John Dowdell noticed that Lee Brimelow has posted a very interesting example of how to integrate Adobe Flash movies with WPF/E using JavaScript. In his example, a Flash movie is positioned next to a WPF/E movie and a ball appears to move between the two seamlessly.
TechCrunch is spotlighting a start-up called Swivel that describes themselves as "YouTube for Data." My first thought was "wow, that sounds pitchy." However, the site, which will supposedly launch later this week, allows for visual analysis of data sets submitted by users. Of the many start-up ideas I've heard about lately, this is probably the most interesting. Of course, I'll reserve judgment until it's finally released to see how well they execute on the concept.
Data analysis is a critical function for many jobs, whether you're a business analyst or even an engineer striving to improve performance in your application. YouTube, however, is useful for entertainment purposes. If this tool succeeds at making it easier for more people to analyze and collaborate on data visually, this could grow into a disruptive service. Though the readers of TechCrunch tend to be a fervent crowd, judging by the comments, others are excited by and see the potential of this idea as well.
Since this tool is targeted at a community, users could benefit from the brilliant and even accidental creations of others. It could also lead to the exchange of difficult to find data sets such as those related to humanitarian efforts. For example, it might be revealing to plot data sets such as the number of deaths from AIDS in Africa versus dollars contributed from the World Bank to fight this epidemic.
Incidentally and stunningly, according to the recent Economist, AIDS has claimed the lives of over two million people living in Africa in 2005. According to Wikipedia, the population of San Jose is 953,679 and the population of San Francisco is 798,680. Imagine if the population of both these cities just disappeared in a year?
Screenshot from TechCrunch:
Walt asked me today about how my experiences have been with my web hosting provider Media Temple. Funny enough, I've been meaning to write about this very topic, and so I thought I'd take a quick moment and acknowledge the fine work the team at Media Temple has done on their amazing Grid-Server product. Yes, the rest of this blog entry is border line product placement, but when a team builds phenomenal product, particularly one that I invested in early, it's in my nature to promote it!
Today, they announced version 1.1 which incorporates numerous performance enhancements. Admittedly, I have yet to encounter any performance issues, but I'm not taxing their grid architecture like others who run high traffic web applications. Nevertheless, the performance and stability has been light years beyond my previous providers -- and the value is unmatched by their competition.
For those of you aren't familiar with Media Temple, for $20 a month you get:
I've just about consolidated all of my domains to Media Temple's Grid-Server now because the business model is structured so that the customer isn't taxed for hosting one domain or one hundred domains! They've also made it very easy to install application containers for tools and technologies such as Ruby. And, yes, the web interface to Cron jobs, 1-click installs, SSH and AJAX webmail are all icing on the cake!
What's also impressive to me is that they are fairly transparent with their roadmap and plan on offering more containers for other technologies such as ColdFusion, FlashMedia and more.
Here is a screenshot of the admin interface that allows you to control containers, manage accounts and more (click for a more detailed view):
Bob Sutton explores how Billy Beane, the talented general manager of baseball's Oakland Athletics, is applying the scientific method to innovate his talent portfolio while still maintaining a profitable business. Beane is doing so well that he's even garnering the respect and admiration of the investment community.
Bob, whose blog I recently discovered and is fast becoming one of my favorites, writes:
There are many signs that the system works, for example, Oakland's cost per win in 2005 was $450,000 in salary, while the New York Yankees paid 1.4 million. The 2006 payrolls (when Oakland had a better season than the Yankees) were about 60 million for the A's and about 200 million for the Yankees. Bean and his staff do impressive analysis to make decisions that gain them cost advantages and increase their odds of success. For example, they stay away for star players that are coming out of high school and prefer college graduates because only 5% of baseball players drafted straight out of high school are in the major leagues in three years, while 17% of college graduates that are drafted make it to the majors.
Also, Bob references one quote from a recent Financial Times article that I particularly like that well summarizes Beane's philosophy to risk management:
So Beane and his statisticians invested their energy in analyzing defence, which is still by far the hardest aspect of the game to categorise numerically. Their efforts resulted last year in what was by common consent the best fielding team in the league. Fielding was under-priced, so once Beane and his team could find a way to measure it, they went out and bought it. “If I can’t measure it, I’m not going to invest in it. The intangibles – personally I don’t believe in it, but that’s just my opinion.”
The ability to quantify and positively react to risk better than one's competitors is clearly a major competitive advantage. The importance of defining success metrics to compare risk is something that I continually try to achieve in my own work, but it's easy to become dependent on predefined or "industry standard" metrics rather than developing new ones. My takeaway: differentiate yourself from others by applying creativity to metrics.
© Copyright 2006 Rob Christensen. All rights reserved.
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