Archive for the ‘problem-opportunity’ Category

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Half-baked Idea Of The Day: TLDR

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Update 1: Based on initial feedback, I might be conveying this wrong. The proposed idea is not yet another way to find interesting things to read. Example use case: The moment you visit a URL, just as you are about to read it, the browser tells you that “hey, before you read this, this might actually be a waste of your time.”

If you’ve never seen that expression “TLDR” on the web, that’s short for “too long didn’t read”.

I use Instapaper to save things I want to read for later when I have time to read. But just as my pre-Instapaper days, the problem is that my list of things to read grows faster than I actually have time to read and de-queue items from the list. As you’ve heard, “wealth of information creates poverty of attention“. Not a new problem that I’m sure a lot of people suffer from.

We all have our own ways of coping, so I wonder if we could take all the methods (that work) and productize it.

There is an old story about a finance professor and a student who come upon a $100 bill lying on the ground. The student stoops to pick it up. “Don’t bother,” the professor admonishes. “If it were really a $100 bill, it wouldn’t be there.[1]“

The above story captures the essence behind one of my own tactics to cope[2]. (more…)

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Posted in half-baked idea of the day, ideas, problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | 2 Comments »

Half-baked idea of the day: Exchanging contact information [update 2]

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Here’s a half-baked idea that I’ve been thinking about today. I’ve recently made some new friends from a dinner party organized by mutual friends (a pretty common thing most people can relate to, I hope) and I was asked for my vCard. That’s rather unusual – first time I’ve been asked for a vCard. Then I started thinking, how have I exchanged information with new people I’ve met? There’s no one clear easy way. Sometimes we exchange Twitter handles, Facebook accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. by means of writing it down on a paper, verbally, exchanging a business card, or literally pulling out the phone in my pocket and immediately firing an email off to the other person so they’d have my email right away (or I email myself their information so that I can tweet at them later, etc.)

No, I don’t use silly phone apps – I know there’s a million of them. Why? While they are cool and feature rich (‘feature rich’ is not a compliment here), usually they require the other person to also have the app. While it’s great for the startup because they think it increases virality and helps with their user acquisition, I’m not going to try to convince someone to install an app the first time I’ve met the person just so we can exchange contact information. No.

But the vCard request digs at something deeper. When I think of someone’s complete and comprehensive contact information, I’m thinking of the person’s email, mobile phone, work phone, home phone, home address, work address, Twitter username, Facebook account, Skype username, LinkedIn, etc.

It’s still fundamentally a pain in the ass to exchange a collection of such information to someone new. Usually we just ask for one piece of information, and we proceed to create a new contact, and then fill in the other fields later, usually manually by hand.

Is there a better solution? Is there an opportunity for a solution?

Update 1: LOL – less than 10 minutes after I post this, someone in my social network tells me he has a startup that’s attacking this problem. I’ll be looking forward to hearing about this solution ;)

Update 2: The day after, I stumble upon this story on WaPo: “Business cards thrive in a digital age“. Perhaps an indication that all electronic solutions to date still don’t have a value proposition that is powerful enough to “punch through” the status quo (to quote Marc Andressen)

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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 | No 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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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 | No Comments »

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