Savvy Avi

this one is from the full share page and another one from activity another one - with a play button this is the code Guy gave me

Name: Stonebreaker Description: The Stonebreaker is a massive broadsword forged for the Onarks , its chipped blade a testament to countless battles, capable of smashing through stone and armor with raw, unrelenting power. Name: Bloodreap Description: The Bloodreap is a hauntingly curved scythe favored by the Saängwyr , its blade eternally stained with blood, perfect for swift, lethal strikes that drain both life and vitality from its foes. Name: Gilded Terra Description: Forged by the royal ironsmith from rare earth materials and gold, the Gilded Terra channels the elemental mastery of the Horas , resonating with the raw power of earth and fire in every strike. Name: Verdant Sovereign Description: A masterfully crafted spear with an emerald blade, the Verdant Sovereign channels the ancient Nature Magic of the Elari , striking with both regal precision and elemental fury. Name: Stellar Edge Description: Crafted using advanced alien technology by the Tingava , the Stellar Edge ...

Apester helps editors in media outlets tell compelling stories using visual interactive units. Increasingly, media is moving from broadcasting information in text or video format to interacting with users. When a reader presses a link to an article on Facebook, they'll usually skim the article, grab the information piece they were looking for and quickly return to Facebook. However, if a reader engages with the article she is more likely to stay longer on the page, continue exploring the website and to remember what she read. Soon publishers won't just post articles on their websites. In the future, articles will be independent media snippets that are published in multiple media outlets (social platforms, aggregators, blogs). Those media units will be small frames that combines multiple reach media to tell engaging stories: visuals, video, text and a two way communication. Content editors will create and publish those detachable media snippets using services like Apester. ...

Instructions for using a search engine: Type in a keyword. The search engine comes back with results. Then scan through them one by one until you find what you’re looking for.  That’s how search engines are used, right? And it works fine. In most cases. Kinda.  Really, a search engine user has only two options. Reject a result “it’s not what I’m looking for” and scan on. Or accept a result “that’s it” and press on it.  How about results that are close to what you’re looking for but not quite it. What if you could cue the search engine “this result is relevant, show me more like it”? How much better will search become?  All major search and recommendation engines are one dimensional with a single direction. Scan from top to bottom or on a carousel from left to right. Kluster presents search on two dimensions and the users can move in multiple direction. It can be used for any type of visual search: pictures, gifs, book covers, paintings, merchandi...

Search engines and recommendation engines display results ranked by relevance, in a list or a thumbnail layout. That’s useful in many cases but sometimes it’s more useful to explore the relation between results. Consider the human mind. When we try to remember something we hop between bits of memories, one memory leads to another, and using associative thinking we eventually find what we are looking for.  Here’s a joke about associative thinking. Two couples meet for dinner and while the women leave for the living room the men stay at dinning table and talk. “Hey” says one “I ate at a great restaurant the other day. What was the name? Something to do with flowers. Daisy, Blossom. No I got it.” Then he shouts to the living room: “Rose, what was the name of that restaurant?” For that propose Roi , Natali and I built Kluster a search tool for associative exploration. The name comes from a combination of cluster and K-means, a popular clustering algorithm that we used in an ...

The online industry is struggling to strike a balance between ad revenue and user experience. In reaction to "heavy" and aggressive ads many users began using ad blocking. Despite conflicting interests, eventually publishers, readers and ad-tech share a common goal of accessible and entertaining content online. With that common interest in-mind I published an editorial piece in MediaPost on what publisher and ad-tech companies should do to keep online video ads without deteriorating user experience:  With the threat of ad blocking looming ominously over both publishers and ad-tech companies, it would be an easy way out to pin the blame on Flash or rich media — the very tools whose ad revenues have long allowed publishers to thrive. Although this easy scapegoat exists, the ad-tech industry seems to understand that the real key to maintain the advertising monetization model is improving the user experience -- doing something along the lines of the new L.E.A.N. approach by th...

Nowadays most media outlets provide their content free of charge, that's what users expect; And with the rise of content aggregators and social media many publishers are struggling. As a result publishers try new ad forms such as content marketing, native ads and video. In response users, annoyed with the increasing distraction, adopt ad blockers. As always, a balance between conflicting interests will be reached. A balance that will keep publishers profitable, or at least afloat, while restraining the negative impact to the reading experience. Video ads may be the best option for consumers and publishers. Video ads, in contrast to native and content marketing,  maintains the clear boundary between content and advertisement. I recently wrote a post for publishers on how to add video ads to their sites. The article was published in Video Ad News magazine. Take a look here . Here's a screen-shot of the article (notice the ads in the screenshot, I stand by publishers and I...

I found out about Neo4j  in Mark Jackson's blog  and then found this post by a Neo4j employee explaining how to chart your Facebook network of friends step by step. Not all the steps worked for me, which is probably for the better, since I had to learn cypher (the Neo4j querying language) to complete the chart. I found a few (semi) interesting facts: - For every direct connection I have there are 10 additional connections between my friends. - I share over half of my connections with my wife. Though this is not bi-directional, she has many more connections than me. In the picture below I am the red dot in the middle and my wife is the red dot at the far right. Every dot between the two of us is a shared connection, while dots to my  left, above and below are only mine connections. - Most of my fiends are clustered in neat silos. This picture is a network diagram of about half of my Facebook connections. I am colored red, my wife is colored orange and other colo...

The app world conference hall is good for networking and sipping coffee but to have some fun I headed down to the device's conference halls. AT&T had a virtual tour on a cargo ship. After driving a lift I want to join the union. Measuring my heart rate with the Asus smart-watch. Yikes; 116, I must be excited by its elegance. An Ubuntu robot. That's a mobile device too, it's not all about phones.  HTC's Re wide angle camera on it's dinosaur shaped charger. It takes two hands to operate, one for the camera and another for the connected phone with the display. Still, I want one. Ford also makes bikes. This bike's horn, light and signals are controlled by an iPhone. Zenfone: the screen reacts to the cover and minimizes to a small circular display. Very handy.  LG Flex 2 adjusts to your butt curves. I wish my iPhone 5 had such a durable glass. Mini projector and a mini computer, together making a perfect home theater. A...

This was posted originally in the Millennial Media  tech blog . The longer products are used before end-of-life, the higher the return on investment. Therefore, we plan our products to be robust enough to withstand market changes and technology evolution. However, in the ever-evolving area of campaign optimization at Millennial Media we build features to be used, learned from, and replaced quickly. Therefore, when we replace a feature, it’s more likely to be because of the feature’s success than due to an inadequacy. Quick end-of-life means that the feature was widely adopted and that we gained meaningful insights from its use, enough to justify investing in the next feature iteration. Paraphrasing Porras’ and Collin’s famous business book, we “build not to last”. Here’s a typical example of how it may occur: Our data-science team comes up with an algorithm to partially automate a certain optimization process. Next, we build an interface to easily initiate, monitor and con...

One of the best events at Jumptap (now Millennial Media) is a quartely hackton. Teams have " 24 hours to build something. There are no constraints, other than the fact that you must demo what you have built at the end. The office stays open all night with pizza, snacks and drinks (including a traveling beer cart). In the morning, the company reconvenes and the groups participating demo theirs ‘hacks’. The audience then votes on a winner using pre-determined criteria, and the winning group receives gift cards and bragging rights." (source Dave Cecere on   http://www.techblog.jumptap.com/?p=114 ).  Each Hackmatch raises the bar in hack innovation and in showmanship. The main event now includes a panel of judges acting as   Simon Cowell ,  Randy Jackson  and    Nicki Minaj. And increasingly hacks are making it into production as real features used by our customers and account managers.  Ad Wall - 2013 Spring Hackaton In spring 2013 Hackmatc...

I recently ran a call tracking campaign for a well known national brand. In this campaign, users see an ad on a mobile site or app. Clicking on the ad prompts a call to the advertiser's call center. A call resulting in sale is counted as a conversion. This particular campaign ran in 42 cities in south US. Users in each city saw the same ad, on the same devices and on the same set of sites and apps. After running for two weeks the results were intriguing. Conversions varied widely from city to city. People in Orlando and Florida were 10 times more likely to respond to the ad and call the call center than people in Nashville and Indianapolis. In the heat map below each city targeted is represented by a circle. A large circle means high conversion rate. It sure looks different but could it be just a coincidence? To find out I ran a Chi-Square for statistical significance. It refutes the hypothesis that this result set comes from a uniform distribution at confidence level of 0.9...

Are you familiar with the project constraint triangle? Budget, time, scope? Improving in one aspect often comes at the expense of the other two. Or, as some put it, pick any two because projects seldom finish on time, on budget, and at scope. The project constraints measure the quality of the process of building an end product. I have learned that there is a similar triangle for product constraints. Constraints that measure the quality of the product itself:  ease of use ,  effectiveness  and  maintainability . Read more in Jumptap's Tech Blog  where I originally published this post.  

I recently started drawing cartoon figures for my daughter, after years of not drawing. It occurred to me that the drawing skills I learned back in the day help in mocking-up user interfaces. It’s about perspective and outline Drawing a cartoon figure is simple, really. The trick is to find a distinctive outline (the shape Mickey-Mouse’s head, the curve of a horse’s body) and drawing it first. Then you lineup every other detail in relation to the outline while keeping perspective in mind. I do the same thing when drawing a mockup of a web page or dashboard. I start off by what should draw the user’s attention (usually in the top center of page) and then layout elements around it. Use the least amount of material to convey a message Cartoon figures are made from just a few lines. These few lines make up a shape (a dog, a bird) and also convey a character. Tweety’s beak is curved to suggest a smile, Road-Runner’s limbs tell us the Road-Runner is in motion. Picasso...

I recently wrote a blog post on click to call mobile advertisement and some of the cool technology I built in Jumptap to improve click to call advertisement success. The post has the catchy name "5 Steps for Successful Click to Call Display Ads". "When mobile advertising first hit the scene, Click-to-Call banners held the promise of being the coolest and most direct way for advertisers to drive direct leads from mobile banners. The challenge, however, was that if a large number of consumers accidentally clicked on a Click-to-Call ad, the advertiser would be charged big money for those ‘misfires’. Recently, Jumptap helped change the equation by offering optimization for reducing this problem. Now, Jumptap can track real calls made from Click-to-Call ads and optimizing around sites that result in large quantities of ‘misfire’ calls. This new function, as well as four other important steps, is critical for any advertiser looking to leverage Click-to-Call for a success...

I think I work pretty hard with a demanding job at Jumptap, EvoTech in the evenings and weekends and being a new father. Then I met the 2012 System Design and Management (SDM) students in “boot camp” and was reminded that one can be even busier. A team of SDM students worked on EvoTech in their design challenge 2 assignments. We asked them to focus on EvoCloud a telemedicine offering we want to pair with our endoscopy camera. They came up with interesting findings: possible NGOs to contact, connections to telemedicine player in India, evaluation of 3G coverage and quality in Africa, a mockup and a fresh look at a new market. In the picture below SDM fellows presenting their work on EvoTech (left to right): Steve Ajemain, Bhushan Desam, Mike Meyer, Sascha Boehme, Andy Campanella, Rajesh Nair, Jake Whitcomb.

IDEO.org , IDEO’s branch for social venture work, has chosen Evotech for a 5 week project. We have a talented team: a mechanical engineer, a designer and a management consultant, working to improve EvoCam’s design and market strategy. It’s a great show of confidence for Evotech, and will no doubt improve our readiness to go to market. Read more in IDEO’s blog post . Working on Evotech part-time, progress comes slow. For every grant, business opportunity or competition won, we’ve lost at least two. However, so far, every achievement is several times bigger than the one before it, and that means we are moving in the right direction.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I built a website for Evolving Technologies. Check it out. www.evotechmed.com . At Evolving Technologies, an early stage venture, we were debating whether it makes sense to have a web presence at such an early stage. After all, we are not looking for customers just yet. Some of us argued that we should be focused on a short list of strategic tasks that doesn’t include maintaining a website. However, we found out that, contacts you talk to expect to be referred to a url. It is also useful in email introductions. What’s more, today with good content management solutions it only takes a day to build a reasonable website, it’s fun and it allows you to show case the things you’ve been working on. So we got one, hope you’ll enjoy it!

A small office, off the infinite corridor, hosts MIT’s International Development Initiative program (IDI). IDI’s mission is to help ideas, worked on at MIT, become products and reach people in developing economies creating a social benefit. Most ideas never make it into products. The gap between good ideas to good implementation is even wider when the intended user is many miles away from the inventor. IDI helps to bridge the gap, many times by flying the entrepreneurs to the destination markets where they refine and test their ideas. This summer IDI granted its Technology Dissemination Fellowship to Evotech , the affordable endoscopy venture I am part of. We are using the grant to develop a medical light source to work with our endoscope. With the grant we hired an intern from MIT who works on prototyping and especially on the light’s electric board. We also used the fellowship to purchase components needed for the device and its development: a refurbished scope, LEDs, circuit bo...

I have been working on EVOCAM a low cost endoscopy system with my partners at Evolving Technologies. Using frugal innovation techniques we developed a light, portable endoscopy prototype for a fraction of the price of existing solutions. Recently Medicine for Humanity physicians used our system to operate in Uganda. To allow training to continue from afar, after volunteer physicians returned home, we are planning to add a tele-medical feature to our device. I joined the team after they already had a working prototype and focused on market research, creating a concise massage and preparing a parametric engineering evaluation that exemplifies how EVOTECH is positioned in the market place. Basically everything it takes to turn a good idea into a good business plan. I am currently working rendering another EVOCAM out of MIT’s hobby machine shop. Together we took EVOTECH into MIT’s $100K business plan semi-finals (still competing) and to a bunch of other competitions in MIT and out...