Savvy Avi

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...