Gee’s Blog

Solecial.com is a site that my friend and I created to help people find and buy shoes online.

The basic idea is that you can search across multiple vendors to see who has a particular shoe in stock, in your size, at the lowest price… but the social aspect also helps you discover more shoes by seeing what others like/have/dislike.  You can also create your own lists of shoes that you have or want, etc and send that to your friends.

The site then uses this data to help shoppers visually see whats hot and whats not.  Each shoe page also has other data such as price history, user uploaded photos, and user comments to help you decide if its the right pair for you.

We are in the middle of implementing Facebook Connect to really open up the social aspect of the site, but right now its still mostly driven by the comparison shopping engine while we continue to collect data from our users via a simple thumbs up and thumbs down button for each shoe.

An interesting techincal note… this site is now hosted on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud services, and so far it works great!  Much faster than our old dedicated servers actually.

Gee Projects Projects

Got an e-mail from Google today… here are 7 tips they included for getting the most out of your AdWords account:

1. Have at least two ads in each ad group
2. Include keywords in your ad text to make those phrases bold
3. Have tightly themed ad groups (preferably three or more)
4. Set a unique destination URL for each group
5. Have at least 50 active keywords in your account
6. Focus on 5-15 keywords in each ad group
7. Remove keywords with a clickthrough rate (CTR) less than 0.1% in the search network

These may or may not be news to you, but in my experience with using them I think its some very good basic advice for anyone starting out.  You don’t have to necessarily follow every one of them, but if you implement the majority of these, you should be well on your way to a successful Adwords campaign

Gee Advertising, Tips

Here is a code snippet that I found very helpful thanks to zachary:

I needed to calculate a simple distance between two latitude, longitude pairs in miles and this did the trick.  Apparently, its not the most accurate way to do it since the Earth is not a perfect sphere, but its close enough (an error of 0.5% at most I believe).

import math
#
# The following formulas are adapted from the Aviation Formulary
# http://williams.best.vwh.net/avform.htm
#
nauticalMilePerLat = 60.00721
nauticalMilePerLongitude = 60.10793
rad = math.pi / 180.0
milesPerNauticalMile = 1.15078
def calcDistance(lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2):
"""
Caclulate distance between two lat lons in NM
"""
yDistance = (lat2 - lat1) * nauticalMilePerLat
xDistance = (math.cos(lat1 * rad) + math.cos(lat2 * rad)) *
                (lon2 - lon1) * (nauticalMilePerLongitude / 2)
distance = math.sqrt( yDistance**2 + xDistance**2 )
return distance * milesPerNauticalMile

Hopefully someone will find this useful as well.

Gee Python, Tips

Just a quick tip to make sure and monitor your PPC advertising accounts on a regular basis!  Its easy to let them cruise along on auto-pilot for weeks or even months at a time… but don’t be surprised if something looks way off the next time you decide to login to your AdWords account.

Here are 2 examples from my own experience as a PPC marketer:

1) The meanings of keywords change over time!

This one is pretty random, but here’s the story… I have an e-comerce site that sells unique No Drip Umbrellas that I import and fulfill through Amazon.  You can imagine the keywords that I bid on in the search engines: umbrella, umbrellas, etc. etc.

The campaign was working pretty well for a while… generating a decent number of sales and some even better leads for large quantity orders etc.  I obviously did not feel the need to monitor this account daily.  Enter Rihanna and her uber hit single “Umbrella“…  I’m sure you can see where this is leading.

As soon as it became a hit, the number of impressions on “umbrella” related keywords skyrocketed almost overnight!  You would think people would be smart enough not to click on an ad that said “Rain Umbrella on Sale”, but then you’d be wrong.  The number of clicks spiked as did my costs.  I doubt even 0.01% of the resulting clicks were from people actually looking to buy an umbrella, so my conversion rates plummeted.  It took me a while before I caught on, and by then the damage was done. The result was a large amount of wasted ad dollars.  Granted, it wasn’t THAT much money, but remember… you never know when one of your keywords will become the title of a hit single.

For those interested, the solution was to add a whole bunch of negative keywords, “-Rihanna”, “-lyrics”, “-mp3″, “-download”, etc. etc. :-/

2) Identity Theft

I pride myself on the fact that I would NEVER click on a phishing email, let alone fill out the resulting login form… but apparently I’m wrong.  One day I noticed there was a $15,000 charge in my Google Adwords account for just one campaign on one day. Apparently someone had “broken into” my Adwords account using my login credentials and created an ad with travel and flight related keywords that pointed to a page full of Adsense ads.  The bids were all in the $5.00 range and that’s why it racked up so many clicks in such a short period of time… talk about the perfect Adsense arbitrage setup (0 cost)

I quickly contacted Google and they halted my account.  They then looked into my claim that this was fraud and got back to me within a couple days.  They happily refunded my money and suggested I run some antivirus and anti-spyware programs… to this day I have no idea how they stole my login credentials.  I was very pleased with Google’s response and to be honest I hadn’t expected anything less from such a great company.  The biggest damage was that this particular AdWords account is no longer usable.  This could have been really bad, but luckily I had already started to phase this one out and wasn’t using it for much anymore…

So, the point is to be careful out there!  Keep an eye on all your advertising accounts and be sure to optimize, optimize, optimize… you probably can never 100% prevent cases like Identity Theft, but at laest you’ll be right on top of things to minimize the damage

Gee Advertising, PPC, Tips

I thought I’d get things started on this blog by writing a bit about my current main project.  I’m a co-founder at AWIT Systems Inc. and we’ve created an application called Remobo.  The project itself has been going on for a few years now, but we are finally gaining some traction with a growing user base and have an idea of how we are going to monetize this thing.

What does Remobo do?

To put it simply, Remobo simply creates a VPN between you and your friends, family, coworkers, etc.  This allows you to do things like share files privately, pay games across the Internet, remote control your home computer form work… basically anything you could do if you and your buddy were physically on the same LAN.

However, we like to think that Remobo is much more than just a VPN.  It provides a layer of connectivity beyond what your traditional social networks provide and anyone can just download it and be up and running in seconds since there’s virtually no configuration needed.  So we have changed our naming slightly and call it an IPN (instant private network).

On the tech side of things…

We use a P2P based architecture and the whole thing is written in C++ using libraries such as boost and wxWidgets.  Currently, its available for both PC and MAC OS X and we hope to have Linux available soon (it runs, but its not production ready yet).

So that’s the project I spend most of my time on… hopefully this is the year we make a breakthrough in the market and start earning some long awaited revenue.  In the future, I’ll post some of the technical issues and design choices we have encountered along the way.  We have a C++ guru on board at Remobo, so I’ll have to ask him to chime in sometime too   I’ve mostly been coding the GUI and application side of things.

Gee C++, Projects, Remobo C++, Projects, Remobo, wxwidgets

Welcome to my new blog!  I’ve created many different themed blogs in the past, but decided it’s finally time to create one about me and my work.  At the moment, I’m an entrepreneur working on several different projects from my home office… one full time, and the rest in my spare time.  You can check them out in the links section or keep following this blog, and I’m sure I’ll eventually write about my experiences with all of them.  Enjoy!

Gee News News