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Archive for the 'thoughts' Category

59ideas in 2007

Published
by
Ken
on 15 January, 2007
in 59ideas and thoughts
. 0 Comments

Time flies, already 2 weeks of 2007 came and went. Is 59Ideas dead?

Not at all! I’m tempted to blame the recent Taiwan earthquake that caused connection outside of Asia (and China in particular) to slow to a crawl for the laziness to post.

As the first post of 2007, it is a must to reflect on what I had done last year and plan for this year.

Last Year

Last year started with high excitment as I set a target to achieve $1000 of revenue purely from online activities. This was how 59Ideas and many of my sites came about. The journey was traced in Seeking Revenue. Things started fine but as half year went by, the target still look elusive.

Again, I’m tempted to use the excuse that I was also running my business offline. But the what did me in was an underestimation of the time commitment and over-stretched myself. In the end, I burned out before the end of the year and things grinded to a halt.

This Year

All was not lost though. Last year’s exercise gave me plenty of insight into how to create revenue online and where the time and effort went.

Right now, my monthly income average $200-300.

My plan this year is to reduce time spent online maintaining all my sites but yet increase revenue 100%.

What happened to Transmeta Crusoe?

Published
by
Ken
on 9 December, 2006
in products and thoughts
. 0 Comments

I have an old Fujitsu LifeBook P2120 which I used now as a DVD player by connecting the S-video out to my TV. While was using it to play CSI today, I noticed the Transmeta Crusoe chip decal. I almost forgotten all about that.

Remember the secretive launch of Transmeta, much like the stealth Web 2.0 startups these day? Even Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was on board.

Linus eventually left in 2003 and in 2005 announced they are getting out of chip business.

Is Transmeta out? Not quite. They were working on a secret project again, this time for Microsoft. The idea behind the project itself is very interesting.

7 years.

Google buys YouTube

Published
by
Ken
on 11 October, 2006
in google, online and thoughts
. 0 Comments

YouTube + Google

This must be the talk of the town. 1.65 billion in stock. Google purchase of YouTube is heating up the internet once again.

I watch YouTube because somehow Google Videos is not available in China. Would the acquisation cut off YouTube from China? I hope not.

Speculation, theory, analysis and naysayer abound.

The biggest take away for me is why buy YouTube when Google has its own video site? It is not the first time Google does this. I recall MeasureMap and Urchin (now Google Analytics). In the standard business textbook there are a few reasons for that:

  1. Take out your strongest competitor
  2. Create an even bigger market
  3. Synergy, better leverage of resources

Whatever the case, I’m just an observer, sometime wondering how all these money game is being played out.

Getting Things Done … another convert soon

Published
by
Ken
on 25 September, 2006
in online and thoughts
. 3 Comments

Very soon I might become the next Getting Things Done (GTD) convert.

I ran into so many positive comments about how using GTD has changed their life and I decided to give it a try.

I just installed GTD Gmail plugin for FireFox and am looking up information all around.

Sounds like fun. Let see if I get things done.

Blogspot blogs Unblock in China?

Published
by
Ken
on 10 August, 2006
in online and thoughts
. 0 Comments

As usual I was surfing around and clicked on a blogspot blog. The usual drill is,

  1. open the blogspot blog in another Firefox tab,
  2. copy the URL into a proxy,
  3. browse the site through a proxy.

A few minutes ago, something extraordinary happened, the blogspot sites loads!

Has China unblock all blogspot sites?

A quick check on WordPress.com, it is still blocked.

Less to talk and more to come

Published
by
Ken
on 13 July, 2006
in blogging, my ideas and thoughts
. 5 Comments

Now that I have a few more sites running, I have less to talk about here. A random rant about spam and the collection of links from del.icio.us

I talk about Motorcycle, Online Revenue, Investing, Analytics, Free Business Softwares elsewhere. If you share similar interest, drop by.

Why so many blog? Check out my original goal.

So there are more sites to come, if you have some interesting ideas about what sites to build, I like to do it with you. It is getting less fun doing alone.

Spam is killing Usability

Published
by
Ken
on 4 July, 2006
in online and thoughts
. 0 Comments

or are over zealous anti-spam tactics shooting themselves in the foot?

A while back I mentioned being unable to post comment because of black list. Today yet another silly tactic stopped me from commenting on Revnews.

Upon submitting my comment, this is what I get.

Comment Submission Error

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I’ve enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.

Funny thing I did not post any comment before this. It was the first comment I’m posting to the site.

I waited for a short amount of time. Try again. No luck. Tried 3 more times. Gave up and decided to write this post instead.

Ask yourself, are you killing spam or killing usability (and user’s patience)?

Google Video not in China

Published
by
Ken
on 1 July, 2006
in google, online and thoughts
. 1 Comment

This must be old news but I hardly look at Google video until today.

And when I did, this was what I got,

Google Video

Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.

I can only suspect it is a China problem because how can this be a technical problem? Which other country is it not available?

Blocked websites, blocked videos. Oh well, the irritation of Internet in China.