One of the Fathers of the Internet

Today I went to Vint Cerf's kick-off lecture for Stanford WTO's annual colloquium series. The talk was a kind of overview of the Internet's history and current developments, and how innovation takes place.

The most important thing to take away is that the current Internet's penetration percentage is highly skewed. North America has 250 million Internet users, a 74% penetration, whereas Asia's 657 million users only account for 17% of the total population. Even more extreme is Africa, with only 5% Internet penetration. On the other hand, the people left off are more likely to first experience the Internet through mobile devices. What does that tell us? We need (much) better services, applications and infrastructure for mobile devices. How would we improve text and Web access, payment systems, navigation, location-based services, etc.? There is a lot to work on in this arena.

Sensor networks are also becoming a considerable part of the Internet. What we can do with these networks, specifically the applications and services that can be built on top of them, are still not fully explored.

He also highlighted the critical infrastructure for innovation to take place. To create a Silicon Valley, you'll need: Educated workers, liquid markets, venture capital, good socializing environment where everyone gets to know each other and tolerance to failures. Governments trying to create a Silicon Valley with just the hardware, but totally ignore the human resources and investment sources, are bound to fail, since nothing comes out of cold and brainless hardware (buildings, equipment, etc.) Communities that heavily penalize and look down upon (business) failures are likewise not suitable to be an innovative hub. For instance, business practices in Europe tend to focus a lot of negative attention on failed businesspeople, who often find it difficult to start over.

As a final note on speeding up innovation, Vint emphasized the importance of working together physically, despite the apparently convenient networked services like email, twitter and instant messaging.

IGames Summit 2009

Thanks to Morgenthaler Ventures, I got a free pass to this new conference called iGamesSummit09. This conference is all about iphone which is very relevant to Think Bulbs.

Panel 1: Lessons Learned: Why iPhone Games Work
- Getting on Top 25 apps list mean unit sales, not dollar sales.
- Free product and in-app purchases
- Tap Tap could have made couple million dollars but the whole user base is much smaller
- Walmart and Best Buy in the pocket
- How to get software above the noise? PR activity before the release, Cross-promotion invented in the games, profile and points relationship, localization (half of revenue for ngmoco from abroad)
- Kotaku or Penny Arcade are good blogs
- More engagement means more social; connect you with new people that share the same interest
- Not if but when regarding Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre
- Building authenticity and community around the game: quality of the game

Breakout Session #1: Building Social Games for the iPhone
- In game items that increase status and ability
- Daily Active User is the important metric
- Social games: Push notifications, micropayments, beginning of multiplayer
- Zynga only interested in API smartphones, Better Plumbing, Industry Needs to Work Together
- Admob is coming out with linkexchange
-1/3 ads, 1/3 lead gen, 1/3 userpay: social game business model
- Cool example: Bejeweled on Facebook

Breakout Session #2 Social Games, Anytime, Anywhere
- iPhone is a device to access social graphs
- Social Graphs now have APIs
- Ganes are good at generating emotions
- What about Social Emotions?
- Success Formality: virality, engagement and monetization
- 100 million DS sold, 180 million console, 1.3 billion web enabled PC, 3 billion mobile (Access)
- 150 million Myspace, 175 million Facebook, 500 million Social Network (Utility)
- Adsense for Games

Breakout Session #3 Social in Motion by SGN
- iFun
- NiiMe
- Vision: Convergence (ability to use facebook connect)
- The Good Noise: Price Elasticity
- Platform-Agnostic Gaming: The Future of Social Motion

Panel Session: Where do we go from here?
- Want to drive to retail: location where you can actually complete the purchase (referring to the Map enabled feature in iphone 3.0)
- 3.0 push notification can drive users back over time; more social experience
- $10 CPM; Display, Lead Gen, and (?)
- Video demo on App Store would be a nice feature

Puri! Launched!

It's a most exciting day at Think Bulbs, for we have just launched Puri!, a super-cool iPhone application that allows you to turn ordinary photos into stunningly original purikura (commonly known as photo stickers) and bring loads of fun to you and your friends. At its first release, Puri! has a host of nice features:

- Take a normal photo with your camera or from your photo albums to turn it into a marvelous purikura.
- Surprise yourself with how great (and funny!) you and your friends look in one of the 15 fantastic picture frames.
- Select from 45 polished chops for innovative decorations. Resize and move the lovely icons around to your desire.
- Tap your artistic skills: draw like there's no tomorrow with the anti-aliased freehand drawing tool!
- Send personal messages to your friends in a totally new way! The text tool lets you place resizable and movable text messages in your new purikura.
- Oops! Did the wrong thing? Our undo / redo system lets you unroll editing mistakes and save lots of time!
- Save your photos so that you can improve them further later on and wow people at parties!

No matter who you are and where you are from, you will find Puri! a great tool to capture your precious moments and turn them into most memorable photos with gorgeous decorations.

And behold, since this is only the beginning. New features are already under development, including in-app uploading to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa. New and creative chops and frames will also be uploaded from time to time to keep your Puri! experience fresh and fun. What's more? Existing users will be able to get these and future updates for free! Meanwhile, start exploring our wonderful new app and see how far your creativity goes!

Jack Ma's speech, Alibaba

We are glad to have Jefferson Chen, a 1st year Stanford GSB, write for us this time since I could not attend the speech myself.

Here are the highlights:
Speech by Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba
Feb 28, 2009 @ Stanford

· A company’s balance sheet can only be fixed when it dies (i.e. there are ongoing ups and downs in a company’s history. The same for an individual life)

· Disasters always come the moment you start to sense success

· Chinese should use the Chinese way – imported ideas from the west might not work as well as you think (The world is changing – reversing positioning of China and the US in the past decade)

· MBA case studies never work in reality – HBS did a case study on Alibaba years ago but the company could barely recognize themselves in the case

· The purpose of this trip by the entire Alibaba management team is mainly “internal team building”

o Think, learn, innovate

o Visit Ebay, Google, MSFT, Starbucks, Yahoo etc

o Looking for partners (making more sense for these big corps in the down turn – “back to basics”)

o Recruiting from Silicon Valley (looking to add 5,000 new positions in 2009, current employee base is 12,000) – best time to compete for the best talents

· #1 priority for a company is NOT its shareholders, but its “CUSTOMERS”

· #2 priority for a company is its Employees; shareholder is only #3

· Most companies only focus on #s, not the vision or its customers and employees, hence they fail

· He personally thinks 2008 was the worst year and best year for Alibaba

o Sensed the financial crisis very early

o Did a lot of internal restructuring (downsize certain functions, preserve cash, etc) to better position in the downturn

o Hence now in a superior position vs. competitors

o Think 2009 will the best year for Alibaba

o Believe the darkest period has passed (Aug-Sept 2008), but the most difficult period has not (probably the next 3-5 years)

· Wants to write a book on “How NOT to be big”

· Current users on Alibaba:

o 30 mm Chinese SMEs and 70 mm int’l SMEs

o 100mm+ users on taobao.com

· Taobao.com

o Overtakes Walmart global total volume in 10 years

o DESIGN FOR CONSUMERS

· Alibaba is a global company – just happen to be started by Chinese

· “Forget” about your competitors, JUST focus on your CUSTOMERS

· Be yourself, be comfortable yourself

· Group do not control anything at subs

o Subs fully run by their own CEOs

o No KPI on subs performance

o Group ONLY provides support, not overhead

· Work happily, live seriously