drc1912

Thursday is a _HUGE_ night at bars (and restaurants with bars) for college students. A lot of kids will take advantage of happy hour pricing on Thursday night and lax attendance policy on Friday morning.

This is anecdotal and I don't have data to support my claim (although someone can probably find something on Google).

Can you please tell us a little bit about the data/population that served as the basis of this analysis (ex: how big is total population of data set, how big is the subset of users who went to both gym and park, etc). It would help us better provide feedback and understand the your results.

To be fair, their marketing spend compared to their competitors was WAY higher than Apple's was compared to MS. Google did spend a lot of dough trying to roll this out.

Can we agree that it (according to the depth of the article) that this decision wasn't made based on statistical analysis, but rather just ratings? "ohhh... a bunch of people judged our video and liked it! Statistically we can't NOT do it!"

Please stop attributing everything "scientists" do as hyper-analytical. It's not like the analysis they did was more complex than what takes place in any focus group - it was just scaled by a few orders of magnitude.

Was it a success? Yes. Was it a success because of statistical analysis? No. It was a success because it was a good fucking ad.

This is why I couldn't handle working in the hard sciences. While there are breakthroughs every day, there is little time for institutions to go through and verify these findings before they become commonly accepted. It is astonishingly easy to find examples of people basing years of research off of faulty premises from other papers who wind up losing those years of research.

Basic premise: Unless you win the lottery, doing what you love isn't an option. In lieu of that, force yourself to work as hard as possible so that you can be successful at what you must do (and learn to love the success).

Reminds me of the "Human Flesh Search Engines" that form on Chinese BBS's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine

A very good point about the disruptive innovator being compared to incremental changes. That being said, Yelp is in a much better position than Netscape was in terms of revenue generation ability/potential and ultimately that is what IPO's focus on.

"Mr. Bierfeldt, it turns out, was carrying the money because he was returning home from a regional conference of Campaign for Liberty, a group that supports Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate. "

It totally makes sense to me that it was a Ron Paul evangelist who made this bruhaha. I have known a few in my life and this seems like something I could see most of them doing.

Way to stand up for yourself!

I'm going to his book signing tonight in Seattle. Any other HN people from Seattle going?

To the above poster, I believe you meant debt is the lower cost way to go, not lower risk.

Am I crazy, or does the subject of this post miss the point completely?

Wasn't the whole point of this article the fact that the writer WASN'T an engineer, but that he intimately learned the product he was marketing, and that was what people wanted?

I think the point here is that the good marketers are the people who can crossover from one part of the office to the next. An engineer with no social skills will do no better than a marketer with no technical knowledge-- you need both. This article happened to be about a marketer who crossed over, not the other way around.

Video of Kara Swisher's visit to ICHC HQ http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090803/kara-visits-lolcats-i-ca...

flowingdata.com FTW. They even have their own data visualization twitter app. Great stuff.