[ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups.
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Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down the road can decrease the time to market but only after assuming significant technical debt.
Balancing performance and scalability vs. fast iteration and cost efficiency can be a significant challenge for startups. The good news is that achieving this balance is not impossible. Here are a few tips to help you build a scalable startup.
1. Scalable startups start with the right foundation: A scalable foundation means that as you experience growth, you can throw hardware at the problem in a cost-efficient way giving you the most bang for your buck. Scaling up can become very expensive very quickly.
2. Scalable startups choose the right language and platform: Choosing the right development language is critical to building a scalable startup. If you choose a platform that gets the product out the door quickly but is inherently un-scalable, you have made the wrong bet.
3. Scalable startups invest in the right talent: Also important is being able to secure the right talent. This goes hand in hand with choosing the right language. Choosing a bleeding edge platform that’s more developer friendly than product friendly can create difficulties down the road when you need to find talent to help scale it. Hiring or seeking advice from an architect in the early days can help save significantly down the road.
4. Scalable startups worry about the right things: When building your startup, you should worry more about the foundation than sweating over performance increases.
5. Scalable startups stay away from building synchronous coupling: The main problem with synchronous coupling is that it makes users wait and ties up system resources that would have otherwise been released. In addition, synchronous operations require infrastructure to be scaled for peak load.
6. Scalable startups worry more about constant response time than latency: Low latency is important but constant response time is even more important. The latter can be achieved by building a foundation that allows for horizontal growth and distribution of load.
7. Scalable startups measure utilization first and then performance Measuring utilization of resources is crucial as it can indicate stress on a system and to what extent resources are being utilized. Measuring performance only helps in being able to speed up response time and is not a qualified measure of ability to handle additional growth.
8. Scalable startups go stateless Maintaining state is expensive. While it is possible to build an infrastructure that can maintain state using a shared system, it is best for scalable startups to build stateless applications.
9. Scalable startups virtualize/abstract everything Abstracting development modules helps keep things manageable. Among other things it allows developers with various skill sets to work on their own layers. For instance, by abstracting the layer that implements and manages database partitioning, you can hide the “ugly” partitioning (sharding) details from the application. This makes it easier to migrate and move logical shards within physical shards.
10. Scalable startups build using APIs APIs are an essential part of building startups as they allow for growth opportunities. Startups that are build using APIs find it easier to scale development, deployment and open up their service.
11. Scalable startups know which shift they belong to: Within the world of scalability, you are either a redshift startup or a blueshift startup. Redshift startups grow faster than Moore’s Law and eventually need to be scaled out. The absolute number of hardware components for redshift startups will continue to increase. Blueshift startups grow at the rate of Moore’s Law or slower and as a result, the infrastructure required for them will continue to curtail. Building an infrastructure that can scale out is suitable and highly recommended for redshift startups.
12. Scalable startups cache everything effectively One of my favorite quotes is “the best IO is no IO,” meaning essentially that the best way to serve data is when you don’t have to hit the disk. This can be achieved easily by effectively caching everything that can benefit from it.
Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo, is on the stage talking about Scaling Synchronous Web Apps at Web 2.0 Expo. There are about 40 million unique people using it and they are around 50 people or so.
The presentation is about tips and practices they have learned about how to scale now vs in 3 years. Scalability is very subjective.
the "hole" - multi-platform (lots of browsers) - spotty network connections - there are only 2 simultaneous open HTTP requests allowed (for now) - page views: Meebo uses 1 page so it is really hard to measure unless you do it on your own. On average a person stays on Meebo for two hours. - static content - no downloads
the "peg": the thing that you're trying to shove into the hole.
instantaneous data transfer: How do you deal with that?
long polling: browsers suck up memory
making the browser do work: Javascript requires the browser to do something. Trying to balance what you make the browser do and what you let the server do is really important.
seamless user experience: you're not going to use a product you don't like. Overall that's the thing you want to strive for.
What is Synchronous?: What part of your app is synchronous and what can you get away with NOT being synchronous? The more you try to dump into the synchronous category, the more issues you are going to be faced with.
She is more involved with the server side so the talk will be server focused.
Don't underestimate the server side architecture! In the start you won't know where the bottlenecks will be.
The type of application you are building determines the type of synchronous scaling you are going to need.
Peg helpers:
long polling (COMET): to keep connections open with Web servers
web servers: using the right technology. Meebo started with Apache which turned out to be not very good. They tried lighttpd and it turned out to be a great help as lighttpd is single thread and event based
compiled vs. interpreted: Meebo is written in C/C++. It's a tradeoff. hiring is difficult for them
databases: can be really expensive or cheap. They use MySQL. Their schemas are simple.
memcache:
load balancers: really expensive and you have to buy them in pairs.
Simple is usually better (unless you can dish out a lot of $$$). Ask yourself whether data is cacheable? Can you use DNS round robin instead of load balancers? Meebo started out using www1, www2 etc but then there were user headaches when the bookmarked URL will go down.
Can you use FastCGI vs. web modules vs. PHP? They ended up writing a module directly into the server.
Do you need to save state? is it persistent? Meebo didn't have user accounts for a long time. Launching feature light is not a bad thing.
Tug of war: There is always a delicate balance between what you can push to the browser and what you can let the server handle. Ask yourself where does the workload make sense? Browsers can be SLOW (just because you can do it in JavaScript, doesn't mean you should). Meebo users mostly use IE so it's optimized for that. Your users will sadly know more about your product than you do because they use it more. Also don't ignore the importance of efficiency with data transfer.
Good enough vs perfect: Perfection is enough simplicity in the system to allow for adaptation. Release and iterate often.
Think ahead but not too much: You shouldn't over-design for the unknown as over-designed code can be worse than hacky code. It makes it difficult to roll back an entire design. Think about building horizontally and see if you can throw more servers at the problem initially? Adding servers is expensive but has a shorter lead time, architecture takes longer but is "free" (development time is not free). Think about striking the right balance. You won't know where your bottlenecks are until you let it use.
Nothing simulates real life: You're probably not the end user. Contingency plans are key. Have some tricks that you haven't used yet. You should have a few tricks up your sleeve. In the end you'll always miss something, but that's ok.
Don't build flood gates, but instead build dams so you will be able to enable/disable components or change operating parameters during runtime. This includes front-end and back-end. When you roll out users, let them know that it may be buggy and you may need to pull it back.
In the end your users will behave in ways you never imagined.
Use your own product: don't be afraid to find bugs. You should overcome the fear of breaking your own product. It helps to keep your finger on the pulse of the community.Trust your users. Use blogs and scale customer service appropriately to stay in touch with users. 70% of meebo's users use IE. Make sacrifice for your users and use what they are using. Go where your users are going.
Being Big Brother: You should be aware of what is going on and monitor key areas: zabbix, nagios, hyperic, ganglia, etc. Eventually you WILL have to build something custom. Don't go overboard on monitoring, you're going to learn to ignore your alerts. You shouldn't ignore what your system tell you (not just hardware) as it is extremely dangerous. Goal of monitoring is basically asking: "is your app healthy?"
Final thoughts: There's no magic solution to scalability. It's very important that you understand the nooks and crannies of your architecture. You should be able to correlate effects to any system changes you make. Always keep the goal in mind, don't lose sight of it. What are you scaling? Remember, everyone scales differently!
Next session is Understanding the Basics of Personal Data: Vendors, Users and You.
Daniela Barbaosa and Chris Saad on the stage. They started data portability project together as co-founders 10 month ago. She works for Dow Jones and he works for Faraday Media.
Version 1 of the Web was the Document Web. Version 2 is the Social Web. They think the next web is the personal web. Data Portability as they define is, the ability to connect to, control, share and remix your personal data between trusted applications.
The inflection points of the industry. - Standardized PC Architecture - Windows: a standardized operating system brought a computer on every desk - IP was the birth of the Internet. - HTTP/HTML which gave birth to the web.
Next step is the standardization of data.
They are showing the data portability video.
Imagine owning and controlling your relationships where they follow your lead. Imagine controlling your calendar, images, video and content. Today, users participate in applications. We join applications. Imagine if instead, applications joined you. Imagine being able to synch your friends between social networks. Today, we share, we comment, we rate, but a user must sign up before being able to do so. The only two things that are unique to you are that they interact with your stuff and you make money. Rest is pretty standardized.
Vendors are hesitant about letting their "proprietary" data go. Data that vendors have isn't comprehensive and expiring fast. With data portability, you get more data, continuous data updates and reduced network fatigue.
They set up a project to crystalize and evangelize these efforts.
They were really no standards across the boards that were addressing data portability. No one was talking about data portability. Then they bought the domain. Then in January, Robert Scoble working with Plaxo scraped all his content from other social networks. That lead to a debate about privacy and security issues and about what users want?
Is it really possible? Yes, it is! It's already happening with OpenID, OAuth, XFN, APML, iCAL, hCal, XMPP, RSS, Atom, OPML etc. They are not creating a new technology, rather they are evangelizing formats.
There are a lot of open questions about security, privacy, who owns what, business models, user education, etc.
Daniela got involved because of the user education reason.
All the big vendors are playing including Microsoft, Google, Six Apart, MySpace, Facebook, Plaxo, digg, Yahoo! and LinkedIn.
Who cares about the big vendors? The dataportability project is an open, grass-roots effort. Anyone can participate. They have members all over the world. International privacy standards are different and they are continuously working on it.
They spent a lot of time working on the governance model. Anyone can join and start participating. They are based on an open participation model. Everyone will own it.
One of the deliverables in the future will be service provider grid where users will be able to learn more about what companies are using which open standards.
They want the data portability logo to become a brand.
Sitting now in Michael Lazerow's session, "Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate." Lazerow is a great speaker and this will be the third conference after Graphing Social Patterns and Social Ad Summit where he has been able to retain me as an audience member. I really need to make sure I get a Buddy Media (cool blue) t-shirt from him this time :)
He starts with the slide, "Social media is here." 37% of adult internet users are using social media sites. All major social networks have opened up their platform. Brands now have cost-effective access to more than 500MM engaged users. 250 million of these users are on Facebook and MySpace alone.
There is massive distribution but still less than 1% of digital ad budgets flow into this space. Social advertising right now sucks. All the techniques that used to work in the past, don't work anymore. Clearly, we're at a junction where we need to invent what's next and how we need to get to the users. One of the problems today is that there is too much noice. Another problem is that it is not scalable. Third problem is that social advertising is not tied to results. We need to know what are the results and how to tie them. Over 100 companies are selling Facebook alone.
Social is not just about advertising. It's not about displaying banners. It's about marketing! It's about CRM and engaging conversations. It's about people.
Impressions are worthless. They are like air. There are so many impressions available today. In the social media sites, impressions are basically worthless. The whole model of buying impressions is like shouting at users and yelling at them.
The new model is Buy Engagement, Earn Loyalty. How do you turn your consumers into intense advocates of your brand? The intense adoption of , commitment to and interaction with a brand in social networks.
We've gone from shouting to listening in the new model.
Next, he is going to talk about case studies that generated results.
The most forward-thinking clients are building applications to support their marketing activities. These are not just facebook or myspace applications. Ad units are tied to a database connected to social graph. In the end these are ads, but better ads.
So why apps? Because of :
Emotion,
Engagement,
Efficiency and
Social Intelligence.
There are two main buckets of apps:
1. Ad applications and the second one is sponsored gift section. You can send a free airborne gift to your friends. Another example he is showing of Tropic Thunder advertising campaign by Social Media.
2. Social branded applications which are cross-platform, tied to CRM, "socialize" existing sites. These apps allow for engaging creative, scalable technology and you pay only for results.
Now is the somehat famous example of campaign Buddy Media did for FedEx. It's a very simple application but simple is sometimes the best. Results of this apps:
100,000 installs in 72 hrs.
more than 300K active users in 6 days
less than 10% uninstall rate
global audience in more than 200 countries
Next is New Balance campaign which was recently covered by MIT Review. Results:
250K active users
86% of visitors came back at least once
57% came back 9 times or more.
1M+ AceBucks earned by consumers playing the game, which can be redeemed for actual shoes.
Facebook just launched age-gating allowing for applications to be limited to a certain age group.
Next example is the "Dude" campaign socialized by Bud Light. They worked with anthropologists to come out with the perfect photos for the application. Results from 5 week long campaign (it's still live):
200,000 installs in 5 weeks of marketing
first application to successfully implement an age-gate that prohibits minors from accessing the app
14% average daily active user growth
6,000+ daily active users during campaign
19% of users visited every day during campaign
Next is the InStyle.com campaign. Results:
185,000 installs in 6 weeks
78% of user base were InStyle's target demo of females 18-35
avg. time on application almost 7 minutes
Buddy Brain provides app results which are promising. Users spent 2:35 on average engaging with the last 10 branded apps. This is 75x greater than time spent with banners and 5x more than time spent watching tv ad. 85% of the users returned multiple times to Buddy Media's apps.
The single biggest mistake brands make is that they launch and expect it to be the top app.
How do you get started?
Make goals. Track results
Think big. Start small
Go fast. Iterate. Iterate
Socialize everything
The days of viral growth are over. The app is the new ad unit. Facebook is not the choice of platform for everyone. Trailer views are directly related to ticket sales.
Sitting in the session, Good to Great: Achieving Product Excellence in Web 2.0 by Dan Olsen at Web 2.0 Expo.
How to Elicit User Needs and Problems: You need to understand your customers, talk to them and ask them what they like and don't like. Also important is observing their behavior.
How can you do this with million of customers? Use quantitative research (.i.e. surveys) and site analytics and usage metrics.
Product Management: A Product Manager by any other name would smell as sweet. Product managers sometimes have different titles even though they are responsible for their product. It's product manager's job to understand the market and customers. Your job is to make sure that product objectives meet business objectives. At the end of the day, a product manager's job is to have a successful product. You should know market and customer better than anyone else. Also you need to be the clearinghouse for all product ideas.
What does ROI mean in a product development context? ROI:
Investment = cost or resources required
Return = "profit" gained from investment
Say you have two feature ideas. The idea that takes minimal time and provides the most return should be the one chosen. You need to find those high leverage ideas. How can we trim off requirements to keep the investment lower? You should prioritize order of ideas by ROI.
Process has 4 components:
Strategy (Business Strategy, Product Strategy and Product Roadmap),
Planning (Business objectives, Product Objectives ad Prioritized Feature list),
Design
Development
UI Design:
Web 2.0 PMs need UI design skills otherwise the design gap exists. Many startups don't have UI designers/ Product managers often asked to fill the void.
Faster pace = less documentation: - long-winded MRDs and PRDs are dead - Now: short specs with wireframes, wikis and whiteboard.
UI changes can cause dramatic changes in user experience.
In the UI design Iceberg, the tip above the water is visual design. This is what most people see. Visual design is followed by interaction design and information architecture.
Elements of UI Design: UI Design
Conceptual design
interaction design
information architecture
visual design
Documents used:
flow charts
wireframes
mock-ups or comps
prototypes
Usability testing
The goal is to evaluate how easy your product is to use. You can show mock-ups and gain feedback
can solicit feedback on product or design documents
Making UI Design Decisions
UI questions are never binary. It's about what percentage of users would take action A or action B?
A key UI concept is the fold. Have the key actionable items above the fold. The fold: "chrome takes away pixels." A lot of space is taken by toolbars, status bars and OS bars. Your 768 resolutions may be reduced to 600.
Why are metrics important? You have a lot of decisions to make and having metrics makes it easier. Identify what are the key metrics for your business so you can optimize the equation of your business. Where is teh current value for each metric? How many resources does it take to "move" each metric a certain amount? What metrics have the highest ROI opportunities?
Track metrics as time series: Time series much better than ad hoc bulk analysis. You should track metrics daily. One row for each day's metrics and each metric should be expressed as a column.
To make raw data more useful, you can do various things. To facilitate comparisons over time:
Create normalized ratios of primary metrics: A/B
often still need to look at A and B independently.
- use analysis over time such as weekly averages and monthly averages.
Viral loop steps and metrics: Active users invite prospective users who may or may not click. Some things you should be tracking include
% of users who are active
% of users who are sending invites
invites per sender
invite clickthrough rate
delivery success rate
open rate
clickthrough rate
registration yield
Optimization through iteration
measure the metric
analyze
hypothesize opportunities to improve
synthesize (design enhancement)
implement enhancement
loop back
Abandonment rate can be calculated as 1 - conversion rate.
They are just launching yourversion.com in closed beta. He can be reached at dan (at) yourversion (dot) com.
I really wanted to go to "10 Things We've Learned at 37 Signals" session but ended up sitting in David's session "Go REST with Rails." However, I did find notes from Chad Capellman at Crowd Vine.
David Heinemeir Hansson is speaking on Go REST with Rails. David wasn't interested in programming but more interested in programs. They decided that at Basecamp they should have APIs. In 2004, not a whole lot of people knew about REST. Flickr API was very unsatisfying at that time. He didn't have an approach that they could hold on to encapsulate development. REST is based on HTTP. Problem with HTTP is that it is like Ogre and Ogre have layers (so do Onions). When he was doing Basecamp he didn't want to worry about GET or POST.
Using REST is like re-discovering the HTTP protocol. Most developers overlook the depth of protocol. REST has very closely assigned relationship with HTTP. REST is like blue-cheese in the sense that it is very much acquired taste. The first time you try it, it seems disgusting. Once you get hooked on it, it is really tasty. REST is a really well thought out approach. That's why there is a very harsh barrier to entry.
What are the barriers? Foundation of REST comes from a guy named Roy Fielding. In chapter 5 of his 2000 dissertation, he introduces REST. He says
"This chapter introduces and elaborates the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems, describing the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, while contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles."
He is talking about WS-*.
REST has infiltrated Rails in the past few years. Creating a REST application is as simple as creating a Rails application. Next he guides people through it. Multiple representational ability of Rails reall helps as you shouldn't need to re-do the work just in order to have another representation.
In PostsController you can do the following to add more representations:
respond_to do |format| format.json {render :json => @post} end
ActiveResource is a convention that builds on same principles as ActiveRecord. Rails is all about Convention over Configuration. Rails allows you to spot natural borders.
David is a great speaker and it was a pleasure to sit in his session finally. I do however wish he'd talked more about scaling REST services, but may be the audience wasn't right.
I am sitting in the session Viral Marketing 2.0 at Web 2.0 Expo. The speaker is Jonah Peretti from BuzzFeed. Jonah is also the co-founder of Huffington Post.
Why somethings go viral and why others don't? Virual diffusion is unpredictable and hard to control.
Core concept that is important is "the bored at work network. (BWN)". The BWN is bigger than NBC, CBS, or any other traditional media network. This decentralized network enables media to "go viral" if ordinary people enjoy sharing it.
The old broadcast model of media is simple and reassuring with the broadcaster in the center. Broadcaster decides what is important and popular.
The new networked world with Internet connecting everyone involves everyone deciding what is popular.
Who can make something popular? Key research performed by Watts and Dodds, JCR 2007. It's not special people that decide what's popular. Rather it's the network that decides what is popular, not the influential taste-maker.
If network permits diffusion, everyone can start something. Example is a forest fire, early facebook apps, blogs and embarrassing homemade videos. Whether or not something spreads depends mostly on network structure. Network structure is often the most important thing.
Hindsight Bias (unrepeatable in the future): after the fact, influential people seem like the key factor. Read the tipping point book. East Village hipsters wore lots of ridiculous clothes besides Hush Puppies. Jeff Jarvis author of Dell Hell, complained about many many things on his blog besides Dell. The problem with hindsight bias is it is not repeatable in the future.
Another project by Dodds was the music lab experiment. Subjects are shown a grid with MP3s from unknown bands. They were then tracked. In some worlds, there was social information condition where people could see and in other worlds they had independent condition where they didn't know. He found that people don't know what they like. They look around. Different songs were popular in different worlds, i.e. no consistent hits. Social influence increased inequality and unpredictability. Mediocre songs did become number 1 but the worst songs never became number 1 and vice versa.
The big problem is radical unpredictability. We can't predict WHO will make something popular or WHAT will become popular. The web is confusing, counter-intuitive and unpredictable.
Soultions:
1. Contagious Media: Make something that ordinary people want to share with each other. Make it easy to understand, easy to share, and include a social imperative. Make media perfect for the Bored at Work Network
What he created for BWN: A Nike "Sweatshop" Email. He ordered a pair of Nikes customized with the word "sweatshop." He then ordered the shoes. Next day he got an email saying the id "sweatshop" is a slang so they won't send him the shoes. Eventually they said they won't send shoes. He asked for the picture of Vietnamese girl who made them. He forwarded an email which led to a viral cascade. He landed up on Today Show debating with a Nike executive.
He wanted to see if he could re-create it. So he created The NYC Rejection Line which allowed people to give "your number" that would play the rejection message with the option of talking to a comfort specialist. People started messaging each other with that number and eventually it got picked up by media.
Then he created a BlackPeopeLoveUs.com which landed him on Good Morning America. They wanted to have a black person who didn't like the site to come on the show.
BWN trumps influentials.
Limits of Contagious Media: Most things are not viral. He wrote a paper "Viral Marketing for Real World" published in Harvard Business Review. R of 1.1 can be awesome but R of 0.9 can stop viral growth.
Solution #2: Big seed marketing: small seeds lead to failure: 10 people recruit 5 people etc. But sub-viral growth is still growth. Big seeds lead to success: 1 million people recruit 500K people, etc.
He did a campaign with Tide Cold Water for a detergent that could save energy. P&G has a huge email list. They created a map showing how many people have accepted the challenge.
Word of Mouth without tipping points. Tide Cold water seeded with huge email list and got 40K extra people. Huge value without elusive tipping point even when the R was less than 1.
Solution # 3: Multi-Seed marketing: try lots of creative ideas - nobody can predict what will be popular. Test to see what is working using real data. Big seed the stuff that is working best. Bottom line is that more data enables more creativity.
You should remove the bad seeds and grow the good seeds. What can a serious business do?
Solution #4: The Mullet Strategy: Business upfront, party in the back!!! At Huffington Post they have business upfront and party (comments, discussions) in the back. Add, Test, Tweak, Optimize, Remove stories in real time. If the editors see the headline is not gathering interest, they will change it.
The Power of Mullets: The front always looks sharp. No need to find influentials and predict the future, just let the good stuff bubble up. Other examples include Youtube, MySpace etc.
Solution #5: Personality Disorders: The web is ruled by fanatics like Perez Hilton, Apple fans, blog commenters, and other crazy people. Help your audience and users fully express their personality disorders.
Histronic/Narcissistic Personality Disorder is key to success for blogs, YouTube, MySpace.
Obsessive-Compulsive personality disorder is key to success for wikipedia, delicious, online games and comments.
Which is better Judaism or Mormonism? Judaism is a high quality religion but their marketing is terrible. They don't want other people to be Jews. He is showing performance metrics of Jews and Mormons. This means that quality isn't the best strategy. Companies with high quality as their only strategy are doomed.
Solution #6: Learn from the Mormons. Mormons want you to be Mormon! Make evangelism core to your strategy. Focus on the mechanics of how an idea spreads, not just the idea itself.
Conclusion: 1. Contagious media: make media that works for the BWN. 2. Big Seed Marketing - do viral marketing without needing elusive tipping points 3. Multi-Seed Marketing - try many ideas and optimize on the fly 4. Mullet Strategy 5. Personality Disorders - use your audience's craziness to your advantage 6. Create Mormon style media, not Jewish style media.
Excellent session overall. I gotta ask him the name of the disorders book.
Contact: Visit his site at buzzfeed.com (jonah at buzzfeed dot com).
When is BWN most bored network? Look at server logs and analytics. Probably when people at east coast and west coast are both at work. Traffic at websites is highest during working hours.
Tomorrow, I am attending Social Ad Summit which is being held at Tribeca Rooftop. Nick O'Neill has done a tremendous job with the session and speaker lineup which includes:
9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising • Spencer Ante, Computers Editor at BusinessWeek and author of “Creative Capital” (Moderator) • David Borstein, Director of Sales, MySpace • Bill Alena, VP of Advertising & Business Development, MyYearbook.com • Mike Trigg, Director of Marketing, hi5 • Martin Green, COO, Meebo • Mark Dillon, Vice President of National Sales, Classmates.com
10:00am - 10:45am - Media Buying on Social Networks • Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek (Moderator) • Shiv Singh, Vice President of Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives, Avenue A | Razorfish • David Bear, Executive Director of Mobile, BBDO • Jennifer Bertheaud, Director of Account Management & Strategy, Noise • David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media, 360i
10:45am - 11:00am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote • Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media
11:00am - 11:15am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote • Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com
11:15am - 12:00pm - Branded Experiences on Social Networks • Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus (Moderator) • Scott Monty, Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motors Company • Deborah Korb, Brand Manager, JP Morgan • Don Steele, VP of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks
1:45pm - 2:30pm - Social Ad Network Solutions • Allen Stern, Editor, CenterNetworks (Moderator) • Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com • Seth Goldstein, CEO & Co-Founder, SocialMedia • Anu Shukla, Founder & CEO, Offerpal • Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery • Chris Cunningham, CEO, appssavvy
2:45pm - 3:30pm - Social Advertising Metrics • Sean Ammirati, Contributor at Read/Write/Web, Founder of mSpoke (Moderator) • Albert Lai, CEO, kontagent • Ian Swanson, Co-Founder & CEO, Sometrics • Cam Balzer, VP of Emerging Media, Doubleclick Performics • Jodi McDermott, Director of Analytics, Clearspring
3:35pm - 4:20pm - Widget Monetization • Kevin Barenblat, Co-Founder & CEO, Context Optional • Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-Founder, Clearspring • Carnet Williams, Co-Founder & CEO, Sprout • Sam Wick, Head of Business Development, Userplane • Ben Pashman, VP of Sales & Business Development, Gigya • Heidi Henson, Director of Advertising, RockYou
4:30pm - 5:15pm - Alternative Social Advertising • Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media • Matt Sanchez, CEO, VideoEgg • James Gross, Director of Sales, Federated Media • Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps • Clara Shih, Director of AppExchange Product Line, salesforce.com and Creator, Faceforce • Ari Gottesmann, Co-Founder, Sightix
5:30pm - 7:00pm Networking reception with open bar.
It should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to it.
