We're building an SMS chatbot for the Canadian cannabis market. It allows you to purchase marijuana directly from dispensaries and licensed producers in a few messages. We’re adding NLP and a basic recommendation engine to help increase retention and drive purchases.
We built out the infrastructure in a hackathon and are grinding away at an MVP. Starting to demo for dispensaries soon. I think we’re really on to something! People have been texting their drug dealer since.. well, the advent of cell phones, so we aren’t changing behaviour. It’s just nicer to chat with a friendly bot (with dispensary to doorstep delivery) than exchanging goods from a blacked-out Malibu in a Walmart parking lot.
Landing page here: http://hicanna.io/ Super happy to discuss our stack or anything else if you’re interested in the project.
> I don't understand ad networks enough to grasp how fraudulent ad inventory works, but as this article shows - you can make a killing exploiting it..
Someone has some "sites" that they show to an ad network or an advertiser and tries to sell the impressions on those sites. They receive "ad tags" in exchange, and the theory is that users are exposed to the ads shown by those ad tags, and the advertiser is satisfied.
However, once they have "ad tags", they can do whatever they want with them. They can find the URL signal that represents "give me money" and arrange to fire that signal.
> As is stands, is there any sort of compliance measure (or regulatory body) to monitor/prevent ad fraud in these networks?
No.
The Media Rating Council[1] was endowed by congress with special powers that allow participants to talk to each other antitrust protections kicking in, but these conversations are extremely non-productive.
