J. Bryan Scott

It appears that Plaxo, the online service once notorious for spam, still irks quite a few users - so much that their top support article is "How do I delete my Plaxo account?"
It seems odd that a company would display their customers’ dissatisfaction so prominently. I’m not sure whether this is by neglect or design, [...]

I was discussing Revenue per Employee with some colleagues this week and noticed a lack of published ratios on the web. So I wrote a simple script to screen scrape revenue per employee data for the NASDAQ-100 from Google Finance. Note: I usually prefer Yahoo Finance because it is much more thorough, but I chose [...]

So far, most news I’ve seen on OpenTable’s IPO fails to analyze the company, instead myopically focusing on the boldness of going public in this market.
But this is a fair point. It’s very peculiar that a company needing only $40 million would file for IPO during a credit crunch. Further, OpenTable is backed by three [...]

This morning, Ashley Burnett sent me a gift on Facebook. This resulted in the news feed item below:

Strangely, HTML appeared in the rendered page. I thought this might be the product of output sanitization, such as by calling htmlspecialchars or equivalent function with HTML unintentionally in the argument.
But upon inspecting the page with FireBug, I [...]

Background
It was recently my birthday and I received a massive number of wall posts on my Facebook profile. This Birthday Effect is propagated when Facebook advertises a user’s birthday to a user’s friends on the Home page via a profile link. I call this hyperlink the Birthday Link. The effect occurs for virtually every one [...]

After years of writing only impromptu articles, I’ve decided to take the leap and write on a routine basis via this blog.
Why a Blog
A blog is a powerful, thought-provoking medium of discussion. Blogging gives me the opportunity to explore my ideas with a wider audience. Tangentially, I seek deeper understanding of the topics that interest [...]