Blog: Inside Inuvo

On Monday, December 6, 2010, Inuvo ushered in the Holiday Season with a celebration at Splitsville Luxury Lanes and Dinner Lounge located in the Channelside District of Tampa, Florida.   The Inuvo Team gathered at Splitsville for an evening full of bowling, laughs, food and drinks. 

The highlight of the event had to be the team costumes! Teams were randomly selected so no one knew who they would be bowling with. Each team of four Inuvians was distinguished by a specific themed costume.  Team attire ranged from cowboys and pirates to firefighters and soldiers. 

"I had a great time at the Holiday Party.  It was fun getting to hang out with people I don't always get a chance to work with on a regular basis!"  

-John

“The Bowling event at Splitsville was so much fun! It was great to get to know the people I don't get to interact with on a daily basis.  I can't wait until our next company event!”

-Jessica

Prizes were randomly raffled off during the event every 20 minutes and gifts were awarded for the Highest and Lowest Individual Scores.

High Score –– Carrie
Low Score –– Mark
First Split – Danielle
First to Arrive – David T.
Inuvo Pride – Chris G.
Most Strikes – Luis (4)
Most Gutter Balls – TJ and Alex (8)
Most Unique Style – Doug
Most Entertaining Team – Pirates – Jamie, Jason, Stacey G. and John P.
Raffles – Wally, David T., Jessica L., Jamie, Stacey G., Kristi, Doug, Alex and Chris H.

Everyone had a great time and the event was a true team-building success!  We hope you enjoy the photos of the event; we have more on the Inuvo Facebook Page.  Feel free to leave your comments on them!

Oktoberfest is celebrated annually in Munich, Bavaria, Germany for 16-18 days from the end of September through the first weekend in October.  More than 5 million people attend the event each year making it the world’s largest fair.  In 2010, the festival lasted until the first Monday in October, to mark the 200-year anniversary of the event. Oktoberfest began with the Royal Wedding of King Ludwig I and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen on October 12, 1810.  Typically, Oktoberfest visitors eat traditional hearty German fare and celebrate with friends and family.

On October 1^st, Inuvo celebrated Oktoberfest with a potluck lunch.  A variety of different dishes were served, everything from turkey, ham, and potato salad to shrimp dip, crock-pot cake, and taco salad.  Everyone from the office gathered to share in the feast, tell stories, laugh, and celebrate the great German tradition of Oktoberfest.  No one left hungry that day! Below, some attendees tell you what Oktoberfest means to them and share their Inuvo Oktoberfest experience. 

“To me, Oktoberfest means being with friends and enjoying good food with great company.  That is exactly what we accomplished here at Inuvo. Oktoberfest at Inuvo was a big hit!!! We had more than enough food for everyone, plus leftovers for the next few days. Everyone was smiling and laughing, all while sitting with each other to eat and converse. I look forward to participating in more events such as this and hopefully some outside team building activities as well.” 
– Stacey Gibbs, Human Resource Generalist

“Oktoberfest, to me, still being a New Yorker at heart, signifies the beginning of the Fall Season, when the leaves are changing and the weather is cooling. With that being said, having a fall celebration here at Inuvo and enjoying the foods that make you think of the colder weather and all the holidays that will be coming up soon is great. Most of all, I enjoyed having the opportunity to sit down and have lunch with the people I spend most of my day with, sharing different dishes, and comparing stories. The chance to continue getting to know everyone makes coming to work an even more enjoyable experience.  I look forward to more potlucks with the upcoming holidays.”
– Stephanie Lopez, RESO Administrative Office Manager

“Oktoberfest is something I don’t celebrate in my culture.  Therefore, I like that we are celebrating Oktoberfest at Inuvo because it gives everyone a chance to meet, eat, and chat just like a family gathering.  To me, holidays and festivals are not just about the delicious foods (I would be lying if I did not mention food was a significant part of the celebration!), but also about the members of the family that you get to see that you haven’t seen often.  So I would say that Oktoberfest gives Inuvo employees an opportunity to have a little fun and see all the wonderful chefs we have in the company. At Inuvo we work hard, and we play harder! 
- Mai Huynh, Staff Accountant

To see the rest of our Oktoberfest photos, visit our Facebook page.

In my last post, I mentioned several projects in the pipeline for Inuvo’s analytics team. One project is bringing transaction-level cost-per-action (CPA) fraud detection to the Inuvo Platform.  Our goal is to create a system that automatically inspects every CPA transaction handled by the Platform, and determine the likelihood that it’s fraudulent.  That information could then be used in a variety of ways – from automatically denying extremely high-risk transactions, to creating reports that will let us tell at a glance when there’s a change in a publisher’s level of traffic quality.  This will make life easier for everyone.  Advertisers utilizing the Platform can be alerted to suspicious activity sooner, Inuvo account managers can spend more time interacting with clients and less time poring over transaction logs, and even publishers can benefit from the increased confidence that advertisers have in the marketplace (which translates into better payouts!).

We recently implemented the first version of this system and we’re excited about the preliminary results.  We’ve already rooted out several fraudsters that had previously escaped detection.  Some had remained hidden because they were extremely low volume, and it’s hard for a human to notice patterns in small amounts of data. Some hid their fake transactions among a larger volume of legitimate traffic, which again masked it from human review. Good news is that we now can detect these cases – we recently shut down a number of bad publishers after as few as just four transactions! Since we are scanning the entire Platform, in real time, we see much more traffic than any given advertiser on the Platform.  So when we shut down one bad publisher, every advertiser benefits.

The CPA fraud detection system (which we don’t have an official name for – suggestions are welcome!) learns from historical data, and makes distinctions between known fraud and known good traffic patterns.  This way the system can tell the difference between good and bad traffic. The only way to get past it is to be just like good traffic, which is basically impossible to do unless you are good traffic!

Of course, humans are also quite good at pattern recognition – when there are few variables, and they can be represented graphically, we can compete with computers.  So, besides giving the system raw data from the Inuvo Platform, we also give it “hints” in the form of custom variables designed to correlate with patterns that we’ve noticed ourselves, or that have been pointed out to us by our great Inuvo account managers.  The result is a system that combines human expertise with a computer’s ability to sort through mounds and mounds of data. The computer algorithms we’re using have proven themselves in shutting down fraud in other parts of the economy, too, so we feel like we’ve brought a big stick to bear against this problem.

The best part is that it will only get better from here.  The system works by making associations – by learning.  As more and more transactions flow through the Inuvo Platform, and as we get more feedback from advertisers on potential fraud, the system gets smarter.   

If you’re an advertiser or network and you’re having issues with handling fraud in a scalable way, contact our sales team at /Users/alex/Documents/sales [at] inuvo [dot] com">sales [at] inuvo [dot] com to discuss how we can help you.  

Oh, and, if you’re a bad publisher ... I hope you have a good lawyer! :)

The 2010 Inuvo Wii Bowling Tournament is now in full swing!  We are holding this competition as a double elimination tournament.  Twenty-four of Inuvo’s best and brightest have thrown their hat in the ring to be crowned the 2010 Inuvo Wii Bowling Champion.  In the first round, there already were many upsets, as sure favorites have been defeated by newcomers.

We are now well into the second round of games and the loser’s bracket is starting to fill up.  Since, this is a double elimination tournament, one person from the winner’s bracket and one person in the loser’s bracket will face off at the end of the tournament to determine who will be the first every Inuvo Wii Bowling Champion!  This means that right now, no one has been eliminated from the tournament yet and next round things will start to heat up as the eliminations begin.

Here’s what the bracket looks like so far: