fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Journey — Playace.co
By: Shrinivas Shinde
Tags: Startup, Covid 19, Fundraising, Founders, Investing

I have always loved house parties over other avenues of socializing. These avenues are either loud, crowded, or a hassle to go to. On the other hand, house parties are casual and comfortable. You can have a good laugh over your favorite drinks and most importantly have a conversation.

I have hosted many house parties for my friends, their friends, and their friends. I love meeting new people and have meaningful conversations. And what better place could it be for such candid interactions than a house party. Isn’t that a true meaning of ‘Catching up’?

Although house parties are exciting and often the preferred option of socializing amongst millennials and GenZ, they are mere occasions. I thought if house parties are liked so much, why don’t we get a chance to be a part of them often? I realized that in India, as our culture, most of us live with our parents. Therefore, we wait for them to go out overnight to have the house to ourselves to host a house party. This was the primary problem I wanted to solve. I thought of creating a platform to connect people looking to attend house parties with people willing to host them. This way I could create inventory and supply of such experiences.

In the year 2015, I stumbled upon a website called Airbnb.com, it was love at first sight. I fell in love with the concept and how the website looked. The idea of living with someone with a different social and cultural background fascinated me. In my free time, I kept browsing through the website and kept checking out different homes in different parts of the world. In the year 2016, I planned a vacation to the USA, and guess where did I book my stay from? … Correct!

It was a Friday evening, I was in Hollywood, Los Angeles, beneath my host’s apartment, waiting for an Uber. I saw a bunch of young people entering the apartment carrying a lot of nibbles and drinks in white carry bags. Anybody could guess that there was a house party happening upstairs. I got lost in the trance, with love for house parties in my heart, I got nostalgic. With these mixed feelings, there was a eureka moment. I thought, why not create an Airbnb for house parties. This is where it began.

I got back to India and started working on the idea with some intermediary research, asked friends and family for their views and got rejection in return like most of the ideas do. Common questions like, ‘Why would I have strangers at my place?’, ‘Why would I go to a strangers place?’, ‘What about the security?’, ‘Would it be safe?’ etc were thrown at me.

However, I kept working on the idea and the product for the next one year. We launched Playace.co on 11th November, 2017, in Mumbai, with a house party themed Friends’ Friends. Today, after almost three and a half years, with one thousand house parties across seven cities, thirty plus brands in our portfolio and zero mishaps, here we are with an exciting journey so far.
Advantage of a math-ruled business model
By: Diop Makhtar
Tags: Startup, Math, Mathematics, Venture Capital, Mathematical Modeling

A search engine is based on mathematical models and deals with numbers and words. By the way, it's possible to always know the number of resources needs to keep it running. This operating cost is a function of the mathematical model used and there is a very very very small likelihood to see upfronts operating cost. In front of such kind of business model, most attention that is allocated to managing, hedging, and improving operating costs in normal businesses goes to making the model itself better and useful to its audience.

Most internet-era business models are like that. This is what I am tempted to call the business model of the internet era. This kind of business model is made possible by the advanced progress we have made in computing words and numbers with electronic devices and the personal computer revolution made it accessible to every one of us given that a smartphone is also a personal computer.

Businesses that lies on computing numbers and words are computable businesses. They almost always are manageable and understandable with mathematical formulas. If you manage yourself have formulas that can make them better and useful. You will have a business that I cannot name actually.

Google is a computable business, google used to care about math and mathematicians, I don't know if they still care about it, I don't know if Google has formulas to make itself better. What I do know is that I have formulas to make myself better, I care about math and I am a mathematician running Book Dojo a mail-only startup publishing data-driven books, building book-driven platforms for book communities and book lovers. I hope you are a book lover and part of a book community if it happens that you are book dojo is for you and you can use this form to involve in Book Dojo.
5 Most Critical Factors That Influences 99% Success of Your Startup
By: Nishi Kashyap
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Business, Entrepreneurship, Technology

#1 Timing

Some of you might argue that idea or money is the most essential for a startup’s success but according to Bill Gross’s research, timing is one of the most important attributes for any startup success as it accounted for a whopping 42% of the difference between success and failure.

“The timing is the most important key element for the success of any startup, idea, or a business” — Bill Gross

We all know, not every moment is perfect to enter the market. Choosing the perfect timing is like choosing the best moment for taking off because one really needs to figure out if the market is ready for his/her idea or whether it is too way too early.

For instance, when YouTube came into the market, there were already dozens of video-streaming platforms, but because YouTube was launched at a perfect moment — after high-speed Internet became the norm — it became a major success.

Airbnb also had its timing on its side as it was launched during the recession when people needed extra cash. And coming to Uber, it came into the market when drivers were looking to pick up some extra money to supplement their income.

These companies took off because they were launched when the time was right — when the people were ready to accept and adapt their technologies.

“The best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them” says Bill Gross.

Choosing the right time to launch a product or service makes sure that the market is ready and willing to use it, and consumers can recognize what they are being offered as a solution to their problem.
Document Your Existing API’s With (Open API) Specification in ASP.NET Core
By: Jay Krishna Reddy
Tags: Startup, Tech, Software Development, Programming, Technology

API 📗 Swagger

In this article, we will learn how to document our already existing APIs with .Net and.Net Core. Many developers absolutely deplore writing documentation. It’s boring to put all these things together in a document by manually writing them. To overcome this we have Swagger to implement documentation and it’s an open-source API documentation tool.

Packages required to configure Swagger,

Swashbuckle.AspNetCore (latest version) — This package adds Swagger and Swagger UI and other libraries to make it easy for us to create API documentation.

Step 1

After installing the package to the respective project, here I am sharing the screenshot for your reference if you are new to Swagger in ASP.Net Core

Fig-1

Step 2 -Setup

We need to enable our project to generate XML comments. The comments come from Triple-slash (///) comments throughout the code.

First, in the project properties, check the box labeled “Generate XML Documentation”

Right Click on the Solution and click on the Properties

Fig-2

You will probably also want to suppress warning 1591, which will now give warnings about any method, class, or field that doesn’t have triple-slash comments.

Fig-3

Step 3 -Configure Swagger

Startup.cs

launchSettings.json

XML Comments

In our XML Comments for methods.

WeatherController.cs

Here are XML nodes in use:

Summary: A high-level summary of what our method /class/field is or does.

remarks: Additional detail about the method/class/field

param: A parameter to the method, and what it represents

returns: A description of what the method returns.

Output — View Swagger

Fig-4

Here is a clear description of what is what in Swagger UI

Fig-5

Thank you for reading, please let me know your questions, thoughts, or feedback in the comments section. I appreciate your feedback and encouragement.

Move your project on next level by hiring skilled and seasoned ASP.NET core developers.

Keep Learning and Exploring…. !!!
.365 — #4 — ai for video editting
By: Gio Kakhiani
Tags: Startup, Product Management, YouTube, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

Problem

Do you feel how vlogging has gained popularity lately? Running a channel on Youtube has become trendy with number of Youtube channels rising daily. In fact there’s an award for being an influencer in the digital world called Shorty Awards.

Yet, videos still need professional editing. Actually editing might be more important than actual raw video material itself. Vloggers of Youtube either spend hours on editing videos or hire professional editors.

Solution

We could make bloggers lives easier if we could automate video editing process with Machine Learning system. In fact we won’t need editing whatsoever.

Can you imagine how many people would start sharing their videos on youtube if we take away the hardest part of being a vlogger?

** idea validation — here’s a movie trailer created entirely by IBM Watson

Target Customer

Obviously I see the demand on such product in video marketing segment. However I’d stick with vlogging market as it’s a great niche segment to start with. I think these are the people who would gain the most out of this solution.

UX

Experience is pretty simple: user uploads a video. Once the edited one is generated he can directly upload it to Youtube or any other platform for that matter.

Videos can be generated in any genres. Users will have freedom to play with various types of videos to sort of A/B test the overall mood and taste of their viewer base.

Business model

At first I thought I’d have different membership types and I’d charge users monthly fees. Somewhere in between of $19 and $49, maybe more.

However I’ve decided charging commission is way better. Simply put I’d charge them 5%–15% of their income per video.

For those who have not made it yet membership would be the way to go.

** I mentioned only Youtube. Imagine how many videos are being shared daily on Instagram, Facebook and other similar platforms..
Incentive problems in venture capital— a thought experiment
By: András Fehér
Tags: Startup, Venture Capital, Incentives, Essay, Investing

The following story has almost nothing to do with venture capital. It’s about a phenomenon that could be found in different domains in our life. One of these is venture capital.

These days it’s more and more popular, even expected from us to take care of nutrition. There are people who gain the necessary knowledge to differentiate various types of fat, cholesterol and so on. In a sense, they’ll be responsible for themselves - nutrition-wise at least - and pick their food by the best of their knowledge (angels).

What if you don’t have the time, energy or capability to take care of your nutrition? Would you pay for your neighbor who is a car dealer to prepare you a meal plan? It is very unlikely. You would go to someone who is considered an expert on the topic and could be trusted like a nutritionist.

This nutritionist writes a plan for you every month for a handsome fee. You take his/her advice and live happily ever after (or not). Nutrition is an interesting phenomenon and the difference between “good” and “not so good” plans could be discovered only after — for the sake of the argument — 7 to 10 years. You are 10 years in the plan, paid 10x12 times the handsome fee when realize, you are not as healthy as should be. Start to wonder, what went wrong?

Let’s try to decipher what possible mistakes you could have made. Was he/she the best you could find, had the credentials and the experience needed for the job? (team) If yes, then maybe the books and teacher and everyone around us was wrong too? (market) Or maybe the local shop sold you sugar instead of stevia the whole time? (ecosystem)

The first questions seem to be very much real, the second is something that could happen, especially in the case of nutrition, and the third seems very much unlikely. It is the nutritionist’s fault then, isn’t it? Maybe yours because you approached him/her?

Although I believe that all the above could happen, there is another perspective or question we should consider. Were my goals (to be healthy) and the goals of the nutritionist (to make money) aligned? Did he/she have the incentives to help me? (the handsome fee I paid was fixed or depended on some KPI we set up early on)

It is not too hard to find someone who can be trusted, nor to filter information. And the probability to be scammed is relatively low. If these were the only criteria for success, we would all be healthy and wealthy.

Whenever the results are not instantaneous, we must be certain that our goals and incentives are aligned with the goals of those who we trust.

Note: this is my first publication, not only in English but ever. This small essay is part of my university thesis with the same title. Every comment, critic is welcome.
So, How Are You Going To Make Money?
Tags: Startup, Startup Lessons, Startup Business Plan, Founder Stories, Financial Modelling

That’s the question I often received right after my pitch.

Photo by Kat Yukawa on Unsplash

It’s a good wake up call as I didn’t think about the money in the beginning. I just want to create products that are useful for others. Now I realise that my passion should be sustainable as well.

It’s good to create something, but it’s not going to end up well if I can’t feed myself and the team. And how will my ideas spread if the business does not even scale? How can my products be useful to others if they don’t even know it?

So I spent the past few weeks researching and talking to people to help me with the business model of my company.

Research, research, research

Since my company is not making any revenue yet, I need to do a lot of research on how other companies, the ones similar to mine, generate their revenue.

Do they get money from grant? Do they raise money from investors? Bootstrapping?

What is their growth rate? What is their Customer Lifetime Value? How much is their Cost per Customer Acquisition?

It’s amazing how much data from other companies that I can find online. It helps to provides foundation for my business model. As Gina Greenlee perfectly sums up:

Experience is a master teacher, even when it’s not our own.

Make assumptions

My former boss used to tell me, “When you ASSUME, you will make an ASS of U and ME”. Unfortunately, this is not applicable in this case.

I need to make a lot of assumptions as they are going to be the building blocks of my business model. My financial projections are basically well-educated guesses.

Some of the assumptions that I need to make:

Source of revenue: How will I generate revenue? Revenue projections: How much money will i generate the next 5 years? How high is the growth rate? Cost assumptions ( fixed and variable ): How much money will be spent on product development? Will I hire a team? How much is their salary? Other assumptions: Will seasonality effect my cash flow? Do people spend less on my product during Christmas?

After I create my assumptions, then I can build my Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow based on it.

Test, rinse, and repeat

Well, this could be the correct mantra then: “When you ASSUME and you don’t TEST it, you will make an ASS of U and ME”.

This is the stage where I am at now: I need to do a lot of testings to prove if my assumptions are correct.

Are brands interested to put their advertisement on my product? Is my company eligible to get some grants from NGOs? Can I get a game developer for x amount of salary?

Initially I dreaded to do this, that’s why it took me so long to get this post out. Having a grasp of my financial model gives me a better understanding of how my business actually works and how to improve it. It’s no longer up in the clouds as i thought it was, everything is measurable and hopefully achievable. :)

//

Thanks for reading!
A Life Full of Adventure|A life well Lived.
By: She Has A Great Scent
Tags: Startup, Purpose, Adventure, Journey, Life

A Life Full of Adventure|A life well Lived.

you will notice me, I’ll be leaving my mark like initials carved in an old oak tree

You wait and see

Maybe I’ll write like Twain wrote

Maybe I’ll paint like Van Gogh

Cure the common cold

I don’t know but I’m ready to start cause I know in my heart

I wanna do something that matters

Say something different

Something that sets the whole world on its ear

I wanna do something better

With the time I’ve been given

And I wanna try

To touch a few hearts in this life

Leave nothing less

Than something that says “I was here”

Thank you lady antebellum for this song!

its more than music to me, its a reminder a guide to do better, to look within, to find that is unique about me and what I can do while here on this earth and to do just that without getting tired ♥️

As i search within my soul, in my mind amd heart for that which feels special, the journey is still on and the road is still wide and clear for me to walk on

I am ready, to search, to make it my mission to seek till I find it. To Do, to experiment, to move and allow myself to experience from all different dimensions and I believe that I will find what am looking for, soon ♥️

Cheers to living a purposeful life! A life full if adventure! A life full of Greatness and courage! A life lived fully! Feeling Alive ♥️
Everything You Need To Know About Industrial Air Coolers
By: Amit Kumar
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Business, Climate Change, Energy

Originally Posted: AirCone

WHAT IS INDUSTRIAL AIR COOLER?

Industrial Air Cooler is specially manufactured to provide a cooling environment in the industrial area where the temperature is much lower than the average area in which humans live. When it is installed in an open entryway or window, air is attracted out and made to go through Cooling pads which are cooled by normal water. This procedure cools the hot air which will pass in the room. The new cool air going into the room flushes out the stale sight-seeing through the open entryways and windows.

TYPES OF INDUSTRIAL AIR COOLER

Nowadays, there are lots of Industrial Air Cooler are available in the market. Some basic types of Air Coolers are as following.

Ductable Air Cooler

Ducting Air Cooler

Commercial Air Cooler

Swamp Air Cooler

Portable Air Cooler

WHY INDUSTRIAL AIR COOLER IS REQUIRED?

The Industrial Air Cooler which is also called as Evaporative Air Cooler is required to make hot air into naturally cooled Air which is not at all harmful for humans. It helps Humans to maintain their body temperature which is getting hotter from industrial machineries, crowded environment etc. And it also helps to generate the work efficiency of workers.

WHAT ARE THE SIZES AVAILABLE IN INDUSTRIAL AIR COOLER?

Generally, Swamp Air Cooler is always to be designed as per the requirement of the customer’s location in which Air Cooler is to be installed. Yes, But standard size is available from the dealers. Industrial Air Coolers are used in various types of industries such as Hotels, Restaurants, Warehouses, Factories, Homes,

WHAT IS THE COST OF INDUSTRIAL AIR COOLER?

Commercial Air Coolers are very cost effective because it consumes less electricity than other cooling equipment and maintenance cost is also very less. These type of Air Coolers saves up to 70% of Electricity. Every Business owner wants to cut down the cost of expense so, Nowadays Evaporative Air Cooler is always preferred rather than any other expensive cooling equipment.

HOW TO PURCHASE INDUSTRIAL AIR COOLERS?

Today, you can purchase from any industrial Air Cooler Manufacturer in your nearby your location. AirCone Air Cooler is a leading manufacturer of these types of coolers.
From digital banking to cybersecurity in two new podcasts from Techsylvania’s Eastern Europe Exposed series
Tags: Startup, Cybersecurity, Podcast, Digital Banking, Tim Draper

From digital banking to cybersecurity in two new podcasts from Techsylvania’s Eastern Europe Exposed series Techsylvania Follow Mar 17, 2019 · 2 min read

Mihai Raneti, founder & CEO of CyberSwarm Inc

Developing a CPU for cybersecurity, getting financed by Tim Draper and the future of Digital Banking from Revolut’s perspective are just a few of the subjects debated in the new episodes of the Eastern Europe Exposed podcast created by Techsylvania.

Podcasts are on the rise and in 2018, according to a new survey, 124 million people chose to listen to at least one. That’s an impressive growth from 2017, when podcasts had 112 million followers. Over 48 million people hit play on a podcast weekly. Will you be one of them? Start with an episode from our series.

Mihai Raneti, founder & CEO of CyberSwarm Inc — Developing a CPU for cybersecurity and getting financed by Tim Draper

To discover more about building a cybersecurity start-up in this part of the world and how you can convince an investor, such as Tim Draper, to finance it, hit play just below.

Building a hardware startup in Eastern Europe has some big advantages. For example, you can have a very strong R&D component here because research in Romania is much cheaper than in Western Europe. It’s a big advantage to develop something in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe, you have limited access to capital. — Mihai Raneti, founder & CEO of CyberSwarm Inc

Irina Scarlat, Country Manager at Revolut — Digital Banking and the future of the mobile-based current accounts

Basically you’ve turned the entire banking industry upside down and turned everything digital. Romania is a priority market for Revolut, because it is out of the euro zone, it has its own currency and the cost people pay for international transfers and the cost we pay every time we go out of the country is crazy big.

If you don`t have a Revolut card yet or you’re curious how a fin-tech startup is changing the banking system in Romania, take a listen.

Irina Scarlat leads Revolut’s operations in Romania and believes Romanians need to take back control of their finances. Before joining forces with Revolut, she`s been leading the marketing efforts of Uber in Romania,

If you’ve enjoyed our podcasts it’s time to book a ticket for the 6th edition of Techsylvania. This is just a small part of what you learn at Techsylvania 2019!

Get your Early Bird ticket: https://techsylvania.com/conference-tickets/

Listen all of Techsylvania’s podcasts on iTunes, too.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/eastern-europe-exposed-podcast-about-startups-founders/id1231183995?mt=2
Hiring! Operations Team Lead
Tags: Startup, Operations, Technology, Peer To Peer, Healthcare

This is a posting for an experienced leader who believes successful patients can and SHOULD play a much bigger role in our health system.

If you are a hard worker, strategic thinker, self-starter and interested in leading multidisciplinary teams to help make this vision a reality, let’s talk :)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

InquisitHealth is a healthcare technology company based in New Jersey.

Our clients are health plans, national patient foundations, hospital systems and local governments. We help everyone utilize evidence-based peer-to-peer mentoring to improve health outcomes. Peer mentors are patients who manage their own chronic disease well. We train our peer mentors to coach other patients-like-them to better health.

A little bit about our culture:

We work hard. We have a lot on our plate. And we are always looking to add more.

We thus greatly value prioritization and being highly efficient.

We value developing and maximizing the talents of each team member.

We value taking initiative, asking the right questions, and taking ownership.

We value lucid thinking to distill complexity.

We are ever-evolving with new approaches and new experiments.

Creativity, grounded in strategic thinking, is key.

We prioritize each individual patient, mentor, and client, while thinking about scale.

We work in an open office. We are casual.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Lead a multidisciplinary team to assess tactical and strategic challenges, identify key gaps/constraints, and define & prioritize work efforts in alignment with the company’s OKRs and vision.

Continuously analyze our programs to guide innovative projects and improvements in quality and operational efficiency

Help build internal and external resources to better support clients, patients and mentors.

Contribute data-driven insights to support and lead strategy discussions

Full time role at our office in northern New Jersey (River Edge).

WHO YOU ARE

Quick preface: We move fast, iterate quickly, experiment often, and do what we can to help our clients, patients and mentors. Our folks thus need to be comfortable with ambiguity, creative self-starters, nimble, quick learners, and great at problem-solving.

Prior experience with health care operations or project management; management consulting background preferred

Comfortable working with data to distill insights

Ability to quickly adjust priorities and balance needs

Articulate over the phone and able to draft clear prose

Strong sense of ownership & personal accountability

Be a champion of OKRs across the company

BENEFITS & PERKS

Title + compensation (including stock options) based on experience

Gym membership to stay healthy and sharp

Health, dental and eye insurance

Health Care FSA

401K

TELL US ABOUT YOU!

Where do you live? Ideal start date? Why is this a great opportunity for you? How does what we do resonate with your background?

Please send resume + cover letter to hello@inquisithealth.com!
9 Habits of very successful entrepreneurs as Steve Jobs & Warren Buffett
By: Leonardo Koenitzer
Tags: Startup, Success, Entrepreneurship, Life, Leadership

One common mistake here is that many people focus on what they don’t want (rather on what they really want). So the way to go is not to set a goal like: “I want to get of my debts”, but rather: “I want to earn 100,000 USD within the next 6 months.”

2) Very successful entrepreneurs are not scared to start

Starting a business often means to have some doubts about possible obstacles. But worrying too much about that can mean that an enterpriser will never start. In our lives there were sometimes hard times, we all had them and often we were not prepared. Still, we found a solution and overcame most of them. It seems that most of the successful entrepreneurs have an attitude regarding obstacles that is like this old English phrase:

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Entrepreneurs know that there might be some “roadblocks” and they might be concerned, but they aren’t worried about them. The difference between concern and worry was very well explained by the famous author Dale Carnegie:
Spreading the word – 6 things we’ve learned after our first exhibition
By: Cornerstone Resources
Tags: Startup, Human Resources, Exhibition

Spreading the word – 6 things we’ve learned after our first exhibition

So we’ve been busy this week at our first exhibition this week and we’ve learned a lot! Here’s a few of the tips that we’ve learned about how we can improve our exhibiting experience.

Don’t rely on the free wifi

I came up with what I thought was a great idea, rather than have a paper sign up sheet to get new contacts, let’s ask people to sign up straight on the website! That will save time won’t it? Well it would if the free wifi actually allowed you to log on and the 4G signal wasn’t being used by several thousand other people. Sometimes low tech is a good thing when exhibiting.

2. Get some gimmicks

Anything that draws people’s attention to your stand is a good thing. Anything that keeps them there is even better! Food is good when exhibiting.

3. Getting people’s attention is hard.

Most people weren’t coming to somewhere like CRE to find an HR Consultancy but we clearly stood out. Many walked straight past us but a few stayed and we had some really good conversations. I believe they will become long term clients.

4. Engage with the other stall holders.

Actually some of the best conversations we had were with other people that were also exhibiting. There’s something about standing on your feet for 12 hours that causes you to bond with others. And just because they are running a stand, doesn’t mean they aren’t potential customers.

5. ROI may be a slow burner.

As I said we had a number of great conversations but the actual payback might take some time. The great thing for us is that we’ve raised our profile, built some partnerships and also enabled us to meet some of our non-local clients. We might not repay our expenses within weeks but we will over time. These last couple of days may propel us forwards.

6. Get a speaking gig if at all possible.

We saw other stall holders get inundated after a seminar they ran. If you can get a short slot to give a message that’s useful for others and will leave them wanting more, then great!

Thanks also to friends who came to see us, your presence was an encouragement. I have a feeling this won’t be our last conference.
Our Mission.
By: Anton Gabb
Tags: Startup, Coworking, Interior Design, Real Estate, Technology

A little bit about Wonderspace and our mission to tackle the coworking industry…

We seamlessly connect you with the most flexible hot desks, fixed desks and private offices around, so that you can focus your energies on making your business soar.

Our service is tech-driven, hassle-free and broker-free… And it costs you nothing.

Whether you’re a corporate giant or plucky sole trader, chances are you’ve been finding work spaces in the same way since day one. We started Wonderspace because the way people work is changing and so too are the types of spaces that enabled them to thrive… And traditional real estate models just aren’t keeping up with these changes.

Wonderspace brings together the best contemporary work spaces, meticulously curated to every business’ individual needs. Whether you’re looking for a hot desk, fixed desk or an entire serviced office for you and your team: you’ll find it here and you’ll find it for free. All the time, effort and technology we put into finding your space (and delivering it to you via our intuitive website and tech-enabled services) are paid for by the office providers.

No stress, no brokers

Digital technologies are transforming the way we work — it makes sense that they should be able to transform where you work as well. We harness the best tech in the business to bring you a service free from endless calls, emails and dashes to one unsuitable space after another.

Our aim is simple: to find you the perfect space and get you moved in many times faster than any traditional broker would manage.

Flexible licenses, not lock-in leases

There’s more to serviced offices and co-working spaces than the incredible networking opportunities and energising interiors. 99.9% of our spaces offer flexible licenses instead of more traditional leases — that means no more lock-in and allows for month-to-month flexibility.

Those monthly payments cover all-inclusive access to exactly what you need, and the timeline to occupancy is vastly reduced. What’s more, you can also adjust or leave the space equally quickly, as and when your business requires.

Transparent, up-front and better-value pricing

Perhaps best of all, serviced offices and co-working spaces are often nowhere near as expensive as more traditional office spaces. While the flat monthly payments might look high at first glance, they include a whole host of rates, taxes and additional expenses that would otherwise bump up the costs of a workspace dramatically.

That encompasses everything from ready-fitted out furnishings, to cleaning services, to lightning fast wi-fi and more — and no requirement to strip everything out and return it to its original empty space whenever you do vacate.

If you’re looking for a new office space, be sure to reach out to our team at hello@wonderspace.ai or visit our website www.wonderspace.ai
🚀Here are my best finds for a Tech Smart Boss this week — Issue #124
By: David Ferguson
Tags: Startup, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Technology

New Videos from Tech Smart Boss

Have Your Slack Team Stand To Attention, With Standuply (Onboarding and Review) — www.youtube.com

If you watch our videos and listen to the Tech Smart Boss podcast, you know I’m a big fan of Slack. Just listen to Episode 54 ( https://be.smartboss.co/episo...

New Podcast from Tech Smart Boss

Episode 118: 8 Tips To Take Your Customer Support From Good To Great — soundcloud.com

Stream Episode 118: 8 Tips To Take Your Customer Support From Good To Great by Tech Smart Boss from desktop or your mobile device

Top Articles of the Week

What are Low-Code Platforms? How to Pick the Best Development for Your Business | Process Street | Checklist, Workflow and SOP Software — www.process.st

Low-code development platforms can help you build apps without the need for expensive software specialists or long, clunky development life-cycles. Get the lowdown on low-code here.

The best CRMs for small businesses: pros, cons, and what you need to know — PieSync — www.piesync.com

The best CRMs for small businesses: pros, cons, and what you need to know

How Can I Generate Traffic With $0 Marketing Budget? — Encharge — encharge.io

10 tactics to generate website traffic with $0 marketing budget, AND also generate revenue for your startup.

Why You Should Build Your Brand with Video — Wistia Blog — wistia.com

Here’s why playing it safe won’t get you noticed — and what building a brand with video really means.

Employee onboarding checklist — slite.com

Employee onboarding checklist How to onboard new hires and set them up for success.

Cool Tech of the Week

I’ve talked on YouTube in the past about how I’m a big fan of the browser, Opera. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised with the improvements to Firefox the past year.

This week we’re naming Firefox as our Cool Tech of the Week, not just for the quickness of their browsing experience but a new thing we came across this week, Firefox Send.

Sure there are lots of ways to send files safely, Dropbox, Google Drive, I personally use pCloud. But Firefox is now another good option and it’s just plain simple.

Just try it out for yourself and see, it my become your new favorite encrypted file sender.

Firefox Send — send.firefox.com

Encrypt and send files with a link that automatically expires to ensure your important documents don’t stay online forever.

That’s it for this edition

Feedback? Suggestions? Email me at david@techsmartboss.com and please, please, please, share the newsletter and www.techsmartboss.com with anyone else you may think will like it!
Intention
By: Tiffany Chao
Tags: Startup, Business, Millennials, Love, Life

Where do we draw our intentions? Are they coming from a place of selflessness? What is the purpose of the gains we are trying to make? Do we ever question why we make the choices we make or do we take action based off of what we’re taught to believe — the social conditioning or grooming from western society? Is having 2.5 kids, a healthy partnership, a beautiful home, a successful career the key to happiness?

When choosing a job, are we taking this to pay the bills, to sustain ourselves? Are we placing weight on the mission or cause of the company we choose to work for? What are their beliefs and values, and what products or services are they offering to better humanity and the world? Are these things we should consider when choosing a job? Do we believe that humanitarian causes and philanthropy are something we can only partake when we’ve gotten to a certain point in our career or is this something we can do at any point in our lives? Do we need to establish ourselves first in order to give back?

What is our purpose in this world? How do we associate our jobs with who we are? Do we reflect the people / company / values we work for? What is our impact in the grand scheme of things? Are we helping humanity? Are we helping the 1% of the 1%? Are we marketing products that provide false hope and empty promises? Are we bringing communities together and uplifting each other?

Are we thriving or merely surviving?
A Introduction to Machine Learning
By: Jessica Rocha
Tags: Supervised Learning, Machine Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Data Science

About Machine Learning, I want to introduce some important concepts into a series of posts that will help us understand so much.

It all started when researchers intersted in artificial intelligence wondered if machines could think or learn like humans.

Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions whith the least human intervention, through different learning methods.

It’s as if the machine learns from experience as it does with us, humans.

From the day we are born, we are learning from everything we observe. I can cite as an example the process we go through until we learn to walk. Nobody grabs our legs for teach us walk. But from observing people, we have learned to use our legs for this purpose. We fall, we rise and little by little we get to know and learn about the balance. That is, we learn to walk with the experience of falling and rising through countless attempts.

And here are two very important words for Machine Learning: Experience and Attempt. That’s because no one is going to tell the machine what the solution of problem ( even because this is what we do not have and we want to get). The machine will experience the problem several times and create her solution model throngh pattern recognition. And this training experience will take place throngh the data. So we need to feed the algorithm with data.

From there, we separate all Machine Learning techniques into two main subgroups: Supervised Learning Methods and Unsupervised Learning Methods.

In supervised training the algorithm is fed with data that contains a label, that is, that contains the value of the response variable. Then the algorithm will use all these explanatory variables and the response variable to find patterns and be able to predict with a certain level of accuracy the values of the data response variable. It’s important to say here that this level of accuracy will be measured using a separate data set and there are different methods for this validation (we will see about this in another post).

In the unsupervised training, the algorithm will be fed with data withough a label, that is, without any response variable. The algorithm will “study object by object” and analyze the characteristics to later group all this data through a relation of proximity. That is, the data with such charactetistics will remain in a group and the data with others characteristics will remain in another group. We call this Clustering.

There are several algorithms use in supervised training and others used in unsupervised training. We’ll see a lot of them in The Data Machine. But we’re done here today.

See you in the next post.
Using Machine Learning for DNS Exfiltration / Tunnel Detection
By: Syed Suleman Qutb
Tags: Cybersecurity, Dns Tunneling, Supervised Learning, Machine Learning, Splunk

Cyber Security Defensive Mechanisms built on Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms heavily rely on old historical logs of recent Cyber Attacks in order to train and tune detection models. The accuracy and relevance of such historical attack dataset facilitates in the effective detection of malwares or recognizing C&C (command & control) domains, thus evading false-positive alerts in SIEM and SOAR systems.

However, unlike other engineering domains, availability of such ideal datasets in Cyber Security is quite scarce. Therefore, Cyber Threat Detection has always been challenging since threat actors are always evolving, thus making implementation of an effective supervised and reinforced machine-learning framework a mammoth task. In order to address this gap (non-availability of dataset in training/validation phase), security researchers can use unsupervised clustering algorithms (like K-Means, DBSCAN, X-Means, Agglomerative, etc.) for classification or identification of anomalies in the datasets.

In this work, we utilized the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit to triage anomalous traffic patterns to detect data exfiltration over alternative protocols (explained in MITRE ATT&CK T1048). We studied and utilized DNS Traffic Logs ingested to Splunk from multiple Data Sources (DNS Servers, Firewalls, WAF, L7 NetFlows and Splunk STREAM Captures). Splunk’s Machine Learning Toolkit is a classical data science platform based on SciKit Learn Project, which can be used to detect uncommon / suspicious patterns in our network.

MITRE ATT&CK T1048, in particular, elaborates threat actors where a client machine sends significantly more data than it receives from an alternative protocol like Domain Name Service DNS. SOC teams often don’t monitor and pay much attention to DNS as it widely used as a translation tool for domain names and is not intended for data transfer. Whereas, DNS queries are also capable of transferring data between two connected systems. Unfortunately, this makes DNS an appealing vector for cyber-attacks that can secretly transport commands and exfiltrate data through DNS tunneling.

We evaluated multiple algorithms provided by Splunk ML Toolkit (K-Means, BIRCH, DBSCAN) and found K-Means as a better option due to its performance and robustness against huge datasets. Our SPL Query that explains our analytics is below:

To detect DNS tunneling at real time, a component has been implemented in our Splunk EUNOMATIX MLDETECT app, in which bytes sent out are analyzed at real-time using unsupervised ML algorithm which detects and pinpoints the IP address of clients having abnormal traffic flow. For more details and functionality of our ML based detection framework, please contact EUNOMATIX, info@eunomatix.com.
Decision Trees from Scratch Using ID3 Python: Coding It Up !!
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Supervised Learning, Machine Learning, Classification, Python

update : We have introduced an interactive learning App for machine learning / AI ,>> Check it out for Free now <<

Import the required libraries

import numpy as np

import pandas as pd

eps = np.finfo(float).eps

from numpy import log2 as log

‘eps’ here is the smallest representable number. At times we get log(0) or 0 in the denominator, to avoid that we are going to use this.

Define the dataset:

Create pandas dataframe :

Now lets try to remember the steps to create a decision tree….

1.compute the entropy for data-set 2.for every attribute/feature:

1.calculate entropy for all categorical values

2.take average information entropy for the current attribute

3.calculate gain for the current attribute 3. pick the highest gain attribute.

4. Repeat until we get the tree we desired

find the Entropy and then Information Gain for splitting the data set.

We’ll define a function that takes in class (target variable vector) and finds the entropy of that class.

Here the fraction is ‘pi’, it is the proportion of a number of elements in that split group to the number of elements in the group before splitting(parent group).

answer is same as we got in our previous article

2 .Now define a function {ent} to calculate entropy of each attribute :

store entropy of each attribute with its name :

a_entropy = {k:ent(df,k) for k in df.keys()[:-1]}

a_entropy

3. calculate Info gain of each attribute :

define a function to calculate IG (infogain) :

IG(attr) = entropy of dataset - entropy of attribute

def ig(e_dataset,e_attr):

return(e_dataset-e_attr)

store IG of each attr in a dict :

#entropy_node = entropy of dataset

#a_entropy[k] = entropy of k(th) attr IG = {k:ig(entropy_node,a_entropy[k]) for k in a_entropy}

as we can see outlook has the highest info gain of 0.24 , therefore we will select outook as the node at this level for splitting.

Now to proceed our tree we will use recursion

Repeat the same thing for sub-trees till we get the tree.

We build a decision tree based on this. Below is the complete code.

Code functions for building the tree

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Introduction to Machine Learning
By: Irfan Rahman
Tags: Supervised Learning, Machine Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Reinforcement Learning

Supervised, Unsupervised & Reinforcement….

Hello world, i hope you are all doing well. In this post we will learn about Machine learning concepts.

As many of us know Machine Learning(ML) is subset of Artificial Intelligence(AI). The objective of ML is to enable machines to learn by themselves using the provided data and make accurate predictions or we can say that it is a method to train the ML algorithms such that they can learn how to make correct predictions.

The fundamental goal of ML is to find the pattern in existing data. That means we feed the data to Machine and we ask “hey these are data, now your task is to learn and find it out the pattern in data”. If you observe what i am trying to say is we are not doing any code to find pattern, we are just feeding the data and we are expecting from machine to provide some kind of insight in data. So, the machine learning is all about to learn from the data without doing any explicit instructions.

Machine Learning Algorithm depends on the data. If we feed more data algorithm output will be more accurate. As we know data in our world increasing everyday drastically and Machine Learning algorithm work more effectively and accurately.
Supervised Learning
By: Sung Won, Chris
Tags: Supervised Learning, Machine Learning, Classification, Regression

Supervised learning is a method of understanding of function which has input(features) and output(label/target). In mathematics, we usually call them as x(dependent variable)and y(independent variable).

According to the characteristic of target variable, we can classify the data science problem as a regression or classification.

# Regression

Regression predicts target which is a continuous number. (ex/ stock, temperature, sale price) There are many different models but we will look at the basic regression model.

Linear Regression

The simplest regression model is linear regression. It tries to understand what the target value will be based on linear relationship of given feature(s).

The graph above is a scatter plot of some values. Black dots are observations and an input(x, horizontal) and its corresponding output(y, vertical) consist of each observation. Red line is the expected result of x, y pair which is the line of best fit. Linear regression model predicts the target according to the linear tendency of our observation. It is easy to interpret from the model to the real data since the line graph directly shows the relationship.

# Classification

Classification predicts target which is a discrete class label. (ex/ democrat vs republic, dog vs cat, A/B/or C) We will talk about the tree-based classification model

Logistic regression

Logistic regression is a widely used statistical model that, in its basic form, uses a logistic function to model a binary target variable. Even though the method has the word “regression” in it, it is still used to predict to choose one class; pass or fail, win or lose and these are usually labeled as 0 and 1. If the logistic function has the value below 0.5, it treats the result as class 0. If the logistic function has the value of 0.5 and above, the result is class 1.

From the graph on left side, blue line represents linear regression and red line represents logistic regression. Linear regression finds the line of best fit, but logistic regression finds the separation of two classes.

There are also many other regression and classification models such as tree-based model, neural network, K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, etc. These are useful to predict some results, but each model has its own way to understand, it is important to choose right model for each case.