Fellows of IBM and Microsoft at Enterprise Developers Conference

Yesterday I participated in the Enterprise Developers Conference.

I particularly enjoyed the speech of Walker Royce, a vice president and chief software economist at IBM. His talk had a definite structure and goal.

Grigory Melnik from the patterns&practices division at Microsoft made a quite another impression. I believe he had looked through the presentation just before his public appearance. At the same time his enormous pride of being a Microsoft fellow made me laugh. This is a pathetic imitation of Steve Balmer.

Tchaikovsky Ballet

Yesterday I watched the Tchaikovsky ballet by Boris Eifman. I believe this is the first time Eifman comes to Kiev.

The choreography is quite unusual for me since it is not classical. Furthermore libreto is not easy to understand, the language is rather complex.

Turning Social into Cash

Almost two years ago I had a talk to a friend of mine about online communities and mechanisms that can be used to analyze relationships between them and their preferences to products and services. The principal idea was based on the fact that social communities consist of people who has common preferences, points of view on some facts, etc. This gives a field for market analysts how to find out the most effective advertisement for the target audience.

Today I looked through some research papers searching for a comprehensive description of sales opportunity estimation. I found a site of Claudia Perlich, a former IBM researcher at Watson Research Center, who has become a chief researcher at Media6Degrees recently. The company makes a bridge between social networks with tons of private information and ads providers. The company holds a number of patents allowing them to make decisions without direct access to user data.

Didn’t you know what social networks are needed for?

http://www.us-venture-partners.us/usvp/news/releases/20090626.pdf