Abstract

BlueMarlin will develop a web service to add intelligence functionality to a plain ad system.

Rationale

The demand is from:

  1. competitors to these dominate cloud players including many leading mobile device manufacturers who want to break into this market and have their internal system needs.
  2. enterprises who want to create differentiated proprietary advertising solutions, need to have an intelligence ad platform as a base to build their own competitive smart ad solutions.

Proposal

Blue Marlin is a critical web infrastructure for advertising based monetization. It is a cloud platform that adds intelligence to a plain ad system by analyzing user data and other data. It is a fundamental component in a modern competitive ad system. It includes the following components: smart booking for inventory, performance forecasting, advertising spending recommendation and more.

Currently, ad system space is dominated by large internet players like Google/Facebook/Adobe in US/EU and Tencent/Baidu in China with a closed based model. No good competitive open source platform exists in the market today. Open source is a good fit for this problem.

Current Status

BlueMarlin has been developed internal for over two years. In the future, We need new optimization algorithms to allocate bookings in inventory. It also needs some deep learning models to recommend the best inventory based on pCTR.

Meritocracy

The initial developers are very familiar with advertising system in many top internet companies. Apache was chosen specifically because the initial developers want to encourage this style of development for the project.

Community

BlueMarlin seeks to develop developer and user communities during incubation.

The initial set of Blue Marlin committers includes folks from Futurewei Technologies. We have varying degrees of experience with Apache-style open source development.

The developers of Blue Marlin want to work with the Apache Software Foundation specifically because Apache has proven to provide a strong foundation and set of practices for developing standards-based infrastructure and server components.

Known Risks

Orphaned products

Most of the active developers would like to become Blue Marlin Committers or PMC Members and have long term interest to develop/maintain and use the code.

Inexperience with Open Source

We has already a good experience with Apache open source development process in previous projects inside Futurewei Technologies.

Homogenous Developers

The current list of Blue Marlin committers includes developers solo from Futurewei Technologies. But we have a plan to expand developers to include many independent volunteers. We are experienced with working in a distributed environment in US, Europe and Asia.

Reliance on Salaried Developers

It is expected that Blue Marlin development will occur on both salaried time and on volunteer time, after hours. While there is reliance on salaried developers (currently from Futurewei Technologies, but it's expected that other company's salaried developers will also be involved). 

 

Relationships with Other Apache Products

A Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand

We believe in the processes, systems, and framework Apache has put in place. The brand is nice, but is not why we wish to come to Apache.

Initial Source

External Dependencies

  • Elasticsearch (Content Search) License: Apache License
  • Tensorflow (ML framework) License: Apache License, 2.0

Required Resources

  • A JIRA issue tracker

Initial Committers

  • Xun Hu, Futurewei Technologies (xun DOT hu AT futurewei DOT com)
  • Reza Adibnia, Futurewei Technologies (reza DOT adibnia AT futurewei DOT com)
  • Devarajulu Kavali, Intel  (devaraj AT apache DOT org)
  • Sheng Wu (wusheng AT apache DOT org)

Sponsors

Champion

  • Dave Fisher (Champion), (wave AT apache DOT org)

Mentors

  • Dave Fisher (ASF), (wave AT apache DOT org)
  • Craig Russell (ASF) (apache DOT clr AT gmail DOT com)
  • Jean-Baptiste Onofré, (jbonofre AT apache DOT org)
  • Von Gosling, (ASF) (vongosling AT apache DOT org )
  • Junping Du (ASF) (junping_du AT apache DOT org)
  • Uma Maheswara Rao Gangumalla  (Intel) (umamahesh AT apache DOT org)

Affiliations

Futurewei, Intel, Alibaba, Tencent

Sponsoring Entity

The Apache Incubator.

 

 

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