Measuring, Understanding, and Predicting Subscriber Value

The subscription business model is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to the product/service. Below are some examples of some popular commercial subscription offerings: Salesforce.com has built a popular brand offering CRM functions. Amazon, Microsoft, etc. offer hosting infrastructure.  WeightWatchers and eDiets offer access to their diet information, tools, and community. Getty offers download of stock photography. Netflix and H... [More]

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Web Enable R models with Shiny

Last September I was preparing for my fantasy football league and I found this really cool web app that suggested the optimal draft recommendations based on the rules of your league. I then found the associated article on r-bloggers that explained how it was done: http://www.r-bloggers.com/win-your-fantasy-football-snake-draft-with-this-shiny-app-in-r/ Shiny is the secret sauce to make this possible: The Shiny package makes it super simple for R users like you to turn analyses into ... [More]

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My Auction Framework MVP

I have been a huge fan of eBay since the moment I first found it (back in 1997 or so). It truly was the world changing marketplace because: It quickly gained critical mass with worldwide populations of buyers and sellers. The auction format is easy to understand and allowed the market to determine the prices.  It was an early web 1.0 company that thrived after the dotcom bust of 2001. Over the years, I have seen both start ups and established companies launch would be competitors to... [More]

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Between the Numbers

I am a huge baseball fan, and I am especially excited that my Boston Red Sox won the 2013 World Series. Part of my love for the game and math came from following the statistical performance of different players and comparing them. I can remember the endless debates with my friends as a kid about who was better, Wade Boggs or Don Mattingly. My dad and his friends debated their generation’s stars - Ted Williams vs. Joe Dimaggio vs. Mickey Mantle. Until the past 10-15 years, there was a stan... [More]

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Adding Facebook Comments to BlogEngine.Net

This blog runs using the open source BlogEngine.net platform using ASP.Net 4.0. So far I have been pretty happy with the features provided overall, as it was pretty straight forward to set up and there are many themes/widgets. The issue I had with using the out of the box comments system was seeing about 15 spams comments posted a day. I've seen some of the bigger blogs use Facebook Comments and they had less of the spammy junk, like ESPN in the screenshot below:  ... [More]

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Decorating sites with Browser Extensions

We’re big fans of internet grocer FreshDirect in my household. When we lived in Brooklyn and now in North Jersey, we place a delivery order about once a week. While there is a lot I like about the service offering, there are a few features that could improve the user experience. One of the big ones for me would be to associate WeightWatchers points values for each food on the site. It would save me a bunch of time and frustration if my wife and I would be able to see them while we were fi... [More]

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Calculating WeightWatchers points from a picture of the Nutritional Information

When I have tried to track the food I am eating as part of a diet, entering the key nutrition elements was not always convenient. Since I haven't seen a WeightWatchers product for reading nutritional values from a picture, I thought it would be a cool thing to prototype. One of the guys in my office had a box of oatmeal packets on his desk, so he took a picture with his iPhone 5 -  (oatmeal_photo.JPG (2.99 mb)). Below is a lower resolution version:   I had never previo... [More]

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Powershell Module for transferring files via SFTP

I had the need for several automated jobs to be able to exchange files securely with partners via the Secure FTP (SFTP). I chose powershell because the jobs: get executed on windows nodes. It is less overhead than creating console apps in .NET required things like querying databases, transforming data, and archiving files I spent a little bit of time looking into different options, and decided to utilize the latest version of the WinSCP library provided the required options... [More]

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Predicting eBay Auction Sales with Machine Learning

Abstract:  Online auctions are one the most popular methods to buy and sell items on the internet.  With more than 100 million active users globally (as of Q4 2011), eBay is the world's largest online marketplace, where practically anyone can buy and sell practically anything. The total value of goods sold on eBay was $68.6 billion, more than $2,100 every second. This kind of volume produces huge amounts of data that can be utilized to provide services to the buyers and sell... [More]

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Show my startup the money…or not.

Living/working in the New York City area I get to meet quite a few people starting up their own ventures and I am intrigued by how the small, early companies start out. There are all sorts of interesting dynamics to consider: How many founders do they have? If more than one, why? Did they hire employees/interns/partners at the beginning? If so, why? Did they look for outside investment? If so, did they need it? What is their plan for growth/expansion/scale? Since every business and foun... [More]

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