My Apple Recap

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I usually write for myself and in the process some others actually read my stuff. This post fits that mantra – after watching the keynote and digesting some other accounts of it I have some opinions of it all. Take it or leave it.

The live stream sucked ass in a big way. It is just embarrassing that a company of Apple’s size with all the money in the world cannot get this right. Hell – pay for two separate infrastructures and just switch over when one doesn’t work right. The whole thing felt like amateur hour and Apple is not a bunch of amateurs. There is really no excuse for not being able to pull of an event of this scale unless the numbers were just too big but I think this was more a case of errors than too many viewers.

First there was this takedown of it :: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/09/why-apples-livestream-failed.html

Some folks are saying this is not an accurate analysis but I think there are some valid points in it. If they did use S3 and Akamai together – that was a huge mistake. It just doesn’t work well together. Akamai is maybe the king of CDN’s but it is the old school internet and is funky to work with.

Other folks are pointing to this article which is good and I even left a comment there but I don’t think it gets to the bottom of what happened. Apple is the inventor of HLS – they should have it nailed by now. Someone just majorly fucked up is my take on it. We may never know.

Either way it ruined being able to watch it in unison with others and as live as possible. Someday I may be able to make it to a real event but for now I am stuck with the live stream. Apple could do a better job of it for all of us staying up late wanting to watch it.

The phones. Nothing dramatic really but we have come to expect it now. I am on the fence as to which phone to get. Sometimes I want the big one but then I think it might be too big to carry around. I do a lot with my phone and with the big one I envision only needing a phone and a laptop and won’t use an iPad anymore. Then again I think I want the smaller one and a new iPad Air. Thus using laptop less. I don’t know yet. I honestly think I want to play with them both but at the same time I am curious about new laptops. I know I need more than one device but now I use three. So the idea for me is I want to get to 2 devices and I don’t know which two yet. I may have to wait for laptops and iPads to hit first.

I think iOS 8 is huge but we shall see when it hits and when the new dev stuff kicks into gear.

Before I get to the watch I just want to say the whole U2 thing was dumb. It came of as cheesy, it didn’t pack the punch Apple expected and I think they should be pushing Beats – not shitty iTunes. Anyway. Who cares but it ruined the close of the event for me.

The watch. I am in no hurry to get one but if it can track my biking and walking well, plus manage notifications easily and look cool – for me it replaces any sort of need for a fitness band. I am still confused what it does when not tethered to a phone since for example – I don’t want to carry my phone when I go running just to track fitness. I had a nike fuelband and digged it but was not married to it. I still don’t feel like I need one but this might be just the right combo. However if I am charging it every night, like the Pebble, I am not in a rush for it.

That being said – to me this is all about wearable computing. We all know it will happen in some form or another. Apple thinks it might be the watch. I tend to agree but is it this version of it? Come on. It’s a 1.0. I didn’t use an iPhone until number 4. I know this has a ways to go but wearable computing is inevitable. This is just their vision of it. It looks pretty amazing but like the new phones – I want to play with one first.

This is what sucks about Singapore for me – where is a real Apple store. Tired of this retailer shit.

okay. back to real work.

Thoughts on SEA ecosystem and location

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Lots of twitter activity over the this post :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/08/28/hong-kong-versus-singapore/

As mentioned I wanted to follow it up with some thoughts on this post :: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/08/23/time-founders-southeast-asia-accepted-location-used-advantage/

Let me preface I did not attend GOAB nd I don’t know Mona. I used to follow her on twitter but she broke my follow rule of never replying to my replies. One of my twitter rules is if I reply a few times to folks – famous or not and they don’t ever reply back then I figure there is no point in following. The point of twitter is reasonable discourse – at least for me anyway.

Mona nails well the recent rise of the SEA ecosystem and how one can most likely build a startup anywhere. Totally agree! However I think there are still some issues.

I will add that this is a tough soapbox to get on for me these days cause I will admit I am NOT in the scene as much as I used to be but this is also one of my weird opinions on the local scene. People talking about the scene and eventing tend to get more attention than those just heads down actually building a startup. Maybe that is just my personal feeling but the local media tends to focus on funding, rumors and covering events talking about the scene more than going deep on what is getting built, by who and the obvious failures that can happen. If I had more time I would do a few things – start a podcast talking to folks building things about how they got here and why they are building what they are building. I would start a review service going deep on all the consumer facing products that are coming at us everyday – some good and of course some bad. An investigative service trying to uncover why local startups fail so we can all learn from it. Alas – I don’t have the time. I am too busy with Spuul and my family to take on any more tasks. I will keep up my mentoring and writing as I see fit. The podcast idea is still brewing cause I miss TWIA and figure there is still some local demand for a good audio feed.

That being said, unlike my time at Yahoo, I am not running around at events or attending many startup focused conferences. Which leads me to another need in the local ecosystem, there are not many events or communities to lean on for those in the local startup land that are a few years in and maturing. This will hopefully improve over time.

Back to some of my thoughts on the article…

– I think seed funding is getting pretty easy to get. However it might all depends on your definition of it. Let’s say less than 150k USD for starters as a rough estimate. I think anyone with some connections, a good idea and some perseverance can land some money in this range. But anything past this I think is hard – there are some trends that buck this. Do something in ecommerce or transportation and for some reason the money is just flowing. Try to do anything with a large risk portfolio, hardware or enterprise and I think the money is much harder to find. Jump in the 150k to 1 million range and unless you have rockstar metrics, a super connected angel or crazy PR – it gets quite hard to find. This is from my personal experience and what I hear from companies I either mentor or talk to a fair amount.

– Location is still tricky. We at Spuul experience this some. The local press tends to pass us up cause they don’t see us in Singapore much. The Indian press always wonders why we are not in India and the USA press tends to overlook global plays from Singapore in general. I think the funding conversations take a similar tact at times. I think for location to work well for you it might make sense to be sure that you can dominate in the market where you have your HQ. Then figure out your regional play and maybe the globe later. Saying you are here and working on the globe might not work for those that like a tangible way to grok things. Of course you may have built something killer or viral that just works for everyone. I am speaking in terms of products as well – not the notion of outsourcing or being a vendor.

– The silicon valley stigma. I look at this one from a different angle than others. I base this on doing some focus groups with yahoo and talking with anthropologists who also study tech. If you get in a room in let’s say in Indonesia. You have a set of normal people who use tech and the internet. You present them with a novel product idea, some screens and user stories. You ask some of these people would they use this if it it came from Indonesia. Or Singapore. Then ask some of them would they use it if it came from Silicon Valley. What happens is they almost always get more excited about the product from the valley. Always. I don’t think this will change anytime soon. It is no different than people loving a Hollywood movie. It is not about what is better but just the cultural aspects that appeal to folks. I think startups in the region have to contend with people on a very local level to win or doing something very unique. If you build something similar to something else that comes from the the valley I think it won’t be successful. Granted this does not pertain to closed or unfair markets like China or say Vietnam who don’t allow truly level playing fields.

The local scene is exploding – just figure out where to make your mark.

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…

More on Karma

~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

Sometimes current events remind me that Karma wins in the end. I’ll just leave it at that.

From Gruber I happened to read this post on politeness. It’s so good. I can’t claim to be this polite but damn I wish I was. We just had a small get together with some friends and family for my daughter’s birthday. She is two now. I hope I can teach her how to be this polite and caring.

I have touched on this subject slightly before – here: http://www.nokpis.com/2013/03/08/learning-from-the-masters/ and http://www.nokpis.com/2013/06/19/being-a-connector/ . The idea being that your past WILL alter your future. How you treat people will come back to delight or haunt you.

I think a lot about my past and can even recall specific events where I was NOT polite. It could be that I was too young to contemplate how my actions would be perceived. I wish even now I could go back and fix those events. Other times I was not polite and I knew it. I wish I could also fix those events as well but I am glad I remember them. A constant reminder helps me to be polite in the present.

I am older now. I think one of the coolest things about aging is that I can get better at my craft – the art of being me. I don’t care so much anymore what I wear or what people think of me. Other than if people meet me, or hear me speak or hear others speak of me – that they will have a good impression of me. I try to remind myself that this is more important than fashion, more important than my job and will in some way lead to delight in my future.

I am sure that I can improve upon this process. I will try. Starting today to be even more polite than I think I am.

Happy Monday!

More semi-random thoughts on the consumer services wave in Singapore

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Had the pleasure of meeting Jeremy yesterday for a coffee finally. One of those people I would chat with over twitter but we had never met in really life. We chatted about the local startup scene, our tour of duty in Asia, politics and of course – consumer services. More info on Jeremy here – http://www.loosewireblog.com/about

Back to the consumer services thing – what I find fascinating is that essentially two girls with an idea and some money can start a consumer services company overnight. Which is cool but unfortunately what happens is that a service is now offered to the public before it is really ready. A blog or some website that is not selling anything doesn’t really factor here but if a service is selling something then it gets real. The customer expects it to work. Just heard about a local service yesterday, JFDI company, that woefully missed their scheduled delivery window with nary a phone call. Pretty much a fail on all levels for a company that has to show up on your doorstep at a specific time.

My own story about iCarsClub hints at a bigger issue which is a well funded company in some ways is no better in delivering their service that a not well funded company. Just look at the comment train for similar experiences to my own.

To summarize, I searched for and called up all the car owners (90+) as shown in the system and was unable to even book a car for just an hour (I had reduced my initial idea of booking for 6 hours down to just one hour to see the response).

Being utterly disappointed in the system, i promptly called up the hotline intending to withdraw my credit and but was simply met by an utter silence. No pickups and no return calls. I will be posting a formal complaint (claim) against the company for intentional fraud or otherwise to the small claims tribunal if there are no answers from the company in the coming week.

And imagine my surprise when I came upon news that the company has recently secured $10 million in Series A funding, with a purported 1,400 personal cars available for rental in Singapore, when in actual fact, reality depicts otherwise.

What I am still surprised about is no one in the local media seems to think it is worthwhile to follow up on funded companies to see how they are doing, how the consumer is fairing and a general update on the progress. Maybe there is no money or readership in this – I don’t know but I think there are people who want to hear about it. A product idea is brewing – but I don’t have the time. My take on iCarsClub is they care more about rapid expansion than about the quality of their service. To this day no one has responded to me about my experience or review. Huge customer service, social media fall in my opinion. If this was my service and someone wrote about it I would be chomping at the bit to respond and hopefully correct the perception. iCarsClub clearly doesn’t give a shit.

Recently tried Redmart and everything worked as planned. They did not have one item – I need to see if the refund processed on it.

This is the new thing I want to try :: http://www.joob.sg/juice-detox-program/

Feel free to leave comments about any experiences you had with local services.