Think Bulbs

BSON Codec for Objective-C

2010-08-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

Coded this up yesternight and tested/debugged it this afternoon. It passes my test cases so far but may still be hilariously wrong at the same time.

BSON, is "Binary JSON" - but it has almost nothing to do with JSON except in name and in its function. It encodes loosely structured data just like JSON, but the encoding output is not human readable. The advantages it has over JSON are two:

JSON does not support binary data directly - you either have to send it via another channel or encode it to printable characters (e.g. via base64). BSON... supports binary data directly.
BSON is less flexible in terms of data types. An independent BSON document must be a dictionary.
Because each BSON document starts with its length, you can use it to pass loosely structured data over network sockets very easily.

The third point means you can have a client and a server passing messages to each other over a streaming socket (e.g. a TCP connection) with nothing more than just BSON documents. No extra layers of protocols or abstractions, no headers, no delimiters, no weird encodings, no extra handshakes, nothing.

Ok, if you need to authenticate your clients or encrypt the data, you still need to add something. But otherwise it's really simple and fast. Encoding a 1MB file to base64 on an iPhone isn't fast. Dumping the raw binary from memory to a TCP socket is fast.

So, here it goes...


//
//  BSONCodec.h
//
//  Created by Martin Kou on 8/17/10.
//  Copyright 2010 Think Bulbs Ltd. All rights reserved.
//

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <stdint.h>

@protocol BSONCoding
- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID;
- (NSData *) BSONEncode;
+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) typeID;
@end

@interface NSDictionary (BSON) <BSONCoding>
@end

@interface NSData (BSON) <BSONCoding>
- (NSDictionary *) BSONValue;
@end

@interface NSNumber (BSON) <BSONCoding>
@end

@interface NSString (BSON) <BSONCoding>
@end

@interface NSArray (BSON) <BSONCoding>
@end

@interface NSNull (BSON) <BSONCoding>
@end


//
//  BSONCodec.m
//
//  Created by Martin Kou on 8/17/10.
//  Copyright 2010 Think Bulbs Ltd. All rights reserved.
//

#import "BSONCodec.h"
#import <ctype.h>

#define BSONTYPE(tag,className) [className class], [NSNumber numberWithChar: (tag)]

static NSDictionary *BSONTypes()
{
static NSDictionary *retval = nil;

if (retval == nil)
{
retval = [[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
   BSONTYPE(0x01, NSNumber),
   BSONTYPE(0x02, NSString),
   BSONTYPE(0x03, NSDictionary),
   BSONTYPE(0x04, NSArray),
   BSONTYPE(0x05, NSData),
   BSONTYPE(0x08, NSNumber),
   BSONTYPE(0x0A, NSNull),
   BSONTYPE(0x10, NSNumber),
   BSONTYPE(0x12, NSNumber),
   nil] retain];
}

return retval;
}

#define SWAP16(x) \
((__uint16_t)((((__uint16_t)(x) & 0xff00) >> 8) | \
(((__uint16_t)(x) & 0x00ff) << 8)))

#define SWAP32(x) \
((__uint32_t)((((__uint32_t)(x) & 0xff000000) >> 24) | \
(((__uint32_t)(x) & 0x00ff0000) >>  8) | \
(((__uint32_t)(x) & 0x0000ff00) <<  8) | \
(((__uint32_t)(x) & 0x000000ff) << 24)))

#define SWAP64(x) \
((__uint64_t)((((__uint64_t)(x) & 0xff00000000000000ULL) >> 56) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x00ff000000000000ULL) >> 40) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x0000ff0000000000ULL) >> 24) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x000000ff00000000ULL) >>  8) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x00000000ff000000ULL) <<  8) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x0000000000ff0000ULL) << 24) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x000000000000ff00ULL) << 40) | \
(((__uint64_t)(x) & 0x00000000000000ffULL) << 56)))


#if BYTE_ORDER == LITTLE_ENDIAN
#define BSONTOHOST16(x) (x)
#define BSONTOHOST32(x) (x)
#define BSONTOHOST64(x) (x)
#define HOSTTOBSON16(x) (x)
#define HOSTTOBSON32(x) (x)
#define HOSTTOBSON64(x) (x)

#elif BYTE_ORDER == BIG_ENDIAN
#define BSONTOHOST16(x) SWAP16(x)
#define BSONTOHOST32(x) SWAP32(x)
#define BSONTOHOST64(x) SWAP64(x)
#define HOSTTOBSON16(x) SWAP16(x)
#define HOSTTOBSON32(x) SWAP16(x)
#define HOSTTOBSON64(x) SWAP16(x)

#endif

@implementation NSDictionary (BSON)

- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID
{
return 0x03;
}

- (NSData *) BSONEncode
{
// Initialize the components structure.
NSMutableArray *components = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

NSMutableData *lengthData = [[NSMutableData alloc] initWithLength: 4];
[components addObject: lengthData];
[lengthData release];

NSMutableData *contentsData = [[NSMutableData alloc] init];
[components addObject: contentsData];
[contentsData release];

[components addObject: [NSData dataWithBytes: "\x00" length: 1]];

// Encode data.
uint8_t elementType = 0;
for (NSString *key in self)
{
id <BSONCoding> value = (id <BSONCoding>) [self objectForKey: key];
elementType = [value BSONTypeID];
[contentsData appendBytes: &elementType length: 1];
[contentsData appendData: [key dataUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding]];
[contentsData appendBytes: "\x00" length: 1];
[contentsData appendData: [value BSONEncode]];
}

// Write length.
uint32_t *length = (uint32_t *)[lengthData mutableBytes];
*length = HOSTTOBSON32([contentsData length]) + 4 + 1;

// Assemble the output data.
NSMutableData *retval = [NSMutableData data];
for (NSData *data in components)
[retval appendData: data];
[components release];

return retval;
}

+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) t
{
const void *current = [data bytes];
if (base != nil)
current = *base;
else
base = ¤t;

uint32_t length = BSONTOHOST32(*((uint32_t *)current));
const void *endPoint = current + length;
current += 4;

NSMutableDictionary *retval = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
while (current < endPoint - 1)
{
uint8_t typeID = *((uint8_t *)current);
current++;

char *utf8Key = (char *) current;
while (*((char *)current) != 0 && current < endPoint - 1)
current++;
current++;
NSString *key = [NSString stringWithUTF8String: utf8Key];

*base = current;
Class typeClass = [BSONTypes() objectForKey: [NSNumber numberWithChar: typeID]];
id value = objc_msgSend(typeClass, @selector(BSONFragment:at:ofType:), data, base, typeID);
current = *base;

[retval setObject: value forKey: key];
}

*base = current + 1;
return retval;
}
@end

@implementation NSData (BSON)
- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID
{
return 0x05;
}

- (NSData *) BSONEncode
{
uint32_t length = HOSTTOBSON32([self length]);
NSMutableData *retval = [NSMutableData data];
[retval appendBytes: &length length: 4];
[retval appendBytes: "\x00" length: 1];
[retval appendData: self];

return retval;
}

+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) t
{
const void *current = [data bytes];
if (base != nil)
current = *base;
else
base = ¤t;

uint32_t length = BSONTOHOST32(*((uint32_t *)current));
current += 4 + 1;

NSData *retval = [NSData dataWithBytes: current length: length];
current += length;
*base = current;
return retval;
}

- (NSDictionary *) BSONValue
{
return [NSDictionary BSONFragment: self at: nil ofType: 0x03];
}
@end

@implementation NSNumber (BSON)
- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID
{
const char encoding = tolower(*([self objCType]));

if (encoding == 'f' || encoding == 'd')
return 0x01;
if (encoding == 'b')
return 0x08;
if (encoding == 'i')
{
// Ok, if you're running Objective-C on 16-bit platforms...
// Then YOU have issues.
// So, yeah, we won't handle that case.

if (sizeof(int) == 4)
return 0x10;
else if (sizeof(int) == 8)
return 0x12;
}
if (encoding == 'l')
{
if (sizeof(long) == 4)
return 0x10;
else if (sizeof(long) == 8)
return 0x12;
}
if (encoding == 'q')
return 0x12;

[NSException raise: NSInvalidArgumentException format: @"%@::%s - invalid encoding type '%c'", [self class], _cmd, encoding];
return 0;
}

- (NSData *) BSONEncode
{
const char encoding = tolower(*([self objCType]));

if (encoding == 'd')
{
double value = [self doubleValue];
return [NSData dataWithBytes: &value length: 8];
}

if (encoding == 'f')
{
double value = [self floatValue];
return [NSData dataWithBytes: &value length: 8];
}

if (encoding == 'b')
{
char value = [self boolValue];
return [NSData dataWithBytes: &value length: 1];
}

if (encoding == 'i')
{
int value = [self intValue];
if (sizeof(int) == 4)
value = HOSTTOBSON32(value);
else if (sizeof(int) == 8)
value = HOSTTOBSON64(value);
return [NSData dataWithBytes: &value length: sizeof(int)];
}

if (encoding == 'l')
{
long value = [self longValue];
if (sizeof(long) == 4)
value = HOSTTOBSON32(value);
else if (sizeof(long) == 8)
value = HOSTTOBSON64(value);

return [NSData dataWithBytes: &value length: sizeof(long)];
}

if (encoding == 'q')
{
long long value = HOSTTOBSON64([self longLongValue]);
return [NSData dataWithBytes: &value length: 8];
}

[NSException raise: NSInvalidArgumentException format: @"%@::%s - invalid encoding type '%c'", [self class], _cmd, encoding];
return nil;
}

+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) t
{
if (t == 0x01)
{
double value = ((double *) *base)[0];
*base += 8;
return [NSNumber numberWithDouble: value];
}

if (t == 0x08)
{
char value = ((char *) *base)[0];
*base += 1;
return [NSNumber numberWithBool: value];
}

if (t == 0x10)
{
int32_t value = BSONTOHOST32(((int32_t *) *base)[0]);
*base += 4;

if (sizeof(int) == 4)
return [NSNumber numberWithInt: value];

return [NSNumber numberWithLong: value];
}

if (t == 0x12)
{
int64_t value = BSONTOHOST64(((int64_t *) *base)[0]);
*base += 8;

return [NSNumber numberWithLongLong: value];
}

return nil;
}
@end

@implementation NSString (BSON)
- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID
{
return 0x02;
}

- (NSData *) BSONEncode
{
NSData *utf8Data = [self dataUsingEncoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding];
uint32_t length = HOSTTOBSON32([utf8Data length] + 1);

NSMutableData *retval = [NSMutableData data];
[retval appendBytes: &length length: 4];
[retval appendData: utf8Data];
[retval appendBytes: "\x00" length: 1];
return retval;
}

+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) typeID
{
uint32_t length = BSONTOHOST32(((const uint32_t *) *base)[0]);
*base += 4;

const char *utf8Str = (const char *) *base;
*base += length;

return [NSString stringWithUTF8String: utf8Str];
}
@end

@implementation NSArray (BSON)
- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID
{
return 0x04;
}

- (NSData *) BSONEncode
{
NSMutableDictionary *tmp = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithCapacity: [self count]];
for (int i = 0; i < [self count]; i++)
[tmp setObject: [self objectAtIndex: i] forKey: [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%d", i]];

return [tmp BSONEncode];
}

+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) typeID
{
NSDictionary *tmp = [NSDictionary BSONFragment: data at: base ofType: 0x03];
NSMutableArray *retval = [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity: [tmp count]];
for (int i = 0; i < [tmp count]; i++)
[retval addObject: [tmp objectForKey: [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%d", i]]];

return retval;
}
@end

@implementation NSNull (BSON)
- (uint8_t) BSONTypeID
{
return 0x0a;
}

- (NSData *) BSONEncode
{
return [NSData dataWithBytes: "" length: 0];
}

+ (id) BSONFragment: (NSData *) data at: (const void **) base ofType: (uint8_t) typeID
{
return [NSNull null];
}
@end

I'll submit the code to Github, and add an open source license to it a bit later.

Update: I've posted the source code to GitHub, you can find it at http://github.com/martinkou/bson-objc

The Birth of Saycheeze

2010-08-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

Think Bulbs haven't been blogging for a while now but we're excited to tell you that our 2nd iPhone product, Saycheeze, is live on the appstore and is doing quite well.

A year ago, our team really wanted to bring the idea of Purikura to the iPhone platform and we delivered. Thanks to all of you who supported, PURI became no.1 of free photography apps and stayed there for 2 months, garnering over 800,000 downloads.

We then thought could we possibly build a camera app that people will want to use everyday? When we looked around the appstore, many camera apps tell customers they have plenty of features. However, packing too many complicated features into one single app has compromised the usability and user experience.

We know user experience is key to any success of consumer products and simplicity and ease of use are often ingredients of great user experience. Therefore, we decided we would strip away all unnecessary features and provide only a few that would be core to users' usages and create a smooth and intuitive flow for the application.

Noticing that it's quite difficult to upload photos from iPhone to Facebook, we decided that it would be awesome if we could help users simplify and quicken the process of doing that. And the result of all these thought experiments is Saycheeze.

Thanks to Apple, we got featured fairly quickly in the New and Noteworthy category and subsequently in the What's Hot category. And day by day we climbed up the ranks of the photography category.

Despite the success, we know we're still far from being the only camera app that people need everyday. There are still features that we could and should build but sometimes we just couldn't do them due to the API's restriction.

It feels great building products that delight many users and we could only hope that users will continue loving them and tell us how they could be improved.

Engineering Virality Bootcamp

2010-01-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

My notes for attending a bootcamp hosted at Stanford GSB on virality.

Julio from Experience Project

Virality: Degree to which something is propagated throughout a population.

Viral: Every affected person leads to at least one other being affected.

Buzz: Conversation generated among people from an event or action.

Left Brain (Quantitative) and Right Brain (Creative, Holistic) approach

The Hotmail example, Facebook platform (driven by invitations)

Andy Smith- Dragonfly model

Ripple effect- Small actions, big change, overtime

Emotional Contagion- Tendency to catch and share emotions

Dragonfly has four wings: Focus, Grab attention, Engage, Take Action

Focus- small, singular; action plan; concrete and specific; true to self; milestones; metrics

Grab attention- (missed this part)

Engage- Understand, tell a story, make it personal, mix media

Take action- Make it easy, fun, promote idiosyncratic, provide feedback, create independent action

Definition of virality: Think Spread, each outbreak begins with an individual, propagation is endogenous (self-sustaining), new infections grow with each generation

Conventional Marketing: Conversions= Prob of conversion x people exposed

Viral Marketing: Reproduction Rate= Transmission Rate x People told, must be >1 to be sustained

Viral leverage comes from increasing the transmission rate

Transmission Rate= Grab attention rate x Engagement Rate x Fit, Ease and Fun taking action

Fireside Chat- Matt, Dave, Ed

Dave- AARRR!: 5- step startup Metrics Model

Acquisition --> Activation--> Retention--> Referral--> Revenue

1 Page Business Model= Users + Conversions+ Priorities

Ed- Conversion Rate-> Engagement Rate--> Invitation Rate

Viral Factor= X*Y*Z

Conversion Rate: Percentage of invited users who install the app

Engagement Rate: Percentage of users who invite at least one friend

Invitation Rate: Average Number of invites sent per engaged user

Concept of A/B testing

Images are really important, using 99designs to see which images are clicked on the most

Tactical vs Long term goal; be cautious of initial messaging

For consumer web, scalable distribution, addictive user experience, design are key

Game mechanics, paid acquisition, social distribution- Zynga

Platform- think more in terms of distribution and monetization rather than features

Iphone apps will go viral first on facebook before on itunes store

Fireside chat- Jeff, Mark, Ben

Jeff invested in Tapulous and they discovered no virality at all on the platform; about 20 million installs

Bootstrapped marketing is all about personally touching people

Ben Katz- Rolodex: Smile, dial and rile; you are Billy Mays, Celebrities: they're just like you, Look big: sleep with Bill Gates, Leland and Yoko, Harness the groundswell: Press, video, social media, email

Getting on techcrunch is prime

Why Startup? (Part 2)

2010-01-04T00:15:00.000-08:00

I've left part 1 of my passage on the blog without a continuation for 3 months. I'm feeling a bit sick today so I'm not really "in the zone" for programming, so I figured I should continue this little passage.

Common Misconception

One common perception among common people is that startup founders would become overnight millionaires - that can hardly be further from the truth. The ideal scenario doesn't happen most of the time.

If one founds a startup based on the assumption that his product or his contract projects would make his and his team overnight millionaires, then the very founding philosophy of that startup, is wrong. The superficial reason is that it's a very poor bet - it doesn't happen very often.

The real reason is that it breaks the team.

Why?

The reason of existence of such a company is making short term profit, so people joined the company in expectation of short term profit. What really happens with startups is that, 99.99% of the time, you won't see that short term profit in the beginning. For the remaining 0.01%, the revenue may drop significantly after just a few months (e.g. your army of Facebook users, just happened to have found something new to play with).

What happens to the team, then? It breaks. Team members expecting to get short term profits would go to do other activities giving them short term money.

Never Lose the Team

The most valuable thing that anyone participating in a startup can gain, is the team - it is risk-free and does not come with an interest rate. It's ok to lose money, it's ok to lose customers, but never lose the team.

One may be born awesome - one may have played computer games all day yet he got straight A at school; he went to exam venues with an evil maniacal laughter; he's a 1-in-1000 genius and he knows it.

But, being a 1-in-1000 genius, also means there're something like 1.4 million people who're just as evil-maniacally-smart as him in China, alone. The chance at success of one person alone, is never too good. And then it's impossible for most people to be a 1-in-1000 evil maniacally laughing genius, by definition.

But if you've managed to find a team of 5, who're "only" 1-in-50 smart - not really hard to find in universities coz they did the pre-screening for you - then you've just probabilistically got yourself a massive advantage over that lone evil maniacally laughing genius. And, obviously, 5 people can do more than just one person, and 5 people can specialize their talents (e.g. engineering, project management, market research, sales, etc.) into different areas of business so each one of them is less distracted while running a company.

Why Startup?

As a young 20-something, which includes myself, it doesn't really matter that the first or second startup attempts fizzle out. We may be poor and lack the social power of our older friends who've got high ranking political or corporate seats. But we have time.

We can do experiments, fail, think, try again; systematically eliminate things and ideas that do not work; build relationships and knowledge; build an awesome team that trust each other; look out for opportunities. Try, until succeed, the details don't matter. You can work without an office, you can work a part time job in McDonald's, you can even have another job at Google or IBM - it doesn't matter. Just stay in the game and snowball your advantage. You don't even have to be technically owning a company - e.g. you can be doing an open project in your free time and build a profit making service around it later - as long as you're making progress with your team, it's good. There's always a way, no matter how devious.

The biggest advantage of a 20-something is time. We are the ones who have the luxury to think and act long term, and reap the results. Have the cake and eat it. Just like we have the exponent advantage in the compound interest game, we also have the advantage in snowballing the talent and the experience. As anybody who has played any multiplayer game that involves two brain cells would know, the winners in the end are always those who took all possible advantages that the game can offer them. And that is the real meaning behind founding a startup for a 20-something - snowball advantages not available to our less aggressive friends - the team, the knowledge, the experience. When we win, it won't be because of fairness.

Startup School 2009

2009-10-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

I'm down at Berkeley for most of the day to attend Startup School, a very popular one day conference hosted by Y Combinator. The line up could be found on their homepage and I typed up notes for most speakers except two (too sleepy for that presentation and the other one wasn't that interesting...). There are about 700-800 technologists attending today.

Paul Graham

Paul asked founders who he funded about what have surprised them the most:

Emotional roller-coasters are much more extreme

Persistence is key

Think Long term

Lots of little things

Start with something minimal: over-engineering is poison

Engage users

Determination with flexibility: Fast iteration is key

Don’t worry about competitors

Expect the worst with deals

Investors are clueless

You may have to play games

Luck is a big factor

The Value of community

You get no respect

Things change as you grow: Roles of founders

Don’t expect startup is like a job

Summary: Overall, pretty good advice about what to expect when doing startups. The lines and quotes will be posted online soon. Many theories echo with the lean startup movement, which is all about iterating and launching fast and early.

Greg Mcadoo (Sequoia partner)

Economy doesn’t really affect the determination of entrepreneurs

Horrible economy headlines instead create innovation

- willing to try new things

- Often without choice

- especially trying to save money

- competition is less irrational

- landlords are ready to deal

- Everything is at fair price

- Recession rewards much more discipline

- Cash register Ringers: earn revenue early

- Committed Crew

Jason Fried (Founder of 37signals)

Bootstrapping- Day 1 bootstrapped company looks to make money, funded company looks to spend money

Practice making money, learn the art early

Funding is crap and an addiction

You can be as successful as you want to be on your own, don’t need others to anoint you

Best way to get feedback is to price it

Planning is Guessing

Useful > Innovative

Software has no edges

You can’t make just one thing

Apologize the right way: say sorry

Failure is not a rite of passage

Summary: Like last year, 37signals tries to debunk many glorious myths of being an entrepreneur. They are also big proponents of selling products for a price.

Chris Anderson (Chief Editor of Wired Magazine)

Freemium:

- Minority subsidize the majority

- Freeloaders cost little

- Free samples are the best marketing

- Multiple tiers of products

- Market segmentation

- Conversion = loyalty

Games: people will pay to save time, lower risk, things they love, status, if you make them

Feature Limited, Capacity Limited, Seat limited, Customer class limited

Summary: Talked about his freemium theory which is essentially different pricing structure with a free version for people to experiment. Quite applicable to the iphone platform and is what we're practicing with our PURI!

Paul Buchheit (founder of Friendfeed and gmail)

Limited life experience + Overgeneralization = Advice

Shared delusions in organizations if one works too long in it

Don’t be too comfortable

Way of internalizing knowledge is by trying and doing

Summary: Paul is obviously a brilliant entrepreneur. He had all the characteristics since he was young and his advice is to just do it and try things out because there isn't a formula to success and everyone has different background and circumstances.

Twitter (Evan Williams and Biz Stone)

So what if it’s just fun and not useful (think ice cream)?

The team likes the product and engages with it.

Engineering: Don’t go overly-clever

Make real effort of communication. Don’t assume you know what others are working on.

Advice they took is gut-checking

API is huge

Summary: Nothing too interesting here. They are probably hiding a lot of things that they couldn't share.

Mark Zuckerberg

Build an incentive structure to share information

Learnt from watching how people use the site

Went after the least receptive audience

A lot of mistakes could be overcome if you’re building something valuable

Management team has steadily evolved and improved

Focusing on technology culture

Google has a more academic culture

Facebook prides on building things fast, keeping a good engineer-user ratio etc.

Biggest risk you can take is to take no risk.

Be measured about doing things that are bold

He’s big on trends on openness and transparency

What tradeoffs are you willing to have to set the direction and values of the company?

Summary: First time listening to Mark speaking and I was impressed by his responses to most questions. He focused a lot on talking about Facebook culture and how it's different from that of Google. He's also big fan of iterating on both products and the management team.

Tony Hsieh (founder and CEO of Zappos)

Two books he recommended: Good to great, Tribal Leadership

Most parts of the talk are similar to the pitch that he gave at Stanford which I blogged some months ago.

What’s the larger vision and greater purpose in their work beyond money or profits?

Difference between Inspiration and Motivation

Don’t keep making compromises regarding hiring

Alignment: It doesn’t matter what your core values are…as long as you commit to them.

Vision and culture can inspire passion and purpose

Happiness: Perceived Control, Perceived Progress, Connectedness, Vision/Meaning

Types of Happiness: Pleasure/Rock Star (Chasing the next high), Passion/flow (Engagement- time flies), Higher purpose/Meaning (Being part of something bigger than yourself)

Summary: As usual, Tony loves talking about culture, vision and how Zappos could deliver Happiness to customers. This time, he has a little more analysis on Happiness and how we could break it down and analyze them.

Mark Pincus

- Control your destiny

- Aspire to be a great CEO

Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource

2009-10-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

Notes for Today's class featuring Treb Ryan (CEO of opsource.net):

- Cloud generation expectations: Immediate availability, sharing and collaboration, Ubiquitous Access

- Enterprise Storm Coming- Security and Compliance, Standards, Support, Management and Control, Performance

- Next CIO will demand the cloud

- Immediate availability = Complete Flexibility; No commits (can turn it off as fast as turn it on)

- Ubiquitous Access= Web+ Programability ; application can call infrastructure to work with increasing user or more need for CPU power etc; calling resources as you need it

- Sharing and Collaboration= Community Resources; users creating images

- Private Cloud not equals Enterprise Cloud

- Private Clouds are Virtual Environments Built on in-house infrastructure

- Security and Performance= Compliance and SLA's

- Standards= software and hardware

- Single User Systems= No Enterprise Control

-Multi User Systems= Management and Control; Private communities, Projects, Departments-->Centralized Control and Billing

- Sell additional support and services once customers use regular service (Good SaaS companies do this like Amazon)

Reid Hoffman

2009-10-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

It's raining really hard today so I came in late to Hoffman's talk but here are some notes

Notes:

- He was mentioning the book Regional advantage

- Vision of modern career- individuals become a brand, small business, need network and manage their opportunity flows; what's my competitive edge?

- Theory of Internet: everyone is a publisher

- Linkedin on how work will happen globally across professional circles: Innovation happens when combining pieces and refining them. Trading work practices

- Most startup strategy is island hopping (finance, operations, finance...)

- Startup lesson: Trying to see something that others don't see (right now they think you're crazy but 2 years later everyone will be like duh...)

- Take competitive issues seriously

- Be willing to take a risk and be wrong

- Internet: Distribution, Distribution, Distribution

- Sites that get large can be thought of as platform for all kinds of things

- Part of entrepreneurship is just GO

- Philosophy applying to business is to think crisply but also think about possibilities

- Spent only 2000 on Adwords at the very beginning of company

- Virality: Create incentives to make it easy for others to share the site

- Zynga: how much fun social things are instead of Halo and other deep games. Chips as incentives.

- Very good to be focused, simple and clear to punch through the noise

- Don't do something that you think is just money

Kai Fu Lee's talk

2009-10-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

Kai Fu Lee came to Stanford to promote his new incubator Innovation Work. I am honored to have the chance to give him the parking permit :)

Here are some notes I've taken:

- He started with the meaning of his name- Kai Fu (Beginning to revive China

- China Internet Market 338 million users; mobile users 155 million

- Chinese people use IM more than email (partly because of SMS and because of QQ built by Tencent)

- Music and Gaming growing really fast; Blog as well

- E commerce is only 1/3 of US

- Average age of internet user is 25 in China

- Young people rely completely on internet for news

- News and blogs have increased expression (this is with regard to censorship)

- Users are very curious: Eye tracking result (Chinese users browse the whole page)

- Internet cafes only break-even; they make money from instant noodles and coke; people stay for 12-24 hours there; they are also really good for dates

- Overcoming E-commerce obstacles like lack of trust and few credit cards: Escrow Payment, Bicycle Delivery, IM Micro Payment; they needed trusted brand; 50 X potential

- Entertainment Centric and Busy Pages

- 6-10 top 10 internet companies is in gaming space

- He mentions couple smart observations that have created huge businesses

- 90% users pay nothing; the remaining spends a lot (1000-5000 US)

- Real beauty certification !!!

- Cloud computing (software managed by server and can be modified from server); it allows you to charge money (internet connectivity)

- Video and news could not get license

- Pause ad- everytime you pause, pops up

- Mobile internet (China is 3G everywhere, government support)

- Usage was highest in Guangdong province because Guangdong mobile has the best flat rate plan (when price comes down, the market will explode)

- Google's Android is going to be huge according to Kai Fu

- Shenzhen Inc's reverse engineering capability is absolutely insane (Shanzai phone)

- Home Court Advantage will soon take over returnee's benefit

Bruce Chizen, Former Adobe CEO

2009-09-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

I'm back blogging partly because I need to take notes for this class: CS 309a. Great seminar featuring awesome speakers (cs309a.stanford.edu). Today the class features Bruce Chizen and he looks a little like Steve Jobs.

At Microsoft, Bruce gets some sense of Microsoft culture. At Claris, he met the best leaders he has ever met Bill Campbell. At Adobe, Bruce balanced it to become a great company to work for and a company that is performance driven and result oriented (early day Adobe was 'fuzzy').

Bruce emphasized taking a step back and restating their values. He thinks every CEO will agree with it's much easier to make change when the company is in crisis mode.

Acrobat platform was built so that tools and other enterprise software could make a lot of money. Photoshop is really a platform too. Flash was critical to Adobe and therefore they spent 3.1 billion to buy Macromedia. Omniture's acquisition is also because of leveraging the flash component.

A question asked: Will Google docs make pdf obsolete? Bruce suspects yes and says it's up to Adobe to figure out the file format (he open sourced it).

Much of the open source initiatives are innovations on top of what a commercial company has already created, Bruce comments. Bruce thinks it's interesting to watch what's happening in the browser space and he guesses one of the two: Chrome vs. Firefox will dominate browser space. Also watch out for HTML 5 and Silverlight.

Strategic review: where are the cash cows, where are the potential homeruns; teams couldn't understand why resources are poured into other products that are loosing money (it's down to the management team to keep those projects from pre-mature deaths).

Once you have data, you go with intuition (great quote...). Need to be humble enough once you made a stupid decision (The Kinkos deal).

It's hard to make money on consumer software. Adobe will continue to play the consumer space as a defense play from competitors.

Do you cripple your own product? No. Need to target marketing messages carefully. This is regarding Photoshop vs photoshop elements.

Bill Campbell advice: Never compromise your integrity. What's the right thing? Is it for the company's long term benefit?

Engage all level of the company.

Don't live in an artificial world (story of Bill Gates not knowing PDF has taken over the file format because Microsoft is all using Microsoft office file format)

Anytime you compete with free, it's really hard. Spend a lot of time with customer to understand why they select one product over the other.

The leader must be intimately involved with the product, technology and the customers otherwise you can't make the right decisions.

Why Startup? (Part 1)

2009-09-08T03:06:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a group of 5 final year project students with their project supervisor in CUHK's CSE Department on Wednesday. One of the persistent topics in the meeting was technology startups. So the word that kept being reiterated during that discussion was "passion" - beyond that, there was little information revealed to the students on what a startup is like. So I can imagine the students were leaving the room empty headed about it, probably thinking tech entrepreneurs like us are just a bunch of maniacs - "man, why don't you go work for an investment bank?".

It has been very difficult to convey to other people in Hong Kong what "startup" means. Most people here will give you a blank look if you tell them you're doing a "startup" - in the entirety of their lives dealing with English documents, they haven't heard of or seen this word once! If you explain to them you're a technology company founder, they'll immediately think you're an ultra-rich who has a fleet of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, etc. If you explain to them that you're just a small company with a bunch of passionate people, people would usually praise you but the gap of understanding is still there.

Passion

"Passion" is an empty word by itself, to really convey the meaning behind this word, an example is needed.

When I was sitting for the university entrance interview 5 years ago, the Professors asked why we're looking to study computer related subjects. Somebody besides me said "Because of the commands! The commands are powerful!" To the Professors this would most likely be a poor answer, but it is an expression of passion nonetheless. The desire to have more control, or to be less helpless, is a kind of passion.

The true difference between people who would go on to found startups, and those people who would prefer to have a stable job, is that those who found startups desire to have more control over their lives. While many people would balk at the risks of actually running a business, and thus the violent changes that can come with it - startup founders see the experience and knowledge missed by those who're limited to their office cubicles as another form of risk. After all, the world has been and will be changing. When change happens, the rule of the day will become survival of the fittest. Anything requiring a greenhouse to survive in, will wither and die. Creative destruction.

Passion is also the ability to see new possibilities from existing circumstances. It is one thing to be able to implement difficult algorithms and get them to work; it is quite another thing to be able to sense the desires of the people (or as Sequoia Capital puts it, pain point), imagine new possibilities, and turn imagination into reality. If you don't have a sense of love towards something good and beautiful, you won't see the possibilities, or at most, you'll just come up with mundane ideas. If a software architect doesn't have a sense of love towards something good and beautiful, he'll just come up with one ugly complicated design after another, no matter how many years he worked in the industry.

Difficulty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

One of the minor things I remembered during the meeting in CUHK was something along the lines of "you guys are having fun because you still have time to play, but these guys actually have to watch out for their cash flow". That was the Professor speaking to his FYP students.

The old FCKeditor site is gone... So I can only do a screencap of a Google cache

But we're actually having a lot of fun. I'm having so much fun running Think Bulbs Limited, that I resigned from FCKeditor, one of the top open source projects in the world, last month. FCKeditor brought me a lot of valuable experience, some money, and a top 0.7% ranking among open source developers worldwide in Ohloh. I have to thank Frederico for it, but I've decided to move on, because of the pursuit of happiness.

Running a startup, designing and implementing real-world projects, talking to customers and reporters... are much more difficult than simply doing a final year project. But the excitement you get from all the unique experiences; from the praises from real, actual customers and other people; from people who had discovered new hope because of your results... is unparalleled to any other thing you can do in this world. The difference between founding a startup and implementing a managed software project is like riding a bicycle with and without the training wheels. If you only ride a bicycle with the training wheels on, you won't fall, but you'll also never appreciate the true joy of riding a bicycle.

Once you've learned to ride a bicycle without the training wheels on, you discover a new form of happiness. Learning to use a computer; coding the first "Hello World"; designing and coding the first practical software application; learning about and improving other peoples' designs and thus, discovering new possibilities in software architectures; finding the first partner whom you share your views with and whom you can trust; finding the first employee who trusts you and your vision; having the first user; reading the first user comment; having the first thousands of users; beating the first competitor; getting the first media report; ... In every step of learning about computer science, and running a startup, there is happiness to be discovered.

Having difficulty isn't really that bad, as long as you're aware of the possibilities while/after overcoming it. Lots of people would re-play a finished computer game at a higher difficulty just to see what else is possible. Startup founders can be seen as those who try the same thing with the real world - my friends already told me what a cubicle life is like, what if I try something else?

Upgrading to Puri! Lite 2.0

2009-07-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

Puri! Lite has returned in full force with a host of exciting new features and better user experience. With version 2.0 of the most popular photo sticker application, users can freely edit both portrait and landscape photos with great ease. More frames and stamps have been added to the already grand collection of high-quality artwork. Emailing purikura and the new speech bubble make it even more fun and convenient making photo stickers.

Foremost, we have improved the user interface significantly with an overhaul of the back-end photo-saving engine. Now you can save photos in the app together with the stamp and frame meta-data and therefore you can resume editing even after you close and reopen the app! This is a rather advanced feature with quite a bit of technical complexity under the hood. Unfortunately, the save format of version 2.0 is not backward compatible with the previous versions. Therefore, upgrading to 2.0 would cause the photos saved within the application to cleared since they are unusable. However, the upgrade does NOT affect photos exported to Facebook and the iPhone's Camera Roll album. *** We strongly advise users to backup their in-app saves by exporting them to the iPhone album and/or Facebook before upgrading. ***

Puri! 2.0

2009-07-21T21:48:00.000-07:00

Puri! 2.0 is finally out after 3 months. The journey of making this iphone app has not been easy and we, as a company, have grown and improved alongside Puri!.

We started out as 3 young adults who were looking to do something unique, something different, something enjoyable. Thinking in the direction of making people happy, we came up with the idea of Puri!.

We hope that Puri! would add new meaning to people’s photos and make photos more fun. We hope that Puri! could be used, shared and enjoyed by father, daughter, husband and wife. We hope that it would put smiles onto people’s faces.

But never have we thought that over 500,000 people will download this app and make us no.1 in the free photography category for over 2 months. This application is special because of all of you and we are truly grateful for everyone’s support and love for this application.

We worked very hard to get this new update out in hope of making the experience an even greater and memorable one. We have listened to many of your feedback and turned Puri! into an even more fun and powerful photo editor. Yet, in its core, it’s still an application that tries to make people laugh and smile.

Ultimately, Puri! is made for you and we’d love to have your thoughts, comments and feedbacks so we can keep innovating and making Puri! more fun.

Out of all the new features, the most exciting for us is the community feature. We want our Puri! users to share their photos with the whole community. We want our Puri! users to share the joy of others through viewing others' purikura. We want our Puri! users to be able to keep and collect their own purikura.

And to that regard, we’re working very hard with printing partners to allow you to order actual photo stickers and get them sent to your home.

Please stay tuned to the coming updates and join the community by going to mypuri.com (full website coming out soon). Thanks again for your support and love!

The proper way to fix linker conflict between AdWhirl and FBConnect

2009-07-21T03:41:00.000-07:00

I was trying to integrate AdWhirl into Puri! Lite 2 yesternight but I was getting a linker error. Apparently the static library that AdWhirl is giving out already contains part of Facebook's FBConnect library and it is causing duplicated symbols with our own FBConnect library. AdWhirl's instructions page has some answers to it but it's not good enough for us, because we're using a customized FBConnect:

Refactoring would work if it's done correctly. But with Objective-C's dynamic nature it's possible for grep/sed/anything relying on regular expressions to miss a few references that aren't apparent in the code. I'm sure it will work for FBConnect (which isn't too complicated a library), but I don't see it as a clean solution.
Removing .m files from FBConnect until no conflict is left - this doesn't work for us because it means we're removing our own customizations.
Specifically compiled .a files without Pinch Media's package (which is the package containing FBConnect libraries) - doesn't work because we want to have Pinch Media's adverts.

There's a far better way than any of the above.

AdWhirl's library is actually an .a file - a static library that can be used by the GNU linker. People who're familiar with GNU toolchain would know that an .a file is actually just an archive containing object files (.o files that are the direct products after you've compiled .c, .cpp or .m source files). Because it's just an archive, it can be opened, listed, extracted and modified.

So let's see what's inside AdWhirl's static library file:

[martinkou@martinkou AdWhirl]$ ar -t libAdWhirlDevice_1.2.0.a
__.SYMDEF SORTED
ARAdNetworkController.o
ARAdRolloController.o
ARCustomController.o
ARExternalAdNetworkController.o
ARJumpTapController.o
ARMillennialMediaController.o
ARMobclixController.o
ARQuattroController.o
ARVideoEggController.o
AdRolloCanvasController.o
AdRolloController.o
AdRolloAdContent.o
AdRolloConnectionURLDownload.o
AdRolloConnectionURLMetricsFetch.o
AdRolloImgCacheManager.o
AdRolloLocationManager.o
AdRolloAdView.o
AdRolloCanvasWebView.o
AdRolloContainerView.o
AdRolloView.o
MMAdOverlayController.o
MMAdView.o
MMAdViewPrivate.o
MMAdWebViewController.o
MMAppData.o
dgif_lib.o
gif_err.o
gif_hash.o
gifalloc.o
PLGIFImageView.o
PLGIFReader.o
ARRollerController.o
ARReachability.o
ARRollerAnalyticsUrlRequest.o
ARRollerConfigurationInfoRequest.o
ARRollerStaticInfo.o
ARRollerUrlMetricsRequest.o
ARRollerUrlRequest.o
ARCDataScanner.o
ARCDataScanner_Extensions.o
ARNSCharacterSet_Extensions.o
ARNSDictionary_JSONExtensions.o
ARNSScanner_Extensions.o
ARCJSONDeserializer.o
ARCJSONScanner.o
ARCJSONSerializer.o
ARRollerView.o
ARRollerViewInternal.o
Mobclix.o
MobclixController.o
MobclixDatabase.o
MobclixJSON.o
MobclixMessenger.o
MobclixReachability.o
MobclixAds.a
MobclixBrowser.a
MobclixFeedback.a
MobclixSocial.a
FMDatabase.o
FMDatabaseAdditions.o
FMResultSet.o
CXMLDocument.o
CXMLDocument_CreationExtensions.o
CXMLDocument_PrivateExtensions.o
CXMLElement.o
CXMLElement_CreationExtensions.o
CXMLElement_ElementTreeExtensions.o
CXMLNode.o
CXMLNode_CreationExtensions.o
CXMLNode_PrivateExtensions.o
CXMLNode_XPathExtensions.o
QWAd.o
QWAdRequestOperation.o
QWAdView.o
QWBannerAdView.o
QWCacheManager.o
QWInterstitialAdView.o
QWLog.o
QWRequestConstants.o
QWSmallBannerAdView.o
QWSubmitReportOperation.o
QWTextAdView.o
QWWebViewController.o
QWAdViewConcrete.o
QWTestMode.o
QWPrefetchOperation.o
QWURLBuilder.o
QWImageFactory.o
NSURLRequest+QWTools.o
QWRegisterAppLaunchOperation.o
AdFrameView.o
PMCDataScanner_Extensions.o
PMNSCharacterSet_Extensions.o
PMNSDictionary_JSONExtensions.o
PMNSScanner_Extensions.o
PMCJSONDeserializer.o
PMCJSONScanner.o
PMCJSONSerializer.o
PMCDataScanner.o
PMAdSizeLookup.o
PMAdViewController.o
PMStaticAdViewController.o
PMDropDownAdViewController.o
PMInterstitialAdViewController.o
PMAdView.o
PMInterstitialAdView.o
PMAd.o
PMAdServer.o
Beacon.o
BeaconDatabase.o
Reachability.o
Database.o
JSONUtils.o
CrackDetector.o
FBConnectGlobal.o
FBRequest.o
FBSession.o
FBXMLHandler.o

Notice the four object files: FBConnectGlobal.o, FBRequest.o, FBSession.o and FBXMLHandler.o at the end of the list. These four files are causing the linker conflict with our customized FBConnect library.

To remove them from AdWhirl's static library archive, use ar -d:

[martinkou@martinkou AdWhirl]$ ar -d libAdWhirlDevice_1.2.0.a \
FBConnectGlobal.o FBRequest.o FBSession.o FBXMLHandler.o

Repeat the same command for the other .a file which is for the Simulator.

After running this command the FBConnect-related object files will no longer be present in the AdWhirl static library (you can use ar -t to check), and thus you'll no longer have the linker conflicts.

The same principle can be applied to other conflicting libraries. e.g. TouchXML or FMDB in Quattro.

What does being an "American cultured" company mean?

2009-07-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

We've recently been negotiating a few potential partnerships with Hong Kong companies as well as Silicon Valley companies. Negotiations with Silicon Valley are usually smooth - I guess it's because they're used to dealing with tech companies anyway and so it's business as usual for them. But when we negotiated with local (i.e. Hong Kong) companies I've found they'd often try to laugh at our notion:

"We're an American cultured company"
"Hey, that's just marketing gimmick, it means nothing to us."

The response is understandable given the local business culture. But whenever I hear this kind of rebuff, I always sigh to myself, "alright, there's a lot of ground we need to cover in this meeting."

Results Oriented

You can know all the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, talk to them until your face turn blue, and yet you won't get any funding. Some antisocial hacker in a basement somewhere, who never cared about socializing apart from DEFCON or 2600's IRC channel, may get funded instead. (Note: antisocial does not mean he cannot communicate himself - (s)he may be a great writer and public speaker) What's the difference? Results. What results means here can be anything - it may be your cash flow; it may be your customer base size; it may be your superior technology; it may be your business model is really innovative. But the point is, you've GOT to have something, something different and powerful in your hands. The usual VC pitches may sound like nonsense to traditional businessmen. But when tech companies are funded by the larger VCs like Kleiner Perkins, these is most often a good reason.

Here at Think Bulbs it doesn't matter that you're a good friend of mine, or Alvin, or Michael - if you're unable to deliver results, you'll be fired. Whenever we have our weekly company meeting the focus is always on the tasks and results - what's been done, what's to be done, is the task feasible, schedule, what's our competitor doing, is the new app a threat to us, how to negate their competitive advantage (if any). The focus is so laser sharp it feels like you're doing maths.

And the market response speaks for our effort - within the few months since Puri! was debuted, everyone was too busy (I'm also working at FCKeditor, all other people are students or have a full time job) to do any serious marketing operation (no promo video!) but we still managed to grab more than 500,000 users worldwide - this is not a fake number. Our iPhone app stayed on the #1 of Photography in a good number of countries for 2 months - we haven't updated Puri! v1.1 for a long time and the customers just keep coming in. Even to this day I can still give you a laundry list of countries where we're still firmly planted within the top 10, and then we're still the #1 in some countries like Mexico. And then for 2 weeks or more we've been within the top 5 of all free apps in a number of countries/localities like Hong Kong and Taiwan. Still don't believe it? Ask Google, search for "Puri! Lite", look at all the blog entries from people taking photos with Puri! and Puri! Lite and praising us. That, my friend, is results.

If you intend to propose a deal to us we can give you Apple's download statistics reports to prove it. And if you doubt our statistics are fabricated, feel free to verify it with Apple.

Quality, as in Doing it the Right Way

If you're not aware of it, software contractors and developers are often paid very cheaply in Hong Kong, even cheaper in mainland China. The tradeoff for the cheap prices, is quality. Good people don't want to work on cheap things, and even if you've somehow got someone good with no independent thought (there are, unfortunately, quite a number of them) - it isn't worth the time to do things correctly for cheap projects. The result? Things that "work" but fall apart at the slightest glance.

And then you have a very large number of people who totally don't know how to do things (let alone doing things correctly), but are passing off as programmers. But that's another story.

At Think Bulbs, however, we strive to do things the right way. If a bug is found (happens a lot), we take time to find out the actual reason (e.g. is it a design flaw? a logic bug? or simply a typo?) and fix it. If the bug has to be fixed by a structural change, then so be it. Unless it's extremely urgent, we don't use hacks to fix bugs. On the graphics front, you'll find that our frames and stamps are actually of pretty high quality, and the strokes you draw in Puri! 1.1 are anti-aliased - no jagged edges! If you compare our app to other photo sticker apps in App Store you'll find that many other apps have really ugly frames and icons - their designs often just look wrong to begin with, and even worse, even their own preset graphics contain jagged edges! Horrible.

Such quality differences are very easily noticeable by your users. And, contrary to what many sales and marketing people may think, users in the App Store are actually quite smart because of the free flow of information (e.g. comments, and the "what users also buy" field). So if you have a poor quality product, put it up in App Store, it'll simply be free advertisement for the higher quality app - your potential customers will simply click on one of those "what users also buy" entries and notice the other product has better ratings. Puri! Lite stayed on the top spot for so long, because of quality. And as I've said in one of the negotiations this week - it doesn't matter that your app goes to the top 10, what's important is making it STAY there.

Passion

Doing things the right way, is actually a boring task. Imagine you have an application that almost works, but you've made a design flaw in the beginning so that 1% of it isn't working - would you choose to fix it with a hack or change the whole design and fix it from the source? Most people would choose to fix it with a hack and release it right away, but with hidden costs when he goes further into the application's development, and probably causing more bugs to appear.

To write a software "the right way", you actually have to spend a lot of time NOT writing code. This is true for the design phase - you have to spend a lot of time imagining how your software is going to work and how it may break. It is also true for implementation and debugging - when something wrong happens, you have to spend a lot of time to investigate why the bug is happening, instead of using hacks to cover it up.

Somebody who went into software development just for the money (the fast money doesn't exist anymore - probably a good thing), will almost certainly not bother with these troubles. The result? Software that breaks at the slightest glance. At Think Bulbs, our development team actually care about our software. We don't see it as just a way to make a tidy profit, we take our creations as something we love. "Cookies need love like everything does" - so does software. And this is why we can have quality without me shouting for it until my throat sores - we just take it as the natural thing to have.

And that's also why I'm writing this blog entry early in the morning, despite the fact I'm feeling sick right now.

Apple's Lousiness

2009-07-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

We'd like to thank our user Katrina for pointing out a flaw in Apple's iTunes management system. If you don't already know, we've already submitted Puri! 2.0 to Apple for review. While preparing for the application description for this exciting new version, we discovered that the app. management system, iTunes Connect, fails to distinguish between certain attributes of different versions of the same application. We were led to believe that the "What's New" section for version 2.0 will be hidden before the application itself has been approved. We were, unfortunately, wrong. Indeed, only the application and its icon can be changed for a new version without affecting the description for the existing version. Consequently, some users have been led to mistake v1.1 with v2.0. We have resolved the issue, and hope that the inconvenience has been short.

GOOD NEWS: Puri! 2.0 will be out within the week! All those who have v1.1 can upgrade to v2.0 for free!! THE UPGRADE WILL BE AWESOME!!!!

Don't forget to visit our community: http://mypuri.com
See you there!

TIECON Day 1

2009-05-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

I attended TIECON today at the Santa Clara convention center. TIECON is one of the biggest technology entrepreneurship conferences every year and over 3000 people have signed up to attend this event.

There were a lot of people talking about startups, iphones, web and I saw many familiar faces (Dave Mcclure, David Hornik, Howard Hartenbaum, Eric Ries etc). I even saw one of Think Bulbs customers!

The panels weren't particularly enlightening but here are some notes I took:

Wireless: What’s working ?
- Messaging, communication (killer app) –Dilip Venkatachari (NEA Ventures)
- Video and branded content is working- Bernard Gershon
- Messaging is changing everyday (email, im, twitter, social messaging); network effect, perishability-Hussein
- Reinvent partnership, privacy issue

- Voice SMS, Google Voice recognition
- Developing countries applications
- Nokia comes with good camera and microphone: announced point and find
- Low cost APN, not AlwaysOn IP phone but think about 35 dollar phone too
- Pay with points not with money
- Enterprise app in Appstore; scalability is key
- Lian Lian pay

PowerConnect 1: Social Web
- Building viral into the experience as opposed to just a tag at the email
- Value shifts: In Linkedin, it is the content now but it will change
- Slideshare: parsing keywords from powerpoint
- Using widget and search to create a viral platform
- iphone application is control monetization
- Greater scale, greater the platform except very focused vertical

Keynote: TIBCO
- Life is not always on schedule
- Trillion of sources of information and absorbing them
- “Because there is fire in my eyes”
- Persevere: Never, Never Give Up
Parallel Session 2: Rules for Renegade
- Have metrics, measure return
- Don’t count on marketing to solve your product problems
- Don’t see point in being stealth

Most inspiring person today was TIBCO's CEO Vivek Ranadive. Remember if you want to become an entrepreneur, you need to have fire in your eye!

Steve Ballmer, ETL

2009-05-06T16:21:00.000-07:00

BASES is proudly hosting Steve Ballmer as one of the speakers of ETL (etl.stanford.edu).

Some highlights of the talk:

1. People are more cautious because of the economic downturn--> If you have a good idea, you'll get funding. The mediocore ideas that were funded before will not and should not be funded now.

2. Hire good people and a lot of patience; 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration is the wrong mentality

3. Emerging technology trends: Many-core processing, screens everywhere, natural UI, all content digital

4. Software powered experiences: Rich client+ cloud, span multiple devices, persistent and personal

5. Timing now is great for startups. Right ingredients are here and dream big

6. Contraction of venture capital capital is not significant enough to drive down innovation

7. Patience vs. Short Term results; Passion for technology vs. Passion for customers; Yin vs. Yang

8. Dig in and do what you love doing; work very hard at it

9. Wish he had taken more computer science classes; Learn how to read balance sheet; cases of Codek and Polaroid; managing art organization (symphony, ballet vs. corporations)

Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang

2009-04-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged for a while but here's a great event I couldn't miss. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is at Stanford today to talk at Entrepreneurs Thought Leaders Seminar (etl.stanford.edu)

Highlights of speech:
1. Building company is extremely gratifying but also very difficult.
2. 16 years ago founded by 3 engineers; vision matters
3. Perspective: Everyone can have one
4. Making technology inexpensive and video games were the killer apps
5. How do you scope market when there's no market at that time?
6. 2 companies doing exactly the same thing can end up in radically different places because they have different perspectives.
7. Moore's law is a law of competition, a law of setting pace: gives you twice the performance every year or two approximately
8. What do you do when your customers tell not to do? He ignored customers !!! (reason being they don't know the nature of your business)
9. Innovation is a rather dangerous thing; some point technology becomes good enough
10. Most important thing when building company and product, skill, intellect, training matters but not enough; passion, love process of building company. Should find out the purpose of building the company
11. Competition sets the price
12. If you want to be successful, develop a tolerance for failure; fail quickly and change courses as soon as one knows it's a dead end
13. Intellectual honesty: continual basis assessing whether something makes sense or not
14. Need to be flexible when one's company has little barrier to entries (i.e. Internet and web based companies)
15. As CEO, selecting people is 99% of the job
16. Intense focus at a market segment and specific niche (don't be jack of all trades, masters of none)
17. Personality: See around the corners, the fuzzy edges; CEOs and leaders need to be comfortable with ambiguity
18. Laser Beamed Focus: do it with intensity
19. Biggest challenge is the reinvention of the company: Every successful thing has to be pulled down and rebuilt and reinvent
20. Cash is always king: making money, raising money or saving money
21. Succession planning is toxic

One of the Fathers of the Internet

2009-03-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-03-04T21:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-03T00:45:00.001-08:00

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

E-week: Global Talent Panel

2009-02-23T16:16:00.000-08:00

Some comment from the distinguished speakers on finding talents on a global level hosted by eweek:
http://eweek.stanford.edu/2009/0223.html

1. Interview skills are short in supply both on interview and interviewee side
2. Most Chinese engineer thinks that if they don't become a manager at age 30, they're a failure
3. Sometimes one cannot promote managers from within, need to hire from external environment
4. Process Management skills are extremely important, and do due diligence.
5. Build one culture amongst different offices when you're still a relatively small company.
6. Communication skills are extremely critical in cementing a team, bridging cultural differences
7. Trust
8. Passion for hating to lose
9. In China, lack project managers or process managers (Fish analogy: one small fish gets eaten by big fish, a group of small fish will scare away the big fish from a distance)
10. Don't overlook your friends' shortcomings
11. Good sleeping habits are important (Have to work on that...)
12. How to schedule things correctly
13. A round of Mahjong can show a person's personality.

Tom Siebel

2009-02-16T22:00:00.000-08:00

Tom Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems and one of the most resepected entrepreneurs, came to speak at Stanford last Weds for the Entrepreneurs Thought Leader Seminars.

His topic was on "From I.T. to E.T." with E.T. being Environmental Technology.

One thing that particularly caught my ears was that he said that if he were a fresh graduate from college, he would get on a boat and head straight to China. He thinks that China's engineers are at least on par with the top US engineers.

I agree with his view and ThinkBulbs will always be spotting out for interesting opportunities in China.

Look out for Mac OS X kernel panics after using QuickPWN 2.2.1

2009-02-06T08:51:00.000-08:00

QuickPWN usually does not brick your iPhone, but the newest version breaks your Mac a bit (provided that you use the Mac version, of course).

The story is this, Apple shipped an updated IOUSBFamily.kext (.kext means kernel extension in a Mac, something roughly analogous to a driver in Windows) with the OS X 10.5.6 update. For some reason, the new kernel extension blocks QuickPWN from detecting your iPhone in DFU mode. DFU mode is a pre-requisite state for QuickPWN to reflash your iPhone's firmware. Without a method of detection, QuickPWN simply cannot jailbreak your iPhone.

To fix this, QuickPWN's developer recommends Mac OS X 10.5.6 users to download an older IOUSBFamily.kext from Apple, install it to their Macs, reboot, and proceed to jailbreak their iPhones.

So your Mac still boots, and your iPhone is jailbroken, all is good, right?

Well, have you tried using a USB stick with your Mac lately? If you haven't, try it now. Last time I tried that on my Mac, I got a kernel panic.

The fix to this problem, is to replace the "cracked" IOUSBFamily.kext with the original one. You can either download the original .kext for 10.5.6 from Apple Developer Connection (the same place you downloaded the older, "cracked" .kext); or, if you're smart, you could have backed up the original .kext while trying out the newest QuickPWN.

First iPhone app!

2009-01-30T16:24:00.000-08:00

Today marks the first iPhone / iPod Touch application - AllYourBase - from Think Bulbs to go on sale. It's a simple app that gives you hours of fun in parties, at home, at work, at school, or even your geeky professor's group meeting! For those who are not familiar with All Your Base, the sensation started on the Internet around eight years ago, when a third-party robotic soundtrack came out for the horrible English translations of Sega's Zero Wing. Our app lets you play the funniest lines from the game in a number of ways - click-to-play, timed and movement-sensitive playback. It's a great way to surprise your friends with "Hahah!" or keep your kids from your precious iPhone / iPod Touch with a robotic "You have no chance to survive make your time!"

We also figured there will be people who feel that we have ruined the AYB legacy by introducing an alternative voice, which, unlikely the original voice, is not synthesized. It's almost like an innocent person telling you something hopeless like "You are on your way to destruction, HAHAHA". We understand that people will still want the original (synthesized) version, but even if it is reproduced, it will still be a violation of copyright of the original track. On the other hand, we spent a lot of time on different tools such as Audacity and various filtering techniques like ring filters, comb filters, simple distortions, etc. The recording we have is one of the best we could come up with. Unfortunately, we are well aware that it is far from perfect, and, without a real sound engineer on our team, we can only humbly learn from our users and reviewers about how to improve the voice. So, please keep the reviews and comments coming! We look forward to improving AllYourBase to make it a good escape from reality by injecting loads of laughter in virtually any place.

Startup2Starup, Amy Jo Kim

2009-01-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

I attended the Startup2Startup dinner last night hosted by Dave Mcclure. This time we had Amy Jo Kim, founder of ShuffleBrain, talking about how social media and games intersect. Here are some keypoints:
1. Look at the reinforcement schedule and tap into customers' primal response. Essentially, think about when and how to engage them and get them back into the game
2. Engage in flow. Not too much and not too little so they just want to come back for more.
3. Collecting as a feature: Why collect? It gives users bragging right or a sense of completion. There are system points, social points, redeemable points. One can use leaderboards to make it more competitive
4. Levels: Level up is so important so that users don't get bored and play new things along the way.
5. Feedback: There are one-way feedbacks (twitter) and two-way feedbacks
6. Exchanges: be it gifts, comments, news articles etc
7. Customization: be it interfaces, content etc
8. Is the product accessbile, syndicated and recombinant?

Interesting observation: Amy mentioned couple Japanese games like brainage and cooking mama, but few people in the audience know about these games. Is it an opportunity?
Conclusion: Everything can be fun if you add in these features. Make things more game like.

Tap Tap Revenge for dummies

2009-01-11T09:49:00.001-08:00

I've been playing Tap Tap Revenge since last Saturday, I've never played any DDR or Guitar Hero-like games seriously before. After just two days of playing I've been able to get near to world record scores for songs in easy mode consistently. Hard mode songs still stump me badly, though.

So I figured my simple techniques may be useful to people who are also new Tap Tap Revenge. It should let you breeze through easy mode and most songs in middle mode. (Click the video to see my tips in the video description)

Tencent

2009-01-09T19:05:00.001-08:00

HYSTA's first event of the year featured CTO Jeff Xiong of Tencent QQ, the internet giant in China.

Here are some of his comments:

1. Significance of numbers in China are important; QQ uses numbers as ID instead of screen name or email
2. Luck plays a major part in its success
3. Tencent focuses more on entertainment due to its target audiences' young age.
4. Tencent has about 300 different product/ services
5. For QQ, Registered Users 8.56 億, Active Users 3.55 億
6. China's Internet Users will continue to increase and more and more people will use broadband; 3G service to go online
7. A story: A girl earns 500 dollars a month and she saves 50 dollars for QQ's avatar. She can buy brand names clothes for her avatar on QQ but not in real life; a different way to express emotions
8. Corporate culture is the focus on customers' demands
9. QQ mail has some innovative features that are better than Gmail's
10. Launching a product: 1) start with smaller customers base first then expands 2) Does customer engagement
11. China's products have been mainly following US's and Korea's trends.
12. The products' success and failure ultimately concern the team
13. Electronic business in China still has a lot of potential (like paypal)
14. 5000萬users online at the same time: How does the backend work?
15. Has around 100 patents; more companies are realizing the importance of IP (You get money if you register for a patent)
16. Tencent's R&D 6 core technology: Internet security, Storage Technology, Data Mining, Multimedia, Chinese processing, Distributed Internet
17. They have 50000 servers
18. Micro-transaction is still doing well, not too affected by the economy
19. QQ is opened up to share users with MSN, SKYPE given that their users like the service and are safe
20. Internet and Mobile still have a bright future in China

Newspaper article about information technology in Hong Kong

2008-12-30T23:10:00.000-08:00

One of my friends, Alex Hung, wrote an interesting passage about the tech industry in Hong Kong yesterday:

http://www.mbaaa.ust.hk/MBAAA_enews/2006/August/HKEJ/HKEJ_Newspaper_30_Dec_2008.pdf

Organic software development

2008-11-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

When Firefox 3 first came out this year, one of their selling points was "100% organic software" - although they have some justifications to that claim, but to the average person's eyes, it still looks like a shameless attempt to borrow from organic food's brand name.

But really, they have good reasons to use the word "organic" there, because it is deeply embedded into their development process. It's not just a brand name.

Why is it organic?
Associations between "open source" and "organic" can be found back in 2001 - at Horde project's presentation in OSCON that year. The term "organic" back then was used in a much more literal sense than in Mozilla's case - Horde project's code didn't come into existence because the project founder planned it. The whole project - the code, the architecture, the features included and to be included, was grown, like a plant. If you look at academic references, it goes back even further. Back in 1986, Frederick Brook's paper, "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" mentioned, "Incremental development--grow, don't build, software."

Horde started with rudimentary features and an architectural mess, but ended up with a large feature set and a well-designed architecture. A significant share of the project's features and designs were implemented or suggested by the external user and developer community, not just the project manager and his team alone. Outside of managing his own team, the project manager is very much just a filter - even in the absence of the project manager, community developers would still write new features and bugfixes - the project manager gets to decide what goes into the trunk and what doesn't. But he cannot decide with total certainty what features to develop and what features to include - the community comes up with new code independently; and rejecting too many of the suggested features (remember, a lot of those suggested features already come with working code patches) will typically cause a fork and rapid loss of market share.

So in the project manager's view, once an open source project grows to a certain scale, it begins to take on a life of itself - thus, organic. While the project team can significantly influence the project's direction, it's the community who sustains it. Even without detailed documentation, development does not stop when the a certain important team member leaves - there's usually more than one person who's been looking at any important part of the code base. And if the core team does a bad enough job - the good part of the code base will be forked to another project where progress can be made (e.g. X.org's fork from XFree86).

How is "organic" implemented?
All that is high level, wishful, stuff, it remains to be explained how organic software development actually works.

At the beginning of a typical organic software project, the project manager, and probably his team (if he has one), implements something simple that "just works". The initial version is a very simple piece of software that may even be very buggy. Why don't they take some more time to come up with a more polished initial version, you may ask? For a few good reasons:

Since the project wasn't started with a clearly defined requirement from some customer (often there's no customer at all!), it's not certain what kind of feature the market wants. More features in the initial version would most probably mean more abandoned features later.
As a result of 1, trying to polish the initial version will result in the code base being overengineered - because of the need to accommodate more useless features, the code base would be more abstracted, complicated and harder to understand than necessary. Scaring off community developers and even developers in the core team, and lengthening development time.
Having a working code base (even a simple one) to develop on and test for is easier for developers than coding everything out of abstract UML diagrams and hoping everything would integrate well later.

You can get the first three advantages by taking an incremental approach, what separates organic apart is point 4:

You can attract an external developer community as fast as possible by releasing an early prototype for them to try out and fiddle with.

Once the software project has a working prototype and a small community of skillful developers and users around it, the rest will happen just like any other open source project - the project team will get a clearer direction from the community's inputs; patches, features and bug requests will be accepted, modified or rejected according to the direction that the project team is taking. Incremental improvements will be made, and when complexity of the code base gets out of hand (in whole or just in parts), it will be refactored or even rewritten. If the project team is incompetent yet the software is highly demanded, community developers will fork to project so progress continues.

Relevancy to today's software startups
So that's how many of today's open source software projects work - some of them are commercial and quite profitable, mind you. But what if your startup isn't doing an open source project?

Obviously, most software startup companies aren't going to release their source code like open source projects do. But when you consider SaaS companies, you can draw many similiarities:

Because you're in total control of the software (it runs on your servers), you can change and update it as often as you like - just like an open source project. Suddenly, the open source mantra - "Release early, release often", makes sense. Release early means your market and your developers have something concrete on their hands as early as possible; release often means any discovered bugs are closed as soon as possible and you react to market signals as fast as possible.
Although you can't let external developers look at your source code, you can give them an API so they can build upon your code base. This is the approach that Salesforce takes, and last time I checked, they're a highly profitable company. They're doing well even though they're competing against an open source counterpart - SugerCRM.
While users of non-open source software may be less eager to give you feedback and advices, you can still get statistics of what they like or don't like by tracking their activities (e.g. mouse clicks) within your applications. It is possible, again, because you have total control over your servers and thus your software. Of course, if you can somehow form a user community as well, that's even better.

Tethering your iPhone 3G with your notebook

2008-11-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

The iPhone 3G doesn't come with any way to tether with a computer by default - a gaping huge missing feature since one of the best uses for a mobile 3G connection is using that to go online with a notebook computer. Fortunately, you can add a tethering function to your iPhone yourself by jailbreaking it, here's how:

Jailbreak your iPhone 3G.
Jailbreaking may sound dangerous and it actually WAS a dangerous thing to do before the iPhone 3G came out - but it's no longer a dangerous and complicated process. Just update your iPhone 3G to the newest firmware (v2.2 as of today) and use QuickPwn to jailbreak it. Jailbreaking with QuickPwn is a painless process. If you fail (typically by missing the button combo for entering DFU mode), you just try again. I haven't seen anyone bricking their iPhone 3G by using QuickPwn.
Install PDAnet 1.33 and MobileTerminal.
You can find PDAnet from Cydia - one of those new icons installed after jailbreaking. Now, the newest version of PDAnet (v1.40 as of today) has turned into trial software and will become restricted after a certain number of days so don't download that. Instead, you should first add a source repository with PDAnet v1.33 inside - go to Manage->Sources->Edit and add the repository http://www.iphone.org.hk/apt/. Then, search for PDAnet v1.33 and install that.

PDAnet 1.33 has a bug though, which will occasionally (often?) require you to use a UNIX shell to fix. But iPhone doesn't come with a way to let you access its UNIX shell by default... so you'll need to download another app to do it. Search for "MobileTerminal" in Cydia, and install that as well.
Create an Ad-hoc Wifi network in your notebook.
PDAnet works by acting as a software router (or more precisely, NAT gateway) between the 3G network and your notebook, so obviously your notebook will need a way to connect to the iPhone via a private IP network. How can that be done? You do that by creating an Ad-hoc Wifi network from your notebook, and then instructing your iPhone to join your notebook's Wifi network.

It can sometimes happen that both your notebook and your iPhone are seemingly in the same Ad-hoc network but they're actually not. To confirm your iPhone and your notebook are really connected, you can either try to ping your notebook from your iPhone's Terminal or do it the other way round. You should be getting healthy responses for your pings. Otherwise, disconnect both devices from the ad-hoc network and try again.
Fire up PDAnet.
If your notebook and your iPhone 3G are connected via an ad-hoc Wifi network, and your iPhone 3G has 3G connectivity, firing up PDAnet should give you the screen above and your notebook should be able to go on the Internet.

A common problem here is getting a "PDAnet is all setup and ready to go" message instead but no Internet connectivity at your notebook. It happens because your notebook's IP and MAC addresses, for some reason (e.g. you just pinged your iPhone? Bonjour on your MacBook?), is already on your iPhone's ARP table, which screws up PDAnet's detection logic. You'll need to use the mobile terminal to fix that in your iPhone. Quit PDAnet and fire up mobile terminal, and type the following commands:
$ su -
<Enter your root password here, default is 'alpine' if you haven't changed that.>
# arp -ad
Go back to PDAnet after entering the two commands above, and you should see the router screen pronto. If it still doesn't work, reboot your iPhone and try again.

Notes:
If you have an unlimited 3G plan then you may be thinking you now have unlimited mobile Internet access. But there are some caveats that prevent you from doing so:

Battery life. Even with your iPhone 3G plugged into a power source, PDAnet will still manage to drain the battery slowly. It takes quite a few hours but your iPhone will turn itself off eventually. So the Internet access you can get from tethering isn't really unlimited.
Latency and bandwidth. Latency on a 3G connection, in my experience, is much worse than a real Wifi connection. Ping times to local sites can easily go up to 400ms or more depending on location and connection quality. Also, most 3G carriers won't give you full HSDPA speeds. The best download speed I've seen from my 3HK carrier was barely over 100KB/s - that's less than 1Mbps, a far cry from the advertised 3.6Mbps and the theoretical maximum of 14.4Mbps for HSDPA.
No incoming connections. PDAnet doesn't seem to have any port mapping, DMZ or uPnP features. Even if it has - your 3G carrier is most probably giving you NAT-ed IP addresses anyway. So even if you can chat with other people via MSN Messenger in your notebook, you'll find great difficulty in sending and receiving files. And if you're thinking about running a mobile web server, you'll have to find some way of getting around that limitation (e.g. by using a VPN and doing port mapping over the VPN).

Webplay at PlugNPlay

2008-11-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

Since thanksgiving holiday is here, I decided to go to this Webplay conference at PlugNPlay to see what the panelists have to say. I had an OK experience last time at PlugNPlay so I was hoping that it would be better this time.

Like last time, the food was quite good and the programme itself is decent. Unfortunately, once again the panels are a little stale and answers are somewhat generic. Thankfully, as it goes on the quality of speakers go up and I've typed out some interesting comments here.

The notes are a little disorganized as there aren't really a structure during these panels and I didn't think there are too many connections between thoughts so I just copy down some interesting quotes:

Eyal Herzog (Founder of Metacafe)
Different pattern of video consumption
Not easy to switch channels
Related videos will be 80% (Recommendation Algorithm)
Producing Media is going to be easier

Jeremy Riney (Founder of Playlist)
Music has always been social
Selling lots of ringtone, merchandise

Brad Jefferson (Founder and CEO of Animoto)
Animoto is about storytelling
Algorithmic logic of how to create this video
Analyzing the beat, energy of the song with motion design
Right amount to tease the user

Lance Tokuda (Founder and CEO of Rockyou)
Self expression as a viral loop
Color actually affects the demographic
Users contact closest friends with relevant information
Build one’s analytic’s platform
Checking in and reengaging with users
Social advertising to reengage users
Facebook app 99% dies
Play Fish- Check that out
Message or photo- receiver wants to get these

Alex Mehr (CEO of Zoosk)
Instrument everything; measure, do AB test and repeat
Should provide value immediately once users hit the site
In Europe people happily spam each other

Jack Jia, Founder and CEO of Baynote

2008-11-15T15:39:00.001-08:00

Listened to Jack talking on his experience starting companies, growing it and IPO. He's also the president of HYSTA, a non profit Chinese community promoting entrepreneurship.

Some interesting comments:
1. Web is not a computational problem, it's like a real society
2. Guiding principle is social science not computer science
3. Startup is a process; it's multiple lightbulbs lighting up not just one of them
4. Market research is asking people whether they'd buy and use it not reading analysts' reports
5. Signal will emerge and noise will cancel each other out using the wisdom of the crowd
6. Startup must have barriers (See Freakanomics) and have lots of dead ends
7. If people say no to your idea, ask them why.
8. Humans are animals of contexts
9. Must be mentally prepared: Startup fundamentally violates human nature (Humans live with the pack, startup is alone, lost, fearful)
10. You must exercise if you're doing startup
11. Engineer must look at the big picture
12. Level 5 leadership: Humility and Professional Will
13. Most startups are killed by themselves
14. Don't do things when everyone is doing it

Arista Networks Take 2

2008-11-13T18:20:00.000-08:00

Turns out that Andy Bechtolsheim was giving a talk on Arista here today. Luckily I got a last-minute notice and squeezed into the room. The talk was divided into two parts - cloud computing and cloud networking.

In the first part, Andy reviewed the remarkable market size and growth of cloud computing, and how customers and vendors view it. It is estimated that the cloud computing infrastructure size will reach a staggering $42-billion by 2012. There is certainly much incentive for them to be a big part of that market!

Customers would love cloud computing because services will be (expectedly) cheaper, faster to obtain, and simpler to use. There is no upfront investment to get an ugly box with CDs/DVDs, and no need to worry about losing the discs, since the service is accessible anywhere at anytime. From a vendor's perspective, cloud computing provides a cheap way of making services available to a large audience. There is no infrastructure cost apart from renting the hardware resources in the cloud. It is also possible to continuously add stuff to services without having to ship out patches / upgrades.

There are, however, certain reservations about cloud computing. For instance, customers might not want their data to be put on the potentially insecure cloud, and could have trouble adopting new applications in their daily routine. Vendors might also have inertia in moving services to the cloud since that may cost them their large user base. There is also the issue of agreements on responsibilities should hardware or software fail in the cloud. In essence, it may not be clear who should be responsible for what kinds of failure. Revenue is another concern, where vendors may have little profit in providing per-use services.

In the second part of the talk, Andy explained the necessity of cloud networking equipment. Basically, the cloud infrastructure is different from that of existing enterprise networks. There will be tens of thousands of servers providing a non-blocking, low-latency multi-terabit capacity and supporting dynamic on-demand application deployment. It must be reliable all-year-round and be of low cost.

Arista's short-term target is to achieve a $100 server with 1Gbps non-blocking capacity. But the real challenge is 10Gbps and up (40Gbps). They envision that 10 gigabit Ethernet would become mainstream in 2009, and almost all motherboards would have a built-in 10 gigabit Ethernet adapter by 2012. The increased capacity brings about more possibilities in designing cloud applications. A nice direction for tech companies is, then, to think of what kinds of applications would be feasible and popular in the next 5 years.

Tom Kelley, IDEO

2008-11-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

Tom, who wrote the book The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation, spoke at Stanford today and here are some highlight notes:

1. Pablo Picasso: Every Child is An Artist
2. Gordon MacKenzie: What happened to all the artists? It's ok to be an artist
3. Start good habits- think like a traveler, treat life as an experiment, Nurture an Attitude of Wisdom, Use your whole brain (Daniel Pink) and Tortoise Mind and Follow your passion (Francis Coppola)
4. Marcel Proust: The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.
5. I haven't failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that do not work- Thomas Edison
6. James Dyson WD-40: Tolerated 5000+ failures
7. Mark Twain: It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that ain't so.
8. Daydream and Find your own muse
9. Intersecting Circles (Jim Collins): Good at, Born to Do, Pay you to do
10. Stay young at heart
11. Be solution finders less problem solvers

Wokai

2008-11-10T23:49:00.001-08:00

Lessons learnt from Wokai, the China microfinance startup by Courtney Mccolgan

Fundraising
Use personal contacts
Get skin in the game
Be direct; Be specific

Infrastructure
Develop a good set of PR materials and temporary website
Get sponsors

Operation
Increase information flow
Create feedback system

Technology
Find out what you like
Develop an outline and mock-up
Find a tech assessment team
Establish well-defined contract (milestones, goal-oriented payment schedule)
Break the site into pieces
Develop site openly
Don’t be afraid to pull the plug

LUNARR

2008-11-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

This morning I went to a LUNARR event in the Graduate School of Business South building. They are amazing, in the sense that they can come up with unique ways of doing things. The meeting is supposed to be about design stuff, but I learned a lot more than design.

LUNARR is a new Web-based platform for team collaboration. When a group of people coordinate work on a particular item, they often find it difficult to keep track of changes made to the item by different people in the team. The (very) old model of so-called cooperation is simply email exchange. One would make changes to the item, attach it to an email, and mass-send it to others. The problem with this approach is three-fold. First and foremost, it's ultra-difficult to do version control on the item. Basically there can be multiple versions scattered around different computers, and there is no simple way to unify them. Second, it is unclear how a single person, say, the manager of that group, or a person struggling at night to make a presentation for that item, to identify the changes and, more importantly, how those changes came to be. For a word document, you could still do annotations, at the huge cost of having to manually combine the incremental changes in the final version. But for a general item, such as an image, a Powerpoint presentation, or a Web page, it is unclear why those changes have been made. Third, the ideas that went into the item might have been inspired by resources outside the team. It is very troublesome to incorporate those resources, such as Web links, pictures, documents, into a coherent view, if all we have are emails and minutes. This model is the so-called "shared model".

Something needs to be done about this. Well, instead of distributing all these nasty multiple versions of a file (maybe each under a different name!), let's just have one visible version, and have an automatic version control system help keep track of the changes. Then everyone in the team can simply make changes to this newest version, save it, and have those changes recorded by the system. This is the model used by Wikipedia. Obviously it solves the version crisis. Unfortunately, we are still unable to capture the communication between the team members in a Wiki page.

And hence, Lunarr introduces a third solution. An item under development can be thought of content written on a sheet of paper. What is wasted is the *back* of the paper. The ingenuity of Lunarr is that by the symbolic flip of the paper via a simple mouse click, virtually everyone can instantly understand the purpose of having a back page for an item - to record the collaboration and changes made to the item. Every email exchanged, logs for every chat session, changes to each version of the item, etc. are all recorded on this back page. Better still, the back page is tailor made for the individual user. So for any given item, the back page may be different for each team member, but any incarnation of it serves to give a clear, concise and complete view of what has been going on in developing that item.

The value of Lunarr can be tremendous, especially when a team consists of people who are not tech-savvy enough to edit Wiki pages or even annotate changes in documents. Its focus on adding value to the collaboration part of the innovation cycle is what makes the service stand out.

Apart from learning about it, I also got to talk to Lunarr's founders, Toru Takasuka and Hideshi Hamaguchi, two modest geniuses who have the vision and courage of going beyond what is comfortable and taken for granted. Toru left Cybozu, the number-one group software company in Japan he founded years ago, to pursue a dream that gives no easy guarantees on success. Hideshi quitted his long-time and high-ranked job at Panasonic to join Lunarr, a startup with untested ideas. This kind of vigor and enthusiasm is truly astounding.

Hideshi also told me something about their marketing and service provisioning strategies. Since they are a Portland-based company, there is little chance of tapping into the innovator pool in Silicon valley through normal means, such as advertising in newspapers, Web sites, etc. What they did was this. They bought billboards along the busy 101 freeway and put up hand-written ads that have nothing to do with Lunarr. They even occasionally made mistakes on some of the ads, and when people called in about it, they made changes by crossing off extra letters, punctuation, etc. This relaxed, friendly, funny and intriguing series of ads caught San Jose Mercury News' attention, which advertised for Lunarr freely by including an article on their service.

Lunarr chose to employ Google-like centralized architecture for its services, instead of leasing or selling the platform to companies. It appears that companies nowadays are less adamant about storing all data on their own servers, and are starting to see the benefits of using a cheaper centralized Web service. Hideshi noted that a US company divides the data into different security levels. Data at lower levels is allowed to be put onto public Web services like Google Docs and Facebook. Surprisingly, the company actually encourages employees to use free Web services for business purposes.

One would expect such a fast-growing technology company to be based in Silicon Valley. But it's not. Lunarr's headquarters is in Portland, Oregon. The reason, explained Toru and Hideshi, was that they wanted to get away from the distractions of the Valley, and concentrate on their products. They are, however, adamant about building the company in the US, since "it is so far the (only) best place to take your technology company global."

All in all, Lunarr is a fascinating company. They have a small but great team of engineers, a clear vision of what to work on, and a good start in the collaboration arena. I can only wonder what future products Toru and Hideshi were hinting at toward the end of the presentation.

Arista Networks

2008-11-05T22:04:00.000-08:00

Alvin and I went to Arista Network's information session at the Gates building this evening. We were there to see what the next company from David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim is like. It was a nearly pure-technical talk by Kenneth Duda, the VP in Software Engineering with a dazzling biography.

The company focuses on building network switches optimized for cloud computing in data centers. Right now, the situation is not good for innovators and companies who want to build services with their own cloud computing platform - they have to build the platform themselves. Ordinary data center equipment are tailor made for classical applications, such as massive databases. The rise of cloud computing has sparked the need for computing platforms in data centers. While one could use platforms like Google's App Engine and Amazon EC2, it may be desirable to have your own customized, potentially large, platform. But the problem is that it's too costly to make it scalable and reliable. Arista Networks come into play here by providing a network switch with a reliable OS architecture, low power consumption and small form factor.

Arista's Extensible Operating System (EOS) modularize the otherwise tight-bound network protocols in traditional switches. You could have SNMP running in a process, while the client interface and OSPF run in their separate threads. A central location called the sysdb stores the switch's state. Any changes to the state will be first reported to sysdb, which then forward the message to related modules. For instance, a link-down event could be propagated to the client interface, SNMP, spanning tree and routing modules. There is no complex inter-protocol communication, which is the root of many of the flexibility and reliability issues in today's switches.

With 45 software engineers and 25 hardware engineers, the company has managed to churn out several products already within 4 years of establishment. It shows how great a small but powerful team can perform. I hope our small team at Think Bulbs could also make spectacular products in the applications arena.

Potential

2008-11-02T23:27:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking of what we might be able to achieve at Thinkbulbs. Here's one.

While taking a break from the grueling exam series, I came across a Dell ad for 1U servers - a whopping $862+ for a Celeron, 512MB RAM, 80G hard drive and 3-year basic enterprise support. As a DIYer, I simply cannot see the value in it. The basic enterprise support is not nice enough to justify the cost.

Well, one argument goes like this: Businesses don't have the manpower assembling and maintaining their own servers. By buying from Dell, you get a usable machine straight away with an all-in-one support package. But this does not include the cost of hosting and maintaining the services on the server. You still need to buy applications and server software to install on the machine, and you need someone to maintain it. Not cheap at all. So why not push the services out to a third party, like, say, Thinkbulbs? There is much potential for us to develop really great and *affordable* applications for small and medium businesses.

One aspect of businesses is particularly annoying - customer support. Even (maybe especially) for large companies. AT&T disappointed me so much yesterday when they told me I couldn't receive calls because of a "routing error" at some outsourced company, and that I would have to wait until they fix it. Uh... what kind of customer support is this? Today my friends told me that such incidents have occurred before, and apparently AT&T is taking no active steps to resolve the issue. I wonder what kind of customer support system they have. How can they not have found out this flaw already? Do they even review their service history at all? There is so much room for improvement.

Another aspect that strikes me as important is logistics. Last week I was at Bestbuy Milpitas looking for a particular LCD. The salesperson was absolutely sure there was no stock left, and I would have to wait for restocking. Undefeated, I tried my luck at another Bestbuy in Palo Alto, and guess what? They do have that LCD. Whether it is a logistics error or laziness on their staff's behalf, there is, again, much to improve for Bestbuy.

But then, these big companies are difficult to change. They often are too accustomed to their ways. Small and medium businesses are different. They can change. They have to, or they risk going out of business. We could help them out in maintaining their competitive edge.

Vidiator and Weardrobe

2008-10-31T22:56:00.000-07:00

It's Friday and finally sometime to catch up on both school and startups.

I first talked to Connie Wong, the CEO of Vidiator and President of Hutchison Whampoa USA. Vidiator is the top mobile technology company, competing directly with Microsoft and beating them. She emphasized a lot on the importance of execution and team. Business cannot be emotional according to Connie and this is especially the case when it comes to layoffs. Apart from that, it's extremely important to think positively. Sometimes one has to try doing things before one knows whether one can do it or not. So never say never!

Afterwards, met up with 2 founders of Weardrobe, a social platform for women to share their love of fashion through photos. I think they are up to something and I personally really like this space as I think there are still lots of rooms for people to make money in it. Rich and Suzanne are very committed to its cause and everyone should keep an eye on this startup!

Startup2Startup Dinner

2008-10-31T02:02:00.000-07:00

After the Stats midterm this afternoon, I went to the Startup2Startup dinner hosted by Dave Mcclure at the Palo Alto Sheraton Hotel. It's a private function and I'm really glad that Dave has invited me to go.

The format of the function is an hour of networking, an hour and a half of eating (had salad, chicken and tiramisu), listening to speakers and discussion, and then about an hour to network again. The speakers for the night are Reid Hoffman from Linkedin and Matt Cohler from Benchmark Capital (I saw Matt 3 times in 2 weeks already). They mainly talk about social networks, platforms and how the economy is affecting startups. Despite the downturn, Reid and Matt are still optimistic about entrepreneurship and they believe firmly that some great companies will emerge out of this. Another important phrase I took away was Maximizing Differentiation. Startups truly have to do something different than others to succeed, so it's revolution not evolution one should aim for.

In the networking sessions, I was glad to see many Stanford alums doing cool startups (Tristan from Apture, Jeff from Increo, Charles from Serious business, Ron from Wellsphere, Scott from Facebook, Silvia from Xonomic etc). One company which I met that I really like is Dropbox. I downloaded their products and it's really simple and intuitive to use.

Backed by Sequoia, CEO Drew told me that it's all about reducing friction so as long as friction is small, people don't mind downloading products which is great news and example for us who are considering about making software instead of web apps.

Also see plenty of familiar VC faces around (Shai from SVB, David and Howard from August, John and Vineet from Bluerun, Katherine from MDV, David from Baseline)

It was a great event and I look forward to attending the next one if I'm invited.

Venture Beat Event- On recession and economy downturn

2008-10-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

I decided to wake up early at 6:30 am once again to help volunteer at another great event hosted by Venture Beat. One main reason of going is that I can attend the event for free when it's 189 per ticket, the other is to see John Doerr, the legendary VC, who is on the 1st panel.

The 1st panel focused on the VC's perspectives during this downturn. They think this is a crisis of confidence and the uncertainty of getting revenue from both enterprise and customers (advertising business model failing..). Raising money is quite difficult in the short term and startups should think about bridge loan as it's much quicker. Start avoiding long term spending commitment, think about slashing unnecessary costs and focus on core product and revenue stream. It's not all doom and gloom with Ron Conway expressing a more optimistic view that innovation will never stop and that the great startups will still prosper in this environment. John Doerr recommending googling John Doerr Startup Manual which will help startups. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/07/082doerr.html

2nd panel also featured a great line of speakers in which Max Levchin, my former boss at Slide, was on there. From the entrepreneurs' perspective, communication amongst staffs, VCs and customers are very important during this environment. Again focus on core products and revenue streams (they mention that performance based advertising is still doing well).

For a more detailed analysis, check out VentureBeat's article: http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/29/venturebeat-downturn-event-tightening-your-belt-isnt-enough/

Opera seminar

2008-10-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

Attended the Opera seminar today and Opera introduced their new Widget toolkit which allows developers to develop widgets on Opera browser quite easily.
CEO of Opera talked about their dominance on the mobile platform and that they're growing quite nicely despite Firefox's, Internet Explorer's and Safari's challenges.

One thing that all developer should check out is this:
http://www.opera.com/wsc/

Teaches you how to be a good web developer.

Tesla x The Funded event

2008-10-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

Attended a networking mixer/party at the Tesla tonight which featured over 200 CEOs and some very nice cars.

Met a lot of cool people over the night and particularly impressed with a company called Booyah headed by Keith Lee, who graduated from Stanford 10 years ago and a fellow Hong Konger (Go Hong Kong!). He tripled majored when he was at Stanford (which is close to impossible) and headed the development of World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment for 7 years. Right now, working at this new mobile iphone app startup at Klenier Perkins incubator. Should look out for his cool apps next year.

Robert at Power Reviews.com

2008-10-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

Listened to a short presentation on how to build successful startups from the founder of Fogdogs (taken public) and Powerreviews.com

Here are some key concepts:
Team is everything
Don't be afraid to give up equity
Innovate, launch, repeat
Get as much money as you can when it's offered
Get ready for a roller coaster

Nothing too surprising here. Once again the book Purple Cow is mentioned and Guy Kawasaki's quote (Don't worry, be crappy).

He also suggests if looking for a top tier VC firm, go for it in the beginning. They don't usually invest in the later stages. Be ready to give up about 40-50% of equity.

Vinod Khosla at ETL

2008-10-22T16:39:00.001-07:00

The topic is on renewable energy.

Few concepts:
1. Chindia Test- must be cheap enough for China and India to adopt= adoption risk
2. Relevant scale: Oil, coal, materials, efficiency
3. Alan Kay: Best way to predict future is to imagine
4. Need to be pragmentalists: Do cost effective stuff, not everything
5. The Art of the Possible: Power of ideas
6. Generic approach: Take a big problem, add the best minds, add the power of ideas, the fuel of entrepreneurial energy and a touch of capitalist greed
7. Black Swan solutions: Retrospectively predicatable, rarity and extreme impact
8. Stock price and bubble are irrelevant: stop paying attention to them
9. The reading list: How to change the world (David Bornstein), Banker to the poor (Muhammad Yunus), The purple cow (Seth Godin), The black swan (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)
10. Ideas build upon each other and outdo each other
11. Don't let conventional wisdom bog down on you
12. Missionaries not the mercenaries who are successful

Global Mobile Conference

2008-10-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

Right after the Plug N Play event, I stopped by CoolIris (a startup backed by KPCB that is working on a new viewing experience for the web). There are tons of Stanford interns there.

Afterwards, headed over to the Business School and attended the Global Mobile Conference.

Couldn't get anything too insightful tonight as I'm already tired from the whole day's events but I guess the take home message is mobile is pervasive and is most likely going to be the most interactive platform in the near future.

Couple panelists I met are Connie Wong (Born in Hong Kong, President of Hutchison USA and her own startup Vidiator) and Rob Trice from SK Telecom Ventures (who worked at Blue Run Ventures before and us ASES had a sponsorship deal with them one year ago).

Will be attending thursday night The Funded.com's CEO gatherings. Will update you guys then.

Plug N Play PACT conference

2008-10-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

Went to this conference at the Plug and Play Tech Center this morning and afternoon.

1st panel talked on legal issues and the 2nd one on technological partnerships and acquisitions.
Nothing too special or interesting going on there...

In the afternoon, there are 42 startups thave have 2 minutes to pitch about their ideas/products. My thoughts on this are out of 42, perhaps only 1 that solves a real problem without adding more problems towards it.

I congrats the entrepreneurs for their courage to start something but I think we should all work towards solving just simple problems instead of coming up with ridiculous web 2.0 idea that relies on only advertising business model.

Something actually meaningful please!

Also Met Tim Draper and Rebecca Lynn, 2 very awesome VCs.

Meeting Great People

2008-10-16T17:46:00.001-07:00

Well, time for me to start blogging here. So I've been in Stanford for a month, finally settling in.

One of the most exciting things here in Stanford is that you get to meet people who invented the many tools you use and who helped bootstrap your field of study. Exciting was my feeling when I attended the talk by Don Knuth. One question that struck me as important was how he felt computer science should advance. His impression of the current state of affairs is worrisome, because many people are depending too much on libraries instead of really understanding what is being done. In retrospect, this really is one of the more important problems that arise during development work. It is easy to misunderstand the functionality of methods you're using when rushing to get things done, and you get punished by nasty bugs that might take hours to debug. The lesson then is, use libraries for development speed-up, but never speed-up beyond the point where you cannot really understand what cryptic-function() is doing.

Another interesting seminar was given by Subhasish Mitra, a young assistant professor whose research group recently demonstrated a working circuit on carbon nanotubes (CNTs). It's amazing how they could "dis-entangle" the naturally wound-up CNTs algorithmically and even prove the correctness of the circuits built. We're enjoying much richer computing power on our handhelds than just a few years ago. If VLSI-scale circuits were made available on CNTs, it'd be difficult to imagine how much more computational power we'd get out of handhelds. We might want to start dreaming of applications that are seemingly impossible from today's technological standpoint, but definitely doable with small computing devices that are hundreds of times more powerful.

Joe Chen of Oak Pacific

2008-10-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

Listened to Joe Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive (http://www.oakpacific.com/), speaks about entrepreneurship in China.

He paid his Stanford MBA tuition by buying brand name technology stocks. He says he's a bubble watcher and people need to be careful when companies are saying that they are printing money.
Like Buffett, Joe only does business in the industry he knows very well and acquiring Xiaonei at a cheap price further strengthens his assets in China's internet business.

Regarding the macro economic environment, Joe is saying that the recession will last about 5 years and it's the worst financial crisis after the depression because everyone is affected. His advice to graduating students is to get a full time job and then do stuff on the side.

He straightly admits that all it takes to succeed in China is to copy a huge successful idea in the US.

I think we should try getting into China!

Straight from the Gut: T.I.E. conference

2008-10-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

I attended a day long conference this morning (7 am-6pm) and had to skip a class for it. But despite getting not quite enough sleep, it is quite an interesting conference and met lots of interesting people.

In the morning, bought Guy's new book and had him signed on it. Then listened to David Hornik (whom I had the chance to meet last spring through BASES) speak. Also met Chris Michel of Nautilus Venture, Lance Tokuda of Rockyou, Sergio Monsalve of Norwest Venture Partners, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital, Tet Rhinegold of Dogster.com, Paul Walborsky of Giga Omni media, Tod Francis of Shasta Ventures, Sonya Chawla of Slide, Jon of Pubmatic and more.

Heard some intersting stuffs but take away is that I think our iphone app is well positioned to get some success based on what I intepreted from the speakers.

Let's code it soon!

David Weekly, PB wiki

2008-10-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

Listen to David Weekly, PB Wiki, speaking on entrepreneurship.

Major take-away is that there are no costs in doing a startup and his assumption shows that doing a startup will outperform just being an employee (salary raising at 5%).

Just do it!

Women 2.0 Event (Startup and Financial Crisis)

2008-10-07T23:32:00.001-07:00

I met some really cool people tonight at this startup event hosted by women 2.0 . Talked to Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital and similar to us he really dislikes pure advertising business model. Howard actually invested in Skype, Bebo etc. which are arguably some of the best startups in the past few years. He also talked about the example of Birthday Alarm which is not a fundable business but can earn much money (The founder earned about 1 million on it, the idea is about reminding people of their friends' birthdays).
So our mobile apps will most likely fall into the lifestyle business category.

Another take home message is that there's still money in Silicon Valley despite the economic downturn. As long as the product is really awesome, then there will be investors.

Betty Kayton, CFO of many startups throughout her career, repeated a famous quote that one must provide pills but not vitamins. The panelists also agree that the education, entertainment and media startups are likely to fare pretty well relative to their peers during this economic crisis.

Career Fair at Stanford

2008-10-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

Over 300 companies participated in the Fall Career Fair today at Stanford and I visited all of the startups who came to recruit.

Here are the ones I talked to:
Zynga, imo.im, Kosmix, Tokbox, CoolIris, Mozilla, Hulu, Roblox, Kiva, Int App, Admob, Adify, Gaia online, M spot, Slide, Pelago and a couple more.

All of them are doing some very interesting stuff. I wonder when Think Bulbs can be there recruiting? :)

2008-10-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

Hello World!

Welcome all to Think Bulbs' blog. Here we will be blogging about our products' developments, web trends, life at Stanford and Silicon Valley. So stay tuned for interesting things!