Online Media Remix  

A captivating look at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior -- at work, at the mall, and in bed Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior -- what we buy, how we vote -- without our even realizing it.

This week Alan Levy, CEO of Blog Talk Radio, will be joining me in a open conversation about how podcasting and online radio can help brands in their marketing effort. Besides being a super guy, Alan CEO Alan Levy along with Bob Charish founded BlogTalkRadio (www.BlogTalkRadio.com) in August 2006. The concept for BlogTalkRadio was developed by Levy as he mourned his father's passing. Levy maintained a blog, www.theinspirationalvisit.blogspot.com to update his family and friends on his father's health - and later as a memorial to his life. Levy thought by combining blogging and telecommunications, a true immediate two-way interactive online platform could be established. This led to the birth of BlogTalkRadio. Please join us as we explore how to effectively use this brave new platform.

This week we will be speaking with Tom Hespos and Eric Porres, partners at Underscore marketing and two of the most knowledgeable guys about marketing and how they employ Social Media for their clients. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Underscore, they are one of New York's premier digital advertising shops and Eric and Tom are fixtures in the industry. Tom has been involved in interactive communications since the commercial explosion of the World Wide Web in 1994. Referred to by some as “a spiritual leader for online advertising,” Tom is well known as a weekly columnist for such publications as ClickZ and Mediapost’s The Online Spin. Not to be outdone by Tom, Eric held management positions at AOL Time Warner and Agency.com, and worked with The Walt Disney Company and LiveTechnology. In 2000, he won both a W@MMY (awarded by the National Academy of Recording Artists & Sciences) and a Yahoo! Internet Life award for one of the largest Internet webcasts in history, Paul McCartney´s “Run Devil Run” concert live from Liverpool. Eric was also a contributing writer for Crossing the River: The Coming of Age of the Internet in Politics And Advocacy.

Michal Bortnik came to AdNectar from Microsoft where he spent 6 years as a Product Manager in the consumer-products group. At Microsoft he was responsible for designing the features for XBox live —winner of the Emmy award for outstanding technological achievement—an online video game community with an industry-leading customer satisfaction rate and five million subscribers. Michal co-invented eighteen patent pending technologies enabling social interactions between Xbox players. Michal has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Computer Science from Harvard. Vlada comes to AdNectar having spent 2 years working with a handful of social networking start ups. Prior, Vlada spent 5 years as a program manager on high profile projects at Microsoft. She was responsible for providing leadership to the cross-discipline teams involved in the design, build, and launch of Windows Live. Vlada designed features of the content publishing platform for Office Online, reducing content delivery time hundredfold and helping drive site traffic from 100 thousand to 65 million unique customers per month. Prior to this, she served as a software engineer at Sprint. Vlada has a BS in Engineering from Northwestern with a double major in Computer Engineering and Art Theory and Practice.

Prior to David Shen Ventures, LLC, David was the Vice President of the User Experience and Design Team at Yahoo! for almost 8 years and has been involved in almost every product and service Yahoo! has built in the U.S. and internationally. As an early employee of Yahoo!, he lived the startup life of working long, committed, and satisfying hours and embodied the "do what it takes" attitude required for success in entrepreneurism.

Making Meaning out of today's Social Media and User Generated Content world. This week we are speaking with Mark Redgrave the CEO of Amplify, a company that brings human understanding to content. Unlike most semantic technologies, which attempt to merely classify or categorize content, Amplify focuses on the meaning of content. Amplify analyzes the actual meaning of the words - automatically identifying the significant topics, brands, people, perspectives, emotions, actions and timescales contained in the text.