Category: Spuul

Hong Kong versus Singapore

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

This is a good read :: http://ventureburn.com/2014/08/hong-kong-and-singapore-meet-the-evil-twin-startup-ecosystems-of-southeast-asia/

I won’t really dig into the startup issues cause my experience with startup land has mostly been from the HQ of Singapore. When I lived in Hong Kong, many moons back for about 5 years, I was focused on enterprise software and at the time Hong Kong made more sense. We were looking to grow in North Asia and Hong Kong was the better location for that. I think back in those days everyone felt that the “gateway” to China was Hong Kong. Now it seems the gateway to China is going to China. So for some the need to be in Hong Kong makes less sense than it did before.

Singapore is sometime’s known as the “gateway” to other parts of SEA region. Again – if you want to focus on Indonesia, you can just setup there. However maybe it is better to establish your HQ in Singapore for various legal reasons. Of course if you are looking at a regional play – Singapore makes a great base for SEA – easy to argue that this is a better place to setup than Hong Kong. It could be that for startup land the North Asia, SEA/South Asia split still plays out. You want to tackle Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan? Hong Kong makes a good base. You want to go for India, Pakistan, and SEA? Singapore is the better choice.

However – maybe you plan on going after the globe, this is what Spuul is doing, and you still need a home base in Asia. For this I reckon that Singapore is the much better bet than Hong Kong. Again here I am not commenting on the HK ecosystem or the I want to live there and do a startup. Or I find HK is a better city for me so I plan on doing my startup there. Great. You should do it wherever you want. That is the cool thing about doing a startup – for the most part location doesn’t matter. I will write some more about this though since I have some stuff to debunk from this article :: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/08/23/time-founders-southeast-asia-accepted-location-used-advantage/.

So back to the I want to tame the globe and I plan on living in Asia – which place is better? Hong Kong or Singapore? I think for this decision to be made one has to dive into some of the practicalities of living – not just the startups issues. On this note I think Singapore is the only choice. Reasons:

– The air is much cleaner. Hong Kong air pollution is epic and worsening.
– Much easier to have a family in Singapore. Yes – not all startups are devoid of real adults, with families. Singapore is easier to manage a family than Hong Kong.
– Public schooling is English first in Singapore and much more modernized. In Hong Kong an expat must put their kids in International Schools unless they speak Cantonese as their main language.
– Permanent residency is much harder to obtain in Hong Kong. Seven years of residency and employment prior to applying. I got my Singapore PR in less than 3 years of working in Singapore.

I am sure there are other issues to consider or even good reasons to refute the list above. Local people may not need to factor any of these issues but I would argue that startups are global in nature with employees from all over the world. These employees will look to settle, have families and for this – Singapore is the obvious choice.

App store hell…

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

I have written about this before and just had another experience with Apple that reminds me how broken the whole process is.

First off Google is broken but in another way – Google let’s everyone and everybody publish anything – you can steal an app, pirate content and break lots of rules but you can still publish on the Play Store until someone alerts Google. Then they may take it down but not always. Google should change their process to vetting every first time app from each developer. They check the app and if cool it hits the store. If is is not cool the developer needs to address it. If they don’t address it the app is not published and this bad mark, so to speak, is remembered. Developer tries to publish another app under the same account and the same process is repeated. Once said developer is allowed to publish a valid app then Google let’s that developer publish without anymore reviews. This would help, but not alleviate, some of the crap in the Play Store. It won’t fix it but at least create some barriers to entry. God knows there are enough apps.

On the Apple side the issue is broken the other direction. Here we have an app that has been around for a few years and still go through the same process as a new app or new developer. We have the normal review time and all that jazz. What is worse is our history means nothing and Apple does make mistakes. Their reviewers don’t always read the notes and reject the app due to not reading the notes. We lose days when this happens. Then we have to either leave rejection comments or republish the app – thus waiting the same review period. Developers should go through the review for a new app and maybe till the .2 or .3 release. Then Apple should let the developers publish at will until they do something wrong or break a rule. Then they are back to square one with some rules for getting out of the review doghouse. Not saying this is a perfect solution but something is better than waiting a week or sometimes two to publish an update to a mature app due to reviewer incompetence.

Let’s also note that this review process does not ensure quality around apps or keep the crap from proliferating in the App Store. Tons of crap and zombie apps in the App Store.

Either way I am baffled that two companies making billions off of phones and apps can’t spend some time fixing the developer process. Just Silly.

How I try to Product Manage… (part 1)

~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

I am usually brutally honest. I am the first to answer I don’t know when I don’t and when I think I know I tell it like I see it. I probably need to take my own advice here more often and getter better at the soft middle of knowing and not knowing. Hell – we all can get better at what we do right?

That being said the role of product management is like a craft one hones over time. I don’t think it is easily taught and I don’t think it is easily learned. It comes with time, experience and lots of mistakes. I excel in the lots of mistakes category so I guess in some sense I am still learning and trying to improve.

I try to listen to lots of podcasts, still haven’t found a good PM podcast, and I read a lot. Plus – I try lots of products. I use my own as well. Personally I am always baffled when you hear people give product advice and you find out they don’t use a lot of products apart from the main ones everyone uses. There is no right or wrong when it comes to product taste since it is a taste and I think taste improves with experience. So I like the school of hard knocks when it comes to acquiring taste – you have to have built some things and you have to have used a lot of things. Of course this is not relevant to the folks who have an idea and build their own stuff – I think that is a different form of PM. I wish I was talented enough to have the coding skills to build my own stuff but alas I don’t. Probably never will.

All that being said I am always looking for tools and techniques to get better at what I do.

Over time I keep settling on the same stuff:

– email
– dispatch
– evernote
– asana
– slack
– spreadsheets
– keynote

I use lots of little things for idea tracking or idea generation or I guess note taking, but still don’t have something I love:

– paper with the paper stylus
– vesper
– IA writer
– probably other things I can’t remember and also just a normal notebook

So I use the tools to manage the team and other tools to convey ideas to the people in the company. I guess then the rest of it is the things I use to manage myself, my ideas and my communication. Communication is so huge and this is why slack is just taking off like a rocketship. Communication is key. Really interested to see how slack will tackle email. Asana is partially tackling email but I will admit that a lot of my interaction with Asana is actually via normal email.

Looking for any comments or ideas on this stack of ideas or products.

I will follow this up with a post for how I manage the team so to speak. Or shall I say unmanage them…

AWS does need to get a mobile story together

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am a big fan of AWS but I will call a spade a spade – their mobile services suck but really they just don’t have any.

Good article on the current situation is here :: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/08/cloud-favorite-aws-is-finally-ready-to-join-the-mobile-development-services-party/

We love AWS at Spuul and wouldn’t be here without it. Yes – you can find cheaper services to run virtual machines on – we know that but when it comes to running a global service with servers we can spin up around the globe – I still think AWS has no equals. None.

However doing some simple things on AWS for mobile is well – not simple. We tried to build our push messaging stack around it and we hit too many walls and had our messages capped per day. AWS had no concept of our user base and the ability for us to buy messages in volume. We went to PushWoosh cause it was simple and cheap. Everything else we do we hand roll behind an API that we run on AWS using AWS services. We always try to use a service versus install code on a server so we have less things to support and update. This keeps our admin headcount low. I won’t tell you how low but let’s say it can’t go any lower.

MSFT is doing a good job with mobile services but I have no first hand experience with it but I know they make some things dead simple – like push messaging, among others. AWS is never really dead simple but it works and you know what you are dealing with.

Mobile is the thing and my guess even the next thing is all about – mobile.

AWS needs to up their mobile game.

I am watching.

Any yes – Brazil really did get spanked.

It’s tough to bank on Google

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

It’s Google I/O time and it’s another conference, like WWDC, that I wish I was attending. Despite that I am not going, I still need to pay attention since Google will inevitably announce something that I will have to consider building on or for. Android is still the biggest thing to come from Google, and startups, like Spuul, have to build on android. There is still some schools of thought that say stick with iOS or start with iOS and deal with android later. However, if you are doing anything at all in Asia or the emerging markets you have to be on android. Period. But I insist that the money for paid services is still in iOS. Android users just don’t pay the way iOS users do – not even close.

Like with WWDC, Google will spend the week announcing a ton of things – I won’t even bother trying to play soothsayer since I don’t think it makes sense to. But I am more sensitive than I have been in the past at taking Google products seriously.

I think the biggest problem with whatever Google will announce is deciding which products or platforms to bank on. I see android TV is already getting some pre announcement love and folks are blessing it as the new thing for Google and it’s love affair with TV. Let me be first the first to say I hope it works cause god knows the current TV ecosystem is fucked. My money is still on Apple TV cause it works, it’s dead simple to build on and we know Apple values ecosystem lock in which means Apple TV is here to stay.

Android TV? Who the hells knows. Google TV was also heralded as the savior for the TV ecosystem and the next best thing to sliced bread for developers working around the TV. What happened to it? It was promising but in typical Google fashion it was essentially a beta that never made it out of beta. I understand why Google does this but it makes it hard to know which beta projects to depend on or bet your company’s development dollars on. Once bitten, twice shy.

I am sure some big companies can jump on every new Google dream in hopes of being the front runner and to ensure that big companies stay big but as a startup I don’t have that luxury. We actually semi invested in Google TV cause it was easy to stick to HTML 5 and HLS for a host of Smart (which we all know means hella dumb) TV platforms. Google TV was almost a reference platform of sorts and mostly just worked – wish I could say the same for the supposed Dumb TV platforms which are some of the worst shipping ecosystems of the modern day web.

But Google TV was a dud and once it looks like a dud the normal Google response is to not really kill it, that’s far too easy for them, but to let it just limp along pretending to be alive but we all know it’s actually the walking dead. Then Google got Apple envy and decided to make chromecast which on paper, plus based on sales, seems to be rocking. But some studies are showing that it’s not being used much. This doesn’t surprise me cause unlike an Apple TV, chromecast is not super user friendly. Yes it works, but it is a pain to setup and is buggy as hell. I am actually hoping that Google will re affirm their commitment to it during I/O, fix all the bugs and double down on it since I think it has legs.

As a techie though it is shocking how much Google forgot to ship with chromecast. Security for streams was not something they focused on but has improved some with updates. At Spuul we still find that HD content with encryption creates brain freezes faster than swallowing a Magnum in one go. The real shocker with chromecast though is there is no easy way to serve video ads with it. Yes – a video product from Google that doesn’t even have a premium content focus has no hooks to any of the standard video ad platforms – not even Google’s own video ad platform. I find this quite comical since if they aren’t going to focus on premium content, something folks pay for, one would think they would make it easy to stream free content with ads.

I hear Google is going to announce something new on the TV front, which I guess means Google TV is dead, but this action will call in to question what the plan is with chromecast. My guess is Android TV has different goals than chromecast so one would hope both platforms are a go and will see proper investment by Google. However, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Android TV getting all the attention while chromecast starts to whither on the vine.

I will be watching the announcements and doing my best to read the tea leaves as to what Google makes that actually will still be going strong in a few years.

Time to update my Google minus account via my Vizio Google TV chrome browser.

How to become a product manager

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Just got the chance to check this out :: http://www.slideshare.net/isouweine/how-to-become-a-product-manager

I had the distinct pleasure of working with Isaac some at Yahoo as well as just chatting with him a bunch when he lived in Singapore. And yes – I have missed him a ton since he left.

It’s a great deck and one that I think about a lot since at Spuul I don’t have any PM’s but someday we might. I always wonder how a startup grows into acquiring or growing PM’s and how I would transition over to letting them manage things instead of the way we do it now.

I think a longer post needs to be written about the PM in a startup versus the PM in an established company. I am sure Isaac has lots to share there given his time at Yahoo and his new tenure at Frank and Oak.

Thanks for sharing Isaac!

Glimpses of a new, more open Apple

~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

One of these days I will make it to the WWDC conference but so far the gods of always conspired against me. I got a ticket last year and gave it up so our iOS dev could go but this year I did not win the lottery and apple refused my request to go as media guy with a huge blog. 😉

Since I didn’t make it I have been watching the videos, reading and talking to our iOS dev who did go. The haters can hate but let’s face it – whether you like Apple or not, one cannot ignore them. For the moment the future of everything mobile is a two horse race with Apple and Google and MSFT doing their best to stay in a distant third position. I for one hope MSFT can even things up a bit which would be good for all of us.

I have written before that there are areas that Google is making Apple look silly and fortunately some of my issues, but not all, were addressed at WWDC.

– App Store to have more data and information about how people go to the apps and better selling details. Awesome news and looking forward to seeing how this beats the info we get from the Google Play.

– Apple is finally opening up in app purchases to a broader set of items. Specifically one can now use consumable purchases for rentals or PPV type media models. This was a glaring omission for years and was frankly just a move to protect iTunes but Apple has changed. Literally post WWDC one can use IAP for creating PPV movie rental apps where prior to WWDC one could not. This has been okay on both the MSFT and Google stores for some time. Apple is playing catchup and I wonder if this point to something new around Apple TV or an entertainment device since now the economics for building PPV like experiences are possible.

– I think the new Swift language is showing that Apple is still a thought leading company that knows the future is in make sure they have good tools to build apps. This is a forward thinking move that I think will pay off for years to come in the iOS development community.

– extensions, continuity and metal – just show that apple is opening up the broad base to developers that can use these frameworks to build things that previously would be impossible on iOS/OS X. This is just killer news and I think no one even knows what new types of apps can be built yet. The future is hard to define now.

I still have some niggles and one of the main ones is payments. Apple is far too draconian in limiting their payments to Apple only in light of the fact that they are doing nothing, absolutely nothing around carrier payments. This is a huge problem for folks like us doing development for apps in emerging markets where we want to charge for things in the app but users don’t have credit cards. Apple could easily fix this by partnering with some on carrier payments or by working with telcos that they are already married that could provide telco payments. Google is slowly doing this but at the same time Google is mostly allowing developers to add their own in the app anyway. Maybe Apple just doesn’t care about the emerging markets yet but I sure wish they did.

Google is up next – and I am sure they are going to answer back on a few of things and push some new stuff of their own.

At the moment – when it comes to mobile ecosystems – these are the only two worth watching when it comes to production apps that want to make money.

have fun

JFDI 2014A

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am back to trying to focus my efforts outside of Spuul in one place again this year – which is JFDI batch 2014A.

http://jfdi.asia/portfolio/

Last Thursday I met with with a few from the list but I think some have already changed their names. I will wait to see who I end up spending the most time with since it is usually up to the teams to ping me for follow up.

For now I have had the most conversations with http://storyroll.co/ and http://stylehunt.com/ . Storyroll is fascinating since it is some guys from Lithuania coming to singapore, frying their asses off, to make a go of the program. I figure I can help a bit given my video and consumer product background. For stylehunt I am always partial to the Thais and it turns out I am from the same part of the world as one of the founders which is cool.

We shall see who continues to bug me as the program rolls on and I will see what kind of impact I can have. Exciting stuff!

Before I get to my tiny advice column I will recall the dinner we had with Werner Vogels and some of what we learned from talking to him. The key takeaway I had was that Amazon is still lots of small teams working on lots of projects. As big as Amazon is today the small team ethos is still going strong. I dig that. The other thing Werner mentioned was how the team still writes the marketing one pager, the FAQ and the press release before any code is written. I love this. I should try to do this at Spuul as well.

It’s good advice to focus on what you want the customer to experience and then work backwards to make it happen. I am sure there are tons of ways to do this or to manage the process but the basics are pretty clear. Don’t code or draw pictures first. Take the time to write out what you hope to build before building.

Obviously this may not work for everyone who has already started making something or is in the program however I think for those who are in the JFDI program there is another way to handle this.

This is the advice I was giving out on Thursday to the companies I met individually with. I have seen a few batches go though the system and generally if one can keep themselves organized and productive leading up to investor day then the odds of success, as far as the program is concerned, are much higher. Fall apart, lose track of time, bicker, try to build too much, or lose sight of the product – will lead you to a bad investor day.

One could hope for breakout success, killer metrics, a sick viral loop or a crazy amount of pr – but pinning your success on the things that may not happen is not very smart. If these things happen consider them a bonus but instead focus on the event. The investor day. Imagine yourself or your team up there presenting, have a vision for what you want to say, make a few slides now that will be the boilerplate for that final day and focus on projecting now what you will accomplish on that stage.

Then work backwards to make it happen. Manage each week precisely enough, don’t go crazy about it, to ensure that you are meeting your weekly milestones that will add up to your successful investor day.

As a member of an accelerator program you are in a time compression chamber. Manage it will and you will succeed.

The Black Box from the developer perspective

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

This is a great post :: http://stratechery.com/2014/black-box-strategy/

WHY TV IS SO ATTRACTIVE
As I’ve written multiple times, the scarcest resource for consumer tech companies, especially ad-supported ones, is user attention. There are only so many minutes in the day, and their consumption is zero-sum: a moment spent doing activity A is not spent doing activity B, and then that moment is gone.

Meanwhile, TV continues to monopolize a significant amount of that user attention. Although digital products have overtaken the amount of time spent on TV, primarily due to the accretive time spent on smartphones, the absolute time spent on TV has remained stubbornly persistent at about four-and-a-half hours per day per U.S. adult (source).

That four-and-a-half hours really is the gold at the end of the rainbow for tech companies: just over the next hill/technical hurdle, yet never actually attainable.

TV really is a cool spot to work in – or video to be more blunt. However what really annoys me is that every article from a tech angle is normally very US centric or US content centric. Of course there is a reason for that – America is where the best content is coming from, where the most ad dollars are and where most of the tech companies playing in the space reside. No argument there but the world is not just America and some of us are playing in the video space from other parts of the world with the hopes of attacking the global stage.

I won’t do a Spuul sales job here but just state that we are global and we are doing it from Singapore. Not easy but fun.

So the article breaks down the TV battle by naming the dominant players who are hacking on the problem. What is telling to me is what or who is not listed – Smart TV’s. I think in theory if you are skating to where the puck is going then possibly you can leave them out but if you are dealing with the video space today you can’t. They exist and users want to see your app there on whatever Smart TV they have but boy, oh boy what a mess. I don’t want to bash here but we know why most of them are not listed as players for the future – they are not going to make it in the future. Their ecosystems are just brutal – they want a cut of payments but they don’t have payment engines. They want a cut of ad revenue but they don’t have ad ecosystems. They have brutally ancient build and deploy systems that look like the early web development days. Frankly – they build shitty software and they are at risk of just going away or being dumb glass. They could fix it but it doesn’t seem like they want to.

Moving down the list we get into Apple TV:

I agree in that this is the one to watch – I don’t say this due to apple fanboyism but mostly cause it works well, they distribute internationally and for developers this stuff really is mostly magic. It just works. The work we go through to get chromecast to work is night and day when it comes to Apple TV which is dead simple. Apple has room for improvement though. They need to get into carrier billing, they need to open up their stuff for the rental market, and they need to open up Apple TV to apps. I don’t see all this happening but it would be awesome.

Amazon:

I don’t have a fire to play with so I can’t say much. Usually with Amazon though their international focus is lacking but when it comes to being open and such they do a good job. Since Amazon has video I find working with them tough because they favor their stuff and then America – but for them to win I think they need more content players on the box. I think if Amazon could make the fire really awesome for developers it would help but that remains to be seen.

Google:

What can I say but keeping up with Google and TV stuff is challenging. There was google tv the web based stack, then the Android 3.2 made for tv stuff, then chromecast and now supposedly a new Android TV. Very hard unless you have insider status to get good info here. They favor America for content and partners and their international stuff is opaque. But the hardest part with Google is they compete with all of us using Youtube, they reward piracy and they make it hard to want to go deep with them but you must go deep with them. There is no choice. On the plus side they have a better ecosystem for developing, they have some carrier payments, they are being open about other payments in android apps and they tend to try and break down the incumbents. We see this with adx, chromecast and the like – so Google is evil but you must work with them on some levels. Android is huge – bottom line. I hope Android TV is killer, truly open and Google courts international developers at some point.

Roku:

Roku is always the one I find interesting in this matrix – first off they are only in America and UK. Of course big markets but it can’t stack up to the other global players in any regard. Worse though is since being invested in by DISH the entire international content library is controlled by DISH. So if someone like Spuul wants to get on Roku we have to go via DISH who usually says no cause they have their own international content packages that they foist onto Roku. So when it comes to Roku being a player – I say not until the DISH deal is done. Roku is one of those funny things that purports to want to give the best experience to users but is really no different than a cable company deciding what you get and what you don’t. Roku claims now to be gaining ground by getting into all the TV’s but I don’t buy it. They should have opened up when they had the chance and gone big – now I think google and amazon will have their way with them.

Microsoft:

Oh what could have been. To me they should have created something akin to the media center PC by creating a cheaper version of the XBOX just for the TV but they wanted TV and Games – both suffered. Now they appear to be tilting back to the gamers which means the TV will suffer. XBOX is cool but MSFT has to step up their game or build a home entertainment to rival the others. I will say this about them though – working with them is getting easier and they are trying hard to build stuff for media companies. If they open up playready DRM more and really cloudify the DRM plumbing then they could become a platform for streaming companies. Time will tell.

All in all the streaming world is booming but to me it is very US centric and I am waiting to see who will change it or maybe it can’t be changed but if so then I will be watching what the international players do more than the US centric ones since the playbook seems pretty well known at this point.

Microsoft

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

Microsoft has a new CEO. I know little about him but he seems to curry favor with the troops and judging by what is being written about him I am guessing he looks to be the right guy to turn the place around. Yes – it needs turning around. Why you might ask? Cause tech folks like myself don’t really use anything from Microsoft anymore. I practically cut my computing teeth on everything Microsoft but now I use mostly Apple products, iOS (and the many made for iOS apps), and lots of other services in the cloud of which none of them are made by Microsoft.

However the world needs competition. A google and apple world is not great for any of us.

BB is dead – let’s not even pretend to think otherwise.

I would love to see bing compete.

I would love to see windows phone compete.

I would love, also very surprised, to see windows wow me with stuff that might tease me away from OSX.

I would love to see azure, or whatever name you call Microsoft cloud services, compete head on with AWS.

I would love to see xbox own the living room, I don’t give a SHIT about gaming, and challenge the notions of what a home entertainment (console) device could do when everything is connected up.

Lately I have been somewhat surprised at working with Microsoft around some Spuul stuff. They have engineered some good tech and offer good support but they still seem to focus everything around windows versus windows phone. Mobile and cloud is where it is at. Bottom line – they need to sort that out quick.

Office – yes I still use it unfortunately but I am miffed they don’t properly support it across all of my iOS devices well. I am guessing the new guy will change that.

So Microsoft is back in the spotlight and people like me are quietly cheering them on. Maybe even less quietly now that they have a CEO that isn’t going to mock or berate people like me.

The clock is ticking but I expect to see the new Microsoft slowly appear this year.