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Top 5 Picks: March Madness Bracket

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:51:11 +0000

Sparxoo in collaboration with Eriq Gardner of FantasyBallJunkie

Welcome to March Madness. For the next few days, in businesses around the nation, people will be filling out brackets in hopes of winning the office pool on the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

We’re not going to pretend this is rocket science. (Like it or not, many of these pools will be won by those who have not watched a single college basketball game this season.)

Nevertheless, as in the many things in life that require investment on upside potential, there are a few tricks of the trade that may offer some bracketology advantages. We like winners. We like Cindarellas. Most of all, we like taking home the money – so read on.

1. Start off with the end-game: The most basic principle is that winners tend to win. The odds that a Cindarella takes home the championship are quite long. Since 2000, only three of the 36 teams to make it to the Final Four were ranked higher than a five seed. In fact, here’s a bar chart that shows what seeds have made it to the Final Four this decade:

Obviously, the top seeds stand a pretty good chance of getting to the Final Four. Most people who will win their pools will be conservative on the end-game, having a healthy share of top seeds advancing all the way through to the end.

2. Structure in some risk threshold: Obviously, those who are filling out their brackets with a lot of top seeds advancing all the way to the end will be going with the large majority. If you pick no upsets, you will largely need to get everything correct to win the big prize. Getting everything right is itself against the odds. That’s not a good plan for success.

Instead, we encourage risk-taking, particularly at the beginning of a tournament and especially in cases where an office poll incentivizes upset picks.

Consider the following scenario: Ten matchups, each where the underdog has a 40% chance of winning.

If you pick the underdog in each of these matchups, odds say you should win 2 of 5 games.

If your competitor picks the favorite in each of these matchups, odds say he or she should win 3 of the 5 games.

But what if you get 1 point for a win and an extra point for an upset?

The result would be that your 2 upset wins merit 4 points while your competitor’s 3 wins merit just 3 points.

Now, how can you achieve the end-game goal as described in Step 1 with adding some short-term upside risk described here in Step 2? Consider the following theoretical bracket:

From above, you will see that we picked a lot of upsets, including an 13 seed beating a 4 seed, a 12 seed beating a 5 seed, a 9 seed beating an 8 seed, an 13 seed beating a 12 seed. Yet, in the end, the top seed triumphs. We’re not suggesting you do it exactly this way. But depending on point incentives of your bracket pool, it may pay to be both risky and have insurance.

3. It’s Cindarella Time: OK, so how do you recognize a good upset in the making? Based on a regression analysis, some factors correlate to big, big upsets on the balancing scale:

Five teams that factor high in these things are #11 VCU (facing UCLA in Round1), #13 Akron (facing Gonzaga), #11 Temple (facing Arizona State), #12 Western Kentucky (facing Illinois) and shockingly, #15 Morgan State (facing Oklahoma)

4. The Strongest Survive: We’re back to the beginning. After picking the upsets, and keeping the top seeds, we’re down to the giants in the Final Four. Most bracket winners will have at least two of these teams and will pick the ultimate winner.

One strong factor correlating to ultimate success is the ability to score, and score often. Twenty of the past twenty-three titles have been won by teams who score 77+ PPG and have a scoring margin of 10+ PPG in the regular season.

Want to know the buzz? We’ve analyzed Google News, the blogosphere, and Twitter since the tournament brackets were announced and here’s a word cloud that viaualizes 2009 champion hype:

5. Making the Challenge: If you are looking for a place to challenge your friends and co-workers, CBS Sportsline is the home of March Madness. Good luck on the games!

Sparxoo is a business blog that inspires breakthrough by tomorrow?s leaders. We are a strategy consulting firm with a pulse on marketing, branding, and development. See our talented team of experts and our parent company dCap Advisors.

Redesigning Our Murder Mystery Website For Today’s Users

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:50:10 +0000

Our company provides professional entertainment for dinner theater, private parties and company events. We specialize in interactive theater like Murder Mystery shows and games, strolling magic and clean live comedy. Our website is often the first look people have of our company. It needs to be top notch, fully functional, easy to use, informative and of course entertaining.From creating the events, casting, rehearsing, performing, coordinating with clients, finding props and maintaing costumes to answering phones, keeping the books, marketing advertising, maintaining the website, it seems that running a small entertainment business in California requires 12 to 14 hour workdays 7 days per week. A good, informative website cuts the workload tremendously. It provides customer service, ordering options, acts as a receptionist, etc. Without a good site we would be doomed.So, this week we took a good hard look at sharpo.com. We asked some tough questions of ourselves and came to the conclusion that it was time to make our site sleeker,simpler, bolder, and faster – without spending a fortune. We kept the humanizetheweb.com walk on video. We shot that a couple of years ago and have been delighted with the reults ever since. We kept our site colors the same. We have gone through so many backgrounds over the years. We like the 003366 blue and will stick with that for now. Then we looked at changing the menu bar at the top of the page. This was tricky because we want an SEO friendly bar and that means CSS instead of fancier flash stuff. We wanted some drop down features to save space and simplify the navigation and of course we needed it to work in IE, Firefox, Google Chrome, or whatever browser our viewers are tuning in with. We found vista-buttons.com and after a few days of learning the software we were able to create a nice new nav bar for the site.After the menu bar, we looked at our logo. The old one was hard to let go of since we have been using a simple cooper font logo for Sharpo.com since the mid 90s. We used a logo making software from laughingbird.com that has opened our eyes to new thinking. Very easy to use and fun to design. The new logo incorporates our entertainment services and changes our sharpo.com logo font to hoteldel or plazapult, which screams “Show-Biz!” We like the look and feel. We also like the fact it says a lot with just a few words – and that brings me to the next challenge we faced: We need good content for SEO right?

We need to talk about our interactive murder mystery shows. How they are different from others. We need to shout that we are the among the first to incorporate social media sites like twitter and facebook in our events. (We tweet murder mystery clues and story exposition). We needed to tell people about the fabulous El Cid Dinner Theater in LA and why it is the perfect and best location in Los Angeles to host a murder mystery dinner party. We needed to inform people about our strolling magicians and clean party crashers. The changes made so far to the site have provided the simplicity of an informative image logo that takes up a big part of the screen. In order to be informative with real content we first used some image “alt” tags” so the search engines will pick up the content and then we put several informative paragraphs below the image. They content is written first to inform our customers and second to be SEO friendly. We are true believers that good content will produce good SEO. Finally we needed to highlight our upcoming and special events. So we made some fun easy mouse-over buttons at cooltext.com, and placed them to the left of our logo image. This was a personal triumph for me since I am no guru when it comes to design. I create all my websites in a simple on-line text editor.The result is live at sharpo.com. I am absolutely sure I will be making many many more changes soon to keep up with ever evolving trends, innovations. and of course our content which must change in order to continue our mission to entertain! I hope that what we created is a fun easy page that represents our little company well. I welcome any suggestions and comments and hope to see you all at one of our upcoming events!

Eric Howell Sharp is a proud member of the Mystery Writers of America, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists, & the American Society Of Composers, Authors and Publishers and the Society of American Magicians.

4 Secrets To Online Business Triumph

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:49:57 +0000

Get your online business spitting out cash daily starting today. The process is simple you just have to start implementing the right techniques today.Here are 4 secrets to online business domination.1.TwitterTwitter and other web 2.0 sites have become the new wave of the future. It is hands down the easiest way to build a huge list and create tons of traffic with it. So…*Open Account*Tweet-(always give value)*Drive all the traffic to your blog2.Get Seo SmartIf you’ve been running your business online for a while, you’ve probably heard of SEO. If not, don’t worry! It stands for “search engine optimisation” and it’s all about getting your site near the top of the listings in Google.There’s a lot more to know about SEO than I can explain here. If you’re fairly tech-savvy, look for information or a good book on SEO. If not, consider hiring an expert (though get references first).3.Start A BlogThe quickest way to get a blog going is through wordpress. It’s free and easy but more importantly you can generate traffic from it. All night long. If your going to write articles, post and forums,and travel myspace you might as well develop a blog for a source of traffic as well.If you don’t have a blog, your small business isn’t going to be seeing the success that it should. Getting a blog on your website has a ton of benefits. It helps you establish a relationship with people before they buy, and it’s good for search engine traffic (the more blog articles you post, the more pages you have on your site for people to find when searching).4.Diversify Your ProductsA great way to get more customers, clients and money is to offer a range of services and products pitched at different prices and needs. For example, if you’re a life coach, you might well be getting website visitors who simply can’t afford life coaching at present. Why not publish an ebook containing some of your expert thoughts and ideas that they could use to “self-coach”? If you hate writing, you could set up a tele-seminar and charge fifty or a hundred people to listen to you for an hour or two!

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