Archive for the ‘problem-opportunity’ Category

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Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Posted in entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, problem-opportunity, quotes, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

Can we contribute to a conversation without being present?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Update 12/16/2009 — My “minimum viable product” (or at least the first very rough iteration of it) is complete. Check it out here http://www.jaysernbot.com. See how my own Twitter account is own its own, chatting up people (screenshot of day 1) I have never discovered before. I would love to hear from you!

I’m a geek and I like to automate stuff, because it’s cool and I am lazy. Not that we aren’t already suffering from chronic email fatigue, but with the advent of social media / Web 2.0 – especially Twitter – the more you try to keep up, the more you actually fall behind.

This sucks.

Case in point: You have to be constantly checking Twitter about what’s someone’s saying about you, or saying to you, or what someone’s saying about something (perhaps a topic of your interest where you have some domain expertise) – if you want to participate in the conversation. If people are tweeting about the ice hockey game right now, and you chime in 3 days later, you’re already out of the conversation. It’s all real-time (or at least “near” real-time) now.

Does anyone else wish that you could participate in a conversation without having to be tethered to your Twitter client 24/7 ?

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Posted in problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | Comments

Ex-Google China Chief speaks on mobile internet, cloud computing, ecommerce

Monday, September 7th, 2009

It’s Labor Day, I’m still groggy from just waking up .. but this is a good piece worth sharing here if you’re looking for opportunities, and focused on mobile and cloud computing. Google’s China chief Kai-Fu Lee just left Google (some of us recall this as it was a controversial high profile hire because Lee was poached from Microsoft). Here’s what he is up to next, and his words from an interview with peHUB.

“There is a confluence of several things happening in China, and we’re at an inflection point of mobile Internet, cloud computing and ecommerce. It’s really now or never.

There is an abundance of companies here and VCs have lots of money, but there is a lack of angel funding and experienced entrepreneurs. It’s a compete imbalance. Whatever you might think of Y Combinator or Idealab in the U.S., the China market is different. China needs this type of business-building platform to hire and train people and provide angel funding, which is scarce.

There also is a worldwide economic crisis, which means that there is a bunch of strong talent out there that we want to hire, in order to start a lot of exicting businesses.“

On why it’s “now or never”, he says,

“Ecommerce in China has gone from 7% adoption to 25% adoption. Payment capabilities are just happening. Really, it’s a lot like the late 90s in the U.S. Remember how quickly Amazon and eBay and even Google search took off? You have to imagine the current Chinese Internet as news and games and blogging, but a big shift is inevitable. The average Chinese Internet user is just 25, compared to 42 in the U.S. That means they are getting older, getting more money, getting married, having kids… A rising ecommerce will lift all boats.

In terms of mobile, there are 650 million cell phones in China and mobile Internet usage is growing like crazy. It’s not just knowledge workers, but it’s also growing rapidly for groups like migrant workers and people making just a few dollars a day. They view it as the only way to access information, and with usage and volume a lot of things will grow.

There also is 3G, which is the one thing the Chinese government is going after and developing this year. In China, when the government wants to do something it happens.

For cloud computing: China has never really developed a software market, and what’s happening is like what’s happening in the U.S. – moving from packaged software to online or the cloud. In that process new businesses and models are starting to happen. If you look at the success of the Amazon platform or Google apps in the U.S., it will also be true in China because there are millions or people who want easy ways to build websites.

There is incredible opportunity right now.“

Via peHUB.

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Posted in business, cloud computing, entrepreneurship, innovation, mobile, problem-opportunity, regular reads, startup | Comments

A Thriving App Economy Key To Telcos, Social Networks, and Handset Manufacturers Survival

Monday, June 8th, 2009
  • Amazon.com was started with the idea that they would make money by shipping physical products. Today’s Amazon makes money by building a market place where every link that take you to a product is in fact an ad (revenue share). They make more money, not by shipping goods, but by referring customers to other goods.
  • In 2008, 3 billions apps where downloaded on the Internet, most on social network and mobiles. That’s 40-50 million daily active users
  • Today < 5% are paid apps, but that's ok because numbers shows that paid apps are trending up
  • Average app price people pay for is the price of an iTunes song, $0.99 – $2.99. There may be a threshold where people won’t pay
  • Many people have call-waiting which cost them $3.99/month, but do they even use it once a month? But you don’t hesitate paying for it again because they want the convenience of having it. Users will pay for apps
  • An app economy is emerging, with lots of little companies. There probably won’t be a big winners, but if you look at the aggregate, this could be a 1 billion revenue stream opportunity, perhaps a $10 billion market cap business.
  • It’s opportunity is viable, real, out there, just won’t support a large company today. A real trend that will continue grow. As Facebook grows, as smartphone industry grows, there’s going to be a need for new revenue sources to support these companies & activities.
  • Telcos: as voice rates continues to drop for telcos, flat-rate data plans begin to fill in these revenue gaps
  • Facebooks of the world: ad won’t support the model, need app-based economy
  • Take off your US-centric lens. People in other countries may not have iPhones but they do consume a lot of data apps
  • AT&T’s of the world: walled-gardens are coming down, because they are seeing the revenue opportunity. They will build their own app stores and take their 30% margin on the apps
  • As iPhone prices come down, AAPL will not be able to make money from hardware, they will increasingly need to rely on revenue from apps

The above is Ram Shriram‘s technology trend prediction, from the 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends at the Churchill Club. I couldn’t find the transcripts from that 2-hour long debate, so yours truly had to hit the YouTube replay a few hundred times over to capture the above. Too good to not capture!

You can watch the entire thing here:

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Posted in apps, mobile, problem-opportunity, silicon valley, social networking, technology, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

“What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20″

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

I have been a longtime fan of Tina Seelig, and her talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I was 20″ that she originally gave to some West Point grads. The podcast is here, a high-level summary here. I’m excited to find out today that she’s now making that into a book! (preview available) SIGN ME UP!  I’m a big fan of that book – and _highly_ recommend it to anyone :) Go Tina!

Browse Inside this bookGet this for your site

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Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, problem-opportunity, stanford | Comments

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