Ben Baumer says his gig as the Mets statistical analyst was a direct result of the popularity of “Moneyball” early last decade. And in his seven seasons in that position, he has seen the sabermetrics movement expand and deepen.

Now, about 15 Major League Baseball teams have a person designated to do some kind of statistics crunching – including the Yankees, Red Sox and Cardinals, Baumer said – and they are looking for new statistical frontiers as well.

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Would James Madison, for example, agree with some current interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, which hold that old-fashioned letters stored in a dresser drawer enjoy stronger legal protection against search and seizure than an e-mail stored on the Web or a private post left for a friend on Facebook?

In a world where every computer is connected, where it doesn’t matter whether your e-mail is on the hard drive in your bedroom or a server half a world away, where your critical company documents can be viewed from anywhere, where would the Founding Fathers draw the line for law enforcement? The “cloud,” already well formed with Hotmail and Google docs, is a potential treasure trove for police investigators. But how can we make sure the cloud doesn’t rain all over Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights to avoid unfair searches?

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They seem to be becoming less popular lately, but not too long ago “stealth” startups were a growing fad in the Internet entrepreneurship sector. A team with a big idea would insist on keeping their business a secret from the public and even from investors until the last possible moment in an effort to ward off any fast moving idea vultures that might swoop in and copy their idea. Others went stealth to create a buzz around their mysterious and unknown project. Some argue, however, that being stealthy limits a startup’s opportunities for funding and feedback, among other things, so is there a better way to go about this?

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In simple terms analytics means using quantitative methods to derive insights from data, and then drawing on those insights to shape business decisions and, ultimately, improve business performance. Thus predictive analytics is emerging as a game-changer. Instead of looking backward to analyze “what happened?” predictive analytics help executives answer “What’s next?” and “What should we do about it?”

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Delegate Mixer – Conference Only

Where: Moscone North 747 Howard St. (Room 134) When: Monday Apr 19th 5pm-6:30pm

Opening Night Party – hosted by Brian Solis, Murray Newlands, Steve Hall, and Marissa Louie

Where: Roe Restaurant and Nightclub 651 Howard Street/4th Street (1 block north of Moscone North) When: Monday, April 19th 7:30pm

ROCK OUT – presented by Partner Weekly

Where: Great American Music Hall 859 O’Farrell Street When: Monday, April 19th 9pm to 1am

Meetup202

Where: B Restaurant, Moscone Center (upstairs from ad:tech) When: Tuesday, April 20th 5pm to 7pm

Big Networking Bash (Open to All Attendees)

Where: Moscone North 747 Howard St. (Room 134) When: Tuesday, April 20th 6pm – 7:30pm

Old Timers Party

Where: XYZ bar in the W Hotel When: Tuesday, April 20th 6:30pm – 7:30pm

VIPMix+Mingle – presented by Moss Networks

Where: Manor West 750 Harrison Street When: Tuesday, April 20th 10pm to Close

Cocktails for a Cure – presented by Affiliate Summit

Where: House of Shield’s Saloon 39 New Montgomery Street When: Tuesday, April 20th 7:30pm to 10:00pm

Blumberg Capital & DoubleVerify Cocktail Party!

Where: Blumberg Capital Offices 580 Howard Street, Ste.101 When: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 from 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM (PT)

Clickbooth Party

Where: 1015 Folsom When: Wednesday, April 22nd (Free Drinks 9pm – 2am)

After Party presented by AdRoll and Girls in Tech

Where: John Colins, 138 Minna at New Montgomery When: Tuesday, April 20th 6pm – 8pm

Thanks to @stevehall for the Google Calendar Link for parties!

Core Needs

Let’s first look at your new companies hosting and servers.  being that you are lean you may most likely be working from home.  So let’s look at hosting and services you will need in order to host some of the Open Source applications will will talk about in a moment.  In my experience the basic things you need to get going in terms of setting up shop are the basics:

• Email
• Phone
• Website
• Computer(s)
• Branding
• Web Conferencing
• Conference Calling

Let’s look at these basic needs and assess how we can get them for little or no money.  Firstly the lifeblood of any business: email.  I have found that Google Apps free version is the easiest and best way to get email without the headache or grief of the dreaded Exchange Server.  You can have email, calendaring, wiki, private GTalk, and Docs all by using this service.  They even allow you now to download a customized version of Chrome browser already configured for your Apps Domain.  So then you need a phone number and extensions for your various people working from their homes.  I have checked out both grasshopper.com and phonebooth.com who are both low cost VoIP and virtual office solutions and find them more than enough to seem a lot less “lean” to your prospective clients.  Computers in most cases might not be an issue since those joining or starting the company (hopefully) already have a computer.  Another common need is web conferencing and conference calling.  I have found two goo free services to do this with ease.  Yugma is a funny named company that provides a stripped down free desktop sharing web conferencing with a pro level service that can be upgraded to for more advanced features.  It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux which is a big plus in today’s diversified OS usage.  For conference calling I have found Rondo to be the best call quality for the price (free).  I have used it for a long time to do daily status calls with teams of developers working from home.

Additional Applications

Some examples of the many Open Source projects one can use to get a jump start on their new venture can be broken down into their respective categories.  Let’s build a basic lean startup with software to fill the needs for most any software development or web service company.

Corporate Website - There are a plethora of Open Source choices when it comes to content management systems (CMSs) one can use to build their company web presence.  Many popular ones are intended for people using a LAMP stack.  Some popular choices are Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and Plone to name a few.  depending on your needs and developers you have on hand any will work to build a company site.  You can even drop around $50 or less for a custom theme to match your branding if you do not have a designer on staff.

CRM - SugarCRM – a robust Open Source CRM that also has a large developer community and the option of Enterprises support.  With SugarCRM you can get your sales team in the habit of building pipelines and keeping tack of prospects easily. SugarCRM also has internal ticketing and bug tracking if you wish to utilize it.

Help Desk - osTicket – a powerful yet simple to setup and use help desk application in PHP.  Allows you to easily support your clients help desk needs.  There are many others out there but to me osTicket has made itself stand out above the rest.

Code Versioning – Subversion many people are using Git now as an alternative to SVN (Subversion).  Depending on your release cycle and ho you develop your applications greatly affects which you would choose.

Project Management - Redmine – a simple to use project management application with bug tracking, wiki, forums, repository viewer, gant/calendar, and many other features is a good fit for multiple projects.

Short Messaging and Collaboration – Along with the wikis, IM,email, and other means of idea and knowledge exchange I have found with an environment with everyone working remotely from home there is a loss of communication in terms of what is going on.  Being that when everyone is in a office you can look over and see what Bob or Alice are doing.  Or ask one of them for a quick opinion or help on something.  My solution to this was to implement a social network internally for the company.  Here people can share updates on what they are doing and feed off of one another.  It’s also a great way to automatically update a feed with Subversion commits.  The easy stripped down way to do this is by installing WordPress or using WordPress.com (hosting this site) and using the P2 theme along with setting the site to private in order to only let your co-workers contribute and read posts.  A more in-depth way to create this community is by having an install of Elgg which will enable the social messaging along with big bonuses like social bookmarking.

In Part 2 we will be covering the hosting infrastructing and tying all these things together.

My phone and myself know that what counts in this war is not the calls made, the buzz on Twitter, nor the calls we make. We know that it is the sells that count. We will SELL…

My phone is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its battery life and its dead zones. I will keep my phone clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…

Before God I swear this creed. My phone and myself are the defenders of my company. We are the masters of our competition. We are the saviours of my life. So be it, until victory is my company’s and there is no competition, but Revenue.

As we understand it from the discussion on stage, a Think Cloud is a “body of knowledge” that is a real-time information base of Amazon cloud that can be pivoted all the way down to the threads and individual data concurrency. It would be an index that acts like a control point that helps define movement of data through a servers and compute tasks. Looking at the journey from the data point of view, including data about the environment itself and how to repair itself when damaged and keep data concurrency in tact.

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Graham identifies four forces: 1. The Internet’s open platform fosters innovation at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds. 2. Moore’s Law worked its magic on Internet bandwidth. 3. Piracy taught a new generation of users it’s more convenient to watch shows on a computer screen. 4. Social applications made everybody from grandmas to 14-year-old girls want computers — in a three-word-nutshell, Facebook killed TV.

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Mr. Kundra also said that he would push the government to embrace cloud computing — having work done on large servers rather than on desktop PCs. He acknowledged that there are privacy and security issues with some cloud-computing efforts, particularly when the computers are not all operated by the government. But he said that should not stop the government from taking advantage of the speed and efficiency such systems offer.

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