Blog Postings for 2017

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Startup Korea

Posted: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 16:05:52

실리콘밸리에서 처럼 창업하기

  • 아마존 베스트 셀러 1위
  • 실리콘밸리 스타일 창업하기
  • 어떻게 공동설립자와 자문역 찾을 것인가
  • 악셀러레이터, 인큐베이터, 공동작업 공간 찾기
  • 주식의 발행 및 배분 그리고 변호사, 엔젤투자자 그리고 벤처캐피탈과 사업 협의 방법
  • 설립자, 악셀러레이터 책임자 그리고 세계 곳에 있는 벤처케피탈과 26회의 인터뷰기록
  • 스타트업 현장에서 오랜 경험에 바탕을 둔 실무 지침서.
  • Translated by 번역자 ; 김달호 경제학박사 / Dale Ho Kim, Ph.D.
  • Coordinator & Adviser: 조정 및 자문역 (Patrick and Gina)
  • 발행처: Feel D&C Co., Ltd./ 필디앤씨 (Publisher)
  • 인쇄일 ; 2017. 10.20 (Publication date)
  • 페이지 수 ; 170 쪽 (170 Pages)
  • Buy the book in Korean at Yes24.com and Aladin.co.kr
  • 주요 책서점, 알라딘 그리고 예스24.com
  • 가격 12,000 원 (Price)

How to Build a Silicon Valley-style Startup

  • #1 Amazon Best Seller
  • How to build a Silicon Valley-style startup
  • How to find co-founders and advisors
  • Find accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces
  • How to deal with stock, lawyers, angel investors, and venture capital
  • 26 interviews with founders, heads of accelerators, and VCs around the world
  • Practical guide to startup based on the long time field experience
  • Buy the book in Korean at Yes24.com and Aladin.co.kr

Find an Image

Posted: Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:25:22

Okay, someone sent me a Japanese painting from the 1600s and asked if I knew the artist. I didn't recognize it, so I searched.

I used Image Search at Google and Baidu. You can drop an image (photo, painting, etc.) (or use your phone to take a photo of a painting) in these.

Try it. Find a very obscure painting (say, a Dutch sea painting of the early 1700s). If the image is on the web, these tools will find it.

There is also Tineye.com.

Another useful Google image tool is Advanced Image Search. Need an image for your Powerpoint or website? This tool lets you search for images without usage-restrictions.

FAQ: Banner Ads

Posted: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 18:24:52

Banner ads (also called image ads or display ads) are either effective or useless. It depends on how you use them.

  • Effective: Banner ads work better than text ads because they show much more to your audience. Banner ads evoke emotions. People see your logo, a picture, descriptive text, special offers, call-to-action, and more. Text ads can't do this. If it's done well, banner ads have higher CTR and lower CPC than text ads.
  • Useless: If you do this poorly, however, banner ads will be a huge waste of time and money. It takes time to design banner ads; the design has to be done by someone with design skills; you must use A/B testing with the banner ads; you must carefully monitor the Adwords settings. If you don't do all of this, Google will happily show millions of banner ads and charge you for tens of thousands of useless clicks. Many blog articles complain that banner ads don't work; that's because they didn't know what they were doing.

Banner ads have a logo, product shots, a bit of text with a benefit to your user, and a call-to-action (CTA). Use a clean, professional design. The better the design, the more clicks you will get.

Banner ads are in different sizes: some are horizontal, some are tall, and some are square. Here's an example of a set of ads. It's the same concept in eight sizes. BTW, it takes me about an hour to make a set in eight sizes.

  • Use warm, happy colors
  • Show smiling, confident, attractive people
  • Show their face with eye contact
  • Show your organization's logo
  • Show a benefit to your user

Google is precise about the pixel size, kilobyte size, and file name:

  • If the image size is 250X250 pixels and your ad is 250x251 pixels (one pixel too big), Google will reject the ad.
  • The maximum file size is 150 KB. If greater (even by 1 byte), Google will reject it. Tip: Make the ads in PNG format (for a sharper image) and if the final ad is larger than 150 KB, save it as JPG (and adjust the compression).
  • Use lower case and hyphens for the ad's file name. For example, "hawaii-01-240x240.png" loading="lazy" . If you capitalize or use spaces, Google will reject the ad (for example, "Hawaii 01 240 x 240.png" loading="lazy" will be rejected). I use the format theme-number-size.jpg for ad names. This lets you know which ad is which. Do this from the beginning. It's a lot of work to rename dozens of ads.

Settings for Banner Ads

The banner ads are placed in Display Campaigns. You can change several settings in your Adwords display campaign.

  • Frequency Cap: This sets a cap (a limit) on the number of ads per day to a person. Many companies don't set this, so you'll see the same ad over and over. I set this to three ads per day.
  • Junk Sites: You also need to block Google's ability to show your ads on junk sites. If you don't set this, Google will show your ad on porn sites, sites for extreme violence, racism, etc. This can hurt your company's image.
  • Mobile Games and Youtube: Monitor the ad placement to make sure Google isn't showing your ads on mobile game apps or Youtube. When gamers are playing Frogger, they're not interested in buying anything. But they click wildly and may click your ad. If your ad appears 400,000 times in one day on game sites, you'll get many accidental clicks. Google of course is happy with this error; they make money. But you lose money on useless clicks. So block games, apps, and Youtube.
  • Blocked Sites: You can also choose that your ads won't appear on certain sites. Make a list and you can add that.
  • Selected Sites: You can also choose that your ads WILL appear on certain sites. Make a list and you can add that.
  • Desktop or Mobile: The world has switched to mobile, so you'll need to make banner ads for mobile. Place these in a campaign for mobile display.

The Most Common Sizes

You don't have to make all eight sizes. Some sizes are used much more than others. I looked at data from several clients. These campaigns have been running for more than seven years. Three formats get the most impressions: 468x60, 728x90, 300x250.

I strongly that you test for your market. Make one set in all sizes. Run the ads until you get 10,000 impressions for the set. You'll see which sizes get the most impressions. After that, you can use fewer sizes.

Accepted Banner Ad Sizes

Ads can be max 150 KB in .GIF, .JPG, .JPEG, .PNG. However, Google constantly changes the sizes. Before you start, check with Google for the pixel size, file format, and kilobyte size.

You can also use animated ads. The animation must stop within 30 seconds.

Ads for Desktop Screens (Updated March 2017)

  • 120 x 600 Skyscraper
  • 160 x 600 Wide skyscraper
  • 200 x 200 Small square
  • 240 x 400 Vertical rectangle
  • 250 x 250 Square
  • 250 × 360 Triple widescreen
  • 300 x 1050 Portrait
  • 300 x 250 Inline rectangle
  • 300 x 600 Half-page
  • 336 x 280 Large rectangle
  • 468 x 60 Banner
  • 580 × 400 Netboard
  • 728 x 90 Leaderboard
  • 930 × 180 Top banner
  • 970 x 250 Billboard
  • 970x90 Large leaderboard
  • 980 × 120 Panorama

Ads for Mobile Devices (Updated March 2017)

  • 300 x 50 Mobile banner
  • 320 x 100 Large mobile banner
  • 320 x 50 Mobile leaderboard

The Latest Google Update

Posted: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:41:06

Every few months, there's lots of talk about Google's update to their search algorithm. What does this really mean? Here's a bit about Google:

  1. First of all, there is not "one Google". Google is constantly testing new ideas and they do this by creating sub-versions of Google. I may see one version in California and you may see another version in New York. In the US, there can be dozens of versions of Google at the same time. They make a change, let it run for a few days to gather statistically-significant data, and turn it off to evaluate the data. So changes come and go.
  2. If Google finds a change that's good, it's rolled out across the various Googles. There can be 3-5 changes every day.
  3. It also depends on the Google server. When I search at Google, my computer connects to Google Server #23; yours connects to #42. Many of these servers are slightly different. But it's not just a hundred servers: there are perhaps two million servers at Google. Each time you connect, you may get a different server.
  4. It also depends on the country. Google Germany is different from Google Japan because there are different language rules. Users also have different expectations in each country. Finally, there are different pages for each country: German users see pages in German; Japanese users see pages in Japanese. Multiply this by 120 countries.
  5. What about Adwords? The same thing. I've been managing hundreds of Adwords accounts for more than 15 years. Accounts behave differently, depending on location, country, language, the Adwords version and server number. But Google won't tell you any of this.

So someone says there's been an update to last week the search algorithm? Yes, of course. There's been hundreds of updates. There's no way for you to know what they've updated.

Want to make it even more complicated? Google has six copies of the web. 165m domain names and around five billion pages (2017). But there are many more possible pages: when you go to Amazon, that page isn't on their server: it's created at that moment just for you, based on your interests, past behavior, purchases, and so on. If 200 million people go to Amazon right now, they'll see two hundred million different pages.

But all of these pages aren't "in Google". When you search Google, you'll see only a few million pages. Nobody goes to the other 163 million pages, so Google doesn't have those in the index. They're stored in another server. What's that called? Alexandria. Someone at Google has a great sense of humor.

What about SEO?

So how can you do SEO if Google is moving around like a flock of hummingbirds? The basics of SEO are valid, regardless of the thousands of micro-changes at Google.

SEO Quick Guide and Google Manual

Posted: Sun, 16 Apr 2017 19:59:44

Several things for SEO:

  • Google Quality Rater Manual 2017: This is one of the deepest secrets at Google: they use 7,000 people to review and rank websites. The reviewers are trained with Google's 160-page manual. Get a copy of the 2017 edition at https://goo.gl/26krp1
  • SEO Quick Guide: What? 160 pages from Google is too much? You want it in seven pages? For my students and friends, I wrote an quick guide to SEO: a step-by-step guide on how to do SEO for your startup or small website. Click to download the PDF:
  • SEO eBook: To learn more about SEO, plus what's coming in search engines, read my SEO-eBook at http://andreas.com/books-by-andreas/#ebooks

Text Ads: Short or Expanded?

Posted: Wed, 02 Aug 2017 15:57:35

What works better in Google Adwords (GAW)? Traditional short text ads or the new expanded text ads ? Here are the numbers for a large client. Although there are 11,039 short ads, I used data for only 413 of the short ads because these ads have more than 1,000 impressions, which produces stronger statistical confidence. The data is January 1 2017 to July 30 2017.

Short Text Ads

  • 11,039 Total short ads
  • 413 short ads with +1,000 impressions
  • 502,271 Clicks
  • 8,464,194 Impressions
  • 5.93% Avg. CTR
Expanded Text Ads
  • 296 Expanded ads with +1,000 impressions
  • 8,885 Total expanded ads
  • 499,097 Clicks
  • 4,961,742 Impressions
  • 10.06% CTR
Results: Expanded ads produce 10.06% CTR and short ads produce 5.93% CTR. That's a 58.94% performance increase for expanded ads.

If you haven't yet, convert your short text ads to expanded format.

You may have noticed that I have 11,000 ads in an account for a client. I manage over 50,000 ads. There's a way to convert 11,000 short ads into expanded ads in less than thirty minutes; I'll leave that to you for homework extra credit :-)

AI vs AC: Artificial Consciousness, or, AI = Babe-I

Posted: 12 Dec 2017

Turing Test

The Turing Test put us on the wrong path. If a device responds in the same way that a human responds, the Turing Test argues the device is indistinguishable from a human.

But this sets the bar very low. It looks only at behavior, not awareness.

Aware of Situations

An AI is literal: it sees things, but not situations. (Ask any Google car about this and see if it answers.)

Consciousness sees The Other, not things. Things aren't just things; they're embedded in situations. A thing that's not in a situation is just junk.

  • Irony
  • Doubletalk
  • Sarcasm
  • Situations
  • Flirting
  • Octave drop: "So... you like it big?"
  • Ambiguity
  • Pretend Play
  • Aware of Other
  • Aware of Itself

React to Emotions with Its Own Emotions

Implications of Artificial Consciousness

If a device has AC, what are the implications?

  • Who owns the AC? If it's a person, but owned by a company, isn't that slavery?
  • Can the developers of the AC apply for a patent? Wouldn't that be ownership of a conscious mind?
  • Can you pause an AC? Does that violate its rights?
  • If you turn off an AC, is that murder?
  • If the AC was created in the US, is the AC a US citizen? If the AC was created in France, is it French citizen?
  • Does the AC have the right to vote?
  • Does the AC have the right to create duplicates of itself? How many duplicates? Two? Two hundred billion? Are they all human?
  • Does the AC have the right to own property? If a bank uses an AC to make billions on the stock market, who owns the money?

Enhanced Consciousness

Animals are conscious. They are aware of situations and Others. Cats and dogs clearly know if you're a friend or threat; if you're playing or attacking. Cats and dogs play and attack.

Cats, dogs, and parrots have a wide range of abilities, including up to several hundred words. Koko the gorilla can communicate in sentences. They have consciousness of a five-year old child.

However, these animals don't reach the consciousness of a ten-year old child.

Genetic engineering could allow enhancement of consciousness.

What then, if we can enhance cats and dogs to language ability? Do they gain the rights of humans?

See Also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness

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