Ever had lots of things to blog about (after being really busy for a while) and am simply too tired to write properly? After 2 weeks of 1am nights at COM1 & E3A, plus a 2.5 day dash, I really felt this way. In the spirit of ensuring that I do not look back at these 2 weeks and wonder what exactly happened (it just hit me today that we’re nearing the end of February already!), here are some quick recap of events, thoughts and ideas through the past 2 weeks:
Recap of Events:
1. Attended 2 technical-oriented Google presentation (about 1) Gears, App Engine, OpenSocial and 2) Android & OpenSocial)
2. Developed a RSS Reader and a To-Do list application on Adobe AIR (tutorials available.. go try)
3. Dumped interface developed on AIR for NÜS Über Stop because Programmers loved Gears more.
4. Attempted to learn FLEX but bolted when it didn’t seem feasible to roll-out anything useful within 2 weeks
5. Learnt AJAX and Javascript
6. Rolled out NÜS Über Stop (Only for Current NUS students)
7. Began working on SaleSeeker project of 2359 Media
Recap of Emotions:
1. “****! Why doesn’t it work on IE! It works fine on all other browsers!”
2. “I hate this part right here…”
3. I used to like creating things with my hands (e.g. sculpting, making music). Nothing has changed since except that my hands are now on the keyboard.
4. “What? I have this, this and this to complete for my other modules?!?!”
Recap of Ideas:
1. All lecturers should shape classes to be like CS3216 (reasons to be published in another post)
2. Development work is actually quite easy to pick up (given the basics in programming). However, it doesn’t necessary mean that one should pick it up. Focus on the area of expertise if possible.
3. Good designers in an app’s early life-cycle will provide an immediate professional look & bring a greater sense of trust towards the app
Overall, it was an excellent sprint for me. Proved once again that sprinting does help accelerate one’s learning curve. Now.. On to the panting (recuperation)..
Singaporeans are not the only kiasu people around. While we can boast of the Bubble Tea phenomena, the Hello Kitty queues and the Donut craze (among others), the herd mentality as a result of “kiasuism” seems to also be present across the world.
Within the last few years, the Facebook explosion and $1.65b buyout of YouTube have gotten everyone crazy about social media. This is no different in Singapore, with the greater use by and coverage of social media news through media companies giving it exposure to the average citizen. Organizations too, have began jumping on board, evident through the increase demand for Social Media consultancy, and the many organizations that pitched with a Facebook Application idea in an attempt to get developers to work on them.
Big Problem though: Social Media is NOT for everyone!
As such, I took some time to compile 7 of the most important things an organization should know before wanting to get onto Social Media (or get a Facebook App for that matter).
1. Focus on Channels with your Audience
Social media is just a MEDIA. Similar to traditional campaigns, pick and choose the media where the target audience can be found and USE THAT MEDIA. There is no point being on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube & Flickr at the same time – there is no such thing as diversification of “risks” by being on all these media.
2. Tribes vs. Eyeballs
There is a need to choose if a campaign is to get as many eyeballs within a short period of time or to build a community around products and services. Having a cool application or social network or YouTube video is nice, but what is the business objective? To have a tribe of fans around products (e.g. Macrumors.com)? Or perhaps just to create buzz around that product?
3. It’s not about what you want
Social Media is not about pounding advertisements down people’s throats, and there is no way to “force” a community to develop. In order to meet the desired social media objective, value must be provided to the community that the organization intends to reach out to.
4. Social Media might not be Cheaper Whopper Sacrifice might have been cheaper to do than a whole page advertisement on Wall Street Journal, but how many failed Internet campaigns have you seen? In addition, once a community is built around a product, how much future money is to be spent maintaining the community?
5. Get an Expert & Leave it to them
Similar to how campaigns are left to PR and Marketing Consultancies (unless you have the expertise), it may make more sense to leave social media work to the experts. These are the people with the latest Social media news, religiously check Twitter, and love contributing to online communities. Spend time doing what you’re world’s best in, give a direct on where you want to go with social media, and let these people work their magic.
If one has all these thought out properly and still want to pitch about a Social Media idea, then I have great news for you. Through the experience thus far from the CS3216 module, all you need is a Good Developer with Passion for the idea, and the idea can be done on ANY platform. Be it on Facebook, OpenSocial or any other platform, magic can be done within 3 short weeks!!
Adapted & Edited from Sports Medicine journal:
“The activity patterns of exciting projects are intermittent in nature, consisting of repeated bouts of brief maximal/near-maximal work interspersed with relatively short moderate/low-intensity recovery periods. This is generalized description currently provides the best means of directly assessing the physiological response to this type of activity. During a single short sprint, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is resynthesised predominantly from having a vision of future achievements, with a small contribution from possible financial gains. During recovery, new ideas sharing remains at a high level to restore motivation via processes such as networking sessions, attending inspiring talks, and seeing others on the same path as you.”
Researching into the successes of the Apples, IDEOs and Toyotas of the world, a common theme of start-ups is often the seeming lack of fear – the singular focus on the goal at hand, ignoring all odds and giving it all you can.
Quoting from Seth Godin’s post yesterday, “The best way to overcome your fear… might be to sprint… all the internal dialogue falls away and we just go as fast as we possibly can… you don’t feel that sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run… You can’t sprint forever… the brevity of the event is a key part of why it works.”
“The project deadline is tomorrow.”, “You have 24 hours to plan and execute the entire roadshow”, “(from Prof Ben) Learn an entire new programming language and API, and deliver an application within 3 weeks”. All of us, in a point or another, have achieved something extraordinary by sprinting, often egged on by external motivation factors, so we know that it is possible. Sometimes, we might even only realize the enormity of the project on hand after we had completed it.
How often do you sprint? Only when people ask you to? Why not decide to sprint regularly and build up your stamina to take on larger projects? Build the next Google? Be the first non-astronaut on the moon?
One thing from the journal to note for the chronic optimist (like myself) though, “if duration of the recovery periods is insufficient to restore the metabolic environment to resting conditions, performance during successive work bouts may be compromised”.. Pick your battles and sprint through to the finish line!
First, my thank you speech: “I am most honoured to win this prize. It has been my lifelong dream to appear in everyone’s presentation!” Seriously, thank you everyone for using me in your presentations. I’ve never felt so loved in NUS ever.
Next, I’m really worried about the predicament of being friends with people in the class, with groups intending to sell you and sacrifice you. What happened to the scared bond of friendship under the influence of Facebook?! Still, I am inclined to provide commentary about these applications given that I have wasted hours on one and was disappointed that the other wasn’t available in Singapore.
Friends For Sale Key Viewpoints by the Team: (my immediate comments in brackets)
1. Simple UI & Easy to use (seems that FFS stopped crashing after I quit)
2. Good for interaction & Ice-breaking (when trying to chat up a pretty girl… but is she really a girl?)
3. Involves strategic thinking & is a competitive environment
4. Facilitates communication – creative interactions (but isn’t that done with Superpoke?), unique relationships (your friend is your pet.. hmm..), 2.3m active users (used to be 5m++ at one point I think)
5. An excellent platform for advertisers – Could improve by having sponsorship to get sponsored chores/gifts (e.g. BK Burger)
6. Could Improve by – Add animations to chores & gift giving
It was a fun presentation and I agree with Points 1, 5 and 6, but having spent hours “researching the economics of FFS”, I must say that there is a fundamental flaw in the game that is not being addressed. Inflation in the game is THROUGH THE ROOF! For the sake of those who have never used FFS before, let me explain. Let X denote a pretty girl, and A & B be 2 guys wanting to buy her as a pet. Each time A & B buy X from each other, her “value” increases in a compounded manner (10% of previous value). From $500, X’s price could possibly go up to $50m in a day, and just by trading X, A & B’s cash holdings could each increase by millions! (“The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest” – Einstein)
From a game player’s stand point, all one does is to find the “rising stock” (popular pet) and chase it all the way till the pet’s price goes out of your buying range, and do this regardless whether you really want the person as your pet. This is flawed on so many levels! For new users, you can never catch up with an experienced user unless you spend all your time on FFS riding all these “rising stocks” (and you need to be beside your computer all the time in order to ride that stock). Only then can you possibly have enough $ to buy the pretty girl (or handsome guy) that you have been looking to take in as a pet. This “barrier to entry” turns people off quickly and one might not get the opportunity to interact with the people he/she wants to.
For the conduct of its Commercial Activities, the hyper-inflation makes it hard for sustainable revenue for FFS as well. With its advertising being run by MyOfferPal, one of the most popular ad service on Facebook, users using multiple apps began choosing to earn points for the other apps (performing the same activity) when they realize that the points earned in FFS are not as useful in achieving the desired goals.
FFS did re-adjust the “economy” recently by changing the value of the new user to $100k, but the problem is only going to come up again unless the rules of the game are changed. Maybe a recession might help
Whopper Sacrifice
It wasn’t in my intentions to comment on the application presentation actually, but given that the Whopper the group Sacrificed me for was given to me, it was only right to leave some comments.
Firstly, Crispin Porter + Bogusky is brilliant. Just go to their site and take a look at the stuff they have done for various companies. Not such a big fan of their work with Microsoft though – most seem too reactionary to Apple’s ads. Next, the team that presented it was on the cutting edge of FB Apps. The App was only up for a week or so before being banned on 14th January. Great job people!
The key point that might be of interest, is whether this phenomenon can be repeated. i.e. Can an advertiser gain that kind of publicity enjoyed by BK by repeating the “sacrifice your friend” campaign? My thoughts on it? No, it will get eyeballs, but it will not be as successful as this first attempt. Buzz Aldrin was never as famous as Neil Armstrong, attempts at a sex-focused drama is unlikely to be as well-received as Sex and the City. You get the point. Despite the possibility of using bots to delete friends, I seriously doubt the effectiveness if this were to be repeated exactly for another company. Any ideas for auxiliary features/marketing gimmicks to augment the delete friends feature?
Now all that’s said and done, the final thing I need to do, is to complete the rest of the song and post it onto YouTube. That’s-What-Friends-are-For-2.0
Posted by HT on February 1st, 2009 in CS3216, News
If you Googled at all at about 11:30 pm Singapore time last night, you must have seen something similar to what I did on the left. Google listed that its website “may harm your computer”.
“Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.”
Didn’t that sound so much like half of the bugs that happened during the workshop? A missing closing parenthesis, a missing line here and there, causing the entire database to be messed up. Difference though, is that we’re still testing our products while this came out and had millions of people Twittering about it immediately. Don’t think it will make a difference to Google’s market share of search over Yahoo though.
On Wednesday, after helping NOC do a pitch to a lecture with many Sophomores, Juliana (NOC staff) asked me for my opinion on the following topic: “What makes Stanford special?” In summary, my response was that while in the graduate and post-graduate levels, there seem to be more opportunities for cutting edge research, in the undergraduate level, things are not all that different from other (good) universities. However, its alumni base, locality and special programs (such as STVP) provides a slight advantage that compounds over time to make it special.
A day ago, this was highlighted in a huge way on Techcrunch.
Before I go on, for those who don’t already know, let me explain what Techcrunch is. TechCrunch is a blog (mostly) about Web2.0 products & companies, started by Michael Arrington, who is one of Time’s Top 100 World’s Most Influential people in 2008. With over 1,808,000 web feed subscribers, mostly in the Web2.0 industry, the companies featured in Techcrunch often get a million users overnight just by being mentioned.
So yesterday, I saw a post titled “Stanford Students Release A Cool Batch Of iPhone Apps”, which was also had links to a prior post that I have seen before about the Facebook Apps released by Stanford students. Granted that the course is a year adrift from the posting about the Facebook Apps post, but seriously, the portfolio of the previous CS3216 course seems way way cooler, I mean, just look at it! There’s a collection of applications that might actually help you do something, instead of the super-poke-type applications.
However, here’s my point. The Stanford courses are featured on Techcrunch, which in turn is a guarantee for a instant jump in number of users. Talk about solving Cold Start strategies. (By the way I’ve heard Web2.0 entrepreneurs pitching to VCs with the marketing plan being “Get featured on Techcrunch”.) While head-starts do not necessarily make you more successful, but this, and other introductions and recommendations in the Valley, are the unfair advantages available exclusively to Stanford students. Leveraging on this to achieve greater successes, makes Stanford special.
Now that things are demystified, we can make NUS equally if not more special. Can’t we?
“I could have built Hotmail”, “I could have built Facebook”, were 2 key quotes from Ben that stuck with me through the night. When Hotmail came out, I was only 12 (but am proud to already have my own personal webpage, from which the nickname “wongoes” was first coined because the website is “where the Wongs go”), so I couldn’t have had anything to do with it. However, with Facebook, I have actually a project proposal written in 2004 which suggested the development of a social network for Cheers Connect International, with the idea to classify people by the school that they belong to (ask me if you want to see evidence). While retrospectively thinking, there is no way that anything we built could have had the success that Facebook did (I mean, a network that has Harvard, then Stanford and MIT students in it, is an instant attraction by itself without any additional features), but “IF ONLY IT WERE ME“!
Notes – Key Propositions from the Microsoft Talk: a. XBox Live Marketplace – Ian Tan
- with XNA Game Studios, you can be a game developer too
- MSFT generated ~US$1b from Xbox Live, so choose a big platform like this to develop on
- MDA is offering $50k for each project that has a good idea for a game on the platform
- From Ben > look out for the battle for “a foothold in your living room”
b. MSFT User Experience Technologies – Apurva Lawale
- Lots of cool technology Microsoft is working with (e.g. SmoothHD, Potosuru)
- (Wonder when would they finally incorporate Photosynth into an application though)
c. Microsoft Imagine Cup – Pratibha Kumar
- Dare to dream
- Imagine Cup is an excellent platform to showcase your ideas
Ben’s Wise Words (henceforth BWW): - Understand the world around you – it’ll show you possibilities you can’t imagine before
- Technology is only a facilitator of problem solving, create real value and SELL
- CS3216 is a community, not just a class – LEVERAGE on each other’s skills
Any Big Problem is a Big Opportunity
Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem. This came to mind once again when we discussed about understanding the world and seeing opportunities all around us. Psychologically, coming back to Singapore from the Valley has proved to be a huge temptation to shift back into mediocrity, but with the rapidly growing entrepreneurial ecosystem in Singapore, the high level of creative discussion and talented individuals in CS3216, (and the pizza and soft drinks of course), I’m happy once more. It’s great to be back in the Valley – SG Edition.
While writing the previous entry about Lessons Learnt from the Last Lecture, it hit me that the “real” last lecture was really relevant to the CS3216 class. To quote the notes, “Sure to have a lot of problems. ”, and to quote the teaching assistants, “the workload is really heavy”. However, doesn’t that just boil down to effective time management?
While I love Randy and the way he delivers his lectures, this particular one is not as spectacular, so instead, I have compiled a shortlist of the key lessons for those who do not have the time to watch the lecture.
1. Time = Money therefore:
a. Get more things done within the same amount of time
b. Exchange money for time – Outsource everything unimportant
c. Cut time wasters: – You are wasting money!
i. Kill Television
ii. Make up a fake class to force yourself to do some work during free period
iii. Cut short phone calls by standing up
iv. Hang up on yourself to cut off telemarketers
2. Do the RIGHT things > Doing THINGS right a. What will happen if I don’t do it?
b. List down items using Covey’s Four-Quadrant Todo List
c. Efficiency vs Effectiveness – *insert story here*
3. Plan & Analyze a. You can only CHANGE a plan when THERE IS A PLAN
b. Analyze Time Journals and discover more time waster
4. Delegate Effectively a. Delegate until people complain, but do the ugliest thing yourself
b. Delegation means empowering with authority, not hiring robots
c. Don’t clear the mess for your subordinates. Teach them to grow
d. Be specific in delegation, right up to the EXACT time of completion
5. Eliminate Procrastination a. Find out what is the psychological barrier from doing the task
b. Cut the task into little pieces and do the ugliest first
c. Doing things at the last minute is really expensive. Do it JUST before the last minute.
d. Make a fake deadline for things that don’t have them so that when push comes to shove it is less stressful
Overall, Randy has, through the lecture, represented the importance of LIVING instead of counting the seconds till we die. I too love how he demonstrated the importance of contributing back to the communities that have benefitted him (University of Virginia in this case), told the audience to honor promises even when people don’t expect you to, and most of all, re-emphasized how staying healthy and being close to the ones that matter to us, is the real way to spend the only commodity that matters. Time.
When I received an email from the Facebook@NUS module teaching team saying that we should all watch Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture before attending the first week of class, it hit me that I really should write down some lessons learnt from the lecture, having watched it 2 times prior to this. (My 2nd thought was, hey, how come it didn’t occur to me that CS3216 was pretty similar in spirit to the Building Virtual Worlds class?) These are what I jotted down while going through the lecture a 3rd time:
1. Dream Big and Celebrate Brick Walls
If only the world celebrated brick walls more. Innovation and entrepreneurship would have progressed in leaps and bounds through the years, but I guess, that’s what make innovators and entrepreneurs special. My corollary to this would be that if an ecosystem were formed to support one another in our quests to break down brick walls, it would seem so much easier. Glad to see that Singapore is finally moving towards this direction through various initiatives and cool modules like CS3216.
2. Educators should learn from Randy
Good teaching imparts knowledge. Great teaching inspires students to have an inquisitive mind towards topics and facilitate their imagination to pursue greater knowledge themselves. Becoming a model of learning and pursuing excellent for the students is one of the best things a teacher could do for students. For me, this seems key in my quest to help others achieve success.
3. “Wait, and people will surprise and impress you.”
Most, if not all of us will have stories from one part of our lives or another that has someone, come out of nowhere to amaze us with what they can do. And this usually happens on 2 fronts, “evil” people doing good things, and people we have written off showing us greater potential than we expected. Jumping to conclusions, especially when it is about people, creates a glass ceiling in our hearts, which should be shattered so that we leave room for these people to impress us.
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While my list of quotes that I wrote down and took from the last lecture far exceeds the above 3, I guess the key lesson is to live life passionately, help everyone else around you succeed, and your own dreams and aspirations will be achieved.
Ever had lots of things to blog about (after being really busy for a while) and am simply too tired to write properly? After 2 weeks of 1am nights at COM1 & E3A, plus a 2.5 day dash, I really felt this way. In the spirit of ensuring that I do not look back at these 2 weeks and wonder what exactly happened (it just hit me today that we’re nearing the end of February already!), here are some quick recap of events, thoughts and ideas through the past 2 weeks:
Singaporeans are not the only 
Adapted & Edited from Sports Medicine journal:
Seriously, thank you everyone for using me in your presentations. I’ve never felt so loved in NUS ever.
If you Googled at all at about 11:30 pm Singapore time last night, you must have seen something similar to what I did on the left. Google listed that its website “may harm your computer”.