Author Archive for cloneofsnake

Creative Commons Hong Kong Launch

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cloneofsnake
on October 27, 2008
in events and hong kong
. 2 Comments

Joi Ito and me (by cloneofsnake)

Went to last Saturday’s Creative Commons launch event in Hong Kong, my knowledge of CC stemmed from my fanboy-ism toward Flickr. I think I had probably heard some Yahoo internal talks about Flickr that included a briefing of this “CC” license thing. So, the presentation from CC founder Prof. Lawr ence Lessig and CEO Joichi Ito were both eye openers for me!

OK, so my knowledge of CC is basically what’s listed in Flickr’s Creative Commons page, and Prof. Lessig presented a much more detailed & updated version of it. The parts that I picked up (and remembered) are:

CC0 - no law, waive, assert, public domain, social norm - honor - keep it free
CC+ - beyond CC, license to buy, for profit
CC Networks - SENSE / RESPECT

For more info on Prof. Lessig, check out this TutSearch result of “Lawrence Lessig”. (Will watch those videos later when I have time.)

While Lawrence Lessig came from a law background and talked about law and licensing. Joi Ito talked about tech & science. Most of it relates to the scientific communities, how researchers could use CC to ease their processes of trading information w/o worrying about the lawyers.

My take-away:

Science Commons

Provider (Designer / Creator) –> Bank (keeps track of use of your creation) –> Users (Re-design, Consume)

For a better summary, check out Ryanne’s blog on the event. It was too bad that the Q&A session was too short, ‘coz as soon as I heard about CC0 and public domain, a weird question came up in my mind. If CC0 would’ve existed 20+ years ago, would it have killed the Mario Brothers? :D Let me explain. Mario is the plumber in Donkey Kong! Donkey Kong was a massively successful video game! Nintendo made a shit load of money off of it. Then, Universal Studios sued Nintendo for infringing their King Kong character. Nintendo of America’s CEO back in the days was Howard Lincoln - a lawyer by trade. He looked it up. Went to court. Had the whole case threw out b’coz Universal Studios had registered King Kong under the public domain. So… if CC0 had existed back then… no Donkey Kong –> no Mario Bros. ??! Possible???

Actually, a more serious question would be how they view Chinese and Asians in general, ‘coz to me (as with a lot of others), Chinese are viewed as selfish and likes to “take” but doesn’t “share”. (And in the worst cases, stealing and profiting from counterfeits / pirated goods.) I think it would’ve been beneficial if Lessig & Ito could give a few examples of other countries with similar issues and how CC had helped.

I really wanted to talk to them afterwards but they both escaped quite fast, I was only able to hunt down Joi Ito! I told him about my projects and also my move to Tokyo in January to work for Cuusoo.com. It’s pretty obvious how CC could help small time designers and artists, but what about an established corporation - like Muji or Lego? Turns out Joi knows about cuusoo too, he remembers it as Elephant-Design, he said he needs to get back to their lawyers as they are not using CC yet, but he thinks that’s only because their lawyers don’t fully comprehend the CC license. He said may be I should explain to Nishiyama-san about the CC license as well! :P … and may be he’ll see me in Japan.

All in all, it was a good day! Learned a lot, pumped me up and gave me new ideas, met up w/ my Flickr and Drupal and Microsoft pals, organized a follow up meeting w/ the Drupal dudes to discuss the usage of CC. I have a feeling that those of us who are working with open source and CC will lead and become “paradigm shifters” in HK (and perhaps even Asia).

Links given during the presentation:
TED Talks - Ideas Worth Spreading. - “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers”

fotonauts - Images for Humanity. - “fotonauts’ mission is to enable the creation of the definitive pool of images for everyone to contribute to, discover, use and enjoy, covering all areas of human interest.”

Making Toys Vs. Developing Software - Agile Hong Kong

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cloneofsnake
on September 19, 2008
in events, hong kong and tech
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Toys vs. Software - Agile Hong Kong (by cloneofsnake)

I almost missed Tuesday night’s Agile Hong Kong event - Toys vs. Software, Fight! Had to check the address and the map at a public terminal in MTR at the last minute!

Jonathan Buford, Managing and Technical Director at Advanced Design Labs, was there to talk about his experience in the toys development process… and how it’s similar / different from software development. He showed us a few of his past designs, one of which I’ve seen on TV commercials in the US. He also has a product that has just finished development and is being manufactured for the coming Chirstmas season. It was pretty interesting to learn about the specifics in creating new toys. In fact, it was so interesting that we kept asking questions about making toys and Jonathan had to ditched the entire 2nd half of his speech on software development! :) This shouldn’t be surprising, as most of the people attending Agile’s events should have IT backgrounds and understand software development processes and project management. So we all had a good grasp on Jonathan’s explanation on the “critical path” in product development.

What really interested me was about the risks - R&D can completely go down the tube if no one is buying the idea. So, to minimize risk, they develop lots and create prototypes quickly. He mentioned Rapid Prototyping machines, saying that eventually users will be able to design and make the prototypes themselves. This is related to crowdsourcing and Cuusoo.com, so I asked him what was his take on “crowdsourcing toys design”. Jonathan thinks that we are heading toward the direction of “user generated products”, there are just 2 factors holding us back - 1) the design tools that Jonathan uses is quite advanced and the general public just don’t have the kind of access to these tools. He mentioned that Google SketchUp is pretty good, and may be some day soon, people can use that to design & make models. 2) is the manufacturing part - how do normal people connect to manufacturers? Obviously, he doesn’t know about Cuusoo.com, it has the entire 2nd part covered! I have heard about SketchUp when it was first bought by Google, I guess it is time for me to pay a visit and see if we can integrate its tools for crowdsourcing design.

BarCamp Hong Kong 2008

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cloneofsnake
on September 7, 2008
in events, hong kong and tech
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Startup Lighting Talks (by 黛)

Comrades at Hong Kong’s Drupal group reminded me about BarCamp Hong Kong 2008, it was my first time and I got a really good impression of it. It’s probably fair to say I won’t be the only one who wishes we can have BarCamps more often. I loved it!

Check out all the photos at flickr and a general write up about it on LaiHiu’s blog and another insightful one at Ca Phun Ung’s yelotofu. Personally, it felt great to be able to immerse once again in an open, knowledge-sharing environment. We have lots of these events in the US, and they are great for networking. I was able to meet with a few great people and also organized more regular offline meetings after BarCamp.

I listened to iPhone apps development (& finding it more and more amazing how Apple can become so popular and “cool” while maintaining their unfriendly, “closed door” stance.) An Open Education open-mic with John Britton (half of it), then jumped over to Microsoft’s OSS session. The lead developer of one of the best online Rich Text Editor - FCKeditor. A Drupal theming session where John Britton informed us about the Knight Drupal Initiative, and we organized what will hopefully become regular offline meetings for HK Drupalers. Finally, there’s the Start-up Lightning talks where I presented my “Environmentally Conscious Restaurant / Food directory” idea. Hopefully, I can connect with a few kindred souls in the 200+ attendants to help spread the site. (Probably gonna use this “currystar” domain.) Finally, met a young entrepreneur, Alvin, who’s still in studying at Stanford… he was working hard networking and spoke with me about having connections to VC in the US. It’s good to know someone who’s so young and passionate!

Saw a couple of Yahoo HK developers, I asked one of them how he felt about Yahoo in HK, and he said it’s too “revenue oriented”. I think this is a typical problem with companies that have grown big and also for small HK companies. As a general observation, I think companies (and people) who are “revenue oriented” are often too short-sighted. Because of that, nothing truly revolutionary will come out of them. At the other end of the spectrum, we have visionaries who dream of producing something that will change the way everybody do things, they might create that revolutionary product, everybody loves them, but then they don’t know how to make money out of it. (The classic Slashdot joke: “Create genius product -> Everybody loves it -> ??? -> PROFIT!!) LOL. Rarely do we see phenomenon like Google ~ where a revolutionary idea also crosses over well into a revenue generating model.

Generally speaking though, I am supportive of the latter crowd. Take Google for example, they have tons of talented developers but very little managers (they found that managers were killing innovations, so they fired a majority of them in 2001!), everyone is encouraged to spent some of their work hours to work on their own projects! I think most of their products are not making them any money ~ Gmail, Apps, Docs, Reader… etc, but with so many people converging on their platform, something good must come out of it. (Sort of reminds me of how Yahoo was before the bust.) Now, as an ex-Yahoo, (and more importantly, a shareholder!) I really hope Yahoo can produce something “good for the people” rather than “something that helps the bottom line.” I think in the long run, this will help Yahoo gets back on track.

For example, Yahoo Hong Kong is the most visited website in Hong Kong, there are so much more they can do to help the locals, so why aren’t they standing at the forefront of it, but rather they are copying local success like OpenRice.com? At BarCamp, one of the guys is creating a mass transit info site - passionately named it whereismybusrightnowdude.com.hk :P As a returning expat, I am like a foreigner who doesn’t know how to get around HK except for the MTR! Other major cities like Tokyo and London already have something like that, people CANNOT live without these services! Why haven’t Yahoo! HK done something similar?

Road to Entrepreneurship is Long and Lonely and Full of Stress

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cloneofsnake
on August 16, 2008
in Work and management
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The development of my site has hit a slight delay due to the developer I had hired is taking a 2 weeks vacation. I’m taking this chance to start entering some contents and check out the inner workings of Drupal. But it is putting some extra stress on me due to the progress of the project being stagnant.

Recently, I’ve also started talking to my acquaintances whom I want to recruit to become my business partners. This basically means I have to “sell” my business idea / model to them. I’m definitely not a good sales person, so this is kind of tough for me. One of the people I talked to is my college friend who has been working at Microsoft since he graduated, switching from technical I.T. roles to marketing roles. So, he can help cover some business skills that I don’t possess. It was really hard selling to him, and I know he still isn’t completely sold yet, but I know if I get him to believe in my business and get him on board, he will be able to sell it 15 times better than I do! :) Besides, I totally understand his position as I had also been a satisfied employee at a major US technology company. I liked my job and although both he and I wanted to work on our own business, we were reluctant to give up our good jobs. Anyway, one interesting thing that he told me to beware of is to “not under-estimate the stress of having no full-time job”. It turns out his sister had tried her hands on starting her own business with her boyfriend, and during that time, they had received a lot of stress from the people around them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t need him to tell me about that, as I am already suffering from a lot of stress from my family. This reminds me of a recent interview of a web entrepreneur in the US, he had had success with his previous web business and is now starting a new one, yet even with his experience, he said on some days, when it seems like there are absolutely no progress at all, he would still question himself… “What am I doing? Why isn’t it going anywhere?!”… That’s pretty close to what I’m feeling now too. At a time like these, when everyone around you is pressuring you to give up and “just find a job”… all you can do is to re-evaluate your vision… believe in the path you’ve chosen and continue to execute your plan!!

It’s not easy, in fact, I can tell you I feel like SHIT right now! It’s definitely a lot easier to “just find a job” and become a “gear” within a machine again and do your 9 to 6. It really pains me to have the people close to me not believe in me and would rather have me submit to a 9 to 6 because of the pressure they feel from other people… Other people who doesn’t even know shit about me and my plans!!! But there’s nothing we can do about this. We all look at the world with our own set of values and we also judge other people based on that. You can’t win over everybody, and you don’t need to explain yourself to everybody. All you can do is stay focus on your vision, believe in yourself, work hard, network with the right people… and just NEVER GIVE UP! This is how all successful empires are built throughout history!

As I get closer to launch, I can feel that things are within my grasp… yet at the same time, there are so many more things that can be expanded on… I can see the possibilities that will open up eventually as the business grow and expand. But for now, from my experience in Project Management, I know better than to lose control of the existing plan. I’m staying focused on launching with the foundation and features as planned on my functional requirements.

Children Education - Raising a child in Hong Kong

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cloneofsnake
on July 28, 2008
in hong kong and wisdom
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After moving to Hong Kong and hearing all the management horror stories, I had an epiphany in regards to the failure of general Chinese / Asian style education.

When I hear about poor management, I realized I cannot possibly work under such a manager or in a company that is governed by “command and control”… and then it hit me… when I went to primary school in Hong Kong, I was also quite rebellious! I was only a few years old, but I already acted out against meaningless rules and unreasonable authorities! My mom would scold me and beat me up, some adults would say I was a bad kid for not obeying the rules… but had anyone really thought about why?! I finally understand… even when I was a kid, even when I was still very inexperienced in life, I could tell what’s efficient, what’s effective, what makes sense… When I encountered “bull shit” rules, like when the adults or teachers told us to just follow the rules and do some stupid shit. I was always like… “Why?! Why do I have to do this?! This is stupid!! Why can’t we do it some other way!!”

Last week, I talked to my friend who’s a psychiatric therapist and child psychologist. I told her about this, and she said: “Yes, kids nowadays are still the same way… but eventually, they learn to shut up and comply.” And I said: “That is exactly the problem!!” You see, children are born with creativity and curiosity, but as they grow up, the adults beat them into following their sad footsteps… “Shut up and comply!!” That’s exactly what most working adults do these days! Continue reading ‘Children Education - Raising a child in Hong Kong’

How to Identify and Hire Good People

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cloneofsnake
on July 21, 2008
in Work and management
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Management that view their people as replaceable “gears” within a machine seems to be the norm these days, but that only applies to low level, mundane jobs that can be handled by robots. Obviously, this shouldn’t be applied to software developers. I would even argue that within any level of a company, it is crucial to recognize and keep your “Grade A” workers! I think I read about this in one of those Harvard Business books, a “Grade A” worker is not only more productive himself, but he also increases the productivity of those that work around him! In the case of a developer, various studies have shown that good developers can be between 10 to 20 times more productive than poor developers! But before we get to the part on how to keep them, the question should be… how to identify them during interviews and hire them?! That’s the question that bothered me the most.

A few years back, when Yahoo!’s stock was doubling every few months and we were hiring like crazy, I read a book that gave me some interesting tips on how to do that. It’s really common-sense stuff actually… First, as the person hiring, you need to identify the characteristics you expect in the person you want for the job, and develop an interview technique that will test for these characteristics. Design some questions that can highlight the desired qualities of the candidate and have HR use those questions instead of their stock ones.
Continue reading ‘How to Identify and Hire Good People’

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