Virtual Advertising in Videos

For one of the hacks at A9/Amazon, I teamed up with one of my co-workers to insert ads into videos for brands. The idea was to identify spots in image frames where you can embed brand ads to present a seamless experience to the users. We used opencv, choose sample videos, used machine learning, color and shape detection algorithms to figure out spots in image frames which can be swapped out with banners of ads. After embedding ads into frames we re-composed back the video. For monetization, we proposed pay for play to the advertisers.

It was a lot of learning and hacking in one day. The crowd who looked at the hack were mesmerized with the idea. After the hack presentation, we found out that one of the judges, founded a start up with the same idea. It was a lot of learning and hacking in one day. A very memorable experience.

Excerpts from my older blog on internet archive

Using the power of web archive project, I was able to get content from my old blog, I used to publish in 2007-2008 time frame. You can see my previous blog here at http://web.archive.org/web/20080420212438/http://www.techiemusings.com/

Here are some interesting articles I picked up:

Location aware Mobile Applications

May 10, 2008 at 8:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

We now have a OS on mobile phones exposing location as a attribute with Google’s Android. The practical applications are huge, the simplest being a poor man’s GPS if you combine with public Wifi’s. I did some research to see if there are any mobile browsers or mobile applications, exposing information about location of a user. Interestingly enough, I found information about twibble  a location aware mobile client, metosphere a mobile browser for Google Android.

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Location Based Advertising

November 17, 2007 at 8:00 am · Filed under Uncategorized

I have been researching around to see the progress in the industry on location based advertising. I stumbled upon proximitymedia a contextual advertising firm which uses blue-tooth network to target content/ads to the user. Applications are end less. A customer gets lunch coupons, when a user enters mall during lunch time, sees movie trailers when he is waiting in a queue for tickets.

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Content Recognition Software

November 15, 2007 at 7:07 am · Filed under Uncategorized

With the proliferation of peer to peer networks and youtube’s, I was researching to see, if I could find any software company which is cashing on copyright infrinngement detection. The software is definitely complex, given the scenario of multiple devices, mutliple wave formats and multiple encoding formats. A variation of fingerprints, hash signatures using Fast Fourier Transform are used to automate the detection of copyright infringement. Virage a division of Autonomy software is helping big name clients like BBC for detection of copyright infringement.

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Social Ads and its hidden Implications

November 6, 2007 at 5:07 am · Filed under Uncategorized, Internet Advertising, Google

I was discussing about Social Ads from Facebook and its implications with one of the co-worker. In my previous post, I was ignoring one major advantage of a Social Network for advertisers, the “social effect”. If an advertiser is able to convert (acquire) at-least one user in a social network, the user can influence decision making of his close friends in the network and hence indirectly increase acquisitions for the advertiser. Google is doing all the right things to prevent Facebook from becomming the dominant Social Network. It would be interesting to follow the adoption of Social Ads across the web.

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Social Ads from Facebook

November 2, 2007 at 5:34 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Facebook is throwing a direct challenge at Google by invading on its domain. It is all set to release “Social Ads” a platform for outside developers to develop niche applications to target ads to facebook users outside of network, based on cookies placed by facebook. This can be a game changing play from facebook, as profiles of facebook users is a rich source of information to target ads. That partly explains the lofty market cap Microsoft gave to Facebook. Google in-turn, has released Open Social platform to dilute the effect of Facebook social network. I am sure, Yahoo is going to make moves in this domain, as it is still the world’s most popular social network.

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Peer to Peer Knowledge Management

November 1, 2007 at 5:18 am · Filed under Search

I was researching articles to know more about peer to peer networks. The recent propulsion of data transfer with an increase in youtube like sites has increased load on network. CDN’s are moving from centralized single point architectures to peer to peer nodes. This explains the recent vc funding into startups working on peer to peer cdn’s. Extending the concept, I was surprised to find the amount of research being done into peer to peer knowledge management. A direct take from one of the publications is “Of all the application domains we have studied, knowledge management is the one where the benefits of peer-to-peer and a clear and straightforward business model for suppliers are most evident”. By coupling virtual meta data of knowledge of all the nodes in a knowledge network and map of node to meta data, individudal data node can be a source of global information, making the node a better decision maker. The applications of such a framework are endless. The literature talks of knowledge management in a enterprise as a classic case

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Direct Mail Targeting by Zillow

October 31, 2007 at 12:19 am · Filed under Internet Advertising

While, I was browsing through the web, I found an interesting article on how zillow is changing the game of direct mail marketing. The whole process started, sometime back in Sep 2006, when it allowed the users to add annotations to their home locations. Since, then now have more data about the adresses, and profiles of homes, zillow is selling this data to advertisers, which can then target the ads based on specific addess detail. Interesting concept. I wonder, if yahoo real estate would do anything in this space.

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Story of Domain Names

October 30, 2007 at 10:09 pm · Filed under Java, Automated Domain Registration

Over the weekend, just for the sake of registering interesting domain names, I ran code to look for unregistered domains on yahoo domains with 3 or 4 alphabets using java httpclient. To my surprise, all the domains are allready taken. Though, I was expecting that domains with 3 alphabets being taken, but not with all the possible combinations of 4 alphabets. This effectively means, that 26*26*26*26 domains names are all ready taken. I was shocked. Yahoo with its 1.99$ domain registration deal seems to be the culprit. Another interesting conclusion, was the rate at which User Generated Content/Internet awareness is spreading over.

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Silicon Valley Code Camp

October 30, 2007 at 5:31 am · Filed under Java, Microsoft

I attended/volunteered for the Silicon Vally Code camp over the weekend. It was a fun event. Had a chance to talk to Peter Kellner, Dave Wright. Dave Wright was confident that it is just the matter of time, before Live.com takes over Google. The technology sessions were really great. People were talking more about commodity computing/ondemand computing, a concept started by Sun Microsystems and now mass marketed by Amazon EC2/S3 services. It is getting traction with mainstream developers and is something definite to watch about. Dave Wright was commenting that Microsoft is not going to enter into it, unless it really starts kicking in. I was also amazed by number of people interested in knowing more about SilverLight. Adobe has to watch out. Though, I completely disagree, someone in session was evangelizing upon modifying architectures to use a cache/relational db in browsers to optimize load on servers. Another interesting session was GridGain a grid computing framework for Java. Overall, it was fun 2 days.

Integers Compression - Number Pairing

I ran into a problem where-in I wanted to persist multiple status codes into one integer for optimizing space. I thought about the problem more and ended up with potential solutions which could potentially leverage bit arithmetic of integers, but the solution was not generalized.

I eventually stumbled on this article on wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function which talked about a general mathematical function to represent multiple numbers using a single number. I could imaging applications of this approach in multiple scenarios such as caching sequences, compressing collections etc.

Mathematics of Decision Making

Did you have to choose one decision out of several decisions ?. Through out our life, we make decisions. We need to find a spouse and have to choose one of the n potential candidates. We need to hire a programmer in the team, and we need to interview m people and find one candidate. Did you explore a career opporutnity recently ?. You have to choose one job, after interviewing m companies and make a stopping decision Do you see the pattern ?. I was researching around to see, if there is any optimal number of decision, we should be looking around before finalizing on one decision. I stumbled around the secretary problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem which suggests that optimal cutoff for further exploration is n/e and we are guaranteed to make the best decision with a probability of 1/e. It is very interesting to see how the random processes can actually help us in guiding us when to stop looking for more options and narrowing down on one.

Crowd Sourcing or User Sourcing

Lucene has got trec data set to measure relevance of search engine. When you are trying to figure out relevance of search engine using either ndcg or mrr methods, you need to get a golden ranking order. Big companies with financial resources get the golden ranking order for search queries using crowd sourcing methods such as crowdflower or amazon trunk. How should a startup with minimal resources can get the golden ranking order. One way to get golden ranking order is to use user clicks. If you remove position bias and compute the click through for search results you can potentially get golden ordering by sorting the results by click throughs. How do you remove position bais ?. You can potentially aggregate the click troughs at each of the positions in search result for a search query by a category or grouping and use it as a heuristic for position bias. Another question, still pops ?. If you are using user clicks, don't the users always click results you show them ?. How do you evaluate relevance for results which you don't show ?. A potential solution can be explore/exploit strategy. If we make a assumption that our top 10 documents are going to be there in top 20-30 results, we can randomly show different users different 10 search results and learn golden ranking from the results.

Balance Algorithm in Auctions

Reviving 2 year old blog with a post on Auction Theory. I was looking into existing solutions for the classic adwords auction problem. Natural instinct says, that we can order the ads in auction using a naive greedy strategy of bids from the advertisers. This approach is not optimal, and has got a competitive ration of .50. The competitive ratio is an indicator of revenue capture or monetization efficiency from the advertisers in auction. A slight variation of the positions allocation to advertisers using remaining budget has got a competitive ratio of .8 in majority of use cases. This variation is called as Balance algorithm. If you want to take relevancy of the documents into consideration, you need to model a function with ctr and tfidf score of documents. I am surprised how subtle variations of algorithms can have an impact of millions of dollars on businesses.

Welcome to my blog

Thanks for visiting my blog. I work as a Staff Engineer at Ebay. Before ebay, I worked at companies like Yahoo, Emc and Seagate. I have filed for several patents in different Software offerings. You can reach me at nomulaj@gmail.com for any software ventures.