Monday, July 30, 2007

Digg.com

Valley Boys

Digg.com's Kevin Rose leads a new brat pack of young entrepreneurs




The story about Digg.com is one of my most favorite. For those of you who wants to start an Internet company but don't know technology that much. Digg is a best example to tell you that what matters is the busienss model, you understanding of the internet community and your guts feeling, but NOT the technology.

Digg demonstrated a few key facts:
1. the power of the crowd. Online usrs are more and more prefer opinion from peers but not from the so-called expert.
2. open, transparent and fair busienss model. Everyone 's vote is equalent. No expert needed. it's a new way of demacracy
3. and it is widely adopted by online news/blogs website. every page almost has a digg-it button..

Friday, July 27, 2007

Internet & the Stranger

I love internet and I love strangers.

Without Internet I won't be able to launch my first start-up nor meeting my wife. I love stranger because the conversation always give me the unexpected surprise. I am reading PureVC.com, a blog talking venture capital. The author invites people who have interest about investment, entrepreneurship etc to contact him and I suddently had the strong feeling to write this blog.

I must say, a common mistake I had seen among people is that they come with various preassumption before meeting/talking with strangers, if they decided to meet at all. Yes, there are lots liars online but it is not hard to exclude them if you did some due diligence. And if you really meet a person who you never meet before, it's like a weird chemical reaction. Two world, two minds and two brains suddently connected. Sometimes it would generate nothing but sometime it may be the catalyst for a fantastic fire...

However, I can not stand the popular way Americans meet strangers, in a noisy bar! So many beautiful grass land in the States so I am wondering why you guys prefer to yell at pub/bar and back home with a sore throat.. For this purpose, Internet is way better, is it.

I think this is also the reason why I am so into the travel things. How exciting it is to visit a totally new land, meet new people and experience new surroundings around. Guess my brain only gets excited by new things...

Embrace the Internet, Embrace the world of strangers, and Embrace the open mind.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

A fund for Free Travel

If my next start-up succeed, instead of giving $ for whatever other purpose, the first thing I will do is setup a travel fund to give free ticket for anyone never visited China. Of course accommodation cost will not be covered, even though food is cheap in China. But may generate enough eyeball to attract sponsors...

I believe the best way to undestand something is to be there by yourself, with an open mind.

Travel is one of the most wonderful activity in the world.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Experience with Scribd.com


I had used Scribd.com for a while when it first emerged but then lost interest. Today, after  my old thinkpad crashed, I realized Scribd is one of the best supplementary site for del.icio.us. Del.icio.us can save every URL but useless for a actual document like a PDF report. While I am using Box.net and Xdrive for private document but the free space is limited(1G and 5G). Now Scribd.com could be the perfect website for my collection of valuable articles that can be shared with others.


So when I login to scribd.com today to upload a new PDF report sent by webtrends and emarkter, I accidentally realized someone added me as friend in scribd (ok, one is scribd staff, boring. the other is not) and another added one of my uploaded article as favorite. It's cool.


Could this scribd thing(Youtube for document) be something, beside the $17M pre-money evaluation they had for series A funding? Something supplementary to Wikipedia? I see scribd a cool site to be acquired since they do have a smart way to have people sort through billions of documents in billions of computers everyday.

Sure people may upload useless files but they are risk their reputation at scribd. And this type of peer pressure is wonderful to solve the quality issue. Wikipedia is using the very same way.


It's indeed a cool way for document sharing. Or say, knowledge sharing.

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Another meaning of DBA

DBA is supposed to be read as DataBase Administrator which is one of the best IT job in the world. I had worked in a partial DBA before and the job is challenging (if you know what data you are deal with) and interesting(so many things to learn)...

Today while I am doing research for my business plan, I had learned another meaning of DBA which may be written as d/b/a as well that is Doing Business As. Guess this is a lawyer invented term?

Monday, July 23, 2007

Parakey-WebOS


Richard@ReadWriteweb has a good post about Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s."

It's fascinating. It's like when I boot my laptop, the 'desktop' is a Firefox window and there is no things called "drive" or "folder" but individual file only with a file name and tags. "my picture" tag may either point to all pictures in my local drive or my photo album at Flickr or Google Picasa. The two can be synced too. Wow. It's cool.

To me, this may eliminate the existence of computer virus since the only executeable application is the Firefox Browser. Office productivity will be done by Google Docs or Zoho like my previous post. To me, this is a more elegant idea than Adobe AIR platform that aiming at: building a web layer beyond whatever OS you are using today, be it WIndows, OS X or Linux. This also remind me the thing I feel so disappointed by Sun Micro: Why not acquire Netscape back to 1996? With Java applet embeded in Netscape browser, Sun can builid a webOS 10 years ago.

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Other's eBay account had been hacked

FYI: This is a real story I received from a friend of mine:

-------------------------------
My painful experience - account thief

This past Sunday night, I found out I got dozens email for "eBay
Listing Confirmed". The items listed are very good stuff with
very attractive price. Such as
NEW-JAMES BOND 007 COLLECTION - 20 DVD BOX ED SET ! Buy It Now
for $55
The X-Files Seasons 1-9 (DVD Boxed Sets) BRAND NEW! Buy It Now
for $70.00
....

Total listed price is over $1000.

I immediately realized my Ebay account got hacked, so I
1. changed my password to a very difficult one(my previous was
very simple and most Chinese people like)
2. Went Ebay website, reported my case online.
3. Sent Ebay email reporting my case
4. I tried to remove the listings, but I could not, so I changed
some of the Listing titles from
such as
"The X-Files Seasons 1-9 (DVD Boxed Sets) BRAND NEW!"
to
"Don't bid. Listed by hacker. Reported to Ebay already."
5. Went bed with a rabbit in my heart.
6. In the morning, to my surprise that I got 3 congratulations
emails from Ebay:"Congratulations, your item sold!"
and one buyer even already paid.
7. I was unhappy that Ebay did not do anything overnight, so I
emailed to all the buyers that "Don't pay".
8. A buyer emailed me back:
Item: Don't bid. Listed by hacker. Reported to Ebay already.
(300102191901)
"xxxxx" is the winner.
Since i had saved this item, i did not see the notice not to bid
until it was too late. Can you have this item removed without
negative feedback. Much appreciated.
9. The person who paid called me back, but he nor me can do
nothing.
10. I tried to call Ebay, but I could not find the phone #. I
found the a "live chat" on Ebay.com. I chatted with a person,
and she/he could not do anything, but instructed me to use
"secure live chat", that is, log in first. After about 40
minutes waiting a guy came on line. He asked my many questions
and even called me confirming my identity.
11. This secure chat person did a great job. He removed all the
listings, refund all my listing fee(about $100), and promised me
to help to get money back from the person who already paid.
12. The person who paid, gave me the name of the people who
received money. They are li zhou and dian zhi you jian.
13. The secure chat person will do more investigation about this
account thief.
14. So far, after spending many hours, everything seems fine
now.

What the account theft did and what he/she would do:
chose Sunday night listed items. Buy It Now only for three days.
Since they were priced good, and all may be sold in three days
by "Buy It Now". The thief chose XXX's paypal account to
receive buyers' money. Then the money go to XXX and
YYY's paypal account.

XXX and
YYY may be a victim also, because my
account theft may be also an identity theft who stole XXX
and
YYY's IDs.

The account theft may use an fake ID, or
XXX/YYY's ID, opened an
bank account/Paypal account and used a public PC logged/created
email/paypal account, so the police may never get them.

If I did not check my email for a few days, the account thief
may get the check from Paypal or money goes to their bank
account. After they get money, they run and leave over $1000
mess for me and the buyers.

Lessons learned: Passwords to any accounts should be as
difficult as possible, monitor all your accounts as often as
possible, read email as much as possible, but don't get fooled
by fishing email.

Be careful!

DanWei.org

DanWei has a fabulous blog post to demonstrate the reasoning process of western people. I think traditionally Chinese are good on those debate but we are far lagging behind. ANd I agree that Chinese government should put more pressure on Sudan. For whatever reason, killing hundres of thousands of people will make the reason absurd. And for the same reason, even though I strongly believe Taiwan is part of China but if a war really occur because Taiwan declare the independence later, I doubt I will support the war.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

iResearch - China Internet Highlight

我国网民低龄化趋势过于明显,其中18~24岁的年轻人所占比例最高,达到38.9%.
截至2006年12月31日,我国网民达到1.37亿,与上年同期相比增加了2600万人,增长率为23.4%,是历年来增长最多的一年。网民总数占总人口比例为10.5%,其中北京市网民普及率首次突破30%.


  网民年轻化趋势明显,25岁以下网民比例从1997年的41.9%升至51.89%.

       此外,到2007年初,宽带用户所占的份额已经达到了71.5%,为1997年的3倍以上。

美国上网的女性接近了9720万,而男性只有9090万


民接触互联网的日均时间也在迅速增长,从2002年的88.5分钟提高到2006年的137.8分钟,

在核心受众中,即25-45岁、大专以上学历、个人月收入2000元+的人群,互联网的日到达率却是一路飙升,由2001年的38.7%达到71.7%.成为仅次于电视与报纸的第三大媒体。


我国网民日均上网时间已逼近网民日均看电视的时间,后者约为140-145分钟。
2006年商务人士在工作日日均接触网络的时间远超平均数,达151.2分钟。

中国有超过3000万的网民会使用网络来购买物品,占整体网民的1/4


在中国,CNNIC的数据显示,中国目前大约有2500万人经常使用网上招聘,1500万人经常使用网络教育。在生活方面,网络电话和网上预订正在迅速兴起,目前分别有大约900万人和600万人在享受网络电话和网上预订带来的好处。

  在娱乐方面,截止到2006年6月份,在线影视收看及下载(在线电视)的规模已经达到4500万,在线音乐收听及下载(在线广播)也超过了4000万。预计在未来一段时间内,网络视频、数字音乐会迎来更大的发展。


2006年,中国网民平均上网时间居世界第一。美国调研机构Ipsos Insight的最新调查结果则显示,中国网民平均每周在线时间为17.9小时

白领迷恋网络同居
中国女网民们在线调查:消费不吝惜金钱

2006年中国游戏产业报告》显示,中国网络游戏用户为3260万人,比上年增长23.8%;国内网络游戏全年市场销售总收入为65.4亿元,比上年增长 73.5%。与此同时,网络游戏产业的快速发展,为电信、IT、媒体和传统出版业等相关产业创造的产值分别达210.5亿元、83.3亿元和39.4亿元,分别比上年增长了21.4%、16.3%和6.2%。根据预测,2007年至2011年,中国网络游戏年复合增长率将达到30.2%。





而据非盈利组织Pew互联网和美国生活计划(Pew Internet and American Life Project)公布的调查结果显示,互联网在美国人日常生活中扮演的角色越来越重要。

  在最近的一次调查中,有45%的被调查者承认,过去两年里,他们在做出重大决定或面临人生转折时曾到互联网上寻求帮助。在2002年的一次类似调查中,这一比例为40%.

  按照45%的比例计算,约有6000万美国人在做出重大人生决定时会到网上寻求帮助。调查显示,约有2100万美国人在寻找培训机会时会到网上寻求帮助;约有1700万美国人依托互联网为家庭成员选择学校或医院;约有1600万美国人购买汽车或投资时使用互联网;约有1000万美国人通

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Saturday, July 21, 2007

OReilly plus OSTG Inc plus Sun Microsystems

(I am merging my two blog together so here is a post from another old blog of mine. Bear with me.)

O'reilly is further towards the position to be the chief evangelist of leading Information Technologies in the world. They realized knowledge distribution is the best way to promote such a goal and their press business already one of the best. By setting up Safari U, organizing series gathering for top technical names such as Perl, Apache and Linux, O'reilly already gained enough credit. Quite like a professor in a Ivy league university, nothing but reputation and good life.

OSTG's slashdot and sourceforge are just like IBM and Intel in the computer industry. While their mother company, VA software, became very silent for a long time after their astonishing IPO back to 2000.


And comes Sun Microsystems. Once another evangelist and warrior of the Freedom of Technology, now paying more attention to survive instead of leading. Java is becoming a successful kid of the whole IT industry but contribute so few to Sun's P&L sheet. By acquiring those storage firms, Sun is struggling to find the right position for itself. Seems another long way to go.


The relationship and contribution of Slashdot and sourceforget for VA is very the same compare with Java and Sun. So what's a possible path for those two once-prominent players? IMHO, one not-that-bad approach is to merge those three companies together to form an enterprise that focus on providing anything to promote IT around the world. This new entity will have community, sufficient expertise, infrastructure, money, credit and experience. It could make sourceforge 10 times better to host, promote and help individuals and SMEs across the world to leverage their intelligence to explore every possibility, it would lower the cost, faster the R&D-to-market process and broader arena. It could create a online Wal-mart for Software and Service. It could make any start-up or individual save more time by avoiding painful CVS setup, server hosting whatsever. It would be the best place to name top 10, top 100 of technologies in the world, instead of so many other rankings. For anyone interested in IT, it's the one-stop place to visit.


If Sun doesn't want to be another DEC, do it.


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Friday, July 20, 2007

Applicationless Windows

No matter what OS I am using, Windows or Linux, 99.99% of the time Firefox is the only application i am running. Sure I admit my laptop is slow so I am avoiding running too many to suck my laptop memory out but then it's more than that. It's convenient and it's fast too.

There is meebo that you can login to all (but skype) your IM services, ICQ/MSN Messenger/Yahoo! Messenger/Gtalk... And I am using Zoho and Google Docs for my need of Microsoft Office. And Zamzar is doing all the document conversion for you, pdf<=>doc, mpeg<=>flash..you name it. Sure I have web email service to replace Outlook. Is there any other cool online service I forget? Oh, I am using Box.net(they suck since doesn't allow me to upload >10M file with free account) and AOL Xdrive (u can choose to install an desktop client to map a local drive to upload/download your file w/out any size limitation). If you are using any, let me know. I am also considering upload all my photos to Flickr someday so no need to burn DVD to store them... Guess will do this wkd.

You know what, I am really wondering when I can simply stop using Norton Antivirus (very soon I think) since I don't care about Virus anymore. why? 1) I don't open Office document with MS office software anymore but Zoho or Google Docs so the most famous Macro Virus embeded inside Office files won't affect me anymore. 2) I am using Firefox plus No Script plugin     so that almost no online malware etc can hurt my computer in the way malwares can do with IE. 3) No more offline data and XP support nice system restore(though I never tried yet) so even my computer was affected by virus, just a restore will solve it.


Poor Microsoft fella. but they are rolling out the Live series of services like Live Hotmail, Live Search etc. Good for them.

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Tuesday, July 17, 2007

New Class, New Professor, New Venture


We are going to have a cool new elective class for 2nd year study at Babson.
 
 
VENTURE & GROWTH CAPITAL (EPS7573) 
Course No. Title Days Time(s) Instructor(s) Location Enroll/Cap Credits
EPS7573-A01 VENTURE & GROWTH CAPITAL R 3:30PM- 6:00PM
Adler, Robert  0 of 42 1.50
 

"I did my undergrad at Brown University and went on to get an MBA from Harvard Business School. These days I am also an adjunct professor in the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College, serve on the board of Samantha's Harvest, a non-profit focused on awareness and support for Down syndrome, and am a member of the Jimmy Fund Visiting Committee at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute."
 
 
 
 
FYI, this company he co-founded had received 12M VC funding already and for anyone participated in the VCIC event this year, the first bplan we got about a company called CCBN? He helped to launch that one as well..
 

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Monday, July 16, 2007

Webless Interenet


For many people, Internet = Web = IE/Firefox. Not really. There are many great Internet application without a web presence. Instant Messaging like ICQ/AIM, Email with client software like Outlook. And a popular trend seems now is weblize non-web application sucha s Meebo is doing for instant messaging market. Email had a web presence for a very long time back to Hotmail. So my point is, how about the other way around? Webless web application? Adobe AIR platform is a clear idea towards this trends. eBay just released the beta version of their Project San Dimas which is going to be a desktop application that users can do whatever they are doing with ebay.com now in a better way. How about flash? How about we flashlize existing web applications? For example, a flash based SNS website or a flash based search clients. Flash has many unique advantage against HTML/Ajax and it would be interesting to see how this will develop in the near future.

 

 


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Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Old Sh*t but New future

Aggregate Knowledge creates automated “behavior recommendations” for websites - things like “people who look at this also looked at” and “people who bought this also bought” features.
This and BizaarVoice.com are two wonderful examples shows how to be a successful start-up by leveraging technology/service that are really commodity today. Yep. Same technology but new application. Great.

Can we be a hosting service provider of online discussion board?forum?
Can we be a hosting service provider of online registration?
Can we be a honesting service provider of online email?

First widget

I had read articles about Widget for a long time and love the potentials. Now finally add my first widget to this blog and the whole process is just super easy and fanscinating. No wonder this start-up, lijit, just got US$3.3M series B funding. It's almost fully automated process though I am wondering I had disclosed so many personal info to lijit. but, am I the person telling JG that younger generation doesn't care much about privacy any more???

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Entrepreneurship info in CHina

WHile doing a bunch of research for my next possible venture's China operation, did lots of research in recent time and here are some may be useful for others (Most of them are in Chinese. But you want to try Google translation service):

The successful story of PCPOP.com in China, leading IT/car review site. The founder is just 25 years old now and has an annual revenue around US$10M.

Shanghai government will waive the debt that had been guaranteed by the local government for  local entrepreneurs to try SME project.


Overview of policies to support Chinese studied oversea in Guangdong Province

And a bunch of other websites that have useful info in this topic:

西安,大连,深圳面向海归投资环境 
北京的8家留学人员创业园
《中国人才报告》透露未来几年可能走红的专业

国家发展门户网
中关村科技园区石景山园
中关村科技园区健翔科技园

中国留学人才网
中关村科技担保有限公司
助新网, 北京中关村高新技术企业协会和中关村科技园区海淀园技术合同登记处联合网站
北京理工留学人员创业园
中关村科技园区留学人员创业企业资助资金申报材料
-经资金管理小组对留学人员资质和企业情况审查后,对具有良好发展前景的留学人员创办的企业,给予小额创业资金支持,最高额度为10万元人民币。
-申请创业资金的留学人员企业,应为留学人员近期(一年之内)归国创办的,且企业成立时间不超过6个月,留学人员(团队)只能申请一次创业资助资金;。
-申请创业资金的留学人员企业,注册资金内应有不低于50万元人民币的现金资产;一名或多名留学人员出资人的出资额占企业注册资本的50%以上,现金部分出资不低于25万元人民币;

中关村科技园区留学人员创业企业小额担保贷款“绿色通道”实施细则
 北京中关村国际孵化器有限公司
北京中关村外商投资企业协会
-以高新技术成果出资设立公司和股份合作企业的,对其高新技术成果出资所占注册资本(金)和股权的比例不作限制,由出资人在企业章程中约定。――《中关村科技园区企业登记注册管理办法》(北京市人民政府令第70号)第13条
-●以高新技术成果向有限责任公司或非公司制企业出资入股,高新技术成果的作价金额可达到公司或企业注册资本的35%,另有约定的除外。――《北京市人民政府印发关于进一步促进高技术产业发展的若干规定的通知》(京政发[2001]38号)第8条
-留学人员来京创业、工作,从事技术转让、技术开发业务和与之相关的技术咨询、技术服务取得的收入,经有关部门认定,免征营业税。留学人员在中关村科技园区内创办高新技术企业的,可享受本市高新技术企业的各项优惠政策。――《关于印发北京市鼓励留学人员来京创业工作若干规定的通知》(京政发[2000]19号)第10条
-●高新技术企业当年发生的研制开发费用比上年实际增长10%(含10%)以上的,当年经主管税务机关批准,可再按技术开发费实际发生额的50%抵扣当年应纳税所得额。――《北京市支持高新技术成果转化项目等税收政策实施办法》(京地税企[2001]694号)第3条

Misc
- 北京市科委认证或在中关村科技园区内(包括:海淀、丰台、昌平、亦庄、电子城、德胜和健翔园)认证注册的高新技术企业以及符合北京市产业发展政策的中小企业

1st Year Option
1 、 留学归国人员创业企业贷款担保

     资格认定:取得中关村科技园区管委会留学人员创业服务总部认定的留学人员创业企业资格;

     额度和期限:主要为流动资金贷款,申请额度原则上不超过 100 万元,期限为一年或一年内;

     优惠政策:简化的评审程序,在全部受理资料备齐后的十个工作日内出具评审意见;年担保费率在基准费率的基础上下浮20 %; 贷款银行执行基准贷款利率。 管委会对符合条件的企业给予利息 50% 和担保费 1% 补贴。

2st Year Option
5 、 海淀园中小企业贷款绿色行动

    基本条件:在中关村科技园区海淀园注册的中小型高科技企业;注册资金不低于 30 万元,资产负债率不高于 60% ;年销售收入不低于 50 万元,且保持盈利。


New tax law for high-tech start-ups:
Tax: 自获利年度起两年内免征企业所得税,免税期满后减按15%的税率征收企业所得税。

1. 申请办理“留学人员创业企业资格证明”所需材料

((申请时需提交原件审核,复印件留存)

   1. 企业法人营业执照副本
   2. 验资报告
   3. 公司章程
   4. 新技术企业资格证书,http://www.gaoxinqiye.com/shenpi/gaoxin.htm
   5. 留学人员身份证明, http://www.bjlx.gov.cn/bjlx/brow.asp?id=1552
   6. 护照

7、《中关村园区企业标准征信报告》
http://www.ecpa.org.cn/news_newshow1.asp?classid=2&newsid=141
http://www.zgc.gov.cn/zcfg/zgckjyqxytxjsxgbf1/20599.htm
注:若再次申请,则需提交上次贷款的银行还款证明(贷款收回凭证)

投资北京政府网站
投资朝阳政府网站


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Monday, July 02, 2007

A cool video intro about web 2.0

I seldom wathc youtube video mainly because already have enough other stuff to read/watch. Everthing needs attention. Then I found this  video from Ling Zhang's blog. IT's just amazing...

One of the angle that this video is talking about is the topic of my next post, the Data. Stay tuned...




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