How Mission critical is your project?

When you evaluate projects to work on, particularly if it is not a personal project, it helps to consider giving a lot of importance to how ‘Mission critical’ the project is. You might be developing in the same technology stack, but there is usually a magnitude of difference between what you learn while working on a Mission critical project versus what you learn in a normal project. All the required stuff that goes into developing a system that just cannot go down will be very crucial for you in the long run.

File this in the same folder as A New Metric For Startup Job Postings. The parameters that developers look for when choosing an assignment is fast changing. Number of users is just one – Mission criticality is another – we will see more!


The 99 Cents Pricing For Music: Where Did That Come From?

This is from Real Networks’ Rob Glaser:

“Now let me answer your question about why songs cost 99 cents (or 88 cents or 79 cents, but not usually 49 cents). Selling songs legitimately consists of 3 components: the cost of the recording, which we usually pay to the record company (who then pays the artist); “publishing” cost which goes to the company that owns the rights to the musical composition (who pays the song writer); and other costs such as credit card fees, bandwidth, and technical support.



We are working with the labels to prove this to them. We think over time we will succeed, but it will take time. The more that customers support our efforts both directly (by voting with your wallets) and by communicating directly to the music industry, the better.”

Source: Slashdot


How Do You Solve This Pain Point?

Most of our decisions these days are data-driven. Or, we think it is that way. The real issue is with data-capture. Let me give an example.

When I drive back from work, I have a choice between taking the freeway and avoiding it altogether. Sometimes I reach faster when I take the freeway, but not always. Every Day, I would like to take this decision based on probabilities. But I have no recorded data and hence no probabilities.

Now you can extend this pain point – As we move towards a data-driven future, hundreds of decisions we take in our everday lives would be driven by data such as this. The data-capture is a pain.

More examples:
Should You Take This Rest Area or the Next? What is the probability of the flight getting delayed?
What is the probability of that Craigslist item getting sold, in what timeframe?
By past history, what would be the Hotel Room availability – better still, what is the probabiltiy that this person would check out by 10 AM, etc?

(You: “I need to check-in early”. Hotel Receptionist: “Well, we can try. Based on past data, there is an 80 percent chance that the person there would be out by 10 AM”)

Summary is this: why do we never capture data that can be captured, and use it to make better decisions?
(On Air ticket fares, this is being used.)

Finally Google Glasses can tell us, like they show in Poker tournaments on TV, the appropriate percentages for different actions everywhere.

But for now – How do you solve this data-capture pain point?


How Is Big Data Measured? The 3 Vs of Big Data

We have definitely been hearing the term ‘Big Data’ quite frequently these days – but what scale are we really talking about? We had written some posts on how big cloud computing really is – we spotted some interesting stats on how big big data really is, not from a specifics standpoint, but from a scale perspective.



Flavors of data can be just as shocking because combinations of relational data, unstructured data such as text, images, video, and every other variations can cause complexity in storing, processing, and querying that data. ”

Statistics Source: Forrester


Who Is Standard & Poor’s To Dictate America On Debt Terms?

Robert Reich has some solid points on the debt ceiling debate:





Is The Jobs Report Almost Always Wrong?

We have written about how the government measures unemployment before – but the jobs report, the one that quotes the number of jobs gained or lost in a particular month, gets revised so many times later, that a lot of people are questioning if the report can ever be close to accurate. A Time article on this more or less summarizes the issue:

“Revisions are of course the norm with government reports, but most of those reports don’t get the attention that the jobs report gets. Worse, the size of the revision seem to matter more at times when the economy is weak. A difference of 50,000 jobs, which is well within what the government deems as an acceptable error, can really change the employment picture at a time when the economy is producing less than 100,000 jobs a month.”

Read more:

Here is the real reason why these numbers are not dependable:

“Making matters worse, the monthly numbers we get on the jobs market come from not one, but two surveys. The number of jobs comes from something called the establishment survey, which is done by asking 140,000 businesses and 440,000 workplaces to fill out a form in the middle of the month detailing how their payrolls have changed. The government takes that data and makes an estimate of how many people are employed in the entire country. The unemployment number, which is also released on the first Friday of the month, comes from a survey of 60,000 households. Despite the smaller sample, the unemployment rate often gets more attention than the jobs tally. Worse, at times the two surveys can say opposite things, which is exactly what happened last month when the unemployment rate rose, but so did the number of people with a job. The differing data can leave economists scratching their heads.”

Read more:

Measurement is key. But wrong measurements, and misinterpretations on top of that can have dire consequences.


Why The Unemployment Rate Went Up






Read more:


Measure Website Traffic Across Devices: comScore’s Total Universe Report

For many new services on the web, audience measurement is getting tougher since most of the usage is on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. comScore seems to have solved this problem with its latest solution.

[From comScore Press Release]


Source: comScore


How the US Government Measures Unemployment

Did you know that the US Government measures unemployment using a survey, and not on number of persons claiming unemployment benefits?



Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
