Ferry Mulyono

Chicken and Egg

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:42:00 -0700

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Photograph by jangrk

You might have heard this phrase before. It is a very common, yet very difficult question to answer. As abstract as it sounds, and yet we met such cases almost everywhere in our lives. Would you, as a consumer, visit a mall that has very limited amounts of tenants who offers the product you need? On the other hand, would you, as a seller, open a store in a mall that has very limited amounts of visitors who might be interested to buy your products?

This kind of problem is commonly known as Two-Sided Market. It is a condition where the market has two different sided, and each side benefits from the other side mutually. Did you know that Sony loses money everytime they sell their Playstation? At first, it might not made any sense. How can Sony run such business and still survives? Why should they do it anyway if they lose money? The most rational thing to do is to cease the product instantly right? Well, you're not seeing the whole market. In Sony Playstation case, the two-sided market consists of gamers and game developers. Gamers benefit from the vast variety of game available in the market; plenty of games they could play (After all, it's the reason they bought the console, right?) Game developers, on the other hand, benefit from crowded market as their target; logically they would choose to develop their game for game consoles which has the most players. At this point, classic chicken-or-egg problem arise. How do you find the equilibrium to balance each sides?

Sony implements a smart strategy by subsidizing one side. In this case, Sony subsidize gamers purchasing Playstation by selling it in the retail price lower than the manufacturing cost, which in return costs Sony for each console they sold. The question is, how do they make profit at all? Sony charges expensive fee for game developers to obtain SDK (Software Development Kit) and publishing their games. As far as I know, the SDK itself costs around $8,000 - $11,000 depending on the agreement. This way, Sony made handsome revenue that covers their loss in their console sales. Another benefits of charging expensive fee to the game developers is they could maintain high-standard of the game quality, because small game developers would not be able to afford the fee just to try out the market; the investment they made is quite high, so they would make sure that the game they released is the best-quality they could produce.

Other example includes real-estate developers. The market involves house owners, and commercial property owners. House owners benefit if there are many commercial facilities (foods, retail stores, entertaintment, etc) available in the area. Deserted area would not interest many house owners afterall, because once they live there, it would be very inconvenient for them to travel just to eat or do other activities. On the other hand, commercial property owners are interested in the area with many house owners, because they're looking forward to run their business in the crowded area to achieve maximum revenue. In order to have sustainable ecosystem, equilibrium must be found between house owners and commercial property owners, and it's a difficult task for the real-estate developers.

There are many more cases where two-sided market could apply. There are many strategies too. Similar market could be tackled with many different strategies, depending on the market behaviour and many other variables. Any other strategy you could think of?

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Posterous Bookmarklet

Mon, 30 May 2011 18:34:00 -0700

Finally Posterous has a way to share posts without having to fire up email clients, or visiting the website. You can either use bookmarket or if you used Chrome (which you should!), use its plugin.

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AITINDO New Office Arrangement

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:50:00 -0700

It's been over a year since we moved here, so we decided to do a little rearrangement for the office positions. Here are how things look like before.

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Here are things after we moved it around.

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PS: Only Maria's position stays the same; I suppose it's the best position available (Fortress of solitude)

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Spam-free with Bouncr

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:29:00 -0700

Nowadays, many companies started to do anything to distribute their info and products to the mass. Back in the days, they would mail hundreds of thousands of catalogues through postal services. Fast-forward to present days, companies would implement membership or registration system in order to acquire your email, which “allows” them to send you their promotional info.

I think it's a common thing to do, and being in advertising industry, I totally gets their intention. However, having OCD of getting promotional emails gets me annoyed to enter a portal which requires me to register to download their PDF or anything.

If you're facing the same issue with me, try Bouncr. It allows you to create alias/mask for your email that you can dispose anytime you want. It's very easy to use. Just enter your real email address, and you'll get your mask that you can give away to anyone.

See the full gallery on Posterous

And the best part is, you can unlink the address anytime you want by using the link you get from Bouncr. Oh, don't bother to try the email in the screenshot, I disabled it already.

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QR Code

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:00:00 -0700

Have you ever seen any of this before?

This is called QR Code (QR stands for Quick Response). It's purpose is similar to barcode (Normally seen in almost every items in the stores), which is to store information in a standardized manner, and easy to scan. However it is different in the application of the code itself. Barcode can only contain up to 20 digits maximum (Manufacturers embed barcodes as identification code, which consists of unique sets of numbers usually registered in local/nation-wide directory encoded into according to barcode specification).

QR Code, however, can contain more than 7,000 characters, and it can be scanned faster and tolerates angle displacement scanning (in contrast to barcode scanning, where it has to be scanned in certain angle limitation). These attribute allows QR Codes to be used in many variation. One of the most common application is to share URL using modified artworks of QR Codes.

Do you know that many smart phones nowadays, especially Blackberry, have built-in QR Code scanner? Blackberry handsets, in particular, uses QR Codes to easily share Blackberry PIN Numbers or Blackberry Groups. Go to Blackberry Messenger application, try to invite new contact, and select scan PIN barcodes. Aim your phone to the QR code, and it will automatically detect the QR Code (it should be in camera mode right now). Check the screenshots below.

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Happy scanning =)

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AITINDO Signage (Part 2)

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:32:00 -0700

In addition to our own artworks few days ago, we have added small ornaments to highlight our logo.

We finally have our own whiteboard too in our Arena.

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AITINDO Signage (Part 1)

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:44:00 -0700

Finally our office has a small signage in front of our meeting room. The artwork is performed by ourself late at night, so never mind the details and glitches. More ornaments to come soon. Next: Our meeting room

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Mac OS X Apps Roundup

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:36:00 -0700

Cinch

This is definitely is a must for layout-OCD users who likes to use full screen apps. One of the thing I dislike about OSX is the apps tends to be cluttered (my personal opinion coming from Windows world). This small utilities will save you a great deal of time resizing windows. Just drag the windows to pre-configured sides and it will resize automatically.

TotalFinder

I would say that this is Finder on steroids. It has all features you'd never imagined you'd need, but it totally made sense! Tab windows (instead of cluttered multiple windows), dual-mode (comparing two folder contents side-by-side), cut-and-paste (ala Windows).

TextMate

This little guy here definitely is the winner of Mac OS X IDE. It can be as simple as you want it to be, and it can be as sophisticated as you need it to be. It has many open-source plugins actively maintained and developed by its community.

Google Chrome

Still looking for fastest and easiest browsers? I know I no longer does, for now. On any normal days, I usually open more than 4 browser windows, each has up to 10 tabs on average. And to make it worse, I don't shut down my notebook when I'm in a rush (which happens quite a lot). So far, the only browser that could stood up against my torture is Google Chrome. It has the best start-up performance, and long-run performance. It has, by far, the fastest Javascript engine. It has separated process for each tabs, which leads to tremendous stability (When one tab is unresponsive, nothing else is affected). And finally, in the long run, it has smallest memory leak.

If any of sentences above doesn't make any sense to you, it doesn't matter. Conclusion: use Google Chrome!

Sparrow

I'm a big fan of Gmail. I used it for my personal emails, and all of my office's emails. Many people have the same preferences like I do, for a good reason too (I don't think I have to go down with it). But the problem is, I need my email to be more than just a web-mail. I need to get notifications when new emails arrives. I need to be able to draft emails offline. I know those features can be achieved using Offline mode which is available for quite a while. But the most important thing is I need to do it all out of the browsers!

Sparrow definitely is the most comfortable email client I met. It has active development too, and it is tightly bound to Gmail.

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AITINDO is hiring web developers

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:51:00 -0700

We are currently hiring full-time web developers with strong basic programming skills. The basic skillset we expected is PHP/MySql for back-end programming and XHTML/CSS2/jQuery for front-end programming, but we challenge you to explore other possibilities such as NoSql technologies, Social media integration with Facebook and Twitter, and latest web standards such as HTML5/CSS3.

Fresh-graduates are welcome to apply as we implemented exciting working and learning environment suitable for anyone ranging from beginner to experts.

Post your CV now to ferry.mulyono [ at ] aitindo.com

A little background about our company

AITINDO is a web-development company established on 2006. Our office is based in West Jakarta, Indonesia. Our services includes web design, development, and maintenance. Our key strength is innovation and maintaining quality based on web standards. Our clients ranging from banking, corporate, retail, photography, real estate, and many more. We also obtained trust from several large agencies to support their digital campaign productions. Along the way, we also produced several products including Benih (http://benih.com), FIMELA (http://fimela.com), and Filmoo (http://filmoo.com)

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Tiny Wings (iOS)

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:59:00 -0800

Another simple yet addictive game recommended by my partner.

The game is very simple. The main character is a tiny bird that couldn't fly. It aims to move forward and fly as high and as fast as possible using gravity and terrains. The birs will slowly move along te slope automatically. When the bird flew as the result of its high speed, tap the screen to dlap its wings thus resulting the bird to fell into the ground rapidly. Kinda hard to explain, but you'll get hold of it soon enough once you tried it.

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Angry Birds Infographics

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:47:00 -0800

(Image courtesy of The Oatmeal)

In-depth analysis of each angry birds (sarcastically speaking)

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Pho Anh (Pantai Indah Kapuk)

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:15:28 -0800

See the full gallery on Posterous

Ice Milk Tea
For some reason, it tastes like local moccacinoe brand

Tomato Rice with Chicken
Overall it's okay, but nothing I can brag about. It looks and tastes like mild-fried rice. It's served with additional vinegar that makes great companion for the chicken.

Pho Bo
Its my sis' actually, I took the liberty of taking the picture. Don't know how it tasted, but it doesn't look too good.

The place is quite nice though if you're looking for a meeting point or place to chill.

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Trees of Doom

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:27:11 -0800

This is the latest game I downloaded in my iPod, and it's highly addictive!
In a way, the gameplay is somewhat similar with Doodle Jump (One of the top selling game in iTunes Store).
The game is about a ninja trying to go to the top by climbing and hopping on two trees. The control is very easy; tap on either side of the tree. There are few obstacles, such as slippery goo, canon balls, and many more. The one that I find very challenging is the bees, as they can slowly but sure chasing you up if you don't move fast.

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