
  Mark Essel

  Here’s what I heard back:
  Hi Mark.

  Thanks for contacting us! We are definitley interested in applying what we have learned to different problems.

  I forwarded your email to other members of the team. Someone should respond in the next few days. If you haven’t heard anything in a few days, please contact me again and I’ll find out what is being done.

  Thanks!

  Greg McAlpin
  member of The Ensemble

   
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    Vlad 1:41 pm on August 8, 2009 Permalink
    

    Wow – great idea reaching out to them. Those guys are clearly some best of the best guys.

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    messel 5:18 am on August 9, 2009 Permalink
    

    If we can’t find a way to work with Ensemble, there are plenty of other teams that all did fantastic pattern matching. The problem being, we have to find real time, large scale applicable algorithms. Pretty sure all the top performing matching algorithms did some type of merging of various results (we’ll find out shortly how things were done).

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  messel 12:42 pm on August 7, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  

  We need to focus on the acceptance and viral spread factor of the contextual advertiser. I think the real time content/conversation search may help users adopt the tool and businesses to utilize the information. Watching http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/07/seth-godins-talk-from-business-of-software-2008.html about 5min in Seth talks about software requiring built in marketing. It’s similar to his earlier talks (sliced bread, old advertising/purchases loop, average products to average people).

   
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  messel 4:49 am on August 6, 2009 | 2 Permalink
  

  Side note, love the slide rocket zendesk/forums: http://sliderocket.zendesk.com/portal
  also a great tool for chart making: http://www.sliderocket.com/

   
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    Vlad 4:44 pm on August 6, 2009 Permalink
    

    That’s a pretty site.

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    Ryan Leland 11:33 am on August 7, 2009 Permalink
    

    Nice looking app. I couldn’t see it replacing keynote, but it’s looks like it would do the trick in a pinch.