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Adam DrakeIntroduction When a company wants to make data one of the prime focuses of the business, often the first problem that arises is how to fit a Data Science team into the current organizational structure. Similar problems have risen in the past with Business Intelligence/Business Analytics, and other disciplines, but the reason that Data Science presents a different problem is because it is a superset of previous areas in terms of technical and business scope. Since a Data Science group is concerned with so many areas of the business, and many levels of technical and product detail, it’s not always straightforward to arrange a Data Science team within the existing organizational structure.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to compute some statistics on win/loss ratios for chess games he downloaded from the millionbase archive, and generally have fun with EMR. Since the data volume was only about 1.75GB containing around 2 million chess games, I was skeptical of using Hadoop for the task, but I can understand his goal of learning and having fun with mrjob and EMR. Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results, it seems ideally suited to stream processing with shell commands. I tried this out, and for the same amount of data I was able to use my laptop to get the results in about 12 seconds (processing speed of about 270MB/sec), while the Hadoop processing took about 26 minutes (processing speed of about 1.14MB/sec).
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read more Adam DrakeThere has been some debate recently on AdExchanger about the benefits of first price versus second price auctions. Esco Strong, the Director of Display Marketplace Strategy for Microsoft Advertising wrote an article that basically said second price auctions didn’t work well for single unit RTB auctions and we should get rid of them:
Comparatively, first-price auctions are competitions where there is no reduction in clearing price for the auction winner; instead, the winner simply acquires the good they have won by paying the price of their bid. The dynamics of this type of marketplace would become much more straightforward and predictable, enabling more parties to participate and experience stable results, as well as manage their businesses to a of set expectations that won’t require constant revision.
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read more Adam DrakeThe advertising world is both feeding, and being fed a lot of hype about the current state and potential of mobile advertising. It’s no doubt that this form of marketing is unique in many ways, and offers opportunities not available via other forms of advertising. As an example, on mobile you can take advantage of information like a relatively precise knowledge of the location of the individual. Now, it is debatable whether such granular knowledge of a person’s location is a good, bad, or neutral thing, but the fact remains that this piece of information is something that simply has not been available to advertisers until recently. Additionally, advertising on mobile is almost guaranteed to be seen by the user due to both the nature of interaction with the device and additionally due to smaller screen sizes. Lastly, the time spent interacting with mobile devices is far greater than time spent with print media, so the percentage of advertising budgets spent on mobile should be proportionally higher, right?
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