Savvy Avi

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...