Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

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A change in direction: Python, Django, and Google App Engine

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

This is a cross-post from my other for-own-use developer blog. I’m posting it here because people often ask me what I’m so busy with.

It’s been a while since my last post; I have been real busy. Anyway, just to quickly say this, I’ve made a change in direction in my development efforts.

I’ve said earlier that I am determined learn a new programming language this year because my brain is starting to rot, but have since decided a few months ago that it will not be Cocoa Touch, for various reasons: too niche (the emerging global mobile apps market is highly fragmented by Nokia, iPhone, Android, Crackberry and possibly Palm as a viable contender), and skills here only attacks a small piece of my larger effort, which my gut tells me it’s a task that could probably be farmed out and done cheaper/faster by outsourcing to a iPhone dev shop where Cocoa Touch is their core competency.

A mobile app that does not utilize any connectivity, nay, “intelligent” connectivity, is not much different from calc.exe on your WinXP desktop. It’s fine for a narrow and specific, uninteresting task. An interesting mobile app would tap the cloud for some form of intelligence. Why not leverage that mandatory data plan from AT&T for your iPhone?

When the time comes, if necessary (such as if the iPhone app will be an important part of my competitive advantage), then I’ll pick up Cocoa Touch myself. For now, I do not think that will be the case, thus I’m going to spend more time on laying the groundwork for the more important piece: the back-end, web 2.0 / cloud computing / SaaS piece. And as Microsoft knows, as Tim O’Reilly says – nobody with their right mind would bet against the Web! (Have you seen HTML5?)

The past month or two, I’ve tried real hard to squeeze time in to learn Python, Django and Google App Engine – all at the same time in parallel, not sequentially. Yes, I’m trying to rush – because I am impatient.
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Posted in execution, goal setting, self improvement, technology | 6 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 | No Comments »

Shai’s Divide and Conquer!

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Shai Agassi is a real genius—one of my rock stars that I’m just dying to meet. I’ve already got to meet the other big name in electric cars, Elon Musk from Tesla.

He has said before that he’s good at break big problems into smaller problems, solving the pieces, then aggregating the results. I’m not familiar with his work at SAP, but clearly he’s proved this with his divide-and-conquer approach to problem solving here. Computer scientists make some of the best problem solvers out there.

In this TED talk, Shai talks about a shift in thinking: viewing the electric car’s battery a discrete unit that’s interchangeable, vs. today’s mentality where the car is one with the fuel tank (who would buy a car without a fuel tank, or vice versa?)

I’ve previously blogged about unbundling production from delivery before with examples of Amazon.com and it’s IT infrastructure, mobile phones as a poverty buster, and this is kind of like that, but with other concepts tied in – e.g. subsidized pricing (e.g. like how cell phones are subsidized by carriers).

The analogy Elon Musk uses (I can’t find where he said this, but I swear I remember him saying this), is like air travel today. I can fly to Europe from California for $500. But that’s because I’m not the first person to ever fly on that plane, nor will I be the last; the same air plane gets reused over and over for many flights. The point here is that the owner of the plane doesn’t have to recoup the cost of the plane with a single flight, it is done over a period of time. The higher the utilization rate, the faster they recoup the investment.

That’s why Elon’s SpaceX goal of building a reusable rocket is so revolutionary (most people don’t realize this) and is an important step for man-kind. Imagine being able to fly to the moon or other planets in our solar system for the price of a flight ticket?

Back to Better Place. In Shai’s talk, he shows how battery for electric cars follow a Moore’s law-like curve; battery prices will drop as its technology increases. By unbundling the ownership of the car and the battery, you can increase the utilization rate per battery which result in people owning these cars having access to the latest and most efficient battery at that time (vs. someone stuck with the same battery for the lifespan of the car). Small but important point.

Shai’s a very cool guy who is literally, changing the world. I’m a big fan.

Check out his TED talk if you haven’t already!

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Posted in changing the world, cleantech, entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, passion, people i like, startup, technology | No Comments »

Startonomics – Los Angeles ’09

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Last week, I made a trip to LA for Startonomics, held on UCLA’s campus. Like most Web 2.0 conferences these days, the presentation slides are all online, and streamed live on the Web, and the videos of the talks to be available online soon. My favourite video + slides startup is still Omnisio – they still do the best job IMHO in presenting the video and slides together in sync.

So why go if all the content is online for free?

Because you can’t meet cool new people and do the face-to-face interaction thing ;)

During the conference, I jotted down some notes, pen and paper. The following are a tiny subset of them .. in a very scribbled fashion (because I have no time to make it pretty :/ )

Morning Keynote Address by David O. Sacks, Founder/CEO of Geni & Yammer

- Lesson from PayPal, don’t rely on someone else’s buy-in to succeed. If your business model hinges upon someone else saying “yes” to you, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

- Avoid deep tech in first few iterations, fail hard and fail fast. All technology as time goes by eventually grows deep anyway, once you’ve tested it on the market and you know you have a rough diamond. “Not right today, but I can fix it tomorrow”

- On the flip side, if you fail too fast, you don’t learn anything. Aka, “pace” your failure.

Get Your Bootstrap On: Starting Up When the Economy is Down by Mike Jones, CEO, Tsavo Media

* This was by far my favorite, I got to speak to Mike during the break and he’s a really cool guy. I can’t seem to embed, but you can find the video here

- Aim for success, prepare for failure

- Good startups, they send weekly status reports to their board of advisors without being asked. It measures where they are and how far they are from the projected objectives. Transparency is good.

- When you raise money, it’s your responsibility to bring back the money to your investors!

Just Like the 405: Seven Ways to Drive Bumper-to-Bumper Traffic by Jason Nazar, CEO, Docstoc

- Like Docstoc: You must ask yourself what piece of the puzzle are you solving? Are you adding value over time?

Afternoon Keynote Address by Richard Rosenblatt, Former Chairman, Myspace.com, Former CEO, Intermix Media, Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Demand Media

- When running a startup, things *will* go wrong. Everything MBAs project will be wrong. But if you go in knowing that you will fail, that’s okay. Because you know you will need to change and evolve your product/b-plan anyway.

- What kind of company will you build? (a) King of my hill (b) Get what the market gives you (c) Go big or go home – change landscape

Pitching and Packaging for Partnerships: How to Land Amazing Deals and Tell If They’re Working by Peter Pham, CEO, BillShrink

- You want your partners to say “you’ve built what we’ve wanted for years, but just didn’t have the resources to build it ourselves”

- You won’t get to be there in person to pitch all decision makers inside of a large corporations, but your email will be forwarded throughout the chain, so include screenshot mockups, they speak volumes for your product.

- Send partner weekly updates, move deals along, don’t let the line go cold.

How to Create a Web site the Users Eat Up and Beg for More by Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster, Inc.

- Use the “so what” litmus test on proposed new product features, fight feature-creep.

- Actionable insights are everything, don’t do inconsequentials.

- Quantitative success does not equal qualitative success.

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.. and many more below other good talks below. Check out the links, for the preso slides as well.

Jim Benedetto (SVP MySpace) on Scaling for the Masses (session 3)

Mark Jeffrey (Mahalo) on the Art of Product Development (session 2)

Neil Patel (ACS) on Finding Users (session 5)

Sean Percival (CEO Tsavo Media) on Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media (session 6)

Jay Weintraub (CEO LeadsCon) on Monetizing by Numbers (session 9)

Frank Addante (CEO Rubicon Project) on The Dynamics of Olympic Startups (session 10)

Dan Gould (Fox Interactive) on Idea to Advisors to Angel Funding to Series A (session 11)

Mark Suster (GRP Partners), Brian Garrett (Crosscut Ventures) and David Travers (Rustic Canyon) wrapped up the day to give their take on startups in LA, valuations in ‘09 and what it takes to get them to cut a check.

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Posted in entrepreneurship, startup, technology | No Comments »

The Internet Culture

Monday, February 9th, 2009

The Internet culture is characterised by four layers: The techno meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the virtual communitarian culture and the entrepreneurial culture [...]

The culture of the Internet is a culture made up of a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology, enacted by communities of hackers thriving on free and open technological creativity, embedded in virtual networks aimed at reinventing society, and materialised by money-driven entrepreneurs into the workings of the new economy

From the book The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) by Manuel Castells. Via The four holy cows of the Mobile Data industry at Open Gardens.

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Posted in regular reads, technology, trends | No Comments »

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