OppTV has designed:

• a query optimizer [25] for Stratified Datalog with negation (i.e., a logic-based programming language)
• the premise for a situation comedy titled Land of OpportuniTV (Again, America is ideally suited to become the Silicon Valley of the global CECS industry [20]; loan programs for CECS consumers should dramatically expand educational and economic opportunity worldwide [16]; and, as is previewed above, the American broadcast TV network owned by the conglomerate that acquires OppTV can be expected to play a central role in the build-out of the CECS industry. Hence the title.)
• the pilot episode of Land of OpportuniTV
• functional specifications for the aforesaid markets

The query optimizer is foundational to the success of an early-stage markets-maker for reasons that are detailed below.

Land of OpportuniTV is foundational to the success of an early-stage markets-maker because:

Again:

The best way to popularize the markets is to create media that:

1. increases awareness of the markets
2. showcases participants in the markets
3. generates profits

Maximizing these profits requires managing a portfolio of media properties and making phased investments in production value.

Land of OpportuniTV is the ideal centerpiece of OppTV’s ‘1.0′ media portfolio, because:

The single most profitable way to market is through an entertainment program that appears on broadcast television in America during prime time [26].

The nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain that gives rise to psychological addiction, is fired by comedy [27], beauty [28], and increased prospects of financial gain [29] and romance [30].

Marketers are aware that it is important to seek out ad space on programs that stimulate the nucleus accumbens:

“Marketers are now interested in a program’s relevance to its audience…it seems viewers remember ads in…programs they’re watching purposefully.”

Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here: Inside the 300 Billion Dollar Business Behind the Media You Constantly Consume
David Verklin and Bernice Kanner
2007

As such, an ideal TV show:

1. is funny
2. features attractive actors and actresses
3. increases viewers’ prospects of professional success and romance

Again, the CECS industry is exceedingly likely to be a leading creator of good jobs for U.S. residents in the coming years [20, 21].

An ideal TV show for the U.S., then, is a reality-based situation comedy that is set at a markets-maker like OppTV, features attractive actors and actresses, and increases viewers’ prospects of romance.

An ideal show for the markets-maker will also deliver profits indirectly. In particular, an ideal ‘1.0′ show will showcase other media properties in the markets-maker’s portfolio.

As is shown below, the premise of Land of OpportuniTV hits all of these marks.

The show will be central to OppTV’s efforts to create a seller’s market for itself, as is detailed in the below section about OppTV’s plans to create this seller’s market.

The premise of Land of OpportuniTV is detailed in the next section (i.e., Step 5). The next section also contains a detailed outline of the pilot episode (i.e., a treatment), and a write-up showing that the design of the pilot conforms to relevant best practices.

"Early innovations in query optimization separated the technologists from the marketers [sic] in the industry…Query optimization technology has proved critical to the performance of database systems, and serves as a cornerstone of [database system] architectures." Readings in Database Systems, 4th edition Joseph M. Hellerstein and Michael Stonebraker, Eds. 2005

The query optimizer is foundational to the success of an early-stage markets-maker because:

As seen above, popularizing OppTV’s CECS market starts with popularizing OppTV’s markets for ad spaces and predictions.

More precisely, with popularizing OppTV’s ad-space market, because:

OppTV’s prediction markets can enable demonstrations of expertise without being popular.

OppTV’s ad-space market can only add value to the extent that it is popular.

Once OppTV’s ad-space market is popular, it can be leveraged to popularize OppTV’s prediction markets (e.g., markets for predicting ad rates).

“Even before [Google’s] OpenSocial launches, there’s already plenty of speculation as to how else the program could expand from its initial incarnation. ‘Their missing element is social search,’ pointed out Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. ‘That’s not part of the APIs right now and Google doesn’t really have a social search engine.’” CNet.com October 31, 2007

A key to attracting media producers to OppTV’s ad-space market is providing tools that enable producers to research distribution channels for their media within webs of interlinked single-creator media, often referred to in aggregate as ‘the social graph’ [31].

“Get ready to start hearing ‘Social Graph’ as frequently as you hear ‘Web 2.0.’” Venture capitalist Brad Feld http://www.feld.com/blog/ August 18, 2007

Providing tools for searching and analyzing the social graph is also a key to attracting traders and advertisers to the ad-space market, because a key to properly valuing an online media property is properly valuing the quality of its online distribution (e.g., its position within the social graph).

The query optimizer will enable the rapid development and efficient scaling of these tools (details below).

The search/analysis results generated by the tools will contain ad spaces, and hence generate revenue for OppTV.

The query optimizer will enable the rapid development and efficient scaling of the aforesaid tools because:

Tool users cannot be allowed to compose their own queries, as ill-conceived queries could be prohibitively compute-intensive. Rather, users must be provided with an ever-expanding library of pre-defined queries (i.e., views), some of which will allow users to instantiate variables (e.g., set the variable NAME equal to ‘Smith’), and/or to compute statistics.

Of course, in-house and third-party developers won’t be able to fully anticipate which queries will be most popular with users.

As such, the site with the best library will be the site that provides in-house and affiliated developers with the best tools for rapidly developing and deploying ‘1.0’ views (each of which can be engineered for scalability if it proves popular).

The foundational tool for rapid development is a declarative programming language that is sufficiently expressive.

The most expressive declarative language for this kind of search/analysis will be powered by a tabled logic programming engine [32].

In many cases, site users will want to pose queries in terms of constraints (e.g., scheduling, cost).

The ideal engine, then, will also support constraint programming [33].

The highest-performing such engine is the XSB Prolog engine originated by OppTV co-founder David Warren [34].

The query optimizer will dramatically improve XSB’s performance in the proposed usage scenario, because:

OppTV will store information about the most popular sites within online social/professional networks (i.e., social graphs) in RAM.

While the view “user” is reviewing the query results retrieved from RAM, the rest of the results will be retrieved from disk and cached.

Functional specifications for building the ‘1.0’ markets are also foundational, of course. But the technology that undergirds these markets will not be a source of competitive advantage, as the requisite transactional software applications are commodities [35].

Next (i.e., Step 5) >>