Nouveau by Zaw Thet - Interesting New Stuff

Goodbye 2007 and Welcome to 2008

I haven't had a chance to update this blog lately. Sorry readers, but I'm sure most of you didn't notice.

No bold predictions for 2008, I haven't had time to pull my heads out of the weeds at 4INFO long enough to think objectively about anything outside wireless and advertising.

I'll leave you with some quick thoughts on starting companies and entrepreneurship:

• If you're going to read one book next year, read Bill Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management.
• My biggest take-aways from Swanson's book:
  
  • When you ask for somebody to do something, also remind them why you are asking for it. That way if they hit a roadblock and you are not around they can come up with a creative solution.
  • Always ask for confirmation that people understand what you are asking for or what they to-do's are.
• Paul Soros once told me: "Starting a company is easy, getting it to break-even is the hard part."
• As a leader, your job should be to try and make yourself obsolete: that means you hired well and all the gears in the company are working...allowing you to focus externally and on big picture strategy.
• Culture, culture, culture - this starts the moment you start a company and is never not important.

Have a great 2008!

First Google billboard I've seen

Interesting move from Google. I first read about this in Tech Crunch. I just saw one of these billboards in San Francisco, right on the 101 by the 4th/Harrison on-ramp.

Makes sense to me. Google is flush with cash and offline media (billboards, newspapers, etc) is the best way of driving mobile voice/text traffic since a person is not in front of a computer and needs the info right away! This Google service competes with Free411, which happens to be a 4INFO partner.

Pic from Tech Crunch below:

Phil Hellmuth is a member of the Stanford Federal Credit Union

I was doing a public service announcement for Stanford and look who pops up on the same website. Phil Hellmuth! Awesome!

Whopper Acquisition Corp AKA Google Inc

Google just filed it's $3.1B merger/acquistion plan for DoubleClick with the SEC. Why I started reading it I have no idea. Found the link on resourceshelf.

What is really funny is that Google has a holding company it uses to do acquisitions called "Whopper Acquisition Corp." Whopper? Anyone know why they structure it this way? I haven't ever heard of Google using holding corps for other big transactions like YouTube. And what a name...

Thought of the Day

“Great players make those around them better.“ - I hear that quote used all the time.

Does the same go for managers? Do great managers make those around them better too?

Sound off.

Woot Deal of the Day (Mobile)

For those of you that have never heard of the site/service Woot, you need to check it out. They offer a new discounted product every single day and have built up quite a community of users. I first heard about Woot from Lifehacker.

The problem is that this stuff sells out fast. To get on top of deals, I need this sent as an update to my phone. Hooray for Open Platform!

Check it out, you can use the widget below to get a free text message update everytime Woot has a new product.

Woot Mobile Alerts
Enter your phone number to have new Woot deals sent to your phone. This is a free service with no extra spam!

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Modify existing alerts
4INFO | Get this tool

Technorati Tags: woot, woot-off, 4INFO

How fast can you type?

Remember the good ol' days of Mavis Beacon? Here's a fun site that tests how fast you can type: http://labs.jphantom.com/wpm/

I got up to 116 words per minute the first try. Not sure if that is good or not, but it is certainly much faster than I ever remember being able to type in school!

Courtesy of lifehacker

Why Are Yawns Contagious?

Sorry it's been a while since my last post. 4INFO has been keeping me plenty busy. We are working on some great stuff that is going to launch this summer. More coming soon!

Ok, so back to the business of blogging. Well this one post I can't claim credit for. I've always wondered why yawns are contagious. You don't even have to be in physical proximity to a person. Haven't you always wondered why when someone yawns (even over the phone) you tend to yawn as well? Well both my mom and dad are physicians (I am the black sheep in the family that didn't go to med school). My dad sent me a great email detailing the latest scientific thought. Some selected excerpts from his email are below. If you want to learn more about my dad you can do so here.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, surgeons found that occasional deep breaths delivered by a bag could reduce post-op atelectasis and respiratory complications. Some considered this to be yawning. However, yawning is almost certainly different from"sighs" (periodic inspirations) that all mammalian species have. Rats sigh 8-10 times/hour and humans 1-3/times an hour (defined as 2 x normal tidal volume). This serves to restore surfactant molecules at the air-liquid interface and without them (or PEEP) , atelectasis can occur especially in ventilated or anesthetized patients.

Yawning seems to be more related to activation of brainstem or primitve brain circuits. Here are extracts from two paras from a 2005 article http://jnnp.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/77/1/98#667

Among mammals, there are three types of morphologically identical yawns occurring in three distinct situations: situations relative to circadian rest- activity rhythms, situations relative to feeding, situations relative to sexuality or social interactions  (from 1st para)

Behavioural pattern continuity from prenatal to postnatal life shows a strict parallelism between the ontogeny of REM sleep and yawning. Basically, REM sleep in the human declines from 50% of total sleep time (8 hours) and a frequency of 30 to 50 yawns per day, in the fetus and newborn, to 15% of total sleep time (1 hour) and less than 20 yawns per day, in the adult. This decrease takes place mainly between birth and the end of puberty. As a flip- flop switch, the reciprocal interactions between sleep and wake promoting brain regions allow the emergence of distinct states of arousal. By its ontogenical links with REM sleep, yawning appears as a behaviour which procures an arousal reinforcement through the powerful stretch and the neuromuscular rewiring induced. The powerful muscular contraction caused by yawning releases arousal by activation of the reticular-formation (locus coeruleus) to which the cranial nerves send retro-projections. At becoming aware, the yawning and stretching reverse the muscular atonia which characterize REM-sleep.[10] (from 4th para)

Nobody knows [why yawns are contagious] but my guess is that as a primitive brain reflex, when people are sleepy even if it's at a subconscious level, the threshold for activation by suggestibility is lowered. It's almost certainly NOT due to low oxygen or high carbon dioxide in the blood. It may be an evolutionary vestige of a way to synchronize behavior or to alter levels of alertness.

Here are some speculations on the subject (in approximate order of usefulness) :

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/yawning.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=00074524-85CD-1D51-90FB809EC5880000

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_309.html

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question572.htm

Chuck Norris and Web 2.0

Hilarious post on Chuck Norris Facts 2.0. Ok, I am kind of a nerd, but it's pretty comic. The original Chuck Norris facts can be found here. I've been a big fan of Chuck ever since he roundkicked me in the face...

So hot...it will make you sweat

What a salacious title for a blog post! All you people out there get your minds out of the gutter. Just because of pictures like this don't think this isn't hard work. What am I talking about? Bikram Yoga.

What is Bikram Yoga? It's a series of stretches, movements, and endurance training done in a room heated to around 100 degrees F. There's nothing like sweating out all the toxins in your body. I ventured into Funky Door Yoga on my own and they convinced me to sign up and try it a couple of months ago.

I can't say that I totally love it. The classes are still pretty tough, especially those of the 6am variety. I can say that it has made me feel a ton better throughout the day, my back no longer hurts from hours of working away furiously on my laptop, and my abs are finally starting to come back (well sort of anyways). I don't like Bikram as much as martial arts training, but when I don't have to the time to do that, yoga is a great alternative.

If you've never tried Bikram before, make sure you don't eat anything and drink a lot of water the first time you go. I literally started seeing stars half-way through my first class and had to step out of the room for a minute. Try Bikram out, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

A Silicon Valley Entrepreneur's Musings on 2005

2005 was a crazy year for me and 2006 looks like more of the same. Before 2006 rolls around I thought I would share some of the questions, lessons, lists and various other things I have on my mind this New Year’s Eve. These are in no particular order of importance other than the order than emerged from my stream of consciousness.

1. This isn’t Web 2.0, it’s Web 3.0 – Web 1.0 was the early manually edited days of Yahoo! et al. Web 2.0 was what most people consider the bubble days of Excite, eBay, etc. Web 3.0 is totally different. It’s user generated and tagged content, Ajax, social networking, on-demand applications, and the idea of the Web as an OS (instead of Windows).
2. What is going on with our political system? Does a dual party system even work?     
3. In 2006, an Iraqi government and country will emerge that is backed by Iran, bordering on the dangerous zone of religious, and completely nothing like the democratic state we claimed we wanted. The real solution to the Middle East problem is not to install governments; it is to modernize the Arab world to bring them up to the same standards of living and openness of Europe or the US.
4. The year of the blog will be 2006. Sorry, make that the year of RSS. Random question: how many blog search engines can there really be?
5. Mobile isn’t ready yet for primetime, it’s coming in 2007. Mobile gaming was a bubble, even    though Jamdat sold for a crazy amount, that was a fluke. Even though lots of great startups like my own 4INFO and others are emerging, there won’t be truly converged devices and deep mobile application penetration until someone can solve the form factor limitations of the cell phone and networks are advanced and OPEN enough for true broadband to work on phones. Who’s building applications that soccer moms will actually use? This is the long tail and there is money in it!
6. Someone will create a dedicated mobile advertising system like adwords but for SMS/WAP. The question is just who is going to be the first people that will really be able to measure conversion.
7. Google is not evil, it’s just not good anymore in the eyes of the techie world. I think this applies to any company that users feel like they played a part into making big, which then cashes out for lots of money. For example, I noticed this week that I have lost daily interest in del.icio.us since Yahoo! acquired them.
8. There are still interesting things left to do on the web. Start-ups like meebo, trulia are just some examples. I have always said that people are driven by basic needs and those are reflected by websites that are successful: food, sex (aka dating), pleasure (travel), shopping, and finding information.
9. The online advertising market is much bigger than most people realize, Google is only the tip of the iceberg. Companies like adteractive and adbrite have gained significant market share without the mainstream public every realizing it.
10. Social networking companies like myspace, facebook, linkedin, and plaxo, are slowly dying. Spoke and Friendster are already dead.
11. New companies are popping up this year like it’s 1999. Hallelujah.
12. The puzzle game Sudoku is taking the world by storm (at least bookstores anyways). In every family I know at least one person got a Sudoku book for Christmas.
13. Starting a company is hard work. Some of the best reads I’ve found on setting a company culture and making sure things are set up the right way: Ten Rules for Web Startups and Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management. 
14. Social software is now the social Web (Yahoo has done best job of jumping on this with its acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us). A whole host of start-ups have followed or will follow: digg, flock, thenorp, tagged, riya, karmaOne, and the list goes on and on. This is Web 3.0 to me. 
15. What happened to all the interest in China? Seriously… the Chinese PR machine must be keeping all talk about how China is now the world’s X largest economy really tight under the lid.
16. I just realized: are there any US airlines that aren’t bankrupt these days? Are Southwest and JetBlue the only carriers that haven’t come out of Chapter 11 recently?
17. All of a sudden gas prices drop 30% post-post Katrina are we are all thrilled? Do you realize that most people are still paying over $2.10 a gallon for unleaded?
18. Does apple really need to keep advertising the iPod so much? I mean San Francisco is completely littered with bus stop billboards, scrapes, highway signs and more. What would happen is apple stopped advertising so much? Would their market share quickly decline? Random side note: was in Europe this November and absolutely NOBODY on the subways or buses was listening to music on an iPod. Most were on Sony or Nokia cell phones / mp3 players.     
19. Products/Websites I use on my laptop on a daily basis: Firefox (kicks IE in the booty), Outlook, Yahoo IM, AIM, Excel, new Yahoo! Mail, Skype, Yahoo! Desktop Search (x1), Typepad, Google Analytics, Google search, CNN, ESPN, and a whole host of RSS feeds in my Firefox bookmarks.

There you have it. My 19 random musings on 2005 (20 just seemed overly round). Hope you enjoyed and have a great 2006.

Zaw

UPDATE: Some other great thoughts on 2005 and tips on 2006.

• 100 things we didn't know this time last year
• Party like it's 2006

4INFO on Flickr

Fun on Flickr, put up some photos of 4INFO.

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called 4INFO In Action. Make your own badge here.

Taxation Without Representation

I was driving down 101 today...actually driving is a strong word, stopped is a better word.

Anyways, I was sitting behind a car that had DC license plates and noticed the tagline below:

I'd never even heard about this, but I thought it was pretty darn funny and a great political statement. For more, here is an article on the license plates from CNN.

"March of the Penguins" a must see

I saw March of the Penguins this weekend and it was absolutely amazing. It was one of those movies that anyone can enjoy. The theatre was filled with laughter as penguin after penguin slid on their bellies down ice sheets and with moments of total silence as the male penguins braced together to survive -80 temperatures after going 3 months without food protecting their eggs.

Update: Yahoo! has a story saying that March of the Penguins might become the #2 documentary of all time.

To find the March of the Penguins playing closest to you, text message "penguins [insert your city or zip]" to 4INFO (44636). More info on how to find movie times using text messaging here.

Technorati Tags:
4INFO, March of the Penguins, Movies, SMS

Update on Gladwell's "Gut Instinct" Theories

As promised, here are some thoughts and comments on the last Silicon Forum with Malcolm Gladwell. See my previous post here.

Thoughts on Gladwell's talk:

- Coming into the talk, I had thought that Gladwell (like many other writers) would focus on how to best use gut instinct to make decisions. I was surprised when he started by listing several examples where gut instinct actually impedes a rational decision making process.

- This is from memory, so the facts may be a little shaky:

• Only when the New York Philharmonic started using screens during auditions were women first admitted. Now women comprise over 50% of the orchestra.
• Of the CEO's in the Fortune 500, an disproportionate number are both male and over 6 feet 2 inches tall. I think the number was 90%.
• When doing blind voice samples, surgeons that portray a more aggressive tone during their first meeting with a patient are statistically more likely to be sued for malpractice. In fact, this is one of the only statistically significant factors ever found.

- Based on these facts, Gladwell actually argued that we should learn to control and rely less and less on our gut instinct. He said that gut instinct increases the possibility that internal biases, that we pretend we don't have, become a factor.

I agree with this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as being blindfolded for every interview. Gut instinct, when used correctly, can be used to make important and time-critical decisions when information is lacking. Biases are a separate issue. People have many different sorts of biases: height, weight, sex, race, looks all play a factor even if we pretend that they do not matter. Overcoming this biases is not as simple as being blindfolded. Completing higher education, being exposed to diverse people, and learning to think with an open mind seem to have a higher likelihood of having an impact.