23 12 / 2015

View from the top!

View from the top! by wonjongnova
Via Flickr:
Although it was a rough take off, thanks to rough weather. It was made up with this surreal view of the clouds from above. Transcontinental flights are taxing, but provides ops.

23 3 / 2015

About a month ago, I felt an urge to try out #Audible. Hoping to listen-read Dune, but not willing to pay for the service, I signed up for 30 days trial and put a reminder at #Wunderlist to cancel the subscription by today (or 3 days ago).

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Though it was an enticing idea, realized that I just didn’t have enough time to consume more audio products in addition to 10 podcasts subscribed in #Stitcher, recently re-subscribed mlb.tv, as well as few other radio services.

Anyways, as I was navigating through the typical mystic path of a member cancellation and discovered savvy ways to try to keep customer to continue to pay.

Here’s the first view when I click to cancel the service

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Nothing special, just a visual reminder on what I am cancelling for.  below the screen, they ask for reason why

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I selected “It’s too expense!””  I lied. then surprisingly, more screen popped out!  They offered 50% off for 3 mos!!  Nicely done.

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But, I still wanted to cancel, then this new offering shows up. Pay $9.95 annually to keep your credit, etc…. 

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I’ve unsubscribed few other services before (namely Google Play and Spotify), but haven’t seen this level of retention efforts before.  Wondering if this is a new personalized effort or something already in the market place 

16 5 / 2014

Few weeks ago, I was in Seoul for my friend’s wedding. During the trip, I got to check out start-up scenes in Korea via few channels thanks to Young Park and Steve Byun.

Despite the food poisoning incident,  I had a chance to

Visit D.CAMP (banking industry driven non-profit start-up supporting org) during their demo day, met with various entrepreneurs, 

Visit D3 Jublee (a social impact venture accelerator/investor group) and met with few of their portfolio company CEOs

Connect with Sternies and Keio Alumni to hear their thoughts and perspectives on start-ups, including Naver, Samsung and BCG folks

..and here is a list of few things I saw and heard about the Korean start-up scene.

1. There is excitement about start-up culture driven by recent successes of few companies (Line, KakaoTalk, some game companies), bringing smart and young would-be entrepreneurs.

2. But, it’s not the best of breeds in the scene. Now mature tech players in the market, such as Naver and gaming companies (along with traditional conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai) are still taking most of smart young people. 

3. There are many copy-cat type of start-up companies that is trying to come up with localized version of successful or recognizable US start-ups.  Paypal of Korea, Tinder for Korea, MyFitnessPal for Korea, so-on…

4. At the same time, some companies are pitching global potential as a part of their business plan, BUT stop short of demonstrating they really thought about feasibility of their vision

5. Korean market may be too small to allow large number of successful start-ups to come out from this new excitement

6. Government and some non-profit organizations are throwing money, but not in an effective way (i.e. not putting money for right companies, investing on not so useful infrastructure)

7. As with all cases in buddying industyr, some shitty people claim to be start-up experts and taking money from governments and entrepreneurs who don’t know better, really creating distractions

8. I haven’t seen female entrepreneurs during the trip

9. Accelerators and everywhere!

10. Just following up on point 6, I was told that many government led initiatives are measured against number of companies they have distributed the funds rather than success or return over long haul  (apparently very typical for government led initiative)

And here are some thoughts

- Despite many shortcomings on pool of talents, inefficient distribution of capital, and general lack of support system, there are definitely people who are ripe for success.

- If the start-up scene can line up few of those teams to create buzz, it may help mainstream Silicon Valley (and Alley) investors and talents to consider Seoul as next start-up hub to build tighter network around, such as Israel and Berlin.

- I actually see another interesting potential talent gathering model.  Is it possible to position start-up industry as a re-boot for involuntary early retirees from conglomerates? Since local regulatory or business environment usually cause significant challenges for many entrepreneurs, wonder if someone can create on-demand SME network for service (fee for service model)

Oh well, back to work!

05 3 / 2014

“Am I slipping away?”
During a not-so-productive call few days ago, my mind drifted for a moment to pose a question for myself
“When do I feel really anxious and slipping away?”
Usually, I feel that way I don’t know what to do because..
1. When I...

“Am I slipping away?”

During a not-so-productive call few days ago, my mind drifted for a moment to pose a question for myself

“When do I feel really anxious and slipping away?”

Usually, I feel that way I don’t know what to do because..

1. When I don’t know the answer

2. When I know the answer/outcome, but don’t know how to get there

3. When I know the answer and how to get there, but am stuck because my hands are tied

4. While waiting for the outcome after I made my move

In each circumstance, my anxiety calms down as I can decide which situation I am facing with.  So, if I can come to the conclusion that I don’t know the answer, I know I can try other ways to find answers. (ask someone, do more research, etc.)  If I know the answer, but don’t know how to get there, the search becomes more specific.  Now, the most nerve breaking situation is when I have made a decision and pushed the button and wait to see what my actions will bring…

While advising start-ups, I think situations #2 happens the most during my discussions with the entrepreneurs.  i.e. We know that we need to re-design our app.  We know we have to have Amazon presence.   We know we need to hire an in-house developer.  So the question then becomes, how do we get there.

What we then strive to do is to minimize trial and error and get to that outcome with maximum efficiency with limited resources we got.  It’s definitely challenging, but I gotta say, it’s whole lot more fun than stuck in situation #3 which happens much more in large corporate settings.

26 2 / 2014

Yet, I am on my Tumblr page, trying to re-ignite my 15 years old dream.  

I want to be a great writer!

My definition or rather vision of a great writer has gone through few iterations (from novelist to non-fiction writer, then to script…) now, I have a bit more abstract vision.  I wanna be able to jut down my thoughts and emotion at ease.  Just like driving.  I don’t have to think how fast I have to turn the handle or how much to let go on the pedal.  I just think to myself that I wanna make a quick turn, then everything comes… naturally.

Enough dreaming, let’s get to spill out what’s in my head now.

Multi-tasking

Wikipedia mentions one definition that I know, which is being able to do something while doing others.  (i.e. writing this blog entry while listening to music off Spotify).

But when I usually describe someone can do multi-tasking, I usually think about someone who can juggle multiple tasks at hands.  (i.e.  Victor has 5 deals at hands at any given time).  So in a way, it’s more like an ability to keep track of many ongoing tasks/events that requires your attention or action and prioritize in a certain way to be able to manage them all.

I’m pretty confident that I wasn’t born with that skill or even capable now without some essential tools by my side (from pencil&paper to task management tool), but I have a vague memory of using multi-tasking as a key quality to describe many so called successful people.

So two questions at hand are

1. Multi-tasking an essential quality for business professionals to have?

2. How do we acquire/build them?

To my first question, 

I think it’s essential, as in, if you are managing a project that has multiple workstreams that all needs your attention and there is interdependency amongst all those workstreams.  Your brain needs to be able to retain key information/ideas relevant to each to able to trigger a thought/action/ideas to accomplish your goal.

But then again, it may be a very process oriented view. but makes sense for now.

So, how do we acquire/build them?  I really don’t know.  I know that my brain isn’t wired in a very organized way, so juggling between different ideas/tasks and not spending minutes/hours walking in circle is a huge challenge. 

Through many $s and hours spent on variety of tools, approaches, and reading, here are few principles/guidelines I’m trying to apply to keep some sanity in my life and be a juggler.

a. Write everything down and have those notes to stay with you (and be legible)

b. Distinguish between action and accompanying thoughts

c. Don’t view tasks as homework, rather continue to remind yourself that those tasks are exciting steps to getting rewards (like candies!)

d. Don’t let your mind drift.  If it drifts use notes to help it come back fast

And…. here are tools I’m using now.  

My Wunderlist, which always stays in reach of my hand (in my personal laptop, work laptop, phone and tablet) constantly reminds me of many tasks at hand.  I group them for each projects at hand and make the tasks to as specific as possible and set due dates.  Every morning, for all tasks past due, update the due date and don’t let it be late tasks no more.  (because it’s depressing)

Evernote: Started using this app to keep some meeting notes and ideas. Only been using it for few weeks, so not sure if this would be a useful tool or not, but let’s see

Pencil and Paper: I haven’t found better ways to keep my thoughts, but I am trying to use this as an intermediary input device until it moves into two mentioned above.

Wonder other folks have different thoughts to two questions? 

26 5 / 2013

puriproject:

Working on “ARA Gut for Summer Ritual- Invited ritual” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. it is opening ritual for 4 seasons (one year cycle) and I will keep continuing this ARA Gut every year here and there….

Ara Gut presents new ritual for the urban space to heal the relationship between nature and human. The first of four seasonal performances composed and choreographed by Dohee Lee from her background of Korean traditional music and dance, shamanic roots and contemporary art forms.

July 20th Saturday YBCA Lobby 4-6pm

This ARA Gut connects to the MAGO Project in 2013 as well.

22 4 / 2013

So Tumblr, once hating the concept of ads are moving full throttle on mobile ads.   They plan to mix the ads while testing another revenue stream as mentioned in the article

“Aside from advertising, the company has experimented with allowing users to pay to expose their posts to a wider audience on Tumbr.”

Why would anyone want to pay for more audience if they won’t get rewarded by showing ad-money?  That is, with an assumption that ones that pay for bigger audience would be bloggers….

Branded messages, no matter how subtle the content may be, will still be branded messages.  I don’t mind paying the cost of having Tumblr services with ads, but still find this turn of events, or evolution of Tumblr’s messaging to be somewhat deceiving.

13 4 / 2013

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My First Zagat 

My first Zagat guide was for San Francisco and the Bay Area. It was a maroon colored signature paperback everyone was familiar with. I was a broke college student then and couldn’t possibly say that I used that guide often.  Yet, I wondered about how awesome those 26 or 27 rates restaurants would be like.  Reading those 20-30 words tips… man, it got me hungry alright

  “… and that foie gras on top of filet mignon with reduced red wine sauce was out of this world…”

 “… the service is just marvelous.  The owner, john, would often show up himself at the tables….”

I trusted the guide.  Restaurants of Zagat Score 25 or above would guarantee a great date.   Since then, it was Zagat = reliability.

My Recollection of Zagat’s disappearance

Seeing Yelp, I wonder how come it isn’t Zagat there.  The experience is so similar to that of Zagat on paper, you know?

If I would have been asked to describe how Zagat would evolve in the Internet age, I would have said, “Zagat should keep its core experience of sharing reviews from avid restaurant goers with brief description of restaurant, yet visualize it with pictures, make it easier compare, add social flavor, making a full use of the new medium.”

But then again, hindsight is always 20/20, right?  So I wondered how is it that I am using Yelp.com, not Zagat.com    

People will pay Zagat, even on Internet

As Zagat saw the need to expand its present over the web, it must have faced a question all newspaper, magazine, and published industry had to answer.

“Can I make people pay for my contents online?”

Zagat had a loyal following.  Even though there were many city guides on the market, it was able to command premium price for their guides.   So the rational must been that “Zagat brand can convince users to pay for its contents.” 

So the Paywall was erected ($25 a year).

To be fair, at least in my recollection, there truly wasn’t a great competitor online.  There were other sites, yes.  Citysearch or Cityguide was one of them.   I didn’t trust the reviews on those websites as much I did on Zagat, but I didn’t feel that I wanted to shelve more money for the site.  Especially when I already gave them money for the guide.

Maybe, if they had given free access to folks who bought the guides, or created tiered pricing, it could have worked.  

In any case, eventually, a capable competitor showed up in the market in the name of Chowhound, then Yelp which basically copied Zagat’s core experience on the web, added with easy picture uploading and reviewing tools to fully leveraging the benefit of the Internet medium.

Zagat could not go over the typical hump that offline leaders faced. It was too hard to let go of the money from offline and cannibalize it with their own hands and waited for someone else to do it.

From an innovator to a follower …. then to a nobody

Just like many others, the once innovative incumbent has become a dinosaur.  Zagat must have noticed that its loyal offline followers ditched it to other competitors.  Oh crap, it must do something.  And it did, but not so successfully

- Get rid of paywall — a bit too late,

- Create a community — First Chowhound, then Yelp established a loyal and engaged community, just like that of Zagat in the past.

- Go Mobile — clumsy app. Yet again, Zagat had the data/content, but didn’t know how to build new and innovative experience in this new medium

All while guide sales have been plummeting. Tragedy

Second life with Google … sort of.

Google bought Zagat in 2011.    It made sense. Content producers complained that Google search, map, and other products are fundamentally designed to keep them within their sites/apps leveraging their contents.  It needed more local info and Zagat had enough of it to warrant buying them out right.

Now Zagat survives as a local info engine in Google Map.   Its viability as a stand along competitor to Yelp seems a bit challenging. (check out the site.  It is not that great. Experience is a bit complicated and not too intuitive.  www.zagat.com)  From the look of it, Zagat will only survive as a small icon when you look for information on Google Map app and Zagat rated stickers (which are being replaced by yelp stickers).

So, I want to know. Would it be possible to bring back Zagat again?  Make it more relevant again today? … Back to its glory days?

Thought #1

Can someone buy the brand only and use it to launch a new mobile service?

Frommer founder recently bought its brand back from Google.   As a part of the agreement, Google kept the data/information from Frommer, but the founder was free to use it to launch a service again. 

Zagat still has brand equity amongst folks in their late 20s to 40s.  Couldn’t someone buy the brand and start a mobile community?  Sure, there are strong niche players in the market, like Epicurious and Chowhound, but can it possibly build a brand that is new “Michelin Star?”

Images that I associate with the Zagat brand is “selective” “trust worthy” “exclusive.”  So instead of rating all the restaurants in the world, Zagat can say that only selected restaurants will be designated with Zagat brand.  Something like “Zagat approved.”

Thought #2

Could Google use the Zagat brand to combine ex-Frommer assets and create a new travel/hospitality service?

Well, this one was something obviously Google thought of it before.  I saw this article today.  ZagatTravel.

Since the website is not up yet.  I will think of few things of my own.   I envision TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, and City Guide.  But distinctive it caters to specific type of travellers that are looking for some unique traveling experience that is not just about sightseeing.  Leverage the Zagat brand what it stands for.  To me at least, the brand means reliable, classy, unique, etc…   Can’t we make some distinctive experiences happen?

Afterthought.

I’ve been sitting on this draft for a week or so and answers to my questions were being answer even before I posed them.  Talking about the pace of information nowadays

24 3 / 2013

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Although I didn’t see it as a trend at the time, to me, Lark was the beginning of the so called Mobile Hardware boom that we are seeing this past 12 months or so.  That device, which keeps track of your sleep pattern to help you get a better sleep, had existed in the past as well, but with the smartphones we now carry, it became less obnoxious/geeky/ugly and became little more hip&cool.  

True, if someone were to call the biggest splash of the connected hardware revolution, you have to go with Square, but it took awhile for more folks came in waves (from 2009 to now).

So obvious questions are, what has brought this phenomena to full wave? I am not going to take credit for thinking about these reasons, but here they are.  (mental note for myself - try to bookmark all articles that inspired your thoughts!)

1. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to ACTUALLY make stuff on your own from having ideas.

2. It’s much easier  to fund your projects that required much more capital than software

3. Smartphone and “always on” connectivity provides provides medium for hardware to be smarter, more convenient and easier to interact with!

4. Self-Awareness of this generation

——

1. Easier to make stuff!  - I listend to this NPR story few weeks ago where a speaker talked about design lab in the silicon valley where you can actually get an excess to equipments that used to cost you tens of thousands or millions of dollars in the past.  Now, you can use software for design at home and bring that design to the shop to create stuff on your own!  Not only that, there are multitudes of factories that are taking individual OEM orders over Internet in Asia.  So, if you have the will and idea, you can even borrow engineering talents to help building the stuff, purely by crowdsourcing of a way

2. Kickstarter, Indiegogo - Crowdfunding is amazing. enough said.

3. At first, it was the beepers and then text messages, then came phones that can send emails (palm), now we have smartphones (with crazy broadband speed).  Our connectivity with the world and others have been evolving and it has finally peaked with the broader broadband connection with gadgets with large enough real estate to provide enough level of insightful information/engagements.

4. Who could have thought that you can actually be your own mechanic? (Automatic) or your own health professional, or anything!  We now have an access to our own data at our fingertip as it had never been!  The currency of the game is Awareness. We are now empowering ourselves with more knowledge that we can act upon to do something more.  

Cools stuff.  Now, let me go back to my pebble

13 3 / 2013

Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA)

I’ve only heard about this law from listening to NPR on my commute to work.  In the news, they talked about how Netflix needed to lobby the congress - Just so that we can share our Netflix shows we are watching, just like Spotify stream….

What’s funny about the news for me was

  • Absurdity of the law: Is social sharing so important now that a business would go for a 2 year lobbying efforts to get a law updated so that it can be done?
  • Antiquity of the law: This law was only enacted in 1988.  I dunno much about the average lifespan of laws typically, but less than 30 years seem so …. young and fresh!  Constitution last for a long time, doesn’t it?
  • … and of course, expanding role of social media: In the last 2-3 years, business has fully embraced social as both the marketing and customer service engine and wanted a “in” on the play with creation of Facebook pages and all where business creates a place where it can guide the conversation of the social sharing.  Now, the case of Netflix and Spotify seems like the case of where they are using our “mouth” to literally spit out their message.   Somehow, I feel that it’s a bit different from paid Facebook advertising. … yup.  it IS different.  they don’t have to pay anything.

Anyways, thought it was interesting to write this random thought before it disappears in my non-permanent memory bank in my “brain”

Here are articles on the matter

From Gigaom - Netflix goes social, turns on Facebook integration for U.S. subscribers

From Paidcontent - The Oddball U.S. Privacy Law That’s Keeping Netflix Away From Facebook