As-Salaam-Alaikum-Khawwati-Nuh-Hassanat. Wasim As-Salaam welcomes you to lecture number nine of Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations, MKT 6-8 at the Virtual University of Pakistan. We're going to get into the first component of the lecture, which is going to be all about examples from the area of mission, objectives and goals. We already have developed a basic understanding of these three elements of the strategic process. And today I'm going to talk about the relationships that exist between these three elements in a way that we understand how these elements flow out of each other in a natural way. We know that it all starts with a purpose. The organization exists because it has a certain purpose at hand. And fulfilling that purpose marks the completion of the strategic process and achievement of the mission. So how these three elements flow out of each other is going to be evident from the two examples that I'm going to give you, one after the other. Let me start with the first one. You happen to be working for an organization that wants to be in the area of alleviating hunger in a particular geographical area. Well, it goes without saying that this geographical area is not affluent. It deserves food, which has to be offered to them, either absolutely free of cost, or maybe at subsidized rates because you think that you have to maintain some level of self-dignity and self-worth of the target market. And therefore, you would like to sell food, although at subsidized rates. Having said that, the way should be clear about the purpose of the organization. But we have not yet understood or other talked about the scope of operations. The scope of operations is going to be dependent on the purpose. If the purpose is to solicit food from other outfits that already are into the area of preparing food, then it is going to be the one set of circumstances. However, if the organization thinks it is going to prepare food by itself, it is going to be another set of circumstances. In either of the cases, the mission statement is going to be a little different because it is going to talk about scope of operations, which is going to be different in either case. Going back to the case of a collection of food from those outfits that are into the business of preparing food, let me tell you here that there are examples of organizations that solicit food from restaurants on daily basis by collecting their leftovers, preserving those, and then distributing those among those who are needy and who have to be fed on daily basis. The organization is supposed to work out certain mechanics as to how to pick those families that are deserving and how the food is going to be distributed to those families comprising the target market. And that is something that we should be part of the objectives first and then goals. But let me go back to the mission statement. Depending on the scope of operations, whether you do it by yourself or you let somebody else do it and then collect it from them and then distribute to the target market, it's going to form the exact construction of the mission statement. And that is why I said I'm not going to construct the statement for you.  Now, this is not a question of your whims or your fancies. This is a question of what kind of resources you have and what level of capabilities and core competencies you have, which will enable you to do the job which you want to do, meaning either collecting food or preparing food. The point here is that the capabilities and core competencies have to be applied in a way that the resources that you have at your disposal could be optimized, could be very finely capitalized on, and you get some kind of advantage out of the whole exercise. Once you are clear about the scope of operations, it will go back into the mission statement and you will proceed accordingly. Now, the next question that you will have, how do you distribute that food? Well, you distribute that food either at stationary distribution points or through mobile network or a combination of both, again, depending upon the resources that you have and the capabilities that you have. The next thing that you must consider and which goes without saying is the product. You can have a couple of different products in shapes and forms. For example, you can have food packets in which you distribute at the distribution points and you also can distribute meals for congregations of different sorts of kinds for different occasions. And if you allow me to go back to the purpose of the organization once again, you can get into relationships with those constituents who are going to the most relevant in terms of the purpose of the organization. In other words, if the purpose is to collect food, then you will like to develop constituents who are the most relevant in terms of providing you with that kind of service. However, if the food is going to be prepared by the organization itself, then you will be developing different kinds of constituents. You may like to get in contact with the growers of food or the distributors of prepared food or food items and wedding party, caterers, and any other constituent who you think can be of a very high level of relevance to the service that you want to perform. So you have seen that you're going to have the different options at your disposal in terms of preparing the product and in terms of distributing the same. You can have the solicitation model, meaning you get food from somebody else and then distribute it, or you get food from somebody else and also distribute it through somebody else. The meaning, you get into an agreement with another NPO that specializes in distribution services and you decide for yourself just to be an interface between those who prepare food and those who distribute food. You perform the function of an organization that identifies the target market and then makes sure that food is collected on daily basis and distributed on daily basis very efficiently. The next shape and form could be that you prepare food and distribute it yourself or you prepared food and have it distributed through somebody else. There could be so many different combinations and all these combinations are going to be a reflection of the mission of the organization. Or in other words, if you go back and try to fit all this to the mission, they should fit very well into it. Once you are clear about the product source the distribution and the complete scope of operations, you are all set to construct the mission statement. And once you have prepared it, you get down to defining the set of objectives which will define the strategic direction that your organization should take in order to move forward. In this particular case, what do you think are going to be the objectives? Well, the foremost objective would be to very strategically identify those constituents who can be most relevant to the organization in terms of enabling you to be able to distribute food to the target market. Whether you solicit food from somebody else or you prepare it by yourself, the objective is going to develop the relevant constituents which could be restaurants and wedding party caterers, like I said earlier, in case you want to collect food from somebody else and which could be growers and manufacturers of food items and distributors of the same so that you can make things easy for you to start preparing food. And the next objective could be to get into a JV, meaning joint venture agreement with another NPO who you think should perform or could perform the distribution function better than your organization because it is not your expertise to get into distribution. Your resources, capabilities, and core competencies do not reflect these kind of features and characteristics that you can undertake the job by yourself and therefore you would like to have another company that already is into a similar business and specializes in distribution networks. So you would like to get into a JV, the mechanics for which you have to very smartly work out so that you can get into a collaborative relationship and develop synergies for effective distribution and marketing. Another objective would certainly be how you could have put all these connections together so that the revenues can be generated at a level that is a prerequisite for the organization to sustain itself. You can also think of a couple of more or a few more objectives which you think provide you with these strategic direction absolutely essential for your organization to move forward toward achievement of the mission. Now, once you have laid down all the objectives, you have to very sharply put together the goals which are going to be a translation into numbers of your objectives. So in other words, here you're going to talk in more certain terms. The goals for this organization would be in the first place to determine the number of families that form your target market. I think that has to be the starting point. Although I'm talking about this particular factor as part of goal specification and the goal determination, but the fact is that your whole business plan for the NPO starts with this particular point that you must know the size of your target market. Once you have identified the families, then you can translate that into the amount or the quantity of food that you require in order to feed them. Here you'll have to work out the mechanics for identifying the families that are your target market and you can get into mechanics like demographics in the first place. In other words, identifying families on the basis of their income distribution. For example, you might decide for yourself that you would not like to distribute food whether free of cost or at subsidized rates to those families that have less than five members and that have more than one earning member. Once you have these numbers based on demographics, you can get into your requirements of distribution because without having information on the quantity of product that you need and the size of the target market that you have, you cannot move ahead with the distribution. Therefore, whether it is distribution of food packets at stationary distribution points or distribution of those packets at the doorsteps of your target market or through a distribution network belonging to another NPO, all is going to depend on the total quantity that you are going to generate on daily basis and then weekly and then monthly basis. With this, we are done with the first example of a food bank that has the mission to alleviate hunger in a particular geographical area. The reason I call it food bank because you may like to opt for the setup that solicits food from other entities that already are into this business and together you're out to collect that food for further distribution and you are basically performing the function of a food bank. So that's why I said this is an example of a food bank. Let us now move on to the next example which is going to further clarify what this concept is all about, meaning the mission, the objectives and the goals. I know that you already are quite clear about how these elements work as part of the strategic process. They flow out of each other and they all start with the purpose of the organization but still I would like to give you another example because I really would like you to be very creative in terms of putting different examples together once you start developing a complete conceptual understanding of the NPO environment. This example relates to a nursing home because you are working for that nursing home which provides medical and nursing care to elderly people in their latest years. Now the intention here is that you would like your organization to become an entity that differs from other organizations offering similar kind of services. You would like to differentiate on so many different counts which are in addition to just offering the boarding and lodging with medical and nursing care to elderly people who may start thinking that they are counting their days and waiting for the terminal point in their life to come and take them from here. That is not the case when it comes to your thinking process and when it comes to your strategic process to be more precise. Because you think by offering differentiation to the residents of your nursing home you can develop a facility which is second to none. And you think it is not just the medical and nursing care rather you must consider other factors like their dietary habits and their socializing needs and their need to determine certain activities in relation to their hobby patterns and so on and so forth. The reason you want to go for these considerations because you want to tell the residents of your facility that they are still relevant to the society and by offering these services in addition to the basics, run off the mill, medical and nursing care you want to develop a sense of self worth and dignity on part of the residents. And the unique selling proposition of your organization that has its roots in differentiation, the kind of differentiation I've just talked about with the meaning all those factors which come in addition to basic medical and nursing care. Once we are done with the mission we are down to defining our objectives. Here in this particular situation I think the foremost objective has to be hiring of the medical and nursing staff that are absolutely essential to keep the facility alive and to be able to provide the residents with the basic service for which the facility exists. In addition to that, we also need to have people who have the savvy for different kinds of social matters because as part of the mission and purpose of the organization we did talk about giving the consideration to the dietary habits of the residents their socializing needs and the need to self determine the various kinds of activities like if somebody wants to get into gardening the organization should be able to provide them with the requisite opportunity and so on and so forth. Therefore we need to have people from different social areas because one being hospitality. So in other words, we need people who are the good at the practices from the area of the hospitals but also in addition we need people who are knowledgeable about the hospitality business. So in other words, we also can join hands with hotels and restaurants as part of some kind of cost marketing relationship whereby we can draw on their expertise, their knowledge and their savvy for the different areas that we wish to or we envision to put together as part of the organization's mission. The thing here is that we've got to put together all those steps and bring them into focus that are required to lay the base for the four hour strategic movement toward achievement of the mission and that of course is going to take us toward specifying goals and the foremost goal here also is the generation of funds, the revenue stream. That's something which is taken for granted and without that the goal, your plan cannot be complete in any sense and therefore take it for granted that this goal always under any circumstances has to be talked about. Another goal could be specifying what kind of a relationship you are going to have with your partners and maybe as part of a cost marketing relationship or maybe as a short-lived joint venture that whatever is the case, you have to translate all the mechanisms into the financial terms and into different numbers so that you can see from day to day and from week to week and from month to month where you stand and where you need to reach and what has been the performance at a given point in time and what is left to be done and so on and so forth. Another goal could be the training and development of the different staff members not just the doctors and nurses but also specialists in different social matters because training and development from time to time will keep them current with the latest trends and by doing that, they can add a lot more value to the concept that I'm talking about. We're now getting into the next component which is on culture. Culture basically is a set of values and beliefs held by the members of the organization. Culture becomes the guiding principle for people to move forward. By harboring those values which are positive and therefore the greatest challenge in terms of inculcating a good culture in any organization, whether it be commercial or an NPO is to standardize those values and beliefs as much as possible because the more people believe in good values and beliefs, the better off the organization will be. So in other words, a large body of employees harboring positive values and beliefs to the will to make their organization a good working place and a successful organization because they're a cohesive team. A good culture means that the team is cohesive and the team is cohesive because it has the commonality of the values and beliefs. Like I said, organizations fail because they do not have good culture. They are successful because they have a strong culture and all the successful organizations have a strong culture. The resources, capabilities and core competencies are something which also evolve out of a good culture and how does that happen? Well, I'm gonna show it to you in a while. Back to cohesiveness. The more cohesive as a team, the better the organization is. It goes without saying and the fact is many good organizations exemplify a very decent and practical working environment without having any policy manuals and very well structured systems and procedures only because they have a very strong culture. So in other words, people working for those organizations know what is to be done under any given set of circumstances. These people do not really have to refer back to any policy manuals or systems or procedures to seek guidance in order to complete a certain job under any set of circumstances. So culture plays a very important role toward making a setup either successful or unsuccessful. Now, this is not to say that good organizations should not have policy manuals and they should not have well-structured systems and procedures. Before I start talking about the need for these factors, let me say here how the culture of an NPO evolves. Well, because NPO's are started by very passionate individuals, NPO's reflect their personalities. Culture development gets a head start and everything that's done in the organization is well-intentioned and people like to carry it forward with a lot of zeal and enthusiasm of following the example of the leader or rather the founder of the organization. They still harbor the values and beliefs that were demonstrated by the founder of the organization and it becomes a way of life, a very strong culture which works day in and day out and it keeps working for a number of years. The organization reaches a point when it really starts growing and it starts feeling the need of making a transition from the formative period to the period of further growth. So it becomes kind of a transition from one phase to another phase and this brings in the need for making certain changes and certain adjustments which reflect on the culture of the organization and that is something which is not really liked and approved by the people who are working for the organization. Let us call these people the existing staff members of the organization. Why is it that the need for making certain changes is felt? Well, the growth of the organization has to be managed in a programmed way which calls for adaptation of the principles of competitive marketing management. So in other words, if we really believe in the concept of customer centeredness, this is the time when the customer or the target market has to be brought into a sharp focus and the bringing the target market into a focus brings along with it a lot of changes that are reflected onto the culture, like I said earlier. The new entrants into the company who are hired mostly from the commercial sector because the organization now wants to have a customer focus are more oriented toward the commercial we are working and have less knowledge of the way an NPO works. It becomes a very interesting kind of a situation which also presents itself as kind of a predicament because the old people working for the organization are very satisfied with the way they are working because whatever they have done over the past years have been to the satisfaction of everyone. But the new entrants think that there has to be a certain different way so that they can make adaptations to the management process of the organization in a way that the target market gets the center stage. Here I would like to point out that the reason target market has not had a center stage until this point is that the NPO has been working very satisfactorily and that owes basically to the fact that it started when there was no competition and it was mostly on its own and a lot many different stakeholders did not really interfere or intervene into their working and it grew to a certain point but now things have changed and customer has taken the center stage and therefore there's a need for making adaptations to the principles of competitive marketing management and when that happens the old group confronts the new group. The new group to say is the marketing expert group so to say and the older group is the one that believes in a very high level of social service which is based on very serious and sincere intentions. This is not to say that the marketing people do not subscribe to that view. The only thing is that marketing people think that the social service that the organization has been providing so far has been very, very intentioned. No question about that but that has been done and achieved in disregard of so many the different principles and parameters that we talk in relation to or in the context of competitive marketing. For example, the old people did not take care of the waste. They were not really concerned about a high level of efficiencies and productivity because they were only concerned about offering the social service regardless of the cost and regardless of the implications of those costs on the future programs. And therefore the new marketing people think that they need to make certain adjustments all over to the organization structure, to the systems and procedures and to think that everything has got to be institutionalized in order to make the working of the organization very much compliant with the principles of not only competitive marketing management but also overall management of organizations. And this is where the conflict between the old people and the new people starts. The conflict grows because there's the one school of thought that thinks that the new school of thought does not really have a commitment to the purpose whereas the new people or the new school of thought thinks that the old one does not really have a concept of the fit between the mission and the strategy. So this is the kind of the conflict that brews and it keeps brewing until the point that it is resolved amicably either between the two groups through their own initiative or with the help of intervention from the board of directors. Whatever the case is, it becomes extremely significant that differences are resolved and the organization is not only put back, you seek it onto a healthy, positive track, but it also starts following some newer concepts in order to meet with future challenges. And that calls for conflict resolution which is brought about only when the one group becomes subservient to the thoughts of the other group. Now here you see that I'm not choosing the word subservient in a negative way, but what I'm trying to say is that the one group gets convinced by the logic and the concept of working of the other group. If it becomes kind of a conflict of egos, the organization will never go for the resolution of the conflict and therefore it is very important for the one group to listen to the other group in a way that their thoughts are subordinated to the ones they think are superior to theirs. And therefore toward that resolution, they've got to answer the certain questions and those questions relate to what exactly is the mission of the organization. So we are going back to the mission. I mean, if the mission is provision of social service at what cost, with what kind of efficiencies and with what kind of results to which they will bring the organization a better vision for the future years. So these are the kind of questions that they have to answer. And then they also have to look into what is wrong with the existing mission. Those people who think something should be added to the mission or something should be deducted from the mission, they've got to have very logical and convincing background and rationale for that so that the other party that could convince itself that yes, we have been missing this particular standpoint or perspective and therefore we should put our thoughts in subordination to what they are saying. And they have to look into what exactly there should be the mission and what kind of adjustments should be made to objectives and goals. Objectives are very strategic in nature and the whole team, meaning the collection of the old school of thought along with the new school of thought have to look into which objectives are going to serve the purpose of the organization better. And once there is agreement on that only then the resolution to the culture conflict or the culture shock will take place. And the whole organization will start talking about not just offering the social service based on very sincere intentions, having good values and beliefs but also in terms of how to maintain very high efficiency, how to cut wastes and how to be very competitive because we are at competitive market stage and the competition offers itself in so many different shapes and forms and to tackle and manage all that we need to have application of the principles of competitive marketing management. We now get into a very interesting component of the strategic process known as SWOT. We all know that SWOT basically stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. And it really is a wonderful tool to analyze the two environments with the meaning of the internal environment as well as the external environment of the organization with the by way of taking count of the strengths, the weaknesses, opportunities and threats. How do we ward off threats with the help of our strengths and how do we exploit our strengths to seize the various opportunities is going to be the learning of this particular component. Although we all know what SWOT is but in an NPO context, I think I need to talk about the basic elements that must be considered before we carry out the two requisite analyses. Well, we know that resolution of any kind of cultural conflict within the organization has got to take place. And once the conflict is over and we have a very cohesive team, we are all set to lay the ground for the moving that is strategically in terms of applying our capabilities and core competencies and optimizing our resources toward any program that is at hand. So in other words, it again is the strong culture which helps us achieve all that. Before we carry out the SWOT analysis, we once again have to understand the whole process that we have learned so far with the help of a graphical presentation because that basically is going to form the basis for internal analysis. And internal analysis is all about what is desired and therefore we've got to be very clear about the fact. To what extent we are in a position to apply our capabilities and to use core competencies toward building a competitive advantage. The ultimate objective of any organization, again, whether it be a commercial organization or an NPO, is to develop a sustainable, competitive advantage. And to do that, we have to count on all those concepts that we have learned so far but then to see if we need to develop certain connections and learn why those are so much important in connection with each other. How the whole that is created, by those factors coming together, is greater than the sum of their parts. Let's take a look at the graphical presentation and see how the whole thing works. As you can see from the slide, that the whole process starts with the strategic intent and this is something that I pointed out earlier also. But the strategic intent is a function of our resources, our capabilities and core competencies and we've got to see to it that the capabilities and core competencies are applied in a way that resources could be optimized.  This is something that we did not touch earlier. All capabilities are not core competencies because those capabilities are also possessed by your competitors, meaning other organizations operating in the similar area and therefore those capabilities, however good and however up-to-date those may be, but those are not core competencies until the point you really can create a differentiation, meaning a point of differentiation which cannot be copied by your competitors, which cannot be followed even if the try by your competitors. In the first place, it has got to be so distinct that your competitors do not even attempt to follow you until a certain point when they think they are ready to follow you.  Now, we should be very clear about this fact that you can optimize your resources and apply the capabilities and core competencies in the most optimal way only if you have a very strong culture. And that is why I talked about the concept of culture and that is why it is so important because without a strong culture, there is absolutely no way that you really can have the differentiation that you desire to have and put in place and set yourself apart. A strong culture is going to enable you to achieve your goals. It is not how finally you define your strategic direction by putting together very fine objectives and specifying some very sharp goals. It is not that. They are not really going to help you until the time the organization has a very strong culture and the strong culture that becomes a way of life in such a way that people work voluntarily as a natural behavior. So this is the beauty of a strong culture and this is the kind of contribution a strong culture makes towards your strategic intent and also building your core competencies. The core competencies cannot be built until the time that you have a strong culture. The team has got to be cohesive. They all have to be on the same page and rather on the same line in order for the organization to move forward and it is only through that that core competencies are going to be built with the help of certain level of differentiation. Once you have built the core competencies you are all set to develop your competitive advantage and competitive advantage is something which should not be, or rather could not be copied by your competitors and that is why you call it sustainable competitive advantage. There are certain conditions to which they make competitive advantage rather sustainable and we've got to take a look at those conditions. The one is, as you can see from the slide, the valuable capabilities. In other words, you have to have capabilities to which you can ward off and neutralize threats in the external environment. If you have those capabilities you are adding value to the organization. The next conditionality is non-substitutable capabilities. These are the capabilities which do not really have strategic equivalents. In other words, you develop these capabilities through your relationships with all the stakeholders. In other words, you develop a network of constituents in a way that your competitors cannot see that. These capabilities are invisible because your relationships are very sacred and your stakeholders and all the constituents, they trust you. Now this is not something the way you can show your competitors and again it is not something which they can easily copy and therefore this becomes kind of a sustainable advantage for the organization. Another dimension to this particular non-substitution is the complexity of the social relationships. The reason I call it the socially complex relations because again nobody can develop the relations the way you have developed because there are certain dynamics which you follow and those are the intangibles which cannot be felt or seen by your competition and that's why we call such capabilities as non-substitutable. The next conditionality is rare capabilities. As the terminology suggests, these capabilities are rare in terms of offering you the point of differentiation and that is why we call them rare. Yet another conditionality is costly to imitate capabilities. Well, these are the capabilities which are extremely hard for the competition to follow or imitate because these basically stem from a historical perspective. You have a certain level of experience and you have the corporate memory and the corporate knowledge that you have developed over a certain period of time and the way that you have done all that it is not really possible for anybody else to follow that and therefore we call them costly to imitate capabilities. Once we have developed the understanding of this process which basically is about building competitive advantage through strategic capabilities, we are all set to carry out the internal analysis of the organization because we are now in a position to build a competitive advantage with the help of very fine application of our capabilities and core competencies and an optimal exploitation of the resources that we have at our disposal. So once we are done with the internal analysis because we know what are the strengths and what weaknesses are and not every company has strengths all the time. So talking about this internal analysis and developing the competitive advantage does not mean that your organization will never have weaknesses. As a matter of fact, it is a question of formulating the right strategies on the basis of these strengths and weaknesses that you come up with a beautiful analysis. So in other words, once you are done with the internal analysis in terms of its strengths and weaknesses, the way of the objective of course is to define some competitive advantage because without that, you're going to have competitive parity and if you have competitive parity, you're as good or as bad as competition because you do not really have something which cannot be imitated or which cannot be copied. Everything can be followed by them. They will limitate you, they will copy you and you'll be as good as them and that's what you call competitive parity. You've got to get out of that phase and get into competitive advantage and that is why I'm rubbing in the point of competitive advantage and exploiting your strengths again and again but at the same time, we all have weaknesses. Once done with the internal analysis, the NPO is onto the external analysis which is about the external environment and I did talk about in one of the components earlier as to what really are the segments of the external environment. So having confidence that we all know what that environment is and what are those segments, we are rather should be all set to carry out the analysis of the external environment and to determine what really are the threats and what are the opportunities that the external environment offers and depending again on our strengths that we have to seize those opportunities. Here the one thing comes in addition to the segments of the external environment in the context of the NPO's and that is that NPO's could have to deal with a few external publics which commercial organizations do not really have to and these external publics that have their input to make, important input to make and therefore we should take a quick look at what these publics are. A public basically is a group of people or organization or both whose needs in some way have to be served by the NPO. That is what you call a public. So let me take you to the slide and show you different publics that NPO's deal with. As you can see from this presentation, the classification of the publics is done into input publics which consists of funders, donors, suppliers and regulators. Then we have internal publics that consists of board of directors, could the management staff volunteers and the fact is that we have a pretty good understanding of all these publics. The only thing is we now have to put their roles into a proper perspective while we analyze the environment externally. And then we have the next publics that is the partners. We have other NPO's. I have showed you with the help of examples. You may like to get into distribution, joint venture with some organization that specializes in that. Then you have other corporations that you may like to get into cost marketing relationships. Then you have traders, you have government agencies. The fourth publics is classified as consuming publics. You know, customers, activists and advocates. Well, these are the broad categories and in one particular context you can make further classifications and subclassifications. But the important thing about all this is that input publics right on the top supply resources that are utilized by the internal publics, which is the second stage, helped by the partners, which is the third stage and consumed by the designated publics, that is the consuming publics. And that's where the target market lies. With this understanding, all I can say is that we have laid the ground for carrying out the analysis which is going to be about the four elements of it. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We can ask ourselves some very pinpointed questions on all these four elements and get the answers. The trick here is, or rather the underlying condition here is that the management of the organization has got to be very honest and objective in carrying out the analysis so that it really can determine its strengths as well as weaknesses and seize upon the opportunities which the external environment offers. At the same time, it should be in a position to neutralize all those threats that the external environment carries in it. Thanks.


I think so. Our first talk today is about dependency analytics. And we have Sunil Samal and Agam Shah, both from Red Hat.  Because they're part of the group of people that had never seen the Terminator movies. Good morning, everybody. So as I said, I'm Sunil. I'm from Red Hat, and he's Agam, my colleague. So today, before I start with my presentation, I would like to tell you about an incident that happened back in May 2018. When the NPM security team received and responded to a report that one of the NPM package named Kate Cookies have a security issues, have a malicious backdoor that allows the attackers to inject arbitrary code into a running server and execute it. So the problem here is that the external applications using the package are under the risk of being exploited. So later, the NPM security team resolved the issue and unpublished the package from the NPM registry. So here you can see we use dependencies on a daily basis to build our applications. So dependencies are nothing but third-party libraries or modules that we use to build our application. And there are lots and lots of dependencies. So hundreds of dependencies gets published every day. So as you can see in the graph, let's take, for example, for the NPM. Each day, thousands of NPM packages gets published to NPM registry. So this many number of choices a developer has to choose from. So when we started looking into this space, we found a potential problem to solve so that we can ease the development process. So we figure out that there are three certain parameters that we need to see while choosing a dependency. The first one is security vulnerability. The second one is license. Third one is popularity and maintainability. And the fourth one is completeness of the application stack. Next slide. OK, what is CVE? So CVE is a security vulnerability that may or may not be present in your application dependencies. So it's always better to check for CVE before using any dependencies to build your application so that at a later point of time, you are not under the risk of being exploited by an attacker. And the second one is license. License can be tricky to choose. Like, most of the developers, they don't have an idea like how the license open source license works. So how many of you here know like the Apache license and the GPL license don't go with each other? So like most of the developers don't know this fact. So they suppose, for example, you are using a package which is in GPL and you decided to release your project under Apache 2. You know you can't do that because Apache and GPL are conflict like they are in conflict. So at this point of time, there is no tool or application which do that. So when we started looking into this space, we created a kind of extension for VS Code which helped developers to choose the right dependencies in the development phase only. So let's see a demo how you can use our extension and choose the right dependencies for your application. So my colleague, Agam, will explain, like will show you the demo and explain our goals and future use cases. Over to you. So yeah, thank you, Sunil. So as Sunil mentioned, there are a lot of dependencies to choose from. And these ecosystems are growing rapidly. Like for NPM, for Maven actually, there were 102% growth in number of packages in the last two years. So you can imagine. Now coming to our goal, we are providing our goal in three aspects. First is the higher confidence aspect where you can choose dependencies which are free of any vulnerabilities and which do not have any license conflicts. So you can have higher confidence while you are productizing your application. You have higher confidence in your deployments and your enterprises have higher confidence in you that you are shipping and building the same, like the best software out there. And the second is the increased productivity levels. So what we mean by here is you don't need to go anywhere to search for any security vulnerabilities, or you don't need to go anywhere to search for licenses for a specific dependency, because we all show you right inside your editor. Third is the reduced development risk. As we already discussed, there are a lot of malicious packages that are out there. And as a developer, we should be knowing that while developing a replication, because that increases our risk if we don't do that.  This is the current statistics of our platform. So as you can see for Node, we have like 577,000 packages and 1.2 million versions that we track for CVEs and license conflicts. And also, we have 438 CVEs as of now for Node and 531 CVEs for Java and 195 for Python. And we have 28 licenses, open source licenses, in our system. So if you're using any of the 20 licenses, then we can actually show you if there is a conflict or under what license your project can be released. Now coming to the demo part, so this is a VS Code extension. The presentation is already on the FOSSAsia website.  So this is the marketplace of Visual Studio Code. As you can see, the extension is dependency analytics. You can just click on install, and it will open the link inside your VS Code editor right here. So I already have it installed. So let's just quickly go through the demo. So here I will be showing two kinds of applications. Let me just zoom in a little bit. Yeah, I think that's visible now. So here I'll be showing two kinds of applications. First is a Node application, which is a color chooser. So you can actually style your terminal using a color of your choice. And second is a Java application, which we created just for this demo for license conflicts. So yeah. So we are using pom.example for Java, as many of you might be using. And we are using Packet JSON, that is the NPM package manager for Node. And yeah. So here, as you can see, we are using four dependencies. First one is the ANSI styles. Second is escape string regular expressions. Third is support scholar. And fourth is Woodstrap. Now we are using specific versions. Well, that's for an example, we are using Woodstrap 4.1.1. Now as you can see, there is a red line down there. That means it has a security vulnerability. And if you hover over it, you can see that application dependency Woodstrap is vulnerable to the following CVEs. Now our recommendation is to use version 4.1.2, and the latest version is 4.3.1. So we actually show you, right inside your editor, how you can get rid of the CVEs. So if you see, there is a tooltip. Switch to recommended version 4.1.2. You can just click on it, and it's done. So now, actually, the CVEs that we saw, we can actually see it as a part of the stack report. So how you can generate a stack report, the whole report with CVEs, license, and everything, you right-click, and you see the dependency analytics report right down there. You can press Command D on Mac or Control D on Windows to directly just generate the report for you. So let's see the report now. So coming to the report part, as we can see, we have four cards based on the four perspectives that we have. So first is the CVE card. As you can see, Woodstrap has CVE 2018 14040. And if you Google it, you can actually see inside the NVD database that in Woodstrap, before 4.1.2, access is possible. So if you're using this, if you're using Woodstrap version before 4.1.2, which was our case, we were using 4.1.1. And your application is vulnerable to an access attack. Now, you as a developer might not know that before this extension tells, before this product tells you. And it's very useful for you in the development phase to make those decisions. Because once your product is shipped, and if a third party is able to access your application using an access attack or is able to exploit, then it comes to a responsibility part. So yeah, so it's better if you do it beforehand. Second is the licenses tab, where right now the suggested license is MIT because we have no license conflicts. So how is it MIT? Now we can go to the dependency detail parts, where we have all the four dependencies that were in the package JSON that have been analyzed. Now we have no unknown dependencies here, but that might not always be the case. There are, as you as I said, there are thousands of packages that have been gathered every day in NPM. So we might not have data for each and every package out there, but we made sure that whenever we see an unseen package, we ingest it for you. And whenever you run the report next time, we will have all the data you need for the particular package and the particular version. So we have automated data pipelines to do that. So coming to the dependency details part, as you can see, support color is as licensed under MIT. And it has this GitHub statistics. So why are GitHub statistics important over here? So you can actually check if your project or if your package is being famous across GitHub or not. How many contributors are there? How many stars? How many forks? How many dependent repos? What does they use at statistics? So you can actually make an informed choice that if this package is being used or is being maintained anymore or not, based on the status you are just seeing right now. So that helps in making great choices. And it has also this license, as I just said, it also has tags. So these tags are just from the NPM registry. If you're familiar with the tagging mechanism in NPM. And this is the bootstrap. So as you can see in bootstrap, we actually see a warning sign the security part because we had a CV, right? If you remember in the 4.1.1 version. Now, these are the CV IDs because we had a CV for this package. And the license is also MIT for this particular dependency. Now the third package is the escape string. And here it is also licensed into MIT. And ANSI's status is also licensed into MIT. And hence, our project license can be MIT. Now if there were a restricted license for this, any of these packages, and there would be a license conflict, I think Sunil already mentioned about Apache and GPL V2. They don't go together because of some patent clauses. So that can make a license conflict. We will see a license conflict in our Java application soon. So yeah, it's a part of the next demo. So then comes the insights part. Now, insights is basically what packages can you use? Think of it as a recommendation system for your application dependencies. Like if you're using these four packages, then you might be interested in using these packages as well. Like it's based on our data collection that we collected public data from GitHub, like what developers mostly use. And we've created a machine learning model that basically recommends you packages based on the packages that you're using right now. So for example, in terms of Python, you might be using NumPy, SciPy, and because they're pretty common nowadays, then you might be interested in our model we'll say you might be interested in pandas or TensorFlow or Scikit-learn or Matplotlib or Seabahn, those kinds of things. So basically, we have trained our models based on the data that we had from the developer's usage point of view, like what kind of packages usually developers use together. So it's kind of helpful because you're developing web application, and web application is not a common thing nowadays, or a machine learning application. It's not a very common thing. Every everybody is doing it. So you might be interested in doing what other people or what people usually use along with those packages. So you don't have to go and search every time, what is the best package out there for this particular, let's say, floating library, right? So that's useful. And we also show a confidence score, like how much confident we are while recommending this package to you. So let's say for Chalk, we are 66% confident. Now, as you can see, there is also feedback button. I like, OK, this is plus one and this is minus one. So if you're happy, if you're using it, then you can just say, OK, I'm using it. It's great for me, it works for me. It's a plus one, and oh, I don't like it. You know, it doesn't make sense for me. So it's minus one. Also, if you drop down, you can see a recommended version, what version to use of that particular dependency. Also, you can see the same statistics and the licenses for those recommended dependencies as well. So you can actually make a choice of what dependency to use based on the confidence score, or either you're comfortable looking at the statistics, or you're comfortable looking at the license that the dependency is using. Maybe you want to project into MIT. So you might not want to choose any dependency which is under less, more restricted licenses as CPLV2, right? It doesn't make sense for you. So those are the kind of things. And coming to the next part, where we are using a Java application. So here we are, as I just learned in this time report, similarly as I did last time, we are using seven dependencies. Now here, as you can see, in the licenses, there is a license conflict. Now, how do we show the license conflict? So we actually show you the dependency name which the license is conflicting with. So dependency is javax.sublet API. And what is the license? CDDL plus GPLV2 with class path exception. That is the license this dependency is licensed under in. And we also show you the other one, the org.javasist, colon javasist, which is licensed under Apache. As we already, I think, discussed Apache and GPLV2 don't usually go together. So here is the license conflict that you just saw. Now, how you can actually see what is the current version you're using and all the statistics right over here. So you might want to actually change your dependency to some other compatible license. So here is the dependency detail path, where we are seeing seven dependencies that we are using. And as you can see, there is a check mark in the every other field except the license step for sublet API and also for same goes for javasist because they are conflicting. So you can actually know what kind of things are broken here right inside your editor. So that's fine. Then there's the inside spot again. Now here, we are using many Apache packages. So as you can see, the third recommendation, Apache Commons Lang3, which is used with most of the Apache packages out there, if you're using some Java Apache packages. So the confidence score is really high. We are ready for personal confidence that you might want to use this dependency. So yeah, that's I think pretty much it for the demo part.  And right now, we support Java and Node. We are releasing support for Python and Go soon. So we will see it in the future use cases part. So coming back to the presentation, yeah. So what are the future use cases that we have? So as I said, Python, we are ready to support. It's already in beta. It's going in the internal testing. Second is the Go lang. Third is transit dependencies, which is already in the internal testing. So what I will talk a little bit about transits. So what transit dependencies do is how actually, so let's for an example, in this particular case of NPM, we only had four dependencies. Now, if you go to the Node modules part of it, once you're in NPM install, you can see many dependencies, like AJ, VEA, Khan, which you didn't mention here at all. At all, right? They don't appear at all. Because those are like dependencies of dependencies. Like maybe ANSI colors need it, or bootstrap needs it, right? You don't know. So we are actually going to show you a complete stack of what your dependencies are using, as in the whole transitive report as well. And we are going to show you the statistics, the license conflicts, the CVEs, everything for all of your transitives, right inside your IDE. So you can actually make a choice as to how and how. Sometimes what happens is there is not a problem in some direct dependency. For example, there might not be a problem in bootstrap. But one of the dependencies of bootstrap has a problem. So how would you know without actually looking at the report? So that is kind of tricky as well. So that is one part. So we are looking at transitives. It's already in beta. And I think it will be released along with Python. Third is the container application. Fourth is the container application scanning, where we actually are planning to integrate this whole thing inside Clare, if you're aware, a tool by CoreOS, which actually scans your container images for runtime vulnerabilities. But we also are planning to do it for application vulnerabilities so that we have a complete end-to-end picture from runtime to from your system to your application. And you can provide your whole report as to how your application is vulnerable at what levels. Fifth is the probability vulnerability based on AI. So right now, what happens is 60% of vulnerabilities are never reported to NVD. So think of NVD as a public database for vulnerabilities. It's not easy to get through. It's not easy to just look at it and tell what package is vulnerable. But it's public. Like anybody can see it. Anybody can use it for their purposes. So that is like 60% don't actually even end up in NVD. So what we are going to do is we are going to look at GitHub. We are going to look at GitHub. So particularly, we are going to look at GitHub commits, GitHub PRs, GitHub issues. And based on the text, if it looks like a CVE has been fixed or any security vulnerability has been fixed based using machine learning, then we are going to show that right in Studio ID before it even gets out there, even if it gets reported. So that's one part. And the fourth is predicting service upgrades for OCP. So this is more to do with OpenShift. So if you're using OpenShift 3 and you want to migrate to OpenShift 4, now if your application is compatible with OCP 4, before even deploying that, we will tell you using machine learning that, OK, how similar applications were deployed and if they're compatible at all. So you can actually make an informed decision beforehand if you want to migrate to OCP 4 or you want to remain to OCP 3. So that's about it. You can find us on GitHub. And you can chat with us on Mattermost. Mattermost is just like Slack, but it's open source. And it's all public. So you can file us an issue or you can rate us on Visual Studio Marketplace. And you can leave us some reviews on Mattermost. And if you have any queries or any questions or any feedback for us, then you can just reach out to us here. Thank you. I think we have time for questions, right? Yeah, one or two minutes, yeah. OK, so you're basically asking for any other platforms, right? Like Sublime or IntelliJ or VIM or anything, yeah. So we have plans to do that. And we have received a number of feature requests from all of the developers that we need for IntelliJ. And so we are prioritizing it accordingly. I think once we go back and give this feedback to the team, we will, I think, prioritize it accordingly and let you know. And you can just follow us on GitHub or on Mattermost to see where we are. And you can actually file an issue for this, marking it as a feature request. I will, at least, suggest you do that so that we can look at it. Yeah, it doesn't get lost, yeah. Any other questions do we have? Oh, you can find us at the center of this booth. If you have any questions or you want us to demo something to you or you want to just try the extension, you can just drop by. And we will see what we can do. I think, thank you. Thank you.


Thank you for your time. I want to start this video by asking you a few questions.  Do you want them to make new friends? Do you want them to increase or improve their technical soccer skills? Do you want them to increase their confidence and self-belief? Do you want to see them actually play better in their next game? Or maybe you just want to keep them busy on this professional day that's happening at the end of the month? If you answered yes to all those questions, any of those questions, if you answered yes to one of those questions, watch this video all the way to the end because I'm going to tell you about a camp that's happening at the Calvary North Soccer Center. So it's happening on January 31st. It's a Friday. As I said, it's a professional day. The kids are out of school. Do you want them sitting at home? Or do you want them improving at the game that they love? It's from 9 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. There is before and after care available if needed. So this is the Progressive Soccer Camp. Progressive Soccer is my brand. Progressive Soccer is my company. My name is Dylan Toovey. I played soccer in Calvary my entire life. And when I was a kid, I was that shy, unconfident kid who struggled to stand out on the field. I was nervous to go to practices because my teammates would make fun of me. I dreaded that car ride home because I honestly felt like I was disappointing my parents. And I'm just saying that to relate to all the kids today because I know they're going through those awkward situations that are hard to handle, especially when you haven't developed that necessary self-confidence yet. Now the good news is I came out of it. I became a confident player, a confident person. I developed the belief that I could improve every area of my game that I wanted to. I could turn my weaknesses into strengths. And I transformed myself into the type of player who can make an impact, who can win a game for my team. And that's something that every player can have if they are open to that possibility and they have, as I said, an open mind, an open mindset. So playing in Calgary, I played for basically every youth team. Eventually I went on to the University of Lethbridge where I got my school pay for, which was amazing. I obtained an academic all-Canadian for five years, which is maintaining a 3.5 grade average while being a collegiate athlete. To date, my greatest accomplishment is probably playing for the Canadian National Futsal Team. On my 30th birthday, I had quite an old age, actually. And that happened two years ago, which was an amazing experience and I'm totally honored. As I said, Progressive Soccer is my business. I started just training kids one-on-one, small groups. But eventually I got into making video tutorials and I posted them online and got a lot of momentum. And to date, I've grown my channel to almost half a million subscribers or 700 free YouTube videos. You can go and check it out. Just search Progressive Soccer on YouTube. My face will come up with a whole bunch of videos to help you improve every area of your game. But through that platform, I'm able to impact soccer players, footballers all around the world. A lot have gone on to make higher level teams, earn college scholarships and even sign professional contracts. In Calgary, I am the head coach of the longest standing men's team, which is the Calyns, the Caledonian's football club. And I am a player and the head coach for the Futsal Team, the ABA Team and the indoor soccer team. I also do all the training for the major Premier Div 1 and youth teams associated with our club. So that's keeping me very busy. But this is going to keep me busy at the end of the month and I would want to give back to the kids and I want to help kids improve. So if your kids want to come to this camp and they just want to have fun and make friends, I can guarantee that. But if they want to better their skills, if they want to increase their confidence and if they want to play better in their next match, that is 100% possible. I will give them the tools necessary to do that. However, they must have an open mind. They must have a thirst for knowledge. They must be hungry to learn. And if they are open minded, they are willing to soak up all this information and put in the work that they can do all these things. Better skills, increased confidence and actually putting it into better performances when it matters on game day. So what's the camp going to look like? We're going to start with intro and expectations. I'm going to set the standard. Like I said, if they want to have fun and just have a great day and play some soccer, they can do that. But if they want to improve and they want to build a foundation that can actually serve them in soccer for the rest of their career, then this is an incredible opportunity if they take advantage of it. So I'll tell them how to get the most out of this camp. The morning is going to be focused on technical training and I want to give them the best technical training that they've ever had. I want to break down. I want to give them the best tutorials, the best skill that I've developed as a coach is the ability to get into the mind of a player because I'm a player myself. I know everything that they're thinking before they even say it. So as that ball is coming to them, I know that they're thinking about their teammates yelling at them. Their coach getting upset when they screw up. They're thinking about getting tackled. They're thinking about having a bad touch rather than thinking about everything that they can control. When they're doing their technique, I know what it feels like to hit the ball on a certain part of the foot as opposed to the other. I know why the ball went that way and it didn't go that way. I know how to speak to them in language that they speak to themselves in their own mind. And that's why my technical training can be so powerful and something that will help them improve faster because the main objective for me in this camp is yes, to give them some good training, but I want them to be able to leave this place and be a better coach on their own, to coach themselves better because really that's the best way to improve yourself. You can't always rely on a coach because the coach isn't there. You are there 100 percent of the time in your own life, so you need to be your own best coach. Now, as you can see, I can get very passionate and for a younger player, some of these ideas may be very advanced. I want you to know if your child is eight years old or 14 years old, they're going to get something out of this camp. I'm not going to overcomplicate it for a younger player.  So I'm going to speak on their level and regardless of their age, regardless of their ability, they are going to get value out of this camp. Before lunch, I want to do some confidence training. So for a young player to understand the power of mentality may be a bit advanced. However, if we have a conversation and they take one idea that sticks with them, that they can use on the field or off the field to improve the quality of their life, to make them more confident, then that's a conversation that we need to have. So we're going to do some basic mental training, some basic confidence training before lunch. We'll have a nice lunch break. And then after we're going to have lots of fun, we're going to apply all the skills that we practice. We're going to apply these ideas about confidence into a fun and competitive 3v3 tournament. Everyone will be challenged at their own level. We'll have lots of fun. At the end of the day, we're going to do a recap to make sure that we don't just have these ideas and never think about them again. Knowledge is great, but you have to apply what you learn if you want to be successful in this game. If you want to be successful in life. So we'll recap everything we learned at the end of the camp. I want to give every kid who came a free training program. So as I said, my business is mainly online soccer training. So I have the YouTube videos. I have free content on my website, but I also sell premium training programs, a digital training program that you can watch on your phone or your laptop or your iPad, and you can use it to train on your own. Every kid who comes this camp, I want to give them one of my training programs for free that they can use to take and improve their skills, their fitness, their confidence on their own time. So that's my gift to them. And I just want to set them up with that before they leave the camp. So as I said, if you want to have fun, make new friends, improve their skills, their confidence and actually play better in their next match, you can register for this camp below. If you have any questions, you can send me an email, put my email below this video. You can also call the Calgary North Soccer Center and talk to our mutual friend Lance. You can send him an email. But if you would like to register before January 31st, I would love for your kid to be part of it. I would love to meet you.  So thank you so much for watching this video. As I said, if you'd like to register, it's at the Calgary North Soccer Center dot com, backslash camp. The link is below this video. You can just click that button. It's easy to register. If you have any questions, give Lance a call. Thank you so much for watching this video and I hope to see you soon.


This is covering the spread part of the Fandall podcast network Week 18 slate of games is getting more intriguing by the day because we now know that I think the Bengals and the Ravens gonna go full-out with the possibility for that that second round matchup the first round matchup being at a neutral site I feel like the NFL is weak this thing in a pretty good way Which means we're gonna have a lot of motivation for a good number of teens week 18 We're gonna break down where you can find value in the prompt market based on that by talking to Tom Vecchio getting his read on week 18 and let you know where you can find value in the prompt market over at Fandall Sportsbook This is covering the spread right here on the Fandall podcast network and number fire com My name is Jim Sonnis I am a senior writer and analyst for number fire calm joined here as mentioned by Tom Vecchio check him out on Twitter at DFS underscore Tommy of course as a senior writer or a writer for us over at number fire calm does our daily iso NBA DFS podcast has a lot of stuff for NBA TV and HL work Tom is all across the board But he's here with us today break that week 18 Tom a happy final regular week of the regular week of the regular season Do you how you doing? I'm doing good. Yeah, I think this is arguably one of the most interesting weeks besides Opening week, which I'll touch on once we get in things but I think you know note like having all your like Your your T's cross your eyes dotted whatever might be and knowing the scenarios for different teams is vital this week Absolutely important. Yeah is vital to the point where you should not try to work out scenarios on a spreadsheet like I did yesterday morning and butchered it So trust the NFL let them tell you what's on the line, you know trust their PR staff Don't do it yourself But luckily it is all known now with the the scenarios being voted on for today We kind of know how things will break down I think that's a key thing to know and I think for me at least I'm handling the Bengals and Ravens as if they're gonna go All out. I think the bills will do the same because They don't want to be the three seed with that game against Bengals So I feel like both these teams will push hard for all four corners And that is important data to have entering week 18 will break down what that means how to apply this How to handle like your bankroll in week 18 as well in just one second First a reminder to make sure you are subscribed to covering this spread wherever you get your podcast our national championship preview TCU vs. Georgia is up with Dr. Red Fang find that on the Fandall YouTube page and my covering the spread podcast heat also Had Ryan Williams back on the show yesterday to break down week 18 in the NFL is thoughts on spreads money lines totals And he likes for this week both those up on the covering the spread podcast heat and the Fandall YouTube page So to get those as they are posted make sure you're subscribed to covering the spread wherever you get your podcast And if you like what you hear leave us a rating and review as well Looking to get more out of the NFL this season Well now is the perfect time to download Fandall America's number one sportsbook because new customers getting no sweat first bet up to $1,000 that's free bets back if your first bet doesn't win just download the Fandall sportsbook app It is safe secure and super easy to use then you can bet on everything from the money line to touchdown scores to over under yards Plus Fandall even lets you combine your bets for a chance at a bigger payout with a same-game parlay So don't miss the chance to get your no sweat first bet up to $1,000 of free bets when you join Fandall Make every moment more with Fandall an official sports betting partner of the NFL must be 21 plus and president select states first online a Real money wager only refund issued is non withdrawal of free bets that expire in 14 days restrictions applies to terms and sportsbook dot Fandall comm gambling problem call 1-800 gambler over the Fandall comm slash RG in Arizona 1-800 next step or text next set to 5334 2 in Connecticut 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg dot org slash chat in Indiana 1-800 9 with it in Kansas and Wyoming 1-800 5 2 2 4700 in Kansas case gambling health comm Louisiana 1-877 770 stop in Maryland md gambling health org in New York 1-877 8 open wire text open Y and in West Virginia go to 1-800 gambler net now time I did want to start here by talking about your approach to week 18 because I Personally don't have as much on the line this week and I find with that I'm okay with that, but I wanted to ask you Do you pull back in how much you bet in week 18 given the uncertainty or does a prospect of the books being wrong and being there more They're being more variance that does that actually draw you in as someone who is very in tune with the news I it actually draws me in I think this week and opening week as I mentioned all for the biggest edges because you know if you're following training camp reports coming into the season and you see player props that You know a receiver's problems at 40 and now you're reading reports that he's expected play a much larger role And this game has high over under all these sorts of things like 40 is not the right line or whatever might be So I think there's an edge at the very beginning of the season when roles are somewhat undefined in the books The lines are wrong and I think this week specifically obviously there's a big edge and with so much news I want to be looking at the spots in terms of the players I'm going and then eliminating all the teams that are obviously out of the playoffs and have no right Motivation or locked into the playoffs and I can't move up or down like the box or essentially the Vikings And then I want to focus in and kind of double down on the teams and the players that have a lot of motivation apply So it actually draws me in more to have heavier exposure to the players that are in must win spots Yeah So you are narrowing your list down not dealing with the the nonsense But on the games where everything matters you feel better about your approach there and I think that actually does make sense because It's easier to predict how teams will play things if there's everything on the line That's why I love like playoff DFS because we're not going to see teams Messing around with like a third string running back getting you know third down snaps We're gonna see snap rates increase on running backs and stuff like that So I think that that thought process makes a lot sense because this is effectively now playoffs and I think that that is interesting So narrowing down the list But solving the regular amount of confidence with the games that are left remaining now you kind of alluded to this There are some teams out there like the Bucks the Giants may not play anyone at all like they might just not bother I think the Bucks will start Tom Brady that sounds like and we could have teams like the Chargers I could have nothing to play for maybe the Vikings I think they'll still push for the 2C But you know there's some risk there at least when you got those teams that might start their starters But then pull them later on are you looking to grab unders potentially in those games or they just full full avoids for you I mean, this is also something props get posted because they might just say Effort and not not post them at all right that that last point is the most important one will props be available at all You know there was a report on Tuesday or Wednesday where Todd bull is the head coach of the box said that You know, Brady could be starting might be starting and they would rotate You know Kyle Traskin rotate playing Gabbard in it's like they're gonna have three quarterbacks It's like I want every under under available for Tom Brady if they're posted, which they're obviously not posted yet That's a spot that I would absolutely love to look so if Her cousins is posted I might consider taking an under depending on what the line is obviously there's timing with that game You know if they're gonna be pushing for the 2C But I would take every under available I possibly could if the players are not expected to play assuming the lines are posted so It's a very touch-and-go situation And it's like ultimately wait and see because we just don't have these lines But I am going to be heavy on unders if they are posted. I think the one that would be interesting for the Vikings is Dalvin Cook and Justin Jefferson unders. I know Jefferson is chasing the yardage record I think with it being as high as it is. I don't think they're going to go for it I think they're going to care more about the postseason than that and The reading Kevin O'Connell's quotes earlier on this week. He said we're not going to be as like You know, we're not going to pull starters fully With the two seats on line because they want the two seats. I think her cousins will play the entire game but I think that we could see dalvin cook get a 60 50 snap rate versus his typical around 80 percent We could see justin jefferson get rotated out with more kj osmore I have feeling in the mix jaylon nailer might play more in this game So I think that's the way we'll see the the changes there, which means if people Steam up just jefferson chasing the the yardage record. That's where I think the unders are in place So jefferson dalv I think specifically are the guys where I could see unders being very lively again If they get posted at all, which they I wouldn't post it personally if our fad will But I mean you should john if you're listening but I don't think I wouldn't be shocked if they just don't post this at all But I think that jefferson and dalv specifically based on reading what o'Connell said I think those are the guys where unders very very lively Now those are not the fluid situations. We're talking about for today. We got a lot of the fluid situations You know some backfields and avian flux some passing games stuff like that when you're looking for Fluid situations where you may see some volatility in the market. Which situations are you targeting there? I think it comes with the I think chargers broncos is probably one of the best examples and that's simply due to the timing and and this is kind of just um A scheduling thing and like there's no I mean unless they played at the same time And this would be the referring to the bangles and the ravens unless they played both at four o'clock if the what is it this if I have this right if the Bangles beat the ravens Then the chargers clinched the five seed and there's no reason for them to play any of their starters Right and that's the reason why you saw the spread moves so heavily towards denver In crazy crazy swing Yeah, it was like it was chargers minus three for the entire time And then once it became clear that bangles ravens are going to be played at 1 p.m But also they weren't going to finish the uh charger the the bangles bill of games That's where you saw the movement heavily towards denver right so now denver's was in two and a half right still Yeah, yeah, so that's a substantial move So if the player prompts are posted That would be great, but We just don't know that yet and that is just a factor of the schedule So that's one thing I would love I would love to take essentially team total unders for the chargers Like if we see the bangles pull out ahead and it's like, okay, maybe you're gonna win this game If I can get team totals for the chargers under that's the spot that would go and I wouldn't expect herbert to play I wouldn't expect echler to play alan Mike williams all these players would not expect and and ultimately it's like it's not the best matchup for them to begin with No, so that is absolutely one The seahawks and and the lions are obviously also Uh another situation where if the seahawks win the lions are out, right? So and the lions are playing on sunday night football. So they will know Before the game even starts whether or not they are you have a shot at the postseason Which again is is just a kind of a it sucks because of the schedule But if the lions don't know if the lions know that they're out Where are they gonna be going with their starters? I think they're going full bore because it's dan cambell psycho so This is from someone who has lions plus four and a half. So take it with a grain of salt and and the lions Uh, you know the packers defense has looked pretty solid over the past number of weeks So, you know, I hate that we they're gonna know prior to the game whether they're in the playoffs or not But and I I do agree with the dan cambell thing that they're they should be going all out um So I have interest in a lot of seahawks players and a lot of seahawks props Um, and then I think saturday slate is also very interesting Yeah, what do you see on the saturday slate? What are you uh, is that a situation you're talking to? Because there are props up for those games Yeah, there are props of games. Uh, one of them i'm gonna i'm gonna write about in the props article I do specifically for saturday is it be christian kerke over 59 and a half receiving yards And I think that this is the best of both worlds where Not only are we talking about motivation for teams to play Clinching playoff spots clenching seating setup center We're also talking about motivation for players due to contract incentives Which is the other side of this where even if a team's eliminated a player's contract is very important So christian kerke over 59 and a half receiving yards makes a lot of sense for multiple reasons jags have to win this game Right, it's a playoff game for them They need to win the win this to win the division make the playoffs Number two the titans secondary is atrocious. We've seen it all year They're bad through allowing a ton of yards to to wide receivers and number three He has a contract incentive for an over on yards right now. His contract incentive is He's at right now. He's at 78 total receptions and 1009 receiving yards He gets an additional 500 000 for 80 receptions So only two more and then an additional 500 000 for 1100 yards. So he's 91 yards off Uh another contract incentive. I expect the two can actually get there But it's the best of both worlds where we have the contract incentive We have the motivation with team to play and I guess we also have an amazing match against the titan secondary So that's the spot that would look I would also go to geno smith over 238 passing yards. That's on sunday, obviously um going back to the I want to touch on two things quick the Titans thing Not only is their secondary bad, but they're getting a lot of their run stuffers back for this game Jeffrey Simmons Didn't play last week for obvious reasons You know with a lot of people they're resting everybody But he's going to play for this week Nico Autry also expect to be back this week And that means that their ground their rush defense, which is always good Is going to be even better this weekend than it has been which means we're going to see lauren's probably chucking it quite a bit I think he had like 368 yards in their first match up And that was a game where they were down the first half, but they won Decently comfortably. He's a very good quarterback. So I think that both kirk and ze jones are very viable I want to go back to the lions too because you mentioned them As being a team that but could potentially set starters now when I see four and a half as a spread That tells me that fendal is accounting for the odds that the seahawks win their game And there's no motivation for the lions I think they're kind of using the money line on the seahawks side as being like a guide for the odds that the Lions don't try What's interesting though is that the prop market is different because they have fendal has jamal williams rushing prop at 56 and a half Jamal williams when justin jackson has been active and when the under search has been had his snaps up He has been well below that number His role had evaporated before last week and granted he looked great last week and it is a jamal williams revenge game I will let you know But that's a big number for a guy whose role has been limited for a large chunk of the year And it's not like it's suddenly they're suddenly in a muslin game They've been playing muslin games since october with the way they started right So I think that even though I think the lions play hard no matter what that has been my firm stance all week That number specifically jamal williams under 56 and a half rushing yards that seems really really high Based on the way he's been used when they've had all their guys healthy Yeah, that makes a lot of sense it does The question is like do you factor in how much do you factor in the dan camble? And revenge game it's like all right It's the last last game of the year might as well throw these players out there because ultimately You know if we take a further step back Who's more important to the team swift or williams going forward? Well, williams is a free agent. I believe right so that answers your question right right So swift is obviously he's younger So they want to keep him long term So will will Williams be out there for more just because at a certain point they're you know, they may not have him next year So it doesn't matter right, so I will say he does have a contract incentive $250,000 when he hits 1,000 rushing yards. He currently has 994 rushing yards. We six away So I'm gonna take over over six and a half Or over five and a half if john sure and gives us that prop. I'll take it So You know, it's again, it's a tricky situation just due to the schedule timing. Yeah But I do see him in a large role if they are eliminated because Swift has already dealt with some injuries this year His his production has been up and down. They kind of seem to hate him too. Which I do it But like why would they need to push him if they know they want to keep him long term, right? Whereas with williams, like you said free agent, so that's a different situation there I think with yeah, I can see that being a concern for sure with him But honestly, I think it's fascinating to look at the juxtaposition of the way the props are handled versus the way the The spread is handled because I think I don't know I think four and a half says to me they expect the lines not to try which is Not the way I'm viewing things. I can be very wrong. I've been very wrong Plenty of times this would not be a first thing a first time by any means Okay, we talked about some yardage props there with christian kirk and gino smith What are that touchdown props? What you liking in that market? Uh, you know, I would go back to christian kirk at plus 210, which is I think a pretty solid number again all the things I touched about incentive Motivation for the team great match versus the titans They should be pushing the ball down field via the passing game instead of the running game plus the tenant is pretty solid um digs at plus 125 Uh, is the one I want one your opinion on it's obviously not the easiest matchup, but the bills clearly do have motivation to play Um, so plus money on stef digs is at least interesting when or plus 115 now I should say um You know anytime you get a dominant receiver at plus money in an offense is a spot that i'm always considering Yeah, I think that one is Is borderline to me. Yeah, I think it's borderline. Uh, first time he faced new england. He had nine targets in that game 92 yards um The bills will have high motivation to win this game given they want to have that ASC championship game on a neutral sites. I think they're playing regardless. That's a good thing as well. Um I think that's that's that's an interesting I tend to I get very wary of receiver props as they inch closer to even money That always makes me like very wary running back. I'm a lot more less I fair about But for receivers, I get more skittish, but if you look it's defund dig so far this year. He has scored a game a touchdown in Accounting all but seven games. So seven of 15 games he scored in more than half of his games eight out of 15 games he scored in this year. So I mean, that's definitely interesting there. I probably wouldn't take it myself, but I believe You could correct me if I'm wrong.  That didn't happen. I'll try that Um, but I think I tried to talk you out of tirey kill So if we use the gym is wrong narrative digs at like minus 300 is like fair value at this point so if you're Going back to your your point about Running backs in their lines or touchdown props. How do you feel about derrick henry at minus 115? Uh, I have the jags minus six. So those two are uncorrelated And I can't be objective about it where I can't uncross my brain out of like I think the jags I have the jag fair by eight in this game. Um, which means a They could just throttle the jags or the titans and tides may not score a whole lot. Um, and b If it's a negative game script, I think henry should still be in there if I were coaching I'd keep him out there as a pass catcher still, but will he be I think those are two separate things So if I were looking at that game You know etn's situation is pretty tough. Um, given how good the titans rush defense is but He's he got three targets before he got pulled last week. I think that's kind of intriguing Um, I think I'd prefer actually etn over henry his red zone rolls very good And that might seem egregious because etn's minus 110 henry is minus 115 so it might be Unearthly dumb to go with etn over henry, but I feel like I prefer that one personally Okay, and then the the last spot that I want to note would be the stealers They obviously have high motivation 100% they need to win. Um Kenny Pickett's passing prop last time I saw is only 195 and a half he's been inefficient In some games, I think is the nicest way to put it, but he is throwing the ball A lot like we're talking about high volume of passing attempts overall Right where some of these games high 30s low 40s of passing attempts so the inefficiency is obviously noted and You know, we see him crossing this line at a very modest rate. It's not like he's blowing past this But motivation to win um High volume of passing. It's a modest number overall I'm at least intrigued on the stealers this week is the point I'm making I like that old team this week. Um What could go wrong, right? What could go wrong with me needing to start uh, jail and warring in a in a must win consolation bracket A lot could go wrong. They're not gonna lie. Yeah, a lot could go wrong there But with the picket one, I'm fine with that. I think that's totally fine because You mentioned that he's been inconsistent. I think that's totally fair But he's been like on the whole since their bi-week His efficiency number has been good and that's without chase clay. But which It's addition buys attraction who can say, um, but like his efficiency in that time has been good Especially in the games that fat fat framerate has been there He had a game that was like a partial game because he got you know, he got a concussion there Miss the next game, but like his broad efficiency numbers. He's been like just a hair below average, which that's not bad for a passing prop under 200 and now davin clowny got sent home It's wrong from practice this morning for the browns. He's not going to play on sunday That then I think that benefits both nagi harris and kenny picket. So harris actually I think is also a spot I'd want to turn to once yardage props are up. They're not up at fan dual right now, but I think Looking at harris rushing plus receiving numbers harris anytime touchdown numbers Picket, I think he's in play pat frimer depending on the number more so for him But I think all those guys are very very lively this week um, and then the final one for saturday is um Or two for saturday both chief's players Okay, juju is very close to some extra incentives as well. He has 76 receptions and 898 receiving yards on he has some incentives to get to uh, Was it a 900 or yeah over 900 yards? So he needs two yards to get an additional 1.5 million dollars. Wow So that's that's kind of important. Uh, and then mohomes is approaching the single season passing record He's 430 yards away, which is which is a lot right 430 yards is a lot in any game When they could blow out the raiders He literally might not need to pass that but the ball that many times to get to 430, but it is still noted um It's noted and it's also posted. Um patrick mohomes believe 20 and a half No for 400 plus passing yards is plus 490 if you want to get nuts though. Well, i'm saying isn't this passing Yeah, it's 320 325 yeah in the alt market if you want to get real crazy I think plus 490 is terrible value But like, you know, you could you could talk yourself into that for sure if you want to play the full narrative game I think that that's uh, that's intriguing for sure The juju receiving prop is 54 and a half right. I don't think that's bad at all that's one I have uh Kirk and juju the two i'm gonna write up in the article for tomorrow I have no objections to either personally. I again, I think zay jones is also I probably prefer kirk by a bit But there are usages so similar that I could do either and be happy in zay jones touchdown prop is plus 250 I think I agree with you where I prefer the kirk one, but zay jones is also very in play a plus 250 in that same game So I think honestly jags and cheese props will very fun. So the the question is The chiefs obviously need to win To secure the to secure the number one seed, but how like how much are they gonna push my homes and then is that enough to It depends on what you think of jared situm Do you think situm is good enough to duplicate what he did last week? Then he keeps that game close and forces them to push, but I tend to I think that was a rally around the flag kind of game where they bench the quarterback. Let's show that you know we're still fighting Those effects tend to be about a one game thing and then they dry up real fast Or like when a coach gets fired and same thing. Yeah, yeah, like jeff saturday wins his first game and they've been abysmal since Absolutely, um That was also the raiders that they'd be in that game. So maybe some uh some correlation in there I think that the so I I've got the she's pretty heavily favored in this game. Um, I haven't bet nine and a half because I've got a little bit. I was like But like I think nine and a half is like very very much a consideration And with that being the case it might scare you away from my home specifically I don't think the juju one is concerning because it's it's low enough where it's actually fine But I think for my home specifically that's enough where I wouldn't be chasing the the 400 plus at plus 490 Uh, yeah, I would agree with that and you know, I would say just as an overall theme Like, you know, we're mentioning these different teams, you know, do your research to make sure You're like dallas philly 49ers jacks titans chiefs bills bangles ravens like all these teams Pat Stalfords all these teams need to win Steelers uh, uh steelers seahawks as well like they need to win. Yeah, so if push comes to shove and you're saying, okay I have these two players that I really like this player could be in for an expanded role because The team is sitting all their starters. It's like do you have to be going with that team? That's a limited right it's like focusing on the teams and the players that truly need to be winning You never have to make a bet. You can always just say now, I'll wait till the wild card round Go to great proposings then like theoretically as you mentioned like KJ Osborne could be in for a nice role Right. Do I do we need to be going there when you can go to z Jones when you could go to Some of the secondary players on teams that do need to win. Yeah, there are a lot of teams with motivation this week So even if we take the the the vecchio approach where we narrow down our list and cut off teams that have no motivation You saw that a lot of teams to look at so personally I'm on board of you where I'm not Like I just doing fewer props this week, which is fine. I have a laurence over but like, you know, not a whole lot for me in general so I think that I'd rather make I'd rather not make a bet than make a bet that I regret so I think that's always come to my baseline but Very comfortable with missing out on stuff for sure Any final thoughts for you on week 18 tom? Uh, no, I you know just double check Double check actives and inactives on sunday morning double check actives and actives for the 4 p.m. Slate, which is obviously also important for teams Um, you know do your research keep everything in line and you should be good to go Oh, that was one point. I wanted to make actually about the chargers. Um They're inactive have to come out. I believe before the end of the Ravens game 90 minutes beforehand, which means eclair might be active and then not play So and if he's active the props count so And syncing with uh with brady like if they announce that he's starting or he's active and the props come out it's all unders, right so Based on fandals house rules those that stand, um, so that's where I'd look if he wants to be active That's where you want to if again at props or post it was that might not be Um, but that's where I'd be looking for sure. Alrighty. That is tom vekio. Tom Appreciate the time and thank you as always and we're talking to you about some nba Starting next week on wednesday. I am looking forward to that. Uh, good luck for you in week 18. We'll talk to you then Thanks so much for having me Check out tom on twitter at dfs underscore tom I'm on twitter at gymson again check out our national championship preview and our week 18 Moneyline spreads and totals previews both up on the covering the spread podcast feed and on the fan dual youtube page We'll talk to you all once again next week. Good luck in week 18 This has been covering the spread right here on the fan dual podcast network