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Saturday, December 31, 2016

Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree - Concept - Error - Sum of Squared Errors


  • Useful for measuring errors in linear regression
  • The goal is to minimize the sum of squared errors

How to Launch Your Startup at SXSW

Did you know that plenty of startup founders choose to launch their products and startups at SXSW? In this Austin, Texas music festival, tech founders can find early adopters, investors, co-founders and more. Here are some ways for you to hustle at SXSW.

Hustle like Uber, Airbnb and Lyft

Uber, Lyft, Airbnb have released their new features and pricing models at SXSW events in the past, capitalizing on the crowd, the demand and the tech savy "tester" consumers of this progressive music and game festival. 

http://www.ibtimes.com/uber-out-sxsw-banned-airport-pickups-lyft-strikes-deal-city-1842492

Participate in a Hackathon or Competition

Previously, SXSW sponsored Eco environment, social entrepreneurship as well as educational startup competitions, pitch events, and hackathons. Participate and get amazing exposures to the tech elites and YC startups, investors who frequent these events.

http://sxsweco.com/news/2015/launch-your-startup
http://www.sxswedu.com/launch

Participate in Release It SXSW Pitch

Participate in a special edition pitch event judged by industry experts at the SXSW startup village. This event is open to all new startups. 
https://www.sxsw.com/apply-to-participate/sxsw-release-it/

Data Science Joke Fun - Data Scientists versus Creationists


Just a really clever screenshot from Imgur. How data scientists data analysts see data versus how creationists see data points. No political view intended. Just a fun image.

Google IO Android Developer Conference Photo Highlights 2016 Mountain View Edition

Women Who Code community group female programmer, women programmer, women developer community picture at the giant conference logo. 
Women Who Code community group female programmer, women programmer, women developer community picture at the giant conference logo.






Take a photo with the giant Google IO logo and claim some bragging rights as an Android fan Google Android geek. at the worlds largest Android Google Developer conference.



Meet the Udacity team and course booth at the Google IO developer conference, android fan festival. Udacity and Google has a Android nanodegree partnership. You can meet the team and get your questions answered here.

Meet the Udacity staff from your online course
and nanodegree in real life at the Google IO

Udacity team at the Google IO 2015 San Francisco


Saturday, December 24, 2016

Pokémon GO where to get holiday edition Pikachu


While these super cute Santa hat wearing Pikachu's are limited edition, they are not hard to find at all in any major cities and their town center landmarks. Keep in mind, Niantic uses Google Map API and the augmented reality game studio and its Ingres testers prefer artistic cultural centers. In San Francisco, it is easy to find holiday Christmas Pikachu from Pokémon GO at the performance arts center, symphony hall and city street art, city murals.

Some players have been saving extra Pidgey's to evolve during Christmas hoping for another bonus XP event when XP is automatically doubled even without a lucky egg.

Starting Christmas Day, special event, holiday pikachu will appear with much higher frequencies.

I have been playing Pokémon GO religiously. While I am still only at level 29. I have collected nearly all the Pokémon's in the pokedex only missing the legendary, regional (I got mr mime during my visit to the U.K.), and a couple of normal ones. 142 pokemons!

Friday, December 23, 2016

Expression - Emoji Fist Bump 👊


  • Emoji fist bump 👊
  • Tech change every day, every day there's an opportunity for new developers
  • Emoji ML crystal ball 🔮
  • Interesting emojis in app store : emoji pocket jesus
Complex concepts
  • Bamboo ceiling : glass ceiling but for Asian Americans :( preventing capable Asian Americans from reaching senior management positions. 
  • Anything that's free you are the product. Data monetization
Interesting words and meaning
  • Pilot : means first episode, usually to gauge interest, test market
  • Lores around the world
  • Inner score card

Machine Learning Concept - Cross Validation


  • Split data into chunks and subsequently use one part as testing and all others as training then switch to the next set. 

Machine Learning Concept - Supervised learning versus unsupervised learning


  • Unsupervised learning : data with no labels

Machine Learning Concepts - Classification versus Regression


  • Regression result is continuous
  • Classification result is discrete. Often encoded as numbers 0 to 1 to n in Sklearn. For example, having tumor is 1, not having tumor is 0

Pokemon Go tips to find Christmas Pikachu

Have you heard? Niantic the Pokemon Go team released limited edition Christmas Pikachu into the wild. These cute Pikachu's will not increase your Pokedex count but comes animated with a red mini Christmas hat. It's super cute and you can keep it in your pocket unless your transfer it away. Super cute! How do you get them? First you have to be playing the game. Next be sure to find the landmark spots in your city! No.1 tourist spots like the Eiffel Tower? A great idea! The city's architectural wonder library? Probably! Small town? No problem. Google (Niantic's map partner and previous parent company) really encourages appreciation for nature, arts and culture (many pokestops are arts, sculptures, landmarks and parks). Visit your local art houses - operas, symphony hall, giant wall murals. These are great places to find Christmas Pikachu's! In our city -  San Francisco, you can find it near the Civic Center performance arts center and Roots an art collective with a giant illustration mural on its side wall in SOMA.



From 0 to 1 Getting to your first sales on Shopify

You have set up your Shopify store, now what? It's time to get your first sales. How? While there are many opportunities to make sales online (the entire ecommerce market is huge), it's hard to get a slice of the big pie. At first. Here are a few tips for you. My store was featured in Christmas 2015 by UberRUSH (Uber postmate delivery) as a top 50 San Francisco small business store on the Shopify platform. www.at-lotus.com we sell high quality gifts that you often find in modern art museum stores!

Message to fellow sellers
Hi sellers, I just wrote this blog post. Please give me some feedback if you can. This is my advice to future sellers on Shopify platform. My store was featured on UberRUSH San Francisco as a top 50 small business seller. They featured my store last Christmas. 2 of my products reached the top 5 list!Among my tips mentioned in the above blog post, 1. generating noise on social media (using hashtags is very important) and 2. frequently checking and making discount offers in abandoned carts are two top tips that generate the most increase in sales. 

Generate some noise on Social Media

Social media is your grassroots marketing. Spread the word about your products on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Enable store function on Social Media

Did you know that you can sell your products directly on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter? Shopify platform allows you to partner up with the big guys: run a Facebook store and enable Buyable pins in minutes. Don't forget Wanelo.

Spread the words to friends and family

I personally emailed my friends to ask them to consider my store for their Christmas shopping. I offered free gift wrapping, tax discount 10% off purchase, steep discount for slow items... They were doing me a favor but also gained value by getting free delivery, free advice and discounts. 

Use the #ShopifyPicks hashtag

Shopify's social media account will feature cool meaningful products on the Shopify platform. You can potentially get them to pay attention to you by using the #ShopifyPicks hashtag. Do not spam. Play nice.

Post to relevant forums

How did you find my blog post? You likely saw it in the Shopify forum just now. Special interest forums guarantees you perfectly targeted audience, who are also supportive and responsive. They are your most relevant audience. Selling  special skateboard and parts, better look for the best forums. You are guaranteed thousands of visitors and some great feedback if you ask.

Check abandoned carts often

Initially when your store needs time to mature and perfect, customers may visit your store and lose trust, interest or encounter difficulties. Use the Abandoned Cart feature to identify these potential customers, write them messages and offer a timely discount code.

Hustle and don't give up. 

I bought startup and entrepreneurship posters and posted them on my wall. I even wrote XyzName Hustles on my coffee mug. Whenever things get difficult, I get a mini boost from those entrepreneurship quotes.

I live and eat in the Silicon Valley. I write about everything Silicon Valley including startup, tech, learn to code, food and ecommerce. 

101 Learn to Code websites resources

Free websites, resources, classes for learning to code. #CsforAll computer science education for all

This post is a work in progress

  1. Google CS First https://www.cs-first.com/en/overview Computer Science education for kids by Google. 

Social Media Growth Hacking Resources Blogs

If you are interviewing as a social media manager or growth hacker, your interviewer may ask you which blog do you follow on a regular basis. You may want to visit these blogs below and mention them during your interview:

(this post is a work in progress)

  • the Unbound blog 



Thursday, December 22, 2016

Youtube Creator Monetization: Youtube Tiers


Social media, youtube monetization, influencer marketing basics series. 
  • Graphite benefits - 1 subscriber or more 
    • Resources: 
      • Creator Studio
      • Creator Academy
      • Support
  • Opal benefits - 1000 subscribers or more
    • Creator Day
    • Local Meetups
    • Workshop at Youtube spaces
  • Bronze benefits - 10,000 subscribers or more
    • Shoot at Youtube spaces
    • Channel consultation (phone)
    • Become an ambassador 
    • Enter Youtube NextUp
  • Silver Gold Diamond benefits - 100,000 subscribers or more
    • Your own partner manager
    • Win a glittering play button
  • Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghtP8dXEouE

Khan Academy Machine Learning Class Review




  • Video 1
    • Academic, professional, jargons, hard-to-understand for beginners
    • Gives real world examples, helpful, thorough
    • Gives an overview of the machine learning landscape

Khan Academy Machine Learning Class on Youtube


  • Notes on Video 1:

    • Classification y belongs to a finite set of choices
    • Regression y belongs to an n dimensional space 

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

A complete guide to election day data prediction mishap - oops we forgot about Johnson and errors


  • A top data visualization team and journal - the New York Times completely failed to predict a Trump win. Predicted 85% Clinton victory. 
  • Nate Silver, author of FiveThirtyEight, also the guy who perfectly predicted Obama 2008 Election results, predicted that Clinton has 2/3 of a chance to win. He's also saying Trump had 30% chance of winning - significantly higher than most people expected. People who had extreme distaste of Trump probably expected close to 0 chance.
    • Nate Silver later posted on his twitter : A—There's a 30% chance of an earthquake B—LOL ur crazy no way it's that high {{earthquake}} B—Idiot! You said a 70% chance of no earthquake
  • We all forgot about Johnson, the minority contender whose presence might have "stolen" the 1-5% margin Clinton so needed but instead narrowly losing to Trump in key Democratic states. Many forgot that these marginal alternative votes to Johnson has cost her many key states like Pennsylvania where her votes were only percentage away from Trump's. Personally I believe that the existence of a 3rd candidate caused Clinton to lose swinging states. In order to exercise their right to vote alternative, many voters have accidentally handed the presidency to Trump, whom they would not have voted for at all. Unintended mathematical result of voting alternative. 
  • Traditional sampling and polling methods claim to have being "blindsided" postmortem. They claim the root data was wrong. Specifically many blamed the early exit polls.
    • Postmortem examination of this method shows clear selection bias - the people who are more vocal would have revealed their votes, as are those who matched the popular expectations.
    • Margin of Error. Columbia University researcher Andrew Gelman found the margin of error of such polling can be as high as 7%, 14-point range +/-. An estimated 50% vote of confidence is actually 43% to 57%.  Crazy, that's the difference between a majority win or loss.
  • HuffingtonPost a Silicon Valley and women friendly media outpost claimed that Clinton will win by more than 90% chance.
  • Election night, people warmed in utter shock as Trump racked up electoral college votes in a landslide
  • The updated NYTimes visualization below shows the stunning "upset" where Trump overtook Clinton in an Election Night victory
  • Just like we cannot predict stock market win/loss, we cannot predict election win/loss.  
  • Data analysis results were wrong but there were some new data visualization charts. Nate Silver came up with a snake board-game-like intestine chart for electoral college votes and the states. Some criticism of the snake chart : no useful info, just a fancy map on electoral votes. And it's a design spin on an vintage game.  
  • Subjective perspective and inherent bias. Many media and data outlets were criticized post election. While no statisticians would ever unwisely predict 100% Clinton win, nearly all liberal outlets were prematurely hailing a Clinton win. Even Nate Silver who gave Trump a 30% chance of winning, did not step out to help the public understand this stats until after the election. 
  • Simulation and randomness. Nearly all respectful data outlets ran simulations with random factors. They build in scenarios of swinging states flipping, margin of error. Yet the models still fell short.
    • Imagine simulating percentage votes versus electoral college votes. Percentage is continuous and can change a fraction of percentage at a time. Electoral Votes are much more discrete, and is allocated by lots of 3, ... , 55 (Alaska...California) margin of error becomes huge on one hand. The "landslide effect" of Clinton's major upset was very apparent on election night when chunks of electoral votes were going to Trump, escalating him quickly to the threshold, swiftly making him the apparent winner.
  • Personally, I think at Election Night, watching the live visualization on Wall Street Journal website, I saw that large cities were voting as expected leaning either democratic or republican but yet there were many lesser known counties were overwhelming voting for Trump from California to New York. Few studies and data analysis were granular on the county level. We were so focused on state level results. 
  • This is an election that swinging states matter a great deal more than usual. Nate Silver used two numbers tipping-point chance and voter power index to highlight these important states that played a crucial role election night. 
  • Who's winning the popular vote? Nate Silver estimated Clinton an average of 48.5% percentage, and Trump 44.9%, really not bad at all. And we forgot Johnson 5%! That is enough margin to make Trump the winner! If Clinton fails to catch all 48.5%, and Johnson fails to capture 5% throughout, that's enough margin going to Trump. Plus the margin of error of estimation... Wow Trump and Hillary win were more like a flip of a coin 50% 50%. (visit Nate silver's blog to see this useful visualizaiton). Again, my personal opinion is that we forgot about Johnson
  • In my personal opinion, Trump's win was not a landslide, instead it appeared to be a landslide because of our electoral college system. The actual votes (popular vote) was a more even split. I personally think we really forgot about errors and Johnson. Landslide victories were unlikely (Obama had a true landslide), so margin of errors and Johnson presence were extremely important. Yet we forgot about them. We still don't think about them when we just claim there was a landslide victory and now we are learning what Trump did right and justify what he did right. Really he did a lot of things right and Clinton was close to do a lot of other things right. One of them won by chance. No one predicted that. 


Sources and Further Reading
  • Fast Company
    • https://www.fastcodesign.com/3065750/why-we-had-no-idea-trump-would-win
  • Nate Silver 
    • http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

Monday, October 31, 2016

Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree Udacity Connect Intensive Syllabus


  • 1. Model evaluation and validation
    • 1.1 STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
    • 1.2 DATA MODEL
    • 1.3 EVALUATION AND VALIDATION
    • 1.4 MANAGING ERROR AND COMPLEXITY
    • 1.5 PROJECT

  • 1.3 EVALUATION AND VALIDATION
    • 1.3.1 TRAINING AND TESTING
      • 1.3.1.1 Benefit of testing
      • 1.3.1.2 Train / Test Split in sklearn
      • Useful concepts : train_test_split function
    • 1.3.2 EVALUATION METRICS
      • 1.3.2.1 Metrics
      • 1.3.2.2 Classification and Regression
        • Useful concepts: Categorical data vs continuous data
      • 1.3.2.3 Classification metrics
        • Useful concepts: discrete predictions
      • 1.3.2.4 Accuracy 
        • Useful concepts: proportion of items classified or labeled correctly, my_model.score(X_test, y_test). Shortcoming of accuracy if data is skewed, or need to err on side of innocence or git. Accuracy: no. of items in a class labeled correct / all items in that class (Erron has a small number of innocent people)
      • Picking the Most Suitable Metric
        • Concept: information asymmetry
      • Confusion Matrix
        • Concept: if care about asymmetric learning, may want to shift the decision front up or down to include certain results
      • Decision Tree: confusion matrix
      • Precision and Recall
      • Equation for Precision
        • Concept: precision = true positives / (true positives and  false positives)
      • Equation for Recall
        • Concept: precision = true positives / (true positives and  false negatives)



Precision vs Recall
F1 Score
Regression metrics

Mean Absolute Error
Mean Squared Error
Regression Scoring Function

Managing Error and Complexity
Cause of Error
Error due to bias
Linear Learner, Quadratic Data (programming learning curve)
Error due to Variance - Precision and Overfitting

Representative Power of a Model

  • 1.1. Curse of Dimensionality

1.2. Curse of Dimensionality Two
Learning Curves and Model Complexity
1.1 Learning Curves
1.2 Learning Curves II
1.3 Ideal Learning Curves
1.4 Model Complexity
1.5 Learning Curves and Model Complexity
1.6 Practical Use of Model Complexity

Section Syllabus

  1. Supervised Learning
    1. Regression
      1. Continuous supervised learning


Sunday, October 30, 2016

Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree Udacity Connect Intensive Review PROS CONS


  • This blog post is a work in progress
  • POSTIVE
  • Industry ready. Pandas, Numpy, Python are industry standards. The course gets your hands dirty right away in industry-standard competitive software packages and libraries.
  • Online contents are made by folks who actually work professionally in the field, invented things, and are top of their field. Being a good tutor is different from being a good professional. Udacity tends to have professional engineers from top tech firms. 
  • Great motivation, easy to stay on track. Past experience with Nanodegrees is that it was hard to stay on track and easy to get stuck. When a class of people is moving ahead together in person, and the classes are day long, it becomes easier to for me personally to stay on track. There are classmates who move faster as well as slower. It's easy to find help and engage in discussions before falling behind too much. 
  • Amazing in-person instructor. I have Nick Hoh. He is an experienced instructor who has a lot of teaching experience. His material supplement and even exceeds the online videos, making it very helpful study material. During his sessions he also talks about how he would approach a problem and break it down. It's helpful to get a new perspective from the online videos and it's very helpful to be able to chat in person, ask questions and chat on Slack occasionally. The help makes a big difference.
  • Offline instructor as a point of contact and a great mentor. Having that one point of contact is really reassuring. While plenty of work needs to be done through extra research and online forums like StackOverflow, having that one point of key contact makes all the difference for me. 

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  • NEGATIVE
  • Course work seems patched together from existing Udacity courses. The content is not always cohesive. Some contents are out of date or inaccurate. Students may be stuck without additional help. For example, the Boston Housing project has a data attribute called PTRATIO. One section calls it ratio of students to teachers, another calls it pupil-student ratio. Pupil is a British word for young students in secondary schools. The actual name is pupil-to-teacher ratio. One section wants us to import a python library from a newer release using a new API call, but the Python installed on Udacity server is of an older release. Beginners will be stuck here forever trying to understand the bug is from the configuration not their code. The courses are constantly improving but the quality of the content needs to be better: more cohesive, consistent and accurate.
  • I find myself Googling a lot for external materials to study. A lot like way above 50%. While it is a common "industry practice" to google and learn additional information, above 50% also means that the course is not doing its job.
  • Lots of implicit prerequisites. While not mandatory, the course actually implicitly requires previous course work in Statistics, Probability, Linear Algebra, data analysis and Python coding. Basic statistics will be used a lot. Linear Algebra is a big part. Python coding is a must. Experience in data analysis and pivot tables. I found doing a massive and comprehensive review beforehand was very helpful. Most of my classmates are engineers. I come from an Economics background from Stanford, which thank goodness, forced me to take linear algebra

Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree Udacity Connect Intensive Cheatsheet Key Concepts


Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree Cheatsheet Useful Functions and Libraries

# libraries
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
# data processing
from sklearn.cross_validation  import ShuffleSplit
from sklearn.cross_validation import train_test_split

# scoring
from sklearn.metrics import r2_score

 # visualizations code visuals.py
import visuals as vs

 # visual display for Jupyter notebooks
%matplotlib inline

 # Load dataset
data = pd.read_csv('xyz.csv')
target = data['col_xyz']
features = data.drop('col_xyz', axis = 1)

#data processing
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, train_size=0.8, random_state=1)

 # Success
print "XYZ dataset has {} data points with {} variables each.".format(*data.shape)

 # Exploring dataset
my_dataframe.head()
my_dataframe.head(5)
my_dataframe.describe()


# learning curve from sklearn.model_selection import learning_curve

from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier
from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix
from sklearn.naive_bayes import GaussianNB
from sklearn.metrics import recall_score as recall
from sklearn.metrics import precision_score as precision

model selection

from sklearn.grid_search import GridSearchCV #legacy
from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV #new release

Useful sklearn modules

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfTransformer
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
from sklearn.cross_validation import train_test_split
from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix
from sklearn import metrics
from sklearn.metrics import roc_curve, auc
from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer

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Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree Udacity Connect in-Person Experience

First day (last Saturday), I started my Udacity Connect experience. For a discounted price, the Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree and a plethora of in-person help, office hours, and study sessions become available at students' disposal. The classroom is a rather simple and gloomy windowless room at Cogswell College (a digital arts, gaming school) in San Jose. The staff is very friendly and our session lead was extremely friendly and energetic. My classmates are on the older side. Many worked for giants of the previous dot-com boom. My first observation is that the course material is new but still "patched" together - they re-used many Udacity courses, video clips and exercises. Unfortunately, recycle and reuse does not always lend the material more clarity. Officially the prerequisites are brief. Like all Nanodegrees, this one just requires some prior knowledge of math, data and coding. The reality is I find myself scrambling to review Linear Algebra, Statistics, Probabilities, Python, data analysis, data science, basic courses on machine learning, AI. The course does not have all the materials one need to succeed even if one does not mind burning time on the course (this situation has changed significantly at the time of this update July 2017. The early lessons are now great and tailored to students). You will find yourself jumping from branches to branches and googling a lot. While this is a "learning experience" per Udacity, it can be overwhelming for beginners. Just watch out. The experience does mimic real world on the job experience. It was challenging and rewarding. It is still a recommended. See our blog for more Udacity Connect reviews.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Monetizing the Pokemon Go Craze in 20 Examples

Why do marketers and brand ambassadors try so hard in social media to get “fake internet points” or “15 seconds of fame”. The fame and value is fleeting unless we hit the holy grail of vitality, buzz-worthy, blanket worldwide free-keting.
One way to go viral is to ride a viral trend — today the trend is Pokemon Go. Here are some clever ideas around the world used to monetize Pokemon Go. For the first time, the glued-to-phones millennials are going outdoors, and the stay-at-home glued-to-computers gaming crowd and scavenger hunting the city. It is a prime time for small businesses to get noticed.
All the tool you need is a smart phone and a clever idea.
A clever idea can stick, make people laugh and remember your business. Your loyal patrons will now know that you care about their hobbies. If you think these are penniless jobless gamers, you are wrong. While a popular mobile game title can gross about $3 million dollar a month, Pokemon Go players logged about $3 million dollars a day for the franchise during lauch. They will be hungry and thirsty after chasing Pokemons for kilometers. It really takes a lot of effort to hatch a lousy egg.
Final price bill discount based on player levels. Example, level 3 free soda, level 5 free slice. Carefully, level 20 is no longer hard to obtain. Example 2, give an incremental discount of 10 cents per level.
Pokemon Go merchandise. Nothing can erase the image of a magikarp mask on a 6 pack jacked body. Cannot be unseen. Currently, you cannot order the Pokemon Go wearable device, so people are charging a premium for guaranteed pre-orders.
Market your location if you spotted a rare Pokemon. Players will go far and abandon their cars for a monster (as seen in the central park example).
Upgrade your kid’s lemon stand. A smart kid has been selling blue Doritos, red Doritos and yellow Lay’s, as well as lemonades served from colored bottles to play into the Pokemon team rivalry. Remember, these trainers are out there for cute monsters. Your kids can totally be sweet and melt many hearts. That lemons stand will win as long as it is near a Pokestop.
Encourage your employees and your employer to set up lures. Lures especially in a Bermuda triangle or a lagoon of concentrated Pokestops means heavy heavy foot traffic. “Location location location!” This game just turned your street into a hot spot. Set up lures by spending dollars in the app store means 10x return in revenue and tips!
A black board stand outside your bar that reads “Something clever about Pokemon that I don’t know. I am too old. Come in and get drunk”. Yes, we are adults and we play because it is a part of our sentimental emotional childhood. Just like Totoro. We may be 20 years behind the Japanese anime industry, but the US is the first place they chose to launch the game way before Japan. We are the jackpot.
Offer your restuarant / coffee shop as a place for the trainers to “charge up, cool off and catch ’em all”. It’s a hot summer out here. Iced cold drinks are great baits.
User testing bait using lures. The Down to Lunch mobile app team set up a lure on UC Berkeley campus to get users to try their app and give feedback. Startup hustle prime example.
Create a new meme worthy Pokemon Go banner. Schrödinger’s Pokeball: When the app freezes the Pokemon is both caught and not caught.
Youtube videos on top 10’s, cheats, history of Pokemon. Popular Youtube channels have been cranking out top 10 videos: cutest, most useless, unexpected, weirdest pokemon. Cheats, tips, even Forbes came up with an article 10 things I wish I knew before hand. Tips and cheatsheets have surfaced on Imgur and Quora.
Poking fun at Pokemon Go in your comic strip, graphic novel. Redoing the launching screen concept art, making fun of a enormous amount of zubats infesting the cit, poking fun of an useless magikarp can run away. Of course, the server crashes.
Doing Pokemon characters in your illustration. Pokemon Go character infographics, web comic series, Pokemon characters re-drawn as chibi ,characters redone as zombies. You name it.
Artists draw landscape concepts in the style of Pokemon Go — the pale blue pastel with rough edges.
A zoo updated the profile of each zoo animal using Pokemon Go characters card UI and design. They know how to connect with their young animal-loving patrons.
Be nice to your new visitors if your house happens to be close to a Pokestop or a gym. You do not want internet mob to internet shame or reality storm you.
Purchasing Nintendo stocks. It has fluctuated 10% up and down within a week.
Create a new mobile game. The game grosses $3 million dollar a day in the Apple App Store. Apple customers are known to spend more. Clearly mobile game is going strong.
Code a new website and API for Pokemon Go sightings. Flex that programmer muscle and get some Github stars and forks. Example: Pokemon Go Map
Copying the Pokemon Go game mechanics. Without a doubt, players think Pokemon Go has assembled known game mechanics into a whole new game play. Venture capitalists have already been pitched all kinds of Pokemon Go copycat games. Why not? Augmented Reality gaming just started. And apparently it doesn’t cost $3000 dollars for a headset.
Sauce: these gems are from Reddit and Imgur.

Monday, August 22, 2016

Japanese Prime Minister Super Mario appearance at Rio Olympics


Japanese Prime Minister dressed as Super Mario made a viral appearance at Rio Olympics 2016.   A video commercial promoting the Tokyo Olympics 2020 was broadcasted at the stadium in Rio Olympics' closing ceremony.

The video highlighted Japan's amazing landmarks, history, hit video games, and animations, including Super Mario.

At the end of the video, athletes passed a red ball symbolizing the Japanese flag, country of the rising sun, to the prime minister dressed in sharp navy blue business suits.

As he headed out of the Japanese parliament in his limousine, he realized that he would be late for his appearance in Rio, so he transformed into Super Mario and upon examining the map of Rio (a word play on Mario's name "Ma RIO") he dived into the iconic green Super Mario pipe and appeared in miraculously person at the Rio stadium wearing the Mario hat carrying the red ball.

The video went viral fast. Everyone thought it was a really clever play. With the popularity of the recent hit game - Pokemon GO, the prime minister is doing his part to promote the gaming industry of Japan and its Olympics Game in 2020. The showmanship is stunning. After all, Japan is still the 3rd largest economy in the world and cannot wait to show its glamor and rich culture.

Tokyo Tower, Senso Ji template at Asakusa, Shinkansen Bullet Train, Shibuya Crossing (Lost in Translation), Captain Tsubasa (animation) are also featured in the video.

Captain Tsubasa appeared
in Tokyo Olympics 2020 promo


The video is copyrighted and cannot appear on Youtube. Download the NBC Sports app on your smart phone in the United States to view the featured video before it disappears.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Pokemon Go Rare Pokemon spawn Pokestops in San Francisco

Squirtles in Fort Mason


Bulbasaur Palace of Fine Art

Pokemon Go Ivysaur in the wild in San Francisco, Palace of Fine Art

Omanyte in Downtown San Francisco


Sunday, August 14, 2016

Pokemon Go Youtube Channel Banners

Building and hosting banners for my new Youtube Channel. This month's highlight is pokemon GO.

Disappointing egg hatch

CodesumBlog youtube channel logo art

Pokemon GO Dratini in San Francisco

This is the photo collection, Youtube video construction in progress.
Fisherman's Wharf Lure

Dratini near the Ferry Building

This Dratini was found "in the wild" near the back of Ferry Building between the Gandhi statue and the water. It's a dark place, not recommended for safety reasons. 


Pokemon GO Dratini in San Francisco

This is the photo collection, Youtube video construction in progress.
Fisherman's Wharf Lure

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Pokemon GO Egg Hatching Guide

How to hatch Pokemon GO eggs efficiently?

No cheating. Driving around won't work. It's not safe.

If sitting in the passenger seat and stuck in a car in heavy traffic, you may be able to log steps by occasionally shake and move your phone allowing the app to check for new locations. Players have hired Uber and Lyft cars for hatching.

Below is a PoGo egg hatching chart - one of the many visual guides illustrating what each of the 10km 5km 2km eggs can potentially hatch.

People have hatched 1800 Snorlax from 10km eggs. 

Some pokemons are easily caught in the wild than hatched. It depends on your geo location.

Hatching eggs can help you log rare pokemons and those that are uncommon inyou neighborhood and unlock info cards in Pokedex.

Pokemons hatched from eggs bring more candies than caught. 

Updated games are now less likely to crash but it also is better at catching players that are cheating. Traveling too fast won't log any mileage.

Some players recommended traveling by bike. In some states using phones and engaging in other distractions may be completely illegal. You may not even be allowed to wear headphones while biking. It's not a safe method. Similarly other players considered roller skating.


Monday, August 1, 2016

Boiling Point Hot Pot Menu Highlights and Restaurant Photos

Specialty sauces are also available for retail. Bay Area restaurant menu. Also see pictures of the dishes, restaurant decors below









Thursday, July 21, 2016

20 examples monetizing Pokemon Go marketing to Peter Pan adults andmillennials

Monetizing the Pokemon Go Craze — Playful Humorous Marketing to Millennials and Peter Pan Adults
Why do marketers and brand ambassadors try so hard in social media to get “fake internet points” or “15 seconds of fame”. The fame and value is fleeting unless we hit the holy grail of vitality, buzz-worthy, blanket worldwide free-keting.
One way to go viral is to ride a viral trend — today the trend is Pokemon Go. Here are some clever ideas around the world used to monetize Pokemon Go. For the first time, the glued-to-phones millennials are going outdoors, and the stay-at-home glued-to-computers gaming crowd and scavenger hunting the city. It is a prime time for small businesses to get noticed.
All the tool you need is a smart phone and a clever idea.
A clever idea can stick, make people laugh and remember your business. Your loyal patrons will now know that you care about their hobbies. If you think these are penniless jobless gamers, you are wrong. While a popular mobile game title can gross about $3 million dollar a month, Pokemon Go players logged about $3 million dollars a day for the franchise during lauch. They will be hungry and thirsty after chasing Pokemons for kilometers. It really takes a lot of effort to hatch a lousy egg.

Final price bill discount based on player levels. Example, level 3 free soda, level 5 free slice. Carefully, level 20 is no longer hard to obtain. Example 2, give an incremental discount of 10 cents per level.

Pokemon Go merchandise. Nothing can erase the image of a magikarp mask on a 6 pack jacked body. Cannot be unseen. Currently, you cannot order the Pokemon Go wearable device, so people are charging a premium for guaranteed pre-orders.
Market your location if you spotted a rare Pokemon. Players will go far and abandon their cars for a monster (as seen in the central park example).
Upgrade your kid’s lemon stand. A smart kid has been selling blue Doritos, red Doritos and yellow Lay’s, as well as lemonades served from colored bottles to play into the Pokemon team rivalry. Remember, these trainers are out there for cute monsters. Your kids can totally be sweet and melt many hearts. That lemons stand will win as long as it is near a Pokestop.
Encourage your employees and your employer to set up lures. Lures especially in a Bermuda triangle or a lagoon of concentrated Pokestops means heavy heavy foot traffic. “Location location location!” This game just turned your street into a hot spot. Set up lures by spending dollars in the app store means 10x return in revenue and tips!
A black board stand outside your bar that reads “Something clever about Pokemon that I don’t know. I am too old. Come in and get drunk”. Yes, we are adults and we play because it is a part of our sentimental emotional childhood. Just like Totoro. We may be 20 years behind the Japanese anime industry, but the US is the first place they chose to launch the game way before Japan. We are the jackpot.
Offer your restuarant / coffee shop as a place for the trainers to “charge up, cool off and catch ’em all”. It’s a hot summer out here. Iced cold drinks are great baits.
User testing bait using lures. The Down to Lunch mobile app team set up a lure on UC Berkeley campus to get users to try their app and give feedback. Startup hustle prime example.
Create a new meme worthy Pokemon Go banner. Schrödinger’s Pokeball: When the app freezes the Pokemon is both caught and not caught.
Youtube videos on top 10’s, cheats, history of Pokemon. Popular Youtube channels have been cranking out top 10 videos: cutest, most useless, unexpected, weirdest pokemon. Cheats, tips, even Forbes came up with an article 10 things I wish I knew before hand. Tips and cheatsheets have surfaced on Imgur and Quora.
Poking fun at Pokemon Go in your comic strip, graphic novel. Redoing the launching screen concept art, making fun of a enormous amount of zubats infesting the cit, poking fun of an useless magikarp can run away. Of course, the server crashes.
Doing Pokemon characters in your illustration. Pokemon Go character infographics, web comic series, Pokemon characters re-drawn as chibi , characters redone as zombies. You name it.
Artists draw landscape concepts in the style of Pokemon Go — the pale blue pastel with rough edges.
A zoo updated the profile of each zoo animal using Pokemon Go characters card UI and design. They know how to connect with their young animal-loving patrons.
Be nice to your new visitors if your house happens to be close to a Pokestop or a gym. You do not want internet mob to internet shame or reality storm you.

Drafting a related Pokemon to gain publicity. A coffee shop uses a sheep Pokemon to market its sheep milk latte. Of course, copyright issues may occur.

(Not marketing but worth mentioning monetizing methods
Purchasing Nintendo stocks. It has fluctuated 10% up and down within a week.
Create a new mobile game. The game grosses $3 million dollar a day in the Apple App Store. Apple customers are known to spend more. Clearly mobile game is going strong.
Code a new website and API for Pokemon Go sightings. Flex that programmer muscle and get some Github stars and forks. Example: Pokemon Go Map
Copying the Pokemon Go game mechanics. Without a doubt, players think Pokemon Go has assembled known game mechanics into a whole new game play. Venture capitalists have already been pitched all kinds of Pokemon Go copycat games. Why not? Augmented Reality gaming just started. And apparently it doesn’t cost $3000 dollars for a headset.

Sauce: Reddit Imgur images and posts. 

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

100 Facts about Pokémon Go That You Don't Know

Too busy Catching Them All? Here's your digest - see what the news and rumors about Pokemon Go are saying.

  • Updated August 2 2016: surprisingly Pokemon Go is slipping in ranking in its native country - Japan, a lucrative mobile gaming market. App Annie. Article from Bloomberg
    • Nintendo reported earnings for the period before Pokemon Go. Its net loss is quite larger than analysts projected. Nintendo is going from "Pokemon Go to Pokemon No". Probably not a good time to buy its shares.
    • The Pokemon wearable would have affected the Nintendo bottomline, but it is delayed to at least September.
  • Updated August 1 2016: new strategy - hatch eggs to get rare Pokemon not wasting money on lures or modules. Use lucky eggs for better bag management and level up quickly and efficiently.  
  • Pokémon Go: What I’ve learned from spending more than $50 on in-game purchases via VentureBeat
    • The gist is you don't need to spend a penny but if you do have a strategy that focuses on hatching eggs and leveling up via lucky eggs which double XP within 30 minutes. 
  • Pokevision, the amazing map that reveals rare and common Pokemon locations is shutting down citing that it will "respect the wish" of Niantic and the Pokemon Go company.
  • Some media sites have called the Pokemon Go abusive - an exploitation of animals. Some went further saying that the Pokemon world is animal slavery. The problem with Pokémon Go no one is talking about via The Daily Dot
  • It may be true that one fan has Gotta Catch 'Em All!  And supposedly he has won a big prize as a result. source article
  • With Pokevision down and Pokemon Go native tracker malfunctioning and buggy, players have resorted to searching for "pokemon tracker" apps in Apple app stores and Google play store. Some apps such as PokeDetector on Android even promises Android watch notifications. Be care of spams, fees, charges. Any unauthorized use of the game's copyrighted information will likely be shutting down soon. Here's a video demo of the app 
  • The end of July update has left the Pokemon tracker broken still, and some players very confused. The new app is a blank slate, upon launching the app, users may be accidentally logging in using another gmail account (already active on their cell phone, likely their primary gmail account) and may not be the google gmail account they have been using to play the game. Select the correct Gmail from the top right dropdown menu and you will resolve this Pokemon Go resets user level to 0 requires new account set up update problem. It's not really a problem, but it's not a great User Experience (UX) as it confused many, include a few of my friends.
  • Did you know that the Hitmonlee fighting Pokemon may be named after Bruce Lee and Hitmonchan likely named after Jackie Chan? These are two Pokemons named after celebrities in the USA.


  • There's a shortcut to the Pokemon menu. Tap hold the menu button swipe up to access Shop, hold and swipe left for your Pokemons and hold swipe right for your items. Can come handy when there are lots of Pokemons to catch. 
  • There are easter eggs in the game. If you name your Eevee after the original owners Rainer, Pyro and Sparky it is guaranteed that you can evolve the Eevee into Vaporeon, Flareon and Jolteon respectively. 
  • Eevee is eevee spelled backwards. Ekans is snake spelled backwards. Arbok is Kobra spelled backwards. Mind blowing!
  • Chanseys can indeed be found near medical centers like hospitals. 
  • Water animals do spawn near water sources. 
  • Lures and incense spawns many additional Pokemons for your personalized experience. The actual system spawning isn't numerous everywhere. In fact, it can be sparse.
  • Pokevision.com is a website that displays real time real life system spawning of all Pokemons. Searchable world wide. Each Pokemon has a timer, and you will indeed find the Pokemons at the exact location.
  • Pokemon Go source code hints potential partnership with McDonald's and monetization of custom gyms, pokestops and more.
  • It is finally released in Japan but it is yet to go live in many countries. In fact, the native birth country of Pokemon is not the first chosen place of the game. United States is the first country to play Pokemon Go!
  • Pokemon Go Plus wearable will be released later on. It will pair with your phone to help you catch pokemons without looking.
  • Yes a dead body was found by a hunter near a river
  • Different cities may offer different pokemons. You may have to travel the world to collect them all.
  • Pokemon Go monetizes by selling gold coins which can buy items
  • Pokemon Go gym owners get rations for holding a gym or helping out a gym
  • Some churches including past church locations are labelled as gyms. A guy whose house was previously a church saw large of amount of people gathering outside his home via buzzed
  • People have called police on hunters thinking they are burglars scouting out homes to target
  • Rose pedal signposts attract a large number of pokemons including rare ones
  • You are likely to meet fellow players at rose pedal signpost and modules
  • Pokemon Go made an "honest mistake" getting access to your entire google account though they claim they only want basic info, but Google has automatically downgraded the permission to protect you 
  • Lots of app crashes while capturing pokemon. Make sure you have good reception when approaching a rare pokemon
  • It's not that hard to find Pikachu near downtown area. Collecting them will get you special medals
  • Pokemon Go is not released in China yet
  • Nintendo stock saw a 10% jump and then subsided 2-3% in the first week following the game going viral
  • Other Augmented Reality companies like Google and Facebook are also on the rise
  • Niantic is the game studio, created Pokemon Go in collaborations with Pokemon International a private company that Nintendo owns a stake in and in turn owns a revenue share in Niantic's game
  • Niantic also created the AR game ingress but didn't receive much attention especially compared to PG.
  • Some areas in downtown will attract rarer pokemons on a daily basis
  • In order to play Pokemon GO your phone must have access to internet and the GPS enabled
  • Some people found that traveling via a car is too fast and will be prevented from getting points, but cars in heavy traffic will do, biking, rollerblading ... but remember in almost all places using a phone while transporting is illegal and dangerous
  • We know some of the mythical creatures exist because people have been stationing them at gyms to show off
  • Different cities, districts offer different pokemons. For example, San Francisco Ferry Building has a lot of water pokemons such as Magikarp, Tentacool, tentacruel, psyduck and squirturl, which are hard to catch inland. 
  • VentureBeat article says PokemonGo grosses around $1.6 million from Apple App Store daily


Sunday, May 29, 2016

Web Analytics Tools & Softwares that Marketers Use on Top of Google Analytics

Summary: Here's an ultimate bucket list of growth hacking, marketing, tracking and analytics tools marketers would use on top of Google Analytics. If you are a sophisticated marketer, you should growth hack with these tools too to gain 360 insights on your customers.


Mixpanel - customer tracking, retention, funnel, customer metrics, visualize funnel, dropout
Hotjar - heatmaps, UX, recording, polls, tracking clicks,
Hubspot - customer tracking, email customization, funnel
Trackjs - developer engineering tracking for javascript errors
Piwik
Optimizely - A/B testing
SumoMe - content tracking tools for publishers to track pages and posts
BuzzSumo - popularity, competitive intelligence
Impactana - popularity
Rival IQ - popularity, competitive intelligence
Drift -
OnBoardTips - on boarding
segment.io
Fullstory
Heap
Moz - SEO
Yoast - SEO meta data
Majectic Tool -
Mysiteauditor
SEO sitecheckup
Raven - great reporting, build-in SEO auditor
Screaming Fog
Oscilloskope -
SEMrush
Adobe Analytics
Stat -
Facebook insights, Pinterest insights, native social media dashboards
Analytics from Buffer
SumAll
Mavenlink - internal tracking, project management
SearchConsole
Kissmetrics
Chartmogul
crazzyegg - user behavior analysis
yandex metrika
proprietary tools - that works with MySQL or MongoDB, internal CRM

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Social media growth hacking tip for nonprofit organizations

This picture below is a great example from the Chinese Twitter Weibo. Picture depicts animals in distress because of ocean trash dumping. The tweet it says do not (click the button for) like only repost (retweet and share). This is a great social media caption for non profit and environmental organizations trying to raise awareness, boost interaction, and grow the social media account.


React UI, UI UX, Reactstrap React Bootstrap

React UI MATERIAL  Install yarn add @material-ui/icons Reactstrap FORMS. Controlled Forms. Uncontrolled Forms.  Columns, grid