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Jake Russo

Items from 14 people Jake Russo follows

Joel Liu
  • Introduction

    The first step towards an understanding of why the study and knowledge of algorithms are so important is to define exactly what we mean by an algorithm. According to the popular algorithms textbook Introduction to Algorithms (Second Edition by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein), "an algorithm is any well-defined computational procedure that takes some value, or set of values, as input and produces some value, or set of values as output." In other words, algorithms are like road maps for accomplishing a given, well-defined task. So, a chunk of code that calculates the terms of the Fibonacci sequence is an implementation of a particular algorithm. Even a simple function for adding two numbers is an algorithm in a sense, albeit a simple one.
Joel Liu

Bar-code Scanning RedLaser iPhone App reaches 750K downloads, over $1M in revenue

RedLaser has been in the top 5 of the App Store paid apps for 3 months now, and got there without any advertising or marketing whatsoever. Co-Founder Jeff Powers says that though the app hit the market in May, it wasn’t getting any traction. After releasing an update to the app which made it “actually work”, according to Jeff, they saw a dramatic increase in sales. This was despite the fact that they did nothing different upon the re-launch and got almost zero press pickup when they updated the app. The hypothesis is that this came entirely from word-of-mouth sales, which is probably a good bet. Who wouldn’t want to show off to their friends the cool new barcode-scanning price-checking app on their phone? The chart below shows exactly how sales ramped up upon release of the update.

Shared by Joel Liu, 5 saves total

Little Wonder
jljohansen

jljohansen on 2008-01-30

We're all Influencers!

pgillin

Paul Gillin on 2008-02-02

Duncan Watts is upsetting the marketing establishment with research that demonstrates that influentials don't matter. This article summarizes his work and presents some compelling reasons to believe that viral phenomena have a lot more to do with random chance than with influence. It concludes: "The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing."

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