It’s time for Philly’s premier emerging tech conference, and I’m going to be speaking once again this year. The conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, is taking place March 26-27, 2008 in Philadelphia.

I’ll be giving a more technical talk this year than last, combining my interests in leading-edge web applications and security. The talk is called Securing Web 2.0 Applications:

The challenges of securing first generation web applications and infrastructure seem like a distant memory: immature technologies throughout the stack, coded in a culture that didn’t understand or value security. Today we have a much more security-conscious community producing components from operating systems to routers to web servers, and the basic architecture of the Internet application has had 10 years to mature under fire.

Even so, the security challenges of Web 1.0 were in many ways less daunting and harder to ignore than those of the current generation. This talk will review the challenges and lessons of the past, and survey security requirements, issues and techniques for dealing with a new generation of web frameworks and tools, massively multi-tenant applications and hosting environments, and loosely-coupled systems.

Its great to see Jeff coming to Philly for this; we have a small but vibrant and growing emerging tech and startup community here, and some people are already using S3, EC2 and the rest of AWS for new projects. For details on the meetup and to sign up, see the event page.

There does seem to be a general upswing in the visibility of math in the commercial world, starting with the extension of the quant revolution in the finance markets to the optimization of a diverse set of industries. The rise in the popularity of poker, and the influx of new players, has led to some new popular interest in math as well - books like The Mathematics of Poker (which I recommend) were hard to imagine on bookstore shelves a few years ago, but have been remarkably successful.

In the world of technology-driven startups, which was the context for Ann’s comment, I draw an imaginary line between two applications of math:

• Creation of a fundamentally new product, business or market
• Optimization of an existing business

The latter of these applications is the one that is driving the quant revolution in finance, poker, and a thousand other areas. In the online world, some big ideas have already broken ground and fundamentally changed the way a number of markets work. The mechanics of business online and the rush to market, however, mean that a lot of the decades of quant optimization in the offline world has been left behind.

I’m pretty excited about the opportunities that come from taking inefficiencies out of businesses that operate at Internet scale, as well as recapturing some of the subtleties of the offline markets. Math is cool again, and some very cool new answers are being created to the age-old question asked of math teachers - “But when will I ever use this?”

The goals of comScore’s research, of course, is to make the case for panel data in accurately measuring audience. Fred’s conclusion is more general:

You cannot rely on your own analytics data. You need third party data as well. That’s not to say that third party data (primarily panel data) is perfect either. You have to triangulate between all the numbers to get a decent view of what’s actually going on.

Undercounting conversions

All of that said, I titled this post “undervaluing web audiences” because I think there is an interesting flipside to the big “audience is overcounted by 2.5x” message of the study. If audiences are overcounted by this much, and those overcounts apply to ad impressions as well as overall unique visitor counts (according to the study, unique ad impressions were indeed part of the analysis), then there is likely some depression of conversion rates in many of the cookie-based analytics tools.

I’m sure that some simple conversion paths are exempt from this problems: a click on a search ad that results in a conversion during the same browser session is unlikely to suffer from any of the cookie-related issues outlined in the study. More complex paths, however, such as those based on brand impressions, repeated display ad impressions or deferred conversions, are likely to be undercounted by the same measure as the unique audience.

The behavioral ad networks are known for the application of their technology to targeting. Another key asset, however, is the ability to measure the value and ROI of online brand advertising. They use their networks, based largely on cookies, to track the deferred conversions that prove the value of a brand impression campaign.

If they are undercounting these conversions by 2.5x, perhaps current impressions are undervalued such that a correction for overcounting of audience would need to be somewhat offset by an adjustment to effective CPM for the brand ads run on the site. In any case, I’m sure advertisers doing brand impression campaigns, as well as the ad networks, will want to figure out how to more effectively measure deferred conversions if cookies present such significant accuracy problems. It sounds like Tacoda might be using comScore’s data to try to adjust.