A dreamer

What is the hottest buzz today? Maybe, Google+? On the first day Google announced the beta testing of so-called, "Facebook killer", Google+, 7 million people signed up for it. Everyone wanted to be invited to be the first of a new trend. Probably, they are sick and tired of Facebook. They might have been burned through spamming and hacking on Facebook. Or, they might be expecting something really big from Google which failed to do so, so far. Last week, when Google announced their earning, the new CEO boasted about 10 million signed users for Google+. And suddenly people started whispering about the future of Facebook. Is it too late for Facebook to go public now? Did they loose at least 10 billion dollars in valuation of the stock? Is Facebook still worth $100B?

Wow! People are really jumping around to find what's hot or what's cool... It's not only the people who are going crazy about this. It's the investors, individuals and professionals, who go crazier about this. They are ready to pour in hundreds of millions of dollars and leap 10 times profit within a year or two by selling the company or push the company go public. Who's then the really victims? And who are the real winners?

I think whoever keeps the "coolness" from the start to the end will be the winner. If you are a risk taker and willing to loose, please hop on this cool trendy stock or business. if you are a true and wise investor, forget about these businesses. If you already invested in Facebook, get out and run. If you are investing in Google because you saw a huge potential from Google+, change your mind.

Find something that's lasting. The rule of temperature. What gets hot fast cools down fast. What gets cool fast will loose coolness fast. Look at the ocean and learn from it. Life is like the ocean. Investment should be like water temperature.

I'm still dreaming about how I can find the true water like business and pour my heart to it...

Monday, November 29, 2010

Java Chaos or Freedom?

Should I use Struts or Spring MVC?
Should I use Ant, Ivy, Maven, or Grable for my build system?
Should I use CVS, SVN, Perforce, GIT, or Mercurial for SCM?
How about search engine - pure Lucene, Solr, or propriety solution such as FAST or Google?
Application server - Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss, Tomcat, or Jetty?
On the database end, Oracle, MySQL, or MS SQL?
Should I use Hibernate, DataNucleus, Toplink, or JPA?
GWT seems to be a good candidate for RIA or Flex or HTML5?
Spring Roo seems to be fascinating in some sense to generate lots of code with convention!
How about Python, Ruby, JRuby, Groovy, Scala, or Grail for functional programming?
On top of that, you've got to learn BPEL, WebSerivces, Portal, CMS and EIS to work on the enterprise level application development.
SQL, GQL, XPath, XQuery are bonus to work with XML, aren't they?

Holy macaroni!!!

How in the world can I master all of these and get down to work without breaking stuff?
Yeah, I have so much freedom and a pool of technologies to choose from.
But what should I use? When should I use one over the other? How much cost will each technology be?

I don't like .NET even though I grew up with Microsoft technologies. But, when I think about the chaos or freedom(?) I have in the Java world, sometimes, I think about going back to .NET or PHP. Not that I really want to do it!

Just dreaming of the world where I have just the right amount of freedom without chaos, but still being able to use the tools I like...
zzzzz

Friday, November 19, 2010

Premium Advertisers or less unsold inventory?

I'm wondering what is the math behind this formula. A: Premium Advertisers. B: Less Unsold Inventory. A > B, A < B, or A=B? Of course, no one can answer this question with so much confidence. However, this is the type of question most of the publishers might have been thinking about very seriously.

I noticed some CEO(s) are scared of losing premium advertisers for the sake of selling more inventory. The reason is very simple. If unsold inventory is sold with a discount, the premium advertisers will ask for the discount as well. I think this is not about the philosophy but rather a mathematical problem.

One think a company can do in order to find a better solution is to simulate both solutions within a fixed period of time with enough audience. But, before coming to a conclusion or even starting the simulation, we can take a look at the current trend of advertisement.

Until recently, TV was the most visited advertisers' destination. Think about the Super Bowl ads. A couple of million dollars for a 20 second ad? It's insane. The effect or ROI? No one really knows, because it's all dependent on how we measure the success and how long. However, if we calculate the effect of the advertisement in a purely revenue and expense sense, it won't be so difficult to figure out what advertisement is the best solution for a company. Anyways, not like the TV ads, Internet advertisement has become one of the most dominant players in the space these days. A boots shop in a small town in Texas started advertising themselves in the small space on the "paid search" side of Google. A big company, such as Target is putting millions of dollars on Google or Yahoo paid advertisement section.

Considering the growth rate of this Internet based advertisements, we can tell how the advertisement industry may look like in the next 10 to 20 years. Is there any player among them who is making a significant amount of money from display ads, I may ask. The reason being, display ads in a sense represents the premium or fixed amount advertisement on the Internet. Whereas, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are betting hugely on the auction based advertisement. We don't know the result yet. But, we can see who is becoming the winner.

Now, I'm thinking about the hybrid solution. What if we give the upper hand to the premium advertisers and auction off the rest of unsold inventory? Meaning, if you want to pay the premium, you're guaranteed to take the spot. If you're a penny saver, still you can take some space and attract visitors with less expense. Doesn't it sound like a "Win-Win" strategy?

I'm still dreaming.
zzzz

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Global Redeeming System

It was about a month ago. I had a chance to talk with one of my coworkers. We were chitchatting about this and that. It was then that my radar suddenly raised an alarm and rang a bell... Wait, what did you say? That was my reaction. I couldn't believe I was hearing something that could be a really, really big idea.

It is about a redeeming system. Yeah, I know there are a lot of them. Starbucks, Tully, and CoffeeBeans have those. Airlines have their own frequent flier programs. AMEX has it's own redeeming system. I accept that.

But, wait a minute. Is there a system that people can use cross business wise? Let's say, I went McDonald for a new menu, McRib with french fries. Of course, I'd like to have something more than hamburger which is I want to know if I can store some points and redeem it later. I'd like to know if I go to Starbucks and use and points that I accumulated from McDonald. I'd like to use the redeeming points I collected from Costco shopping towards an airline ticket for a trip to Paris. I want to get some discount when I go to Cheesecake Factory because I've been there multiple times before.

There are so many of these local redeeming systems that are not usable cross-business. I also don't want to have 567 redeeming cards in my little wallet. I just want to have one card and one system.

What about businesses? Why does each business have to come up with their own system when they can just register themselves and configure the rules. They can easily become a member of the Global Redeeming System and let people know that we are a member of GRS, therefore, you can use the card you already have to accumulate points. Some business may want to make an alliance so that customers can use the redeeming points from each other.

New small businesses can easily participate in this program without creating an expensive infrastructure. Just visit the website and become a member. One more thing to do. Just put a sign, "GRS member" out on the window where people can see it like "Zagat rated" for restaurants.

If we are talking about 1% redeeming point for every purchase being made in the United States, considering the GDP is around $15,000,000,000,000. We're talking about $150,000,000,000 business each year. It's an astronomical number, isn't it?

Is it realistic? Maybe, to some extent. Will business adopt this system by replacing what they have? I'm very positive, because there is a huge leverage effect by joining forces and control their rules. Will people like it? Of course? I'd love to use it and use my redeeming points towards travel every year. If I spend $50,000 a year for whatever reason, I would get $500 bonus airline ticket? Yeah...

Well, it maybe just another dream...
zzz