A Note on the Oak Creek Shooting

While I know everyone by now has already heard about the Sikh gurdwara shooting that left numerous men and women killed, and my thoughts and prayers go out to members of the Oak Creek sangat, I did want to extend my thanks to members of the media who were able to educate individuals about Sikhs and our culture in general. As written best by a good family friend of mine, Associate Professor Dawinder S. Sidhu of the University of New Mexico, the violence that we as Americans witnessed on that Sunday truly stemmed from ignorance and fear towards others. This isn’t the first time Sikhs in America have been attacked or targeted since 9/11; while no attack is ever less harmful or less hateful, this attack took the most number of lives in a truly tragic way.

Out of all of the chaos from that Sunday, with all of the numerous reports swirling about what was actually going on that Sunday morning, I felt that the media did a great job disseminating information about Sikhs, who we are, and our culture. Given that I was traveling back home from a trip that Sunday, I was unable to get to my computer and read on the web. However, access to Twitter, and specifically access to the TuneIn Radio app, allowed me to get up-to-date information on what was going on. I’d like to sincerely thank all of the people who work at WTMJ 620 local news radio in Milwaukee who provided listeners with information not only about the events transpiring in Oak Creek, but for also providing listeners with information about the Sikh faith, basic tenets about our faith, and information on how Sikhs have been targeted since 9/11. It was truly responsible and educated news media, and I can’t thank you enough for your dedication to providing your listeners with all of that information.

The more we can get the word out, the more we can educate, the more we can get the community at large to recognize Sikhs in society, the better the chances we can reduce or even stop these types of events from happening in the future. Hopefully one day these acts of violence will stop, not just against Sikhs, but against everyone, as we are all Americans, regardless of race, color or creed.

Weekly Reading Roundup

A collection of articles and posts that I have been reading over the course of the past week.

Publisher Monetization Strategies – Bound Together by Audience

The inevitable march towards audience buying is well underway and has been well underway for quite some time by this point. Yet, across the web, I still see publishers aligning themselves across industry or business verticals: content publishers who are writing male-centric content are huddling together for group inventory plays and so forth. What’s the real problem here? Publishers should be aligning themselves with other publishers whose audiences match, not some perceived and (quite frankly) archaic notion of verticals. The only verticals we should be moving towards are “audience-targeting verticals”. If I am a reference publisher whose audience of Males Aged 18-25 nicely lines up with a content publisher or blog who happens to have a large following in that demographic as well, we should be able to band together and provide our inventory in aggregate supply.

For a while, the problem for most publishers was the lack of functionality and ability to actually provide audience targeting solutions above and beyond simple things like geo-location, browser type, and perhaps some other built-in features that come from ad servers. As ad servers like DFP began to open up custom targeting functionality to their small and medium tier DFP clients, publishers within this range also became exposed to the massive third party data pools that many of the major publishers have been using for quite some time now (think companies like BlueKai, Lotame, eXelate, etc. as audience targeting data providers and large publishers like NYTimes.com).

One key problem for small and medium tier publishers is their inability to attract top dollar or advertisers based on three factors:

  1. lack of audience targeting capabilities within the ad server;
  2. lack of publisher brand recognition; and
  3. lack of traffic volume

As already highlighted above, smaller publishers are now more capable than ever to integrate advanced audience targeting solutions within their ad server. Granted hurdles remain in that the costs of delivery to provide those targeting solutions may be cost-prohibitive for some publishers, but over time these costs should go down as more and more publishers adopt these solutions (costs for data providers should go down as economics of scale occur, thereby creating price competition and forcing the prices publishers have to pay in transmission/delivery fees to the data providers).

The last two points are key and directly related. Since publishers have been aligning themselves on industry verticals, it may have been difficult for publishers who couldn’t neatly fit into a vertical to get top dollar advertisers, thereby effectively making their traffic volume become a hinderance to their ability to gain more money. However, now that publishers have audience targeting solutions, they can come together in a sort of “audience match vertical” whereby any publishers, regardless of type, size or content, can come together and provide a large amount of inventory based on the types of targeting offered. Advertisers win since they get highly targeted placements based on the publisher’s audience targeting capabilities, while publishers win since they are no longer handicapped from the lucrative world of direct premium sales due to a lack of traffic volume or brand recognition. Sure, many of the major advertisers will still care about publisher brand recognition. But I think as those advertisers see a better return per dollar spent by using these audience targeting solutions, they will feel less and less worried as before in name recognition. So long as the publisher’s brand isn’t seriously detrimental, wouldn’t the advertiser want to accurately target the individual and get better ROI?

There are still some challenges that publishers face. Notably, there is still no way for publishers to reach out and connect with other, similar publishers (based on audience targeting) since other publishers may not know the targeting capabilities of a publishers (hint hint Quantcast et. al. you have an incredible opportunity here to match up publishers based on the collective knowledge of audience data from all of those publisher clients you have). This obviously hinders the ability for publishers to offer greater collective inventory together, but its a rather small hurdle to overcome in order to make publisher offerings more successful. Therein lies an opportunity of course, and over time publishers will realize that they can attract premium ad dollars by coming together around their similar audiences.

Wang Xiaoli, left, and Yang Yu were kicked out of the Games for trying to lose a match. But did they do anything wrong?

The Olympic Badminton Scandal

Image by Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters

The NYTimes ran a great article the other day surrounding the controversy and “scandal” that was the badminton doubles competition. For those sitting in a cave, 4 pairs of teams from various countries played terribly in their last group stage matches because they wanted to either draw or lose, so as to play a less difficult opponent in the elimination rounds.

At first glance, I was shocked to say the least; the fact that a team would decidedly throw a game felt so fundamentally wrong. But then I read that NYTimes article and it really got me to think: was what those teams did wrong? Or, simply part of their overall winning strategy? The NYTimes lists many different times, in many different sports, where athletes don’t necessarily “give it their all” at any particular moment, and yet, no one reacts as we did when we found out about what those badminton teams were doing on the court.

“They simply looked at the information that was presented to them, looked at their ultimate goal and went in the direction that seemed to have the best chance of leading them there. A loss in those matches, they decided, would give them a better path to winning a medal. How is this different from, say, a swimmer who coasts to the wall in a preliminary heat or a runner who jogs past the finish line in a semifinal to conserve energy for the final? Is it even that much different from a baseball player bunting?” – Sam Borden, New York Times

Was the competition at the Olympic level, and all the pride, duty, honor, sacrifice, etc. to blame for our overblown reaction to what should be simply viewed as a winning strategy for teams who want to try and capture gold? What I found most surprising too, is how this has played out plenty of times in the past, particularly in major soccer tournaments like the Euro Cup or the World Cup. A team can easily win their first couple group stage matches, and then “coast” in their third match. There are caveats here of course: there are things to consider like goal differential, goals for and goals against, etc. so it would behoove the winning team to still play well. However, the thought process and logic is still there: “we don’t need to give this our all, and we don’t even mind if we lose (by that much) because we have already secured our place in the next round and cannot affect that.”

It is worth noting, too, that the notion of “always give it your all” or whatever other hoary chestnut you can imagine a hyperactive Little League coach spewing in a pregame huddle is largely Western. As the British have been so quick to remind us over the past two weeks, fair play and sportsmanship were invented here. But what does that truly mean? Play to win in a meaningless match, only to be rewarded with a more difficult path later on? – Sam Borden, New York Times

I was initially very supportive of the ruling to throw out the players, especially after watching the extremely dismal and dull display that they were putting on for the crowd (that is a separate discussion, as to whether or not the fans “deserve” to see something spectacular when it comes to competition on such a big stage). Right now I am leaning towards the camp of what those teams did was simply part of an overall winning strategy, in an attempt to provide themselves with the best possible chance of taking home gold in the end. I could be wrong.

London 2012 Olympics

I personally love the Olympics. The earliest one I can remember where I truly paid attention was 1996, but I was very young. I remember watching the Magnificent Seven in gymnastics (even though back then I thought gymnastics was “dumb” but my dad told me it took a lot of skill, dedication and sacrifice…something which I truly appreciate over the years and after having watched the Fab Five pull off one of the best Team All Around floor routines in recent history).

There is something to be said about how the games has evolved and changed over time. Think about how more and more women are competing in major events, countries are actually letting their women participate (whether or not it’s lip service I cannot tell; I’m looking at you, Saudi Arabia) and the level of competition and human achievement that we have seen from our athletes.

However, given all of these monumental changes, the way we present the games to the world has been largely unchanged, specifically with regards to the broadcast via NBC. I haven’t been as upset with everyone else with regards to NBC’s coverage of the Olympics: I’m in the camp that, if you want to see the games during the day, turn on your TV or head over to the live stream online to watch. Granted, there are definitely some problems with the live stream at NBCOlympics.com but for the most part, they got that right. I will also say I was particularly annoyed when I saw ads actually interrupt a live stream of the All Around competition in which the Americans were very close to winning the Gold, yet I got an ad for P&G moms for 15 seconds. My frustration quickly melted away as the Americans took Gold for the first time since 1996. I can also appreciate why individuals would be very mad when they find out the results of a competition via an advertisement, rather than even a website or the tape delay.

Beyond the live stream, there was the issue of the opening ceremony. In the age of social media when arguably news about an event can travel faster than the actual event happening (think the tweets firing off as the Japanese Tsunami happened) NBC should have learned that they could not tape delay such an important event. Why was the opening ceremony not offered to viewers on their live stream? If they were so concerned about their advertisers, couldn’t they have just included advertising as part of the live stream? Or perhaps included some more innovative ways to mesh online advertising with the live stream? I recognize they have sunk close to $1.8 billion in these games, so money is clearly a huge factor here; but they could have done a better job handling the opening ceremony, and the fallout thereafter.

The games are an awesome time for everyone to come together and root for our country even when things aren’t looking so great both in the economy and in the country as a whole. Let’s hope NBC can learn from their mistakes and get things right as the games progress. Here’s hoping the Americans can keep the medal count neck and neck with the Chinese!

Weekly Reading Roundup

Below is a collection of various articles and posts across the web that I have been reading or are currently reading.

Incredible Europe Video of the Day

This video was a time lapse done by David Smith while on a few trips through Europe. In his own words, from his Vimeo page:

The images used in this time lapse were taken in 2011 over the course of three summer months in Europe. My wife’s mother lives in Lithuania, just outside of the capital city Vilnius, so we decided to make it our homebase from the end of May through August while we traveled to various countries. Some of the places we had been to were new to us, others we had visited before. But all in all, it was an amazing summer and definitely an unforgettable part of our lives. – David Smith

Just makes me want to go there so badly (I’ve only ever been to London but never to continental Europe). Here is the video:

EuroLapse from David Kosmos Smith on Vimeo.

Backblaze Lands $5M in Funding

I had the opportunity to meet with Gleb and a few members of the Backblaze team while out in San Francisco. This is a great win for them! Their technology is absolutely incredible and they managed to create their own cloud storage custom built that seriously competes with AWS and other similar cloud storage systems. Their competitors are the big guys in the field, but they should all be worried with the ease of use of their technology, as well as the cost of their inputs. Without going into specific details, let’s just say their cost of servers is MUCH less than their competitors, which allow them to provide their service at such a low monthly price point while also earning profit (as Gleb says, they have been profitable since the early days of the company post-bootstrapping).

If you are in the market for an incredibly simple, easy to use backup solution where you do not have to think of your backup, go with Backblaze. They have an incredible team and an incredible product and I cannot speak anything but highly of them. Congratulations on this round!

Incredible Video of the Day

Well then, this is just incredible. I don’t really follow Moto GP at all, but I think we can all recognize that this took a lot of skill…and pure guts. I’m truly surprised he didn’t completely wipe out.

Granted this video was posted back in 2009, but I just saw it. And it’s awesome.

UPDATE: Looks like a copyright notice shows up when you want to watch the site via the embed feature. You can still view the video on YouTube in all its glory. Sorry about that!

Weekly Reading Roundup

A collection of articles and posts that I have been reading over the past week.

And at the moment, I figured I would post the song that I am listening to while writing this post:

None other than The Allman Brothers band Live from the Fillmore East in ’71. Love this track.