Neal Mueller – Page 2 of 20 – serial adventurer, instrument-rated pilot, Everest summiter unguided with Sherpa, 7 summits summiter, English Channel crossing swimmer, Pacific Ocean sailor from Honolulu to SF, Guinness World Record Holder in Arctic ocean rowing, technologist, and lately high-centered on space travel. This website is a collection of things I liked, at the moment.

Simple questions you should ask to help reduce AI hype

As Machine Learning captures our imagination, it’s important to separate the material from the hype. Here are 5 simple questions you should ask to help reduce AI hype:

“How much training data is required?”
“Can this work unsupervised (= without labelling the examples)?”
“Can the system predict out of vocabulary names?” (i.e. Imagine if I said “My friend Rudinyard was mean to me” – many AI systems would never be able to answer “Who was mean to me?” as Rudinyard is out of its vocabulary)
“How much does the accuracy fall as the input story gets longer?”
“How stable is the model’s performance over time?”

source: Stephen Merity of Salesforce

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Video– Excellent product description by Chevy from 1937

Skip to 3:01 to learn how the automobile differential allows a vehicle to turn a corner while keeping the wheels from skidding. It’s brilliant product marketing, using language and concepts to conceptualize the product features into something that everyone understands and wants to buy.

Video– Talk at Battery SF about Fix Maps

Here’s the recorded video of a 5-minute talk I gave at Battery San Francisco about Fix Maps. The talk format is called “Ignite” which calls for 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.

Here’s the slides from the talk.

How To Build A Snow Cave

Snow caves are fun to build and provide warm places to sleep and take shelter from a storm. This is a brief how-to guide to building a snow cave.

The snow cave in this example was built by 4 people near Skinner Hut at the edge of the timberline in late-December 2015 at 11,620 feet. Builders were Brett Poulin, Chris, Nick, and me, Neal Mueller. The cave we built was large enough to sleep and provide eating quarters and shelter for 4 people. It included a vapor escape for cooking.

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Analysis of 250 SaaS Pricing Pages

Dropbox Pricing

This guy analyzed 250 SaaS pricing pages — here’s what he found:

The average number of packages is three and a half
50% highlight a package as the best option
69% of companies sell the benefits
81 percent organize prices low to high
38 percent list their most expensive package as ‘Contact us’
The most common call to action is ‘Buy Now’
36 percent don’t use a contrasting CTA color
63 percent offer a free trial
4% of companies offer pricing on a sliding scale
81 percent of packages are named
6% show a money back guarantee on-page

Read the full report.

A sign of over-exuberance

A sign of over-exuberance. What some might call a bubble. Seen in San Francisco’s Mission district.

Clever Red Bull advertising in hexadecimal

Want to know how to spell “Red Bull gives you wiiings.” in hexadecimal? Check out these two red bull advertisement in silicon valley. Here’s a hex to text converter to see for yourself. It’s not a recruiting ad, because this is the only job they have in SF. Must be just advertising to thirsty programmers. I love it.

52 65 64 20 42 75 6c 6c 20 67 69 76 65 73 20 79 6f 75 20 77 69 69 69 6e 67 73 2e

Red bull advertising in hexadecimal billboard

Apple Confidential – Steve Jobs on “Think Different” – Internal Meeting Sept. 23, 1997

Video of internal 1997 meeting 2-months after Jobs returned to Apple. He defines marketing as values. Sets the vision as something other than speeds and feeds. Launches the brand for the next 15-years, which you can see even today. The 1997 ‘Think Different’ billboards are reminiscent of the 2015 ‘Shot on Iphone 6’ billboards.

Worth the 16 minutes if you’re interested in corporate strategy and product branding.