blog.emilykwan.com

HotOrNot case study

emily — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:48:52 +0000

Interesting read about HotOrNot. Rumor has it Hotornot is making 20 million dollar per year.
http://www.startup-review.com/blog/hotornotcom-case-study-mixing-free-and-premium-services.php/trackback/

they walk among us and many work retail!

emily — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:51:06 +0000

They Walk Among Us !!!

I was at the checkout of a K-Mart. The clerk rang up $46.64 charge. I gave her a fifty dollar bill. She gave me back $46.64. I gave it back to her and told her that she had made a mistake in MY favor! She became indignant and informed me she was educated, knew what she was doing, and returned the money again. I gave her the money back again.. .same scenario! I departed the store with the $46.64.

I walked into a Mickey D’s with a “buy-one-get-one-free” coupon for a sandwich. I handed it to the girl and she looked over at a little chalkboard that said “buy one-get one free.” ”They’re already buy-one-get-one-free”, she said, “so I guess they’re both free”! She handed me my free sandwiches and I walked out the door.

They Walk Among Us and Many Work Retail

One day I was walking down the beach with some friends when one of them shouted, “Look at that dead bird!” Someone looked up at the sky and said, “Where?”

They Walk Among Us!

While looking at a house, my brother asked the real estate agent which direction was north because, he explained, he didn’t want the sun waking him up every morning. She asked, “Does the sun rise in the north?” When my brother explained that the sun rises in the east, and has for sometime, she shook her head and said, “Oh I don’t keep up with that stuff.”

They Walk Among Us!!

I used to work in technical support for a 24/7 call center. One day I got a call from an individual who asked what hours the call center was open. I told him, “The number you dialed is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” He responded, “Is that Eastern or Pacific time?” Wanting to end the call quickly, I said, “Uh, Pacific.”

They Walk Among Us!

My sister has a lifesaving tool in her car designed to cut through a seat belt if she gets trapped. She keeps it in the trunk.

They Walk Among Us!

My friends and I were on a beer run and noticed that the cases were discounted 10%. Since it was a big party, we bought 2 cases. The cashier multiplied 2 times 10% and gave us a 20% discount.

They Walk Among Us!

I couldn’t find my luggage at the airport baggage area, so I went to the lost luggage office and told the woman there that my bags never showed up. She smiled and told me not to worry because she was a trained professional and I was in good hands. ”Now,” she asked me, has your plane arrived yet?”

They Walk Among Us!

While working at a pizza parlor I observed a man ordering a small pizza to go. He appeared to be alone and the cook asked him if he would like it cut into 4 pieces or 6 pieces. He thought about it for some time before responding. “Just cut it into 4 pieces; I don’t think I’m hungry enough to eat 6 pieces.”

They Do Walk Among Us!

Funny Bumper Sticker

emily — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 06:42:57 +0000

You see those family / kids’ activity stickers on the rear windows of vehicles everywhere; you may even have one on your car. So far, this one is my personal favorite …

Wii second shipment date?

emily — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:48:39 +0000

Anyboy know when is the wii second shipment date? I missed the Nov 19 big day and I want to get my Wii badly…

Easy Mental Multiplication Trick

emily — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 03:54:32 +0000

Easy Mental Multiplication Trick

How to transform a multiplication into addition through the drawing of a stool. It works with any numbers if you keep the right partition. You can verify with your calculator!

Easy Mental Multiplication Trick - video powered by Metacafe

Startup links

emily — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:01:54 +0000

This provides free wiki hosting and it will do the adsense on the side.

http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia

And this just provide web 2.0 companies listing.

http://www.allthingsweb2.com/

Code sharing web sites

emily — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 09:31:20 +0000

I just created a code sharing and exchange web site. Currently, it just has some articles about Ruby performance tuning. I will put more articles there for different languages and system issues in the future.
http://hack.emilykwan.com/

AOL releases search data

emily — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 05:59:31 +0000

According to “The Paradigm Shift” a lot of people will mine this data.

Here is the link to get the AOL search data.

http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/

and this is the Bit Torrent link:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/388815

Here is the searchable database for the data.

http://data.aolsearchlogs.com/search/index.cgi

Kids Skating in Bay Area

emily — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 03:17:53 +0000

We are taking the kids to skating. We found 2 places near our home. Both of them have Saturday morning kids session.

The first one is San Jose Skate. http://www.sanjoseskate.com/
397 Blossom Hill Rd., San Jose, CA 95123. 7$ per skater and 1$ for parent to get in. Last time only had about 10 people in the Saturday morning session.

We also went to Cal Skate in Milpitas. 5.75$ per kid and parent is free to get in. Have about 50 kids there every Saturday. Cal Skate Of Milpitas, 980 Los Coches St, Milpitas, CA 95035

Without a doubt, Cal Skate of Milpitas is more fun than San Jose Skate. At least it is cheaper.

Seven things you need to know about your next big startup idea

emily — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 22:00:07 +0000

From http://blog.labnotes.org/2006/08/04/seven-things-you-need-to-know-about-your-next-big-startup-idea/

VC funding is not a liquidation event. When you’re playing in an emerging market, the most you can do is speculate. VC rounds are hard numbers, but they’re not market intelligence, unless you’re price shopping for interest rate. Borrowing money is not the definition of success, it’s a sign that you’re not making a profit.

Search is not broken. Search works great for most people most of the time. There’s a few places where search can improve, and you can round up the corners. But if you understand that it’s not broken, just has some untapped niche markets, you’ll be able to cost it better.

There’s no bottomless pit of attention. We have not found a cure for sleep, and people still don’t have more spare time to divert more attention to more services. Attention is hard to find. And what TechCrunch gives this week, TechCrunch takes away next week when someone outdoes you with better gradients.

All problems are interesting to solve. Some problems are also profitable to solve. It depends on how cheaply you can do it in the face of mounting competition. Yes, you can make a boatload of money dominating in the software industry, but even Microsoft’s ticket for success was bought for cheap. The Web is not different.

Objects in the mirror look closer than they are. Craigslist, Evite and Yahoo Groups didn’t just happen, they took years to build up the audience. And it will take you years to build up your audience, and a smaller one if you’re trying to win users away.

People are intelligently lazy. In VC pitches people have a tagging problem they can intelligently solve by being lazy and using your service. In real life, people have real problems and they’re intelligently lazy enough to ignore your service.

All the good ideas are taken. Launching on TechCrunch a week ahead of your competitors is not being first to market. It’s being late to market by five years.

And what about the fallacy of ads? I don’t believe in that. Ads are a source of revenue and you can make profit. Provided that limited attention spread over years is enough to make your non-interesting solution profitable after you pay back the debt. It’s the other variables of the equation you need to pay attention to.

And last but not least, if you’re doing anything in the architecture of participation economy by leveraging user generated content to maximize the wisdom of crowd, maybe you should listen to the wisdom of crowd first. Read some blogs even if you don’t like what people have to say.