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    The Black Rider

    authentic since 1981 'welcome to my bomboclot mind'

    Sunday, October 21, 2012

    Stream of Oblivion

    From Evernote:

    Stream of Oblivion

    Good morning world. First organic blog entry in forever dot com here. Been like forever. I always come here to write my thoughts during time of duress it seems. I started blogging in the winter of 2006 when I was 25. Eventually my blog became a place for me to feed my own ego so I emailed stories to the words in there to get hits. Now it's for whatever. 

     Writer writes because he must and so I'm writing today. I must speak. No spell check no clarity I care not too much for grammar or punctuation.  This is just for me. 

    Life is short and cruel and rewarding and we are not all equipped to get through it. Live and die every day. Fight. Destroy. Have an attitude. Give a damn. Don't care what other people think. Care what what you think of yourself. 

    Can you go to bed at nigh and wake up in the morning. 

    Are your intentions good and productive. 

    Avoid the illusions of magicians and trickster who use their wiles to deceive. 

    Win. 

    Life is too long to give up and too short to give in. 

    Make people upset and laugh at their umbrage

    It is a compliment when people are upset at you. 

    You matter. 

    Win. 

    Fuck the noise. Make a spectacle of yourself. Smile. 

    I'm going to start making a habit of this. 

    I have a wealth of words and lyrics to share. And I will share it. 

    Go. 

    Sunday, October 14, 2012

    Reuter site - Analysis: Smaller firms grab big slice of mobile advertising

    This article was sent to you from bombastic4000@yahoo.com, who uses Reuters Mobile Site to get news and information on the go. To access Reuters on your mobile phone, go to:
    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSBRE89B0YU20121012

    Analysis: Smaller firms grab big slice of mobile advertising

    Fri, Oct 12 15:44 PM EDT

    By Sayantani Ghosh

    (Reuters) - When Auntie Anne's, the pretzel chain, wanted to tempt moms in Atlanta shopping malls with free offers, it dished out coupons through smartphones that could be redeemed immediately for a free drink or other specials.

    But while the moms received the coupons on their iPhone or Android device, the power behind the campaign was not Google Inc or Apple Inc -- it was Millennial Media, a nimble six-year old independent that has grabbed the No.2 spot in mobile advertising in the United States.

    Google is No.1, but the flexibility of its smaller rivals is helping them catch up in a U.S. market that is expected to triple in size to more than $20 billion in the next three years, according to market research firm Gartner.

    Smaller firms have the freedom to reach users who use any mobile operating system, unlike Apple, which promotes advertising on its Apple iOS platform, and Google, which handles advertising across all devices but also has its own platform, Android.

    "Advertisers want to be able to reach the broadest population they can and in the mobile world, where the platforms are fragmented, this gives an opening to the providers who are truly platform neutral," Gartner analyst Andrew Frank said.

    Google held 24 percent of the U.S. market last year, while Millennial had 17 percent and Apple 15.5 percent, according to market research firm IDC. Unlisted Jumptap held 9.5 percent, Yahoo Inc 7.5 percent and India's InMobi 2.2. percent.

    Ireland-based Velti Plc, which listed in early 2011, is also chasing market share.

    Investors are taking notice.

    While Facebook Inc has been pilloried for lacking a mobile strategy, shares of Millennial have jumped 76 percent from a low of $9 in early August. Shares of Velti have leaped 59 percent from a life low of $4.99 on July 25.

    Millennial, a roughly $1 billion company, is a great bet for someone looking for investments in mobile advertising, said Steven Dray, a portfolio manager at investment firm AlphaOne Capital Partners LLC.

    "When you get to brand advertising, which is eventually going to be a huge pile of money that's going to move from traditional advertising to mobile, I think that's where Millennial and some of the smaller players could have very good success," Dray said.

    AlphaOne bought into Millennial after its initial public offering in March and holds about 40,000 shares in the company.

    Despite the run-up in their shares, the smaller firms have not run ahead of the sector. Millennial trades at 4.3 times forward 12-month sales and Velti trades at 1.3 times.

    While their businesses are obviously much bigger and more varied, Google trades at a multiple of 4.6 and Facebook at 6.7.

    As consumers increasingly surf the Web on the go, advertisers are looking to ply them with targeted information about nearby restaurants, pubs, theaters, shops and salons.

    But there's no point pitching a shampoo to a skinhead, so the secret sauce for advertisers is user information -- and Millennial's trove of user data is what CEO Paul Palmieri is counting on to give his firm an advantage.

    Millennial gathers "first-party" data -- information that users provide to a publisher, or that is gleaned from surfing habits that website owners share with advertising companies.

    "It is also valuable to users because the more targeted-advertising they get, the more relevant their experience ends up being," Palmieri said, although analysts say the privacy issues this raises are yet to be resolved.

    The smaller companies tout their tight focus on the mobile sector, rather than worrying about how that fits in with online advertising.

    "We only focus on mobile. Google on the other hand has many different things to worry about. Yes mobile is important, but is it the most important? Probably not," said InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari, although he is not complacent about the challenge.

    "The only way to compete with (Google) is by innovating faster," said Tewari, who expects his 850-person company to report billions of dollars in revenue in a couple of years.

    RISING COMPETITION

    But the big guns are not far away. The entry of Facebook and Twitter is expected to change mobile advertising.

    Facebook, which declined to comment for this story, is investing heavily in improving mobile applications and creating new metrics to measure the success of mobile advertising -- a move expected to give a fillip to the wider market.

    "There is a lack of maturity in the metrics that are available for measuring mobile campaigns," Gartner's Frank said.

    "That's where there's an opening for innovation that some of the larger companies are not able to satisfy today."

    Twitter, too, expanded its advertising program for the iPhone and Android devices and now sells promoted tweets and advertises promoted accounts on its mobile applications timeline, rather than only on a search page.

    And Google is determined not to lose its No.1 spot. It bought mobile ad platform AdMob in 2009 and its YouTube video service recently launched a new iPhone app that carries video advertisements.

    The success of iPhones and Android smartphones and the fact that Google owns many popular mobile applications also helps push its mobile advertisements.

    ROAD BLOCKS

    The mobile advertising model has its detractors, and some have groused that the small screen on mobile devices makes viewing advertisements difficult, while a lack of good mobile websites might keep away potential viewers.

    Users tend to spend less time on their mobiles in one go and advertisements have to be designed for short attention spans.

    "I think it's still a struggle. Most of the advertising that you see on mobile devices today is still predominantly not very well targeted or not very granually targeted," Frank said.

    Uncertainty about how best to advertise on mobile platforms is holding back the valuations of mobile advertising firms, Baird and Co analyst Colin Sebastian said.

    While industry-standard measurements are lacking, the companies argue that mobile advertising has five times the click-through rate of online advertising.

    "You can touch the ad, flip the ad, move the ad, you can do things that you cannot do on a PC. Your interactivity levels are very high," Tewari said.

    (This story was corrected to remove paragraph 29 that refers to Google's mobile advertisement revenue run-rate as the data was from 2011)

    (Additional reporting by Aurindom Mukherjee; Editing by Rodney Joyce)

    Tuesday, October 9, 2012

    Reuter site - Nobel for quantum "parlor trick" that could make super computers

    This article was sent to you from bombastic4000@yahoo.com, who uses Reuters Mobile Site to get news and information on the go. To access Reuters on your mobile phone, go to:
    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSBRE8980DZ20121009

    Nobel for quantum "parlor trick" that could make super computers

    Tue, Oct 09 08:18 AM EDT

    By Niklas Pollard and Anna Ringstrom

    STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A French and an American scientist won the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for finding ways to measure quantum particles without destroying them, which could make it possible to build a new kind of computer far more powerful than any seen before.

    Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland, both 68, found ways to manipulate the very smallest particles of matter and light to observe strange behavior that previously could only be imagined in equations and thought experiments.

    Wineland has described his own work as a "parlor trick" that performed the seemingly magical feat of putting an object in two places at once. Other scientists praised the achievements as bringing to life the wildest dreams of science fiction.

    "The Nobel laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded them the 8 million crown ($1.2 million) Nobel Prize in Physics.

    "Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century."

    Haroche said he was walking in the street with his wife when he recognized the Swedish country code on the incoming call to inform him of the award.

    "I saw the area code 46, then I sat down," he told reporters in Sweden by telephone. "First I called my children, then I called my closest colleagues, without whom I would never have won this prize," he said. Asked how he would celebrate, he said: "I will have champagne, of course."

    He told Reuters he hoped the prize would give him a platform "that will allow me to communicate ideas, not just in this field of research but for research in general, fundamental research".

    Physics is the second of this year's crop of awards; scientists from Britain and Japan shared the first prize on Monday, in medicine, for adult stem cell research. The prizes, which reward achievements in science, literature and peace, were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of Swedish dynamite millionaire Alfred Nobel.

    WEIRDER ASPECTS

    "This year's Nobel Prize recognizes some of the most incredible experimental tests of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics," said Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey in Britain.

    "Until the last decade or two, some of these results were nothing more than ideas in science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists. Wineland and Haroche and their teams have shown just how strange the quantum world really is and opened up the potential for new technologies undreamt of not so long ago."

    Quantum physics studies the behavior of the fundamental building blocks of the universe at a scale smaller than atoms, when tiny particles act in strange ways that can only be described with advanced mathematics.

    Researchers have long dreamt of building "quantum computers" that would operate using that mathematics - able to conduct far more complicated calculations and hold vastly more data than classical computers. But they could only be built if the behavior of individual particles could be observed.

    "Single particles are not easily isolated from their surrounding environment, and they lose their mysterious quantum properties as soon as they interact with the outside world," the Nobel committee explained.

    "Through their ingenious laboratory methods Haroche and Wineland, together with their research groups, have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, which were previously thought inaccessible for direct observation. The new methods allow them to examine, control and count the particles."

    Both scientists work in the field of quantum optics, studying the fundamental interactions between light and matter. The Nobel committee said they used opposite approaches to the same problem: Wineland uses light particles - or photons - to measure and control particles of matter - electrons - while Haroche uses electrons to control and measure photons.

    In one of the strange properties of quantum mechanics, tiny particles act as if they are simultaneously in two locations, based on the likelihood that they would be found at either, known as a "superposition".

    It was long thought that it would be impossible to demonstrate this in a lab. But Wineland's "parlor trick" was to hit an atom with laser light, which according to quantum theory would have a 50 percent chance of moving it, and observe the atom at two different locations, 80 billionths of a meter apart.

    In a normal computer, a switch must either be on or off. A quantum computer would work with switches that, like the particles in Wineland's experiment, behaved as if they were in more than one position at the same time.

    An example is a computer trying to work out the shortest route around town for a travelling salesman. A traditional computer might try every possible route and then choose the shortest. A quantum computer could do the calculation in one step, as if the salesman travelled each route simultaneously.

    ($1 = 6.6125 Swedish crowns)

    (Additional reporting by Sharon Begley, Patrick Lannin, Alistair Scrutton, Chris Wickham, Ben Hirschler and Nicholas Vinocur; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Will Waterman)

    Monday, October 1, 2012

    Reuter site - Facebook's new pitch to brand advertisers: forget about clicks

    This article was sent to you from bombastic4000@yahoo.com, who uses Reuters Mobile Site to get news and information on the go. To access Reuters on your mobile phone, go to:
    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSBRE8900I120121001

    Facebook's new pitch to brand advertisers: forget about clicks

    Mon, Oct 01 12:12 PM EDT

    By Alexei Oreskovic

    SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc, stung by doubts that advertising on the social network delivers enough bang for the buck, is preparing to unveil data to counter its critics and show that "clicks," the current metric of choice, tell only half the story.

    The world's No. 1 social network, embarrassed just days before its IPO when General Motors declared it was pulling the plug on all paid advertising on its network, will argue that big-brand marketers should abandon the industry's obsession with numbers of clicks and focus on more effective advertising techniques.

    Fewer than 1 percent of in-store sales tied to brand advertising campaigns on Facebook come from people who clicked on an ad, according to a new study that Facebook has conducted through a partnership with Datalogix, a data mining firm that tracks real world retail sales.

    "We ended up in this world where the click is king," said Brad Smallwood, Facebook's head of measurement and insights, who will present some of Facebook's findings at one of the advertising industry's biggest conferences in New York on Monday.

    While designing online ads to garner clicks makes sense for certain type of companies - such as e-commerce firms trying to ring-up immediate online sales - clicks are not relevant to brand marketers, Smallwood said.

    Through its partnership with Datalogix, Facebook says it can now give brand marketers data on the actual in-store sales that their ad campaigns on Facebook have generated - a more useful piece of feedback than total clicks. Datalogix tracks the relationship between ads on Facebook and real-world spending by compiling consumer purchasing information from retail stores and matching it with data about Facebook ad impressions.

    Facebook's push to provide marketers with more feedback comes as the company's revenue growth slows and the effectiveness of its ads remains a hotly debated topic. Facebook, whose stock by the end of the third quarter was down 43 percent since its May initial public offering, has unveiled a variety of new advertising capabilities in recent months, including its first ads designed to be viewed on smartpthones.

    "Advertisers have been increasingly vocal about concerns regarding effectiveness of Facebook," said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

    Clicks became a metric of choice in part because they had become directly tied to Google Inc's performance. The world's No. 1 Web search engine offers an effective and easy-to-measure form of advertising because it lets marketers reach consumers at the moment they are searching for a particular product.

    If a consumer clicks on the search ad, the job is done.

    But Facebook argues that for brand advertisers, fine-tuning the number of times a particular consumer sees an ad as well as ensuring that the ad has reached all of its target audience are far more effective techniques.

    According to Smallwood, marketers can increase the return on investment from their ads by 40 percent by focusing on an ad's so-called frequency - instead of one Facebook user seeing an ad 100 times and another user seeing the ad only twice, for example, Facebook says it will soon offer advertisers' insight on the ideal number of ad impressions for a particular campaign.

    "Using the Datalogix tool, we'll able to understand what that sweetspot is," Smallwood said, adding that Facebook will then control how often each user sees the ad.

    Many large brand advertising campaigns are not even hitting half of their target audience, according to Smallwood. But ad campaigns that focus on getting the optimal reach are 88 percent more effective at improving their return on investment, Facebook says its studies have shown.

    Getting online advertisers to break their long-running focus on clicks will not be easy, but Facebook says the techniques it is advocating are standard in the television advertising world.

    As Facebook strives to convince marketers to think differently, the company also has to assuage privacy concerns.

    Facebook's partnership with Datalogix has raised complaints from some privacy advocates, who say the social networking company could be violating the terms of a privacy settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission by not obtaining the express consent from users to share their personal information.

    Smallwood said that the only information given to Datalogix is that people were exposed to certain marketing messages, adding that Facebook is not receiving any personal consumer information from Datalogix.

    (Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic)

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    If you know me then you know my name. I am The Black Rider and the world is my Flame. The rider writes, observes, creates, produces, and learns the world around him. Ride on. Ride on!

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