Affiliate marketing - Apple uses LinkShare

31. January 2012 by admin.

Did you know that in order to become an affiliate for Apple Itunes you need to create an account at LinkShare (run by the same company that hosts Buy.com)

Here is the link to get started earning affiliate income when you use the JSON api

LinkShare Referral Program

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only 30% - “well I think I need to pass on my knowledge to my kids, now”

30. January 2012 by admin.

According to the Harvard researchers, there is performance persistence in entrepreneurship.

They write, “All else equal, a venture-capital-backed entrepreneur who succeeds in a venture (by our definition, starts a company that goes public) has a 30% chance of succeeding in his next venture. By contrast, first-time entrepreneurs have only an 18% chance of succeeding and entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding.”

Posted in Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

Greenfield to the Cloud

23. January 2012 by admin.

Bought the RAD-XE suite today:

Offer extended to January 31, 2012! - Delphi XE2, C++Builder XE2 and RAD Studio XE2 are here with new capabilities you’ve been waiting for like 64-bit Delphi and the ability to target both Windows and Mac from a single source code base. For a limited time, all earlier version users qualify for upgrade pricing. You can save up to 45% off the regular, new user price if you upgrade by January 31st!

Embarcadero has a killer suite here.

Bonus: Buy One Tool, Get a Second Tool Free! - Combine two offers for the very best deal. Purchase by January 31 to get the upgrade price. Then when you register your new XE2 product, choose a second Embarcadero developer tool or database tool of equal or lesser value free. See the BOGO information page for complete details.

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Technology IPO market

18. January 2012 by admin.

• The rise of late stage private equity (including secondary markets) provides all the liquidity of an IPO without the regulation;
• The high cost of compliance and new regulations has closed the IPO market to many smaller companies; and,
• Despite the trend, companies with strong fundamentals and real businesses still have access to public markets

Posted in Wealth Management, Invention, Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

Wicked Systems

16. January 2012 by admin.

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2007systems/Thursday/AM/Track8/UnderstandingSocialNetworks_BriefingFINAL.pdf

It is possible to correlate the product of the social interaction of

the individuals involved, with the properties of wicked problems.

• Relevant correlations:  Requirement articulation

– Property 1:  There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.

– Property 7: Every wicked problem is essentially unique

– Property 6:  Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively

describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of

permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan

“Social network analysis is based on an assumption of the importance of relationships

among interacting units.  The social network perspective encompasses theories,

models, and applications that are expressed in terms of relational concepts or

processes.”

[1]

• Social network analysis should not be outside the capability of a systems engineer,

but rather its benefits would fold nicely into mission engineering—a core component

of systems engineering.

– Mission engineering is that often overlooked aspect in which the system

developers ask the ‘big picture’ question: “why is this system being

developed?”

[2]

– Social network analysis makes the question more fundamental: “Why is this

system being developed and who is important to its sustained success?”

• “The purpose of social network analysis is to provide insightful information and

inferences on the organization and structural properties of a network, given its nodes

and relations.

– Property 8: Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another

problem

– Property 5: Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”;

because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts

significantly

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Metro style app samples- get ready for windows 8

10. January 2012 by admin.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps

Windows 8 Developer Preview Metro style app samples

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample pack includes all the Metro style app code examples developed for Windows 8 Developer Preview. The sample pack provides a convenient way to download all the samples at once.

XAML, DirectX, Direct3D

9/14/2011

61,935 Downloads

     (66)

App Bar Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to use the app bar to present navigation, commands, and tools to users. The app bar is hidden by default and appears when users swipe a finger from the top or bottom edge of the screen. It covers the content of the applic…

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

25,816 Downloads

C#, VB.NET, C++,JavaScript

     (18)

Splash screen sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample shows how to customize the transition from splash screen to app.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

9,930 Downloads

C#, C++, JavaScript

     (10)

File access sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample shows how to create, read, write to, copy or delete a file, how to retrieve file properties, and how to add a file to the most recently used (MRU) list and then retrieve the file from the list.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

8,982 Downloads

C#, C++, JavaScript

     (7)

Simple Direct3D 11.1 Game Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates a basic end-to-end model for a simple first person 3D game using DirectX (Direct3D 11.1, Direct2D, and DirectWrite) in a Metro style C++ app.

DirectX, Direct3D

9/14/2011

7,611 Downloads

C++

     (9)

FlipView Control

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to use the FlipView control.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

5,110 Downloads

C#, VB.NET, C++,JavaScript

     (3)

Basic Controls

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to use the basic controls.

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

4,808 Downloads

C#, VB.NET

     (4)

Advanced Tiles Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates advanced functionality for creating and sending tile notifications.

Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

3,835 Downloads

C#, JavaScript

     (6)

Simple HTML5 Canvas Game Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

Demonstrates how to structure a basic casual game in HTML5, from end-to-end. The game included in the sample is deliberately simple to minimize distractions from game logic intended to be replaced.

HTML5, Windows Runtime

10/5/2011

1,171 Downloads

JavaScript

     (4)

Metro style Device App for Camera Sample

Official Windows SDK Sample - Microsoft

This sample demonstrates how to create a Metro style device app for camera. A Metro style device app is provided by an IHV or OEM to differentiate the capture experience for a particular camera. It can be used to adjust camera settings or to provide …

XAML, HTML5, Windows Runtime

9/14/2011

3,530 Downloads

C#, C++, JavaScript

     (3)

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The world is smaller than we expected “Chains”

9. January 2012 by admin.

Frigyes Karinthy, in his 1929 short story “L\’aancszemek” (”Chains”) suggested that any two persons are distanced by at most six friendship links. (The exact wording of the story is slightly ambiguous: “He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual […]”. It is not completely clear whether the selected individual is part of the five, so this could actually allude to distance five or six in the language of graph theory, but the “six degrees of separation” phrase stuck after John Guare’s 1990 eponymous play. Following Milgram’s definition and Guare’s interpretation, we will assume that “degrees of separation” is the same as “distance minus one”, where “distance” is the usual path length-the number of arcs in the path.) Stanley Milgram in his famous experiment challenged people to route postcards to a fixed recipient by passing them only through direct acquaintances. The average number of intermediaries on the path of the postcards lay between 4.4 and 5.7, depending on the sample of people chosen. 
We report the results of the first world-scale social-network graph-distance computations, using the entire Facebook network of active users (\approx721 million users, \approx69 billion friendship links). The average distance we observe is 4.74, corresponding to 3.74 intermediaries or “degrees of separation”, showing that the world is even smaller than we expected, and prompting the title of this paper. More generally, we study the distance distribution of Facebook and of some interesting geographic subgraphs, looking also at their evolution over time. 
The networks we are able to explore are almost two orders of magnitude larger than those analysed in the previous literature. We report detailed statistical metadata showing that our measurements (which rely on probabilistic algorithms) are very accurate.

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How to increase newsfeed exposure

9. January 2012 by admin.

 

The great thing about Facebook is that it allows us to connect with others anytime, anywhere. That’s great, but how can we possibly see all of those connections?

 

One feature that most Facebook users don’t know about is increasing their number of connections that display in their newsfeed. This allows us to see more (and share more) from our friends.

 

One feature that most Facebook users don’t know about is increasing their number of connections that display in their newsfeed. This allows us to see more (and share more) from our friends.

 

 

Increase your facebook connections.

 

Here are the steps you can take to increase the number of connections you see on Facebook.

1. Login to Facebook

2. Scroll to the bottom of your newsfeed

3. Look for ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Edit Options’ - hint: they’re at the bottom of your newsfeed.

4. Change the number of friends to 5,000 to show in your live newsfeed and click save.

 

That’s it! I have included a screen of what you should see.

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Facebook fundamentals

9. January 2012 by admin.

Anatomy of Facebook

by Lars Backstrom on Monday, November 21, 2011 at 5:04pm

Think back to the last time you were in a crowded airport or bus terminal far from home. Did you consider that the person sitting next to you probably knew a friend of a friend of a friend of yours? In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment” famously tested the idea that any two people in the world are separated by only a small number of intermediate connections, arguably the first experimental study to reveal the surprising structure of social networks.

With the rise of modern computing, social networks are now being mapped in digital form, giving researchers the ability to study them on a much grander, even global, scale. Continuing this tradition of social network research, Facebook, in collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, is today releasing two studies of the Facebook social graph.

First, we measured how many friends people have, and found that this distribution differs significantly from previous studies of large-scale social networks. Second, we found that the degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown. Finally, we observed that while the entire world is only a few degrees away, a user’s friends are most likely to be of a similar age and come from the same country.

In our studies, performed earlier this year, we examined all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them. To date, these are the largest social network studies ever released.

How many friends?

An important basic view of any social network is the cumulative degree distribution, which shows the percentage of individuals that have less than a given number of friends. As you can see above, only 10% of people have less than 10 friends, 20% have less than 25 friends, while 50% (the median) have over 100 friends. Meanwhile, because the distribution is highly skewed, the average friend count is 190. An important finding from our study, however, is that the distribution is not nearly as skewed as earlier studies of social networks have suggested.

At first glance, the median friend count on Facebook — 100 — may seem surprisingly low; a quick survey of my own friends reveals that they almost all have more than 100 friends. But no, your friends are not atypically social – a classic paradox regarding social networks dictates that, for most people, the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count. On Facebook, that’s the case for 84% of our users. Why? Scott Feld wrote about this phenomenon in his 1991 paper Why Your Friends Have More Friends than You Do, showing that the same phenomenon dictates that college students typically find that their classes to be larger than the average class size, and that when sitting on an airplane, it will typically be more crowded than the average occupancy. These effects all arise because for people, classes, and flights to be popular, you must be much more likely to choose them. So you shouldn’t feel bad if it seems like all your friends are more popular than you: it appears this way to most of us.

Four degrees of separation.

The idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ — that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections — was first proposed in 1929 in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, and made popular by the John Guare play and movie, Six Degrees of Separation. The idea was first put to the test by Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s. Milgram selected 296 volunteers and asked them to dispatch a message to a specific individual, a stockholder living in the Boston suburb of Sharon, Massachusetts. The volunteers were told that they couldn’t send the message directly to the target person (unless the sender knew them personally), but that they should route the message to a personal acquaintance that was more likely than the sender to know the target person. Milgram found that the average number of intermediate persons in these chains was 5.2 (representing about 6 hops). The experiment showed that not only are there few degrees of separation between any two people, but that individuals can successfully navigate these short paths, even though they have no way of seeing the entire network.

While we will never know if it was true in 1929, the scale and international reach of Facebook allows us to finally perform this study on a global scale. Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops). It is important to note that while Milgram was motivated by the same question (how many individuals separate any two people), these numbers are not directly comparable; his subjects only had limited knowledge of the social network, while we have a nearly complete representation of the entire thing. Our measurements essentially describe the shortest possible routes that his subjects could have found.

Your friends and you.

It’s easy for me to imagine that a path from me to a random person in Siberia goes first to one of my few Russian friends in California, and then hops around the globe to a friend of theirs living in Russia. But, while I can imagine these short paths connecting all pairs of people in the world, this notion stands in sharp contrast to my day-to-day experience. Most of my friends live in the US, and the ones I am closest to live within just a few miles of me.

This is what makes social networks somewhat unique: they are both well-connected in the sense that you can reach anyone from anyone else in a relatively short number of hops, but at the same time, they are very locally clustered, with the vast majority of connections spanning a short distance. In our study, we found that 84% of all connections are between users in the same country. But this isn’t the only dimension along which people tend to cluster. We also find that people tend to have a similar, albeit typically smaller, number of friends as their neighbors, and tend to be about the same age. Somewhat surprisingly, even for individuals aged 60, the distribution of their friends’ ages is sharply peaked at exactly 60.

Conclusions

To facilitate open access within the scientific community, the two works are available for download:

J. Ugander, B. Karrer, L. Backstrom, C. Marlow.

The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph,

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503

L. Backstrom, P. Boldi, M. Rosa, J. Ugander, S. Vigna.

Four Degrees of Separation,

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570

In these two works, we show how the Facebook social network is at once both global and local. It connects people who are far apart, but also has the dense local structure we see in small communities. We show that, as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become even more connected. In the years to come, we look forward to continuing to illuminate social trends and helping people understand how the world is becoming more connected.

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culled Siri commands

9. January 2012 by admin.

Siri commands iPhone URL Schemes:

Useless Commands: 

If you say “Smile Face” ———— Siri interprets it as “:-)”

If you say “Wink Face” ———— Siri interprets it as “;-)”

Useful Commands:

If you say “Period” ———— Siri interprets it as “.”

If you say “Coma” ———— Siri interprets it as “,”

If you say “Exclamation Point” ———— Siri interprets it as “!”

If you say “Question Mark” ———— Siri interprets it as “?”

If you say “New Paragraph” —- Siri creates a new line or new paragraph

Hard ones:

If you say “Open Parenthesis” ———— Siri interprets it as “(”

If you say “Close Parenthesis” ———— Siri interprets it as “)”

If you say “Open Quotation” ———— Siri interprets it as “”"

If you say “Close Quotation” ———— Siri interprets it as “”"

If you say “All Caps” before a “word” —- Siri interprets it as “WORD”

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