Sweepstakes,amp,#58,Give,the,O marketing Sweepstakes: Give the Old Lady a New Look

Awhile ago, I got an email from one of the "gurus" I follow and it shocked me. The gist of it was this person wanted to trade services for a household item.To say it floored me would be an understatement.What was worse was a few days later t Automation technologies represent a fundamental aspect of any modern industry. The major types of industrial automation solutions, such as DCS, PLC, SCADA, and MES, are used on a large-scale in process and discrete industries.DCS technologie

The sweepstakes is an old marketing tool everybody is using. Ifyou need to introduce a new product, or you need to give yoursales a boost, you use the sweepstakes. Usually, you will have adrawing from the pool of your buyers, and each week, or month,you will draw some winners, either by some computer algorithmor hand of some beautiful or famous person. The problem with the sweepstakes concept is that everybody isusing it, so that a particular sweepstakes promo gets indistinguishable, and the participant knows, from previousexperience, that his/her chance of winning are slim. Lotterytype drawing is impersonal, it has no content, and always leavesthe taste of possible fraud with the people who didn't win. The main object of sweepstakes, which is to bring more buyers,is thus losing its power in web marketing. On the web everybodyis talking about content and learning experience, so, for our10th anniversary we thought of giving the old lady a new look. Being IT developers, we knew we had to give the participantsa better chance to win, while still be in the range of acceptability for us. We understood that the chance for aparticipant to win should be bigger at the beginning, so that itshould nudge him to participate (buy our product) early. Inmathematical terms, we should be using such a DISTRIBUTION,which will give the participant a big chance to win early,while still giving a fair chance of wining later on. We decidedon prime numbers distribution, mostly because of a catchy name, i.e. we could say that our sweepstakes were "primed".The distribution would be implemented in such a way that everybuyer would get an unique, sequential ID number, when he buys.If his ID number is a prime number, he wins the sweepstakes. The distribution of wins is really appealing to the participant: 54% chance of winning in the first 11 buyers45% in the first 2026% in the first 10016.9% in the first 100012.3% in the first 10000 So, for any sales over 100, we would be in the regular rangeof standard 25% opening discount everybody gives away. On theother hand, even if the participant isn't among first 100 buyers,he stands a fair chance to win because even high numbers like9923, 9929 and 9931 are primes. More importantly, the participanthas a feeling he can control the wining because he can increasehis chances if he buys early, which is, of course, the mainpurpose of the sweepstakes. We designed a page ( http://www.CarpioHelpdesk.com ) and showed it tosome of our friends, and we were surprised to learn that most ofthem didn't really know what prime numbers were, and felt wewere feeding them some kind of "get $90,000 in 14 hours flat"scheme. We then realized we were on the Net, and that we shouldadd "content" to our sweepstakes, the participants should beable to learn something new, should learn about the importanceof prime numbers in computer industry. So, what's so important about prime numbers? K.F. GAUSS, one of the fathers of modern mathematics, in hisDistquisitines Arithmeticae, Art. 329(1801) says thatdistinguishing prime numbers from composites (non prime) is oneof the most important and useful problems in whole ofarithmetics. Donald E. Knuth, one of the fathers of computerprogramming, calls the prime numbers "somewhat MYSTERIOUS" andsays it will be necessary to develop new mathematical propertiesto fully understand their distribution. First of all, what is a prime number?A prime number is an integer greater than one which can bedivided only by one and itself. One, two and three are primes.Four isn't, because it is divisible by two. Five and seven areprimes, while six (divisible by two and three), eight (divisibleby four and two) and nine (divisible by three) are not. Prime numbers play an extremely important role in mathematicsand are used in numerous calculations (most known are factoring,greatest common divisor, linear equation solving, etc.). Butperhaps the most important quality of prime numbers is thesimplest one: any number grater than one may be written as aproduct of prime numbers. But their real importance for the computer world became evidentaround 1977, when R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adlemandiscovered a way to encode messages in such a way that thecode would be almost impossible to break even if the methodof encoding was public, i.e. known to everybody. In very simple terms, if you have a secret code (number), and itis written as a product of two prime numbers, then you can makepublic the method of encoding, and the number (public key), whilethe the factor is kept secret. Sound familiar? Remember PGP? So,how secure would be such an arrangement? It would be easy to generate a prime number of about 120 digits,as it would take only about 90 comparisons using modernalgorithms. Generate another prime number of 130 digits, and youwould end up with a key of 250 digits which would be thesecurity code. Prof. Donald E. Knuth in "The Art of ComputerProgramming" Vol.II page 388 analyzes how long would it take tobreak such a security code. If we knew of a method to find factorsof a 250 digit number in one tenths of a microsecond (which is what the FLOPS term is all about), we would need about 10 tothe power of 25 microseconds (that's a big number of microseconds:one followed by twenty five zeroes) to find all the comparisons. Asthere is only 1,556,952,000,000 microseconds in a year we wouldneed more than 3 x 10 to the power of 11 [300,000,000,000] yearsof CPU time to find the answer. If there were a government agencywhich would try to decode the message, and it purchased tenbillion computers and set them all to work on such a problem,it would still take them 31 years to crack the security code intofactors. So if you published the security code (public key) andalso the method of encoding, but kept secret one of the factorsyou would still be pretty secured. Understand why all the fuss about PGP (which stands for Prettygood privacy)?Understand the importance of prime numbers? So, the old lady is getting a new fresh look. It seems far moreinteresting than the lottery style sweepstakes. The participantseems to control his chances, and the cost for over 1000 buyersis even less than the regular opening discount everybody givesaway. We just added content, i.e. we let the participants learnsomething new, which is what the web is all about. I guess the point of this article really is: you shouldn't throwaway the old marketing tools that worked well for so many years.You just have to make them content rich, give them a new twist. Article Tags: Prime Numbers, Prime Number, Security Code