Neal's Notes

“Say it ain’t so Joe!”

Those words were supposedly uttered by a small boy outside the Cook County (IL) Courthouse to ‘Shoeless Joe’ Jackson. He had just finished testifying to a grand jury; one of eight Chicago White Sox baseball players who allegedly took bribes allowing the Cincinnati Reds to win the 1919 World Series. Jackson was banned from baseball after the 1920 season but was found innocent in 1921 by a jury.

Debates have raged for 90+ years on Jackson’s guilt or innocence; his baseball cards, however, have stood the test of time. Currently on eBay, for example, you can buy a 1909 E90-1 American Caramel rookie for $10,999.95. If you’ve got some spare change hidden in the sofa, you can grab a 1952 Mickey Mantle Topps Rookie RC #311 for only $38,795, also on eBay (with free shipping!). And in late April, a T206 Honus Wagner card sold at auction for $1.32 million.

While the market for certain types of baseball cards is still strong, a paucity of children and even teenagers at major baseball card shows in recent years appears to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Baseball card prices have been falling in recent years in relation to their scarcity. In response, The Economist reported that “seeking to entice new generations of buyers, card manufacturers have experimented with new formats, including cards with pieces of game jerseys and scraps of used bat embedded: gimmicks, true, but tempting ones to those with a desire to commune with actual heroes of the diamond.”

And some companies ratcheted it up even more. Back in 2007, Upper Deck tried to convince collectors to buy its packs by including a card with a World Series ticket signed by Babe Ruth in one of them.

Fast forward to 2015 – Upper Deck doesn’t even offer baseball cards for sale – it now focuses on basketball, football golf, hockey and soccer.

Venerable Topps (established in 1938 as a family gum business in Brooklyn) is capitalizing on its history to lure more customers. The company even has a Rediscover tab on its website with a nice catchphrase – “Rediscover Topps. The story of collecting lasts a lifetime.”

There’s also a cute 30-second commercial featuring San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey. A bunch of eight-year-olds are haggling over his card and what they could get for it. Posey isn’t happy with any of the trade choices until he’s offered a 1969 Johnnie Bench rookie card that had been stored in a shoebox by the father of one of the kids. Posey immediately accepts.

The Rediscover section also has a welter of subsections that provide a lot of useful information for budding collectors. Some of these include Start Collecting and Your Vintage Cards. The most relevant of these for kids in today’s digital society is probably the all-important Apps. One popular app is Topps BUNT®, a real-time Major League Baseball digital trading card game “where the cards you own and collect earn points based on how your players perform on the field each day.”

I still have my 10,000+ collection of baseball cards; I hope all of the card manufacturers can reel in the next gen of collectors – but it will be an uphill battle.

Nonetheless, it’s a great hobby that lends itself to a lot of youthful camaraderie, best summed up by Jefferson Burdick, a renowned baseball card collector and cataloguer whose massive collection is now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City:

“A card collection is a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cards to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day – brought to life in vivid pictures and prose.”

Because it’s still relatively new, most consumers – and marketers – probably don’t have a clear understand of bitcoin. But it’s really the blockchain – the technology underpinning the digital currency – that could have a huge impact on financial and consumer markets.

Gil Luria, a financial technology analyst with Wedbush Securities, estimates that 20 percent of U.S. GDP – about $3.6 trillion – is generated by industries that could be disrupted by blockchain technology. And Aite Group, a market research consultancy, predicts that capital markets will spend $75 million this year alone on developing blockchain technology, reaching more than $400 million in four years.

So what exactly is a blockchain? In brief, it acts as a globally-distributed ledger that logs transactions.

Here’s one concise explanation from Re/code:

“A blockchain is essentially a record of digital events – one that’s “distributed” or shared between many different parties. It can only be updated by consensus of a majority of the participants in the system. And, once entered, information can never be erased. The bitcoin blockchain contains a certain and verifiable record of every single bitcoin transaction ever made.”

Regardless of what you think about bitcoin, the blockchain itself has so far worked flawlessly, enabling strangers, notes Re/code, “to hold and exchange digital money in a completely transparent way – without having to trust each other or any central authority.”

And here’s one real-world example – when someone uses bitcoin to buy a cappuccino, the transaction is recorded on a ‘block,’ or a file of data. Once a block is full, the next block created includes computer code that refers to the preceding block. The result is the blockchain – a permanent string of records.

Bitcoin blockchain technology may also eventually be adopted by quite a few of the world’s leading banks. A partnership recently assembled by financial tech firm R3 has lined up nine global financial institutions to design and deliver distributed/shared ledger technologies to financial markets. It will also try and establish standards and protocols. Participants include Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, State Street, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, BBA and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The banks are keenly interested in the blockchain method because it is supposed to make fraud more difficult.

“These new technologies could transform how financial transactions are recorded, reconciled and reported – all with additional security, lower error rates and significant cost reductions,” said Hu Liang, Senior Vice President and head of Emerging Technologies at State Street.

So how will this all play out? Writing in Forbes, Laura Shin noted that this shared ledger approach could streamline recordkeeping and property transfers – from land titles to patent and trademark holdings. Shin added that Deloitte, the world’s largest accounting firm, is studying blockchain systems for auditing, reconciliation and other functions, “which could sideline legions of CPAs.”

Shin added that while eliminating certain jobs and possibly entire professions, the blockchain – if readily adopted – could result in creating new marketplaces, e.g., for trading mobile telephone minutes and energy credits.

There may also be an “explosion of micro transactions on the Web,” she said. “The Internet of value, linked up with the Internet of Things, could transform the supply chain and global trade.”

And on the consumer side, blockchain technology may soon result in trades and specialization we can’t even fathom today.

Chris DeRose heads up the Counterparty Foundation, a consultancy that advises businesses and organizations on how to integrate Counterparty technology and software (a financial platform for generating peer-to-peer financial applications on the bitcoin blockchain).

Writing in American Banker, DeRose said it’s not a stretch to imagine users reconciling account needs between their Facebook profiles, World of Warcraft guilds and Instagram followings.

“Financiers will be able to create futures markets for ad impressions, airline tickets and LinkedIn connections. And loans could be collateralized from the value earned by answering questions on StackExchange, alongside ownership of rare online goods and assets,” said DeRose.

The power of the blockchain, he added, lies in its ability “to become the lubricant by which markets cross borders, risk profiles and silos. These changes will affect society in much the same way that the Internet crossed markets, reduced risk and opened information silos in the first part of the 21st century. This is the future of the blockchain.”

Will the blockchain usher in money’s new operating system? Has the renaissance of money already begun and with it, open up a new way for consumers and marketers to do business?

Jury’s still out, but a lot of smart people in technology think so.

SIGGRAPH has always served as a unique forum for an array of cool and innovative technologies and computer graphics approaches. Last week’s SIGGRAPH 2015 conference continued the trend.

This marked the 42nd conference and exhibition; SIGGRAPH reported that almost 15,000 attendees, partners and media from 70+ nations descended upon the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Kristy Pron, SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies Program Chair said at this year’s conference, “we wanted to find technologies that can be applied to daily life, whether it will be tomorrow or in a few years. We also wanted to uncover practical emerging technology apps from various industries such as automotive.”

So here are a few examples that are still in the nascent stage but could have real-world applications soon:

SemanticPaint – A collaborative effort by Microsoft, the University of Oxford and Stanford University. The SIGGRAPH demo unveiled what the research team says is a “new and interactive and online approach to 3D scene understanding.” The system lets users simultaneously scan their environment and interactively segments a scene by “reaching out and touching any desired object or surface.” Users have continuous live feedback online. The researchers further stated that errors can be immediately corrected in the segmentation and/or learning, which they claim isn’t currently available to batch and offline methods. They believe SemanticPaint will usher in new apps in augmented reality, interior design and human/robot navigation.

“It provides the ability to capture substantially labelled 3D datasets for training largescale visual recognitions,” noted the researchers.

Cypress, CA-based Christie Digital Systems USA, a visual and audio technology company, demonstrated its latest digital ‘sandbox.’ The company auto-calibrated projection-mapped displays on a number of different types of surfaces and scaled them down to less than 30 seconds. Attendees saw a 3D printed apartment building projection-mapped in real-time. The process – which uses cameras, projectors and 3D geometry “to augment any real object’s surface with imagery defined by a virtual model” – has also been recently patented.

Mid-Air Touch Display – A team of researchers from Keio University and the University of Tokyo in Japan demonstrated a system allowing visuo-tactile interaction with bare hands of mid-air 3D dimensional objects. The researchers created ultrasound fields that created rich tactile textures. Users could see and touch virtually floating objects with the naked eye and their hands.

These and other projects are pushing technology boundaries; going forward, it’ll be fascinating to see how many of these will ultimately impact the way we live and work.

On April 1st, California Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order mandating a substantial reduction in urban water consumption compared with 2013 levels. One key element – a 25% reduction in urban water use to help mitigate the state’s worst ongoing drought in more than a century.

And while a number of climatologists and meteorologists have predicted a better than 50% chance of an El Nino winter – which means greater than average rainfall- there’s no guarantee that the desperately needed rain will arrive.

Enter the Internet of Things (IoT). The drought has spawned a welter of startups and innovative partnerships with public agencies and the private sector that utilize the IoT to find smart solutions to manage both water distribution and electricity use.

A few examples:

The Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency (MRWPCA) has teamed up with Candi Controls and MC Engineering to install a system of low-cost, industrial-class IoT devices. By collecting data from connected sensors, the system is helping to optimize distribution of reclaimed water among farmers and everyday users; it also minimizes energy by tracking usage and power consumption.

According to Tom Kouretas, an MRWPCA engineer, the agency is able to mitigate some of the costs associated with its power consumption by moving water at night when possible, and supplementing with solar energy during daylight. However, he added, the water has to be there, 24/7, and solar energy is a ‘dynamic resource’ that fluctuates continually depending on weather patterns and time of day.

“Trying to understand how best to optimize these processes and stay below peak energy demands means that the agency must understand when we are using power, what the price is on the grid, what the total load is of each process, how to distribute loads among various pumps, and how much the solar production contributes to power availability in the moment,” said Kouretas.

Milwaukee-based Wellntel, launched in 2013, has created a non-invasive sensor system that collects water level information from water wells and produces the data on graphs and charts on a private, personalized website and smartphone app. The system is placed on top of groundwater wells and emits a sonar like ping to measure well water. Wellntel has been conducting an 18-month pilot program in Templeton in California’s Central Valley; the system may prove useful in the region as groundwater levels are being depleted at an alarming rate.

San Francisco startup WaterSmart provides software to water utilities nationwide. The company collects literally hundreds of millions of data points each hour that enable utilities to discover leaks and also identify homes or neighborhoods that are heavy water users.

WaterSmart also has a ticker on its website that shows how much users are saving – as this story was getting ready to post, the company claimed that WaterSmart users have saved 1,799,128,431 gallons of water; $9,530,418.58 dollars; 15,834.04 tons of carbon dioxide.

All of the aforementioned isn’t a total panacea that will resolve California’s drought overnight.

But it’s a good start.

Thomas Odenwald, writing in Digitalist Magazine (produced by SAP), summed it up:

“The growing visibility of drought and water challenges in California has created a new urgency and renewed momentum for action by companies, individuals, and elected officials to take action on water stewardship at both the local and state levels.”

“Exterminate, exterminate.”

-Briefing warning from the Daleks before firing their extermination rays on various “Dr. Who” episodes

What is one of the most well-known catch phrases on the long-running BBC series, “Dr. Who,” might eventually be uttered by a robot greeting you at your front door to take care of your termites.

Farfetched? Maybe right now, but a robot may soon be coming to your home to spray pesticides, clean your windows, and perhaps even tutor your kids.

ABI Research expects the global market for consumer robots to top $6.5 billion by 2017. BI Intelligence says the market for consumer and office robots will grow at a CAGR of 17% between 2015-2019, seven times faster than the market for manufacturing robots.

And some other key takeaways from BI Intelligence in their ‘The Robotics Market Report’:

• Three distinct categories will dominate the consumer/office side: home cleaning and maintenance; telepresence (i.e., telecommuting to events or remote offices) and advanced robots for home entertainment.

• The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets is making it easier to develop robots for consumer and office applications. The report says mobile devices offer designers the opportunity to ‘outsource’ computing and user interface tasks to companion devices, allowing developers to produce app-controlled robots at more accessible price points.

• Robot vendors still face significant challenges – a lot of people are still turned off by robots too humanoid in appearance. “There is also a brewing potential for the kinds of intellectual property battles seen in the smartphone space,” added BI Intelligence.

The robot invasion is well underway. Lowe’s announced last year that the company’s Innovation Labs unit was testing OSHbot, a retail-ready, mobile multilingual robot, designed to help shoppers navigate stores quickly and easily.

Still in development, OSHbot not only knows where every piece of inventory is at all times, but has a telepresence enabling shoppers to connect with off-site experts who can provide useful home projects information.

According to Kyle Nel, executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs, “home improvement is a very high involvement thing so having that ability to ask questions in your native language every time to a robot, makes the expectation that every time you’ll have the same high quality experience.”

A few other quick examples:

Tractica, a market intelligence firm focusing on human interaction with technology, reported that SoftBank Robotics and Aldebaran Robotics have tag teamed to produce Pepper, which their creators say is the first robot able to not only read and respond to human emotion, but also analyze how people are feeling and guide them in the right direction. Tractica says Nestle Japan plans to use Pepper to sell Nescafe machines in home appliance stores throughout Japan by the end of this year.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group will introduce Nao at a few of its bank branches this summer on a trial basis. The robot, noted Tractica, can speak 19 languages and uses a camera to detect emotions from customers’ facial expressions.

And last year at International CES, Industry Week reported that the French-based firm Keecker rolled out a robot that can project video or other content from a tablet or smartphone to a wall or ceiling.

“You can enjoy life without being tied to the television set,” said Pierre Lebeau, the company’s founder/CEO.

Lastly, while the sky’s the limit on how robots will be utilized by marketers to sell products and services, how humans control and interact with them is a critical component for success.

Hiring expert Dana Borowka best summed it up:

“A tough challenge for small business managers with robots will be consistently hiring quality people to take care of the robots,” he said. “These devices will need to be set up, programmed, monitored and repaired. No benefit comes without a price.”

Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery

 –Exodus 20:14

What’s considered adultery really isn’t readily defined in this Biblical passage. And for the numerous online sites that offer a chance to be anonymously naughty, that’s probably good for them – and good for their business.  And it is a big business.

Earlier this year I wrote a piece on how the dating industry has become a global multi-billion annual industry. Market research firm IBISWorld predicts, for instance, that it will be just under $3 billion in four years.

Data on extramarital dating sites is sparse but UK-based The Independent reported these interesting snippets back in February:

Canada-based Ashley Madison, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, is hugely popular in the UK, for instance; it currently operates in 45 countries with more than 32 million members worldwide. Ashley Madison (parent company Avid Life Media is now trying to raise about $200 million by listing shares for Ashley Madison in London later this year) also claims to be the world’s second largest dating site – only Match.com is bigger.

A 2013 freedom of information request showed that Members of Parliament, peers, and their staff in Parliament had clicked on an extra-marital dating website called Out of Town Affairs 52,745 times. The site’s moniker – “Adult dating with no complications.”

And last year Ashley Madison worked with researchers from New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, analyzing data on more than eight million men who had registered with the site.  The Wall Street Journal reported that the study was one of six published together in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ journal. It examined when people made significant life changes.

The Journal story also stated that “the study found about 950,000 men ages 29, 39, 49, 59 and their numbers on the dating site were 18% higher than what would be expected by chance, according to the researchers.  The study also looked at data for women and found a similar, though less pronounced, pattern.”

And way back in 2007, researchers at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and Cal State University-Los Angeles, surveyed 60,000+ heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals.  They asked more than 100 questions on infidelity.

“Men looked for sexual variety and excitement,” said Dr. David Frederick, assistant professor of healthy psychology at Chapman and the study’s lead researcher.  “Women were more likely to fall in love with someone else or to look for reassurance that they were still desirable.”

Today there are literally dozens of extramarital dating sites; some accept various forms of advertising, some also offer affiliate programs.  Ashley Madison’s, affiliate program, for example, bills itself  as “an easy-to-join system that enables webmasters, affiliates and publishers to earn monthly pay checks by promoting one or more of the sites within our diverse network of offerings.”

Despite the growing popularity of extramarital dating sites, there have been some hiccups.

French site Gleeden has 2.3 million members in Europe, including one million in France. Women don’t pay to register on the site; men buy credit, opening up different levels of access to registered women. Gleeden was hit in March with a legal complaint against the site’s American publisher, Black Divine, in a Paris superior court. The Association of Catholic Families (ACF) filed a complaint about risqué ads splashed on the backs of buses in several French cities. A French court will now decide whether the company is illegally encouraging spouses to cheat.

And there may be some legal precedence, reports BBC News. Article 212 of France’s Civil Code states “married partners owe each other the duty of respect, fidelity, help and assistance.”

“What we are trying to do with our suit is to show that the civil code – the law — has meaning…what makes Gleeden different from other websites out there is that its business model is based on marital infidelity,” said Jean-Marie Andres, ACF president.

No matter the Gleeden outcome, it’s safe to bet that this rather unique segment of the online dating industry will continue to flourish.

“Dave’s Not Here Man”

—Tommy Chong

“They’ve Outlawed the Number One Vegetable on the Planet”

—Timothy Leary

Grass. Pot. Weed. Ganja. Reefer. Wacky tobaccy.

The monikers are infinite.

And apparently, so is the growth potential of the burgeoning cannabis industry. GreenWave Advisors, a marijuana research and financial analysis firm (could anyone have remotely envisioned such a firm a decade ago?) prognosticated last year in a report that if the federal government and all 50 states legalize recreational marijuana, it could be a $35 billion annual business by 2020.

While that’s probably a Rocky Mountain High pipe dream for the near future, another cannabis industry investment and research firm, Oakland, CA-based ArcView Group, said that the U.S. market for legal cannabis almost doubled from $1.5 billion in 2013 to $2.7 billion last year. ArcView also predicts that by 2020, another 14 states will legalize recreational marijuana and two more states will legalize medical marijuana.

Currently four states – Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington – have legalized retail marijuana; Washington D.C. voters legalized recreational use but sales are still illegal.

Erik Devaney, writing in HubSpot, said it’s not just marijuana growers, distributors and dispensaries comprising this potentially lucrative landscape.

“It’s also fertilizer companies, and lighting system companies, and hydroponic supplies companies, and jar & container companies, and analytical testing laboratories – there are even staffing groups that specialize in placing workers in the cannabis industry,” said Devaney.

Sounds like a marketer’s dream, n’est pas?

Not so fast.

Marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. So marijuana marketers are still faced with numerous hurdles. Google and Facebook, noted Devaney, forbid advertising marijuana on their platforms. Same holds true for photo-sharing service Instagram (owned by Facebook) – cannabis industry accounts belonging to businesses have been suspended.

“In many cases the online restrictions that marijuana marketers face are simply a result of companies trying to adhere to the law,” said Devaney. “Under federal law, marijuana dispensary operators are classified as narcotics traffickers. So if a company helps those operators sell their product (e.g., through providing ad space, or by allowing them to share photos on a public platform), that company theoretically could be convicted of participating in a criminal conspiracy.”

There are a number of other significant hurdles. A 1982 federal tax code amendment – known as Section 280E – denies tax credits or exemptions to businesses “trafficking” in controlled substances. So a lot of newbie marijuana dispensaries in Colorado and Washington, for instance, are taking a big hit (pun intended) – federal tax rates in many instances have ranged between 60-90 percent. They also can’t write off advertising costs, employee salaries and rent.

And most banks still won’t do business with the marijuana industry so legal weed has become a de-facto cash business. One that is, First Security Bank of Nevada, has opened accounts for about 80 marijuana-related businesses.

“The applicants hold approximately $35 million in deposits,” said John Sullivan, the bank’s president/CEO. “As a small community bank, there are benefits to providing services to the industry in the form of new deposits as well as opening doors to other businesses and services.”

Media companies have by and large avoided selling ad space to cannabis-based businesses too because again, at the federal level, it’s illegal to advertise marijuana and related products.

And trying to patent a marijuana brand is currently impossible right now – the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) won’t issue a trademark for something that’s currently not lawful on the federal level.

Despite all of the aforementioned, the industry continues to grow. Colorado retailers sold $386 million of medical marijuana and $313 million for recreational use last year; tax revenues were $63 million, licenses/fees brought in another $13 million. The state expects annual sales to top $1 billion by 2016.

Private equity groups also see opportunities. Last fall, Seattle-based Privateer Holdings cobbled together more than 40 investors and has raised over $50 million that is being spent on various cannabis industry ventures. One of these is Marley Natural, created by the family of the late Jamaican reggae artist Bob Marley. The family launched what they call the world’s first global cannabis brand – it will sell cannabis-infused creams, lotions and various accessories.

Privateer Holdings has made one U.S. acquisition, according to CNBC – Leafly, which bills itself as “the world’s largest cannabis information resource.” Leafly, per their web site, says “we make the process of finding the right strains and products for you fast, simple, and comfortable.”

Creating demand and building brand loyalty will continue to pose challenges over the next few years. John A. Quelch, a Harvard Business School marketing professor, told Forbes that a national mass-market brand of marijuana is not on the horizon anytime soon. Until a majority of states – and the federal government – legalize marijuana sales, large cigarette and alcohol companies won’t take the risk.

Quelch does think some marijuana companies may expand to additional states to carve out early market share.

“They’ll achieve economies of scale that position them to be bought out later by national players. Unlike craft beer, marijuana would be inexpensive to transport across state lines to retail outlets across the country. I think you’ll definitely see a couple of companies get licenses in more than one state,” said Quelch.

Clay Butler, who founded now defunct Canna Cola, a soft drink containing THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, summed it up:

“My suspicion is that, if some day it is decriminalized, and you can get marijuana products in a liquor store or a 7-Eleven, I really don’t think it would be the big established food companies that would get involved,” Butler said. “I could see them buying out existing brands, which is a lot easier for them anyway. I think the market is going to the early pioneers.”

A recent study at Carnegie Mellon University shows that when people are aware that free smart phone apps may be sharing private info with third parties, they’ll often rapidly move to limit further sharing.

Carnegie Mellon News reported that the study evaluated the benefits of app permission managers (for Android 4.3, known as AppOps) that tell them how many times info like location, contact lists or phone call logs had been shared.

One example:

“Your location has been shared 5,398 times with Facebook, Groupon, GO Launcher EX and seven other apps in the last 14 days.”

“App permission managers are better than nothing, but by themselves aren’t sufficient,” said Norman Sadeh, a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “Privacy ‘nudges’ can play an important role in increasing awareness and in motivating people to review and adjust their privacy settings.”

All of this available location data can be a bit of a sticky wicket for marketers, who are trying to drive sales for their products/services, but at the same time, increasingly realizing they need to respect consumer privacy. Marketers, according to Greg Stuart, CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association, will pay 10-20 percent more for online ads that contain location information – and because location data can make ads more relevant, that data can be used, for instance, to show an ad for a store to nearby customers.

But even consumers often can’t figure out what they want when it comes to key privacy issues.

Case in point – last year Accenture queried 2,012 consumers, ages 20-40 in the U.S. and the U.K. Eighty percent said privacy is a thing of the past; 87 percent said safeguards are insufficient to protect personal information. Yet 49 percent also said they wouldn’t object to companies tracking their buying behaviors if it meant receiving more relevant offers. And 64 percent would allow text messages while in a store if the on-the-spot offers were in concert with their buying preferences.

Go figure.

Josh Manion, writing in Marketing Land, wondered about what happens when privacy’s viewed as a matter of enterprise strategy based on who your customers are and how you engage them:

“We need to change our focus on privacy as country- or channel-based, and instead, make it an enterprise strategy implemented at the level of individual users,” said Manion. “That way, the consumer directs the brand, “Here’s when and how you can use my data. And here’s what I want in exchange.” That’s how we gain, and regain, the trust of consumers!”

A few months ago a long-standing colleague of mine decided to leave her tech company after 14 years. The pay was good, benefits great, but she came to the realization that she couldn’t breach that proverbial ‘glass ceiling.’ Despite her stellar qualifications, she resigned.

She’s now getting her teaching credential and wants to teach computer programming to high school students. Any high school that hires her will immediately be that much better.

But her story isn’t an isolated one. Tracey Lien recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times that women are leaving the tech industry in droves. It’s becoming a significant issue for the tech economy.

“According to the industry group Code.org, computing jobs will more than double by 2020, to 1.4 million,” said Lien. “If women continue to leave the field, an already dire shortage of qualified tech workers will grow worse. Last summer, Google, Facebook, Apple and other big tech companies released figures showing that men outnumbered women 4 to 1 or more in their technical sectors.”

Vivek Wadhwa, a tech entrepreneur and fellow with Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, said that when women go to venture capitalists seeking financing for their new startups, they are sometimes treated differently from men and held to a higher standard.

In an interview with Stanford News Service, Wadhwa added there are a number of reasons why there are so few women in technology.

“It’s still perceived to be a profession best suited to males. Parents often discourage their daughters from studying engineering because they don’t believe it is for girls. In schools, girls in engineering are ridiculed as tomboys or nerds. When they join the workforce, they may face discrimination,” said Wadhwa.

And on the other side of the pond in the United Kingdom, a survey of more than 600 people in the tech industry taken by The Guardian between Oct. 12 – Nov. 10, 2014 revealed that:

• 73% of both men and women believe the industry to be sexist;
• 52% say women are paid less than men for the same job;
• Structural and cultural sexism is still widespread.

Catalyst, a nonprofit research organization focused on the advancement of women, also analyzed the career paths of almost 10,000 MBA grads from 2007-2014 in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. More than half – 53% – left tech-intensive professions for other work, compared to 31% of the men.

“There is still the ‘brogrammer’ culture in high tech,” said Anna Beninger, Catalyst’s research director. “The tech industry has some significant culture issues, and it’s really damaging their ability to attract the best talent.”

There’s no magic cure-all. Joan C. Williams, law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and coauthor of “What Works for Women: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know,” told the Los Angeles Times that “companies need to research the biases that prevent women from getting ahead and devise ‘interrupters’ – instead of single training sessions, companies need to make systemic changes.”

Stanford scholar Wadhwa added that companies started by women “achieve 35% higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, bring in 12% higher revenue than venture-backed male-owned tech companies.”

His parting caveat – “we must level the playing field for women by supporting their startups and removing the hurdles that are thrown in their way. Parents must inspire their daughters to step forth and take their rightful role in the innovation economy.”

You go girl!

A number of years ago I was retained to provide marketing communications services for a San Diego-based dating site. Good concept, decent funding from private sources, number of stories generated across various media genres. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t enough. Competition was too fierce; site just wasn’t attracting enough eyeballs and the venture folded.

Fast forward to 2015. Buddy of mine asked if I knew of any good dating sites as he was, to quote him, ‘back in the game.’ Told him I hadn’t been following the space for awhile but was curious to see how the industry had evolved.

The dating industry has become huge – $2.2 billion in 2014 according to market research firm IBISWorld; $2.7 billion by 2019. And Pew Research says that of Americans in a committed relationship that have used an online dating site, one in three met online.

Decided to have a little fun so did a bit of research/searching for oddball, offbeat and in some cases, truly weird dating sites. All seem to be flourishing; many have attracted advertising. In short, your future significant other may just be a few clicks away, no matter your fetishes.

So here are a few:

Vampersonals – Still searching for that special undead darling? For those with enlarged incisors, this site’s especially for you. Vampersonals boasts “whether you want to meet others like you for simple recreation and a drink, or find that special someone to shine within the dark for you, come check us! We don’t bite…too hard.” Reckon that drink’s probably red-hued.

Women Behind Bars – This started out as a pen pal site but has grown considerably since then. Looking for that special woman doing 5 to 20 but really don’t want to commit to a long-term relationship? This one’s for you then.

Here’s what one satisfied customer posted on the site:

“I purchased an address in January and have been corresponding with a beautiful, warm, funny, loving woman. This past weekend I finally was able to visit her. She is in Texas and I am in Pennsylvania. Well, this woman is the one. I am planning to have her coming home with me when she is released and then both of us want to have our relationship grow (possible marriage). I am just completely amazed that one letter has turned into a great, although long distance, relationship.”

And advertisers apparently like the site’s traffic. According to Todd Muffoletto, who founded the site, Women Behind Bars offers a banner rotation ad program; he says the site has also been the subject of 11 TV and 197 radio interviews and numerous print/web based articles.

Fat Bastard Dating – This site originated in the United Kingdom and boasts ‘thousands of members.’ Tired of working out to impress a date? Forget about it – exhale and let that paunch out and allow those love handles to reign supreme. In fact, the site says “being a fat bastard doesn’t mean you have to be single forever…the fatter you are, the better as far as the members on this site are concerned. Girls like a guy who has got presence and men love a cuddly lass.” The site also says there’s no obligation to pay until “you’ve found a fat bastard worth contacting.”

Kingsnake After Dark – OK, this one admittedly creeps me out a bit. Billed as a ‘herp-centric dating site’ for snake lovers, Kingsnake After Dark is attracting advertisers, albeit most of them, not surprisingly, are reptilian-centric. The home page has an ad running alongside the site’s main logo for Rodentpro.com®, which offers low prices for mice, rats, rabbits, chicks, and quail – everything you need to keep that seven-foot boa constrictor that lives under your bed well-fed and content.

SaladMatch.com – If you’re a steak and potatoes kinda guy or girl, this site’s probably not for you. But there are obviously a lot of arugula-lovers out there. The Facebook page has more than 11,000 Likes; Twitter followers are approaching 4,000. The site was launched by Just Salad, a New York City chain of salad restaurants/cafes. You can find your salad ‘soul mate’ by listing your favorite salad ingredients.

Whatever tickles your fancy, the online data industry’s convinced there’s someone out there waiting for you.