Jun

29

For-profit corps can change the world

Filed Under changing the world, entrepreneurship, regular reads, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

A common trait among forward-thinking Generation Y “millennials” are that they don’t just want to make money (who doesn’t?), but to also do good by giving back some how, by changing the world for the better, by actually making difference. For this group of young adults, they may have struggled with the question of “to work for a non-profit or for-profit?”

The lines between the for-profit and non-profit jobs are blurring, which means that the actual experience gained, and the job compensation, whichever your choice, is roughly the same. Thus, this question can be effectively boiled down to, “which path feels better?”, or “which as a larger touchy-feely” factor?

In light of all the large corporation scandals (wow, Wikipedia has a list here), it’s no wonder that the winner to the touchy-feely question is undoubtly, the non-profits. However, I do think, nay, believe that if executed properly, for-profits can make a larger and more lasting impact on the world.

This is exactly what Bill Gates has done, all “Microsoft is evil”  puns aside. From Anil’s blog:

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.

Now that, is powerful. Microsoft might as well be a sovereign multi-national government. I think this is a feat tough to pull by a non-profit–simply because it might involve some questionable tactics in business.

I’ve blogged here about a book by C. K. Prahalad, titled “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid“, which essentially concludes with proof that making profit is not mutually exclusive from helping the poor. Prahalad is a distinguished professor of strategy at the Univ. of Michigan.

Jun

21

Lindros P88 composite blade

Filed Under ice hockey | Leave a Comment

I broke my blade at practice 2 weeks ago and was shopping around today for a new blade, finally settling on a Lindros P88 right hand composite blade. My team captain happened to be at the pro shop, helping me pick and gave me a crash course on the “science” behind picking a blade (wow, I didn’t know that there were _that_ variables). Mostly, I just pick a stick whose flex is in the 70’s range, with a decent blade curvature that I can see myself living with, and a stick with some cool hockey player’s name on it.

I thought the famous player’s name on the hockey stick is just to make it look cool, some marketing ploy. Today, I realized that those names actually mean something about the stick/blade that would actually affect my handling! Anyway, so I looked up Eric Lindros, and turns out .. he is quite a cool guy.

He checks (and fights) really well. In this video clip, he evens knocks the other guy down during a face-off! :D

His jersey number is 88; is that why the blade is a P88? I’m guessing 88 is probably _not_ the Morse code short hand for “love and kisses“. Ham radio operators usually sign off with “73″, which is a short for “best regards”. Random trivia for you :) who else mixes wireless radio transmissions+Morse code with hockey?

Lindros P88 composite blade

As a side rant, I had a match today .. and twice I had someone knock me over on ice and say, “Sorry man, you alright?”. Come on, it’s friggin ice hockey–not ice ballerina. No need to be polite. It wasn’t even a hard hit. This isn’t a “polite” sport (not to be confused with un-sportsmen-like conduct). Apologizing for little things like that annoys me more than it makes me happy. I got sent to the penalty box for 2 minutes, for “uhh, number 7, .. minor roughing”. Apparently I hit someone’s face on the ice while trying to get up from a pileup on ice. I didn’t notice. Okay, so I did apologize for that one .. but the minor stuff, please don’t apologize — I can so handle being pushed around.

Jun

16

JavaScripherTution in{j|f}ection

Filed Under security research, technology, websense | Leave a Comment

This is a cross-post from my company’s blog that I posted today.

The injection of malicious <script src="malicious.js”> JavaScript tags on a massive scale into everyday popular and reputable Web sites, commonly visited by the casual surfer at home (and at work), has been the trend. Today, as my team and I here at Security Labs made our routine rounds around the block to spy on what the bad guys are up to next, we discovered a somewhat weak but interesting piece of malicious code, whose techniques date back to the early days of encryption - the substitution cipher.

Wikipedia has a good introduction on this topic:

In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are substituted with ciphertext according to a regular system; the “units” may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing an inverse substitution.

Doing a character for character substitution, using a keyword of “MALCODE“, we get:

Plaintext:  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Ciphertext: MALCODEHIJKFBNGPQRSTUVWXYZ

Using that mapping, we can encrypt a message from a hypothetical botnet master to his/her herd of bots from this:

LAUNCH THE DDOS ATTACK NOW

to this:

FMUNLH THO CCGS MTTMLK NGW

It’s a very trivial algorithm, and extremely weak in terms of the protection it provides (by today’s standards), but it is definitely good enough to conceal the true message from casual prying eyes. This was certainly as good as bulletproof during the days of Julius Caesar (wow, we’ve come a long way!).
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Jun

13

My App Engine “Wall”

Filed Under geeky, technology | Leave a Comment

I was messing around with Google’s App Engine this week, and learning some Python (the programming language, not the snake! I had someone ask me that) at the same time.

App Engine (for scalability reasons) does not support SQL, but instead provide and API they call Datastore for persistent storage. For the app I made, I queried for data ordered by date, but for some reason the result set still comes out unordered. Odd. I’m probably not calling it right. Anyway, it was just an exercise to see what App Engine was all about.

Here’s a replica of the Facebook Wall I made, feel free to write your heart out. As you can see, I’ve had friends say some really nice things about me already. The full address is liew.appspot.com .. but there’s an iframe to it if you’re too lazy to click on that link :)

Update 6/15/2008 — Tinkered around a little and realized why its unordered .. I lost the timestamps on some of the posts, so for those that come out unordered, it’s because there are no records of which came first (the timestamp was NULL). It should be fine going forward. The un-stamped posts take precedence in ordering over the stamped ones, so you may have to scroll down a little to see your post (or just CTRL-F it).

Jun

8

Web 2.0 weekend roundup: Mashup (projected) money, Slide, plus mobile

Filed Under mobile, regular reads, web 2.0 | 1 Comment

Forrester reports that mashups are taking off. A trend/wave to take note of. This reminds me of what Greg McAdoo (VC with Sequoia) said, that the tiny companies have no power to change waves (technology trends), only the option of riding the wave. So here’s the wave, for those who want to ride it!

Mashups — custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique — are coming to the enterprise. Forrester projects that the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013; while this means that there is plenty of money to be made selling mashup platforms, it will affect nearly every software vendor. Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion’s share of the market — and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms. Those vendor strategists that move quickly, plan a mashup strategy, and build a partner ecosystem will come out on top.

The full report costs $775 ( ouch! psst .. can someone share? :) )

I got that link from Dion Hincliffe’s report on the mashup industry. An interesting read, do check it out — I do no justice in summarizing it here. It’ll get you a quick overview of the state of the mash-o-sphere (did I just invent yet-another-useless new Web 2.0 buzzword?) Plus, it features cool San Diego tech startup by two cool people I know; shoutouts to my friends Steve and Aaron from MindTouch!

On another note, Slide reports that they are doubling down their efforts on their current top widget properties to make them even better, .. implying that they are going to slow down on churning out new and potential “disruptive” widgets. I’m all about focusing on your core business for sure, but I hope they still carve out some time (as a percentage) throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, since there’s no time better to encourage innovation than during hard times. Maybe this is all just an investor-relations fluff .. in which case, fine.

Max Levchin is no stranger to innovation, and I am sure he knows what he is doing. He is definitely someone I admire, and I’ve covered him previously on my blog here before.

Someone I spoke to this weekend was blindingly oblivious to the revenue opportunities in value-added services for mobile, so I thought including this pretty picture from this very worthy blog post from Alec Saunders here was in order.

Silly wabbit, of course you can make money writing apps for mobile :) — just google for {iPhone, Android, Blackberry} fund.

mobile value added services: long tail

Jun

7

Breaktrough at hockey practice yesterday

Filed Under ice hockey | Leave a Comment

Can you guess which stick I used at hockey practice yesterday?

Breaktrough at hockey practice yesterday

And of course, my stick just has to break on the one day that I didn’t bring a backup stick with me.

Jun

3

Real-time stock quotes at rock bottom prices

Filed Under marketing, product management | Leave a Comment

Google has just announced that Google Finance now provides free stock quotes in REAL-TIME. The “real-time” part is important, because all the major free stock quote providers (such as Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money) has always provided the quotes, but delayed. As a matter of fact, I had coincidentally recently blogged about why they delay the quotes on purpose, which to sum up quickly, is a pricing strategy to extract more money from those who are willing to pay more.

So with Google now providing the coveted real-time prices for rock-bottom prices (free!) you can’t beat, what else does this mean? I predict that MSN Money and Yahoo Finance will follow suit. That’s mostly my intuition since I have no hard facts, but I really do think they will.

If Yahoo and MSN’s finance visitors are not in the demographics where more value can be extracted from (i.e. people who actually buy and sell stocks), then MSN/Yahoo would have no incentive to drive down the price of real-time prices to $0.00 since it’s not a differentiator anyway–but on the flip side if real-time was a differentiator, then start the countdown before MSN/Yahoo tear down the silly self-induced delayed prices (uhh .. look out for your customers/visitors best interest and make them feel happy?)

In my opinion, the delay doesn’t really make people want to fork over even more loads of cash to MSN/Yahoo (so there’s little upside); it’s really more of an annoyance–”here’s your price, but ha-ha, it’s delayed”. From quick cost-benefit perspective, it appears to make sense to not delay the quotes.

For all the other folks like brokerages, if your marketing is around “sign up today and get free real-time quotes!”.. tough luck. Google just voided your campaign.

Kudos to Google for sticking to their corporate values: do not be evil (delaying information on purpose is evil), and to making useful information universally accessible to all!

This actually ties in really nicely to Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson’s (author of The Long Tail) argument on why “free” business models make sense.

Jun

1

Pains that heal and those that don’t.

Filed Under failure, fear, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

In life, some problems can be solved by throwing money at the problem (e.g. growing pains in scaling up (or down) operations in your fledgling tech startup? invest in cloud computing). However, there are certainly some problems that cannot be solved even with deep pockets (e.g. Microsoft can’t for all its might and power build a Google-killer).

I’m reminded of this money-can-help vs. no-money-can-help problem in this series of Paulo Coelho’s Reflections of the Warrior of the Light. Some sufferings can heal. Some cannot. Pick wisely what you wish to suffer.

A warrior of the light never acts in a cowardly fashion.

Fight may be an excellent art of defense, but it cannot be used when fear is great. When in doubt, the warrior prefers to risk defeat and then cure his wounds - because he knows that if he runs away, he is giving his aggressor more power than he deserves.

He can cure physical suffering, but will be persecuted forever for any spiritual weakness.

Faced with difficult and painful moments, the warrior faces unfavorable circumstances with heroism, resignation and courage.

Jun

1

(Cognitive) memory hack: recall just before you forget

Filed Under did you know, regular reads, self improvement | Leave a Comment

I’m backlogged on my reading and I have just gotten around to reading this interesting (but lengthy) piece from Wired about some cool psychology hacks. I’m going to distill the key points for easier (read: less time consuming) mass consumption here. This is a very interesting memory trick. Simply put, I’m sure everyone could use a better memory.

Piotr Wozniak found a trick of how to remember stuff, and his software SuperMemo is a tool to help accomplish just that.

The problem statement and the general theory behind the solution:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

The benefits:

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

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