radical candour from a deep generalist
Marco is obviously a very successful guy but I think this is where he and a lot of people from the states and Europe miss the boat sometimes – they clearly don’t understand the emerging markets and the freedom developers have around Android when it comes to telcos and bizdev. Given this – for some apps going Android first may make a ton of sense.
http://www.marco.org/2014/11/07/business-insider-maintains-usual-level-of-quality
From time to time I write about something other than tech because for a period in my life, possibly a very early mid life crisis, I decided to abandon tech to just exist. I had no real plan but to travel some, hang out and learn a language. I sold my house, moved from Hong Kong and ended up in the pub business in Bangkok. I have regrets and will always question my choices but I also have some solid real life experiences that I always call upon and a very healthy appreciation for the tech life, friends and of course family. I know I am spoiled.
That being said, standing on the other side of the bar in places like Bangkok would afford me a view of humanity that not a lot of people talk about openly. We would see it a mile away – some normal dude living the high life in Asia seemingly unaware that they were getting sucked in too deep. The alcohol, the drugs, the corruption, and yes the girls.
These people would miss work, miss meetings and some would even start a double life without their families knowing about it. I know of very successful people who have two families and have even imported their second family to their home country. Just nutty stuff. Situations that before my time in Asia I didn’t even know existed. I was too naive to be honest.
Sometimes the right people in that someone’s life, who had gone off the rails, would step in forcibly try to extract their friend or family from the lifestyle in hopes of getting them back home.
I would hear stories like this all over Asia – believe me it wasn’t just Bangkok. Many times it was in places where someone was making a lot of money and just didn’t realize what was happening to them. Funny enough I recall that more than a few of these folks were in finance and some were also in tech. Usually males of course.
Given the circumstances an extraction was needed and many times it worked but other times the lost soul didn’t want saving. They continued on with their new life.
Other times you would hear of a suicide or someone getting killed. Or even just dying from something strange.
I won’t wager an opinion on any of this except to say that this story coming out about Rurik Jutting sounds very believable. An extraction was needed – too bad there was no one around him to pull it off.
Apart from it being a total pile of shit at this point – it really is the most unsecure messaging product in the mass market. Of course Yahoo’s hold on the mass market is really anything but these days. Scathing.
What a huge downfall for what was once the chat product of the world and a huge product in Asia.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/which-messaging-technologies-are-truly-safe-and-secure
Cool deck by the once resident Singaporean who knows a thing or two about product
We miss him dearly but bummed I didn’t make his talent list. I guess the cold weather is getting to him.
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/isouweine/intro-to-southeast-asia-startup-ecosystems
Added tweet conversations as they come :: https://storify.com/dreampipe/conversation-with-dreampipe-and-bleongcw
From here on out I am calling this SASH – yes. SASH. Saves me some keyboard time since I do a lot of posting from my phone one handed.
I will even add a blog category for it. So it’s real folks.
One of my most recent Singapore posts in reply to TIA (penn olson if you look at their social media account) :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/10/25/singapore-the-aircraft-carrier/
I am all in on Singapore – just FYI.
I wrote this today – mostly out of frustration :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/10/29/stripe-is-cool-too-bad-its-not-in-singapore/
But it made me think about it more deeply – something I conversed with Andy on twitter :: https://storify.com/dreampipe/conversation-with-dreampipe-and-andycroll-1
Btw this is the easiest way to get a twitter conversation link – easier than using Storify directly. Use tweetbot to see a conversation and the tweet it to get the link. I am sure other nerds have an easier way – please share.
In many ways Singapore is rocking when it comes to support or in the list of companies who support Singapore that sell picks and shovels to people building startups. I won’t go through the list here but I will point out a glaring omission – the payment infrastructure options suck huge ASS in Singapore. Please someone from banking or the government read this. Let me repeat the payment infrastructure options available to startups in Singapore is horrendous.
Yes I know some companies work around it. They become a merchant, then get some gateway provider to help smooth over the shitty API options from the bank or merchant accounts but it is a serious amount of work and costly. The bill is normally out of reach for most early stage startups. Even if you can afford it you have to set aside capital for it but you may also find you can’t get approved. At Spuul a lot of the banks could not deal with subscriptions for digital goods. Yes – something like that they were hung up on. Pathetic.
Before any of you slam me to say their are options please note that I write this stuff to learn as much as to complain. If you know of better options please spell them out since the purpose of the blog is to learn as much as to share, but I know from talking to real companies, real devs and our own experiences – that this is a hard road to ride on. Very experienced devs and startups are flummoxed daily.
What I don’t get is with Singapore being such a banking center, the government throwing money at SASH, and with all the “accelerators” here – why is no one working on the problem? Could it be that everyone is just waiting for Stripe, PayPal or someone to solve it but no one willing to risk it? Stripe says they are coming but been hearing that for a while. All the braintree stuff from PayPal is really for just US accounts so none of that is helping. So we all wait but sometimes I wonder if it will get fixed.
Anyone with deeper knowledge on the subject please chime in.
Since I don’t feel like building things on Twitter anyway the old issue don’t bother me much but of course if I built stuff on Fabric and they yanked that I would be pissed. However I think the world has evolved this time around. Notice a conversation I had with the CTO of Twitter:
https://storify.com/dreampipe/conversation-with-dreampipe-burnflare-and-adam-mes
Of course time will tell and my guess is many more folks will build on these frameworks than were interested in building Twitter clients which means it could impact a lot more apps and ecosystems.
Interesting times.
Looks like I spoke too soon – maybe another deal going down already – http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/20/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-buy-video-ad-platform-brightroll-for-around-700m/
Some of you may or may not follow all the companies in the “video” space but since I am in the space I can’t stop watching. Lately though the pace of acquisitions has been hectic. Couple this with all the announcements these past few weeks about all the content guys getting into launching their own OTT services and you can see that their is a land grab going on. I won’t list all the players but yesterday I was having a meeting with Brightcove and talking to a senior Zencoder employee about the space and the consolidation. Zencoder was a yCombinator company that was bought by Brightcove so they kicked off some of this activity.
Liverail bought by Facebook – this was the other big ad player in the region so now we have Videoplaza being bought by Ooyala :: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/20/ooyala-buys-euro-video-ad-startup-videoplaza-in-its-first-acquisition/ . Ooyala was just recently bought by Telstra.
Viki was bought by Rakuten which kicked off activity in this region.
Dramafever was just picked up by Softbank. Their big competitor Crunchyroll was picked up The Chernin Group.
The list goes on and on but the more this pace quickens the more I realize there are not that many independent players left to work with in the space which means the products we all use to build video based sites are shrinking pretty rapidly. This is partially the reason why at Spuul we try to roll a lot of our own kit – we never know anymore what product we are using if it will still be around.
Nutty times!
I keep using Path cause my parents are on it and it’s an easy place to share things. Because of this my brothers are also on it. So we all use it – but not heavily.
It’s funny how it is growing though, feature wise not users, and it reminds me a lot of my Koprol days and how we use to daydream about what we wanted Koprol to be when it grew up. It was always about the conversations around places. So it is interesting to see Path add the ability to talk to a place versus about a place. It sounds cool but it only works in the USA. I am sure it is useful but I still don’t see how it will make money, unless they charge for it, and how they will scale it – while still making money.
http://blog.path.com/post/98818902277/now-in-path-talk-message-people-and-places-in-one-app
Lots of people in the west a few years ago had never heard of Tencent or Alibaba. Those of us in Asia obviously have but I think many people don’t realize that these two companies created some of the largest investment deals ever. Naspers buying a large share of Tencent for millions that turned out to be worth billions. Then Jerry Yang and team buying a large share of Alibaba for millions that is also worth billions. What’s stunning is how a lame duck board and an even lamer CEO at the time sold a lot of the Alibaba shares for a fraction of what they were worth a few years ago. Just a stunning mistake. Of course Yahoo still made a ton of money and who the hell knows what they will do with it. Just look at how Ebay is dumping PayPal to unlock some value to see that the threat of breaking Yahoo up is very possible.
There is so much more to talk about when it comes to the downfall of Yahoo, their missed Asian oppurtunities and what they will do now – not sure I have enough time to cover it but bottom line is the Yahoo joint ventures look to be the better businesses for Yahoo than their own owned and operated businesses. It’s a shame Yahoo didn’t create a lot more of them when they were in such a dominant position to do so. I honestly don’t believe Yahoo will ever make a substantial comeback in their core businesses.
For I will always enjoy the limited time I spent working with Yang – check out this Fortune article on Yang, the Alibaba deal and what he is doing today.
Wow. Been hearing rumors of lots of things changing at The Next Web and now we see Jon has left. Not much else to say other than congrats on the new gig. Interesting to see TechCrunch expansion in Asia and where Jon will take the coverage going forward.
Jon – just let me know when you want your first interview. 😉
Have fun on your trip!
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