Good afternoon, my name is Andy Walton. I'm the director of technical sales for Serba. And today I'm going to talk about densifying OpenStack with predictive analytics. Serba is a analytics provider. We make software based out of Toronto, Ontario. And we've got some of the world's largest and some of the smallest organizations in the world using our software to optimize their hybrid cloud environments. Today I'm specifically going to focus in on OpenStack. So OpenStack and the Enterprise. So obviously one of OpenStack's biggest strengths is KVM. It's cost effective. It's an open alternative. One of its biggest weaknesses is also KVM. And I could actually say this about any of the different hypervisors, whether it be VMware or PowerVM or Hyper-V. Management ecosystem in KVM is still maturing. And Solometer, the technology we use to actually go and get the data, is still going through major changes. It does every single release. But this is the last piece here, the VM placement, density optimization, software license optimization. These present many challenges in the private clouds in terms of getting those answers right. And like I said, that applies to any hypervisor system, not just KVM running underneath OpenStack. So the analytics that you need to understand supply and demand in these environments is critical. And if you've been by our booth or you're going to visit afterwards, hopefully, we liken this kind of to a game of Tetris, where your playing field is all the infrastructure capacity. And every workload kind of represents your different supply and demand. My thing is falling off here. Let's get this thing. It's stuck in my hair. There we go. Hopefully, that's all right. Anyhow, the workload demands are like a piece of Tetris. And you think about different shapes and sizes, workloads that are busy in the morning, some of they're busy in the evening, some disk IO, network IO intensive, CPU memory. And they all have different requirements as well in terms of the compute, the storage, their network requirements, and even the software that runs on them. And many of the environments we see before we get our hands on them, we get our software and our analytics on them, look like a badly played game of Tetris where any of the gray space is stranded capacity and you've got workloads that are potentially exceeding operational boundaries that pose risk to the environment. Now, what we're seeing is software-defined control is enabled by policies, the way you govern the environment, the way you manage it. Let me fix this thing again. This is getting irritating. There we go. Let's try that. So you've got different parameters that you need to actually watch. Things like density, performance, the applications, availability requirements, compliance in terms of which workloads run where and which ones can run together and whether or not they can run internally or in the external cloud. Volatility, operational cycles and software licensing requirements. And if this type of parameter was just required in just one environment, say production critical, density has to be low, performance is high, you need to make sure the applications are running. N plus two availability at the node level, rigorous compliance about where workloads will run, business-defined operational cycles and host-based licensing parameters. Tough enough to do when you're looking at just single environments, but when you're running multiple types of workloads, production IT or cloud or batch or DevOps, what have you, you've got all these different parameters to control. Very difficult to do with the operational tools that are available today, especially in some of the maturing technologies, things like KVM. And really what we're finding is that software-defined control of these types of things. So looking at utilization, over-commit ratio, security compliance, utilization levels, if you can control that using a policy, you're going to have a much more governed environment, especially when you take all these different parameters and all these different environments into consideration. So there's really two pieces here I wanted to talk to you today. One was the supply and the demand. Let's start with supply and optimizing. So if you look at, say, your KVM virtual infrastructure and kind of a simple diagram of a couple different availability zones, the VMs running under the KVM nodes. And there's your poorly played game of Tetris. And the problems here is you've got fragmented capacity, you've got potential contention risk, obviously software license issues if you've got any host or core-based licensing and you want to try to contain those things. And then potentially inefficiency in terms of how you're using the infrastructure both at the VM level and the node level and even at the storage level. So when you look at analytics and actually start taking each one of those workloads and playing a game of Tetris essentially cheating with it and understanding predictively what is the history and what are the requirements of those workloads in terms of all those different utilization parameters and fitting them together, dovetailing those workloads such that the analytics tell us, you know, this is what an environment looks like after the fact. Much denser, making better use of the infrastructure and essentially freeing up capacity. So we find Tetris is a great way to kind of show this analogy and how you can free up this capacity. What does that result in optimized density, software savings at the host and core-based level, lower operational risk, lower volatility because we're predicting what's going to happen. This is not application performance monitoring where we're looking at something and reacting to what happened five minutes ago. We're looking at the history and predicting what's going to happen and then basically fixing the problem before it occurs. The way we visualize this for open stack in KVM or for VMware or PowerVM or what have you is a spectrum essentially and it looks like this. So at the top you've got your availability zones, you've got your nodes in the middle and the guests. We get all our data from Solometer. So we go out and pull that information in and it gives us configuration and relative workloads and performance of each one of these things and we paint it out on the spectrum based on if you're in the red you're at risk. So we violated a policy, that policy we described earlier. So anything in the risk has to be dealt with quickly. Anything in the yellow is essentially waste. So we paint out things in the yellow, we've got the nodes that aren't using their infrastructure efficiently. We've got VMs or guests that are running that, someone's asked for an extra large instance size and over time they're using the equivalent of a small. And in the middle is kind of the just right zone. So this is where you wanna be operating within these policy based goal posts. So this environment after the fact, after we publish our recommendations, essentially you'll see things kind of squish into the middle. So in the middle is where we wanna be operating. So we get rid of the risk, we reduce the waste wherever possible. And this is the operating zone and it's basically there's the recommendations that help make that zone or make that so, whether it be recommendations for placements or allocation changes. One other key element of the software license control is looking at, how are you using the host or the core based licenses. So placements is also a key consideration for savings on these types of licensing models. And if we use something simple, just something like Windows or Linux VMs, and typically what we see is they're scattered across the environment, some customers don't care about those costs, maybe they're an education institution, a higher learning, what have you. But other ones we see, they do pay a fair bit of money for host or core based licenses. And if they're scattered across and you're paying on a host basis, you're spending a lot of extra money potentially. Some people artificially try to contain those things within boundaries or availability zones. And other ones, when you get more than one software license that you're trying to control that becomes very, very difficult. So using analytics to try to say on a daily basis, let's try to make these things actually fit within a smaller subset of the host and the environment. So there's big savings around that. The job is number one, to shrink and isolate those types of VMs and optimize the placements. And then on an ongoing basis, you can't just do this once and then hope you stay within compliance. It'll sprawl up the next day as things come in and things move around. And we can configure the filter scheduler to use that, work off these containment boundaries, which we've established them by our predictive analytics. So that's a key component and it's not just say Windows or Linux, it can be any host or core based license, Oracle, some customers SQL server, what have you. So that's the supply side optimization. Let's talk a little bit about demand now. And what we typically see, brand new workloads coming online, somebody using the OpenStack, the customer portal and someone's asking for a new application to come online. And it maybe represents whatever, 510 VMs, requires Red Hat OS, Oracle database, it has customer data on it, it needs certain sand tier storage and it should run on the West Coast. So this is almost like a manifest of requirements. And what the software does and what it's designed to do, well, that's how you first, the issue with doing that is it's simple scheduling today. So if you're doing this, there's no consideration for the existing loads that are running environment. And again, I'm not just pointing this out, say on KVM and OpenStack, we see this across other platforms, Private Cloud. There's no fit for purpose analysis beyond the simple filters. And so what we're trying to do here is programmatically determine through a routing API, so we take those requests in and saying, where is the best place to run this? It's almost like hotels.com. You've got a guest with requirements, you've got hosts with different capabilities and available rooms, so where should I go? So what the software does programmatically in real time and suggests, where is the best place to run that workload? Policy-based analysis. The thing is that it's not just a certain type of, we call it the self-service type of request. There's other types of requests that will come in. You've got enterprise app deployments, so great big apps that are coming online, say, I don't know, two, three months lead time, big application, migration and consolidation activities, you're moving from one platform to another or you're bringing in physicals into the virtual environment, or you've got existing applications that are migrating around. So this represents different kinds of demand. Again, there's no predictive element to determine from a time basis when these things come online and say 30 days, do I have enough space? Do I have enough compute and storage? So we need to be able to reserve the capacity and there's no future infrastructure modeling, say, what if I move out all this different kinds of hardware I'm running today? What if I replace it with something else? And then the rerouting analysis for workloads that are currently running, what if I take it from this environment and move to another one? So again, what we're doing is taking in these different types of demand models, ones that aren't necessarily coming online immediately, but sometime in the future. And what you get with this demand management, the optimization here is best execution venue routing, where's the best place to run these workloads again? The detailed VM placement, so which nodes specifically should these workloads run on and what's the sizing and the allocation we should give them? Local workload rebalancing and then global workload rerouting to different environments, not just necessarily OpenStack, but other hypervisors may be running internally on your private cloud, VMWare, or even into the public cloud, is getting it to AWS Azure soft player. And what this gives you is this closed loop, this demand management and forecasting, as you're doing the supply and the demand modeling, we're continuing analyzing and determining, do we have enough supply say in 60 days to meet the demand? The way we visualize this is essentially, now this is the interface we have, and again we'll show you a full demo if you wanna come by the booth, but essentially all the new applications coming on the left side, and we programmatically and in real time match them to the different destinations that you have available, whether that be internal environments, OpenStack or even external public cloud, what have you. Wanted to walk through a little more detailed workflow here of a real world example, so this is Cisco, and this is their network services orchestration tool, as they provision in real time, NFV types of workloads, routers and firewalls, switches, et cetera. So at the top you've got the Cisco layer, which is essentially capturing the demand and doing the work around the provisioning and the orchestration, so essentially think of them as the arms and legs and the environment. Service sitting in the middle, as the analytics software defined infrastructure control with a real time API, the routing and reservation capability, and a continual supply optimization and at the bottom, typically with working with Cisco, the supply is an OpenStack with KVM. So the first thing we need to do is the supply optimization, so that piece on the continual analysis and moving workloads around and changing allocations, so a continual analysis of that so we get an understanding of just how much supply we have available. The second piece, so think of this as the real time workload request, a new workload comes in, demand is initiated through the Cisco, the NSO system, and the routing comes to us through a real time API, so it's the manifest of the requirements of that workload of that application, whatever they're asking for. We do an analysis of any outstanding reservations in the demand and the supply pipeline, we look at the forecast of the supply and the demand, and essentially what it does from a high level is make a routing decision as to which environment can support that.  So we'll come back and we'll actually confirm that reservation saying, yeah, we got space here, here's the best place. That programmatically, we create that reservation and we decrement, lock that capacity inside of our control module, send back the request back up through to NSO, and it confirms its demand reservation and captures the details of where that workload is going to run. Now, this can be on-demand typically with this model, it's an on-demand model, so it's a self-service request. So we come back now where the provisioning is immediately initiated. For a future workload request, it's basically going to sit there until at such time as that workload is designed to come online, and then it would now initiate the demand. But what we're doing now is we figure out, we analyze the latest state and bookings. So if it's a future request, obviously things may have changed. If it happens immediately, then we determine, okay, which host, which storage are we going to put this workload on? And so we'll send back the information. It's kind of like when you check into a hotel, you know which hotel you're staying at when you arrive at the front desk, that's when you get your room number. So we determine which node does it go on, we send that information back to NSO, it initiates the provisioning and executes that in real time. And then that demand is actually placed on the supply. Again, think of us more of as a brain and we're talking to the arms and the legs because the analytics isn't, we're not trying to recreate the wheel here. Provisioning is confirmed, it's completed, the reservation is fulfilled, and then there's a reconciliation process that happens where we look at the latest state and then we decrement the supply or increase it as it were if it's a reservation that's coming out of the system. So this is just kind of a high level description of how we work and again, some of these products and names can easily change. You know, we've seen other ones here where it might be something like a vRealize automation or something from IBM, the cloud orchestrator. But the idea is that the process is very similar. So again, just from a high level, we're highly automated and integrated, we basically sit as the control brain between the cloud management platforms whether it be OpenStack or VRealize or ICO. We have an API that talks to those functions and does the global routing and the local optimization and through policy or sorry, local optimization and policy and automation. We're talking to various hypervisors, whether that be KVM or VMWare, Rev, Hyper-V or Power-VM and then reserving and locking the capacity for all those different components, compute, storage, software. The benefits of this, you know, why are customers doing this? You know, the supply optimization yields typically what we see is an increase of around 48% density, which relates to a hardware savings around 33% and software license savings of doing this intelligent placing workloads in the right place around 55%. There's also kind of soft benefits, reduced capacity risk and of course the ability to increase the automation in your private cloud. I wanted to just mention one other component here, which is something we just launched. Everything we're doing right now, we put on-prem, so when we're working with the OpenStack KVM environments, we install an application in its own VM or a physical system and it's got a backend database. We just announced a SaaS-based offering, which today is just VMWare in public cloud, but essentially what it does is there's a connector that sits on your-prem, it analyzes the local private cloud and it pushes those analytics up to a cloud instance that we're running an IBM software where there's a person there that actually is watching and essentially an extended member of the operations management team. So I just wanted to mention that it's not just an on-prem deployment, we now have a SaaS-based offering. Two minutes left. I just want to thank you very much for your attention. We're right over there. If I throw this water bottle, I can hit our booth. You can see it right there near that tower. So come on by if you'd like to see a live demonstration we've got all the software running and we can talk to you folks about how we could do this for your environment. So thank you very much for your attention today.


Well, today I'm going to talk about an aspect of structural heart disease treatment that I have strong interest with, which is management of theortic valve stenosis with a minimally invasive approach. Traditionally speaking, patients with theortic valve stenosis needed open heart surgery to implant a new valve. Nowadays, and for the last few years, we've been doing a procedure that is minimally invasive and does not require open heart surgery, and we deliver a new valve to the patient's heart without the need for open heart using a small incision in the groin. So, this will reduce the patient's complication rate and reduces the hospital stay, and it makes the recovery much easier than open heart surgery.


We're going to get started. Getting back straight up on here. So I'm here to introduce Jennifer McKnight. She is a Carolina girl with a tendency to be laid back in serious settings. While this didn't always work in her favor in the corporate world, she eventually found her calling in as a writer. She now plans this full-time as a UX writer, while also running an online content agency in January writing and marketing. And now I'm going to get out some just-guessing notes. And I'm going to hand this out, while she keeps starting. Hi, everyone. I'm going to start by saying what she just said. I'm a writer, I'm not a talker, because this is actually my very first time doing any kind of public speaking whatsoever. So if I get a little untied or confused, please choose me. I think I'll read my website. It's really better, right, Brittany? So who's ready for a second talk on writing and experience? I'm totally sorry to disappoint all of you guys. Before we get started talking about that, what do you guys think you're dressed? Yeah. So this dress, I actually spent as much time thinking about what I'm going to wear, as I did what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it. Because what I'm wearing is just as important, because that is part of my brand. Brand is going to define how people view you and you guys are going to pay attention to what I'm wearing. So it was the story behind the dress. It actually is quite relevant. So I live in a very, very small town. It's so small, it doesn't even have a town designation. And I have a neighbor there. She's a young girl, and she's a local.  And typically speaking, it's not very much remarkable about her clothing. She's dressed by design. But she has this crocheted pantyhack that she wears. And it's so obvious, like, wow, that's cool. It's a crocheted pantyhack. Where did you get that? And she goes, I made it. I said, ah, what are you going to make me want? And she's looking at me like crazy, but I'm serious. I don't want to wear those crocheted pantyhacks. So she just kind of laughs at me every time I ask her, and I can ask her. And there's about a couple weeks, and then one day I ran into her and she had a crocheted pantyhack working. And I was like, oh my god. I literally jumped into it now a few times. But the funny thing about it was it didn't stop with the pantyhacks, and it was a scarf, it was a hat, it was some fingerless gloves. I was just like, girl, seriously, can you like make a dress or something? I got children to speak. The first thing that popped in my mind was I'm wearing that dress. I'm not kidding, that's the first thing that went in my mind. And so the thing, the reason that I immediately thought of this dress is because this dress is very descriptive of who I am. The story behind it, my personality, just the things that I value, it really defines me. And I felt like if I looked it up here and thought to you guys about branding, I'm gonna wear this dress. That's just the end of it. Another thing about what I just did, I just told you a story about me, rather than if my parents said, hey, I do this, I do that, I do this. That is an experience. I gave each of you an experience that's going to hopefully elicit me. Sorry, I forgot to introduce, this is my son. All for me, okay? But before we started talking about branding and user experience, well I just totally went off the cards and he said, what are you doing, mom? This is not how I'm going to do it. I'm sorry. Before I started talking about branding and user experience, I think I should kind of explain why I'm qualified to do so. I've been working in content marketing for about nine years. Prior to that, I worked in experiential marketing. And prior to that, I worked as a journalist. All of these things were as a pre-master. I love them, thank you. But I've also had some regular jobs, all in the tech industry, all in customer service or sales, mostly for the benefits. Because I absolutely adore free marketing and I have been doing it since 2015 solely. But I totally fell in love with my career. Oh yeah, me was to say, I love content. Especially with the background of working in content management and working as a journalist, I really have a passion for content. And what I really like about content is this ability to tell a story. If a design is great, you can really kind of give it a feeling of a product with a design. When it comes to content, you can tell a story. As stories, you make experiences. The internet is a great place to actually use content in that manner to create stories and experiences. I first have my first website in 2000. It was a baby registry site for my daughter. And what I remembered about it, I'm not a website developer. This was literally probably the only site I've ever coded to scratch. And back then, it wasn't even white, it was just, I guess, transparent. And if you wanted to do anything you had to like, put a tedious amount of code, like for everything, you wanted it to have something like that. That was a lot of code. And that is exactly what was on my website. I was like this. I remember it. I was like, I don't even know what to do with this thing. Back then, when you look at the stories, you go, wow, that's pretty ugly. But in 2000, I was just like, I don't even know anybody else who could make one. It was a big deal. Back in 2000, websites were mostly about utilities. The fact that it was there and the fact that it saved people time was a big deal. If you have a business and you have a website that meant people didn't have to call, they could just go on the website and find the information that they needed. But in 2009, things started to really change. That's about the same time as most of the media became a thing. And then everybody wanted to be on the internet. If you wanted to serve people, sell to people, or even meet people, you have the ability of a net to get people in. So the expectation of websites changed exponentially. It's not enough to just have an employee you have to actually attract them to somewhere. You can do it with them. So in 2010, my, I had an experiential client. He stayed there. He had a booth in the exhibition hall. And it was different than everyone else's booth because it was literally just him sitting there with a power happy problem that I remember him. Like, literally he's the one who forgot. His call to action is his method of getting people to stop was, do you want to buy some meat? I swear if I didn't actually know this man, I think it was a great like get up but I would literally leave it just being himself. Okay, so the thing about, he asked me to be a spokesperson for his business because I would say I'm working as a spokesperson for a LASA company. So I was also at a booth but I was doing a lot more than he was and he had to set up anything. And he asked me to work for his company and I said, no, that's not happening. But he kept bugging me and eventually I helped him out with his marketing and I helped him out with sponsorship opportunities, promotion ideas, public relations, that was a lot. And eventually I ended up doing his website as well. So now I was an independent marketing person. I used to be an experiential marketing person. So what happened after that, the thing about Idle Leaf is, he is like many other small businesses in that he doesn't have time to focus on his marketing. He has to focus on supply and demand and quality and logistics and all these stuff. And he had to meet with my help to help with marketing. And if you make the websites that you make, this is hard if you do any type of design or help for small businesses, they're gonna expect you to do their marketing as well because they, most of the time, I don't have the time or the expertise to really know how to present themselves to customers. They just know that they want to. And so it becomes your problem. So small businesses need to be concerned about bringing in user experience. It's not just something for big websites, it's for every website. You need to be concerned about brand names and user buildings and user experience, excuse me. The difference between a new example I like to think of is, say you had people, you had some type of setup where people need to turn in some paperwork. And you have the paperwork there, you have the stapler right there.  Well, what if you had a beautiful receptionist who took the papers from them, stapled it and got it done. One of them's gonna make more of an impression on your customers than the other, even though they both do the exact same thing. That is the difference between bringing in user experience and not having it. So now that I've kind of given a little bit of an overview as to why we should care about bringing in user experience, I'm going to give a very basic overview of what they are, followed by some actual tips on how you can use them in your day to day, what about them. A brand is more than a thing, right? It's not a brand name, there are two different things. A brand name would be something like in a Tylenol or instead of, we use brand names a lot in our society, but branding is the idea that something has a personality. It's when a product or service is more than the actual product or service. It's most valuable when you're talking about marketing and sales, because if you have to, two people have to sell the exact same thing, which is typically case online. You want your signature in there. People perceive your product or service into coming through and eventually make up what is the brand. It is a value added attribute. It's the perception that people have about your product and can either hurt or help you depending on making sure that that perception is a good one. The big thing to remember though, there is no perception. People are interacting with your product or service and not having any feelings about it. It's not a brand, it's just a product or service. You want to be memorable in some way and that's what makes you a brand. It can be defined, but it's difficult. And part of the reason is because it's based on perception, it's based on something that's not really concrete. So trying to put your actual definition on, okay, this is what the brand is. The minute you understand what that brand is, it may shift into something else because this is based on not just one person's product or service, but a whole group of people's thoughts about it and then as more and more people have thoughts or something goes viral, it can just spiral out of control and then change. So defining a brand is definitely a art and it's a reason why there's brand strategies and all these brand specialists because it gets really complicated. And I'm not trying to go on to that. I just want you guys to understand that it is a very big topic that even if you have a negative brand experience happening right now, you can change it very quickly. And the process of doing so is branding. Branding is endowments products and services with the power of the brand. It's taking a product or service and giving it a brand, giving it something that people associate with it other than the actual product or service.  You can do it with advertising, you can do it with product design, you can do it with your in-store experiences, you can do it with the pricing, you can do it with the specific identity of the product, but with the terms of web design, you can impact advertising, product design, and in-store experiences, all in the little things that you're doing within your website. Incorporate branding into web design. The easy way is by using video elements that have people in them. Even if you're selling something that is extremely boring, the minute you put a testimonial on there with someone who has a compelling and a compassionate story, people are gonna identify with that product a bit more. That's branding. You can also try characters that personify human qualities. You know how to sell sugar cereal? You put Captain Crunch on it. That's how you sell sugar cereal. It's with a character and you didn't even take that character and you add more personality to it and it doesn't matter what the product is. You can do that in web design. I think if you also think of that being more of a character, they can be the actual people, but they have that whole caricature brand that goes with it. The last thing I have is aesthetics that enlist an emotion. When you're designing, think about the aesthetics. Think about how people are going to feel by what you're seeing. That goes on to the psychology of branding and stuff like that. That's more specific design principles that come into play with branding. But it's also, from my point of view, content has to do with tone, choice of language, all of that is gonna have to do with aesthetics. Okay, so these are some specific ways that you can kind of link to human experiences and emotions and websites offer unique opportunities to enlist emotions and create experiences. And these are the ways, but specifically within a website that you can brand. With advertising, it's how you, specifically how you use copyright on your website, your choice of language and your whole advertising strategy, your slogan, all of that's gonna come under advertising. Your in-store experience is relevant to like e-commerce stores, how they go through the checkout process on your website, that's how effective branding, visual identities, your choice of logos, colors, fonts, yeah. And usability is how easy it is to navigate through a website. It's difficult to get through your website that can cause a negative brand experience that it won't be good. So once again, the summarized branding, websites are one of the most effective ways to brand your product or service because you can do it from advertising, you can affect the in-store experience, you can affect usability, it has multiple ways of impacting the brand. You can brand through other measures, of course, and if you talk to a brand strategy, they'll probably have way many, a whole bunch of ideas how to brand, but websites are a nice, easy way to do it, or at least get started. So I'm gonna move on to user experience. And user experience, where brands, and websites can create experiences that lead to branding, experiences create the individual perceptions that lead to branding. They're very much related, but they're very different at the same time. So let's go a little bit deeper into user experience. According to Don Norman of the Nelson Norman Group, user experience is everything. It's not just when your website user interacts with the website, it's everything that's going on with that user before, during, and after they interact with your website. Because of this, the best way to put it is it's highly riveting, existentialism, and I swear I practiced that word like two months and I still can't say it perfectly, and that's about as vague as the term is, it's just one of those things that you just, it's hard to define existentialism and user experience at the same way. User experiences will create perceptions that are not always quantifiable because they're incorporating more than the obvious experience that the web designer or web developer might seek or what they think is going on. So you have to do the research to really understand the experiences of your users and that is a complicated process. It's tied to emotions and attitudes which also makes it a little bit more hard to measure because just like in branding, the experiences that people have, the emotions that people have, the big forms of perceptions, they all are going to change on a limb. They all can change based on what's going on where they live, what's going on with them that day, anything. So to really try to understand your user experience is a challenging task because of that. And the last and most important thing I want to point out about user experience is that it is separated from usability. They're not the same thing. They sound the same but they are not the same thing. User experience is the experience that someone has when they interact with the website. Usability is how easy it is for them to have that interaction in the first place. They are related but they're not the same. So you should always be thinking about usability and that's going to affect both branding and user experience but you shouldn't just think about usability. There's way more involved. So the core of user experience is ensuring that users find value in what you're providing to them. That is the goal when you think about user experience. Thinking about the user, making sure they're getting something out of what you're doing. That whole concept of utility that we used to have on websites back in the day. So here are some ways to define and determine whether the website that you have is going to provide a good user experience. Number first question, is it useful? Do they come to a website and they don't immediately say, wow, that was a complete waste of my time. Number two, is it usable? Are they able to navigate through the website without having any obvious problems and glitches? Number three, is it desirable? When they got to the website, did they go yay or did they go, that's, number four is it findable? This means both from the SEO perspective and they get to your website without too much searching also from the on-page search option. When they are looking for specific information within your website, are they able to find it without much effort? And the five, is it accessible? Can they open your website on their tablet, on their computer and on your mobile? You want to be able to access that information wherever they are at whatever type of level they're at and that's very important to your experience. The last, is it credible? Because no one likes fake news. They can just throw random stuff in your website and people will get irritated when they find out. User experience will determine how people interact with the product or service. I mean just forgetting the whole conversation about branding, even if you only have a product or service and it doesn't really have a brand, your user experience is going to determine whether you have repeat visitors or not. If they're not, they're having a good experience, they probably won't come back to tell you. So, now that we've kind of gone over branding and user experience, I'm going to talk about some tools that work with WordPress that are going to help with these things, okay? First is, I will say I do work with this company, SlipPlan, and although they hate me, I also use the product. So I'm speaking from personal experience as well as I know the product, but I like to set this finger out there. My journalist did that for myself. But SlipPlan is a website planning tool and it helps with user experience because it's going to make the websites more useful, findable. It's based on information architecture, which is a science that studies how people access information and the best ways to do that. And so it has a lot of tools for information architects or people who want to have their websites. So with SlipPlan, you can create site maps, plan content, plan the content out, diagram your site structure, and construct design mockups. Because it's going to help improve usability, it will likely help improve your branding if you're trying to brand. You have a better brand experience. It is a, it doesn't have a plugin available for WordPress. It's called the SlipPlan quarter as a 30 day trial and the price is based on the number of users that you have. So it works in an agency that seems to be quite well. Next one is Yoast, which I'm sure most of you are familiar with. Yoast is a search engine optimization software and it too can help with both branding and user experience. Obviously Yoast is going to help with findability. You know, it's going to make your SEO better which is going to help there. But it can also improve branding because when you have the right stuff showing up in search and people click on that and they actually come to a website that is exactly what the search result said it should be, that makes them happy. And that's going to give them a good experience. It's also going to reinforce the actual identity of this brand that you're trying to put out there. This kind of comes into play when you see people who are brand specialists, personal brand specialists who will go in and bury pages online. I don't know if you've seen that before but you have like negative things written about online and their job is just to go in and hide it so that when you search, when people search for your name they don't see the negative stuff. So Yoast can basically do that for your business. It can help you manage that so that you're only showing what you want people to see on your search and your results. It can be pretty helpful and depending on how you use it. Yoast can also help with site speed, project quality and accessibility. So it helps with a US feature to findability, accessibility and credibility. It is a free plugin but there's also a premium version. So the next one is called Admin Custom Login and this is a plugin that lets you customize the login screen. And basically this is a branding, this will help with branding. If you have any type of WordPress site where people have to log in, you want them to be hit with your brand not just the WordPress logo, ideally. The more people see your name, your logo and they associate with this is what this business is about, this is what this product is. Like say your product brand is the color purple. Even like on your login page, you don't want to have that blue WordPress thing. You want it to be purple and have your brand on there and that just keeps the brand going. This also helps with site security which not with my talk at all but it's very important. So especially on sites where you have people logging in you want to make sure you have the security. So I put it on here for mostly because of the site security and does some branding. It's $25 for single use license and $75 for if I use full price with a product. Okay, the next one is obviously good for switching to change and optimization but it is a big one for user experience because you can take the analytics from there and the data that you get from it and determine what type of experience the users are having without asking them. Now one of the easiest ways or another way to find out what type of experience users are having is by doing surveys and getting feedback in different ways but other than doing that you can look at the data and Google Analytics is free. Everyone can do this. So something to look at is the bounce rate, page engagement and actual user slow. By looking at those page you're able to see which pages are not working for your users. Which, how long are they staying on the site? Maybe this isn't the right, you have to figure out why they're leaving but it shows you where to focus on so that you can start improving. How usable your site is, it's going to impact both branding and user experience and if you use it to improve your SEL then that will also impact the findability. Google Analytics, let's have a draw back, it's extremely RTS if you don't know what you're doing so you want to get someone that knows how to understand Google Analytics or you can do the training through the website which is free to me. So it's just a matter of figuring out and taking the time to learn how to read it. It's how analytics academy, that's one that Google has, is free. So Google Analytics works with multiple plugins on WordPress so you don't have to get like one specific with Google Analytics, there's third party ones. You also don't have to use a plugin, just most people recommend using a plugin. And the last one is one of my favorites called Slider Revolution. In my business I sometimes make websites for people like Idon'tBeat who would otherwise not get a website unless I tell them they have to get a website. So I do those type of websites and I have a helper on my team and he does anything and I love it, love it, love it, love it. Slider Revolution is a slider plugin and it's going to extend the functionality of your visual content. And as I said earlier, videos and pictures are extremely useful for creating brands because they give that personal feeling no matter what the product is. It's just got like a hand and face on there and people are like I relate to that. So Slider Revolution makes it even easier to cause, to create those label experiences. It has accessibility features in addition to that. That makes it, you put the videos in there and then your page scrolls super fast. It has extra security features. It's really easy to add video and pictures to Slider Revolution without like making your site, without removing your site, without extra extra stuff. So I highly recommend it for that. It's $24,000 for a website and or you can buy a full license and build a thing and just keep reading the thing. And that's what the guy from my team does. They have like a thing with it built in. All of my websites that I've built have some version of Slider Revolution in it. It's great. So I think that is all I have. Oh yeah, this part. Okay, thank you guys. But that's all I have.  What do you do to study your audience, besides people in the mix, when you're doing that client and take you, how do you question them and let their audience let their perceived audience know? That is a great question. And I can actually only answer what I personally do. That's okay with you. And once you guys understand me, that I am like very, I only deal with very, very low tech people. There are a lot of different ways to get that answer though. There's a lot of high end technique. And I would recommend, if you want a really good answer to that, is to go to Slip Plans Vlog, because we have a lot of tutorial on it. But my personal thing, to answer your question, okay? When someone comes to me, since they want a website, and I want to make sure that I'm branding it correctly, I'll pick up your ideal target base to be. First question I have is, who are your competitors? If they have competitors, then they probably have similar customers. And then I look at where those customers are going. If you go, if it's, I go really deep, then I would go to that website, that the competitor's website, and then see where their traffic is coming from. And see what their traffic, what type of website they visit. Perhaps I go to the social media sites and see what other pages they like. And then look at what type of people like that company, that all the connections and you can work out. And you study the competitive research. You study the language that they use, everything. All of the, I just study all of their branding and figure out, okay, how are they getting their customers? Do we want those customers? Or do we want to go after someone completely different? And we have that discussion and figure out, okay, who's our target? With IWB, it was easy because he had an experiential campaign. He just did trade shows and fairs and everything. And he could tell me who these customers were. He could describe them to me. And then I went up to Idaho and I got to know him more better. A lot of times I really spend a lot of time getting to know what the business are, figure out what they're about, and then I just brand them specifically rather than work it out that way. Is that answer it? Okay, thank you. What do you do when you have a client that their brand is kind of hanging by that? Is it that like, they don't have a brand at that point? You start with that. You have that so much money, they like the best. Yeah, that was driving me crazy. Most of the people I started with, they don't. Okay, wait, first of all, you said they have multiple brands. Let me build. They have multiple designs, right? The brand is going to be what other people think of them. What, if they have been established for a while and they have customers, then what I would do is go after customers and find out what exactly is sticking. It's kind of the same way as what SEO guys do when they, SEO people, they'd be political friends, but with SEO people try to figure out which page is worth keeping. They go and look at how much traffic has come in, how many do you know, and they decide which one is keeping based on what actually made them money. It's the same idea with branding, which image is working for them the best, right? There's AD testing, right? AD can come up with a few ideas, different designs, throw it out there. Social media is a great way for that because it's not committing. So you just put out some different identities for a while, see which one fights, see which one people like, and then make the website around that. Or make multiple websites, multiple landing pages. See which one is going to respond the most and then make the website out there. Yeah, absolutely. So you're wondering when you're working with small businesses, how do you explain to them that they need to be concerned about user experience? And still pay you, yeah, pay you the extra money for it. With people who don't really care about technology that much, I really give them actual examples and one thing I would do, I mean, depending on the person I work with, but say, what was the example, what was the business she said for real estate business? Perhaps they have to deal with the MLS, right? Say, these terminology that they're familiar with makes them feel like they know they need to go on the same page. So, oh yeah, have you ever had to go on the MLS website? Yeah, how fun is that?  And then, you know, let them talk about that so, if someone had a choice and they had to go to a real website or your other person's website and you were just like the MLS, which one do you think they'll deal with? That's something real for them to understand their own frustration that they feel and then put that back on them and make them feel like the customer they're trying to get. And sometimes that works. It took me a while to convince the overriding to be to the website to think about two years. He did not see the point of it and I had to put it in language to do with understanding and the reason for his point of view that he couldn't understand. People are maybe less comfortable with Google taking more of their data. Yeah. What would you recommend instead of Google Analytics or analyzing the customer experience? That is a very good question and I would say there definitely are other tools besides Google Analytics. I would also say that I can't name the one on the top of my head because I don't work as a US analyst. And a US analyst would tell you that I chose Google because it's free and it's easiest for most people. But yes, there are definite tools. You can either reach out to me directly. I will ask at Slip Plan on Monday and they will tell me. I won't have it. It will not say, you know, I'm gonna answer that question. Or you can check their website out. That's what I would recommend for that kind of information. On Matano's website, what are we not supposed to do with it? What was the code again? It's Matano. Oh. You got the word for you with it? Yeah. Yeah, now that they changed the name. It's called Matano. Oh, okay. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. He's at Quantcast, Q-A-N-T-C-A-S-T from the level as well. Question based? No. I mean, you can take a word for me about the S-3-A-S-T. It's got a 3-1 to be awesome. Any other questions? Have you found that on-site surveys are helpful or useful even when the talk pops up? Is there a cell footage in here? I'm seeing you've got a question. Is that always a good way to get feedback from your users if they're just online users who don't have any scores here? Are the surveys that have been activated or are there other ways that you can get that feedback? Again, a little bit more than I do. I don't actually do any UX analytics. I'm more focused on branding with me personally, but I think the name UX Mastery, the website's popping in my head, is one of the good ones that have, they have these type of discussions and like, okay, what are some good ways to improve your experience? There's, I should have had that off, but I could look it up after this talk and tell you some of the websites that are really good for deeper diving into some actual practices such as that. Thank you guys. Definitely, if you have any more questions, feel free to ask me after this. Thanks.


Welcome traders to another tickmail earnings report preview with me Patrick Monday before we jump into today's report As always want to adhere to the risk disclaimer Most pertinent today's presentation is the fact that the views expressed by me today are solely mine They're not indicative or representative of those held by technical UK or tickmail Europe limited Okay, let's jump into today's report. We are looking at draft Kings draft Kings are set to announce earnings before the open of New York trade today looking for an EPS of 87 cents there under the share on revenue of 424.42 billion I would Highlights that there is a whisper number on the street that the EPS could come in as high as 95 cents So that's something to bear in mind We have had a positive development in the sports betting sector in general as investors Ju-star the Massachusetts led just later Passed a bill to authorize retail and online sports wagering on professional and collegiate sports The governor is expected to sign the bill the house and senate has been going back and forth on the issue of college sports betting Before compromising to allow college betting but not on in-state schools Unless they're playing in a major tournament like March Madness The massachusetts tax rate will be 15 percent for wages placed in person at a retail betting location and 20 percent for online Bets the taxes will be paid by the sports betting operators and not the better themselves the tax rates are significantly lower Than those in some other states on the east coast and so Boston based draft Kings Is an obvious beneficiary of sports betting being legal in its home state JP Morgan analysts launched coverage on draft Kings with a market outperform rating The firm expects draft Kings to see a positive re-rating as the company nears profitability JP Morgan view draft Kings as a high high investment in daily fantasy sports products in the years leading up to This legislation positioned the company to successfully Cross-sell its database into online sports betting management that has proven its ability to gain market access in legal states with The industry leading us population exposure as a result JP Morgan see draft Kings growing revenue at 19 percent year over year through to 2030 while JP Morgan believe they're in the early innings of an online gaming sector Which they believe draft Kings can maintain a top share in north america online Gaming driven through cross-selling and its superior technology capabilities in the sports betting Technology sector leading to high levels of profitable growth Looking ahead JP Morgan thinks draft Kings leverage its platform as an acquisition vehicle to cross-sell into higher margin products They have assigned a price target of 25 dollars to draft Kings based on blend of four times the 2025 to 20 27 sales estimates and 12 times 20 27 ebit Estimates draft Kings is noted to be currently trading at 1.6 times Its sales book down from its historical average of 10 times book The price target set by JP Morgan implies more than 80 percent upside for its shares So let's look at some statistical trading patterns around the draft Kings earnings release draft Kings shares have moved lower in the immediate after half of earnings Five out of nine previous reports on average stop move down two percent in the first day after Releasing earnings based on the previous nine earnings releases draft Kings more like trade hire one day after earnings from average gain at 0.4 percent on average the stock has moved 2.9 percent one week after earnings In terms of the implied volatility the options market is pricing in a potential 10.5 percent move on earnings And the stock has averaged in general 8.2 percent move in recent quarters It's from a flow and sentiment perspective that's been notable buying 1,624 contracts of the bullish $18 core expiring today Option order flow sentiment in general has actually also been polished investor sentiment going into the earnings has 62 Looking for an earnings beat draft finish shares have drifted 24.8 post its prior earnings Advancements using the last 12 courses of dates the average drift between earnings announcement is 1.3 percent Let's pull up draft Kings chart and see where we are from a technical perspective Where the trading opportunities might be for us. So we can see here that draft Kings Let's trade it down Into this 13 dollar area the high volume node on the weekly chart And we have consolidated there and we have recently broken out of on the daily timeframe A ascending triangle. So I'm looking now any pullbacks into that prior Resistance now to act as support just below the 15 dollar level. I like to be a buyer there or on a breakthrough the 17 1750 level and I think we can grind it out here to that $25 target that JP Morgan have certainly achievable beyond there If we can maintain support into that 1750 level, I'd actually be looking for a 33 3380 as my upside objective for draft Kings in In coming months based upon this last leg of corrective upside that we saw and that's that gives us that symmetry swing target So 3380 will be the upside objective. Again, that's not going to be happening In the near term, but this is one that I think is a slow burner and certainly one that I I'd like to build a long-term position in as always traders plan the trade trade the plan the most importantly Manage your risk until next time. Thanks very much


I am Senior Master Sergeant Demetrius Booth, and today I'm going to talk to you about our social pillar. We can't dive into the social pillar without thinking about the foundation. And I don't have all of the answers, but I have some questions for you. How do you care, commit, connect, communicate, and celebrate with the people that you love and the people that you lead? Because now more than ever they need you because you are someone's lighthouse.


Hey guys, what's up? My name is Sonali. Welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to be talking about how you can prepare for recruitment to feel less stressed. I know I was super overwhelmed with the whole recruitment process. It is a week long and it's just a lot to kind of take in but it is so worth it in the end. So I just wanted to come on here and help you guys out kind of prepare you guys for what's to come and what you might need before the week even starts and all that jazz. If you guys have watched my videos before, you guys know that I am a capitol at the University of Central Florida and it honestly makes my heart so happy to help other people find their home away from home. Like I know that's super cliche but it really truly is like capitol is my second home and my college experience definitely would not be the same without it. So if you clicked on this video you are probably thinking about signing up for recruitment or you already signed up for recruitment. I'm so excited for you and let's get started. The first thing you want to do is sign up and register for recruitment. I will have the link to UCF's registration in the description box below. So if you're planning on going through recruitment at UCF you can just click that link and you can sign up right there. But if you are going to a different school it is super easy to just type in Google registration for blank school Panhellenic recruitment and a link should pop up and it should be super easy to sign up. There is a fee. I'm not really sure how much it is. It's definitely under a hundred or around a hundred. My best recommendation is to do it as early as possible because throughout the summer the prices just keep getting higher. So you can get the early bird price if you sign up in the beginning of the summer. So definitely recommend doing that. Save yourself some money. Save your parents some money whoever's paying for it and sign up ASAP. If you're still on the fence of whether you might want to join a sorority or not definitely check out my whole playlist of how to sorority. It has some vlogs. It has just videos to prepare you to go through recruitment and maybe that will help you make up your mind. Maybe you think it's a lot of work. Maybe you think it's something that you really want to try out and yeah. So just go check out that playlist and I hope that helps. When you do sign up for recruitment I'm 99% sure you probably have to upload like a headshot of you or like just like a really nice senior picture. I know at my high school we called them senior casuals and it wasn't like our senior headshot. It was kind of like we went to a field or we would like go take pictures at some nice building. So lucky for you guys you don't need to hire a professional photographer. Back in my day we didn't have portrait mode on our iPhones but now that you guys do have that if you didn't take senior casuals you can always just go get dressed up. Take some pictures with your friends. Maybe your friends going through recruitment and you can take each other's pictures. I just recommend uploading like a super high quality picture not like a bathroom selfie with like low light. Low light pictures are always the worst. Try your hardest to upload like a high quality picture in good lighting. The next thing I recommend is definitely picking out your outfits way ahead of time. It doesn't mean you have to spend all this money on all new outfits. You can always just see what you have in your closet. Maybe like get some new accessories to match a dress you've already worn. I know a lot of people that use their high school graduation dresses during recruitment which is a really smart idea and I also recommend always going to Plato's closet before you buy anything because you would be surprised what you could find there. I feel like I always find really good name brand stuff there. You just have to really have to look and I know during recruitment you might want to buy all new clothes so going to Plato's closet is definitely going to cut your costs down. Maybe even check Poshmark if you know your size in different brands. So just try to save money anywhere you can. If you guys are wondering what to wear to recruitment I did a video on this a couple years ago so it's not really updated. Not super trendy but you can kind of get like a feel for what I wore and I definitely vlogged my whole recruitment experience so you can see what I wore for my actual recruitment. Also remember to accessorize. I mean you don't really have to. It definitely makes you look a lot more put together. I'm not saying you need to buy expensive jewelry because you really don't and I can't stress this enough. That's not what recruitment is about. It's not about having the most expensive things. So again maybe just go to Plato's closet and pick out a few things on their accessory wall or Forever 21 has super affordable accessories and also Boohoo does too. So definitely look around before spending and splurging. Before recruitment starts you must, must test out your makeup and hair in the climate that you're going to be in if that makes sense.  It's like humid. It's super hot and it literally felt like my makeup was like rolling down with the sweat off my face. So maybe find some good dupes at Ulta. I know Nix has amazing dupes like their powders and their setting sprays and maybe just do some trial runs the week before to see how your makeup is going to hold up. My next piece of advice is that you should definitely have a first aid kit and what I mean by this is that you should have an extra pair of flip flops.  Maybe you can like plug it in your phone or something like that but definitely have a fan. Next is that you should get used to hydrating a lot because when that recruitment week comes you're going to need to drink so much water to stay energized and to stay hydrated you're going to be outside and walking from house to house and the sun is just going to suck your energy out so I definitely recommend hydrating because it is very easy to get dehydrated. The next thing I recommend is preparing some questions beforehand so maybe if you want to like jot them down in your phone that way before you go into the house you can quickly look at your notes and just kind of put those questions in the back of your brain. I highly recommend doing this because it just makes it so much easier when both people have like questions and answers and it's not just a one-way street and obviously being a potential new member you're gonna have a lot of questions so do not be afraid to ask them because that's what they're there for to answer your questions and help you figure out which place is your home. I actually made a video and a blog post about some of the questions that you could ask a sister while going through recruitment it's literally just like a list of questions and maybe these questions can spark some ideas and you can make up your own and the last thing I recommend is just to keep an open mind the week before and the week of recruitment. I know during this time it's really hard not to like hear all the rumors going around and they're called rumors for a reason they might not be true so please don't believe everything that you hear and the worst thing you could ever do before recruitment is go on any kind of greek forum and start reading about different sororities on there because they are literally all lies they're just all so untrue so I would really hate for you to read something and just like get turned off by a sorority automatically like that's just not okay I really want you guys to only make your opinions on a sorority off your own experiences with that sorority so that's all I have for today I hope you guys feel a little bit less stressed about recruitment week and if you guys have any other questions definitely leave them in the comments down below let me know if there's any other videos that you guys want me to do talking about sororities just a specific topic or anything like that leave them in the comments down below and I will see you guys in my next video bye guys


Hello friends, I am Sanjay Gupta. In this video, I am going to demonstrate you how you can pass an array into a function using pointer. Before starting, you can note my information. You can follow or subscribe my YouTube channel through the URL youtube.com slash sanjaygupta underscore tech school. You can download my programming app Techimus which is available on Google Play. Now I am going to demonstrate you how you can pass an array into function with the help of pointer. So first of all, I am including a header file that is a stdio.h. Now I am declaring a function whose name is print. Its return type is void and it will receive an argument that will be an address of a location. So I have declared here integer pointer. So this statement is function declaration. Now I am defining main function inside main function. I am declaring an array and variable I am now with help of print f the masses entered 10 elements will be displayed on console to read this. Sorry to read these 10 elements, I am applying a follow which will repeat 10 times and it will receive 10 elements from the user and all the elements will be stored inside a array. So this is the reading process of array. Now I have to call print function and I am passing name of array inside it. So this statement is function calling. Here you have to remember that the name of array represents base address. So if I am passing an array into a function, then indirectly I am passing its base address to a particular function. So you can say here print function definition will be receiving base address of this array a then return 0. Now I have to define definition of print function. So this block will be known as function definition. So here you can see I have declared a pointer P which will receive address of this array or this array will be passing its base address which will be stored inside P pointer. Now with the help of P pointer I can access all the locations of this array. So I am declaring a variable I now I have implemented follow which will repeat 10 times inside this follow. I am writing a statement print f which will display elements on console with the help of pointer. So here you can see I have used as to this P. So P is containing base address of the array and to print values which are available on that address I have to dereference this pointer. So here asterisk means value at address. So P contains a particular address if I want to print value that is available on that address. I have to use this asterisk sign. Now to move on next location of array I have to apply P plus plus. So this way I have implemented the logic in front of you. So I have passed array into function through its base address then pointer is received that base address and through pointer I am printing all the elements which are available inside array. So now I am executing this code so that you can understand how it is working. So here it is asking for 10 numbers. So I am entering 10 elements. You can see the entered 10 elements are displayed again. So with the help of this loop I have displayed all elements on console. I hope you have understood how you can pass array into a function and that array will be processed with the help of pointer. So this is all about passing array into function using pointer. If you want to watch more programming related videos you can follow or subscribe my YouTube channel the URL youtube.com slash sanjay gupta underscore tech school. You can download my programming app TechMS which is available on Google Play. Thank you for watching this video.


This is the VOA Special English Education Report. Last week, we told you how some international students have few friends in their host countries when they study overseas. One study in the United States found that 38 percent of foreign students said they had no close American friends. Elizabeth Garries studied more than 450 foreign students. VOA's Jessica Stahl also investigated the issue in her blog, The Student Union. Her survey showed 75 percent of foreign students said they have more than two American friends. But 10 percent reported having no American friends. Elizabeth Garries at Baruch College in New York says efforts to improve relationships between the two groups of students have yet to be studied in detail. She says these efforts should begin with the college or university. Elizabeth Garries says teaching institutions should build systems that support contact. They can do that, she says, with group activities early in the school year. She suggests taking walks, going on bicycle, field or camping trips, and attending parties, sporting events or film festivals. She says such activities should be held repeatedly to bring students together throughout the school term. Elizabeth Garries also suggests that foreign students share housing with American students. Michigan State University is known for its programs for international students. Last year, about 5,900 students from 133 countries attended Michigan State. They made up perhaps 12 percent of the total university population. Peter Briggs directs the Office for International Students and Scholars at Michigan State. He says more foreign students are expected to register this year. Many students and community members are trained and prepared to help foreign students. The volunteers assist new students as they complete government requirements and find their academic advisors. Peter Briggs says the volunteers also help answer their traditional questions of new people anywhere. Where do I get an identification card? Which is the best bank? What is my cell phone plan? How do I get a social security number or driver's license? He says that kind of information is shared both formally and informally as students advise other students. We're really supporting that network, he says. Peter Briggs also notes that if the new students make friends as they begin school, they will come to feel part of the life and traditions of the university. For VOA Special English, I'm Laurel Bowman.