isabel wang's blog

This site may harm your computer

2009-01-31T11:00:07-05:00

In his post on GDrive yesterday, Om Malik wrote that he didn't like the idea at all:

My biggest problem with GDrive is that it would come from Google. As my friend Mark Evans points out, “Before you know it, Google has become a daily and integral part of your digital portfolio. Not that this a bad thing given Google’s products are really good but it should make you think about how dependent you can become on Google for pretty much everything. The downside is you can lose access to a lot of essential information if Google, for whatever reason, locks you out.”

How timely of Google to show Om less than 24 hours later that we have more immediate worries than "Google one day going too far, and getting away with it".

Until I saw Robin Wauters' Techcrunch post, I wondered if I could have done something wrong. Hmm. Maybe I should be backing up my Gmail messages and Google Docs.

I haven't come so far after all

2009-01-07T16:32:31-05:00

In 1986, having just landed in Baltimore from Taipei, I spoke almost no English and couldn't finish the simplest sentence without getting stuck on some unknown word or phrase. One by one I looked them up in my Chinese/English dictionary.

Last week, having just landed in DC from Taipei, I thought of my 10th grade self, who used to live 40 some miles away. I had met the folks from Civic Taipei during my trip and promised to send them a quick guide on uploading online videos. Disoriented from jetlag, I'm not sure I realized I'd be answering their questions in Chinese. But then a Chinese follow-up email landed in my inbox. I'd apparently taken on a nearly insurmountable task.

Typical. File. Formats. Did I know how to say any part of that in Chinese? Copy embed code and paste in HTML? Yikes. Google Translator lookups are a whole lot faster than flipping through a paper dictionary, but it's still a struggle to string bits and pieces of text together in a way that sounds right. It brought back such vivid memories of having done this before. I am almost exactly where I was, geographically and linguistically, 23 years ago.

"That Patrick Mara, he gets things done"

2008-09-09T21:53:42-04:00

A friend who recently became an American citizen voted for the first time today, in a primary election that hardly anyone else showed up for. The low turnout, along with his being one of DC's handful of registered Republicans (29,622, according to the Washington Post), gave his vote real weight in the Carol Schwartz vs Patrick Mara race for City Council.

In spite of the enormous number of posters that Carol Schwartz (the incumbent, who's been active in DC politics since 1974) blanketed our neighborhood with, he voted for Mara because of one single postcard he got in the mail. It announced Mara's unsurprising support for the McCain/Palin ticket and arrived two days after news broke on McCain's VP pick.

That Patrick Mara, he gets things done, my friend said. Think about the planning, the effort, that must have gone into delivering such a timely message. It shows preparedness. Commitment. All that good stuff. (Mara's bio does say he's an Eagle Scout!)

It's so interesting, how converts are won by ad campaigns. It's not all about reach, frequency, bright colors, attention getting taglines, etc. Sometimes timing is all that matters.

21st century window shopping

2008-08-28T14:54:18-04:00

From Gib Olander's MediaPost article on local search:

According to comScore, nearly 90% of people will research online and buy offline. In fact, the trend is so popular that it was recently coined, "ROBO," (Research Online Buy Offline) by Yahoo's GM of Local, Frazier Miller... ROBO is changing consumers' definition of "window-shopping." Now the Internet is becoming the vantage point through which consumers gauge the retail landscape.

And from WCBSTV, on the exterior touch screens at Ralph Lauren Rugby's Manhattan store:

If you're on the outside looking in, not only can you find out how much the new fall looks cost but now you can buy them all without ever stepping foot inside the store. It's 21st century window shopping. Just like you would on your computer screen at home, shoppers can view images of everything Rugby carries and more. When you see a product you like, just touch it and with a swipe of a credit card it's yours, any time -- day or night.

PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff thinks this kind of self-service technology will become increasingly popular because it puts consumers in control.

So we'll be searching online online for offline stores that we'd visit to buy things online? Or could mobile devices like the iPhone blur the line between being on- versus offline?

What if I could start at Ralph Lauren Rugby's website, pick out a list of items I'd like to try on, send them to a shopping cart on my phone, then purchase the outfits I want - either right in the dressing room or hours after I've left the store?

Thoughts like this make me glad that I have an iPhone.

The real Easter is in the computer

2008-03-29T00:31:15-04:00

1. From Slate.com:

Charlotte (age 5) dangled Easter (a Webkinz bunny) out the window. Then let go. Tears. Pandemonium. This is precisely the stuffed animal death that parents fear. Except Eva (age 7) made Charlotte see that it wasn't in fact a death. The real Easter, she convinced her weeping sister, was not the lost bunny. The real Easter was in the computer. The run-over toy didn't matter, really, because it was just that, a toy, "like there could be a toy of you and me, but that wouldn't be the real you and me," as Eva explained it.

2. I recently read Altered Carbon, a sci fi novel in which 25th century technology allows any person's digitized consciousness to be re-installed in any organic or synthetic body - which has no more significance than a Webkinz bunny. Those who can afford proper backup are able to survive any disaster without losing more than a few hours of life experience.

3. Yesterday Sophy sent me this New York Times article on SugarSync, which backs up your files from and makes them available to multiple PCs, Macs and phones. 10 GB of storage costs $25/year, and 250GB costs $250.

I wonder how much space it'd take to digitize the real you?

How to fight commoditization, 140 characters at a time

2008-02-08T20:35:03-05:00

My mom said it makes no sense to go to a bookstore waaay out in Dan Shui, which is about a 30 minute subway ride from Taipei. In the pouring rain, especially. And when there are dozens of bookstores right across the street. Did I even want to buy any books?

But I'd been following book686's sometimes poignant, occasionally hilarious and often philosophical Twitter updates. I had to see the place.

I ended up getting two books that I could have bought across the street. I could have had a latte next door, too. Which would have felt more like an errand than a pilgrimage.

Einstein's five houses vs Kevin's five servers

2008-01-31T14:49:11-05:00

I was reading The Houdini Solution; the last chapter ends with Einstein's Puzzle. Kevin says it can only be solved by 2% of the world's population, but this website claims that the average time to solve it is about an hour.

In the riddle, there are 5 houses of 5 different colors with owners of 5 different nationalities. Each owns a different kind of pet, prefers a different kind of drink and smokes a different brand of cigar. It took at least two hours before I figured out who owns the fish.

On the other hand, I came up with the answer to Kevin's version of the puzzle in 5 minutes. All it took was writing all possible values for each variable in 5 columns and crossing out options as I read the list of clues.

I've always had more admiration for fast thinkers who can dream up creative solutions on the fly, and less patience for methodical people who are obsessed with developing procedures. Now I see the value of having reproducible processes.

Who would have thought?

2008-01-31T10:05:37-05:00

I came across this ancient Washington Post ad on Flickr. I had never imagined 1920s businessmen having Chinese food for lunch.

Image from rockcreek's Flickr stream

Out of curiosity I looked up "1920s Chinese restaurant" and found the Google Books' preview for China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West:

"The Los Angeles City Directory for 1924 listed 28 Chinese restaurants. The telephone directories for the city of Philadelphia for 1920 included 8 Chinese restaurants... In 1929, when the Chinese and Japanese numbered only 2.3% of California's population, they served 4.3% of all restaurant meals consumed."

The author goes on to mention Forbidden City, a San Francisco night club with a Chinese chorus line, and New Shanghai Terrace Bowl, a restaurant that solicited non-Chinese customers by handing out coupons in department stores.

But neither example is as intriguing as the Republic Cafe, a non-Asian-sounding venue that advertised Asian food to a non-Asian audience. Somehow I've always thought of DC as a less culinarily adventurous place than California or New York, but apparently that's not true!

Help them help you

2008-01-28T01:06:35-05:00

There's an interesting article in this week's New York Times Magazine about Kiva, a microfinance non-profit that matches sponsors with third-world entrepreneurs. The organization has generated so much interest among supporters that it sometimes runs out of loan-seekers to give money to.

Kiva's lenders get regular updates from the businesses they sponsor; 99.84% do well enough to repay their loans. How awesome would it feel to know that you contributed to such a track record?

The Kiva story reminded me of two related experiences I've had in the non-profit world:

1. A local charity acknowledged my contribution to its Feline Fund with a form letter about its rescue of a... Rottweiler. Over the holidays, it sent out a direct mail solicitation featuring fictitious animals that have never come through its shelter.

The organization's management laments that given their limited budget, it's tough to find funding for systems and processes that improve the level of accountability they provide. The question is, can they (and the countless other traditional charities in their shoes) compete against Kiva-like upstarts without modernizing their operations?

2. Last Friday another organization emailed me with the good news that they've managed to increase the value of my two donations by more than 100x. They plan to use the proceeds to help old-school non-profits reach beyond philanthropy-as-they-know-it by providing necessary technology tools.

I found out about Grassroots.org through DomainNameNews back in December. I was psyched to hear about their Domains for Change program. Instead of letting my unused domain names expire, it seemed like a better idea to donate them for a tax deduction.

I had picked up CheapStudios.com and ImportLiquor.com, among other domains, in GoDaddy's aftermarket fire sales for $15 or $20 each. I'd read that "generic" domains are valuable, but it turned out I had no idea how to unlock their value. They sold for $2,500 and $3,500 in this week's DomainFest live auction.

Grassroots.org says other donors have had great success as well, and more Domains for Change auctions are on the way. So if you've got domains you aren't putting to use, talk to Mary. You could end up making a surprising amount of impact on Grassroots.org, the 1,000 non-profits they serve, those organizations' constituents - and your tax return!

The core problem

2008-01-25T13:03:44-05:00

1. In 2005, Basex, an analyst firm, estimated that interruptions consume 28% of a knowledge worker's day. Basex CEO Jonathan Spira lamented that whether you're at home, in your office, or working from a client site, "the likelihood of being able to complete a task without interruption is nil." He recommended "finding a place without landline phones, mobile phone reception, Wi-Fi and possibly even people."

2. According to UC Irvine professor Gloria Marks, Spira was mistaken. The good news from her 2005 paper (PDF) was, the likelihood of a task being completed without interruption is actually 42.9%! On the downside, the type of interruptions considered in Basex's report (incoming phone calls, emails, etc) represents only 52% total interruptions observed in her study. Workers are almost equally likely (48%) to self-interrupt by switching between tasks.

3. If we roughly assume that internal and external interruptions are equally disruptive, a worker is left with just 46.2% of his day for productive work.

(Marks' study showed that on average, workers take 22 minutes to get back to the task at hand after being interrupted by someone else, versus 29 minutes after switching tasks on their own. In addition, only 47.6% of self-interrupted tasks are resumed on the same day, versus 53.3% after external interruptions. So while workers experience slightly fewer incidences of self-interruption, they are more damaging on a per unit basis than external interruptions.)

4. So multiple monitors might be a must-have for anyone who wants to get anything done. Lifehacker reported a couple of years ago that having two monitors increases the rate of task completion by 20%-30%. Maybe the additional display space reduces attention-shifting frequency? I definitely tend to leave half-read/half-written documents all over different windows and browser tabs. If I could see everything all at once, would I be more likely to finish what I started? Probably.

5. So I was telling Dmitri that maybe the real message behind this chart isn't his software's ability to do more. Instead, it prevents self-interruption by corralling the user's attention. Maybe that's why customers of Salesforce and Zoho, among others, have asked for Relenta-like email/CRM consolidation under the same interface? And maybe it wasn't just marketing-speak when Dmitri insisted that not only does he eat his own dog food, he wouldn't have any free time ever without Relenta.

6. I feel like I understand marketing so much better after reading It's Not Luck. Everyone talks about focusing on benefits vs features, but the book goes farther in pointing out that benefits only matter if they address customers' "core problems". Nobody wants CRM software as much they want more free time, so CRM apps are valuable only to the extent that they help users get more done (and hopefully close more deals) in less time. It sounds obvious, but I don't think I've ever thought of it that way before.