trendpreneur

The guys at Penny-Arcade love Kenny Rogers, and so do I. His songs underpin my teenage years, parental music choices becoming truly appreciated. One of his greatest songs is The Gambler:

Said: if you’re gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right.

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

Now ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to surviving
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
Cause ev’ry hands a winner and ev’ry hands a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

Perhaps not that last line. But it’s really struck home to me lately that all this is a big game, and you gotta know the rules. Once you do? It’s easy.

Everything has an underlying pattern, from what makes up a good business plan to marketing strategy to the n slides of an investor presentation. Learn the rules, learn the frameworks, learn how to fill in the gaps… and Bob’s your uncle. (Actually, I really do have an uncle called Bob.)

See, Kenny was right.

Yesterday I had the mixed pleasure of getting up at the crack of dawn to head to Aberdeen for my third NESTA Starter for 6 workshop. S46, as it’s affectionately known, is a scheme whereby aspiring creative and technology entrepreneurs get some solid hands-on training in the various skills needed to run a successful business.

This month’s session was on marketing, run by two seasoned professionals from The Value Innovators. Obviously defining and then approaching your target market in the right way is crucial to a young business’s success, as startups rarely have the cash or even the time to absorb wasted marketing efforts.

The session focused on four key aspects of marketing: product, customers, promotion and PR.
[...]

Eurovision, to those uninitiated in this glorious annual ritual of self-parodying and ultra-serious Europop, is technically a European version of The X Factor. Only with a voting system Congress would be proud of, with countries picking local favourites, allocating points, and the winner being the country garnering the most points overall.

Voting has traditionally been a wondrous mish-mash of politics and geography combined with points directly proportional to the cheesiness of the act. For example, the UK always tends to vote Ireland up, and vice versa; Eastern European countries pat each other on the back, and Germany never gives points to France.

(This is somewhat of an exaggeration, but as a teenager, Eurovision was how I learnt international politics and, later, the French for ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’.)

So, I went on what I’ll fondly call a public transport experiment on my way home from the airport on Saturday night. This is relevant, because it means I was on a bus in the middle of nowhere for most of Eurovision. Fortunately, thanks to Twitter, it was as if I was sat at home in front of the TV.

Nothing really comes close to Twitter for event coverage when you’re away from civilisation. It really was amazing. Snark and sarcasm from celebrities coupled with genuine patriotism, descriptions of astounding costumes, and mildly-concealed insults (it’s not xenophobia if it’s Eurovision, right?).

The First Eurovision Problem

The title of this post is misleading; there are two Eurovision problems (discounting the fact the UK didn’t come last, disappointingly).

Firstly was my simple inability, when on the move, to only follow certain Eurovision-related tweets. I heard that @Schofe and @Wossy were providing great commentary, but their tweets either got lost in the flood of ‘all updates’ or ‘all eurovision’; I didn’t have a way to see ‘all (friends + eurovision)’.

Nor did I, using Tweetie, have a way to temporarily define a group of people whose updates I wanted to follow. I was tempted to create a new Twitter account just to follow a few people and get Eurovision that way, but figured it would be too awkward to do this by phone.

Of course, this is all my own fault for following so many people in the first place, so I suppose the solution would be to do a grand Twitter prune, or set up a second account just for information overload. But that doesn’t really seem in the spirit of it.

The Second Eurovision Problem

This is a fun and meaty information filtering problem that relates to realtime predictions in a big way. I didn’t have a chance to watch Hubdub/Betfair/etc change as the show was going on, but I dearly wish I had.

Clearly, as people see the various acts, their opinion of the best one changes. Thus the probability of a certain act winning changes over time as more variables enter the equation. This is also affected by hype and, sadly, the aforementioned geography and politics (although I think this is less the case than it used to be).

With Eurovision, it’s likely a safe bet to say that as each act plays, it introduces a new probability of that act winning into the overall picture, and also affects the probability of previous acts’ victories. (Note that a bad song may increase the previous acts’ chances!)

The probabilistic question is whether to start off assuming each act is equally likely to win, or to break time into discrete units and assume that only acts that have played so far have a probability of winning (so at t=2, with two countries having played, the only possible winners are those countries).

Perhaps a mix of the two, mirroring the viewer’s tendency to ‘pick a favourite’ but also look forward to certain new acts. This combines hype and visibility. Once the act has played, it becomes a known variable, affected by future acts but also far more tangible than before.

Would you feel more or less comfortable putting your money on Norway before or after they have played? How about after everyone has played? At what point would you commit £100 to a win – or would you always hedge and put some on your second favourite?

Where this becomes a really interesting problem, for me, is in social media analysis. I was very tuned into the Twitter conversation around Eurovision, although due to information overload and 3G black holes I didn’t see or digest every single tweet. What took part was the pub or living room conversation, on a larger scale.

To what extent did Twitter sentiment about the Eurovision participants reflect the overall voting?

To what extent did it reflect the voting of the United Kingdom?

To what extent was it wildly wrong?

The latter is interesting. Given country X, with a ridiculous Euro-trash entry in some language nobody’s ever heard of, with pink hotpants and glitter and other ridicule-worthy aspects, the conversation traffic about it might be surprisingly positive. It would certainly be disproportionately high given the entry’s quality.

But does this reflect perhaps a sympathy vote? If everyone’s ridiculing Nowherezikstan, does that stop at Twitter snark or does it translate into points? How can we tell the difference between genuine excitement, ridicule just because it’s bad, and ridicule because it’s so bad it’s actually quite good?

Back to the first two questions. Thanks to Twitter geocoding, we can strip out the UK opinion from everyone else’s, or we can just assume that the majority of English-speaking tweets who care about Eurovision will come from the UK. We do need to do some filtering, or else we will just assume our own country wins; as countries can’t vote for themselves, we need to remove that as a possibility.

The ultimate question and gold standard involve two things: how do the betting companies do it? and how can we build something that reflects twitter/online sentiment (think Facebook Connect on a Eurovision live stream) over time, comparing that to votes? It’s like a constant, ongoing, realtime poll that could affect betting as well as simply being a fun way of automatically watching bar charts change as you talk.

Of course, there are problems associated with the IR/NLP side of things. How do we know which entry a tweet refers to? How do we track @-conversations to measure agreement with sentiment? (e.g. @Wossy says Norway’s act is amazing and 100 people say “@Wossy I agree!!!!”). How do we strip out the sarcasm, or do we? Do we build a probability model specific to Eurovision and refine it after every act by looking at the sentiment, or do we simply track mentions and normalise? Do we even normalise?

There are answers to some of these problems, varying from the complicated to the simple (”We don’t”). Some of it is more experimental, to see what’s the best result. And some of it is just academic fun :)

So, next year, if you see an interactive, realtime, constantly-changing chart of who’s going to win Eurovision, you know who created it — and some of the hurdles along the way!

The Twitterverse is currently abuzz with a small change that’s caused a big noise.

Since the start, you could view your Twitter stream in three ways – server-side, so this affected whichever method you used to browse Twitter. The options were to only show ‘broadcast’ messages, i.e. nothing starting with an @; to show @-replies between people you were following, i.e. only conversations where you knew both parties (the default); and to show all messages, including those @-replies directed at people you didn’t follow.

Quite sensibly, Twitter looked at the user behaviour – almost everyone kept to the default. Having tried out the ‘firehose’, ‘everyone’s tweets to anyone’ approach I’m not that surprised. Even when I was following around 100 people, my stream became vastly noisy and unmanageable. The idea of being able to discover new people through seeing half their conversations was nice, but without any client that can pull in the rest of the conversation, it was like overhearing a phone conversation on the train — annoying and unnecessary.

Product management decision ahoy: ‘let’s remove the option, nobody (<2%) uses it and keeping it there costs money without translating that cost into value’.

Enter TechCrunch, stage left, and suddenly — apart from a bit of whining that TC should shut up about Twitter, which is fair enough — it’s cool to demand the ‘firehose’ of @-replies back. The angle that ‘we’re not smart enough for it’ was very clever, and also downright underhand. Spinning a product management decision so that most of the product’s users, who were previously unaware of the feature’s very existence, now demand for it back… I guess it causes pageviews, but it’s simply ridiculous.

There’s a bit of a terminology hiccup which isn’t helping, in that people are getting the idea that their actual ability to reply to people they don’t follow will be hindered – it won’t – or that they won’t see replies from people who don’t follow them – er, no. Even the discovery aspect isn’t really a big problem, as there are plenty of conversations/RTs/etc that don’t start with an @ and introduce the username later in the text. Those’ll still show up.

Twitter will almost certainly have to reverse the change, and those complaining loudest about it and yelling ‘#fixreplies‘ from the rooftops will go back to not using it. In fact, I wonder if the canniest thing they could do right now is to put the @-firehose option on – the one that everyone’s complaining about missing out on – and watch the majority of users drown in confusion for an hour or two.

3D films. The phrase instantly conjures up memories of cardboard glasses found in cereal packets, entranced slack-jawed children and dinosaurs. I distinctly remember a lot of dinosaurs being involved.

Coraline 3D had none of these. The silly specs are still a factor, but they’ve grown up; today’s dimension-adding specs could almost be mistaken for celebrity sunglasses. If that celebrity were Jarvis Cocker.

As for the drooling, I’ll cheerfully admit to that. You see, despite growing up in an age where aforesaid cereal boxen were ten a penny, I’d never seen a 3D movie or, well, 3D anything before. No, not even The Polar Express. Part of that is to do with wearing glasses, part of that is a mere disinterest. However, when I donned my x-ray specs during the trailers, I was actually impressed, a feeling of entranced wonder that only deepened as the film began.

A notable moment near the start of the film, where a needle appears to jut out of the screen right into the viewer’s face, really made me sit up and take notice of this 3D thing. As the film progressed, it was clear that a lot of clever thought had been put into various depth effects, and while I became more accustomed to it, every so often a particularly inspired use of the mechanics made me giggle in wonder.

I think part of this is due to the film itself; its eerie presentation, its haunting characters, its entrancing alternate world. Whether I was more moved by the film or by the three-dimensional presentation, it’s hard to say, but the 3D experience definitely added something I wasn’t expecting.

A little bit of film spoilage follows:

Films these days, especially animated ones, strike me more and more as simply games on auto-play. Coraline was one of the strongest adherents to this rule I’ve seen in a while; the sense of exploration, of dimension-twisting imagination, of a quest and final battle all are crucial ingredients to many videogames.

Think Psychonauts twisted up with a bit of classic point’n'click — get flashlight, use flashlight on bat-dogs — but in today’s 3D. I’m getting strong overtones of American McGee’s Alice, as Coraline jumps through the rabbit hole; and even the graphical style, that of scrawny necks, spindly legs, smooth surfaces, dilapidated buildings, is reminiscent of any of a handful of games with a darker touch (the ‘sneezed on by Tim Burton‘ style).

Of course, this is ironic given the film’s stop-motion, albeit not entirely. Still, watching Coraline makes me want to make the game, not play it; if it has that effect on some of the young and talented, then only good things can come of it.

To me the interesting things happen when we’re watching the film, passengers in Coraline’s story, and start wondering what we would have done differently were it a game. Perhaps that, in itself, is the game — one of imagination and supposition, of creating our own possibilities and worlds, rather than blindly shooting zombies in glorious Technicolour.

Although saving the world from an undead apocalypse is always fun.