Things I See – Page 2

Ralph Kiner’s Place in History

February 7, 2014 by tmcgMNM

Mets Broadcast Team – Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner

If you’re not a NY Mets fan, Ralph Kiner’s passing may not be as big a part of your childhood as it is to those of us that grew up in the WOR-9 area. For those of us that waited every night for Kiner’s Korner following the night’s broadcast this is a great loss.

For baseball fans, Kiner’s place in history is overlooked as current day numbers pile up. When Kiner retired in 1955 after just 10 seasons. He was #6 in career HRs. Check out the Top 6 list at the time:
1. Babe Ruth (714)
2. Jimmie Foxx (534)
3. Mel Ott (511)
4. Lou Gehrig (493)
5. Ted Williams (394)
6. Ralph Kiner (369)
He led the NL in HRs in each of his first 7 seasons in the majors. No rookie has ever led his league since 1905, and Kiner did it his first 7 years.

Meeting Mr. Tony

August 20, 2013 by tmcgMNM

Today was my first day at the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open where I volunteer each year in the media room — and sometimes I see golf. Since today was Pro-Am day, I looked down the list of amateurs to see if I knew anyone playing in case I go for a walk.

About half way down the list, I see “Tony Kornheiser.” Mr. Tony is in Endicott and I don’t know this? This is the same town that advertised a Roy White appearance for a month. Can’t be Tony from PTI.

His playing partner: Harvey Stenger. The President at Binghamton University. I guess that was Mr. Tony.

If you follow this blog, you may remember how I had my letter read on Tony’s show, and the premise of that note was that they would send me a “TK” sticker that I would then pass along to President Stenger.

So I ran out and found them on the 5th hole. After they finished the hole, I introduced myself and told them the story. Now I have President Stenger AND Tony, but the sticker was at home. They were both very nice and laughed at how this worked out.

The best line: I told Tony I don’t have know what to do between 10 am – noon since I can’t listen while he’s off for the summer. His response: “Now I’m here in person.”

The Big Data Role

August 1, 2013 by tmcgMNM

I had an interesting meeting today with the Sr. VP of a marketing and data processing services company (being vague to protect future interests). They are sitting on years of data and generating more each day, so they are vetting ideas on how to improve their offerings based on this data, starting with plans to hire two executives focusing on “big data” and digital strategy.

Of course, for full disclosure, I was trying to get myself hired. However, the real challenge was getting hired into roles that are fairly undefined at this point. I won’t bury the suspense, it’s not going to happen for me this week, but it’s more of a “It’s not you, it’s me” thing, since it was apparent after a while that he was looking for a Data Scientist for his “data” role, so I would have to take up the data strategy role with an organization that he did not manage.

As we talked through the roles it become more clear where my technology and marketing background offers the most value — as usual it is in hybrid role. Let’s look at a three possible job roles in the digital data cycle:

Product Manager >> Generates & Consumes Data

Traditional digital product owner where a carve out of their role relates to data generation and usage, such as a mobile app that has its design and application requirements, but also generates and uses location-based data.Could this be me >> YES! No surprise since it’s a role I’ve held before.

Big Data Manager >> Owns data strategy and implementation — along with evangelism.

Responsible for owning the carrying out the organization’s data strategy. This is a cross-product role in a way since the BDPM needs to make sure all the traditional products are on plan for generating data to help the organization and standard data access is available to support products.Could this be me >> YES! Excited by this opportunity, since it is a great blend of using my tech experience and applying the output to building and supporting business cases.

Data Scientist >> Builds data systems and crunches the numbers.

Could this be me >> No. I’ll have this person on speed dial. Earlier this week I was reading my newest Big Data (http://www.manning.com/marz/) book, and was excited by the applications and business opportunities around monetizing data. Then I hit chapter 2 where the discussion turned to data tools and structures, and my brain started melting — a natural sign that I was over my head.

The outcome: I have to find the Big Data Manager type of role where I am responsible for finding the business opportunities, maybe get my hands a little dirty by working with the engineers, and then hand it off for the data scientists to make the magic.

Gov. Cuomo Announces Moreland Commission at Binghamton U.

July 2, 2013 by tmcgMNM

Gov Cuomo speaking today at Binghamton University

“Government is us . . . I believe in us.”

I had a special opportunity to see public politics in action at Binghamton University where Gov Cuomo announced the formation of a Moreland Commission.

I’m not going to try to come across as political wonk, but it as always it is important to take advantage of opportunities to attend events such as this when you get a chance.

The Moreland Commission is being formed to investigate corruption in NYS government following recent arrests in Albany and around the state of elected officials.

The goal of the commission as stated by Gov. Cuomo (and paraphrased like crazy by me) is to identify any wrong doers in government, but also vindicate those that are doing good for the people and are unjustly lumped into the ill will created by a few bad apples.

Do You Know Who I Am!?!

May 29, 2013 by tmcgMNM

That question is one of many inside jokes known to regular listeners of The Tony Kornheiser Show heard on ESPN 980 out of Washington. His show is my regular 10 am – noon listening via their website or the podcast if I’m busy.

Recently he started offering “TK” stickers, but the trick is that you can’t just ask for one; you have to work for it. Some people go as far as to record gag versions of the show’s theme song or send in gifts — I wrote a note.

Knowing that Tony went to school in Binghamton, I loaded it with Binghamton University references. The premise is that I have found myself recently attending events that BU President Harvey Stenger also attended, but I needed an excuse to speak with him.

Enter the sticker. Listen to Tony read my letter.

Please note – In my letter I’m joking when I say I left President Stenger’s speech early. Again an inside joke based on Tony’s habit of leaving dinner parties before the dinner is served.

NY Tech Day – Quick Post

April 26, 2013 by tmcgMNM

There is no way that I have the time to sit down and do a full write up about yesterday’s NY Tech Day show at Pier 92.

I’ll start here: Big. Impressive. People. People. More People.

I’ll need all day to debrief and go through the materials that I gathered, and then will make an update.

Bot Traffic Is Out There, But Where?

April 5, 2013 by tmcgMNM

Chameleon Bot An Adweek story from early last week about bad internet traffic caught my eye, and before I could write up a post they followed it up with a little more detail. Unfortunately the outcome is less on detail and more on “we know something is up, but can’t figure it out.”

I’ve shared this same frustration in the past where I was working on a project and we decided step was to increase traffic by buying traffic through some networks that do this sort of arbitrage work.

These stories first center around some “suspect” content networks that are being credited with millions of page views a month. Good for them? Well the issue is that they really are not very sites and the fact that they are related though a central publishing group makes you question are there really users going to the site and generating clicks.

The problem that crosses the line is when these page views generate millions of page view X multiple ad units per page. When these numbers get tallied the revenue estimates for these sites again reach into the $millions.

Here are the stories:

Meet the Most Suspect Publishers on the Web – The rise of ghost sites, where traffic is huge but humans are few.
Alphabird, Digimogul: Tell Us Who’s Behind the Botnet – The CEO of Spider.io speculates on who is behind a massive Web fraud effort
Spider released data on a new bot network dubbed Chameleon that Spider believes is costing advertisers $6 million a month.

My personal feeling is that traffic buying strategy should be an act of last resort or only used as a primary strategy if you absolutely need to generate traffic today (even that raises concerns of finding a better plan). Our experience is that if you find the wrong vendors they can serve you up the equivalent of traffic-crack where all your traffic loves your sponsored links. From there management loves the spike in revenue, and you’re stuck with no proven strategy that will maintain that new revenue.

I remember the addition of one vendor that caused our query traffic to go through the roof for “Rolex Watches;” suddenly, the whole world wanted a Rolex, and they were clicking on the top ad link for more data. You know it can’t be true, but – Cha-ching! — management loved it and the biggest issue became swapping in a plan to ween ourselves from the purchased traffic and that provided us sustained organic traffic. We were able to pull this off, but it took 4-6 months, which is not surprising for good content and SEO to get recognized, and many “trust me, this is better notes” to the people upstairs.

Bing It On – Working With No Budget

February 21, 2013 by tmcgMNM

Hakia Challenge

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a re-hash of Bing’s Bing It On challenge where they show side-by-side results with Google and give you one search box. They then ask you to vote on which is best.

Seems similar. Yes, back when I was at Hakia we tried a similar “Challenge” in 2007 as shown in this blog post from Profy. It appears that the Challenge page is down now.

The biggest differences in Bing’s campaign vs Hakia’s is not the search technology; in fact, the inclusion of Powerset’s semantic search technology from their acquisition in 2008 probably makes the technologies very similar. The big difference is ca$h money. Hakia never would have had the budget to promote this type of program.

The other interesting thing I saw in researching this is that there really is no best search results when you get to this level. Results are too subjective and how the user interprets them is really determined by how they search (vague vs detail) and whether they have sense of what they are searching for.

Recently in trying to set-up a WordPress test blog on my lap-top, I found myself using Google frequently for getting help with each next step. What I learned was to start extremely detailed by constructing queries that included all the key differentiators. For instance, this would be my starting point: “upload wordpress photo xampp OSX” (Google | Bing) Grade the results: Maybe even, but it is tough to answer until I read each page to see if it answers my next step.

However, if you keep is simple, like “Red Sox” (Google | Bing) then it comes down to why you searched: news, score, general website, etc. They seem about the same.

Parent – Child UI

April 15, 2012 by tmcgMNM

An iKid

So what do you know about good UI? I know one little monster that is glad that the Apple people made life easy for her. In the side picture, she is pictures on the plane going to visit family in Florida about a week after her fourth birthday and , yes, she is playing on an iPhone.

It would be cool (check that, scary) to say that she booked her own flight, but we’re not ready for bringing that up, but she did utter these words on that trip: “you can get it at the Apple app store. Mama, what’s an apple app?”

However, she is very comfortable grabbing an iDevice in the house and scrolling the screens until she finds the photo gallery to look at pictures of herself or her Olivia app, who is a little piglet that also likes to look at pictures of herself.

Friends had suggested around Christmas about getting one of the other new kid-targeted tablets that had come on the market, but the one fear in introducing one of these is understanding the UI and how early frustration can make-or-break whether she would use it. Now, full disclosure, the fear of understanding the UI was about me. I knew that I would be the person that had to set it up and download the apps for this new device, so my first thought was that it had to be easier just to set up the retired iPhone 3. This isn’t an everyday toy for her, but it has certainly worked for longer trips.

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