Archive for the ‘regular reads’ Category

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Why do people participate in social Web 2.0 ?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

So you’ve heard about Web 2.0 and you’re probably at least dabbling in it, but do you know why you’re doing it? If you’re a business owner, do you know why your customers/prospects participate in it? Do you know why you should also participate?If you’re in the midst of building a “social” strategy for your company, or trying to develop a social web application, you’ll find this useful.

I’m currently reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I highly recommend this book. Here’s their web site on the topic.

Why do people participate in the social web? There could be many reasons and it’s different for everybody, but here are the big buckets that Charlene and Josh suggests, and I certainly fit a few of these.

* Keeping up friendships. I’m on Facebook and I love it. I see it as a way to “scale” relationships in a way, because it’s so difficult to keep up with everybody, given your busy schedule or geographical distance.

* Making new friends. Dating sites are an obvious example, but there are plenty of other examples of people getting to know each other (in real life) without first getting introduced face-to-face. This definitely resonates with me. I first met my first online buddy Andy from Germany (while I was in Malaysia) over IRC – yeah, back in .. 1996 (+/- 2), and we’ve been real good friends ever since.

* Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends. This is largely true for the late majority and laggards – maybe the early majority. See technology adoption lifecycle. That’s right, if you’re laggard – that means you’re sloooow. Also see Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore.

* Paying it forward. Having seeing and believing that a site is genuinely valuable/useful yourself first hand, you may be compelled to help out and contribute, however little, maybe it just that 1 click to pick 3.5 stars out of 5 stars on a review.

* The altruistic impulse. People do good in the offline world, surely this can be extended to the social web. We have microfinance to help people get out of poverty (See Wokai, Kiva), people writing software and giving them away for free (open source), and free advice online from everything ranging from motorcycle problems, to legal and medical advice.

* The prurient impulse. What Charlene and Josh describes as an endless parade of exhibitionism from people online that are fascinating, sexy, entertaining, and stupid. Kind of like picking up the TV remote and flipping the channels.

* The creative impulse. Not everyone is a professional programmer, writer, photographer, but the Web is a place for anybody to showcase their portfolio and get feedback, a form of payment for the creative mind.

* The validation impulse. People feel validated of their expertise when they help others online for free. Validation is a powerful driver for social networks; people put themselves out there and the community reassures them about their place in the world.

* The affinity impulse. Maybe your hockey league has a Facebook fan page, your favorite NHL team has a social network where all the fans unite, maybe the motorcycle gang you just joined organize events online; surely there’s a group of people who share a common interest with you that are actively engaging the group online. However odd, rare, niche an interest is, is not a problem. The long tail of the web almost guarantees you will find someone in the world who shares it with you. And it’s better t be alienated together as a group than individually as a person, but I digress.

I highly recommend it if you’re looking to leverage social Web 2.0 to help your business in some way. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Posted in regular reads, social networking, web 2.0 | 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

The good kind of stress.

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

We hear people whining about stress but rarely do we hear someone extolling it. And that’s why I’d like to make a distinction between stress and pressure. I understand that the two words are used interchangeably, and that there was a book about good stress, but the word is itself stressful. Stress is when you’re contemplating failure, when you’re threatened, in danger, being pushed. Ah, but pressure can be when you’re hopeful, when you’re contemplating victory, when opportunity is winking at you, pulling you onward.

“Deadlines are your friends,” has been my companion for many years. Deadlines mean you get to finish, to let go. And, for many of us, deadlines mean you get to start. After all, if there’s no hurry, it’s never going to see the upper half of your to-do list. A deadline is GAME ON!

From the Boston Globe.

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Posted in execution, quotes, regular reads | Comments

Creature of Anticipation

Monday, June 1st, 2009

The idea, as promoted by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, is as follows: What is the most potent use of our brain? It is precisely the ability to project conjectures into the future and play the counterfactual game—”If I punch him in the nose, then he will punch me back right away, or, worse, call his lawyer in New York.” One of the advantages of doing so is that we can let our conjectures die in our stead. Used correctly and in place of more visceral reactions, the ability to project effectively frees us from immediate, first-order natural selection—as opposed to more primitive organisms that were vulnerable to death and only grew by the improvement in the gene pool through the selection of the best. In a way, projecting allows us to cheat evolution: it now takes place in our head, as a series of projections and counterfactual scenarios.

This ability to mentally play with conjectures, even if it frees us from the laws of evolution, is itself supposed to be the product of evolution—it is as if evolution has put us on a long leash whereas other animals live on the very short leash of immediate dependence on their environment. For Dennett, our brains are “anticipation machines”; for him the human mind and consciousness are emerging properties, those properties necessary for our accelerated development.

—excerpt from The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

So that’s why computer scientists run simulations on computers all day long!

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CNET’s “Android ‘a revolution’” key questions

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

The importance of thinking big, the big picture, scale, a product transcending products (a.k.a. a platform):

I’d much rather be the guy that does a platform that’s capable of running on multiple companies’ phones than just focusing on a single product.

A single product is going to have, eventually, limitations. Even if that was two products that’s going to have limitations. But if it’s a hundred products, now we’re getting somewhere, to the scale at which Google thinks people want to access information.

Proactively anticipating tectonic shifts in the landscape that would create a problem, and proactively attacking the problem now:

We look at it first from the scale perspective. The mission here is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and relevant. So the accessible part: think of a world in which you are somehow prevented from accessing the information you want. When I go to a hotel room and pay the $19.95 to get on the Internet and they have some firewall that doesn’t let me get to my Exchange server, it makes me berserk.

I look at things–and Google looks at things–in (terms of) how could the landscape change in such a way that consumers who want to access Google services can’t?

Full article here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10245994-93.html

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Posted in changing the world, google, mobile, regular reads, trends | Comments

Excerpt: Larry Page’s Commencement Speech

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Full post can be found here.

You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming.

I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born.When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

When I was here at Michigan, I had actually been taught how to make dreams real! I know it sounds funny, but that is what I learned in a summer camp converted into a training program called Leadershape. Their slogan is to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible”. That program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea at the time: I wanted to build a personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses. It was a futuristic way of solving our transportation problem. I still think a lot about transportation — you never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. Many things that people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will require much less human time in the future. That is, if we “have a healthy disregard for the impossible” and actually build new solutions.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges. That is what happened with Google. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can that not get you excited? But we almost didn’t start Google because my co-founder Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program. You are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. That was the first hardware for Google. Parents and friends: more credit cards always help. What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

As a Ph.D. student, I actually had three projects I wanted to work on. Thank goodness my advisor said, “why don’t you work on the web for a while”. He gave me some seriously good advice because the web was really growing with people and activity, even in 1995! Technology and especially the internet can really help you be lazy. Lazy? What I mean is a group of three people can write software that millions can use and enjoy. Can three people answer the phone a million times a day? Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!

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Posted in changing the world, passion, regular reads, startup, things to remind myself | Comments

The meaning of meaning

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

From “Personal Renewal” by John Gardner, posted on PBS. It’s a long post, but full of gems:

“We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. As you get a little older, you’re told you’ve earned the right to think about yourself. But that’s a deadly prescription! People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Another significant ingredient in motivation is one’s attitude toward the future. Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone makes fun of it. Someone said “Pessimists got that way by financing optimists.” But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, “I’d be a pessimist but it would never work.”

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall,”

“You’ve known such people — feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for [...] Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.”

“We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can’t change, by taking risks.” 

(more…)

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Posted in failure, fear, goal setting, mentoring, perseverance, quotes, regular reads, self improvement, things to ponder about, things to remind myself, values | Comments

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