george tziralis thought log

"As you grow up, work deteriorates in mails & meetings."

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:34:00 +0300

“As you grow up, work deteriorates in mails & meetings.”

- This older tweet of mine tends to be an accurate description of my daily schedule lately…

Cease and Desist or Start to Exist?

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:37:00 +0200

Every new day brings a new opportunity and today I had the fortune to enjoy a unique experience; the one of receiving a cease and desist letter. The email regarded the “use of XXX company’s logo and trade name in my websites http://datamine.it & http://gtziralis.com/post/59121553/introducing-datamine-it” and I cannot put it better than pasting some (slightly modified to avoid mentioning the sender, if that is possible after all) excerpts from the letter itself.

As it is already known to your goodselves (comment: I appreciate that, nice template by the way!), our clients have already registered the logo and trade name “DATAMINE” in the Greek Ministry of Commerce under the Number XXX since XXX (pursuant to the decision XXX of the Trade Mark Committee).

According to the said decision XXX has the right to use the above mentioned logo in order to distinct specific products and services, such as, information technology services, data warehousing, gathering and process analysis, IT infrastructure architecture and systems integration, reporting, predictive modelling, software engineering, statistical science, data-mining and many others.

Given that XXX is the sole beneficiary of the Logo “DATAMINE” and since your behavior to act in the Greek Market under the same Trade Mark by sending business offers to our clients deceiving them on your identity, constitutes an illegitimate and unconventional act, and in order to avoid any legal proceedings against you and your company, we hereby, without prejudice,

CALL UPON YOU (caps are not mine)

to immediately cease, discontinue and interrupt the use of the Trade Mark and Logo “DATAMINE” upon receipt of the present notice of demand. Otherwise we are left with no alternative but to proceed, without further notice, with any and all steps available to seek security/satisfaction in case you have not taken the proper action.

Ok, let me now shed some light and put things in context. When we came up with the idea of getting together and turn our humble expertise into a start-up (the story is in the link above, put the blame on me!), we didn’t even think of the term “data mining” as a trademark or anything like that (you know, we are scientists and engineers above everything else and we lack knowledge of legalities or pathological imagination, poor us).

So, we started looking for a catchy domain name to better describe our offering, which is, well, data mining (check wikipedia for more on this popular research area, plus there exist today only 14.3 million relevant results in the web, according to google). We came up with the phrase “data mine it” and the italian domain “datamine.it”, utilizing a “domain hack” just like myriads of other web services like del.icio.us, blo.gs, grou.ps etc. ad infinitum do.

And we launched the website about three months ago, targeting the international market and waiting for our services to mature before we get incorporated or quit our day jobs (neither of which is a fact yet). To give you a better idea of the way we look at things and “competition” (with the conventional use of it), we also organized an open event entitled “data mining in business”, sending an invite to company XXX to be our proud guest speaker.

We actually didn’t receive a reply, or I think -to my great surprise- we just did, asking us to comply with some requirements I personally find nonsense, to say the least. And it is not that big of an effort to satisfy these requirements; to be honest it’s a matter of minutes and a few euros to find a better domain and change our logo, plus we haven’t build such a fantastic brand awareness yet and a simple redirect will do the job for us.

However, before moving on, I need some clear answers in the following questions and I would be glad if you could elaborate.

Firstly, is it possible for a firm to trademark the name of a research field or a popular tool (like data mining or statistics or … email)? In this context, if company X registers the trademark “statistics” or “email”, then nobody is able to provide email services, or relevant services to email, or utilize anyhow the term “email”, is that correct?
Second, if a company owns the “trademark” of “datamine” (or anything else in that matter) in Greece, or Delaware or Papua New Guinea, then every other company willing to pitch a customer in that location, having a name or offering somehow related to this trademark (like datamine.co.uk, datamine.com etc) should ask for the local company’s permission first?
Finally, if “datamine” is registered as a trademark, then is this trademark also valid in every other derivative of it (just like the full “datamine.it” we are using religiously) or every component of the word (in our case “data” and “mine”)? In that case for example, should every company ask for British Airways’ permission to include the syllable “ba” (as of ba.com) in its brand?

Generic nonsense or our innocence, I would be happy if the above proved to be just a poor joke. In case that it’s not, while I undertake full responsibility of everything wrong (?) happened, I dare to say that our team is more determined and passionate than ever to turn threats into opportunities and a bad (?) start into a great asset, good karma included.

You get to know the results.

An holistic approach to investment assessment

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:42:00 +0200

A paper I co-authored is finally published (in early view, .pdf) in the journal of Managerial and Decision Economics. Along with Konstantinos Kirytopoulos, Athanassios Rentizelas and my professor Ilias Tatsiopoulos, we proposed an holistic approach to investment assessment, a process of value that may be highlighted under the current economic situation.

To make a long story short, the typical approach to investment assessment includes the following steps, as these are described in the figure.

However, one may argue that the process remains fundamentally suboptimal, with the discrete nature of its steps serving as one of its most important flaws (given that the optimization of each step does not necessarily result into the optimization of the process as a whole). We tried to address this concern by introducing an integrated holistic approach, as in the figure that follows.

The input variables to the selected criterion’s function (typically Net Present Value) is broken into two categories, the ones directly defined by the investor being the first (like investment’s height or operational specifications), and those that cannot be modified being the second (interest rates etc).

The approach suggests initially assigning to the latter ones their most probable values, so as to be able to optimize (using genetic algorithms, because of the tough nature of the problem) the values of investor defined variables, then moving on to an extended risk analysis by Monte Carlo simulation to accurately (probabilistically that is) compute the implied risk of the investment. We also introduced NPV Expected Shortfall and NPV Risk Preference Index, providing a customizable metric of high informational value picturing the whole probability density function, next to demonstrating the whole process by an extended case study regarding the comparison of two renewable investment scenarios.

As a closing note, I should mention that, to me, the concept of studying the problem at hand by separating its variables to the ones you can influence and the ones you cannot, while then attempting to optimize the first set and track the total risk of the second, remains an approach of great practical -if not philosophical- value, next to its academic one. And I do hope that is of interest to you, too.

My humble activity report for 2008

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:18:55 +0200

The last day of the year is a good chance to review what you did and what you didn’t, helping you shape out tangible plans for the year to come. I’ll try to do so in the lines to follow, based on the sparse 35 posts I happened to post in this blog during 2008.

So, what did I do?

finally launched -together with Efthimios- AskMarkets and AskMarkets Services, but we’re clearly in the very beginning
had a very poor year academic-wise, with a few minor research contributions (some others are to come up soon though), while focusing mainly on my PhD
watched Open Coffee Greece and the local start-up community bloom, with 21+ events (including one with TechCrunch), 87+ speeches (among them Jason Calacanis) and hundreds of participants, I was happy enough to get to know tons of people, too
teached A Course by Blog on data mining, next to a couple of lectures on prediction markets (all of them in greek, apologies), then set up DataMine.it as a start-up with my fellow students
launched with Efthimios and Dimitris a little web service which got some serious coverage, WebSource.it that is
set up the promising HowSocial.ru with a fantastic team within a weekend
turned almost into a ‘parsley’ by gaining (or not) some media attention (ok, I’m joking, but to me media coverage is far from an achievement)

So, I can roughly describe 2008 as ‘a year of launches’. And that makes the target for 2009 clear. Turn launches into successes, premises into actions, potential into results. PhD included.

PS: Can’t wait, will be fun!

Europe's Best Young Entrepreneur by Business Week - close enough, or not

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:02:54 +0200

About a month ago, I receive an email from Business Week, stating that I was one of the about 40 nominees for the Europe’s Best Young Entrepreneur 2008 contest. That was a really pleasant surprise, asking me to reply with more information on my business, next to confirming that I am 29 years old or younger, I am the founder or manager of my company, my company has been in business for five years or less and it is a viable, revenue-producing entity, not just a business plan.

I finally wasn’t happy enough to be included among the final entrants, and to my disappointment there is only one entrant from Southern Europe, but I think my reply mail is of an almost autobiographical value you may find of interest (event it is kind of outdated one month afterwards), so I’m attaching it hereby:

Dear ****,

first of all, I’m really thrilled of receiving such an invite and I need to thank you for this tremendous opportunity. To be honest, my first thought was that I’m just not eligible for participating (we have yet to host hundreds of thousands of users in our web service and I’m definitely not a millionaire, for the time being at least). However, giving it a second thought, I decided to tell you my humble story, you being the judge. So, here it goes.

Originally a researcher, I was interested in everything related to forecasting. I got my Diploma in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering with a thesis attempting to predict -using artificial intelligence techniques- the future stock prices in Athens stock exchange. Right after that I was self forced to continue researching the field of forecasting, starting a PhD in Operations Research (both Diploma and PhD from National Technical University of Athens).

I focused initially on machine learning and data mining (the expertise I gained from the latter one enabled me to teach a relevant course at post graduate level, all of which was made through a blog, you may find more about that here), but the attraction was almost instant when I found out about the innovative use of markets as a forecasting mechanism, the so-called ‘prediction markets’. So, I switched focus, mastering the subject while making some academic contributions and attempting to make a name in the field, to realize that my theoretical / algorithmic contributions also needed some actual implementation and a web application to be tested at (by nature, prediction markets live on the web).

At this point, I was lucky enough to met up with Efthimios Mpothos, who later on proved to be my co-founder and true soulmate. Thimios was a PhD researcher at NTUA, studying prediction markets, too (actually we probably were the only researchers on the field in Greece, yet struggling to find some time to finish up our PhD dissertations), while possessing a stronger technical background than mine. We immediately decided to join forces and scale up our targets, from an experimental application needed just for our research, to a rock solid web service and potentially the best prediction market offering around the globe.

So, we started working together in the lab, initially during the weekends, trying to simplify the concept of prediction markets as much as possible and bring its potential into the masses. And we founded AskMarkets UnLtd about one year ago, to host our work, devotion and vision.

Le me describe you the latter: Markets by their very nature bring people together, they sum up their information and transmit it through prices. We intend to bring this functionality to the masses, by enabling anyone to create a virtual market or trade in markets already created by others. You may visualize it as the concept of stock markets brought into your everyday life, as a market game or a social bet, also as a dynamic survey or the next generation of polls. But, no matter how you visualize it, the tool aggregates the opinions and knowledge of the many and transforms these into a meaningful result, more accurate than the opinions of the few experts and faster than every other decision support mechanism.

You may take a look at all these at http://askmarkets.com, which is our default marketplace and a demonstration of the potential of our services (we’re putting this out of private beta this week, so don’t expect to find that much traffic there), while we offer separate marketplaces as a paid service. An example of these is what you can find at http://techcrunch.askmarkets.com (we’re launching this marketplace for the biggest tech blog in the globe in the following week) and, while we’re still finalizing our product and we haven’t yet launched our service platform out and loud (we’re counting down to next week for that, too), we do already have some big clients from europe and america (the only name I’m allowed to tell you is ********) and income.

Apart from AskMarkets, we have also created http://websource.it, a simple tool which you may find useful, especially if you work all day editing and refining texts, plus I happened to launched yesterday another start-up, http://datamine.it, providing data mining services.

Another activity of mine which you may find of interest and related to the contest, while I do consider it as one of my most important achievements, if any, regards Open Coffee Greece. I happen to be the initiator and principal organizer of Open Coffee meetups and events in Greece, for the last one and a half year. And even if we started with virtually no interest in startups and entrepreneurship in general, we have managed to organize about 30 events countrywide (maybe the most successful Open Coffee meetings around the globe), gathering hundreds of people in each one, inviting great speakers and finally managed to create a vibrant start-up community from scratch, giving birth to a bunch of companies out of thin air. You may find more about this activity at http://opencoffee.gr, we were also privileged enough to co-host a relevant session with Jennifer Schenker of BusinessWeek at Stream 08 a few months ago in Athens.

All that said, I do apologize about the extent of this email (it looks more like an interview, rather than an one-paragraph introduction to my entrepreneurial activities after all) and I do remain at your disposal for any further information needed.

Thank you again for what is to me a great honor, at least.

Kind regards,
George Tziralis

And we're TechCrunched!

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 21:35:00 +0200

And we're TechCrunched!

Launching askmarkets services

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:37:29 +0200

Launching askmarkets services:

go create your marketplace now

Introducing HowSocial.ru, a project of Startup Weekend Athens

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:39:00 +0200

I’m too exhausted to write about anything but my excitement on participating at Startup Weekend Athens, as @andrewhyde said “the biggest SUW ever organized in Europe”. We set up a fantastic team by @kcorax, @dimitristi, @netwire, @ageor and @thimios and turned a rough idea (“friendfeed counter anyone?”) conceived about an hour before the event into a solid service and valuable offering, which you may better visualize as “PeopleRank”.

So, we eventually decided to go for computing the informational value a person has across various networks, in other words her global social impact factor. And we ended up creating a number of crawlers scanning all the relevant information we can get from popular social networks, a sophisticated algorithm to take into account all that information (giving it a second thought, I may say it’s pretty close to the concept of a customized pagerank, this time with people as nodes), also a capable web interface, next to the business model and plan and service’s presentation.

I’m not that secure the social impact metric you’ll get right now won’t eventually harm our own reputation, but rest assured that our crawlers are up and running, so that the system accumulates wisdom next to storing data over time and will provide more accurate results every next time you try it.

You may find more details about the concept and its implementation in our presentation embedded below, but, no matter the details, let me say it again: It was a weekend of pure fun.

HowSocialRU Launch Presentation, Startup Weekend Athens View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: how social)

(update) @dimitrisTI has more: Part I & Part II

It is about time to let the good times roll: We are launching askmarkets. Quietly.

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:37:47 +0200

It is about time to let the good times roll: We are launching askmarkets. Quietly.

Introducing DataMine.it

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:24:12 +0200

I’m more than happy to share with you that the Course via Blog has matured into a solid start-up. DataMine.it that is and our offering regards -you guessed that right- data mining services.

We put great effort on adding value to AI algorithms by spicing them up with our very human expertise, while trying to keep the whole procedure as simple as it gets and its results much more intuitive than what you may imagine. So, you may go find out more right now at datamine.it, while we can’t wait to put our hands on your precious data and I’d like to thank you in advance for your support and feedback.

Teaching Prediction Markets

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:00:17 +0300

I gave an introductory lecture on prediction markets earlier today, in the context of a undergraduate course in Logistics at NTUA’s School of Mechanical Engineering. The feedback and responses on running some hands-on experiments (you can guess the software) were really great, I expect that this will be repeated in a few days when I’m giving a lecture again, in the course of Production Management & Control this time.

I also came up with some extended lecture notes, which you may find of value in the all-but-rare case of being interested in the topic and understanding greek (63 pgs, .pdf, published under CC attribution -share alike 3.0).

"He who writes a lot, has little to say."

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:42:43 +0300

“He who writes a lot, has little to say.”

- from a discussion with Professor George Cosmetatos, member of my PhD thesis committee, on the extent of my dissertation

Conjuring Startups out of Thin Air, a presentation at Stream08

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:49:00 +0300

A couple of days ago, George Kasselakis, Dimitris Athanasiadis and I had the privilege to lead a discussion at the Stream08 unconferene. Together with Jennifer Schenker of BusinessWeek, we attempted -quite successfully!- to trigger the conversation about innovation in Europe, trying to figure out some best practices for enabling entrepreneurship excellence.

The presentation is embedded below and we were lucky enough to get feedback from some very experienced european VCs and Tim O’Reilly, among others. Insights on which should be the steps to follow the apparent (but yet almost outward) success of Open Coffee in Greece were plenty (also Jeff Pulver contributed some very useful insights later on in the bar), however I do believe that your insights are equally valuable, so please contribute to the discussion here or in the original Open Coffee post.

| View | Upload your own

P.S.: On a side note, Jason Calacanis will attend and speak at Open Coffee Athens XV tomorrow, you just can’t miss that!

update: Jennifer Schenker’s piece on Stream08 and our session, available right in Business Week.

an interview of mine appeared yesterday in V-Men magazine,...

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:09:16 +0300

an interview of mine appeared yesterday in V-Men magazine, distributed with the sunday edition of daily newspaper To Vima and claiming a circulation of .475M (full text is here, in greek).

"The show has moved to the tech start-up scene."

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:01:26 +0300

“The show has moved to the tech start-up scene.”

- Attending SIME Helsinki, the semantics of location just made this clear to me…

Market-driven Innovation Management, from the inside in

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:37:00 +0300

I attach the presentation file, full paper and abstract of the work I presented earlier today at APMS 2008, here in beautiful Espoo, Finland. Your comments are welcome.

Market Drive Innovation Management, from the inside in View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: tziralis predictionmarkets)

abstract: Modern enterprises and organizations seem like market-agnostic, semi-permeable bubbles, in a market-powered universe. Although markets external ly deﬁne companies’ operations, such mechanisms have yet no place in supporting the decisions of those entities. We attempt to address this reality by exploring the use and impact of an internal market mechanism to support decision-making in innovation management. We step up by focusing on a generic innovation’s management problem, the one of idea selection. An abstract model of an internal market is shaped, with contracts traded on selecting the idea that has the greatest potential for deployment. The questions that we ultimately address regard the properties of market’s convergence towards equilibrium. In our case, this translates to a meta-mechanism able to aggregate the totality of available information throughout knowledge workers and utilize it to highlight among the available ideas the one with the greatest potential for development. A market-approach to innovation management is rather novel; we believe that this text provides some unique contributions in this developing ﬁeld, while introduces various options for further research.

full paper (.pdf)

Introducing WebSource.it, a new pet project

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:30:00 +0300

Have you ever realized how many times you use Google search every single day? No? Get prepared to be amazed if you navigate to Google web history and click on ‘trends’. In my account, for example, Google has already tracked 23,025 searches, an average of about 45 queries per day. Sounds like a lot, right? And you may say it actually is, for a rudimentary service that has almost remained unchanged since its introduction 10 years ago and ‘just provides relevant results to search queries’. Well, let me argue that it’s not; at least for users being slightly smarter than dumb. Let me elaborate the reason.

Google, except from being relevant, is also fast. And speed is a matter of utter importance, if not the most significant one. Yes, it’s faster to search the web than your hard disk, enter arithmetic calculations or find word definitions into your browsers’ search box rather than opening a calculator or a dictionary, search for ‘wikipedia silvereye’ and feel lucky, instead of navigating to wikipedia’s homepage and finding your way from there; it keeps going. It should be by now apparent, Google turns out to be a launcher -over time and the more you use it-, next to its default search functionality, the recent Chrome browser being the most ubiquitous proof.

Turning back to my personal experiences -I bet they sound familiar- what I realize is that more and more often I enter longer queries and I don’t even click on any of the search results; Google web history comes again into support and reveals that this is the case for roughly half of my very recent queries. So, why is that, has Google become less relevant? No, not at all. It appears that I’m just looking for something else, which turns out to be different than any of the specific results. And that is their total number. The total number of results returned by a query in Google might look worthless, and it actually is when considered in an absolute sense. But, move that to a relative setting -aka comparing the results of two or more search queries- and yet you have a fantastic tool for a wide variety of purposes, powerful while elegant on its simplicity. Feeling unsafe about two potential spellings of a word? Run a query for both of them and select the one with the most results. Wanna pick a product and you don’t know which of the reviews to trust? Search for “productname good” and “productname bad” and find out how many people have written about the first versus the second, that will probably turn out to be a more sincere advice, at least worth of the time you spent for the ‘survey’.

Well, to be honest and while speaking of time spent, the concept is fantastic, but its implementation is not-so-fast. Needing to iterate the search process a couple of times or more and then remembering the specific number of results that Google returned each time is a process that could profoundly be improved. And the conception was common and clear in a recent Open Coffee Athens meeting, when my co-founder Efthimios Mpothos, our good friend Dimitris Athanasiadis and I were talking about how each one of us utilizes Google in daily practice: Why don’t we optimize the process by ourselves?

So, today we are happy enough to introduce you a tiny tool, result of limited effort and time, but potentially able to make you reconsider the value a couple of google queries can offer you. And while we cannot claim of reinventing the wheel (clearly, there are many wheels out there), we do think that our app is slick and simple, next to cute and time and attention efficient. It’s name? Well, each group of searches serves as an attempt to outsource a task, ranging from a quick spell checker task, to an elementary poll, to a basic sentiment analysis tool, or to whatever else you can imagine it being serving of. And, particularly, this is an attempt to outsource this task to Google, essentially to outsource it to the web-at-large. So, let it be named WebSource.it, and that’s the name of it.

Yes, by now you may navigate to http://websource.it, enter up to 5 terms separated by a Tab stroke and hit enter: What you’ll get is just the number of relevant Google search results, as provided by the Google API. And you may rest on the shoulders of the crowds to select the term with the most results, highlighted with green. Or, as an another uber-fast option for you “big-guys-who-don’t-click”, you may enter websource.it/search/term1/term2 to get your results directly, without leaving the address bar.

We hope it will be useful for you, at least as it was proved to be for us so far and we do await for your own very innovative uses.

We just added another option -facebook connect that is- to let...

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:29:57 +0300

We just added another option -facebook connect that is- to let practically anyone get into and take a look at our pride and joy, askmarkets. So, by now you can navigate to askmarkets.com, press the facebook button, enter your facebook credentials and -boom- you’re in, go trade, spread the word and let us know what you think askmarkets.

Quoted in Chicago Tribune - the story beyond

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:04:00 +0300

I was honored enough to be quoted among the former ATHOC President Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki and the former Mayor of Athens and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Dora Bakoyannis, in a today’s article of the much respected Chicago Tribune, regarding the post-Games Athens (update: the article actually appeared at the newspaper’s front page).

To give you some more info on that, I have met the journalist Philip Hersh in Guatemala, at an IOC conference a year ago. Interestingly, we both attended the Sport Accord 2008 exhibition, held early June in Athens and I was at Chicago a month ago; however the interview was conducted via phone and I was asked to share my humble opinion about the status of the Olympic legacy of Athens, as a senior researcher of the Athens OGGI team.

After all, Mr. Hersh quotes me saying “I do think there are some opportunities that haven’t been used, and I don’t know if and when they will be” and [regarding the main Athens Olympic Sports complex] “I would like to see it as an Olympic Park, where people would use it, we in Athens don’t have a large park or one like [Chicago’s] Millennium Park” (well, clearly I pretty much liked the audio picnic option there, but this is another topic).

While I do not put into question the validity of quotes attributed to me, I feel that there was maybe a slightly biased and somehow disjointed citation of them, especially in the given context of the article’s corpus. I mean, in the phrase “Well, ‘A’ is true, but consider also ‘B’ and ‘C’, which clearly change the broader picture ‘D’.”, you may quote someone saying ‘A’, but this is only the partial truth, and not the full story.

I’m not willing to open the huge debate on 2004 Olympics and their legacy right here and now, nor I consider myself as the most appropriate one to handle or take part in it. However, if you want to get a much broader picture, you may go read this paper and this text (more and specific data are on their way to release) and shape your very own opinion. As for me, I clearly learned my lesson, concerning dealing with (old) media: If you don’t want to be quoted of saying ‘A’, then just don’t say it, in any context and collocation of your words. :)

"Everything under the sun is on ‘public domain’. Thus, it might end up on the web, too...."

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:26:00 +0300

“Everything under the sun is on ‘public domain’. Thus, it might end up on the web, too. Get used to it, or stay at home.”

- a re-tweet, inspired by boris and mike.

please accept/correct/upgrade, or discard (I’m not the law guy)