As I mentioned in my post Kickstarter: a data analysis exercise, I am a guitarist.

So, basically, my life surrounds the following: (Please note, I chose an unordered list…for convenience purposes as I write in MarkDown…but this could, just as easily, be an ordered list.)

• Father of 2 lovely girls
• Husband to Jocelyn Hannan
• Platform Evangelist
• Community Builder
• Musician

And, in all of these circumstances, I began to notice a problem.

• A Television that was, perhaps, a bit loud at times
• Missing things said by my daughter
• Missing things said at the other end of the table in meetings
• Difficulty at Meetups, etc that prevented actually engaging with folk in discussion
• Minor frustration that everyone else in the world mumbled

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are loved.

I am a data nerd.
I am a platform geek.
I am passionate about commerce.

These are things that, if you have met me, you know.

What you may not know (unless you have seen the fingernails on my right hand) is that I also am a guitarist.

Music represents a unique creative outlet that I find wildly important. Recently, I have had the opportunity to partner with good friends at LaunchPad Studios, Inc. (in Arvada, Colorado) as a studio musician and a producer on an as needed basis.

Over the last several months, it has been interesting to watch as a high percentage of projects have been funded through Kickstarter. This, in and of itself, is not that suprising…after all, Kickstarter announced this week that their Platform has enabled more than 1 Million backers and more than 100 Million in funding.

Kickstarter is a platform, it enables a commerce workflow, is related to music, and generates a wealth of interesting data. Seems the perfect confluence of events and interests for a Friday night exercise…

I will warn/advise you, in advance, that the purpose of this exercise was not to discuss the methodology by which Kickstarter collects and disburses funds (although that is an interesting discussion) but to analyze the outcome of the funding process itself.

In discussing this process with several of these artists, there are some base assumptions that are made regarding the most popular level of backing, duration of project, etc. And, while experiential knowledge is important, I was interested in whether I could identify any patterns from some simple analysis of data available on the Kickstarter website.

My methodology was not what I would refer to as “rigorously scientific” but the analysis thereof did result in some interesting patterns. Read the rest of this entry »

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("RIP, dmr\n");
    return 0;
}

more information

It has been a long time since I’ve written on this blog…
and, frankly, I miss it.

While I have been writing, sometimes at excess, for work purposes…my personal author activities have been overwhelmed by the activities of the summer (see previous posts for more). With that said, my daughter is now healthy and my internal musings desire to be put onto a series of servers in html format.

In August of 2010 I wrote a post entitled Solving Problems: Innovation Upon -or- Innovation In Spite Of. In it, I discussed two blog posts that had similar content and spoke about the import of innovation. At the time, I made the following assertion.

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