Mike Plater

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Trying Samuel Adams Double Bock from their Imperial Series.

It is dark ruby in color, with a tan head that dissapates quickly.  I think I can smell the malt in this one.  Everything else is pretty light.  Oh wow, as soon as it hit my tongue I could tell the ‘size’ of the beer. It just feels big.  The maltiness is really piled on that leads to a not overpowering taste of the high alcohol content.

Had the Smuttynose’s Old Brown Dog Ale.  I didn’t know there was an American Brown Ale and a English Brown Ale.  Apparently the American is (stereotypically) bigger in terms of maltiness and hoppiness.  Though I’m still not sure I can actually taste the difference in different levels of malts.  I’ll have to work on that.

I am going to always look up the beer and style before tasting in the Beer Judge Guidelines and on BeerAdvocate.

Now on to the actual beer.

It had a dark reddish brown color with a tall off white colored head.  The smell had a strong coffee scent with a hoppy finish, though not as nutty or chocolaty as I expected.  It was smooth going down with a slightly bitter finish and a coffee after taste.

This monday brings a mashup from a DJ I just recently found, DJ Dave. The song samples Blink 182 and Wiz Khalifa, check it out:

No Sleep and All The Small Things by DJ Dave

Amid the flurry of negative posts about Groupon this morning I will throw a positive one into the pot.  This is more built upon a predictive ideology than and cold hard metrics.  Here are things I believe:

• There is no way Groupon will exist as it does today in 10 years
• The one daily deal idea is getting stale
• However, the idea of group buying for discounts will
• Groupon is the largest player in this space
• Groupon can fire just as fast as it can hire

With these things in mind I believe Groupon will eventually move to a self service model with business’ and send out a deal digest type email everyday with all of the relevant deals to that subscriber in their area.

If a business wants to use this type of service they will obviously want the largest subscriber base to send to.  Especially for niche business who want to target.  This means the company with the most subscribers and most data wins, aka Groupon.

As for the thousands of sales people Groupon has hired, they will eventually be fired, and then boom, Step 3: Profit.  It will become more economical for Groupon to start buying and consolidating the other smaller group buying sites; they’re basically buying the contact list.

Groupon will end up become the Adwords of the group buying industry.  Everyone knows it, everyone uses it first, then perhaps if you find a really really profitable campaign maybe if you have enough marketing savvy you’ll branch out to one of the lesser known niche group buying networks.

In the end though Groupon wins, which is why I’ll buy some stock.

As a marketing strategist I have had to try and figure out market penetration which hinges on knowing the total size of a market.  The most accurate and expensive method is to poll thousands of people asking which have the desired trait you are looking for, or you could buy some $3000 market report.  For most of us including me, this is not possible.  Thus I must scrounge around the internet piecing together disparate clues to hopefully shake out the other end some actionable data.

Let’s take the example that you are in charge of finding out how many fashion designers there are in the United States to sign up for your new website in the fashion business.

One decent source is the U.S. Department of Labor, which states that there are 22,700 fashion designers in the U.S.  This is nice, however it is slightly limited in that it only reflects people who’s full time jobs are fashion design, not people who do it as hobbies and who have expendable income to spend on it, nor is it easy to extrapolate outside the U.S.

Another source that is even more awesome is Facebook Ads.  Facebook allows you to see the approximate reach of your ads.  For example if we look up everyone in the U.S. that has indicated an interest of “Fashion Designer” and “Fashion Design” and “Fashion Designing”, ages 15 and older (this will be important for later) there are 73,260 people.

However Facebook only represents a subset of the U.S. population, a very large subset albeit.  There are currently 146,328,340 U.S. Facebook users over the age of 15.  You can get this just by clearing the Interests section.  Now what we need is the population of the United States, with one caveat, Facebook is only suppose to represent individuals 13 and older so we need the population segmented by age.  I was only able to find this using our Census.Gov.  On that page change the Age Group to “Broad Age Groups” and Country to “United States”.  There you will be able to get the population 15 and up.  If you know of a place I can get populations age 13 and up please let me know in the comments.

The answer for the United States is 250,342,321.  Now we extrapolate the Facebook fashion designers based on the ratio of Facebook Users to United States population:

250,342,321 * 73,260 / 146,328,340 = 125,335

There we are, approximately 125,335 Fashion Designers live in the U.S., at least one’s with the potential enough to sign up for some service.

You can do the same thing for international markets as well, though it may be more accurate to use the average Facebook User penetration rate for the english speaking countries U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and South Africa, which as of now is 48.9%.

Happy market potentializing.

Mashup Mondays is something I want to try to make regular.  It’ll be just the track or maybe playlist I heard throughout the past week that I liked the most or just an oldy mashup that I want to share.  Mashups are my favorite type of music and I tend to find them using soundcloud.com and 8tracks.com.

Money to Brightside by Mochi Beats

I read about the tech world and all things startup a lot and being a marketer, I have to say it just makes me jealous.  Seeing all these people spitting out cool project after project, committing this and Git’n that.  So I took the plunge and decided to join the action; October 2010 I bought a PHP and Mysql book.

It took a while for me to get over the hump of thinking I didn’t need to learn to program.  I always figured I shouldn’t get lost in the code and could find some other way of making money and then bring on a team later.  My thought process is now that I can get to version 1.0 much quicker actually building it myself and ownership to me is king, so being a one person shop in the beginning fits that.  Plus no hacker respects a business guy with an idea.  So now I’m a business guy hacking and who can hopefully bring more the table upfront, a bizhacker if you will .

Anyway the beginning…sucked.  That book was (/is?) my bible.  I’d work through learning the different components and then when I felt I had a decent amount of tools in the box to build the first small project I had in my head, I set out.  Soon Stack Overflow became my best friend and PHP.Net became his really smart but annoying friend.   I was going back and forth toiling until finally after a couple of weeks of work out popped iChic.Me.  It’s a demo (currently broken I believe :/) of a clone for Techmeme.  I wanted something where I could just list a bunch of feeds, give each feed an importance score, and then it would just pop out the top 10 posts from the feeds based upon a formula of current Facebook stats, Twitter stats, my score, and time.

After that was done it was time to try something a little more ambitious, EspadaMate, the first true online blind dating service.  How it works is everyone receives a potential date a day, however all you can see is their picture and first name.  Only your  friends who you approve through Facebook can actually approve of the date.  If they do, you get sent to the dates approvers and if they approve of you, the two of you can message each other.  Needless to say this was a bit of an exercise for me in Mysql.  It took me about a month to make it and I could probably go back through it right now and cut the number of queries down to a third; I learned about joins and other cool stuff about 2/3rds of the way into building it.

While it was painful (if you think Facebook API sucks, try having that be one of your first programming experiences), I have to admit it was addicting.  I’d start coding at 7 and look up and all of sudden it was 4am.  And the victories…oh yeah the victories, when something finally..FINALLy, went right.  It feels like I just scored a touchdown in the superbowl, like I was giving a digital birth of bits onto the internet.

Now I’m working on some other projects, even collaborating.  It’s still hard but still addicting and I’m having as much fun now as the next guy

Let’s make a promise to build something, to build something of importance. This could be a piece of art, a published research paper, a business, a book; there are a lot of options. I believe people these days, especially young people are conditioned to care so much about a few indicators of talent and success such as a GPA. A good GPA has its place but it isn’t the end all of everything like many people make it out to be.
At this point there are plenty of self-appointed young go getters who will speak out and whole heartedly agree with me, saying it is important to do something constructive with your life even at an early point. However, the vast majority of these young people are probably thinking about the school or club positions they hold or the hospital volunteering they do, or the jobs they might have at a prestigous company. This is not building something. There were other student body presidents before, the hospital was built already, and that prestigous company will be hiring other people for the same job later.
Now that I’ve been a pesimist let me say that there is nothing wrong at all with any of these situations, in fact they are all quite useful, but they are very different from building something. Building something literally involves you creating something from seemingly nothing. This should not be too daunting. If you are a student then you’ve been doing it for a while. Yes your GPA is something you have built. Your GPA is actually very important because it is the first thing you are able to build and show off to others. But that is it. It is just the first thing you have built in a line of other things you are building.
So your a junior in college. You are a good student, high up in a few school clubs, what now? What about all the time you would have to put into and towards building something? Well the good thing is building something actually has a lot of weight behind it with other people. What’s more impressive, an internship at a very prominent publishing house or self-publishing your own successful collection of short stories during college? Even if you don’t actually want to depend on the things you build, such as wanting to be an author, building something still has the best time to benefit ratio for your career. An employer will greatly value a PROVEN self starter.
Now that you have decided to build something, what should you build? Well a lot of people will be self selected at this part, biology, english, art majors, etc.. What about for others who can not write a book or doing biology research or paint? It is true that while you are young it is tough to build certain things that might take more time and knowledge (tough but not impossible). I have found that the most prominent skills young people can use just as effectively as anyone else are writing, programming, and entrepreneurship. There probably are more and I’d love to know them. Luckily it almost doesn’t matter what your inclinations or passions are, they can probably use one of these three skills to build something.
Let’s say you have an interest in hip hop dancing. Let’s look at this interest from all three skills. Since you have this knowledge you could easily write down directions for all of the different moves with pictures and make a useful collection. Now you want to make this collection public and easily accessable, so you could create a website with pages for each move. You could even include movies and anything else useful. You might have to take an HTML class or use one of the many web page builders out there. Subsequently, you find out people like what you have written and put on the internet and your site is now one of the top hip hop dance sites on the net. You decide you could probably make some money off this now. So you get a camera and make a DVD, which you sell through your website, Amazon, and Google.
Now when you go in for an interview at a company, you don’t have to prove you can handle the operations through your words; you have already proven it through what you have built. The example above is one of first things I built. So I implore others to go out and actually build something. Everybody has the power to do nothing, some people have the power to do something, and few people actually do anything.