UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

News Fit to Print — in Modern-Day Myanmar

By Elise Anderson

In today’s digital age, with mobile devices and online streaming services ascendant, print is considered a dinosaur.

But when Sylvia Saw McKaige (’11) surveyed the Southeast Asian media landscape, she decided to take an alternative, back-to-the-future tack with a country that only recently came online. The longtime media professional and UCLA Anderson graduate recently launched Frontier Myanmar, an English-language print magazine published weekly in Myanmar.

“I felt that good solid journalism was missing in the market,” she says. “You know, that feeling when you watch a news program or read an article and you think, ‘Wow, that’s good reporting.’”

McKaige’s background, both personal and professional, prepared her to make this leap of faith in a country not known for press freedom. She was born and raised in Singapore. Her father is Burmese and her mother is Chinese. She gained journalism experience working as a business reporter at the Bangkok Post newspaper in Thailand and as a television producer at CNBC Asia, and later headed the guest assignment desk as part of the senior editorial team involved with the development of strategy for programming.

UCLA Anderson Executive-in-Residence Charles Burdick Rode Technology Waves Across the Globe

 

By Elise Anderson

Charles Burdick (’77) is the first to admit that his career trajectory was not the result of some grand plan: rather, it was more defined by hard work, preparation and learning and understanding his specific “talent,” and then being ready to take advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves, as they ultimately did in a number of different fields and industries.

He shared some of the details that led to his current position as chairman of Virgin Connect Russia, a provider of broadband, telephony and cable TV in Russia, and as advisory board member for the UCLA Anderson Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports.

Burdick began his career in finance as an M&A analyst at Getty Oil before joining Carnation to work in the international division in finance and treasury. When Time Warner’s assistant treasurer of international, whom he knew slightly, mentioned he was retiring, Burdick applied for the job and got it — just a few months before the stock market crash of 1987.

“I was thinking I was fortunate that I had made the job move (to Time Warner) when I did, but the timing, job and industry were really more by accident than design,” he says.

It was at Time Warner that he discovered his passion for the entertainment business, which he found “full of bright, interesting people from all disciplines, whether it was finance, the creative end or branding and marketing.”

Nopical: Not Your Typical News Source

Alex Gostomelsky pitches Nopical at Plug & Play Selection Day, a startup accelerator program in Los Angeles

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By Isha Patel

The entrepreneurial spirit is nothing new to UCLA Anderson. Among the many opportunities available to MBA students with innovative ideas is a chance to start or plan their own company through the Business Creation Option of the Applied Management Research field study project. However, Alex Gostomelsky’s (’17) entrepreneurial journey started long before he arrived at Anderson.

It was May 2, 2011, and Gostomelsky was scrolling through Twitter to find out why major news sources were halting their regular evening newscasts to announce a special message from the White House. After a long search, Gostomelsky finally happened upon a tweet from a mid-tier news source that claimed Osama bin Laden had been shot in a raid led by the United States. After hearing of the breaking news, Gostomelsky had another thought: Why did it take so long for him to find a tweet that had high engagement rates and should have been one of the first tweets he saw on his feed?

It was this question that led him to create Nopical, a news aggregation website that allows users to build custom news feeds based on their interests. Gostomelsky wanted to provide a platform for users that took all the legwork out; people could now follow top stories in different subjects without having to follow all news sources or scroll through thousands of tweets to get the most relevant information.

These Quants Create Algorithms to Your Taste

UCLA Anderson MBA students conduct Applied Management Research field study projects in lieu of a thesis. Anderson gives full-time students the Business Creation Option in which entrepreneurs launch companies while still in school. Team Connoisseur researched the restaurant landscape in L.A. to devise a delicious formula for picking local dining options that improves on standard rating sites.

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By Zodin Del Rosario (’17), Richard Fernandez (’17), Kimberly Kalb (’17), Christina Rath (’17) and Sean Ginley (’17)

The restaurant search process is broken. With so many restaurants in L.A., people feel overwhelmed, and current websites like Yelp prove untrustworthy and cumbersome for people to sort through.

Connoisseur is a mobile app designed to offer personalized restaurant recommendations based on your dining history.

To gather seed data for our algorithm, the Connoisseur team surveyed 82 respondents to rate all the restaurants they had visited in Santa Monica. We explored multiple methodologies for predicting restaurant scores, including a k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN), in which users are plotted in vector space and the actual physical distance between users is measured. In a k-NN, users with similar restaurant ratings will be closer to each other. We looked to find the five nearest neighbors to any user. Taking the average ratings of these five nearest neighbors, we found the other restaurants that these similar users loved.

We were able to test the viability of this approach by removing some of the data and using the algorithm to predict the deleted scores. This method was most effective when users had rated at least 25 restaurants, meaning once we moved outside of Santa Monica we would need users to rate even more in order to give accurate predictions.

Globe-Trotting Avatars Just Got This UCLA Anderson XPRIZE Visioneer a Step Closer to $20 Million in Funding

Illustration: PC

By Ioan Istrate (’17)

I had the opportunity to work with the XPRIZE Foundation, laying groundwork for a new technological concept involving avatars. The project demanded the networking skills I gained at UCLA Anderson, my pre-MBA business acumen and a wealth of entrepreneurial skills gained during my six months with XPRIZE, the nonprofit that makes radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity by encouraging technological and social development through a high-profile, public competition model.

How I got there

Since I was in high school I’d been following the world-changing impact of XPRIZE. I was fascinated by their ecosystem that connects science, entrepreneurial vision and financial capital to develop new industries and social change.

Once I moved from Bucharest, Romania, to L.A., I tried to connect with several organizations I admired, including XPRIZE, reaching out to team members through LinkedIn and social media and attending as many events as I could. My network, as well as the efforts of UCLA Anderson’s Price Center to connect Anderson to XPRIZE, helped me secure an invitation to participate in the inaugural Visioneers program.

Positive Prognostication: Dodgers CEO Stan Kasten on BAMTech and the Business of Baseball

By Paul Feinberg

“The baseball business has never been stronger,” said Stan Kasten, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Dodgers. “We bought the team for $2 billion five years ago and everyone perceived it was too much. But we spent so much because it was worth so much more.” Kasten’s proclamation came during his keynote conversation with UCLA Anderson Professor Sanjay Sood at the 2017 Pulse Entertainment, Sports & Technology Conference held in Korn Convocation Hall.

The discussion covered a range of topics, from baseball’s business practices and innovations to the Dodgers’ prospects for the upcoming season. The former largely revolves around the quality and quantity of content the sport has to offer.

“We have more live attendees than other major sports put together,” Kasten said. “That made our digital business better because we have so much more content.” He noted that the Major League Baseball’s “At Bat” app allows fans to access games, news and highlights via their smart phones and tablets wherever in the world they find themselves. Kasten also talked about baseball’s decision to unify its content. “We made the decision in 2,000 to merge all the digital intellectual property. Everything was tightly controlled to the benefit of everyone.” That effort, known as Major League Baseball Advanced Metric (MLBAM) led to the spinoff media company BAMTech. Disney invested $1 billion in BAMTech last summer; the media giant now owns 33 percent of BAMTech with an option to become a majority stakeholder.

CES at Anderson, Where Technology Shakes Hands with Science

Enjoy the complete album of photos from CES at Anderson

UCLA Anderson’s annual CES^® event, held in partnership with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)^TM following the world-renowned CES conference in Las Vegas, attracted audiences among the wider community of UCLA students, faculty and staff, as well as industry professionals and business leaders.

The CES at Anderson differentiator is the university context, where rigorous scientific research meets entrepreneurship across disciplines. Professor Mayank Mehta, who teaches in UCLA’s departments of physics and astronomy and neurobiology, and Dr. Ramin Ramezani, assistant adjunct professor of computer science, both lent expertise to panels that explored machine learning, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Several Anderson alumni chimed in with insights from their positions at companies that include Epson, Sengled and Deepgram. Dyan Decker (’02), PwC’s U.S. forensic technology leader, sat down with Easton Technology Management Center faculty director John Blevins for a conversation about CES in Las Vegas, where the emphasis was on rapidly developing smart home technology and the race to refine virtual assistants.

Joss Whedon to UCLA Anderson Students: “Make Your Choice, and Give Yourself to that Choice”

By Paul Feinberg

“Save the Day … didn’t,” said writer/director/producer/auteur Joss Whedon, referencing the digital production company he founded in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. The goal of his super PAC Save the Day was to get out the vote, specifically in support of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, though the candidate herself was never specifically mentioned in any of the short films produced by the organization.

But while the text of Save the Day didn’t go as planned, the subtext contained several important lessons: that the act of voting is a powerful one and that getting involved in the causes one believes in is a brave and necessary act in a democracy. Whedon recently emphasized these points in an appearance at UCLA Anderson at the invitation of the Entertainment Management Association.

Whedon was a working writer in Hollywood when he created his first television show. Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a cultural phenomenon, featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy: high school student by day, killer of vampires and other denizens of the evil realms by night. Buffy begat its spin-off Angel and Whedon and his company Mutant Enemy Productions became power brokers in the entertainment industry. His body of work includes creating, writing and directing television shows, comic books and feature films. If you’re one of the millions of people who enjoyed the two Marvel films featuring the super hero team the Avengers, you’ve enjoyed Whedon’s work.

Up Close and Personal with Cutting-Edge Technology Innovations at the 3rd Annual CES @ UCLA Anderson

On Thursday, January 12, UCLA Anderson’s Easton Technology Management Center, in association with student-run Anderson Tech Business Association, is hosting its third annual CES^® conference. The free event occurs in partnership with and follows the wildly popular annual CES^® conference held in Las Vegas by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)^TM, which showcases the latest innovations in consumer electronics. The CES^® event at UCLA Anderson will highlight some of the newest emerging technologies through featured speakers and panel discussions from various industries.

“This third edition of the CES at Anderson will feature the latest innovations in terms of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality,” says Guillaume Roels, UCLA Anderson associate professor of decisions, operations and technology management and faculty director of the Easton Technology Management Center. “Technology innovations, such as self-driving cars and computers detecting credit fraud or making health care recommendations, which seemed so far-fetched a few years ago, have now become reality. We are very excited to bring together a distinguished set of speakers and panelists to discuss their business implications.”

UCLA Anderson Team Bound for Deloitte National Case Competition Finals

Left to right: Melissa Tran, Sophia Moreno, Ella Foux, Bradley McGough

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UCLA Anderson MBA students compete in case competitions locally, nationally and internationally, often bringing home first prize and always returning with valuable experience facing real-world business challenges in a competitive environment. Today, the UCLA Anderson blog presents the fourth in a series of guest posts by case competition participants. This is the prevailing Anderson team’s story of getting to the final phase of the Deloitte National Case Competition in Texas, January 5–8.

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By Bradley McGough (FEMBA ’18)

We received the case prompt for the Deloitte National Case Competition at 7:00 p.m. on a Thursday night. This marked the start of a UCLA Anderson-only competition that would get our team — Melissa Tran (FEMBA ’18), Sophia Moreno (FEMBA ’18), Ella Foux (FEMBA ’18) and I — to the Deloitte NCC finals.

The challenge Deloitte posed to us was how to leverage technology to address business challenges faced by a major sports network. We had just over 24 hours to dig into the data and put together a presentation on our proposed solution.

Our plan was for each of us to read through the case on Thursday evening and come up with a few ideas that we’d explore further in the morning, following a decent night’s rest, ensuring that our time together as a group would be spent as efficiently as possible. Although well-equipped rooms in Rosenfeld Library were at our disposal, we made the decision to meet at Ella’s house instead, so as to eliminate any distraction from the other 23 formidable Anderson teams.

The deadline to submit our polished proposal and deck was 11:00 p.m. the next night.