Yesterday, Forbes reported (and we retweeted) an article stating that President Obama’s opposition to the bills would effectively kill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).  This action from the White House spurred the House of Representatives to delay making a decision on SOPA for at least a month.  PIPA (Protect IP Act) is still scheduled to go up for a procedural vote in the Senate on January 24.  These bills, meant to stop online piracy, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American businesses, in particular countless entrepreneurs who make their livelihoods on the internet.

Unfortunately, the wishful thinking of yesterday’s Forbes article has been debunked by a Forbes article today, stating that the “comforting rumble from the White House” only put the bill on hold and that while this is a small victory, there’s still quite the battle ahead.

Today, you have without a doubt noticed the conspicuous black out of sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist, WordPress and Reddit or have seen all your Facebook friends change their profile photos to express their opposition to internet censorship.  The intense opposition comes not only from SOPA’s decidedly anti-free speech spirit, but, more importantly, the intentionally vague language and scope of the bill.   Chris Heald of Mashable dissects the actual text of the bill uncovers some of the SOPA’s more insidious, overreaching and dangerous.

An `Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property’ if [a portion of the site is US-directed] and is used by users within the United States and is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables or facilitates [copyright violation or circumvention of copyright protection measures].

Still doesn’t sound that bad, but consider this: Any site that allows users to post content is “primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.” The site doesn’t have to be clearly designed for the purpose of copyright violation; it only has to provide functionality that can be used to enable copyright violation.

This means that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be “Internet sites…dedicated to theft of U.S. property,” under SOPA’s definition. Simply providing a feature that would make it possible for someone to commit copyright infringement or circumvention (see: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) is enough to get your entire site branded as an infringing site.

We can hardly begin to think of what the impact of such a bill would have on data marketplaces, including our own catalog, which relies heavily on user-submitted and curated data from source such as Wikipedia and Twitter.  It’s easy to imagine the reach of this bill, supported primarily by huge media companies, would go far beyond the original stated intent of ending online piracy and begin to unravel the very fabric of the web.

There are countless sources with information on SOPA, PIPA and their potential (almost, inevitable) threats to freedom on the Internet.  We encourage you to educate yourself about the bills, who supports them, and join us and millions of other voices opposed to crippling innovation.

Learn about SOPA, PIPA and their Supporters

• A technical explanation of SOPA and PROTECT IP | reddit
• What’s Wrong With SOPA? | EFF [pdf]
• Free Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Link | EFF
• Wikipedia Blackout 101: What exactly are SOPA and PIPA? | NY Daily News
• The Author of SOPA is a Copyright Violator | VICE

• Contact Info for US Elected Officials | USA.gov
• End Piracy, Not Liberty | Google
• Web Goes on Strike | Fight for the Future

Were he still alive today, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be 83 years old; however, his impact on the world, even 44 years after his death, is undeniable. The power of his words, in particular from his famous “I Have a Dream” speech still resonate with us today as we examine the state of human rights in the US and worldwide.

One year ago, Nancy Duarte shared a project on MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Her findings provide great insight into how to effectively, and more importantly, convincingly communicate with an audience.

MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is not only literarily brilliant, its structure follows the presentation form perfectly, by traversing back and forth between what is and what could be, and ending by describing what the new bliss of equality looks like. In addition, MLK carefully chooses phrases and metaphors that resonate deeply with his audience.

If you’re struggling to create your next big presentation or even just crafting the message for your next staff meeting, take a few minutes to be inspired by the brilliance of one of America’s most beloved orators. Thank you, Dr. King, for standing up and speaking out to change the world.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech analyzed by Nancy Duarte from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

Today, Foursquare announced the launch of a web version of Explore, their tool for discovering interesting places.  Leveraging the power of 1.5 billion checkins, this recommendation engine does not spit out one -size-fits-all answers.  Instead, it intelligently compares your own check-in history with those of your friends and others to help you answer questions like…

• What’s the best sushi restaurant in my town that I haven’t been to before?
• What food trailer on East 6th Street will offer me the fastest service at 1am when I have had too much to drink and need a delicious mobile food option NOW?
• Where can I get Golden Monkey beer near the Infochimps HQ during happy hour?

Foursquare Explore is a great illustration of a favorite saying of our CTO, Flip Kromer – “the solution to the too much data problem is more data!”  With the massive amount of check-in data and comments/tips left by Foursquare users, we can suddenly begin to get reliable answers to our strangely difficult to answer everyday questions.

Interested in building a tool similar to Foursquare Explore or augmenting an existing places recommendation engine?  You too can unlock the power of Big Data with some of these great Infochimps APIs:

• Foursquare Places (the Foursquare check-in firehose)
• Bundle.com APIs (aggregated, anonymized credit card transaction data for places – currently, only NYC and SF, but soon with nationwide content)
• Twitter TrstRank and Influence Metrics (dozens of metrics for understanding Twitter users)
• Wikipedia Articles

In most of the country, high unemployment rates continue to plague individual’s lives and the overall health of our economy.  Average length of unemployment throughout 2011 rose, leaving the typical unemployed person out of work for an average of 40 weeks.  Obviously, there’s a need for an immediate and effective solution.

However, walk into any tech conference, startup job fair or Big Data meetup and it becomes readily apparent that there are jobs out there, but there aren’t enough people with the right skills.  With their ingenious and well-timed project, Code Year, Codecademy aims to teach technical skills to the masses via interactive programming lessons emailed weekly.  The promise is that participants will be up and programming within the year.

We suspect most folks reading this blog have some serious technical chops, but if you aren’t amongst the Rubyists and PHP-junkies, this is a great way for you to get started.  And if you’ve got the skills, we suggest you share with your friends.

It’ll be interesting to track the success of this project (how many people will actually learn to code by the end of 2012?) and see if a similar model can be applied to other job skills.

What makes a great software engineer and perhaps more importantly, what skills will most likely land you a sweet job?  Mixtent and KISSMetrics analyzed LinkedIn data and surveyed users on perceptions of candidate skill levels based on their profiles and purported skill sets.

The key findings?

• Python engineers are perceived as better engineers
• Engineers with teamwork, dedication and a solid work ethic are perceived as better engineers.  Creativity and communication skills are less valued.
• Ruby engineers are viewed a good front-end engineers (Rails?)

Hiring Managers – do you agree with the findings of this study?  Do you find yourself making these kinds of decisions between candidates?

Developers & Data Scientists - got some awesome Ruby, Python and Hadoop skills and want to join a strong, dedicated team with a solid work ethic?  Check out our current job listings.

by KISSmetrics via

 

Yesterday, we attended the MadeInAustin Fair, an event that can perhaps be described as a “Job Fair 2.0″.  The event, endorsed by Mayor Lee Leffingwell, Bob Metcalfe and other local leaders, focused on connecting students with start-ups and small companies.  The goal?  To stop the massive brain drain of tech talent from the Silicon Hills.

According to Leffingwell, 80% of the engineers graduating from the University of Texas leave the city to seek work in other cities.  With over 100 companies in attendance at yesterday’s event, the vast majority searching for engineers, it’s obvious that the start-up community of Austin needs to make a concerted effort to keep and attract talent to our fair city.

So what’s the sell to UT’s most talented engineers who tend leave Austin to work for the Googles and Facebooks of the world?  Instead of leaving town, connect to the start-ups in your community and work for the next Google and the next Facebook.

The sell of working for a start-up?  Your job will be a dynamic and exciting.  You’ll have real influence over the direction of the company and its products.  You get to work with similarly driven, innovative, (often) very fun people.  And if it all works out, the monetary payoffs can be huge.

In addition to the openings for full time positions and internships with us, there’s tons of other opportunities in Austin.  We encourage you to keep the spirit of innovation alive by joining or starting your own startup.

Here are some great resources to check out to get you on your way:

MadeInAustin Fair: Interested in a position with an Austin start-up or small tech company?  Peruse the full list of attendees of the first MadeInAustin Fair and check out current openings for full-time, part-time and internship roles.

campus2careers: Connect with positions at start-ups and small/medium sized businesses.  Currently only available in Texas, but looking to be nationwide in the next year.

Capital Factory: Check out this early stage accelerator program for tech startups that provides a small amount of seed capital and weekly mentoring sessions by entrepreneurs who have founded successful companies.

This is a repost from our friends at Luminoso, a text mining and analytics solutions company.  (They’re some smart monkeys!)  Dennis Clark is their Chief Strategy Officer.

At Luminoso, we sometimes combine our serious analytics with something a bit more fanciful.

We were pitching to a company that deals with internal corporate documents — there are lots of fun things we can do with text analytics and a lot of internal documents — but where on earth are we going to get our hands on secret, internal corporate documents of any kind? Nobody’s handing them out on the street.

Rather than the oft-proposed method called “theft,” we did what most email researchers do: take advantage of the fact that Enron got all their email subpoenaed. Hence, the Enron Corpus, consisting of about half a million emails between about 150 top Enron executives, running from late 1999 to early 2002, from slightly before the actual price fixing to slightly after the bankruptcy. Then we did what we usually do.

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On any given weekend when you’re hanging out with your friends watching a game, it’s inevitable that everyone will pipe up with their opinions and none are more vocal than those of us in the fantasy community.  But whose opinion can you trust and which one will lead you to a winning roster?  Professional football, much like baseball, is a heavily tracked sport with tons of stats on every player and every game.  So, sure, you can wade through a bunch of player stats or look to expert rankings, but wouldn’t it be more fun to pit your own football knowledge against the rest of the community?

Football Verdict is a new fantasy football advice platform where managers can ask weekly sit-or-start questions and get advice from the fantasy community. Football Verdict aims to provide personalized fantasy advice by giving you feedback on your specific dilemma. To encourage answers and engage users, we evaluate every answer submitted to the site and rank each user on our leaderboard based on their accuracy. Rather than purely focusing on player stats, we look to measures that gives us a better chance at the right prediction, fueled by a strong, passionate community.

Reviewing our data, in Week 8, fantasy football players most often asked about Bernard Scott, Antonio Brown, Roy Helu, and Jackie Battle. In Week 8, many high-powered offenses had bye weeks and there were a lot of injuries. Thus, fantasy owners asked many questions about fringe players.

What a difference a week makes.

In Week 9, there’s a boldface name sitting at the top: Chris Johnson. Just over halfway through the season, and the fantasy player most often in question is the same player who went #2 in most drafts this year.

Week 9′s Most Frequently Questions Players (with position, team and percentage of Verdict questions appearing)

1. Chris Johnson (RB, TEN, 14%)
Fantasy owners seek justification to bench their first round pick

2. Mike Williams (WR, TB, 12%)
Josh Freeman’s numbers are down all season

3. Brandon Lloyd (WR, STL, 8%)
Lloyd shows early promise in St. Louis, but instability at quarterback leaves players clueless

4. Stevie Johnson (WR, BUF, 8%)
Stranded on Revis Island

5. DeMarco Murray (RB, DAL, 8%)
Does Felix Jones’ return spell a committee in Dallas?

With four teams on byes this week (Detroit, Minnesota, Carolina, Jacksonville), and fewer than 6 viable fantasy players on those rosters, Football Verdict is seeing a glut of questions at the skill positions this week:

Wide Receivers: 32%
Trending: Mike Williams, Brandon Lloyd, Stevie Johnson

WR/RB Flex: 24%

Quarterbacks: 18%
Trending: Matt Cassel, Josh Freeman

Running Backs: 16%
Trending: Chris Johnson, DeMarco Murray, Cedric Benson

If you’re struggling with a fantasy football decision, ask your question at Football Verdict and the community will help you decide. If you think you’re great at predicting results, answer questions and you’ll see your name in lights on the leaderboard. If you have any questions, please email info@footballverdict.com.

Dan Chaparian is the co-founder of Football Verdict.

Yesterday, our CEO, Nick Ducoff presented at Data Content, an Infocommerce conference. In this presentation geared towards fellow data publishers, Nick takes us through a history of information and his thoughts on the future and where Infochimps fits into the puzzle.  If you’d like to review a full transcript of his presentation, you can check it out after the jump. Enjoy!

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Hello fellow data monkeys,

A few weeks ago, Infochimps and Parse.ly completed a collaboration to release nearly 30 million news headlines and summaries from 2009-2011 in a nicely-structured JSON dump. This is data that Parse.ly’s crawlers have collected over the last 2 years from over 500,000 web news sources. I am a cofounder of Parse.ly and was the lead engineer who worked on making the data dump happen.

We have been receiving some questions about this data, so I thought it’d be helpful to give some background via this guest blog post. It’s also great timing: the whole Parse.ly team has just returned from a trip to Austin that included a stop at the Infochimps world headquarters. Let’s not let this opportunity for big data collaboration slip away!

OK, so what’s Parse.ly?

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