Tag: Facebook

Stay hungry, stay foolish, keep Searching

In his 2005 Standford commencement address, Steve Jobs ended with ” Stay hungry. Stay foolish”. Today, we should add “keep searching”. After Google, Bing and Yahoo and Blekko, which promised to keep out spam.

Wild Wild West.  More content, more classification, increasing need for trusted recommendation.

Part of the reason Facebook is where it is today is due to the ease of sharing (photo, film clip and music video).

We , the anchoring community, are the algorithm, the editorial board of our swam-like network.

See me, feel me, tweet me, show me …

A community needs common language (LOL), ritual (tweet me), and causes (poverty alleviation).

Right now, the obvious need is worker’s retraining ( for America to stay competitive).

Yet, it’s a chicken-and-the-egg cycle i.e. which industry should we be focusing on, and who will pick up the tab for work force training?

The growth of University of Phoenix and the likes shows a need for continuing education .

When IBM saw the writing on the wall, the Elephant learned to walk fast (and finally spun off its hardware segment).

Best of wishes to Blekko. It’s a vast Wild Wild Web out there. Google is taking its own medicine. That of the innovator’s dilemma. After “pageranking”, we will see stack-ranking of search engines. But then, it already knew. Google is moving to the cloud, to TV and to mobile O/S.

That’s what makes America competitive: up the value chain. Stay hungry, stay foolish, keep searching. Fear not.

 

Third life

As recent as 60 years ago, a businessman could let his hair down (or hat off) at home, smoke a cigarette or pipe, and watch the news

(in black and white). In fact, at the U of TX Austin museum, an exhibition is underway to show you just that: witness to a century.

Now, we spend a considerable amount of time online, commenting, following, blogging, liking and…venting.

Welcome to modernity i.e. jet plane, mobile devices, fast food and “social” sans borders.

It will either be misinformation or disinformation about us, and certainly, easy access (Snowden’s alert).

(at least, on LinkedIn, they let you reverse look up people who looked you up).

Some people even advocate cyber abstinence or cyber sabbatical.

The idea is to rearrange our priorities so face time can take precedence over screen time.

Twitter is so prescient in mobile connectivity. “Where are you now” has been one of the most asked questions in mobile conversation.

Now, with Twitter, we can proactively let “followers” know our where-about (In transit at a Korean airport, for instance).

Next and last frontier would be cloud-based computing (dropbox).

One exception: college students still prefer to haul around heavy textbooks over digital readers. Masochist?

Or just the last streak of rebellion?

In case you haven’t noticed, we now know more about Facebook friends of friends who posted regularly on-line, than our closest relatives who live far away.

So back to our businessman in the 50’s, who wore suspenders like Larry King‘s. Only now that our Happy Days dad comes home from work (first life) skips over his second life (wife, kids and supper time) to go online (third life), where he keeps taps intimate details of his “friends”, while his wife, perhaps is doing so on her mobile, while out shopping for a bargain on groupons.

And what about the kids? They have already got their daily dose of  100 SMS messages before seamlessly continue their virtual existence on multi-screen. The truth hit home to me, when, upon staying at a friend’s house last week, I discovered a stool in the toilet. Asked what it’s for. Guess what, the kids surfed the internet while using the bathroom. That stool was his lap top stand.

Welcome to our 21st century, when we not only have public and private life, as in the 50’s, but also, virtual life.

If unchecked, this technology-aided life (Third Life) will take a larger chunk of our 24-hour pie, even bathroom time. Amuse ourselves to death.

Where have all the salesmen gone?

Algorithm rules. Pop-up ads and SEO.

Sales automation. Who needs a firm handshake, the smell of splash perfume and sincere eye contact!

Users know everything about the product and the industry anyway.

There is no need for more information. Only the recommendation part, which they rely on friends and families.

Strangers knocking on doors and pushing product don’t seem to work as it once did during the industrial era (Death of the salesman).

Willy Loman takes off his hat, and resigns to his fate. Ours is an age of logistic and automation. May the best route win.  User-generated content, user-interphase, user-comment. We call this empowerment. Democratizing the web.  Everyone logs in, surfs and is glued to the set.

And we barely scratch the surface. Since mobile penetration is faster than desktop’s, designers beef up mobile IP and liberate users from their “desks”.

First the “brick” phone, then the I-phone. We should hold memorials for boombox, Walkman, brick phone and mainframe computers. Products are smaller, cheaper, easier to ship. No manual needed. No demo. No need for salesmen. Click here, enter there, and UPS or FedEx will ship to your door (it started with Amazon, Ebay and Priceline until it grows on you). Or more conveniently, swipe your credit card, punch in the vending selection, and transact with a machine.

Every start-up now enjoys lower barriers of entry (open source software, cheaper hardware, increased bandwidth and labor surplus). San Francisco is witnessing a Renaissance: game companies, Twitter etc… Let’s play. Let the game begin.

Excuse me, I just got interrupted by an automated sales call by a machine. At least, it is accent-reduced. So the choice now is speech recognition or live, but from far off-shored call centers. Which one do you prefer? Can’t afford to send a rep. He would fumble despite having rehearsed his elevator speech. He already forgot how to tie a knot. It’s a lost art from a lost species. Where have all the salesmen gone? Long time passing.

 

Unsung heroes

I channel surfed last night. C-SPAN 3 covered the Memorial in PA for flight 93, those unsung heroes who diverted terrorist plot 9 years ago.

The uncut shot kept panning the vast expanse of Pennsylvanian field, future home of Flight 93 Memorial.

Graphically speaking, it was boring. MOS (mid out sound) since the mike did not reach far enough to hear the VIP conversation (First Lady and former FL were among them).

In contrast, we could see and hear Terry Jones, instant celebrity for his threat and now recanted threat, just fine.

His Campbell-soup-like-15 minutes of fame.

An article in the Washington Post says it all “tyranny of the moment”.

The Web democratizes so much that the Gainesville pastor gains a PR upper hand (which makes Kansas pastor who has protested at military funerals envy).

He even grew his signature mustache to come across as credible (it’s a step up from preaching just to his extended families).

I am sure he will have fans and followers if opened a facebook page.

Meanwhile, real heroes who took action and paid the price with their lives barely got their names on the marble.

Such is the state of the world as we are living it.

Imagine flight 93 heroes debating the consequences of their action. No, there weren’t any time. They just went ahead and did the right thing.

Brought to mind my favorite quote: “he is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose”.  American martyrs don’t get noticed,

since it’s not in the US culture to condone and celebrate such an act. But it did happen, on that fateful day, which we often forget due to tyranny of the moment.

 

India + 1 cafeteria

I ordered an iced coffee with milk, this time not in the to-go cup.

I just want to sit down, and take it all in. No I am not in India.

But close. I am in formerly known as Saigon. On the  8th floor. REBOOT CAFE.

The LogiGear building. Offshore software testing center. Young engineers

might as well be in India, where I read so much about (their call centers offered training in accent reduction, their corporate night-out etc…). As of this edit, there is a sister branch in DaNang 200 testers strong.

Back packers who are first timers in Vietnam often cocoon in Ta Hien or De Tham.

From that standpoint, they observe  people walking the street in pajamas and cone hats.

Here I am sitting on the 8th floor with back-up generators, CAT5 running up the stairways, and engineers test all sorts of things, from TRANSFORMERS the game to Steven Covey‘s Habits-forming software.

Sure, who wouldn’t suffer from the economic downturn.

But young Vietnamese engineers have somewhat been spared. They have grown up not demanding too much space for oneself.  Here, on the 6th floor, they can play a game of ping-pong, sing a song like they would at school recess.

It’s not Electronic Arts, and it’s not India. But it’s something that has potential to take off. Everybody is on the path from pajamas to tuxedos.

Some of us got as far as shirt-and-tie. Others in uniforms.

Most perhaps will never own a tux or wear one.

But one thing for sure, online, no one knows or cares if you wore a pair of shorts underneath (Peter Jennings used to report from the balcony of the Continental Hotel with sport coats and tie, wearing shorts).

After all, Facebook Mark wore his pajamas to a Venture capital meeting.

I don’t condone such practice. But take heart. A nation will advance not only from its broadband built-out, but also due to its young and thriving work force. Here, I see ingenuity, commitment to excellence and team  work.

This morning, I saw a candidate, perhaps in for an interview.

I held the door for her, and can’t help seeing the sweat on her forehead.

It’s hot here in Saigon, and perhaps, she carries a mixture of cold sweat as well.

I wish her luck. In the western sense, luck is something you can control,

first by showing up. She did that (90 percent down, 10 to go). See you at REBOOT CAFE.

Not India. Just India + 1. Vietnamese are used to delay opportunities, as long there were any at all.

No wonder the nation still stands on its own legs, after having driven out the giant in the North (then pleaded for peace throughout its history). It’s less insulting to title this India+1 (high-value service driven economy) then to call it China+1 (manufacturing driven and less sustainable).

 

the art of showing

In Impressive First Impressions, author Vu Pham introduces the concept of “reset”.  By that he means, we constantly need to reset our first impressions according to each context and situation:  at work, at play, at home.

The same guy.  When he was at the top of his game, generated a different impression than when he is at the bottom. Still, in either case, he needs to press reset. (He who appears to be a winner often has the ball passed to him).

As Jackson Brown Jr. puts it, “opportunity dances with those already on the dancing floor”.

Showing up is difficult. Woody Allen went even further to ascribe 90% of success to showing up. The” Road Less Traveled” opens with a single sentence ” Life is difficult”.

When the book came out, it was a sensational bestseller.

Before the screen (first, second and third screen) permeates our lives. Another book came out to advocate a screen Sabbatical. e.g. turn off your TV, your computer and your phone on Saturday, for instance.

Our addiction to the screen fueled the economy of Asia Tigers, just as our addiction for oil, the Middle East nations.

These days, we don’t talk about being telegenic (reserved for the likes of  Peter Jennings). Instead, we talk about web presence,  our digital footprint, our online reputation etc..

As men traveled through the centuries leaving behind traces and tracks on the sand of time, so will our descendants with their digital fingerprints.

This is an exciting time to be alive. To show up, on and off-line. You need to press reset every time, to cultivate that impressive first impressions. Here is our chance to self-reinvent which only made possible this side of the web.

Name Change

It costs about $800 to change one’s name here in the US e.g. on social security , driver’s license and passport.

One might prefer something that has global sounding: Villa, Gaga, Shakira.

Between YouTube, Facebook and World Cup, we enjoy an unprecedented confluence of technology and globalization.

And the common denominators are football scores and music scores.

For a brief moment our world is united.

(this morning, at the gym, a stranger I was talking to couldn’t recall Argentina, who played opposite Brazil. Thanks to World Cup, we could strike small talks).

We kid ourselves into thinking that we will be forever young, and glorious .

These sport idols represent our aspiration i.e. fame and fortune. I know parents want what’s best for their children.

What they don’t know is the specifics on how their expectations fan out e.g. doctors, dentists etc.. (no one wants to dream their children grow up to be a secretary. It just happens that it is increasingly a less desirable occupation due to automation).

And as Friedman keeps reminding his children at night :”if you don’t get up early, and study hard, kids from China and India will take your jobs”.

They are already here, excelling in many aspects that involved a tool or an instrument (Yo-Yo, Lang Lang).

The elementary school I attended in Saigon was L’ecole Aurore. It’s been renamed twice, just to end up with its original translation “Rang Dong.”

Many of the French colonial street names aren’t that lucky

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/05/world/la-fg-vietnam-names-20100705

And life goes on in Shanghai, Saigon or Singapore. One street vendor FOB replaces another on that same spot.

Even banks change their names. Keep the sign shops busy. Call it unbranding or what not. Same script, different actors.

Isn’t it the same in Las Vegas, Sunset Boulevard and 42nd St! Like Friedman, I told my girls to study hard or else kids from BRIC nations will take their jobs.

They may even change their names to land an interviews. I named mine Aimy and Maily. That way, they can go back and forth between the Vietnamese world and the Anglo one. Hope they don’t spend $800 someday to switch to Gaga or Shakira. I prefer Paris if it comes to that . Might as well be bold!

strip tease

A Canadian lady, on her insurance-paid leave for mental distress, walked into a bar. Not just any bar, but a male strip tease bar. And she posted her excursion in Facebook to share with “friends”. Among the uninvited  “friends” was the Insurance adjuster. So, her insurance checks stop coming. Reason: “we have joy, we have fun, we have seasons in the sun”, now back to work.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091121/wl_canada_afp/lifestylecanadahealthinternetfacebook_20091121190842

Yahoo News has “denial” theme today: claim denial (Canadian) to Communion denial (Kennedy).

Huge companies are probably up for another round of Stimulus . The Beast got a taste for blood. Should that be denied also?

V-shape recovery? Here is a portrait of a nation, according to Garp.

More people are “discovering” Thrift Shops. More people are buying Peanut Butter and Jelly.

Black Friday pre-sales, soft opening etc…Long Island or nation wide, Walmart doormen now have plan C, with color-coded alert taking a page from Home Land Security.

Less people on the payroll= less tax revenue=tuition increase.

Berkeley students protest , this time, not against the Law professor who argues for torture, but against the U system that seeks to turn torture closer to home: on their own students.

Instead of “Hell No, we won’t go”, it is Pink Floyd’s ” We don’t need no education”.

Some have argued for a 3-year college sysrem. Others went overseas to obtain nursing degrees (cheaper).

I personally went to Hanoi, to obtain my CELTA , a taste of Edu- tourism.

There is a growing field if one really wants to get a job: negotiating for a lower national debt in Mandarin. That’s what our Utah ex-governor was doing in China.

Or you can claim extreme stress, and wants to be depressurized in a strip bar. Just make sure you are thorough with your Facebook privacy setting. Out of fear, we settle for the lowest common denominator, and end up with triviality, and plasticity. Facebook turns Filebook full of self-incriminating evidence instead of peer recommendation.

Everything you post may be used against you in the court of law. There, you have been warned.

In social history, every time we were told to shut up, we ended up with a movement that changed history.

I can’t wait to see what’s next. But first, let me go get my Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich.

P.S. I feel for California college students, among them, my daughter. Give peace and Aimy a chance.

You don’t want both Daddy and daughter “backpacking” in Vietnam, on an extended eco/edu tour, do you?

I am just being proactive, in case the US needs a bi-lingual debt negotiator after I am gone. I got a succession plan in place. Today’s freshmen are tomorrow’s congress person. Treat them right, and do not provoke them, Provost!

Ireland and India offered free education, and look at where those two countries are today.

P.S. 2 we need a new policy to protect online sharing, that way, people are less vulnerable to preying and prying. The insurance claim specialist was probably enjoying his/her moment of “gotcha!”, thinking he/she was en par with CNBC special investigation.  I hope the lady (even posed in bikini lying on the beach) gets her checks. And this time, don’t spend it all in Chippendale.

 

Aimy Telephony

Aimy’s birthday is this Friday.

She was born in Burbank, while I was still trying to close a telephony deal (Centrex or “cloud telephony”).

Phones get smaller (from brick phone to pocket phone) while Aimy grows bigger.

She went with me to many direct sales events, Daddy and daughter singing “We Are the Champions” to psych up for  sales training and rah-rah session.

Now she is nearing adulthood while telephony is nearing zero (pricing).

It seems as if the 60’s movement for social change could only do so much in one generation.

Technology picks up the slacks and pushes the envelope (Moore’s law and eco awareness).

Things have gone from a moral approach to a viral approach , from “the Death of God” to “the Death of Distance”. Amazon, Salesforce.com and EMC are offering data warehousing and data mining service (clean tech not smokestack, time-saving not labor-saving). I just got winked at by an online-degree ad girl on Yahoo homepage.

Voice mail, SMS, Twitter and Facebook help usher in the reputation economy (prosumers’ advertising), where each of us is either the spreader or receiver of viral message (Have you seen the trailer for Amelia?). Distributed worker bees.

As of this edit, Facebook fans are protesting the new “recommended” feed, in place of the old Live Feed.

Telephony and computing converge to give us crisp and clear data streaming transmitted at lightning speed. Our next frontier will be peer creation (Web 3.0), Blu Ray on steroid.

Aimy created her mySpace page at a very early age. Daddy can barely catch up with “friends” on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Amelia flew in the air onto the unknown. Aimy “hip hops” on the ground and online. All the powers to her. There is no better time to live, on this side of medical breakthrough (TB, Polio and cholera, all curable) and on the crest of technological invention (Twitter, Google glasses, I phone). As long as she gets it, that one is to live life as if one were dying. It makes every bit (no punt intended) all the more sweeter. War, Recession, Terrorism can never weigh us down. We are the champions!

Go to Disney Land, Aimy. Or see Amelia. It’s your life now. No permission is needed. My struggle is your strength. BTW, Aimy and company won US Championship in Hip-Hop. (How about that for subliminal persuasion).

I think I am going to text her on Friday. It costs much less now with “all you can text” deal. Near zero pricing Triple Play.

Snapperizing

The Nobel Prize winners this year are being honored for their work on fiber optic (which made possible  data transmission across the globe) and digital photography (pixel-driven process).

Put the two inventions together with the rise of crowdsourcing, we got the phenomenon of  iPhoto, Flicker etc..

I am sure Facebook and Match.com are direct beneficiaries of photo sharing across the continents.

Faxing disrupts snail mail. Email disrupts FedEx. And finally, Adobe complements and completes electronic communications with photo/file attachment….that is, until something else (Snapper?) emerges.

I packed away my fax machine last year, and haven’t missed it a bit.

Who needs those grainy black and white copies when one can transmit via the Internet color photos?

Among the ten magazines that got shut down this month were Nick and Nick Jr magazines.

I am sure kids can go directly to Nick’s web sites, search and siege, then share files with peers on Facebook or Instagram.

Glossy magazines for all segmented markets were early beneficiaries of Gutenberg mass printing. Now, print medium starts retreating while photo sharing and amateur photography dominates the world-wide web.

Human resource experts are predicting the coming public acceptance of video CV.

Current TV (as of this edit, was acquired) had tapped into Viewer-Created-Content  (VC2) right before YouTube was launched.

And Google Video followed right behind.

All due to fiber optic (dark and lit) applications.

A pixel here and a pixel there, all of the sudden, we found ourselves living in a whole new society, more visual and global.

The veil has been lifted. And there is no turning back. Gone were the days when the husband’s first glimpse of  his bride is on their wedding day. Or an employer with his/her new hire.

I remember broadcasters always asked for demo tapes when recruiting newscasters. Today, perhaps those ads would say ” please send us your web links”. And the response would be equally fast.

Viva la broadband!