Miles Skorpen

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Posted on December 10, 2010 by Miles

Hi! I do mobile commerce: Partnerships, sales, account management, development, product management, marketing, and strategy.

Manager, RedLaser / eBay / Present
I work on business development for RedLaser, the leading general shopping app. I develop and maintain partnerships with companies, both to provide data to consumers and the build new applications off of our scanning SDK.
Business Analyst / McKinsey & Company / 2009-2011
Consultant / Kaiser Associates / 2008-2009
Co-Founder / CoPress / 2008-2009

See my LinkedIn account for more.

WordPress dominant in leading college newspapers!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Miles

Four years ago, I was editor at my small college newspaper, and we were experimenting with new (for us) forms of online publishing — we’d launched a new site based on Django, after experimenting on WordPress, and I was desperate to find other tech-minded journalists.

Somehow, I got introduced to people like Daniel Bachhuber, Greg Linch, Adam Hemphill, and a few others. Together, we went launched CoPress, where we encouraged college media to become more innovative.

At the time it was an organization seriously at odds with college media. Most major papers were published using College Publisher, a locked-down platform which also severely misaligned incentives for college papers by taking most/all of their online advertising revenue.

Within a year, though, we managed to launch a half-dozen newspapers on WordPress, and I think a critical turning point was when five of our partners won Pacemaker awards for their web presences.

CoPress only lasted two years, but its had an impressive legacy. One of our former advisor, Bryan Murley, just analyzed the results of the 2012 Pacemaker awards, and found that more than half are on WordPress … and only 4% are hosted on College Publisher.

Ayn Rand and … standing desks!?

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I really want to know why the eBay corporate site has a copy of "The Fountainhead" lying around. And why it showed up when I searched for "Standing Desk."

LASIK: Success!

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On Friday, I had LASIK surgery. My eyes were cut open, the cornea reshaped, and I'm now sitting in bed, able to read small text from across the room. Without glasses. I won't know my final prescription for some time, but I've clearly got good news.

Data as the new oil

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Miles

I’m in a great conversation on the value of data. Major issue that is raised is anonymity — it is really hard to anonymize big data:

Anonymity might be easy for diabetes, hard for Crohn’s, impossible for ALS. #SXDataNewOil #SxSW

— Miles Skorpen (@milesskorpen) March 11, 2012

Seems like one solution might be creating a new, regulated, profession, like doctors or lawyers. Not exactly the crowd-source and internet-loved solution, but I’m not sure we can trust society with utterly open information … while there clearly is enormous potential value to analyzing this information.

Wolfram Alpha does vision

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Just discovered an awesome feature of Wolfram Alpha -- enter in your vision prescription, and it'll return an image of what an eye chart looks like with that vision acuity. This is what I see today. Should change in 2 weeks.