make differences

What does your bank account worth?

2008-05-19T15:46:00.000-07:00

Ever heard about underground economy on the internet, where people sell bank accounts information and credit cards?
Here is a detail report. I'm surprised that the pricing could so rely on different bank, account balance, if it's admin password, and a package as well. Just give an idea, for a MBNA account with $22,000 balance, priced at $1500.

No time. skip again

2008-04-09T19:15:00.001-07:00

skip again

2008-04-09T19:14:00.002-07:00

skip

2008-04-09T19:14:00.001-07:00

Don't blame China! It's just a part of development and learning process!

2007-08-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

From the Techdirt:

China's Counterfeit Behavior Is Actually A Copy... Of 19th Century America

sea turtle and local entrepreneur at HYSTA

2007-05-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

Sea turtle in China refers to oversea Chinese return China after receiving degrees or working experience outside of China. It carries sort of very positive meaning. Usually sea turtle entrepreneur enjoy much higher reputation than local entrepreneur, I guess, due to some tactics backed by government policy to attract oversea Chinese to return home. To my knowledge, if we just look at Chinese companies on NASDAQ, over 90% of them are founded by sea turtles. There are many reasons to explain this. This absolutely doesn't mean there are no successful local entrepreneur. Actually, in the current China internet industry, several most successful entrepreneur are from local, Hongyi Zhou, Lei Ding and Jack Ma. They are very successful because they pay their full attention on local market, which is clearly restated by Lei Ding at HYSTA 2007. Netease doesn't go global because he believes Chinese market is big enough with 1.3 billion people. He really believes Chinese market has great potential.

It's also interesting to observe that Lei Ding and Wei Guo spoke Chinese during conference. Actually when I ran into Jerry Yang in the VIP room, I found his Chinese is very good. He was having picture with Zhi Tan. Both of them are around 40. However, both of them have half of hair white.

SouFun CEO Vincent T. Mo

2007-05-10T23:12:00.000-07:00

At HYSTA, I had a brief chat with Vincent, CEO of SouFun. SouFun grows with the Chinese real estate market. It expects to IPO soon. It currently has 1200 employees, which is a really big number for me. If I'm not wrong, I remember that before Google went IPO, it had only a little over 2000 employees.
However, I felt the IPO process for SouFun is not smooth now.

Zhi Tan President of Focus Media

2007-05-10T22:55:00.000-07:00

As the first speaker at HYSTA 2007, Zhi Tan is very different from the rest of entrepreneurs at the conference. He invested 2 million dollars in a very small elevator advertisement poster company and acquired the total 8 companies in that industry in the following one year, then his company was acquired by Focus Media fro over 100 million dollars in stock. When the deal was closed after 6 months, the deal went up to over 500 million dollars due to stock appreciation. This is just an amazing story. Like Zhi Tan repeated said, "no technology, great return in one year", which was jealously joked by Wei Guo, CEO of Digital China, that "if every business is like Zhi Tan's, the business world would be great."

I think there are many business opportunities similar in every industry in China. Almost for 90% industries in China, the market is highly fragmented. The management doesn't have vision, experience, and knowledge to run a large business. The operation is not efficient. There are a lot of consolidation business opportunities. The franchise business start becoming really popular in China in the last few years. I'm not sure how it goes.

I overheard Zhi Tan's white hair is from when he studies PhD at Boston. It seems getting a PhD degree is way harder than growing 2 millions dollars to 500 millions dollars in 18 months.

Yadong Liu, CEO of Primeton

2007-05-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

Yadong Liu, co-founder, former Executive VP and COO of AsiaInfo(NASDAQ:ASIA), is now CEO of Primeton, which is a middleware software provider. I have to admit I haven't heard them before although I started using WebSphere in 2001 and have been working on Application Server for over five years. Yadong told me they are doing very well in the Chinese finance and telecom industry. He believes they are very good at connecting the software components using XML, which is strongly demanded by those two industries. He mentioned that Oracle Application Server doesn't have any market in China and they are likely an acquisition target from IBM. The price range would be around 20 million dollars.

a dinner talk with Mino CEO Jing Liu

2007-05-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

Before HYSTA 2007 I heard this year's dinner would be buffet, which disappointed me since the dinner last year was so impressive. But I'm wrong. This year's dinner is no worse than last year. Since it's buffet, I was able to walk around during dinner to find interesting people to talk. Then I sat beside Jing Liu, CEO of Mino.
Jing has been a serial entrepreneur and Mino is the 4th company he founded. The first three were not very successful. But I saw Jing is well respected in the community and people believe Mino will be mostly likely a hit. When Jing was introduced to me, I asked, "what happened for your previous startup?". Jing said, "I failed three times." This is Silicon Vally. Failure is an award.
Simply say, Mino is "Skype on Mobile phones". I asked Jing, "VOIP now is like commodity. What makes you different to compete with Skype or GTalk on the phone?". Jing said, "we are looking at Enterprise market.", which makes sense. Enterprise customer always have different requirement from consumers. Jing also joked that the difficulty of being an entrepreneur without a girl friend. "No girl dates me because I have to travel a lot. It's better just marry before starting a company or marry after selling your company. ":)

Talk with Qi Lu on Yahoo Search Strategy at HYSTA

2007-05-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

In previous post, I said Google and Yahoo have different strategy based on the analysis of their acquisition. Yahoo acquired many media companies like flickr, bix etc while Google acquisition is focused on ad platform(doubleclick), content platform technologies (like jotspot and sketchup) except YouTube.
I talked to Qi Lu , who heads the Yahoo Search at HYSTA 2007 Annual Conference. I discussed with him the above observation and asked,

me: "if Yahoo develops into the online media monopoly provider and blocks Google to crawl Yahoo content, what does Google search/index?".
He answered, "we are blocking them now", which surprised me;

I asked, "from the acquisition observation, Google is really focused on search, which limits itself into search ads, while Yahoo bought so many content providers, which focuses itself on banner ads. It looks for me that search ads are more effective measured by Cost Per Click than banner ads measured by Cost Per Impression. How do you think about it?"
Qi responded, "Search ads is over. You can see it from why Google bought DoubleClick".

I asked, "isn't it just a defensive strategy?"
Qi, "of course not".

I'm not even close to internet advertisement expert so that I don't have any judgement on this. But my impression is internet advertisement is till at the very early stage because I am still seeing there are more and more innovative internet advertisement technology providers. Baynote, for example, which is founded by former HYSTA president. I think internet advertisement technologies are still infant comparing with other computer technologies like robot.

I also talked to the other Yahoo Search up management person, who made the comment that Yahoo Panama project might not meet the expectation.

HYSTA 2007 rocks Silicon Valley

2007-05-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

Serious. I felt it. HYSTA 2007 rocked Silicon Valley. No kidding.
I was driving at 80 miles on 101 south toward Santa Clara. At the Mountain View exit, a red sexy mercedes-benz convertible passed me like crazy. I wondered what's the hurry. I'm a crazy guy too so I followed it. Well, we ended up parking side by side at the Santa Clara Convention Center, where the HYSTA 2007 was being held. But since I made a wrong turn, I didn't see the driver. Who are you? I'm very curious to know. Your licence plate is XXXXXXX. :)

Seriously, the conference room was very crowded. HYSTA 2007 is kindly enough to issue a press pass so that I had chances to talk to many speakers. I have so many things to write here that I will post a blog for each person I talked to. Here is a quick list: Qi Lu, Jing Liu from Mino, Robert I. Chen from RAE Systems, Wilson Liu from e-China Alliances, Yadong Liu from Primeton, and Vincent T. Mo from SouFun. There are also other interesting company CEOs whom I didn't have much time to talk to. But I will profile their companies and some stories I overheard later too.

Please check back!

I'm convinced by Al Gore today!

2007-05-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

What a day! A great day! This is the greatest event in the Silicon Valley every year. This is the Annual HYSTA conference.

Of course, today's event is all about Al Gore. He announced that "he will go for 2008 presidential election". Actually, John Doerr said that. John gave a speech in 2006 HYSTA conference, which is not impressive enough to convince me that global warming is really a problem now. I did some research on global warming back in school and took a few classes on global warming causes and effects, policies, sustainable development, and etc. I know there are many controversial research results on this aspect. Researchers only observe there are strong correlation between volume of CO2 emission and global warming, but there is no sound cause/effect theory. The famous butterfly effect chaos theory scare me and a lot of researchers into agnosticists. But today, Al Gore convinced me that global warming actually is true, although he conveniently didn't mention any theory from the other side. Actually earth is a self-balancing system. For any force increasing temperature, there are other forces that will try to decrease it. More CO2 will increase vegetation, which will absorb CO2. But more vegetation will cause other effects like red tide for fishes, which will cause other things. Did I tell you I'm agnosticist?
But today Al Gore convinced me. I think I should have listened to John last year and picked up my old textbook to do something, clean energy, sustainable development, going back to World Bank, call friend Jin Yi or Feng asking them if I can help them on their clean energy ventures. :)

notes from zero2ipo conference

2007-05-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

I recently went Zero2IPO Silicon Valley Capital Forum. It's my first time attending their event. Zero2IPO is a professional conference organizer, which means it makes money from organizing conference and selling market reports. Here are my observations:
Venture capital industry is a small circle. There were 500 attendees in this conference. Most people know each other quite well. I guess this conference is the place for them to catch up with each other. One lawyer sitting beside me told me that if it's funny that he haven't seen his neighbor for a long time since both of them travel a lot, but they met at this conference;
Since it's a "zero2ipo" conference, from my personal sample, 1/3 are lawyers, 1/3 are M&A bankers, 1/5 are enterpreneur, 1/5 are venture capitalists. 1/10 are speakers; 1/10 are journalists;
One takeaway from the panelist talk is that it's said that Chinese entrepreneur is mostly financial driven comparing with American entrepreneur. I guess VCs will like that. Am I right?

Google did it again! This time is not Google China!

2007-04-20T21:53:00.000-07:00

Somebody at Ajax magazine have found out Google Personal page uses Yahoo javaScript library without credit Yahoo.
If Yahoo just sues Google as Sohu sues Google China, that would be really big.

Google and Yahoo still diverges on strategy

2007-04-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

As Jerry started Yahoo from the very beginning, he wants to build a media company. He becomes a media star. He invited the current Yahoo CEO from Hollywood, who is still commuting between Hollywood and Silicon Valley on a private jet on every weekend. The Yahoo logo was turned into purple. Yahoo never had its own search engine. Yahoo bought all kinds of companies related to media, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the most recent rivals.com. Yahoo is all focused on media. Yahoo argues that users stay on Yahoo longer than most other sites. At least this was the case before myspace.com and Fackbook shew up. By this standard, Yahoo probably could sell the most expensive banner ads. The issue here is who will click on that banner. This is the difference between Cost Per Click and Cost Per Impression.

However, Google is continually buying ad companies, including the largest one, doubleclick. Google is focused on ads and contents. It bought jotspot, YouTube, and other ad technology companies. It is building web office to help people write and convert content onto the web. Then Google can search it, index it, and sell keywords.

Goolge wants to become the gate to the information bank while Yahoo strives to be the media king on the internet. I haven't researched it but my impression is search ads increase dramatically while banner ads increases very slowly.

Those are just observations. It's hard to say which strategy will win the race. Where is Microsoft? It probably has enough power and resource to try both.

Google China vs. Sohu on Chinese input software

2007-04-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

Google China's Chinese input software has received very positive feedback since it's launched. I used it. It's really good.

By now, we knew that Google China uses Sohu's proprietary word database without permission. Google China has apologized and this story was even reported on Wall Street Journal.

Google China also fired its Director of Public Relationship, which I don't get it. I think the PR was handled very well. Make mistakes, correct them. No big deal! If somebody needs to be fired, it should be the person who made the decision to steal other's database.

Why Sohu sues Google? If Sohu makes a good Chinese input software, why nobody has heard about it? Google China hasn't got a nickel from it either except of some praise. Google apologized and everybody knows now that Sohu has something better than Google. Sohu got the fame too. Why lawsuit? If I were Sohu, I would rather tell Google to co-brand this piece of software by allowing users to switch between Google Word Search and Sogou Word Search.

Qihoo vs. Yahoo China -- Hongyi Zhou vs. Yun Ma AGAIN

2007-04-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

Qihoo has announced its free anti-virus software 360 Safe has uninstalled Yahoo China's tool bar Yahoo Assistant (formally known as 3721) 26 million times. Zhou believes 3721 is a form of mal-ware and publicly admitted he introduced mal-ware into China and he wants to correct his mistake now by removing them.

For me, it is just the same as somebody robs and demolishes your house and now come back to offer, "pay me and rebuild it for you."

Remember, Zhou sold 3721 to Yahoo USD 100 million and now builds his new business on removing them.

If Zhou really shows his sincere attitude, I suggest him donate 10 million dollars to a third party researching on internet security.

Google China apologized

2007-04-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

Google China apologized using competitors' unpublicized word database in its new Chinese input software, which has received very positive review since launched.

why haven't I been blogging?

2007-03-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

because I have not been able to login my account in the past month. Obviously when Google was trying to migrate the Blogger account to Google account, there were some issues. But it has been giving me a hard time to figure out what was my password because Blogger blamed me the wrong password. I could not use the "forget the password" link because it directed me to the Q&A page. To submit a Q&A, it requires me to login. WTF!
Yesterday I tried again using the same password, it went through. So summarized below:
1) Google is better at hiding information than Yahoo because Yahoo's migration of Flickr account used a forceful method that irritate a lot of people. Although Google has no better way to do it, it blames the customer's memory and has no way for you to complain. Maybe, they already know a lot of customer will complain if the Q&A loop was not a mistake.

2) Single Sign On (SSO) is very hard to implement. I know it because I am working on it.

3) Password is bad. Don't need to explain. Everybody understands.

Happy v-day! Skip a shower!

2007-02-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

According to research at UC Berkeley, men's sweat contains chemistry that cause sexual arousal in women.
So to make your v-day happier, skip a show today.
Berkey Research

Google, Microsoft, and Intel

2007-02-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

On Monday, Intel shows off its 80 brain processors, which will be available for commercial use in five years. Great. But what do we do with so much power? Software development has been behind the processor for a long time so that Intel has to put up its own investment into software companies via Intel Capital.
We have paid too much attention on how Google's and others' web application will change the desktop software landscape dominated by Microsoft so that we forgot the impact on Intel. If I spend 90% of my time within a web browser, why do I need a duo core machine?

Surprised by Taobao and thought on Jack Ma vs. Hongyi Zhou

2007-01-17T10:57:00.000-08:00

According to this news, average Taobao users spent 563 Yuan in 2006. I think it is a huge number. 30 million users visited your store spending 70$ every year, which really can keep me smiling awake although exactly say, Taobao is a C2C site and only get money from transaction processing.

Like a magic, online credibility has been established in China in the last several years. I am seeing more and more friends on my MSN starting opening their Taobao online store. I feel really excited and thankful that Taobao help make this happen. I have tried Taobao and tried all the service channels like call center. I am extremely satisfied with their service. A lot of people don't believe credit card could be widely used in China. I don't want to argue that because there is no fact to support that bold judgment. But 30 millions users have used Taobao, which means used Alipay. This is a very good number. But this is only 7.5% of China internet users. I heard Taobao will start charging this Feb after its free service forced Ebay(eachnet) out of China. (BTW, eachnet is out, what about Paypal China? I heard nothing.) I hope Taobao could make good use of this revenue to improve Taobal and Alipay.

Related to this topic, I also want to comment on the war between Jack Ma and Hongyi Zhou. Besides a lot of comments about each's personality and acheivement from other people, I just want to comment based on the fact. We, as e-business professional, should thank them for educating Chinese small business owners on e-business. However, what makes them apart is, Jack helps establish the online credibility while Hongyi ruined it by introducing malware into China.

i-names, a very bad idea

2006-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

At the same time that people are complaining of the central control of DNS under ICANN, the identity community has a similar solution on internet identity management called i-names, which I think it is a very bad idea.

In the last one month, I was struggling with DNS. I bought a domain from a domain seller so that I need to transfer the registrant. This is the first I buy domain from the domain sellers. It looks like it is not enough to just transfer the username and password and contact information. It is important to change the registrant information, which, according to ICANN, requires a special procedure. There are some companies just in this business. They charge $60 flat fee for domain valued under $600. If the domain sale value is above $600, they charge 5% of sale value. This is just unbelievable.

Talking back i-names, besides the ridiculous registration fee, $20 a year, which is a ridiculous big number for anyone outside of the top 10 richest countries, which might cover only 1.5 billion people on this planet, the above issue will come up later as well.

i-names is a bad idea.

Yahoo Wallet

2006-12-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

Recently I purchased something from Yahoo and received an email from Yahoo saying "a Yahoo Wallet" has been created for me, which will store my billing and shipping information. This is something similar as Google Checkout. Comparing with Google, Yahoo is on a better position because Yahoo has been working with small businesses in Yahoo Store and Yahoo Shopping for a long time, which makes Yahoo Wallet easier than Google Checkout. Since its inception, Google Checkout is having a difficult time to sign up partnership even after offering huge discount for partner stores and shoppers.

Next year, Microsoft Vista e-wallet will come into play. Until then, among Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, ebay, only Amazon doesn't have its own payment service. But obviously, it is not difficult for them to come up one very quickly and even offer it as a web service. After all, Amazon already sells its virtual online shelf and computing resources.

I am not sure how many percentage of Paypal revenue come from non-ebay users. But if it is a good number, then ebay will have a problem. We already know ebay has been relying on paypal's high margin for the last several years since its auction business grows very slowly. It's certain that ebay users can only use Paypal. But if a significant 3rd party Paypal users start using Google, MS, Yahoo solutions, it's going to be a big issue for ebay.

3rd HYSTA Annual Entrepreneur Boot Camp

2006-11-20T14:00:00.000-08:00

I spent the whole Saturday on the 3rd HYSTA Annual Entrepreneur Boot Camp. This year HYSTA worked with AAMA together. Therefore, comparing with last year, this year's conference had a good number of audience.

This year's topics are more advanced than last year; last year, there was a talk on how to incorporate a company; how to construct the share structure; how to deal with the issues during the rapid growth of the startup; how to work with board member;
This year is more about how to approach VC and how to pitch ideas.

Here is a good summary about the conference.

As usual, investors look at people. People first. This is really tough for a first time entrepreneur. One audience quotes a data that in one conference, all the VC firms on the panel only made one investment that was not through the referral filters. However, I also heard a story about the bloglines.com's founder, Mark Fletcher, has kept emailing DFJ(?) until one day, DFJ invited him for a talk. I verified with Mark himself when I met him. He said the story is true, but DFJ still didn't invest him. Here are good tips from Mark.

The other interesting takeaway is how to dance with elephant as a startup. Many VCs ask such a question, "what if Google enters this market?" I really believe this is not a good question. Just take a look, how many cases does a big company enters a new market and successfully trumps the ants? We saw many many examples like, big companies try to build in house first, fail, then go out to purchase the best player or buy the second best player. The reason is simple, the elephant needs to focus on fighting with other elephants for butter. It just can't see the ant. Even when it sees the ant, it can't master its muscle from the full body to trump the ant. It is true big companies have more resources, both financial and human. But they are not aligned well. Employees in small companies have much stronger incites to perform well than employees in large companies. Right?

The best part of the conference is the fast pitch. However, the judges are not very entertaining. I really wish Guy could be on the panel.
All the presentation are very good. They cover value proposition competition, and others. However, some of them didn't mention their financial model like how much money would like to raise? where those money are gonna to be used on? cash flow? when to breakeven? and what's the exit strategy? I guess 5 minutes might be short. Also VC panelist also focused their questions on value validation and marketing strategy.
I would rather suggest a good presentation should start with storytelling, especially for a consumer oriented business. Describe how your service or produce improve the consumer experience. Tell a story, which is much more appealing than starting the presentation with a simple slogan. I honestly admit, I almost feel some presentation is very bored.

How is elevator pitch looks like?

what type of seacher are you?

2006-11-13T22:01:00.000-08:00

We all know AOL screws up recently by releasing the search data it collects from its users. EU has a law to prohibit ISP collecting data from customer. But unfortunately USA doesn't have this law yet. I hope AOL could push the American people to consider a similar law.
But anyway, if you are data digger like the Freakonomics author. You could find the raw data here. You might be able to dig one of seachers 's real identity.

walk along right or left?

2006-11-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

I was walking along right side along the hall way and clashed with a friend from Hong Kong. This makes me wonder, along which side people in the British culture walk. We know they drive on the left side, but which side do they walk? Isn't interesting?

automatically tagging photos

2006-11-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

I read article from Technology Review about a new software helping people tagging pictures automatically rather than like Flickr, human must tag by themselves. It's cool. Left is my test result.
People have read my blog before could recognize this picture. Those are USB devices. Ok, this might be too hard for the software since even people can not recognize it. But it turns out the software does give some interesting tags like man-made, people, art, and antique.
Wait a minute, are those words very common everywhere like people always say that we can link every word to sex. Isn't the beauty of human mind? Ok, my bad, even as a blogger, an anonymous blogger, I should stay away from sexual content. But my point is shared with the other CMU professor, who comments out that the testing set,Flickr photos, which ALIPR used, are mostly likely sharing common things. They are mostly related to people. He says. "So just using the word 'people' already tags a large percentage of the images correctly." I personally think his comment is very harsh to two students behind ALIPR. And, he says the research is a "step in the right direction".
I really can't agree both of his points. I stand with the inventor of tagging, Joshua Schachter, who deliberately avoided imposing any rules about how people could use tags. He knew it wouldn't work: "If I went in there and said, Hey, you're using that tag wrong, people would just tell me to fuck off,"
I would tag using any word I want, but this software still can help.

a detail article on why Friendster fails?

2006-11-03T12:48:00.000-08:00

NY Time has a good detail article on why Friendster fails. It is not really inspiring though. The author believes the performance issue is the major reason of the fail. I can't agree on that. A Silicon Valley engineer, founder of Friendster coded in PHP, has a edge over two LA boys, founders of MySpace coded in CodeFusion. We all know MySpace goes down frequently but doesn't bother its users much.

I believe the major reasons are:
1) Friendster talked about adding new features but didn't do it quickly;
2) MySpace music band is an important factor;
3) MySpace provides a platform to link YouTube video, flickr photo, and others; it's more a open platform.

Jeff Nolan nodes, Silicon Valley is tech Mecca.

2006-11-02T18:49:00.000-08:00

I have a previous post on why I think Silicon Valley is still the tech Mecca. Here Jeff has experienced in Boston.

Lost confidence on Yahoo!

2006-10-29T15:17:00.000-08:00

I have been a supporter on Yahoo in the GGYY war because
1) I believe the future of search is social search and Yahoo is determined to move to that direction while Google starts very slowly partly because Google is a strong believer of technology while Yahoo has transformed itself to a media company since it hired its current CEO from Hollywood.
2) I believe a media business is more sustainable than a pure technology company. Bill Gates started calling Microsoft a media company since early this year. Even Google shows its conversion by the recent deal of Youtube. There is no surprise that people stay much longer time on Yahoo than on Google. Many people like me using Google as homepage. Everytime I open a browser, Google got one page view. However, I still spend more time on Yahoo since I read news on Yahoo.
3) Yahoo is more smart at buying into web 2.0 companies. Its recent acquisition of flickr, del.icio.us, JumpCut, and others costed less than 100 millions.

However, I have been very disappointed by the cooperation among Yahoo teams. For example, Yahoo recently announced Yahoo Bookmarks. I was excited to give a try. I have been with del.icio.us for a long time and found it starts very difficult to manage the tags. However, I am surprised to find out that how difficult to import my del.icio.us bookmarks into Yahoo Bookmarks. I still had to export a file from del.icio.us to local, upload to Yahoo, and then I was shown an error during the processing and asked me to try again.
I just don't believe both are the same company and the del.icio.us founder is still working at Yahoo HQ campus.
I was thinking that Yahoo stock is a good buy because it has been traded at a very low P/E and it still holds a lot of cash, and the recent rumor that Yahoo might be an acquisition target. Yahoo bookmarks just makes me think it still has some space to fall down.

Silicon Valley is still tech Mecca?

2006-10-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

New York Times has an article why Silicon Valley is still the Mecca for technology startups. A VC in NYC obviously has different opinions. And of course, except the VC in NYC has different say, VCs from other states or countries are arguing too. Just Google RANDALL STROSS, the author's name, you will see this article appears in the third and followed by the blog comment from VCs in the other stats. (BTW, it looks like Google crawlers works much harder than before. Soon or later, technorati, so called the real-time web search engine over Google, will have a tough time.)

"A VC in NYC" suggest the author of that article, Randall, who is a professor at San Jose State University to walk out of Silicon Vally to look at the world. But he might forget he was sitting in his NYC apartment writing that blog.

Randall lists many successful startups in Silicon Valley, while "A VC in NYC" appends others outside of Silicon Valley.

Randall is a professor, who is good at playing numbers, has some percentage numbers, like 43% web 2.0 startup in Silicon Valley. "A VC in NYC" has some counter numbers like two of the three top web 2.0 startups are outside of Silicon Valley. If we have all read the book freakonomics, we know everything can be explained by data. (ya, Google also has a rule, every decision should be supported by data.). But it gives me the feeling that "A VC in NYC"'s data are more individual cases, including his argument that there are some lawyers in NYC who are willing to defer legal fees and take equity shares. I trust more on Randall's data. And also, "A VC in NYC" seems not bother to argue 1/3 of ventural capital are in the valley. It might because it is a fact.

"A VC in NYC" ignored the talent, the drivers of the technology. I know MIT has 10,000 alumni in the Silicon Valley, plus Berkeley and Stanford. Silicon Valley attracts and builds the largest talent pool. Every startup starts with team building. There is no better place you can find the right partner through your personal network in the silicon vally quickly. Both authors should have quoted from AnnaLee Saxenian's book on immigration.

The world is going flat but Silicon Valley is the still the tech Mecca.

BTW, remember, I am living in Silicon Valley now. But I have lived in Boston, Europe, and Asia.

Why most of my posts are so short?

2006-10-20T23:03:00.000-07:00

Here is the answer.

Following on the story of "CEO doesn't need insurance"

2006-10-19T19:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I blogged Grasso,ex-chairman of NYSE, received a huge amount of compensation. "Under my blog's influence", today, a New York State judge has decided that Grasso will have to "return tens of millions of dollars" to the New York Stock Exchange.

Web 2.0 fever?!

2006-10-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

On HYSTA 2006, John Doerr made a remark that "do less insignificant web 2.0 companies and do more green tech". When asked "how do we, as engineers, to catch the wave of green tech", he answered, "pick up a chemistry textbook and learn it, it is not very complicate to pick up that knowledge." This is the second time I heard from him on pitching green tech. Last time, he was interviewed in an web technology conference and he spent most of his time talking green tech. The interviewer had to push him by saying,"see, most of audience here paid several thousands dollar ticket to hear your opions on the trend of web technology, could you talk more about the internet?".
Well, I understand John Doerr. His boss, Tom Perkins, has explained how VCs work. They pick up an industry, build the buzz words, invest some companies, sell them. When the industry becomes crowded, they move to the next target. Especially for the VC firm as big as KPCB, they have the clout to build the buzz. As stock traders spy on Warren Buffett, a lot of VCs spy on KPCB. When KPCB started the firm as a pioneer venture capitalist firm, it was started having the largest fund in the world, although it had only sevearl millions dollars then.

Anyway, today there is a report on Web 2.0 deal in the first half of 2006 fomr Dow Jones VentureOne. Below are some key observations:

49 Web 2.0 companies have been funded in the first half of 2006, garnering $262.3 million in equity capital. That compares to 51 deals and $199.1 million invested into similar companies in all of 2005, indicating activity is likely to double last year's level.

While the investment levels are growing, so far the data shows that Web 2.0 is a relatively small portion of the market. For comparison's sake, a total of $13 billion was invested in 1,213 U.S. venture-backed companies in the first half of this year. The deal size remains smaller as well. The median size of a Web 2.0 financing round this year is $4.4 million, compared to $7.5 million for a venture financing overall.
some 65% of the Web 2.0 deals so far this year have been seed- and first-round deals. Last year, there were even more: 75% of the deals were for these early-stage financings. But in a sign that these companies also are maturing, seven later-stage deals were completed in the first two quarters of 2006. That compares to zero later-stage deals in any of the last three years.
More than half the companies (25) receiving investments in 2006 were generating revenue, including three which were identified as profitable. None of the financings in 2005 went to profitable companies. Those revenue generating companies also received 61% of the total investment.
In terms of recent financings, consumer focus appears to be king: the majority of the Web 2.0 rounds funded this year (27) were listed as IT consumer services companies, receiving $165.3 million. This industry segment dominated the Web 2.0 activity last year as well, representing about half of the total 51 deals and garnering $78.3 million of the total capital.
The most active investors in Web 2.0 this year include Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. When compared over a longer period -- since 2001--the most active investors include those three along with Sequoia Capital and Omidyar Network.

My summary: web 2.0 companies could be bootstrapped; the investment might be small because of open source software, the return could be huge, Skype, YouTube?!

Feel spoiled by Silicon Valley

2006-10-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

Today I read the article from NY Times that explains how the Paypal alumni network creates so many successful companies like YouTube, Slide, and etc. I also read some people from around the world are complaining they lack resource, either technology or finance, in their countries or cities. Yes, Silicon Valley is great. If you get a cool idea, you can always find some smart guys working with you. If you want some technology know-how, through your network you can always reach some person having that expertise. Guy has said this advantage in a more marketing-person way. Silicon Valley is great is because it is not as hot as Hiwaii, not as cold as New York.
Anyway, after Paypal was acquired, we didn't see any innovation. Mobile payment is a long waiting feature. That's why those energetic Paypal aluni left and started own venture. I am pretty sure as Google becomes bigger, its code becomes aging and difficult to upgrade, its innovation will become slow. It is always easier to draw a more beatiful picture on a white paper than on a highly polluted canvas. Google prefers hiring fresh grads. When Google is slow on innovation, I am pretty sure those guys will quickly becomes Google alumni and change Silicon Valley again. At least, they've got money and talent.

Being an CEO doesn't need insurance.

2006-10-18T23:41:00.000-07:00

I am always amazed that Sandy Weil, former CEO of Citi Bank, is listed on the Forbes as one of the richest persons. I also learned that the secretary of former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso could earn around 200,000 a year. But today I still feel shocked that the CEO of United Health Care could get 1.6 billion dollars if he walks away from UHC. 1.6 billion is from his option vest. However, the reason he has to step down is he is involved in the option back dating scandal. It is just bizarre!

technology for developing countries

2006-10-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

I am a supporter of developing technology specially for developing countries. I have worked on a project called TEK at school, which is a search engine for developing countries.
Those technologies are just as challenging as any other cutting-edge technologies. Many people have doubted the $100 laptop
Those technologies create just as much values as those created by the x-prize projects. Most cases, those technologies are just more cost effective.(Simple technologies save energy and lifes)
I cheer for this year's Nobel peace prize is given to the microloan Indian banker. I also predict Bill Gates will win Nobel prize in the future.
Here I blog a cheaping computing provided by NComputing, whose technology makes many people can share one computer. It is similar as the mainframe machine connected with many terminals.

I like this picture

2006-10-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

shot by option scandal

2006-10-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

Today two CEO are forced to leave because of option related scandal. They are CEOs of McAfee and CNet. I think we might expect more like this will happen.

China develops a $200 laptop

2006-10-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

From Pacific Epoch

Sichuan Guoxin Technology has recently finished developing its notebook PC Sinomanic, which is based on China's domestically developed CPU Dragon Chip, reports Sina. Guoxin will start a small scale production in January 2007. The laptops target at students and will be priced at 1,998 Yuan each.

Web as a OS? not yet!

2006-10-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

I recently start using Google Spreadsheet and first, I was very surprised it can give me similar user experience as the MS Office, like ctrl+C and ctrl+p; But after I use it more, I found Google Spreadsheet is far more surfficient to challenge MS Office.
1) The reason I use Google Spreadsheet is certianly for sharing. However, after I invite my friend to edit, they kept complaining to me on MSN that Google Spreadsheet shows them "It seems you don't have access right to this document". Then after some time, they can see the sheet. After many time, I finally figure out that the reason is because when my friend accessed the sheet, I am still working on it. We two can't edit the sheet at the same time. However, the error message is so confusing. This should be something Google at lease can do. Just let the other user view only while someone is editing the sheet.

2) Sometime Google Spreadsheet gave me errors like "It seems that you have edited this sheet during offline" and gave me two choices, "either discard the offline edit or view only". Again, I don't understand what the second option means.

Beside Google Spreadsheet, I have been using Google personalized home page for a while. I start feeling I am still using My Yahoo. No revolution, Just Buzz!

why my Gmail, Yahoo mail, and hotmail certify my emails for me?

2006-10-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I read an article from WSJ which advise people not to trust any email from financial institution, which is quoted below:

Don't trust email from financial institutions. Email is so easily manipulated by crooks that you simply should never, ever consider any email from a financial institution as legitimate. The message may bear a bank's or a broker's logo, but you should never respond to such an email, and never click on any link it contains.

I feel very sorry for those banks that are trying really hard to convience their customers to swith to paperless statement. I feel very sorry for the trees too.

Stanford researchers have designed a method to provent phishing, which is very simple and "useful"(quoted because I am not sure if it is hackable once it is widely used).

But I wonder, why not my email service providers just certify the those bank email senders for me? GYM(google,yahoo,microsoft) just get the Public Key from Citi Bank, verify the email and tell me this email is authenticated to be secure.

We all know PKI is best and most secure methods and it has been tested for over 2o years. Do you know even RSA patent expired in 2000? The only reason of PKI failure is the difficulty of managing the public keys. It is extremely difficult to ask my hundreds of pals to update my public key after my private key is stolen. However, this should not be a problem for those big players. After so many years competition and consolidation, I guess 90% of people are common customer of GYM, Citi Bank, MNBA, BOA, WM, WF, etc. It should not be difficult for them to manage a PKI.

reflection on SaaS and tadionational software

2006-10-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

If we think a web page is a software, then a web site is a SaaS. Why is Saas better than traditional software? well, if I want to use the software, put the url, then I am ready to rock. No go out buy the software or download the software, no CD installation or download installation, no reboot machine, no risk of virus, no upgrade. However, everybody looks at the same thing; everybody follows the same processes, which is embeded into the web site programming. I can't change how it looks and how it runs.

Then there is the trend of personalization. Web site users can change the skin, change some language preference, font preference, and etc. But I still can't change how the website process runs.

I am waiting for the next change. If Gmail doesn't provide a chinese spell checker, I can always plug in a kingSoft chinese spell checker in my gmail. Is it similar as Salesforce AppExchange? I hope their SalesforceOS is based on stardard web service grid, which indicates the age of Software Plug-n-Play.

Simple approach helps NASA solve complex problems

2006-10-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

Space shuttle tiles are always the weakest part of the shuttle. It always is the cause of launch delay. It is the cause of the Columbia accident. Now NASA is using a simple way to avoid this problem by just using a long arm camera to enable astronauts check the tiles from inside the shuttle.

2006-10-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

Shutterfly goes IPO

Shutterfly, based in Redwood City, Calif., closed at $15.55, up 3.7% from its IPO price of $15. It sold 5.8 million shares at the high point of its expected price range, which was set by underwriter J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Shutterfly operates a Web site where people can upload, share, and order prints of their digital photos. In the first six months of this year, its net revenue rose 34% to $36.5 million, compared with a year earlier, as customers ordered more prints and print-related merchandise like calendars and greeting cards. The company's net loss widened to $3.7 million from $1.3 million as its operating expenses outpaced revenue gains.

I am staying away from this. I think this field is so crowded. I think ofoto has a lot of power on this. Too bad, webshot WAS very good. :)

2006-10-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

HYSTA conference 2006
I was very impressed by HYSTA conference 2005 and got to know many great people. This year's conference is even better. I met with old friends and even more important, I knew many new friends as well. HYSTA is very successful at fund raising in the last one year so that this conference could offer many "promotion ticket"(I got a great dinner for free, ya, really good beaf). I think the kudos should go to Jin Yi, who was my old friend at MIT and was the president of the largest engineer entrepreneur club at MIT campus. Now he is director of HYSTA public relationship.
Below are several differences I observed from last year:

speakers of course are higher profile;
more audiance from outside of Silicon Valley, LA, middle east, and China;
more audiance currently have day jobs in China and frequently visit here;
ya, a lot more lawyers, especially more M&A lawyers
I personally saw a lot more new faces, many of them have been in Silicon Valley for few months or years ; perhaps all the old faces have gone back China?!
except engineers, I met people from difference background, even an hollywood actor!

Except HYSTA, I also recommend another two great organizations: SDForum and techdir greenhouse

2006-09-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

I like those "USB flash". Invisible computing is everywhere now.

2006-09-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

Yahoo todays publishes its Single Sign On answer to Google Checkout.
I need to research the differences among Yahoo SSO, Google Checkout, and Microsoft Passport later.
Just saw you even can accumulate Thank You points on Google Checkout. I have spent tons of money on Paypal and never got one cents. Thanks Google.

2006-09-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

I am about to change my blog reader and leave Google Reader because I feel more and more difficult to manage just using tags since my subscribtion are more than 100.
Today Google reader has a new version that supports catogory.
Wow, don't need to switch!