Gave my talk on branding for startups. Discussed the Three R’s of branding and some of the particular issues of note for a young company trying to get established in an Internet driven economy.
Then I went late to a talk on the Erlang programming language. It was standing room only so live-blogging wasn’t practical. Cool talk though. The big idea here: Erlang is massively scalable! The rest was over my head 🙂
Now I’m in a talk on Bayesian algorithms for filtering – two groups combined for this talk, one interested in Bayesian analysis the other in AI and cognition (with a futurist spin). Thought this would be a more philosophical discussion because of the AI, but the Bayesians have numbers on their side so the talk is getting into logic and algorithms. Spam filtering is a popular problem for applying the power of Bayesian. Basically by recognizing user behaviors and aggregating behaviors across users and then create probabilities for saving and for scrubbing any particular message. So Bayesian calculations get the probablities that score likelihood of scrub and likelihood of save. Then another algorithm has to look at the balance between the scores to determine the final save/scrub decision. The goal is to have a system that continues to learn over time to get better over time. Surprise issue – you don’t want the system to learn too fast! If it does the system can develop biases that might move you away from desirable result. Learning at the right pace allows the system to aggregate enough scores to have more relevant outcomes.
What does this have to do with branding? As I mentioned an hour or so ago, I’m indulging my nerdy roots and hanging out at Barcamp Atlanta. The technology is driving everything these days. And I believe in the long run these technologies will influence marketing and buying behaviors, just like the web has.
Moderating is discussing filtering large data sets – question now about qualifying market data as another use case. Bayesian is good at putting info into buckets. Not as good for mathematical evaluation.
Could you use Bayesian to create real estate recomendations? Start learning behavior for a home buyer? Could the home buyer train the system fast enough to make it useful infiltering a databse of 100000 homes? (questions from Alan Pinstein) The experts say yes, this is a good application for Bayesian approach.
Conversation is moving to relevance engines, but it is 10pm so time to change rooms.
Barcamp 2 – Friday night continues – Where are the girls?
Next session I’m sitting in on is called “Where are the girls?” A fair question for such a technology-focused event. I’d say the event this year has more women than last year, and I think right now 90% of them are in this room (one of about 5 where presentations are going on concurrently). I count 5 women including the moderator, and about 13 men.
Moderator is a social media researcher seeking funding for a new idea. Applying through Y-combinator a new hatchery/ incubator for startups.
Last funding round a Y Combinator bbrought out 97 dudes and 3 women. So the question asked is why? Where are the women? Are they not out there? Do they not know where to look? So the presentation is about where the women are, where the women are online, and what’s the future.
Stats show male students start earlier on computers, use them more for entertainment and get more comfortable with them earlier. Computer games are a gateway drug for technology lifestyle.
Gender gap is closing – more women are using the web, but they use it differently. Doing different things influences impressions and behaviors.
Club penguin – virtual environment/game environment popular with 6-14 yr old girls. Purchased by Disney for $350 Million! The niche can pay off!
Confidence effects use. Anecdote given. Moderator asked a colleague what she used online, the colleague replied “my Internet usage is boring” — issue of confidence/attitude about Internet experience. Discussion of importance of positive reinforcement.
Discussion of Julia Alllyson – a successful online self promoter often categorized as “famous for being famous”
Lisa Brewster (aka “techslut”) – engineer photographer, web 2.0 entrepreneure and technology culture and geek sexuality — she sells T-shirts with cool startup names, She has a company called Startup Schwag (maybe they’d like the Equation Arts logo?)
I want a T-shirt that says “I got tackled at Barcamp”
Sometimes the tool is valued more than the content. Some sites aren’t “hard” but attract large followings of contributors and customers – Etsy is a great example.
Lesson – Get outside the normal developer peer group! Get input from other circles – find out what other people use and you may gain insights for your concepts and ideas to reach not techie demographics (get outside the “hack shack”.