Look around

There are some people around us who are working so hard to fulfill their dreams that you know that they will succeed.

Find them.

Legal firms using online tools to automate legal document generation

http://www.altgate.com/blog/2009/04/law-firm-wilson-sonsini-now-preparing-term-sheets-for-free.html
Interestingly, legal firms are making the process of generating certain legal documents more automatic.

Google Apps and cloud computing update

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-apps-highlights-1222010.html
Google Apps allows you to upload any file up to a limit of 1 GB, of which you can share 250MB.
Is 1GB enough for personal users? Probably.

What are they doing with all the data?

Complete Intro to the Pen Tool in Illustrator

Hi all,
I found this awesome guide to the confusing Pen tool in Illustrator.
"http://www.oit.umass.edu/workshops/tutorials/images_publishing/ai_2.pdf"
Enjoy~!

What I learn from Benjamin Zander

The real message behind Zander's video.

Life means sense only when there's a structure from the beginning to the end and you follow your passion.

Integrity in Business

One of the toughest things about doing business in developing countries is deciding when to compromise and when not to.

Tomorrow's lesson

Looking forward to the Design classes tomorrow.
Nite! =)
Btw, there's a damn funny new group on Facebook.
Overheard at the National University of Singapore: "http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=270781852897&ref=mf"

Y-Combinator in SG?

Looking at the SGEntrepreneurs website.. There seems to be some buzz going on.

For reference,

Tech Startup Events for 2009 http://sgentrepreneurs.com/commentary/2009/12/21/7-tech-entrepreneurship-events-that-rocked-singapore/#more-9948

Copying Y Combinator by Jed Christiansen http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2009/09/21/copying-y-combinator-why-and-how/

I'm actually rather surprised that there are so many Singaporean startups making their impact on prominent conferences. Looks like I need to talk to more people and find out what's going on..

Wow, Brandtology is doing well. Major props =)

All your bases are belong to us

Got pwned real bad.. Everyone has crashed out around me. Seb is sleeping on his Mac running Windows 7, Jon is dreaming of stuff that does not involve designing jungles and I just woke up with the sense that I have fed 100 million mosquitoes.

MRT ftw.

Article on "Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup"

http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/12/achieving-flow-in-a-lean-startup/
Good reading.

Being "crazy"

I like the comments from Prof Ben taken from Prof Randy and Apple about the "crazy" people.

You can't ignore them cause they want to make the world better and they never stop trying.

(A few seconds after writing this, I suddenly think of Hitler. Obviously, there needs to be some way to stop lunacy like that..)

starting a cleantech startup vs a tech startup

Tech startups are normally started by a bunch of people (3 or less) with an idea or their guts telling them that there's a niche to exploit. They spend 1 year working on it on their laptops/desktops, surviving until they manage to convince customers/angels/VCs to give them money.

Relatively, cleantech startups require lots of capital investment as there's normally a product involved. Building a product requires prototyping, testing, manufacturing facilities..
It does not make sense to graft the SV startup process to cleantech.

So, how do 3 (or less) good friends in university start a cleantech company?
1. Pair with an experienced businessman/professor who already has the invention
2. Look through the Patent and Licensing Office of the university
3. Turn their FYPs or research projects in university into their product and make use of the university's resources to develop it

Yiyang and gang's process is starting to make more sense to me.

Feedback (for the noob me)?

Event: Developers' Garage this Friday

Developers' Garage

Event details as follows:

Date / Day: 29 January 2010, Friday

Time: 4 – 6pm

Venue: BuzzCity (Yellow Pages Building)

Address: 1 Lor 2 Toa Payoh Yellow Pages Building #02-03 Singapore 319637

Speakers: Steven Goh (mig33), Je Alipio (BuzzCity)

Some things behind education - CS3216

Learning how to learn and.. learning how to teach

Learning how to learn

2 aspects - On your own, and from others

Learning how to teach (give?)

(an intermediate response to the question"What have you learnt?" posed. I take very long to give answers to questions that deserve thinking.)

NUS Email thoughts

Okie, so I've just received an email from NUS saying that my mailbox is full. Thoughts to ponder..

I've enabled POP3 access to my gmail, so I get all my NUS emails nicely with the appropriate filters and labels. The search is faster and better. Essentially, since I have all my emails, I can ignore the email alert.

The storage limit is pitiful for almost anyone with a normal email usage. You almost have to check twice daily in order to clear the inbox.

There is a lot of mail that is not relevant, with people happily attaching 1MB files/posters to mass emails.

I guess cost is the issue, luckily gmail is a free and better alternative.

Surface Contradictions and Balance

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

When you feel that both ideas are opposed and make sense, they probably do...

This quote is one of my favourites. It captures the feeling I had about the debate we had after class today with Prof Ben. Basically, I find myself disagreeing (or being uncomfortable) with his method of thinking big and failing big. Hence, I did a search for "Breakthrough Innovation versus Incremental Improvements".

I think the challenge would be to be aware of these 2 processes and integrate them into your daily thinking. (But hey, I would still take a series of easy victories anytime over no victory to build up momentum.) I guess you could think of it as a bicycle with 2 wheels. The front wheel would be the breakthrough idea, but it needs to be powered by the back wheel which is a summation of all the small ideas that enable the execution.

How do we come up with breakthrough innovations? I guess that first, you need to be open-minded and accept any input. If you are working in a team, it would be the best to listen to everyone's opinion and ideas. There are many proven methods for generating ideas, and I think employing any one of them is useful.
What about incremental improvements? Googling "kaizen" would provide some ideas.

There are many ironies in a startup (or life). In a startup, you try to think big, but start by executing small, eventually scaling up to your vision.

This quote also seems to capture a lot of ironies that I have encountered in my short time on Earth. To lead people, you must first serve. To earn respect, you must be humble. To be strong is to show weakness. The smartest people always say "I don't know." To be a good conversationalist, listen more than you talk.

Another concept that Prof Ben touched on was "balance". I guess everyone has their own interpretation of it, but I would take the Buddhist view (middlefold path) or the Taoist ("Tao") view on it.

Millenium Development Goals

Just to save some people time..

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals

1. End poverty and hunger

2. Provide universal primary education

3. Ensure gender equality

4. Reduce child mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDs, Malaria

7. Environmental sustainability

8. Global partnership for development

Let's measure them against the S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) criteria .. Nuff said.

What can we do to improve these goals so that they are S.M.A.R.T.? I guess we need to systematically break down the problems. The good thing about these 8 areas is that any solution used would probably be able to address at least a few areas at once.

This reminds of what Ernest Madu said in his TED speech:"The best way to spiral into poverty is to kill the parents."

Singapore's strategies for competitiveness

Okie, my blog will have some controvesial and ill-thought out articles, because I normally write when I have inspiration and I don't normally proofread what I write (Only want to spend half an hour each day writing at the most). However, I don't normally seek to criticize, but just to offer my thoughts on certain issues which strike me. I don't think I'm normally right, but I hope that I can stimulate different thoughts in people.
(stuff so that I won't kena too many bad comments.. Then again, if people who comment put in a little more thought to offer constructive criticism.. the internet would not be as full of trash)

Singapore's gameplan has always been (at least to me) to be the Asian (working) version of what works in the West, albeit a bit cheaper. Working means that there are no hidden business, legal, administrative, infrastructural obstacles for doing business. We often take that for granted (so I highly recommend people go to a less developed country even for a short trip). It was manufacturing, petroleum, semiconductors, finance, IT, pharmaceuticals (forgive my lack of history) and now.. Startups?

If the previous strategy was to be slightly cheaper and geographically better positioned, then that winning strategy might need to be rethought. Startups are the only way that America is still the most valuable economy (not its financial magic tricks). It requires world class universities to provide excellent education, open-mindedness to immigrants and society's positive perceptions of failure.

To be honest, I'm not so hopeful on those 3 counts (there are more.. but I am limited by my lack of exposure and experience a.k.a. I am a noob). Sometimes, you really get what you pay for. A quick look at the video lectures available on MIT OCW would probably highlight some significant differences between the quality of teaching. (then again the difference in quality of students.. )

One of the simple explanations I can think of for why we don't have scrappy entrepreneurs is due to our policy of National Service compounded with our society's mores.
Guys normally get married at 27 , 28 and girls, at around 25,26. Given that most guys graduate only at the age of 24 (and girls at 22), that only leaves 4 years to accumulate enough capital to make it to marriage. The house downpayment and associated costs (wedding, honeymoon, car, renovations, furniture) are a big hurdle (at least a cool $100,000 - $200,000 of debt borne by both families).

Given that most startups take easily 2 years of hard work before showing profitability, it's easy to see why our society's mores contribute to the lack of a startup culture. The people who are working on their startups are not playing DOTA on their computers. They are also not going to networking events and drinking endless cups of coffee for nothing. Brainstorming sessions might involve going for a party and talking about random stuff while being unemployed.

Imagine the hypothetical effect on the startup culture if we did not have National Service that stretches up to 2 years?

I feel it's reasonable to say that as the period of NS decreases, we should see a small increase of startups being started by guys bumming around after their ORD and before they matriculate. (Hopefully, girls too.. as they wait 6 months after their A Levels and before they matriculate).

This is a flawed argument, but I thought that this might be useful for people drafting policies. Policies are difficult to draft and the long term impacts are hard to gauge. It might start to be a bit too costly to have NS stretching for a period of 2 years, if our national goal is to be an island Silicon Valley.

These are some simplistic suggestions to mitigate the time loss caused by NS.

1. Accelerate the university curriculum. I don't see the point of people having 2 modules for their final semester and coming to school just for 1 day in the week. Buggers in university can jolly well take 6 modules each semester and graduate reasonably well. It's still not as siong as working 8 - 6 for 5 days. If I actually put in that amount of hours for my studies, I would be on the Dean's list or easily somewhere near it.
2. Open up a Vacation Internship Module with 4 MCs for people to work on their startup idea during the break and make it easy for people to take a leave of absence after it. Supporting evidence could be signs of traction (user growth.. etc), number of letters of intent, revenue growth.. etc
3. Make it easier for people who are from other faculties to take a Minor in Entrepreneurship with modules from business. The modules should only cover the essentials which are: Accounting (Scorekeeping), Marketing (Selling), Project Management (Delivering), Team Management (Teamworking) and Customer Service (I might be wrong but the founders normally look for outside help or advice beyond the team to do the rest of the essential functions like legal stuff etc). To my limited knowhow, it seems that the combination of a hard technical skill (computer science, engineering, accounting, law, medicine.. etc) (sorry for leaving out a few) coupled with a basic knowledge of business (Revenues - Costs = Profits) is a potent combination for being a founder.
4. Increase the number of literature and support available for female entrepreneurs. Hey, there are a lot of successful businesswomen around.. What's up? We can't always be referring to Olivia Lum. Unfortunately, I am too noob to know more high profile cases (although I do know a few good female friends who are starting their own ventures.. =) ) There are a lot of businesses which focus traditionally on industries that guys ignore, like fashion, crafts, cooking, dancing, flowers.. etc (at the risk of sounding sexist)
5. Offer more financial education education to the young (or even better, make them financially independent younger). This will cause them to think twice about buying iPhones, branded clothes, new wallets if they have to earn every dollar of that purchase. Suddenly, you will see them working hard and taking on all the part time service jobs that we are struggling to fill with hardworking foreigners. Some of them will suddenly get the bright idea that working for someone is being a highly paid serf, but the person who really earns the money is the one employing the serfs.

My hope is that more people start their own businesses to create more social good. Blog shops are fine, but there's really nothing behind it in terms of making something useful to society. It seems that it's just fueling a consumer craze to keep buying stuff. We need businesses that create real products and services that increase the amount of value in the economy, not increase the amount of materialism.

Hmm.. National Economic Competitiveness vs National Military Competitiveness? What is the real factor for the rise and fall of nations?

Be Good vs Don't Be Evil

Okie, pondering about the difference between "Be Good" (Paul Graham) and "Don't Be Evil" (Google)..

Test of a good blog post

Perhaps, to reduce the amount of trash you read on blogs is to apply the criteria that the content or questions posed should be at least relevant for 3 months (arbitarily chosen by me).

Of course, one of the gold standards are Paul Graham's essays. You can read his old essays from more than a year ago and they still make sense.

Something wrong?

There's got to be something wrong when doctors are paid 2.6k when they start their houseman year and people who land jobs in banks start with an average upwards of 3K. Am I missing something here?

Productivity and Einstein's method of solving problems

http://litemind.com/productivity-principles/?
Pretty good read for those people who are always learning how to maximize their time to lead a more fulfilling life.

http://litemind.com/problem-definition/
"Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. "
Damn. Wish I read that before I started any problem.

FB builds its own data centre

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/21/facebook-data-center/trackback/
Okie, other than the obvious points in the article, what strikes me is that the energy saving techniques that FB is employing. That to me, is supremely interesting as someone who is looking for solutions to solve climate change while also maintaining quality of life.

The solutions are sometimes kinda duh, but hey, what works works.

startup concepts

A very brief post here, but I just like to capture some validated concepts from the speakers for the last 2 days.

1. Product/market fit
Google this. Very important.
http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/
http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/06/15/why-you-should-make-it-easy-for-users-to-quit-your-product/

a. good problem, good solution > b. no problem, good solution > c. bad problem, no good solution > d. no problem, no good solution
My understanding so far is that a is the best. Your startup will fly after you achieve this. b is not bad, but you need to work harder cause you got the ass but not the head. So you find the right head since you already have a good ass. c is bad cause you tackled a problem that is too big to be handled by your team (assuming you have a team). d. Don't give up, talk to more people, do your groundwork.

2. MVP, Pivot
Google this. If you find the wrong results, cannot help you sia..
MVP - minimum viable product
Pivot - Validate, then change slightly to test hypothesis, then measure (which leads to pt 3)

3. Metrics
Choose the proper metrics to measure success. What they are, I don't know. I'm also figuring out for my own startup.
Common ones are:
1. Traction - new subscribers, new users, new sales accounts, people calling to complain (sometimes the best source). Unfortunately, press is not a metric to rely on, unless your business is in the media industry.
2. Finance - Cashflow, revenue from advertisements etc..

4. Negotiation skills
Err.. mostly applicable during major crunch times, e.g. Loss of major customer account, equity sale, exit stage

5. Don't feature bloat
Listening to your customers (or whom you thought were your ideal customers) would cause you to add more features to satisfy them. Super Bad. This pt is also closely related to..

6. Talk to the REAL customers
Very applicable to the geeks (sorry, I'm not a geek yet, I only have friends who are geeks). Geeks are not the real market for most of the projects. Not many people need a command line interface that makes it easier to hack a consumer-focused application. So don't build it.
Summarised in one short snappy sentence:
"Talk to your MUM."

7. No money, no talk
You can ask during trials/alpha launch etc:
"Do you think this is a good feature? Does it solve your problem? What improvements do you want?" etc etc. All very good questions
But the most important questions might be:
"How much would you pay for this? If I remove a few features, would you still pay for it?"

8. Focus

9. Saying No
No to partnerships when you have not figured out your product/market fit, no to miscellaneous requests, no to blah blah blah that distract you from your focus. (If you don't have a focus, ho sei.. )

10. Relentlessly resourceful

Go figure

Just summarizing my thoughts after the last 2 days, so I might be wrong. I have not been through the whole journey from start to exit, so I can't comment much except for what I understand from people whom I've talked to.

Stupid to make mistakes people already made, Stupider to repeat mistakes.

Singapore's future 5 years

I guess I am pretty paranoid, but I am very concerned for Singapore. This was exacerbated by attending 2 recent networking events. Both were very useful to me as someone interested in China and entrepreneurship.

It seems that many of my peers are in a cocoon of blissful ignorance. However, we must realise that China's impact will cause Singapore to lose certain advantages that we take for granted in 5 - 8 years time. We are no longer as advanced or as rich as we think we are. There will no longer be jobs in MNCs or banks. The moment that China's business environment becomes more stable and easier to do business, many of these MNCs will seriously contemplating uprooting their operations. My major takeaway from the event is the deadline that is ticking, a window of 5 years for us to exploit our bilingual advantage. Miss that, and we are useless. We are clearly ranked after Hongkong, Shanghai and Taiwan in the pecking order as an entrance into China.

There are a lot of attitudes towards China that I am strongly opposed to. Singaporeans seem to think that China is a hardship posting and that we can always rely on the U.S. market for jobs. Singaporeans also have a biased attitude towards the Chinese. However, I think it should be an attitude of mutual respect.

Singapore is not a gateway to Asia. It can only be a gateway to Southeast Asia, which is a geographically diverse region with many smaller regional economies. It is not a region with market economies of scale. Infrastructure and language problems plague the region, and there is no semblance of connectivity between the countries. Taking a wild shot, Indonesia, Vietnam and Phillipines seem promising. I personally would be most interested in Indonesia's and Vietnam's development over the next few years. I only know Indonesia and Vietnam superficially through holidays and short trips, but I feel that it's time to put in some effort to understand them better.

I will add on to this post with further thoughts, but I thought it's better to publish this first and get feedback.

Things I should have done before programming

1. Sleep
2. Write on paper first the steps in the process
3. Plan list of variables, function names

1 hour of planning saves 10 hours of debugging. Argh...

Same steps apply when debugging, except
1. SLEEP

Why sleep is important for peak performance

Err.. Don't agree with the "If you don't sleep, you get a lot of things done."

Sorry guys, if I am really tired, you will see me sleep. After the nap, I will be more productive than a zombie sitting there dozing off.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080609071106.htm - "..more specifically, how sleep is a significant factor in achieving peak athletic performance.."

"Mah offers these tips to help athletes improve their performance by maximizing their sleep:

• Make sleep a part of your regular training regimen.
• Extend nightly sleep for several weeks to reduce your sleep debt before competition.
• Maintain a low sleep debt by obtaining a sufficient amount of nightly sleep (seven to eight hours for adults, nine or more hours for teens and young adults).
• Keep a regular sleep-wake schedule, going to bed and waking up at the same times every day.
• Take brief naps to obtain additional sleep during the day, especially if drowsy"

Seen too many friends just crashing or zoning out, when they think they can survive on 4 hours of sleep each day.

Nite!

Making what the customer wants and SV style vs China style

Okie.. We've (E3Alive) changed our idea like for the 4th time already. Luckily, we have not did serious work on it. Firm believer of asking what the customer wants, and doing it. Phew, did not waste effort.

Meeting more people this week, gotta prepare name cards! =) I hope I meet interesting people.
Interesting: intelligent, good character, passionate.

Okie, interesting conversation of the day. There are 2 conflicting entrepreneurial mentalities that I have sitting in my brain.

1. The SV style
Find your passion and do it.
Do it - gather a team, find resources, work your ass off...
Money comes as a aftereffect due to the value you've created.

2. The China style
Find the opportunity, make tons of money, then think about social good (building schools.. donating money)

Err, good friends in both camps, and I don't think they will like talking to each other.

The lecture on how to talk between programmers and non-programmers

Err. Dammit. Took me so long to google the stuff covered in the lecture. Should have taken this module earlier. Haha.. oh well..

Lame jokes

1. 4 million lines of code - [printf "you are screwed.";] x 3.9999999 million lines

2. 50 million lines of code, 500 million bugs

3. Non-programmers are useful.

The CS3216 seems to be teaching basics that students should already know.. Or maybe our education system is not teaching the things that people should be learning first? Or are our students just happy to take modules, pass them and forget them? (I am supremely guilty of this, and regretting it.)

Interesting lecture by the previous students. It's good that they have real life experience working to help a client (CVWO - http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/vwo/aboutus.html). Pretty smart way to achieve the objectives of:

1. Getting students to appreciate the power that they have been gifted with through their training

2. Using the resources of the school to benefit society (public funds for social benefit)

3. Management, teamwork, leadership

4. Professionalism

The first result for "Scrum" in google shows the software development model result, not the rugby related result (wert..).

Lol.. major takeaway lesson when managing your own business: Cannot tio smoke by anyone. Must have some experience yourself in as many areas of the business as possible.. (So why hire managers from biz admin without real-world experience?) (I have a lot of biz ad friends who are my good friends. =p) Kinda reminds me of the time when I took a class on VC investments, but the lecturer seemed like he never invested before.

Okie, I sensed a lot of groups floundering. I guess my group is still searching for an idea, but we've thrown away a lot of paper already. Our KPI is probably to hit 100 pages of crap before finding something good.

I realised there's a big difference between Sebastian, me and Jonathan. Not sure how to resolve it, but I wish Jonathan can just push back against our stupid ideas. Maybe the 2 of us are just too intimidating..

The USD1,000 iPhone App: Why?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/17/most-expensive-iphone-app-barmax/

Okie, why does this iPhone costs USD1,000?

I think it's cause users find USD1,000 of value in it.

1. Provides highly specialised knowedge

2. That people are willing to pay for

Which leads me to think of other kinds of highly specialized exams.. (MCAT?)

I wonder whether there are any good iPhone apps that teach people basic English. The English teaching classes offered by the tuition chains in China are ridiculously expensive and quite scam-riddled.

Responding to Paul Graham's essay on "Can You Buy a Sillicon Valley?"

The original essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html

"They're just a couple founders with laptops."

Hmm.. NUS has plenty of people with laptops. (Surfing FB, playing games, emailing, reading notes... creating value??)

"There are two ways to do that: have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point in their life when they naturally take root. The first approach is a mistake, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups. If your terms force startups to do things they don't want to, only the desperate ones will take your money."

Okie, slightly tougher. But does it make sense to really uproot the whole team to a place like SV? (Not very sure about this, as I want to start by solving the problems near me first, before going global.)

"For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world."

Starting to get interesting.. There's already a lot of money floating around in Singapore from the various funds.

Okie, that last part is the selection process for choosing the startups. Do we have a big enough community of angel investors in Singapore who have the experience to be mentors? That's an answer that I myself would like to find out.

Hmm, what is the net effect on the economy if we sacrificed 1 IR for 1 Silicon Valley experiment?

Of course, Paul makes it sound easy. I'm not sure how such an experiment would be conducted. However, I am quite sure that given the amount of bureaucracy, controls and checks over public money, it would be quite difficult to do.

In fact, I don't even think that there are that many technically inclined people in Singapore who want to start their own businesses. Most want to work for MNCs..

Okie, I may be wrong with this post. Hope that people will give some other points.. Really hope that Singapore becomes known for innovative startups. I don't think that we are any less capable, so there must be some obvious reasons why we have the technical training but not the culture.

Blog moved back..

Okie, so the sina.com experiment was a failure =)

moved the content back to http://sharetheconversation.blogspot.com/

Biz Case Presentation

NOC is finally over, with the end of my business case presentation. It wasn't pretty, but I really hope that I get an A for it (since I did not get to see what other people presented, I can't be sure). Prof Kau was very nice and asked questions that gave me a lot of space to answer.

Doing the presentation brought back a lot of memories from work. Suddenly, I almost felt that I was back in the office again. However, despite liking my boss and colleagues, I was not very passionate about that industry. However, it was good to challenge myself in a totally unrelated industry.

Running a business to sell it off or running a business cause you have a passion for it? Although I am more inclined to the latter, it seems that I hear a lot of my peers who think that running a business is solely to get it to a point where you can exit. I must qualify that most of them who possess this thought are interested in investments.

Tomorrow will be interesting. It marks the first day that I'm officially meeting the class and my group mates. I guess I'm pretty Zen about the grouping (cause of age?). It does not really matter as much as it did a few semesters ago. When everyone is good, you don't really care.

Going to try to sleep a regular 7 hours this year.

Google contemplates pulling out of China

Can't believe this. I would be crippled without access to gmail. Can't imagine the impact on people and businesses in China if this happens.

Good PR though.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/12/google-china-attack/

On the flip side, China is facing a lot of problems with external media trying to influence its citizens.

No rights and no wrongs..

Coffee w Jason

Met Jason yesterday for coffee. I was never close to him in school, but it seems so weird that we can talk about topics easily. We share common interests in China. He comes from a tech/finance background, and I come from a engineering? background.

"It's not the amount of hours you work, it's the amount of work you put in the hours." - one of the personal mantras I will adopt.

Want to finish my presentation for tomorrow (suddenly seems quite boring, gonna look up Steve Jobs for tips) and actually start thinking about CS3216. There must be something a group of smart and passionate people can do beyond Singapore, given 3 months.

I can only say that most of the younger ones have the advantage of time to learn, and most of the people around my age have the advantage of a better skillset.

Team Success Criteria

Team of good people with good idea > team of good people with bad idea > team of bad people with good idea > team of bad people with bad idea

"What is the meaning of life?"

Saw this from a very good friend email's signature:

"The purpose of life is to discover your gift, the meaning of life is to give your gift away" - David Viscott

A pretty good answer =)

CS3216

Recipe for a successful module
1. Take a passionate lecturer who
2. Is slightly crazy and wants to
3. Challenge students to reach their potential by
4. Making them do stuff they
5. Never thought they could
6. With people they don't know so that they can
7. Learn from each other.

I hope that the people taking this module consider going for NOC. Most of the year 3s and year 4s are probably too old, but the year 1s and 2s still have the chance. The culture in SV, BV and Stockholm should suit the people in class. It will even make them become better, as they leave the comfortable environment of home. Home sometimes makes you lazy and complacent. NOC in China.. is a different story.

I feel old when taking the class. Old in the sense that they all seem so untouched by the cynicism that a whole life in the education system causes in people. I hope they never lose their passion, cause it took me a long time to find mine and I would not want to lose it.

It's funny how a simple show and tell session can tell you so much about a person. I find it so much easier to talk to someone once you know that that person has a passion.

How to use 5 Whys and TPS in our daily lives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System

Has anyone thought about using the TPS for our personal lives? It would be interesting to see how it could be implemented.

Common concepts (copied from Wikipedia)

• Andon (行灯) (English: Signboard)
• Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) (English: Go and see for yourself)
• Hansei (反省) (English: Self-reflection)
• Heijunka (平準化) (English: Production Smoothing)
• Jidoka (自働化) (English: Autonomation - automation with human intelligence)
• Just In Time (ジャストインタイム) (JIT)
• Kaizen (改善) (English: Continuous Improvement)
• Kanban (看板, also かんばん) (English: Sign, Index Card)
• Manufacturing supermarket where all components are available to be withdrawn by a process
• Muda (浪费, also ムダ) (English: Waste)
• Mura (斑 or ムラ) (English: Unevenness)
• Muri (無理) (English: Overburden)
• Nemawashi (根回し) (English: Laying the groundwork, literally: Going around the roots)
• Poka-yoke (差错预防 ポカヨケ) (English: fail-safing - to avoid (yokeru) inadvertent errors (poka))

I guess just reading through this list could generate ideas for improving personal workflow.

Perhaps, we could start with our physical workspace. Is it full of clutter, or is it very neatly organised? Are commonly used items easily found?

千里之行，始于足下

若不是这学期需要开始自己的博客,也许会等到下个月才开始。刚从NOC回来，一时还有点对来自功课、创业、家人、朋友、女朋友的压力招架不住。

我对环保、系统、创业、潜能培养有浓厚的兴趣。希望这个博客可以应许我介绍一些有关这三方面的消息，让大家有个意义性的讨论。

介绍一下最近让我思考的文章和演讲：

1. 跟 Eric Ries的访问， 有关 Minimum Viable Product (最基本有效产品)
http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product
我觉的这样完全地符合了尽量不要浪费时间和精力的原则。

2. Guy Kawasaki - Art of Innovation
http://www.zentation.com/viewer/index.php?passcode=epbcSNExIQr
Guy的演讲幽默地拨开创业的奥秘。

3. http://www.ted.com
每当需要鼓励或灵感的时候，就到这个网站看演讲。世界上有太多聪明和伟大的人。

4. "Flow" - 心理学、成功秘诀
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
一生都保持这样的状态的人生是怎样的人生？

5. How to Make Wealth 怎样制造财富
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
透彻的分析

6. Technology Transfer and IP Licensing in China 在中国有关实行科技转移和知识产权的要点
http://academy.epo.org/e_learning/technology_transfer_and_ip_licensing_china/player.html

7. 80/20 Principle

新年的约定，简单又难：吾日三省吾身

张家铨 Ryan
twwt: ryanteocc
click: http://www.e3alive.org

New blog

http://blog.sina.com.cn/ryanteocc
Cause blogger is blocked in China =)