BarnTools is a rapidly growing innovative AgTech company specializing in improving the swine and poultry industries

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Will robots take my job? Last Tuesday saw the official launch of and 5 days later we have passed 500K visitors and 4M page views. Will Robots Take My Job? To say this surpassed any expectations we had would be a major understatement. This is a recap of how the project got started and the first 5 days after launch. The Back Story Just over a month ago launched . I’ve freelanced on and off for over 10 years, so I was happy to back the documentary, and joined the Slack community. Dann Petty Freelance TV has also joined and messaged me, and we started talking about the possibility of working together on a project. We decided to start with something small and quick to see how we might like working together. Dimitar Raykov Dimitar mentioned his idea of building a website around a in 2013 about the probability that jobs would be automated thru Machine Learning and Mobile Robotics. report published I’ve been interested in the AI/ML space for a while, even co-founding . BotList BotList We’ve already seen many chatbots assist people in their jobs, even replacing them in some instances, the and categories are good examples of this. HR Travel We decided to move forward with the project. Just showing the percentage automation risk, would not make for a very interesting user experience, so we looked for additional data that would help. We found additional information about the jobs in the report via the website. We were able to download salary data and estimates for number of people employed. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics The Build Dimitar would handle the design & front end and I would handle the backend and hosting duties. We wanted to make it easy for people to find jobs, since the report only covered 702 jobs, finding similar jobs would be an important feature. We decided to go with to achieve this. Their search matching is great (even with misspelled words) and the synonym feature would make it easy to find related jobs. We signed up for the trial and thought the free tier would mean we’d get able to run the site with no cost — more on that later! Algolia We started working and I built a quick prototype on using Bootstrap, while Dimitar worked on the design. LaravelPHP Once the design was complete, Dimitar built the pages out in static html pages, and passed them over to me to integrate. Some fun features we added as we worked: Algolia Instantsearch to power the job search autocomplete, why reinvent the wheel. Easy job page link copying and sharing to Twitter and Facebook. Custom open graph share images for each job. Random color palette for each visit. Go ahead and try it! Each visit you’ll be assigned one of ten palettes. All in the build took about 3 weeks, of us working on evenings and weekends. I setup the website on a droplet I had for other projects, and the site was live, just nobody knew it. We share the site with a few friends and got some early feedback. Digital Ocean The Launch Given my affinity for that seemed to be the obvious place to launch our project. I reached out to and discussed the project with him. He agreed to hunt it for us. Dimitar created the thumbnail image we wanted to use for the product on the site, and prepared some images to show some of the features, and we passed those on to Ben. Product Hunt Ben Tossell The site appeared on about 3:15am (et) on Tuesday (May 30th). I like to be around when something is first hunted, to add a comment and respond to any immediate questions. Since I was up, I decided to also post the site to , and Dimitar posted it to . Product Hunt Hacker News Designer News We immediately got traction on all three sites. We quickly moved to the 2nd spot on Product Hunt, and my post moved to the front page of and . As I was going to head to sleep, I noticed the visitors start to tick up. Google Analytics showed we have 48 people on the site, that jumped to 88, and then to 327. No going to bed now. Designer News Hacker News It wasn’t until about 5am when I finally got to bed, the visitors peaked out at around 440 users. After my short nap, had to get up and get the kids ready for school, I saw that we’d been written about in The Next Web. That had pushed our visitors higher, we had over 500 visitors on the website. Featured on The Next Web homepage This site estimates how likely you are to lose your job to robots We quickly passed the Agolia free tier limit and upgraded to their Starter package. 1M operations a month, we should be good with that. Dimitar started to reach out to journalist to help spread the word about the website. Having the initial success, helped frame the outreach, which would lead to further success. Visitors continued to rise through the day, the article from TNW was syndicated to a number of sites, including MSN and AOL. We jumped to 822 visitors and then peaked out during the day at over 1400. Day 2 We continued to get have articles written on all sorts of website, most interestingly not just in the tech space. General news sites in Arizona, Texas and Washington state wrote about us, and a post on lead to a massive jump in visitors. BarStoolSports A New Website Tells You The Likelihood Of A Robot Taking Your Job And When It'll Do It By We peaked out with about 2000 visitors on the site! We were rapidly approaching the Starter tier limit on Aloglia. I couldn’t justify the $300 to upgrade to the next tier, and started investigating alternatives. I tweeted about the situation, and Algolia responded and offered to help us out by raising our usage limit. That saved us a bunch of time and worry, the support from Algolia is much appreciated! The full search alternatives to Algolia wouldn’t have been much cheaper and a lot more work. Running our own server with Lucene or Elasticsearch would have been one option, but the cost of hosting and the time sunken to get that operational wouldn’t have been a good use of my time. Our best alternative would have been to switch to , no additional server would be required and writing a JSON API around the search would have been relatively straight forward in Laravel. Thankfully none of this ended up being required. TNTSearch for Laravel Scout Day 3 We had a very steady stream of visitors all day, ended by topping the sub-reddit. InternetIsBeautiful <a href="https://medium.com/media/cc095486140faf2980bf79cee104bf22/href">https://medium.com/media/cc095486140faf2980bf79cee104bf22/href</a> Although we finished the day with over 5000 votes, we unfortunately didn’t make the Reddit popular page, perhaps next time! Day 4 I decided it was best to upgrade the server, we were getting pretty steady visitors and although the server was handling the load pretty well, I wanted to have some spare capacity, and ensure the pages loaded very quickly for our visitors. makes it ridiculously easy to setup servers, my only concern was adding SSL to the new server. I used on the original server, but you can’t do this until you’ve pointed your DNS to the server. Luckily I remembered that I had some unused SSL certificates in my account. I ordered a SSL cert, and in a few minutes the new server was up and running. Laravel Forge LetsEncrypt Namecheap I crossed my fingers as I updated the DNS to the new server. Luckily we managed to get things migrated with zero downtime. The extra capacity came in handy. Although we didn’t get another big surge in visitors, the average was higher thru the day. We did end the day with a peak of 1600 visitors which appeared to be coming from Google search. We’re still unsure what caused that surge in visitors. Day 5 Finally some time to breath. The weekend lead to lower visitors levels, but with about 300–400 visitors on the site through the day, we’re still pretty happy! The Results Although we topped the Product Hunt homepage for a while on launch day, we ultimately ended up in the 2nd spot. Falling behind Andy Rubin’s Essential phone. Product Hunt votes for May 30th, 2017 We have close to 950 votes, I’m hoping to reach the 1000 vote club for the 4th time before soon :) We stayed on the Hacker News homepage for a few hours, we topped a popular sub-reddit for 3 days, and appeared in many popular sites, including: TheNextWeb, LifeHacker, Mashable, MSN, FoxNews, AOL, BarStoolSports, BusinessInsider, Geek.com, Vice, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, and Fortune. Google Analytics summary for the first 5 days By the end of Saturday, just 5 days, over 500K people have visited the website and generated over 4.2M page views, an average of over 6 pageviews per session. We expect the visitors to slow down, even a significant drop will leave us with a lot more traffic than we expected. Top 10 Searched Jobs The Lessons Just because you build something small and quick, doesn’t mean it won’t have a big impact. Will Robots Take My Job? is easily the most successful personal product launch I’ve been involved with. Yes I’ve been involved more high profile, high traffic launches, but those involved big marketing teams and big budgets. We are a developer from Upstate New York, a designer from Bulgaria, with no budget. Make it fun Dimitar and I had fun building the website, and working together for the first time, but that’s not the only thing what I’m referring too. We made the website fun for our visitors. Instead of being dry and just displaying numbers, we injected some fun into the website. Any job highly likely to be automated was presented with a “Your are doomed message”. Make it Shareable Although it wasn’t easy we made it so that every job had a custom share image, so when people shared their job on social media it presented their specific automation likelihood rather than a generic image. Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 100K visitors, which we think is large part due to our custom share images. Be Available Via email, via social media, via comments. We tried to respond to anyone and everyone who had a question or comment. We believe this lead to more articles, more shares and more votes. It takes time, but if you don’t dedicate your time to your project why should any one else. Be Grateful Both Dimitar and I are very grateful to everyone who wrote about, shared or just visited the site. None of this would have been possible without you. We’re especially grateful to Algolia for the support, we may need to discuss raising operations limit again 😁. If you haven’t had a chance to visit yet, go ahead and try it out now. Come back and leave a comment with what you think. Will Robots Take My Job?

From Idea to 4M Page Views in 4 Weeks

People on social media love to talk about investing, but few will do the due diligence for their investments. Throwing money at companies without doing any research is closer to gambling than investing. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but the gambler is much more likely to sell when an investment has a large drawdown than the investor. Due diligence enables investors to have high conviction in an investment, which helps prevent them from selling during a large drawdown. Until late last year, I was more of a gambler than an investor. So what changed? The perfect opportunity fell into my lap. I learned about a small-cap company at the intersection of my interests and knowledge in public policy, sports, gambling, and technology. The stars aligned when I realized that their mobile app had been on my phone for years. The company was called Score Media and Gaming (SCR/SCR.TO). To say I became obsessed might be an understatement. In late 2020, I officially became a shareholder in the company. On March 23, 2021, I published my first analysis supporting a public company. My long thesis for SCR was now public knowledge for the world. To summarize my research, I had high conviction in this company for the following reasons: Founder led Huge TAM being unlocked in sports betting by new legislation in North America Governments are always looking for new tax revenue sources, especially in times of budget crises (i.e., COVID spending). Sin taxes, such as gambling, are easier to gain public support. Asset light company Strong user base for their sports media app, which I had been using for years. This could lead to a low customer acquisition cost (CAC) in their future sports betting ecosystem. Access to first-party data via their media app –> more important with the IDFA/Apple advertisement changes A proven history of building mobile apps and websites (i.e., a tech company). Potential to vertically integrate with the technology stack for their sports betting product, improving margins and adding control over the recommendation engine. An established brand in Ontario, one of the largest sports betting markets in North America History of being ahead of technology and market trends, such as shifting to mobile apps and starting an online eSports brand Free social media advertising from a few Barstool accounts and personalities because PENN had a minority stake in SCR Future TAM expansion opportunities in iGaming After doing the due diligence, I truly believed I found a potential multi-bagger. Around the time I published my article, I managed to convince almost a dozen friends and family to put some money in as well. As soon as everyone did, the stock tanked. Lesson #1: You should not rely solely on fundamental analysis for investment. All of my research was based on fundamentals but ignored one of the most important elements of investing: timing. Four weeks after my publication, SCR was down 31 percent. Eight weeks after my publication, it was down 47 percent. You will notice the huge drop from March 2021 through May 2021 in the chart from Koyfin below. After such a huge drawdown, what do you think happened next? As any normal shareholder would do, my friends and family began questioning my advice. Doubt and skepticism filled the air in every text or discussion. Their questions and concerns continued for months. Lesson #2: Be extremely cautious about giving investment advice to anyone. Their money and your reputation are at stake. Throughout this time, I had to repeatedly explain my reasoning for being long SCR. Often this had to be conveyed over a short text or a quick phone call. I constantly reiterated that huge drawdowns are normal for small caps and the long-term thesis remained largely intact. Lesson #3: You should be able to explain your investment thesis in a simple story to anyone, regardless of their background in investing. During this time of poor performance, I doubled down on my bet. I continued to dollar cost average my position and encouraged everyone to follow suit. This lowered our average price of purchase but shifted everyone’s portfolio allocation heavily towards one company. At times, SCR was more than 10 percent of my portfolio. For my friends and colleagues, it represented a sizeable percentage, too. Lesson #4: If you can’t do technical analysis, strongly consider dollar-cost averaging into a position for an individual stock. Meanwhile, we were all waiting for the one political event that would significantly impact the company’s future TAM. This was bill C-218 that proposed the legalization of single-event sports betting in Canada. Having 10 percent of your portfolio dependent on one unpredictable event is gut-wrenching. Anyone can tell you what uncertainty means, but living it every day can have a material impact on your mental state. There were days where my anxiety levels were very uncomfortable. Lesson #5: Drawdowns are incredibly painful no matter your conviction. Finally, we made it to the day of the Canadian Senate vote. SCR had been performing well during the weeks leading up to the event. I was optimistic about the future, but in the back of my mind knew about the term “sell the news. “ In the days after the bill was legalized, the stock declined 20 percent. Four weeks after the legislation had passed, the stock was close to the lowest point since their Nasdaq listing. Lesson #6: Sell the news events are a strange market phenomenon. The market is capable of declining no matter how positive the catalyst might be. After so many months of emotional pain, I began to wonder how long it could take for SCR’s price to reflect my thesis. If this huge, positive catalyst couldn’t maintain a higher market price, then what would? The next obvious catalysts on the horizon appeared to be earnings calls in 2022. This would show whether SCR could capture a large market share of sports betting in the Ontario market. While I still believed in this outcome, I was not blind to the bear thesis. What happens when the top competitors (e.g., DKNG, FanDuel, MGM) are willing to spend limitless amounts of advertising dollars to acquire customers? If these companies can sustain losses for years, then SCR’s theoretical low CAC advantage might remain just that. A theory. Lesson #7: No matter how much research you do, your thesis could take years to play out. Days will feel like weeks, weeks will feel like months, and months will feel like years. Throughout this period, I noticed a pattern among SPACs and many of the exciting, futuristic stocks. This included my beloved SCR. The pattern was the following: Lesson #8: Speculative earnings often mean temporary boosts in stock prices. Realized earnings will sustain higher stock valuations more permanently. Most of SCR’s future revenue was unproven; therefore, it was uncertain. And the market HATES uncertainty. With such a large drawdown, I began to debate whether to sell most of my position for tax harvesting and reenter in 30 days. After much internal debate, I chose not to and voiced my slight hesitation to my fellow shareholders. Lesson #9: Be extremely careful about tax harvesting during large drawdowns for volatile stocks. Anything can happen during the 30 day period where you are not holding a stock. On Aug 5, 2021, I awoke to a barrage of texts, missed calls, and notifications. I ignored the calls and texts because I saw a strange email subject flash across the screen. After opening the email, I learned that PENN had acquired SCR. The stock opened at 29.55, an incredible 63 percent increase from the previous day’s close. Because of months of depressing performance, it took me a couple of days to process how good of a result this was. Lesson #10: It only takes one other person, or company, to agree with your thesis to potentially change everything. In this case, PENN must have put the same premium on SCR’s theoretical low CAC ecosystem as I did. After collecting my thoughts, I summarized the result of the investment recommendation to my family and friends. Below is the performance breakdown for our SCR investment compared with the S&P500 and domestic small caps from March 22, 2021, through August 6, 2021. Additional cost bases are displayed since we continued to add to our SCR position as its price declined. S&P 500 (VOO): 12% Small cap (IWM): -1% SCR ($27 cost basis): 22% SCR($24): 37% SCR($22): 50% After seeing these results, some readers might think I’m a good investor. After seeing all of my mistakes, some readers might say that I was lucky. Lesson #11: It is incredibly difficult to evaluate whether someone is a good investor. It could take years to come to any sort of conclusion. ~ The Data Generalist *Approximate calculations, assuming VOO, IWM, and SCR $27 cost basis) were purchased on March 22, 2021. SCR continued to be purchased at different cost bases as it declined. All percentages are based on selling the respective shares on August 6, 2021. Image Source: Tabitha Turner on Unsplash Also Published On: https://thedatageneralist.com/lessons-from-my-first-high-conviction-investment/

What I Learned From Going "All In" On My First High-Conviction Stock Investment

The US sports betting market is booming. In 2020, Americans spent almost , so it’s no surprise that the competition to acquire customers for sportsbooks is fierce. As a growing number of states legalize sports betting, millions of new gamblers are emerging, making it imperative for companies to invest heavily in customer acquisition to secure a piece of the action. $35 billion wagering on sports events Strategic Localization DraftKings and FanDuel are the standout leaders in the rapidly expanding sports betting sector, responsible for approximately 80% of the US market. But a growing number of competitors are coming forward in an attempt to gain market share as the sports gambling industry reaches new heights in revenue. While Nevada continues to hold the largest sports betting market in the US, gambling is now legal in approximately half of the states, with others soon to follow. Starting from June 2018 up to June 2021, New Jersey hit a revenue of with monthly handle of $447.5 million in May. $1,089 million from sportsbook operators [Source: ESPN; As for May 25, 2021] In our recent video discussion about in the sports betting space, Daniel Kustelski, co-founder and CEO of games-as-a-service provider Chalkline, stated the importance of localization in the current climate. effective customer acquisition strategies “Obviously, what we're seeing – varying strategy and tactics by the operators depending on really the size of their balance sheets. There's a lot of national coverage for brands, but really what it comes down to is what is working on a state-by-state basis. We're seeing lots of, certainly, above the line advertising. But then down at its more regional and local level, it's really about figuring out who in each one of these states is interested in sports betting and/or maybe has bet illegally in the past and how do you acquire those customers.” In addition to expressing the need to customize advertising on a state-by-state basis, Kustelski mentioned some methods being used to acquire customers. “(We’re seeing) lots of deals with media companies right now between sportsbooks and major media companies, and not just on a major national scale. We're seeing those types of deals happening locally and regionally, and maybe just relevant for a couple of states.” Overcoming Barriers to Entry While the sports betting market is highly lucrative, it’s not easy to enter. Startups in this space must navigate a patchwork of complex regulations that vary from state to state. The two market leaders—DraftKings and FanDuel—are both owned by large public companies, giving them access to deep pockets for advertising spend in addition to vast legal and compliance teams to manage the regulatory complexities of the industry. “I think the first wave that we saw was really about market access ,” Kustelski explained. “Do I have access to this state or that state, or what does that look like. And I think that while we're still starting to see market access deals, I think there's certainly a push now to ‘Okay, I am in particular states - how do I now acquire customers in those particular states and what is my arsenal in order to do that.’” [Source: Roundhill Investments] Another challenge facing sports betting startups is how to differentiate themselves from competitors. The reality is that most betting platforms offer basically the same service. While many companies offer a range of bonuses for registration with their service, new entrants in this space can stand out from the pack by delving deeply into the analysis of what sports fans are most interested in and subsequently tailoring their special offers accordingly. Every registration bonus is not created equally, and those that can appeal directly to the largest percentage of new customers in the sports betting market can significantly raise awareness and interest in their platform. An excellent example of effectively applying this concept comes from FanDuel. FanDuel partnered with WSC Sports to deliver in-game highlights directly to their users, in near real-time. The technology uses AI to automatically analyze live sports broadcasts, identify events that occur, and then create customized short-form video that can be published on a mobile app. One more difficulty facing entrants in the sports betting industry is the extraordinarily long journey from an initial customer touchpoint to their eventual registration with a platform. During our discussion, Kustelski talked about some misconceptions held by startups in their first attempts to acquire customers. Kustelski explained before providing us with a more realistic view of the industry, which typically includes the need for acquisition tools to achieve success. “I think that there is some assumption from some of the operators and the sportsbooks that if they build it, people are going to come, and everybody's going to sign up in the first two months and then that's it,” “It's really hard to sign up customers on my sportsbook. People would come to my registration page ten to eleven times before they even started the registration process. It depends (on) walking people through that process of registering and depositing and then placing that wager. There will forever be a need for acquisition tools because everybody is in a slightly different state of education.” Impactful Strategies for Success Sportsbook operators in the US typically employ a range of tactics in their quest to acquire customers, such as registration bonuses, ongoing promotions, odds boosts, and sponsorship deals. #1 Media Deals and Sponsorships Media deals and sponsorships are on the rise as the sports betting market skyrockets. With a growing number of new entrants vying for attention, combined with a rapidly increasing revenue stream as the industry expands to additional states, partnership deals provide a powerful method for raising awareness of new betting platforms. It’s interesting to note that . While the lion’s share of paid advertising comes from DraftKings and FanDuel with a from January-September 2020, as illustrated in the following chart from market research firm Kantar, new industry entrants may climb further up the spend ladder in the coming period. 90% of sports betting ad spend in 2020 went to TV broadcasters combined media ad spend of over $154 million [Source: Kantar] Many companies have signed profitable partnership deals to further their customer acquisition reach, including: CBS / William Hill NBCU / PointsBet Fox / Stars Group Turner / DraftKings & FanDuel ESPN / Caesars New York Knicks, Rangers, & Giants / DraftKings While media partnerships and sponsorships can be excellent methods for expanding the awareness of sports betting platforms, it’s vital to ensure that the brand image being created is on point. When a platform uses questionable promotion tactics, it may harm their image significantly, resulting in a major backlash from customers and the overall sports betting industry. For example, in what may be remembered as the most inappropriate advertising strategy of the year, Pennsylvania’s Barstool Sportsbook posted an image on Instagram of a young child holding up a sign that said “Daddy I need -3.5” with a caption reading “Do it for the children”. Although the company later deleted the content from its account, the post received a lot of negative attention and may prove to be a permanent scar on the platform’s reputation. #2 Promotional Offers Promotional offers continue to be a major tool for customer acquisition in the sports betting industry. Providing the right type of promotional offers can help a platform stand out from the competition while being an overall incentive to join the world of gambling on sporting events. In a report by PaySafe called , the company points to research commissioned in 2020 which found that 28% of US players named good promotional offers as a differentiator when evaluating different sportsbooks that they do not currently have an account with. “ All the way players pay: The game plan for growth ” Another promotional offer strategy is a controversial tactic that’s sometimes called “a race to the bottom”. A new American sportsbook called Vigtory is attempting to disrupt the industry by taking a vig from wagers that’s between 50-75% lower than what traditional sportsbooks take. The company is targeting bettors who are big spenders as opposed to average sports gamblers, believing that offering a major savings on the vig will attract high rollers to its platform. Such tactics can be difficult to manage for many operators, as : Harry Lang, a UK sports and online gaming marketer, explained “The smaller guys will find it hard to compete because they won’t be able to ‘loss lead’ with small margins. They’ll go broke trying to keep up.” #3 Expansive Access to Services Providing wide access to betting services is a key component of successful platforms. A strong mobile presence is imperative as online betting continues to grow in popularity for the majority of consumers. A large percentage of people are on two screens for much of their day, especially during the pandemic due to the reduction of in-person retail. Building an innovative second screen experience is an excellent way to keep sports fans entertained and engaged while increasing betting opportunities that lead to additional revenue. Kustelski explained. “I think that New Jersey is a great example of the importance of mobile. It's probably 90% of all the wagers that come in on mobile, and certainly during the pandemic when there was no retail opportunity. Providing people the ability to entertain themselves on free-to-play or sports betting on their mobile phones where they are already – it’s not important, it's everything,” He elaborated on this point based on his experiences with Chalkline. “We have 20% of our game plays on desktop but 80% is on mobile and so especially when you look at these states like say Tennessee, Tennessee is mobile and online only and that's a really unique opportunity for people to kind of panel beat their processes around getting people to sign up through digital means.” [Source: CNBC; As of March 12, 2021] #4 Behavioral Marketing Behavioral marketing is an advanced method of targeting customers based on their activity on websites as opposed to simply analyzing the pages a customer visits. The actions being tracked and utilized may include the way a user engages with product listings, the length of time spent viewing a coupon, a user’s search history, and other measureable activities. For platforms in the sports betting space, behavioral marketing provides powerful information that can be used to acquire customers in a highly personalized manner. In Chalkline’s case, the company analyzes the passion points of each user of its games, including which ones they engage with and how long they spend playing each game. This information is subsequently used to personalize their messaging, sending users the campaigns that are best aligned with their tracked activity. Considering the modern consumer’s expectations for personalization, behavioral marketing is an ideal tool in the quest for customers, as Kustelski illustrated during our recent conversation. “We collect a lot of data , and all of our data is captured on behalf of our clients. But on a weekly basis that report really looks like this: how many games we created, we created 15 games for you last week, these are all the types of players that played, this is how many times player X or player Y played these games, player X only played the football games and player Y actually played the UFC and the golf games,” Kustelski explained. The extraordinary amount of data collected can subsequently be used to understand what works best for customers and what isn’t working as well. Kustelski continued. “The BI that we collect is really grounded in the fact that our tech team and our team has built a sportsbook,” “We understand the value of every single thing that the client does on our site, and we know that is intelligence to the operator. That is critically important for the operator but also when we start to collect information from the operator, we can also start to glean how they are engaging with our particular product - our free play as well as real money - so we know that most of the time, if there's a free play component by an operator, it's going to be played. Fifty percent of all the real money players are going to be playing that free play for various reasons. If there are ways that we can maybe entice people to deposit money if they've already signed up, what are some of those games and what are some of those passion points that we can use (to say) ‘hey, here are campaigns that work for the various personas and the various registrations down into the funnel.’” We’ve covered a lot of material about a range of customer acquisition tactics in this article. The following comparison table summarizes the options to help you decide which methods are best for meeting your particular goals. Keeping Up with Competition Although sports betting used to be relegated to very small parts of the US, this pastime has now expanded to half of the country and will continue to spread throughout additional states in the coming period. As a growing number of startups attempt to grab a piece of the lucrative action, the platforms that apply innovative marketing methodologies along with exceptional technological infrastructures are poised to climb the competitive ladder of the rapidly expanding sports betting market. By Russell Karp , VP Media & Entertainment at DataArt

4 Ways to Acquire Customers as a Sports Betting Business

The recent battle was a classic David vs. Goliath story that pitted the old against the new. The video game retailer’s stock price shot up nearly 2000% in a fierce battle between retail investors and overexposed hedge funds. Gamestop (GME) vs. Wall Street Just a year ago, GME was stagnant and trading under $4 as the company struggled to find footing in a shift to online prominence. Fast forward a year and the stock had increased to a high of $470. This was not a result of great management or financial performance, but rather an ambitious and dedicated group of Reddit users who worked together to catapult the price in a successful short squeeze against a hedge fund called Melvin Capital. This sparked a collective effort to find and exploit hedge funds with large shorts on struggling companies. A global news frenzy ensued, with people joining forces to support the movement from the comfort of their homes using various mobile trading applications. The hype has since subdued but the clinging effects of this event include a continued discussion around the power of hedge funds and various collaborative entities, regulation, and what appears to be the into what happened. beginning of an investigation How did this all start? In short, Gamestop shares surged as a result of a subreddit called , where degens and talented traders collide to drop alpha and place bets on stocks. Over the past few months, a smaller group of WallStreetBets members believed that GameStop's stock was undervalued, largely due to a massive options bet in 2019 by one user who was later as a prominent Youtube financial educator and trader. r/wallstreetbets doxed During this squeeze, the rally of retail investors grew and demand for the stock was through the roof. Right as critical mass and support were building, several mobile apps begin interfering with user trades. Several trading platforms such as WeBull, Apex Holdings, and most prominently Robinhood refused to allow more buying of GameStop shares. WeBull highlighted that the market is characterized by extreme volatility and its clearing house was unable to process more orders. As a result, the users of WeBull were forced to liquidate or sell GME and other stocks with short squeeze potential. Robinhood also cited extreme volatility. Trading in GameStop shares was stopped, preventing retail investors from buying more shares. There was immense pressure on circuit breakers and trading platforms to restrict trades. This paved the way for people calling for the need for more censorship-resistant trading and decentralization in its best form.  The event also saw massive support from top influencers, thinkers, and media personalities.  Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital and popular influencer, : tweeted Dave Portnoy, Founder of Barstool Sports and popular crusader against Wall Street, strongly against Robinhood and demanded that they get punished for the crime. came out Making a Strong Case for DeFi A fundamental shift from centralized exchanges and apps (that can essentially control your money without your permission) to decentralized solutions is currently underway. In the context of the cryptocurrency markets, a centralized exchange like Coinbase has a closed order book that is managed by a central system. They use their own servers to take care of the trades meaning that the company alone takes decisions on several critical factors such as suspending trades on certain listings and other events that can be detrimental to their user base. In the world of equities, Robinhood benefits from its relationship with Citadel Securities and other large liquidity providers, funds, and partners. In return for access to order data, Robinhood sold roughly $69 million worth of user Information in 2018 to firms like Citadel Securities. One could argue their interests are not in their users (who can use the app for free) but in the profit potential their user data brings. Decentralized finance (DeFi) brings the transparency and security of distributed ledger technologies to traditional finance use cases while reducing inefficiencies and solving pain points. Similar to migrating financial processes from the physical realm to the digital realm, DeFi intended to migrate from current infrastructures to more robust, secure, and efficient systems. Open-sourced smart contracts allow for an immutable ledger backed by consensus mechanisms. Hence decentralized technologies can easily transfer the burden of trust from a centralized authority to software. The ability to automate the creation and settlement of agreements using smart contracts provides a secure and reliable basis to access financial services for the underbanked and unbanked populations. With decentralization also comes great transparency. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains records of all blockchain network activity and is shared by everyone. This is a major game-changer and ultimately is more secure, robust, and efficient vs. legacy systems. With the smart use of consensus algorithms and cryptography, like Proof-of-Work, one can achieve true immutability. This makes manipulating records stored on the blockchain network impossible. How DAO’s Help Provide Transparency and Control The main feature of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) is that their operating rules are automatically hardcoded. These rules are enforced when the conditions specified in the software are met in stark contrast to traditional norms. In the case of DAOs, funds are immediately transferred upon result of a contract's approval. Not even influential internal stakeholders and third parties like banks can then stop it. Everyone has a stake in a DAO can make proposals regarding its future. Stakeholders vote on various proposals and proposals are determined based on the opinion of the majority. Currently in the blockchain industry, DAOs are as various applications and products realize the importance of governance within their platforms. In fact, since 2019, the number of active DAOs have . In 2020, we saw the rise of DeFi DAOs including oracles ( and ), staking derivatives platforms (OINDAO), and other notable names like . gaining momentum increased by 660% DIA Data API3 Curve DAO In the case of , its blockchain systems offer convenient and robust solutions to create DeFi functions. allows projects to mint their own stablecoins with the help of a customization staking pool. This way users can swap their hot coins in order to accumulate more and surge their holdings. Users can leverage their holdings, use it for many use cases, earn rewards, and much more. With such progressive DAO solutions onboard, OIN Finance and OINDAO are a good example of what v2 DOAs look like in 2021's Defi landscape. OIN Finance OINDAO Conclusion While the debate for decentralization is still ongoing, the recent turn of events has driven people away from centralized platforms towards a more trustless and decentralized future in trading. The people have spoken and they want more control over their money and how it is used.

Following the Robinhood Saga, the Demand for Decentralization Has Never Been Higher

How to Invest Intelligently in the Podcast Ecosystem

If the internet is an ever-evolving collective consciousness of content, then memes are it’s DNA. In this week’s edition of Internet Culture Roundup, we have a diverse array of memes take the spotlight including a mobile game with ads showing delusions of grandeur, a photobombing Fiji water bottle model, an ambitious content creator, a victim of an All-Star baseball player’s troll campaign, and a deleted Wikipedia page. Mafia City There are normal mobile game advertisements, and then there are Mafia City ads which are in the league of their own. Created by Shanghai-based Yotta Games, Mafia City gameplay consists of different clans competition to be the preeminent crime family of the city. But what has really taken the internet by storm is not the games, but the ads that accompany it are ludicrous enough to become meme-worthy. A typical Mafia City ad consists of a Level 1 “Crook” performing an action such as robbing a bank or drinking a power-up drink, and then transforming to a Level 35 “Mafia Boss.” Some ads even have the Mafia Boss coming in at the end with the caption “That’s how mafia works.” A number of have appeared since Mafia City ads became popular in late 2018/early 2019, some of the most popular include the “That’s how mafia works” graphic below a . Maybe if we are lucky enough, a full-length movie will be in the works. memes mischievous action or headline Kelleth Cuthbert photobombing Richard Madden at the Golden Globes Kelleth Cuthbert (Fiji Water Girl) Model and brand ambassador Kelleth Cuthbert recently got a plethora of attention from her appearance on the Golden Globes red carpet. No, she was not nominated for any awards that night, but people could not get enough of her holding a plate of Fiji water bottles behind the nominees. Her photobombing of celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, Judy Greer, Idris Elba, and Jim Carrey have brought her newfound fame and left many wondering where she came from. The Toronto-born, Los Angeles based model has a bachelor’s degree in social work and previously worked specializing in mental health and addictions counseling before pursuing modeling full-time. Her full biography, as always, can be found on her Everipedia page. Still-frame from the YOUNG PAGEVIEWS music video Young Pageviews Ben Friedman a.k.a. Young Pageviews had an interesting path to joining Barstool Sports full-time. The St. Louis-native created a music video to get the attention of El Presidente David Portnoy and when given the chance, drove 1,000 miles to New York City to make his case to start Barstool Outdoors which focuses on outdoorsman/wildlife content. Out of sheer determination and will, Friedman got the job and has been at Barstool Sports since 2016. Friedman, like many Barstool Sports bloggers, produces engaging content and have strong followings on social media. Yet, outside the Barstool Sports community, they fail to get the recognition they deserve (hence why the Everipedia community started a ). list of Barstool Sports bloggers A picture of Nikki Giles Nikki Giles Texas State senior and former softball player Nikki Giles had to deal with the full wrath of Twitter trolls led by Cleveland Indians All-Star pitcher Trevor Bauer. It all started after Bauer made a run at Houston Astros third baseman Alex Bregman, Giles’ favorite player, and she later criticized him. Infuriated, Bauer went as far as digging up old tweets of Giles and sharing them with his followers and tagging her in a number of tweets. The Twitter fight has been reported in major outlets such as the and . Although there have been many Twitter fights between individuals in the fast, the Giles-Bauer debacle shows how fast things can escalate, especially when one side as 135x more followers than the other. New York Post USA Today A picture of Micah Baldwin Micah Baldwin Micah Baldwin is an unsung hero of the social media growth hackers of the world. The Executive Director of Create33 started #followfriday (#ff) way back in January 2009. What started as a way of helping his two friends who were competing to see who could gain more followers ended up becoming a global trend the following Friday with more than 400,000 tweets including the hashtag. Since then, Baldwin has gone on to have a successful career in the startup world, founding companies such as Graphic.ly, working with accelerators Y Combinator and TechStars, and advising a slew of companies. Yet, with all of his accomplishments, Baldwin had his Wikipedia page deleted due to their “notability” requirements. I guess that’s how mafia works…

Internet Culture Roundup #3: Not “Notable” Enough, That’s How Mafia Works

Mary Meeker recently presented her . Among the many trends included in her 300-page deck was a nod to video game Fortnite Battle Royale, the most watched game on . Twitch’s continued growth in streaming hours and the total mobile video viewing for gaming are opening the door for new emerging content types and monetization. isn’t just garnering the attention of new gamers, but unanticipated startups have also started to take notice. 2018 Internet Trends Report Twitch Fortnite Developed and published by Epic Games, Fortnite made $296M in the month of April, breaking the record for most additional content revenue in a single month by a console game according to . The overall industry saw digital spending grow 23% in April as consumers spent $9B on digital games across console, mobile and PC platforms in April. Super Data Fortnite’s ascension to being one of the most popular games in the world can be attributed to it’s free-to-play model where users can purchase virtual goods via micropayments. Startups have been applying technology applications and creative experiences used in traditional sports and carrying them over to eSports (see ). They are providing a brand new platform for advertisers and corporate partners to monetize streams. Some startups are expanding or pivoting entirely to eSports. One example of a company doing just that is LA-based, REELY. eSports One developed a computer vision tool set for identifying highlights in traditional sports. They use AI and Machine Learning to recognize, rank and distribute sports highlights for notable college teams and even professional leagues like Major League Lacrosse. Through REELY, teams can now look at scores, moves, players, basic analytics and automate highlight reels. View a baseball highlight from one of their customers, The University of Kansas, below: REELY body[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;} JAYHAWKS WIN!!!! Citta walks it off with a 2-run bomb in the bottom of the 12th #KUbaseball https://t.co/MQGvYwLdbI — @kubaseball function notifyResize(height) {height = height ? height : document.documentElement.offsetHeight; var resized = false; if (window.donkey && donkey.resize) {donkey.resize(height); resized = true;}if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var obj = {iframe: window.frameElement, height: height}; parent._resizeIframe(obj); resized = true;}if (window.location && window.location.hash === "#amp=1" && window.parent && window.parent.postMessage) {window.parent.postMessage({sentinel: "amp", type: "embed-size", height: height}, "*");}if (window.webkit && window.webkit.messageHandlers && window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize) {window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize.postMessage(height); resized = true;}return resized;}twttr.events.bind('rendered', function (event) {notifyResize();}); twttr.events.bind('resize', function (event) {notifyResize();});if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var maxWidth = parseInt(window.frameElement.getAttribute("width")); if ( 500 < maxWidth) {window.frameElement.setAttribute("width", "500");}} After receiving significant demand, REELY’s developed an eSports prototype for the game Fortnite, in partnership with . REELY’s CFO & Co-Founder, Frank Bryan, states, “The robust computer vision toolset we’ve built for traditional sports is a perfect fit to empower the content automation capabilities of influencers and content marketers in the eSports and gaming space.” The response has been overwhelming, and they’re evaluating product opportunities for automating short-form content creation for streamers, advertisers and competition organizers. GamerzArena body[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;} Spun up this awesome #BarstoolBattle highlight reel @GetReely @StoolGametime https://t.co/kkc7KW4eKb — @GamerzArena function notifyResize(height) {height = height ? height : document.documentElement.offsetHeight; var resized = false; if (window.donkey && donkey.resize) {donkey.resize(height); resized = true;}if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var obj = {iframe: window.frameElement, height: height}; parent._resizeIframe(obj); resized = true;}if (window.location && window.location.hash === "#amp=1" && window.parent && window.parent.postMessage) {window.parent.postMessage({sentinel: "amp", type: "embed-size", height: height}, "*");}if (window.webkit && window.webkit.messageHandlers && window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize) {window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize.postMessage(height); resized = true;}return resized;}twttr.events.bind('rendered', function (event) {notifyResize();}); twttr.events.bind('resize', function (event) {notifyResize();});if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var maxWidth = parseInt(window.frameElement.getAttribute("width")); if ( 500 < maxWidth) {window.frameElement.setAttribute("width", "500");}} The average time spent watching eSports continues to grow in contrast to traditional sports decline in viewership. Managing Partner, Stephen Hays, believes the games are transitioning into a Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS). The games might start free, but eventually the content will be paid. Hays states: Deep Space Ventures Just look at the number of people who are willing to pay, to by buying single-use emojis (purchased via “bits”). The willingness to spend money in this market is much larger than most people think, and it is just the beginning.” — , cheer for their favorite Overwatch team in Twitch chat, Stephen Hays Esports Media Consumption-The Future is Paid Content REELY is entering eSports at a time when the demographic is young, highly concentrated and has a willingness to spend. Typical market strategy for startups focused on traditional sports is to saturate one sport and then move into the next. But the same startups can very well capture more value by expanding their access horizontally to more users and more time with those users in the eSports space. are implementing this on a larger level with distribution rights, acquiring teams and incorporating eSports into their strategy, but it won’t be long until we start seeing more upstarts make the lateral move into gaming on the startup side. Media outlets and Professional sports franchises

eSports: Untapped Monetization For Traditional Sports Startups

Random title, I know, but aren't you just a little bit intrigued? I love a teaser title that makes you go ‘hmm’ and then *fingers crossed* sucks you in as you thirst to know more. To elaborate, ‘the talk at MOO’ happened earlier this week on Tuesday and was a talk by James Kirkham, Co-founder of Holler and Global Head of Mobile and Social for Leo Burnett. His talk was titled ‘Social Media will never be the same again’ and was hosted by MOO, the company who print rather fancy cards and are based in Shoreditch #obvs business I hot-footed it to that talk with Digital Mums partner-in-crime, Annika, departing from the convivial Digital Mums shipping container office (yes, really) in Hackney. Despite the fact we were already in East London, we still managed to be a tad late #awks as we walked along Scrutton Street, firstly, missing the building completely (doh!) and, secondly, on entering, not realising the talk was in the building basement. The room was full when we arrived and James had already begun; I entered efficient mode, spied two stools in a meeting room off the kitchen, beckoned Annika over slyly so that the other two ladies we walked in with and didn't know wouldn't clock them and then we plonked them down by the ping pong table (naturally) and adopted that air of having been there t_he whole time._ James had a lot to say about social media and I took as many notes as I could in my trusty notepad with a purple-inked pen. Since a few of my colleagues couldn't make it, I felt it was my duty to soak up as much info as I could so I could share it later which is, well, what I'm planning to do now so here goes: ‘Effectiveness is now reliant on great ideas that people talk about’ James expanded on this further by citing the example of a Mercedes TV advert he had worked on that was a ‘socially driven advert’, appropriately hash-tagged with #youdrive. People were able to choose the ending of the advert by tweeting with the hashtag and were also sent back a personalised film poster image with a Mercedes featured within it. He highlighted the increase of reactive content and warned that brands should not saturate social media and simply fill it with noise. Another interesting social media campaign that James talked us through was created for the Jura Whisky Distillery Company. The idea was created in an hour and cost in the region of £100 or so but the return was over £200,000 — impressive stuff, so what did they do?! In response to Google Maps somehow taking the Isle of Jura, where the distillery is based, off the map, they launched #findjura. The buzz around ‘the missing island’ was covered in the media and people seem to enjoy playing the devised ‘pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey’ style #findjura game. I must say, I preferred this example to the Mercedes one as it was for a lesser known brand, didn't have a massive budget behind it but using the power of a catchy hashtag and bags of personality, it was still able to have a huge impact. Isn't that what the power of social media is all about? James is, unsurprisingly, a massive enthusiast and, honestly, the fervour of his speech on its rapid growth meant I was hardly able to keep up with my note-taking at times! One of the key points that stuck with me, however, is that when technology is completely adopted, the word initially used to describe it disappears as it becomes so embedded in our lives. To illustrate this, he said that in ten years time, the word ‘smartphone’ wouldn't be used any more and I must say I'm inclined to agree. technology He gave us some rather impressive internet use stats to ponder: 14 years ago, 400m people use the internet Today, 3bn people use the internet with 2bn accessing the internet via their smartphone thus demonstrating the fusion of the internet with mobile telephony and why he stated earlier in the talk that It sure is. . ‘your social strategy is your mobile strategy’ This neatly segwayed into social media and apps we use on our phone. He cited the seemingly comic but ultimately highly successful example of ‘Yo’, an app that allows you, with the push of a button to send the word ‘yo’ to your contacts. The app was created by one person with zero investment and has gone on to have a million users. The point James was making about ‘Yo’ was that with its one-touch-one-function facility, the app played into what we are increasingly seeking — simplicity. He then stated: with the backdrop of an image of a Swiss Army Knife for good measure. ‘The app that does everything is dead’ No talk about social media and mobile would be complete without a little nod to Snapchat, a social media platform that is way out of my demographic though I feel more and more curious about trying it out. Snapchat is all about being in the now, James said, while adding that it’s great for sneak peeks and teasers and is fun and exciting. Testino even shared some photos of Burberry’s new collection on Snapchat. He spoke to some teens about their interaction with Snapchat and it seems they find it authentic due to the increased honesty shared as a result of its transient nature. He also told us that young people used ‘Snapchat Discover’ as a means of seeking advice as they were drawn to its visual nature. On this note, James told us about Tunepics, an app that essentially allows users to share pictures/photos with music over the top and the inclusion of a mood wheel. In case you hadn't noticed, emotion on social media is a big deal and it’s probably going to continue that way for some time and that’s not to mention the ever increasing use of emoji in our everyday interactions these days. I'm usually partially to the cheeky wink one most of the time but can’t say I've ever used the aubergine in earnest (we all know what it stands for right?!) James touched on Periscope and highlighted the unpredictable success of #DrummondPuddleWatch (people watching other people navigate and/or jump into a massive puddle in Drummond!) as well as mentioning the relatively recent addition of Moments on Twitter. He also added that with WhatsApp, the rise and rise of messaging will present opportunities for brands to think about especially as these messages become increasingly audio/visual. His speech continued at 100mph as he discussed ‘haptic experiences’ through the use of technology you wear, affective interfaces that allow you to judge the mood of the nation and the body as an interface through the use of wearable technology. I must say that the ‘Toxic Friend Finder’ bracelet did sound pretty out there but, hey, you never know… As he summarised the key learnings to take away, he reminded us that our social media content needs to be: Bespoke Personal Tailored Relevant As well as the fact that: ‘social is everywhere, it permeates everything’ Rounding off with: ‘Your ideas inspire technologists. There’s never been a better time to be in the ideas business’ It’s no wonder that once this talk was done, I found myself grabbing handful after handful of the free popcorn around and refuelling after taking all that in. As people started to leave, Annika and I found our Digital Mum mates and a trip to the pub was arranged to debrief. We couldn't possibly divulge what we talked about there because, hey, when mums get a night out, you the conversation gets very interesting indeed. What I will tell you, however, was that a cat with a diamante collar came into the pub, strode along the bar and plonked itself on a barstool and naturally I took a photo and tweeted it as #standard. The internet still loves a cat pic, after all. know

Digital Mum Days: The talk at MOO

Homegrown master-master replication for a NoSQL database

Original article available at https://habrahabr.ru/post/322266/ In the article , I described a simple voting service and provided the working PHP code. You saw how easy it is to use this NoSQL database in your own project. However, one thing has remained unclear — why I picked a NoSQL in the first place and what performance gains it offers as compared to a traditional database. This article will be about exactly that. To answer this question, I’m going to test one of my servers that hosts a virtual machine with 1 GB of RAM and the following CPU: Tarantool: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly database processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5–26xx (Sandy Bridge)cpu MHz: 1999.999cache size: 4096 KBbogomips: 3999.99 The SSD disk subsystem is pretty decent: hdparm -t /dev/sda1/dev/sda1:Timing buffered disk reads: 484 MB in 3.00 seconds = 161.13 MB/sec My hosting provider claims the virtual server bandwidth is 100 Mbit. Even though some tests I ran showed a higher network speed, let’s assume the 100 Mbit cap is true. A few words about the software I’m using: , , . Nginx 1.6.2 PHP/PHP-FPM Tarantool 1.7.3 I’ll do the testing with a utility called . After running wrk several times with different parameters and some tuning of Nginx, the latter ended up having the following configuration: wrk worker_processes 1; events {worker_connections 1024;multi_accept on;use epoll;} http { keepalive_timeout 60; tcp_nodelay on;tcp_nopush on; gzip on;gzip_comp_level 5;…} # Timeouts # TCP options # Compression In the end, wrk generated 50 parallel requests. If the number is lower, it’s impossible to achieve the server’s peak performance. At 100 and higher, the RPS performance does improve a little, but the latency skyrockets; in other words, increasing the number of parallel requests beyond a reasonable limit leads to inevitable losses. Here’s a picture that’s worth a thousand words: (in Russian) The image is taken from Konstantin Osipov’s article Tips and tricks for queue processing Tarantool’s test results The round-trip delay time between the server being tested and the traffic generator was 32 ms. After I ran some preliminary tests, I restarted my server, just in case, to obtain a less biased result. I got the following results: wrk -c50 -d60s -t4 Running 1m test @ 4 threads and 50 connectionsThread Stats    Avg    Stdev    Max    +/- StdevLatency   54.48ms 10.15ms 441.17ms   95.62%Req/Sec   220.76  19.43   270.00     74.65%52760 requests in 1.00m, 320.86MB readRequests/sec: 878.72Transfer/sec: 5.34MB http://ugly.begetan.me/good http://ugly.begetan.me/good The server received slightly less than 900 RPS with the latency of 54 ms. Is it good or bad? Let’s recall what happens in the script of the voting service on a page hit: The script sees a page hit and tries to obtain a new visitor’s cookies that don’t exist yet. A new UUID is generated in . Tarantool Tarantool performs an upsert operation that adds the new visitor’s UUID, timestamp, IP address and user agent. The script calls Tarantool’s command that selects top 9 records out of 16,000 by the index set on the field. rating These four steps take about 1 ms on a virtual private server with the lowest configuration possible! Over one million records were inserted into the table during the testing, and it didn’t affect the server performance at all. Not too bad, right? session You can get some more details by using the utility. As I mentioned earlier, I restarted my server prior to testing. I made the screenshot below at the beginning of the second (counting from the restart) benchmark. top This image shows how CPU time is distributed across different tasks. About a quarter is consumed by Tarantool. PHP-FPM handlers turned out to be major time consumers, which was to be expected. Nginx holds the third place in terms of resource consumption. As I increased the number of parallel requests in wrk, Nginx required more and more CPU time. As a result, PHP-FPM didn’t get enough resources and the log files featured errors 499 and 502. It would be a logical next step to rewrite the application and replace Tarantool with some regular SQL database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, and compare the results. However, I’m not a big fan of wasting my time, so I came up with another option. Why not test the Nginx + PHP-FPM bundle, but without Tarantool, and see how the performance behaves. Test results without Tarantool For starters, let me explain why I picked exactly 50 ( parameter) parallel requests for testing my server. When you’re using a single request, the test starts to repeatedly load the page. Due to network latency and non-zero request processing time, it generates a very low workload. That’s why you start increasing the number of requests and monitor test results and the server performance. As the number of parallel requests grows, so does (almost linearly) the CPU time consumed by Nginx. Once the workload is too high, the server’s not getting enough CPU resources, so some test requests lead to errors: they are either aborted by wrk on timeout, or the server throws error 502, Bad Gateway (PHP-FPM in our case). -c50 The main takeaway from the paragraph above is that the test parameters were carefully chosen specifically for my hosting and test server configurations. Testing another bundle, say, over a LAN would require a completely different set of parameters. Let’s take a look at the bar chart — and then I’ll tell you a couple of really interesting things. So, calls to Tarantool were replaced with the following graceless stub: function action_good() {$title = ‘Top of the best stickers for Telegram’; $top[0] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/18.png', 1,-1);$top[1] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/17.png', 1,-1);$top[2] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/16.png', 1,-1);$top[3] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/15.png', 1,-1);$top[4] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/14.png', 1,-1);$top[5] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/13.png', 1,-1);$top[6] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/12.png', 1,-1);$top[7] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/11.png', 1,-1);$top[8] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/10.png', 1,-1);$top[9] = array(0, 7, ‘Procy’, 0, ‘https://s.tcdn.co/6fb/382/6fb38239-ce7c-3234-bc8a-e6267086b46a/9.png', 1,-1);$active_good =’class=”active”’;$active_bad =’’; // $top = get_top(10,Tarantool::ITERATOR_LE); include_once(‘top.html’);} Also, I commented out or removed all the Tarantool references from the script and ran it. As you can see in the diagram above (blue column, ), with Tarantool removed and 50 requests issued simultaneously, the server received 1,150 RPS, which is a 30% speed gain as compared to the previous 879 RPS. Isn’t that cool? Not really! In fact, this result doesn’t tell you anything, since the test was initially designed in such a way that the site workload reaches 100%. But now that we got rid of one resource-intensive process (consuming about 30% of CPU time), the site’s no longer 100% loaded. Fancy a little test? nginx+php The blue bar continues to grow steadily as the server workload increases. With 150 parallel request, the server receives almost 3,000 RPS, which is slightly more than three times the result obtained with Tarantool. Now that’s more like it. By the way, why did the server performance triple with Tarantool disabled, although it was using only 30% of CPU time? The answer is simple: with Tarantool out of the bundle, the workload on PHP-FPM workers decreased as well. The workload grew, because Nginx was consuming more CPU resources now. This workload was driven by the number of parallel requests that I was increasing until errors started to pop up. One curious thing I’d like to mention here. What’s in the chart above? As usual, you stumble upon interesting findings purely by chance. It happened when I disabled all the Tarantool procedure calls and ran the test — somehow the Tarantool process was still devouring a huge amount of CPU time. It turned out I’d forgotten to comment out this snippet that initializes a connection: Tarantool+Connect $tarantool = new Tarantool(‘localhost’, 3301, ‘good’, ‘bad’); # Init database try {$tarantool->ping();} catch (Exception $e) {echo “Exception: “, $e->getMessage(), “\n”;} In the diagram, Tarantool+Connect shows the server performance with a connection initialized, but without any computations performed. As I found out, in the demo application I built, it is connection initialization, and not computations per se, that accounts for a greater part of CPU consumption by the Tarantool process. In my test, Tarantool+Connect alone takes up 20% of CPU time, whereas fully functional Tarantool consumes 28%. What’s the takeaway here? Perhaps initializing a Tarantool connection is a resource-intensive operation, or PHP driver isn’t optimized properly. What’s important is that a daemon written in C, Java or Go would take four times less CPU resources to initialize such a connection. You need to keep that in mind when building applications. WAL or no WAL? Finally, the last test that, although pretty simple, is very interesting for developers. As you already know, Tarantool ensures data safety via two mechanisms: snapshotting, which regularly creates and saves memory snapshots, and write-ahead log (WAL), which writes each change to a special change log. Thus, in case of a sudden server failure or shutdown, all the data can be restored at system restart. When I tested the server with the WAL disabled and 50 requests issued in parallel, the performance went up to 963 RPS, which is to be expected: not saving an extra log file on disk should speed up the system that’s 100% loaded. However, such performance gain is insignificant and not worth the price you have to pay for it. It’s better to be sure your precious data is safe. Final thoughts An all-too-common idea that used to be thrown around in the web development community was “why create a web frontend in a fast programming language if databases are still slow.” Nowadays, with more powerful hardware, virtualization and NoSQL solutions, databases cease to be an application bottleneck. I’ve yet to find an answer to one important question: is Tarantool really as reliable as its developers make it seem? What if it’s not? I’d like to find out how good Tarantool is at data loss prevention by “breaking” it. But to achieve it, I need all the help and advice I can get from skeptics, competitors and ordinary haters of Mail.Ru Group, so that I can model really tough conditions! “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend,” as the saying goes. Oh, and don’t forget to vote on my . Otherwise, I’ll be forced to post one and the same racoon from the Top Picks section. demo site

Stress test for Nginx + PHP + Tarantool

Using Tarantool in a .NET project on Windows

Getting to know Tarantool 1.6

Photo showing the devices used for prototyping. As you can plainly see, I’m using Intel Edison, as it supports many microcomputers, like MIPS, ARM and so on. In this article, I want to share with you how I solved a very interesting problem of synchronizing data between IoT devices and a cloud application. I’ll start by outlining the general idea and the goals of my project. Then I’ll describe my implementation in greater detail. This is going to be a more technically advanced part, where I’ll be talking about the Contiki OS, databases, protocols and the like. In the end, I’ll summarize the technologies I used to implement the whole system. Project overview So, let’s talk about the general idea first. Here’s a scheme illustrating the final state of the whole system: I have a user who can connect to IoT devices via a cloud service or directly (that is over Wi-Fi). Also, I have an application server somewhere in the cloud and the cloud itself somewhere on the Internet. This cloud can be anything — for example, an AWS or Azure instance or it could be a dedicated server, it could be anything :) The application server is connected to IoT devices over some protocol. I need this connection to exchange data between the application server and the IoT devices. The IoT devices are connected to each other in some way (say, over Ethernet or Wi-Fi). Also, I have more IoT devices generating some telemetry data, like light or temperature readings. There can be more than 100 and even over 1,000 devices. Basically, my goal was to make it possible to exchange data between the cloud and these IoT devices. Before I proceed, let me outline some requirements for my system: It should synchronize data among the IoT devices. It should be gathering data from the IoT devices. It should synchronize data between the IoT devices and the cloud. Implementation It’s pretty straightforward: the user connects to the application server over HTTP(S) or WebSocket or a similar protocol. Okay, here’s a little quiz for you. What do you think can be used to connect the application server to an IoT device? If you thought of MQTT, you are definitely right! As are those who chose HTTP(S). In fact, it may be any protocol! Just pick one and be done with it. And — drum roll — my choice is asynchronous replication! I’m talking about the usual replication that databases have. You might be wondering how replication can help me. Well, basically, replication exists for synchronizing data. So, I can maintain the same database on all devices, including the cloud and IoT devices. Replication is difficult to implement, though. If you want to have replication, you need to have a database that supports it. Because replication is a natural feature of databases. Here, I’d like to say a few words about the databases I considered for this project: , , , and . SQLite Redis MySQL PostgreSQL Tarantool I compared their characteristics and tried running some of them — except for MySQL and PostgreSQL — directly on an IoT device, and would like to share the results I got. SQLite is definitely a good choice for storing data directly on an IoT device, but it doesn’t have replication and doesn’t really support concurrent access for different processes. Redis doesn’t support master-master replication, so it won’t solve my problem since I need two-way replication. MySQL and PostgreSQL are too heavy for an IoT device. I didn’t even try to install them. But if you decide to give MySQL or PostgreSQL a try, feel free to share your experience in the comments below. The last database on my list was Tarantool. In fact, I’m a committer to the Tarantool project, so I know the people who develop it. Definitely, this was a good choice for me, because I know this project well. And of course, Tarantool has master-master replication. You could also try something else with it. My main point here is that IoT devices can leverage real databases with master-master replication for data transfer. But we’ve only scratched the surface so far, so let’s now dive deeper into the implementation. I’ll start with the problems I had with Tarantool. First of all, Tarantool wouldn’t work on the ARMv7 architecture. To make things worse, Tarantool wouldn’t run in a 32-bit environment (only 64-bit). I managed to solve these problems, and I want to share my development rules that helped me get this done: _Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time patching your CMake files, like I did._ Use toolchain files for CMake. _libc has special types for that, like uint32_t. Otherwise, you’ll get undefined behavior. This rule applies only to C/C++ code._ Don’t use unsigned and other types with unspecified sizes. _You should expect that your auto-tests can be executed on an IoT device. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time fixing bugs._ Port your auto-tests. Okay, I have a working database with master-master replication. So far so good! My next step is to connect devices running this database over . 6LoWPAN Recall that I have a lot of interconnected IoT devices in a 6LoWPAN network. And I need to gather all telemetry data from them. Here’s a brief visual explanation of how this whole setup works Devices with sensors transfer telemetry data via radio waves. This standard is called 6LoWPAN, which is an acronym for IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks. I’d like to point out that I didn’t use . I might use it in future, though. In this article, I’ll be focusing on 6LoWPAN alone. LoRaWAN So, telemetry data is collected by a gateway, which is an important part of the system. A gateway is a MIPS device — to refresh your memory, MIPS is a processor family — that has a WAN antenna for gathering data transmitted over radio waves. Also, a gateway has 6LBR software installed that helps convert data received over radio waves to IPv6 packets. 6LBR application The image above illustrates the workflow of 6LBR. The gateway with 6LBR software installed is a converter between a wireless sensor network and anything else. The reason this image shows conversion from a wireless sensor network to an IP network is because it’s the default behavior of 6LBR. I’ll explain how to change this behavior further down the road. For more information, check this link to the . 6LBR GitHub page You might ask, “What exactly does 6LBR do for me?” First, it gives me an IP stack, so I can use all the features of the TCP and UDP stacks inside my 6LBR applications. Second, I can use any I/O devices with 6LBR. Say, I could write raw data directly to bash =) Unfortunately, 6LBR can’t write directly to MQTT. MQTT brokers don’t know anything about raw data. Sad, but true! But why would I need to write directly to an MQTT broker in the first place? The answer is legacy. I’d like to say a few words about 6LBR applications here. Generally, a 6LBR application is C code with the 6LBR API that allows using an IP stack and doing other things as well. Developing such an application is associated with at least two major difficulties: complex thread model and complex memory model. That said, if you want to create a 6LBR application, you must be ready for a lot of segfaults. Here’s a snippet of my 6LBR application (sorry, I can give only a screenshot with obfuscated code, the true sources are closed): Notice one interesting thing here — PROCESS_YIELD(). 6LBR has cooperative multitasking, which means 6LBR applications have to yield, and they do so for each loop iteration. The code should not run for too long. Let’s review where we stand with the project right now. A 6LBR gateway enabled me to create a mesh network, so I could read and write data to it. Also, I was able to wrap IP packets into MQTT messages, each containing information about the device, including telemetry data. Moreover, I had the ability to manipulate I/O devices. For instance, I was able to write MQTT messages to UART. But then I faced a new problem: Tarantool doesn’t work with MQTT brokers. Here’s how I got around this issue. I decided to use , an MQTT library written in plain C, as a simple and portable way to integrate MQTT into my application. libmosquitto The snippet below shows how to use this library to handle MQTT messages( ): link I can take a reference to a socket file handle and use my own event loop for handling some events. Great, right? I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that also has cooperative multitasking, same as 6LBR. For yields, Tarantool uses coio_wait(). Tarantool Oh, I forgot to mention is a Lua application server. Surprise! Tarantool So, I ported libmosquitto for using this code in Lua. Below is an example where I call the function that you saw in the previous snippet: Also, I ported all functions from the libmosquitto API. You can check this port . Here is an of how it’s used. here example To get data from all devices inside a mesh network, I need to call the subscribe() function from a specific location and publish the get() method. That’s all it takes to communicate with devices within a mesh network! Wrap-up Let’s now take a look at the resulting setup: The application server is connected via Tarantool’s master-master replication. This gives me two features: When the application server changes any dataset, those changes are delivered to all IoT devices in the network. When an IoT device changes any dataset, those changes are delivered to the application server. These two features are the solution to my problems. Also, I can connect my IoT devices via master-master replication. This ties them and the cloud into a cluster that allows me to synchronize all datasets. All IoT devices and the cloud are in sync most of the time, except for when a connection is down. But once it is back up, they’re quickly synced again. Isn’t that cool! The 6LBR gateway allows exchanging datasets between my IoT devices and other IoT devices. It wraps each message into an MQTT message and passes them into a UART channel. IoT device #N, which has an MQTT broker installed, reads those messages from the UART channel. The MQTT broker redirects the messages to Tarantool over an MQTT connection. Tarantool reads them — and then Tarantool’s application server executes some code for each message. IoT device #N is connected to all other devices via Tarantool’s master-master replication. The cloud and each IoT device are connected via Tarantool’s master-master replication as well. Well, that wraps it up! I’ve managed to solve that issue, and I really hope that my experience helps you in the future. Just to reiterate, I was using Tarantool both as the main frontend on my dedicated servers and as an application server. If you’re interested and want to know more, check this . article Stay tuned for more cool stuff!

Master-Master Replication and Scaling of an Application between Each of the IoT Devices and the…

Hey guys, This is an English translation of a post by Leonid Yuriev, originally published on Facebook here: . https://www.facebook.com/leo.yuriev/posts/553318381522430?pnref=story The post is about Leonid’s experience of using both Tarantool and Redis. This is only the beginning. More articles are on the way. So let’s start :-) As a part of my work, I have compared Tarantool and Redis from Redis Labs. Here are some intermediate results. Dev team availability Kostja Osipov and the guys from Tarantool’s team are always available. 2. Support of Lua To make the long story short, Tarantool is a real Lua application server, whilst Redis can just run Lua functions only with local variables. In detail: Tarantool Tarantool has a full-feature Lua engine with JIT, which is integrated with the and has embedded fiber support. database For the majority of blocking libc functions, Tarantool’s Lua implementation has counterparts that switch fibers. You can write and run a full-feature service that can use any Lua libraries, use , get and process internal requests, connect to external services. network Stored procedures and triggers just exist and work as they should,including the fact that you can write them in C and load them as shared libraries. You can easily update/reload all Lua functions without even having to restart the server. Redis Lua interpreter lives aside in a sandbox and is good only for simple scripting (only pure functions and only local variables). You can complete a script by EVAL or load and start it later by EVALSHA. Redis itself is available from a script only via a local connector. In last versions of Redis you can write modules/plugins on C. 3. Persistency Redis is focused on in-memory processing with a possibility to back up data periodically or on stop. On the other hand, Tarantool can continuously persist data on disk. Tarantool: besides snapshots, it has a full-scale WAL (write ahead log). So it can secure data persistency after each transaction out-of-the-box. Redis: in fact, it has snapshots only. Technically, you have AOF (append-only file, where all the operations are written), but it requires manual control over it, including manual restore after reboot. Simply put, with Redis you need to manually suspend the server now and then, make snapshots and archive AOF. 4. Latency and throughput In Tarantool, you have dedicated threads to handle networking and writing to disk. That’s why you have better latency in real-life cases. But in synthetic tests, Redis should have better throughput because there is no CPU usage on context switching and thread synchronization. 5. Indexes Tarantool has secondary indexes, including Geospatial Indexes (R-TREE). Redis does not have secondary indexes, but you can simulate them with several operations or by Lua scripts. Sometimes it looks gross. See details here: http://redis.io/topics/indexes 6. External API Redis has simple interfaces for basic data structures like lists, sets, hash tables. Those interface methods are based on the concept of accessing an object/structure via network, which is intuitive for most people. Tarantool has a more general interface for data manipulation, which supports all the functionality above. 7. Clusterization and replication Redis has ready-to-use Sentinel with replication and failover. Tarantool has replication, including master-master, but there is no intrinsic orchestration of a cluster or native failover (Tarantool developers say that this is in progress). 8. Database size Tarantool has a brand-new storage engine named “vinyl” (it is not officially released, but you can already try it). It allows you to store and process data which does not fit in your RAM. Redis only has an in-memory engine and nothing more in plans by now. 9. SQL Tarantool: SQL support is coming soon (based on a fork of sqlite), including ODBC/JDBC. Select operations have already been implemented. You can try them. Redis: No SQL support at the moment and not even in plans. P.S. If you aspire for absolute objectivism, then you should know that the comparison above contains some inaccuracies.However, attempts to eliminate them will require a huge number of details that cannot be objectively compared. Thank you for reading. If you want to add something on top of what’s been said above or clarify it, feel free to leave a comment.

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