guan's to be named blog

Viva Internet!

2009-07-19T21:42:00.001-07:00

I've just settled down here in Bellevue (Seattle), my new home for a couple of months. Moving to a new city is always exciting, especially the first days when you get to explore all the restaurants, shopping malls, and other attractions. But how do you find all these places, in a city where you've never been before?! Google Map and GPS are really your best mates. Today we use the technology without thinking about it, but I've actually reflected a bit on it, on how much the convenience technology has brought me - from Dallas to Seattle.

I checked in on the web for my flight from Dallas to Seattle, with a stopover in Phoenix. When I got to the airport, I printed out my boarding pass and sent my bagage to the bagage drop. Plane landed on time in Phoenix, one hour waiting before boarding to the next flight. I opened up my laptop to google a bit on the neighborhood that I'm gonna stay in Seattle. Free Wifi at Phoenix airport!! Voila!

I entered the hotel address in Seattle on Google map, used the Street view to look whats around, really not much. I also found a "send" button for the address, I clicked on it and I can actually send the location info to my phone, great! So now I got it as SMS with also a google map link attached to it. I continued googling restaurants and stuff and sending the location info to my phone so I have them saved there.

Three hours later, I safely touched down in Seattle airport, picked up my bagage and went to the rental car centre to pick up my car that I reserved from Hertz website. A Mazda 5 prepared and ready to take me to my hotel. I installed my GPS, grabbed the address from the SMS stored on my phone (of course it would be even more convenient if the address was directly sent to the GPS). On the road, I enjoyed the stunning view of this beautiful city and arrived at the hotel after half an hour.

Time for dinner! After a short drive to Bellevue downtown, I found a nice Japanese restaurant, while waiting for my food I sent a text to my Pixl8r status channel:"first meal in beautiful Seattle" - my facebook and twitter status got updated automatically. After a while, I got a text message from facebook saying that a friend of mine commented on my status - "in Seattle?? You are kidding, I'm there in 5 days, are you still gonna be there?"

Life must be tough without technology :-)

Facebook Developer Garage in Dallas

2009-06-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

A bit lagged blog post on the fb dev garage held in Dallas on 26th June. There were two tracks in the event - marketing and tech, I went to the marketing. So I was expecting that someone from Facebook's marketing would present on the latest developments. Nope, surprisingly there was nobody from Facebook at all at the event. The guys presenting were mainly entreprenuers/app developers and social media marketing gurus. It was a lot about tips, tricks and hacks on how to stand out in the social media "noise", how to monetize the apps and so on. Some notes and key learnings:

- Social media is not about selling stuff directly. Instead, use it to influcence and create trust.

- Build your social capital, help others out, establish your reputation, make your (and others) accomplishments public.

- Banners suck. You need to create participation through apps, fan pages etc.

- Think about monetization in an early phase to make sure that it is possible to monetize.

Also, check out some of the successful facebook fan pages used for marketing - pizza hut, chicken fil-A, Whole foods, and Red Mango.

Its 6:40, time to go home!

Guess where

2009-06-28T10:03:00.000-07:00

This picture is taken from the plane (US. Airways 753 from Stockholm to Philadelphia). I don't have a good answer myself on where this could be. My best guess is somewhere in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This can't be Greenland right? Anyway, it's beautiful.

Any ideas?

So big, so different, but so nice

2009-06-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hello world again,I'm back as an extremely unsuccessful blogger. As you can see my last post was written on April 2008. This time, I'm sitting in my hotel room in Plano, Texas in an attempt to make this blog come alive.

So first week in the U.S - the country where everything is so big, so different, but so nice! Here is my lunch as an example:

And my rental car here in Plano:

Time for some fitness, see ya!

The future of blogging

2008-04-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

Last week, we had a small discussion on the future of blogging. Some people believe that blogs will be more and more niched. That's actually an important observation typically articulating the trend following the long-tail phenomena. Studies of the topology of hyperlink structures of blogs also show a power-law distribution, i.e. approximately 20% of all blogs are heavily linked with each other but the rest 80% of the blogs have few links into them and represent all the niches forming the long-tail.

Enough said about the distribution of blogs, how about the blogging behaviour. Just as many other buzzwords, the definition of blogging has become more diffuse. However, I think that we all agree that the main purpose of blogging is to share information with other people on what we do, think, eat, dream, and so on. Today, I found that there are plenty of ways of doing that beyond writing this post here on blogger. I can do microblogging through Jaiku, status update through all social community networks, upload a video on youtube, share what I read as favourites through netvibes, and almost everything I share could be published/syndicated through friendfeeds aggregating all my acitivities (you can find mine here, feel free to add me)... In my opinion, all of this kind of microblogging using syndication will take over the "traditional way" of blogging.

Having that said, why am I still writing this stupid blog post that probably no one will read? Well... its a good place for myself to document my thoughts :-)

where is flickr going?

2008-04-19T01:48:00.000-07:00

My flickr pro account subscription just expired. 2 days before the expiration, I got a notice with big text: Don't panic, your photos will not disappear! Learn more about the differences between pro and free member bla bla...

Ok, now guess what. The stingy flickr only let me see the 200 most recent photos!! As I havn't been actively uploading photos recently I was thinking that I would set in more money when I do another trip and then would have more photos to upload... but only letting me see 200 photos... that's annoying.

And now what am I thinking: did this limitation exist back in flickr-alone time or was this a Yahoo strategy? Hah, Wired has also posted a how-to wiki on backuping your flickr photos, people are getting scared that flickr would get acquired by MS. Here is the link

I'll think about where to store my pics in the future... not that $25 per year is a lot money but...

Crossing the chasm for telecom

2008-04-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

I picked up reading Geofrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm which basically enhances Roger's diffusion of innovation focusing on disruptive and discontinous innovations. Everyone in high-tech knows that this is a must-read-book for start-ups challenging the traditional ways of doing things (I got the book when I was in the incubation program).

Anyway, question is, how much is the chasm crossing framework applicable for a company such as Ericsson, which typically deals with both legacy infrastructure and multimedia solutions. Obvisouly, infrastructure (network) business is neither disruptive nor discontinous as the operators are typically ... giants, and the products should give operators a smooth way of upgrading, i.e. discontinousity is undesired. However, for multimedia solutions, innovations could be discontinous. I see IMS for example as a discontinous innovation that definitely should apply chasm framework. The difficulty though is the market segmentation part. First question, shall we consider operators as one and only segment? And is it clear that some operators are early adopters (BT 21CN network?) and others belong to mainstream market? Moore examplifies with macintosh which first focused on the art directors in big firms as early adopters, and these big firms were in different industries so that we later could have the bowlin pin effect.

I'm tired, gonna leave this post like this, already too long. Baaaah

Where is my mobile Internet startpage?

2008-04-12T04:04:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that netvibes is fantastic - it is now my absolute start page when browsing the web. It certainly proves the power of syndication, it presents my RSS subscriptions in an intuitive way, and it also allows the user to customize the page layout. As netvibes provides flexibility over many other RSS readers such as firefox in-built RSS, it is an obvious choice for me.

Now my question is where is my netvibes on my phone? I've tried mobispine before, but it doesn't provide me with the flexibility and it is a java application... What I really need is a mobile startpage which I can personalize and utilizes syndication to its maximum.

Hello web/mob 2.0

2008-04-07T04:37:00.000-07:00

Hello world from blogger. Second week of the trainee program that I'm participating, I got sick and I'm staying at home instead of going to work. Anyway, the good thing is that I'm writing this very first blog post here! From now on, I will dig into the buzzword and the world of web2.0 - technology, business models, and etc. I also intend to find out what implications web2.0 have on mobile, and how the mobile world can tap into the web 2.0 opportunity. You may call this mobile 2.0 if you wish.

First thing to do is to tune in my netvibes as it seems to be a good start-page for my Internet browsing.

Tomorrow we have a group presentation - my parts will be to present technology adoption and the long-tail phenomena. Got to do my homework! These two areas are described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm and http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

You can also find the long-tail blog at http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/