http://davidcancel.com Making something from nothing. Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:53:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Last week we announced that we sold our Ad Network business to AdKnowledge. Thanks to everyone who sent along their congratulations. We did that in order to focus on our data business. Our business is data, making it open and freely accessible for every website on the web via our Audience ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/11/13/free-website-demographics-for-your-site/ If any of the words in the title resonate with you then you should checkout our new Lookery Dev Blog. The dev blog has only been around for a little under a month but we've already created an open source Javascript library, a PHP UTF-8 compliance script, and written lots about ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/10/29/python-erlang-hadoop-git-and-sparklines/ Flickr Photo by noahwesley Scott Rafer's 5 lessons for Entrepreneurs: Make the first startup simple and small. Make a million or two and get some leverage. Sexy sucks. boring is always better. If anyone thinks that they can get laid competing with you, it will screw up your economics. VC deals are mortgages not ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/09/25/5-lessons-for-entrepreneurs/ Today I created a simple plugin that allows you to easily add the Lookery Audience Analytics tracker to your Wordpress blog. Lookery's Audience Analytics is like Google Analytics + Compete.com but instead of measuring your site's "pageviews" and "clicks" Lookery helps you analyze your site's audience. We're working on some great analytics ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/09/08/amplify-wordpress-with-lookery/ The first thing you learn in the data business is that all data has biases. But sometimes data biases are easier to spot. I'll let you play "Where's Waldo" with the screenshot below and find one particular data bias that Quantcast has: Clue: it's not CraigsList or Sears. http://davidcancel.com/2008/08/27/where-does-quantcast-get-their-data/ Last year I created a GreaseMonkey script called Invisible Web that notified you about the web beacons (web bugs) that the page you're on is using to track your behavior. Changes in this release: Favicons are now stored locally to increase performance. Updated definition for Lookery Updated definition for Google Analytics ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/07/01/my-web-beacon-finder-updated/ If you're interested to know what we're up to at Lookery listen to this interview my partner Scott Rafer did with Social Times last week. [audio:Interview_with_Scott_Rafer_of_Lookery.mp3] PS. Checkout our new Lookery East Coast Office (Cambridge, MA)      Thanks to the Viximo guys for renting part-time space to us. We're in the office only a ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/06/09/lookery-secrets-exposed/ In my last post I compared using Amazon S3 as a CDN to other low cost alternatives. What was clear was that S3 performed badly when compared to the true CDNs. Not such a surprising outcome; S3 was not designed to be a CDN. The real surprise to me was that ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/06/04/using-amazon-s3-as-cdn-part-2-cacheability/ At Lookery our Javascript analytics tracker is now pushing more than 250GB of bandwidth per month. This javascript file has grown a bit but is still about 6kb. We've been serving that file from a Nginx webserver running on Amazon EC2 instances. Currently Amazon has 3 EC2 data centers but ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/05/29/using-amazon-s3-as-a-cdn/ I'm going to be moderating the Web 2.0: Viable Business Model or Bursting Bubble? panel at TiECON East 2008 later this week (May 30th). The panelists I'll be interviewing are: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft's Emerging Business Team Nabeel Hyatt, Founder of Conduit Labs. Brian ... http://davidcancel.com/2008/05/27/what-would-you-ask-fred-wilson-how-about-don-dodge/