Presentation for students at Howard University studying Information Systems and Supply Chain Management and taking the Digital Business course. The goal was to tell some stories about how I used data over my career so far in business situations to illustrate how important it can be for a business today. I talk about my domain name business, master's thesis doing box office prediction for movies and review signal (http://reviewsignal.com) my startup which does web hosting reviews.

1. Kevin Ohashi
Founder, Review Signal LLC
Freelance Software Developer
Amateur Digital Nomad
Board Member, Affinity Lab

2. Playing with Data for Fun
and Profit

3. Who Am I?
Background:
● MSc in Entrepreneurship
● MSc in International Marketing & Brand
Management
● BA in Economics
● Minor in Computer Science

4. My First Business - Domain Names

5. Which Domain Names are Valuable?
Source: ICANN.org
Hint: it’s
.COM

6. What Makes Domain Names Valuable?
● Brandability
● Industry/Market
● Length (shortness)
● Assocations/imagery
● …
● -------------------------->
TRAFFIC!

7. Domain Name Business Model
Traffic == Money
1. Buy Domain
Names with Traffic
2. Redirect them to
Advertising
3. Collect Checks
Disclaimer: Might be evil. Many
people hate these sites. I don’t blame
them.
$$
$$

8. Data back in my day...
Yahoo! Overture
● Showed every query’s
popularity
● Updated monthly
● Unlimited Querying
● ==Data Mining Jackpot

9. What the data taught me...
Data showed a strong correlation between search
volume and traffic
Finding valuable domains was limited by:
● Algorithms to generate names
● Registering them faster than anyone else
Automation is a form of innovation

10. My Master’s Thesis - Predicting Box
Office Sales with Twitter Data

11. Why did I do this?
Why Not?
The goal of my research was to show electronic
word of mouth (WoM) == normal word of
mouth.
The byproduct was electronic WoM can be
recorded and analyzed. So I explored the
data...

12. I Love Movies, So I Studied Them

13. “The highest adjusted R^2 (.96) for week 3
used: Positive Buzz, Theaters and P/N
Ratio, to explain box office sales. “
tl;dr: The volume of positive
messages, the number of
theaters playing it, and the
ratio of positive to negative
messages explained 96% of
box office sales.

15. Most Important Data Skill Learned:
Sentiment Analysis

16. Commercialization of Thesis

17. How Does Review Signal Work?

18. Core Business: Sentiment Analysis
● Automatically analyzed over 15 million
opinions
● Created a source of reviews where none
existed before
● Always Up to Date (or Up to Data)

19. Thank You!
Remember...
● Data can be fun.
● Data can be profitable.
● Data can unlock new information/insights.
● Data is only as good as the person analyzing it.
@KevinOhashi Personal Website:
KevinOhashi.com
Business Website:
ReviewSignal.com
Kevin@ReviewSignal.com