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Monthly Archive for November, 2005

Focus

Published on 29 November, 2005 in Entrepreneur and Startup. 0 Comments

Focus - an important trait of entrepreneur that I badly need to improve. 

As of now, I am spliting my time into far too many things and more ideas are cropping up each day. Need to stop, reorganise and focus on, perhaps not one but definitely not too many things at a time.

For past number of months now I had stopped building a single business but going for multiple activities that I anticipate will provide multiple revenue streams and options. 

Mainly I grouped them under 3 categories - online, sourcing and investing.

Online. Here I am building up a portfolio of sites (of which 3 are started on this site already) as well as related services. Currently revenues are still limited to minuscule ads income and service fees.

One thing about web is that success can be built built upon success and most of the time effort are accumulative over time. So I am expecting this activity to slowly grow. Spend sometime each day and accumulates.

Sourcing. Sourcing, purchasing and providing business services is what I am physically doing with 2 partners here in China.

We had some success in closing a few good deals but supplier quality problems, payment issues and other challenges sapped away our time and effort.

We are still pretty far on this one. Not only my focus but focus of the team had to be aligned. This is the most uncertain but certainly has great potential for development and growth.

Investing. This is my cash cow at the moment. The stock market recovery over the last one year plus had helped financed my bleeding activities. I fear though I am slowly suffocating the proverbial golden goose as I liquidate my investments to fund my other activities. Time is running out.

Also with more time spent on other activities I had lesser time to monitor the market. Most of the money remains in unit trusts (mutual funds) as I liquidate the stock holdings.

The power of iPod users

Published on 29 November, 2005 in Business Models and Products. 0 Comments

Let me quote this exchange among a group of iPod fan(atics) among my friends.

A: …S, Da, R I bought IPOD NANO!!. Haven’t name it yet. Any ideas? …

Do: … welcome to the Fellowship of the Pods… well, can name it "Aunt A"

Da: Welcome to the iPod family! Of course, you have to go through the iPod initiation rites. First, you GOT TO christen your Nano. How about "Axxx" or "Cxxx-eey"? Then, you got to clock up at least 50 hours of listening time within the 1st week. After that, you are a bona fide iPod-er.

C: Not fair! I protest~~~!! I feel real excluded without iPod!!

As you can see S, Da, R, Do and A (and a few more) are iPod users. C and myself (and a dwindling others) are not. When we get together, conversation will somehow turned to the little white cool gadget and another soon become a convert.

Mind you, when the iPoders introduce the iPod, they did it with passion and hardsell. "You got to get one!" "It totally changed my life!" "I will go with you to buy one!"

Another iPod sold.

Some company pays handsome for salesperson. Apple get it all for free!

How? Another case for marketing textbook no less.

Domainer

Published on 25 November, 2005 in Business Models and Online. 0 Comments

Few of my friends had quietly became domainer. What is a domainer?

Domainer is someone who buys and sells domain names.

According to Business2.0, this is the online version of real estate. Just like people invest or speculate in real estates, domainers invest or speculate virtual estates - domain names.

The latest (not really new but getting more attention) thing for domainers is international language domains as well as country level domains like 中文.com or domainname.cn.

With low investment and potential high returns, it had gotten many people excited.

Although I had been registering domains since 1995. I had never seriously consider being a domainer. Of course I had kicked myself for letting go of a number of good names over the years.

As a result of this recent craze, I’m taking a look at it more closely but it really has all the ingredients of a tulip fever. Will there be a bigger fool to buy those names from you?

Firefox and China websites

Published on 23 November, 2005 in China, Free Desktop and Online. 0 Comments

One the the biggest frustration to Firefox users in China is the many websites that are still coded specifically for Internet Explorer (IE).

Often there is no indication to the requirement. The transaction will just work until the very last step and simply failed. All one may get is a blank screen or an unrelated error message.

This is not just for small website but major websites, banks, government sites. We can forgive small sites for not spending extra effort on browser compatibility. But it is simply bigotry for the big well funded sites.

Back home in Singapore, Citibank website had been supporting Netscape and Firefox for a long time. So do all the banks (DBS, UOB, OCBC) that I use and government sites like CPF.

Oh well, end of rant, have to fire up IE and redo the transaction again.

Disruptive Break

Published on 20 November, 2005 in Entrepreneur. 0 Comments

Too often we tried to push our way through when thing gets tough, spending ever more time and energy with diminishing return.

It usually doesn’t work but the mind tricks us in such a way that we think it does. Everything then spiral down to a total burn out.

I fell into this trap recently. Things wasn’t going well and I was pinned down by depressive thoughts.

What we need is a distruptive break. Accept the inability to breakthrough and totally get away from it all. Do something different to combat the depressive mood. Realise that in the greater scheme of things, that inability to breakthrough is really insignificant.

That’s exactly what I did last week. I took a break, went for a trip to Taipei and attended a canoepolo coaching course. A refreshing change, doing something I like and missed.

With no internet access for a whole week, it was also a rude awakening that things doesn’t need to move at warp-speed.

Everything at work was perfectly fine when I returned. Things wouldn’t have change much had I spent the week brooding. By going away and have a disruptive break, I’m now recharged and read to charge!

Firefox 1.5 RC2

Published on 12 November, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

Hot on the heel of Firefox 1.5 RC1, RC2 is just released. Of course for those running 1.5, this is old news since the moment Firefox is fired up, it detects upgrade, downloads necessary files and prompts for install.

Wonder what you are missing?

Update:  More on using free softwares in business at Free Biz Ware.

The Blame Game

Published on 10 November, 2005 in China and Entrepreneur. 0 Comments

The blame game is something I very bad at and have no intention of improving. Unfortunately for me, in the envirnoment I’m in, the locals had perfected it into a fine art.

Instead of lamenting what happened today, let me just recount this little incident a week ago.

I went into a noodle stall for a late lunch and ordered �酱�(noodle
with meat sauce). So after paying at the counter, I got a slip of paper
with the order written, handed it over to the waitress who then handed
it to the kitchen. A short while later, the noodle arrived - soup
noodle with meat sauce.

Before the story continues, some background about �
酱é�¢. This dish is serve differently in different part of the country.
Some server it with soup and meat sauce, others serve dry (drained like
spaghetti) with meat sauce.

In this particular incident I was expecting the dry version, which is more common. So I ask the waitress if she could have the soup drained.

What
followed is really what I am trying to illustrate. An attitude so
common and ingrained that one wonders if anyone take responsibility at
all.

The reply came was "It was written on the slip". I look disbelived.

More
was to come. The girl at the counter overheard (it was a small shop)
and immediate proclaimed, "You (meaning me) did not told me".

Fine, please drain the soup. Relunctantly the waitress took it back. It did not rest there though. All the way back to the kitchen she mumbled "It was not written". Over at the cashier, the girl emphasised a few more time that their version is the soup version.

Amusing? Not if similar things happened in your business.

If ony the energy spent on playing blame game is redirected to getting things done right.

OpenOffice 2.0简体中文版

Published on 10 November, 2005 in Free Desktop. 0 Comments

OpenOffice 2.0 had been officially released for a few weeks now. My beta release was upgraded last week. Yesterday, I downloaded the simplified chinese version and installed on one of the company’s computer.

Someone should setup a OpenOffice mirror in China. Took me a long time to download the whole package. Also I noticed that there seems to be more Traditional Chinese than Simplifed Chinese content on OpenOffice.org website. With the readily available of cheap office suites, perhaps mainland is not as keen on an open source alternative.

Anyway, I am going to do my small part and introduce OpenOffice to my Chinese colleagues.

Word and Excel are too deeply entrenched even though they probably cannot distinguish Word from Writer. Suggestion of a change in application will very likely raise skeptism and subtle relunctance. So my plan of attack is from Impress, Draw or Base.

More report of the progress here. Stay tuned.

Update:  More on using free softwares in business at Free Biz Ware.

Referrer Log Spam

Published on 7 November, 2005 in Online. 0 Comments

Spam. Damn spam!

First email spam, then blog comment spam, wiki spam and now the latest, Referer log spam.

Referrer spam is getting serious on my blog. On a conservative estimate, 50% of last month’s web traffic are spam.

Basically there is no effective solution to stop these spammers. If your webhosting has monthly traffic quota, it will eat into that. The only way might be to request filtering at the hosting provider’s router but it is unlike that a provider will want to do that.

On top of that, these spam totally ruined traffic statistics. The statistics are so skewed that the only way to fix it is to filtering the log and re-run the stats.

Spent the morning adding some Apache rewrite rules. Not that it helps much but it sure feels good to give these bastard the 403.

Selecting Technology and Business

Published on 7 November, 2005 in China, Development, Entrepreneur and Startup. 0 Comments

Technology changes fast. So fast that before one can decide which
technology to use, a new one is out to replace those in consideration.

At the same time, there are too many competing technologies. One can hardly find time to fully understand one, let alone so many of them.

Add
these all up and sprinkle in ample amount of business activities. You
can be sure a small technology-based business owner has his hands full.

Bill Gates coined Business at the Speed of Thoughts. I wished. One thing is for sure, it is not arriving as soon as Bill thinks.

Today I took a step back and looked at what I had done, after a year of probing in China. Not very comforting. I hasn’t progressed far. In fact, certain things had even came a full circle, bringing me back to the starting point.

It is not to say there isn’t any achievement. I learnt alot, did alot, know alot of people (both good and bad, though more of the latter).

One of the thing I learnt is about selecting technology.

For a small business, selecting technology isn’t so much about what you like. It isn’t even matter so much what you know. I am talk about a small, one man, maybe two, business.

It really is about what technology people know in the market.

Fine, I should have know that. But I was idealistic, stubbornly so.

Take PHP for example. Where are the PHP developers in China? I am sure there are. Some of the wildly popular applications are coded in PHP. Some major websites are in PHP.

I can only speculate,

  1. They are all taken away by those companies or some MNCs
  2. No one cares about PHP, just use ASP whose software and books are widely available.
  3. Everyone that knows PHP decides to start a business on their own and not work for others.

While I’m still trapped with the lack of PHP developers, I starting to think whether PHP is my bet for the road ahead.

Ruby is looking very bright. Python is rearing its head.

On the development platform front, I’m not sure if developing for the web is the way to go. Sure, web 2.0 is reviving the interesting in using standard based HTML interface. Stealing the limelight from Flash and Actionscript altogether.

Eclipse is casting its shadow over many areas and possibility. Konfabulator makes developing for the desktop fun once again. Cross platform is a major overarching theme.

One year later, I am back to deciding.