James Hong

More on Happiness

2009-05-16T14:56:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short blog post about happiness where I said that happiness = reality - expectations. My basic point was that as long as you have low expectations from things, you are more bound to be pleasantly surprised (and happy) than disappointed.

There's a fascinating piece in The Atlantic about a Harvard study that has been going for 72 years now, following the lives of 200+ men. The paper talks a bit about what variables made for happier people. Below is a short clip of the current leader of the study (for 42 years). I highly recommend people watch it and read the article!

I've been wanting Photo Phonebook for a while

2009-02-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jeremy Liew for connecting me to the kids that run a small iphone app shop called Zintin.

I came to them with an idea for an app that i've always wanted. It is basically an app that sucks photos from a centralized directory (and also from facebook) to my phone.. I always liked having my friend's photos show up when they call, but I am too lazy to take their pictures and set it up for each and every contact I have. This app scrapes around to get their pictures for me.

Now I have about 40% of my contacts with pictures in a few minutes.

If you have an iphone, please try it out:

http://bit.ly/1agJu5

and if you like it, please retweet my twitter about it!

http://twitter.com/jhong/statuses/1250326351

My economic projections

2009-02-22T17:23:00.000-08:00

I had breakfast with my friend Jeremy Liew this morning, and he mentioned I don't really blog anymore. It seems to me that services like Facebook and Twitter are growing at the expense of blogs because most things i write in my blog could probably be reduced to 140 characters, and that is just plain easier.

In the interest of blogging something meaningful, I've decided to write about what's been on my mind nonstop since selling HOTorNOT in February 2008.. the economy.

I liquidated the majority of my equity holdings last Summer and have been in a cash position ever since. So as the market continues to tank, I should be feeling good, right? Wrong. I've been worried sick that the American Dollar is going to collapse and that cash may be rendered worthless. My fear has grown to the point where even if I have an opinion on what to do, I'm too scared to do it. Deer-in-headlights mode.

Last December, I tried to encourage myself to man up by writing down my investment thesis on paper and stuck it on the wall. Unfortunately, even going to this length didn't change my behavior, and I'm still all cash. But here is what I wrote:

My theory was that we would experience three stages: Deflation, Transition, (Hyper?)Inflation

Stage 1 - Deflation

The economy is still contracting has deleveraging continues to happen. The entire world starts to feel the full impact of increasingly lost jobs, people tightening up their pocketbooks, and mortgages defaulting (at all price levels and in all locations.. and no, San Francisco City is not "special" or "different", just like real estate is NOT always a good investment in the long run.).

As all of this happens, industry slows, commodity prices fall, energy prices fall, and the pains of recession start to be felt. Basically everything falls with a few exceptions like gold, where people who are pulling out of the market flee to for safety. I was actually wrong on this one, I had gold going sideways because i wasn't sure whether downward pressure from economic slowdown or upward pressure from flight to safety would be stronger. It looks like right now, gold is going up up up. Sure wish I'd bought some.

The rest of the world falls too, as their economies are so linked to Western consumption.

Stage 2 - Transisition

As my theory progresses, it gets more controversial. I call this stage "transition" because this is where the balance of power between first world countries and certain second/third world countries shifts.

Ever wonder how empires fall and how other's rise? Like how Spain and Portugal used to be the most powerful nations in the western world, and where are they now, relatively? It happens through dislocations like the one we are having now.

My theory is that as stage 1 starts to end, the world economy starts to pick up. consumption starts picking up. The only problem is that it won't happen uniformly. People in China will start buying more stuff (from themselves), and their economy will start growing like crazy as a result.

In other words, the recovery happens, but mostly in other countries, as their economies have decoupled from ours and they start driving their own demand. In this scenario, commodities and energy prices rise (and will surpass previous highs, including oil), Gold also rises. US equities don't drop anymore, and they might even start growing again, but not at the same rate the rest of world is. (keep in mind, china is still growing even now, just not as fast as they were before. in contrast, the US has been contracting like crazy.)

Stage 3 - (hyper?)inflation

Here's where the scary part comes.

As energy prices jump, but not based on US demand, the cost of energy massively outpaces our ability to afford it. The price of energy is embedded in practically everything you buy, through it's use to process raw goods to powering factories to transporting goods. All of a sudden, things start getting REALLY expensive. The dollar is severely weakened. In order to respond, the government may or may not start printing money like crazy, at levels well beyond what they are doing today. (Despite Monetary and Fiscal policy supposedly being independent in the US, in tough times boundaries tend to break down).

Maybe we don't have Zimbabwean levels of inflation, but maybe we see just a 10x drop in the value of the dollar. In US dollars, things like oil and gold shoot through the roof.

Some people claim that they do not believe it's even possible for the US to experience hyperinflation. Of course, many of them thought the US economy was sound just one year ago. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and I haven't really reached any conclusions.

I don't think it's impossible, the question is just how likely?

What I do know is this.. I can ignore stage 1 and stage 2, but if stage 3 happens, anyone with significant assets that fails to protect him/herself is going to really regret it.

I'm very interested to hear what other people's thoughts are.

update: Heard back from some people, and want to clarify a few things. The timespan in which I see this potentially happening is on the order of decades, not years. I think we are going to be in stage 1 for at least 2-3 if not 5 years. Step 3 also doesn't happen unless the dollar stops being the de facto global currency. Some other currency like the Chinese Yuan would have to take over that role first. Until that happens, I don't see hyperinflation happening in the US.

Back Pain

2009-02-16T20:48:00.001-08:00

I've been having back pain for the last 2.5 years. It started out as a case of sciatica with the pain shooting down might right leg, but that seemed to heal after 4 or 5 months. But even after the sciatic pain went away, i've been experiencing general back pain ever since.

I've tried everything.. Stretching seemed to help a bit, but not a lot. I bought some device called the sacro wedgy that didn't really do too much for me.

Julia recently bought me a book she heard about called "8 steps to a pain free back

This book makes the point that there are many cultures in the world where back pain is not a problem for 95% of the population, regardless of age. The culprit? According to the book, the problem is bad posture. This seems feasible, as I recall my mom complaining about my posture my entire life.

So lately I've started working on my posture and have been doing some of the stretches in the book, which primarily seem to be about decompressing the spine, and I have to admit that I have been feeling a lot better in just a few days. We'll see if that continues or not, but in any case, just thought I'd write about this in case anyone else has chronic back pain. I highly recommend checking out the book.

Here's a talk the author gave at Google last year too, followed by an excerpt from her book.

No more back pain

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Health & Medicine Health & Medicine exercise pain

Stephen Fowler is NOT representative of people in San Francisco

2009-02-09T02:38:00.001-08:00

I just watched an episode of Wifeswap that has gotten a lot of attention recently.

There's a horrible person in Noe Valley named Stephen Fowler who is obnoxious, snotty, mean, and rude beyond imagination.

I really hope people don't watch this show and think this guy is typical for San Francisco. Even here, he's a serious asshole.

And to the Fowlers, as someone who also got an MBA (and spent some time at your alma mater London Business School), let me be the first to tell you that an MBA is hardly an "advanced degree".

Apparently he is a venture partner at some fund called the Fulcrum Fund.

UPDATE: I had videos from YouTube on here, but apparently the production company and ABC had them taken down. Perfect chance to show people clips of their show to grow awareness and interest, and instead they idiotically take it down. Sometimes I wonder if these old media companies realize how shortsighted they and how badly they are shooting themselves in the foot.

There's a blog dedicated to explaining why the dude is a douchebag

Wow...

2008-12-03T17:08:00.000-08:00

Would love to have all the people slamming this dude in the video watch this and see what they have to say now.

This one never gets old..

2008-11-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

It's Big Game week, the week of the year where Cal fans like to rub this video in Stanford's face. Thanks to Youtube, this is now done much easier.

This particular video has the minute of play just prior to The Play, with Elway's spectacular scoring drive that begins with Stanford on the 13 yard line, 4th and 17. Seeing what happened prior to The Play increases the intensity of emotion you experience compared to just watching The Play by itself. If you've only seen the Big Play clip standalone and have never seen Stanford's drive leading up to it, I encourage you to watch this! The second video is the play digitally enhanced so you can see it clearer.

Not that I am the school spirit rah rah type, but.. Go Bears! :)

Just The Play, in enhanced quality:

Oh my god, this is funny

2008-10-07T10:33:00.001-07:00

You can click on the picture to make it bigger.

blah blah blah

2008-10-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long time since I blogged anything meaningful. When I first started this blog, it was primarily for HOTorNOT communication. Once we sold HOTorNOT, I didn’t really have anything to write about. Truth is, I’m not sure anyone even reads this blog anymore since I moved it off of HOTorNOT’s servers and to a different address. If this post seems less coherent than previous ones, it's because I used to write and rewrite and rewrite. For this one I am just writing rants in a cafe.

Anyhow, this morning I loafed around in bed, doing emails and watching the stock market obsessively. By the time I got out of my pajamas around 2pm, I started feeling a bit bad that I’m not really doing anything (but really, why do we all feel pressure to be productive all the time anyway?), I decided I would at least update my blog today.

Since this is a bit forced, I have no particular topic, but just a bunch of random assorted thoughts and announcements.

1. I’m engaged!

Yes it's true. The last of the 2 HOTorNOT guys has finally found true love. I finally have something to put on this domain.

2. Palin

Come on.. SERIOUSLY?!?!?!

The most depressing thing about her interviews with Couric is that if you watch them side by side with Tina Fey’s parody, after a while you can’t really tell which one is the joke. I guess they both are.

Couric couldn’t get any straight answers out of Palin, not even what sorts of materials she reads to learn about foreign policy. “You know, I have lots of sources that I read. Yea, but which one specifically? Yea, well, umm, you know, there are lots of sources out there to read blah blah blah”

Not that all politicians don’t evade the most basic of questions, but for God’s sake, show me that you’re smart by at least doing it well.
And I thought W was oblivious!

3. The Economy / Bailout

The first thing I have to say Is that I’m amazed the guy charged with fixing this issue (Paulson) is one of the guys who helped create the problem. Paulson is reportedly worth over $500MM, and he certainly profited from the regulations that got us where we are today.

Ideologically, I don’t like the idea of a bailout. But I also understand that if there is no bailout, the economy might collapse faster and harder than we can deal with. I agree that we need to do things to slowly ramp things down to avoid massive shocks, but we can’t put a bandaid on things and hope to just go back to business as usual either.

Our economy is fundamentally in trouble right now because we Americans have gotten fat and lazy. Over the past few decades, banks and other credit lenders have had every incentive to get people to spend more and owe more. When deregulation happened that enabled the credit originators to securitize debt and sell the risk to someone else, the credit originators had even more incentive to SELL SELL SELL credit cards, mortgages, etc.. to you and me, the American public.

The worst part of it all is that not only did we collectively sign up for more and more credit, we got used to it. And now like a salesman with a large expense account who just got fired, we have to live with the fact that all we can REALLY afford is ramen.

To be honest, part of me feels that a depression is exactly what this country needs. . because just like a drug addict who has to go through withdrawal the hard way before becoming well again, we can’t expect things to be easy. We’ve been living large for decades now, and unfortunately it’s time to pay the piper. But don’t worry, it’ll be just the wakeup call we need. We’ll wake up poor, start working hard and smart again, and rebuild ourselves. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.
So accept the bailout, but accept the fact that our markets are also still probably inflated and let it drop, and depression may be headed our way no matter what.. because bailout or not, I don’t see credit loosening anytime soon.

4. Why it can be GOOD being an entrepreneur in a shitty economy

So the economy is going to get shittier, and housing has only just begun to crash. (In reality, If you look at housing prices outside the top 20 MSAs, I think median housing prices may have actually have risen over the last year.. so in many cases, it has not even begun to crash, but trust me, it will)

Must be a crappy time to be an entrepreneur, right? Charles Cooper seems to think so, in his latest article about how the Freemium model must be in trouble.

With all due respect, because I have been reading him for a long time and respect his writing very much, I think Charles is missing something here. Most of the cool companies that made a lot of money out the ashes of the last dotcom crash, many of them relying on freemium models, were never on the edge of not making payroll. They were all flush with cash in fact. Why?

A. He makes the statement that “The idea is predicated on the assumption that you'll be around long enough to collect”. Is this true? No. Most people who convert on the web through freemium models convert quickly. The vast majority of HOTorNOT users who ended up paying paid within heir first week. In other words, most models that work on the web work quickly. And when you are starting at zero, it doesn’t matter if the economy is crap.. when you are starting at zero and have nothing to protect, any compelling model looks and feels good. And if you have a good model, because costs are so low, it won’t be long before you are able to hire and pay your employees.. with CASHFLOW, not funding.

B. Startups in a downturn are run a lot more efficiently. You don’t have to hire designers turned coders whose definition of coding is HTML, CSS, and a tad of javascript, for $150,000 a year. No, instead you can hire top CS grads from Stanford and Berkeley for $75k. Half the cost, 5x the productivity. (note: you don’t have to go to school to be a good coder, and going to a good school doesn’t mean you’re a good coder. Interview and test all types rigorously). And this is even if they hire at all.

The smart startups will start small, perhaps never hiring anyone at all until they are profitable and able to afford employees. In a nutshell, Charles is wrong because he presumes the traditional, increasingly outdated way of starting a company: raising institutional money and hiring lots of people, then hoping to have enough money to pay them. In a world where computing and network resources are increasingly cheap , and where the only REAL cost is that of the programmer, 3 guys in a dorm room can do a LOT… and they can probably do it faster and better than the well funded startup trying to do the same thing.

C. In a downturn, smart startups either raise a SHITLOAD of cash to weather the storm and buy other, undervalued, desperate startups on the cheap (Slide, Ning, etc..), or they raise nothing and grow off cashflow. Or sell.

The truth is, it’s never a bad time to be an entrepreneur, but it’s often easier when times are bad, if you can handle the pain of eating ramen and keeping your personal expenses at a minimum (which is why I also think the best time to start a startup is when you are 21, not 41).

Hiring is cheaper, office space is cheaper, everything is cheaper. Employees don’t get pissed off because you decided not to stock “microkitchens” with Odwalla, and when you DO stock them, they actually appreciate it and think of it as a perk, not a privilege. And best of all, there are fewer competitors, meaning less noise. .. and by the time things turn around and people start wanting to invest again, guess who will already have been doing it for the last 3 years?

So if you recently graduated from college and might lose your job, or maybe you were never able to find one to begin with.. instead of continuing looking, maybe you can figure out a way to spend the next few years eating ramen with a couple of buddies and going for it. You are maximizing your chance of success by doing it now not later.. and even if your venture does fail, I promise you, you’ll have the time of your life.

Find the Perfect Engagement Ring !

Does your iphone take FOREVER to sync/backup?

2008-08-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

Mine was too.. i searched around the web and found this.. worked like a charm! Enjoy :)

http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?p=340389

"Extraordinary long backups are caused by an error when an app (or apps) was installed or updated, particularly if you have ever installed or updated using the App Store on the device itself rather than iTunes. Even if you were never aware that there was a problem, they can arise and will cause problems with the backup process. Maybe you did have a problem during an update or install. Maybe the update stalled, or the App Store crashed. These issues are very likely what have been causing your long backups and you didn't even know it. During the backup process these errors cause it to drag and pause for a very long time before it gets moving again. From your view, you just see a normal backup that is taking hours, and undoubtedly annoying you to no end. On the inside, iTunes is trying desperately to get past a roadblock that it doesn't know where it came from.

This is how to fix the problem. This is not a quick fix, but it is an effective fix. And it is a FIX, not a band aid. Depending on how many apps you have installed, this can take several hours to complete. You will also lose all game scores and any other data stored in your apps. You will be starting fresh. It is an inconvenience, but in the end, you will be rewarded with quick, efficient backups, the way Apple intended. And you will never have to dread the
iTunes backup again.

The Process:

1. Open iTunes, go to Edit>Preferences>Syncing and remove all previous backups. Also click "Disable automatic syncing for all iPhones and iPods"

2. In your system file structure, locate the backup files for iTunes.
On Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup
On a Mac: Users/YOURACCOUNT/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
Delete ALL files and folders inside the Backup folder.

3. Plug in iPod. On the Applications tab, uncheck sync apps. iTunes will ask if you want to remove the apps from the iPod, say yes. Click sync. This will remove all apps on your iPod, it will also backup the ipod. This backup will be very fast, and will recreate the backup folders you deleted in step 2.

4. After the sync is complete, if there are any apps left on your ipod, touch and hold the icon until it starts to wiggle, then touch the X to delete the app. Delete all apps left on your ipod. Then sync again.

5. After the sync is complete, disconnect the iPod and do a hard restart by holding down the sleep/power button until the slider appears, slide to power off. Wait 5 seconds and push the power button again and wait for the ipod to boot up.

6. Connect your iPod again. Now begin adding apps back to your ipod one by one. On the Applications tab, click "Sync applications" AND "Selected applications". Make sure all apps are unchecked.

7. Check one app and sync. After the sync is complete, right click on your ipod under Devices in the left column of iTunes. Click "Back Up" and allow the backup to complete.

8. Repeat step 7 for each app you want to install. Keep the previous installed apps checked, just check one more app each time. Be sure to backup after each install. As you add more and more apps, the backup will take longer and longer as the process scans apps for changes. An initial backup can also be long for a particularly large application. However, ONLY the initial backup after you install an app will take a long time. Subsequent backups are very quick. Even these "long" backups are just minutes long, sometimes up to 15 minutes in my experience.

9. When you are finished installing and backing up all apps, go to Edit>Preferences>Syncing and enable automatic syncing for all iPhones and iPods.

10. Unplug and plug your device back in just for kicks. Let it back up and sync. Better?

Notes:

The very first time an application is backed up, all critical data is written to your hard drive. This is why the backups are so long the first time. Afterward, only data changes are written, so backups are much shorter.

Backup times will continue to vary based on how many apps were altered since the last sync. If you've used one app since the last backup, your backup will be very short. If you've used 20 apps, the backup will be longer. But you will be rid of the dreaded hour (or more) long backup, that is a promise.

Now that your apps are installed and backing up correctly, the number one rule is to never, ever install or update apps through the App Store on the iPod. ONLY install and update through iTunes, and backup after every install or update. The App Store on the iPod is still unstable and can cause lock ups, crashes and freezes. And it is the culprit in these long backup times. Avoid it until the bugs are ironed out.

Also, do not be tempted to disable backups using programs or code edits available online. Your backups are crucial in the event of a restore. Backups contain all of your personal data like game scores, notes, icon arrangement, application data, etc. And it's not a matter of if you'll have to restore one day, it's when, and you'll be glad you have a backup when you do."

ok.. SO AWESOME!

2008-06-19T00:00:00.001-07:00

All my friends know how much I absolutely love karaoke.. I've been wanting to get a system at home for years, but figuring out the right software, hardware setup, and buying (bit-torrenting?) all the songs seemed like to much of a pain in the ass... so it just never happened.

Julia and I upgraded yesterday from an old school 26" CRT TV to a monstrous 52" LCD display.. This thing is HUGE in our living room. I hooked it up to my laptop and tried out a new online Karaoke service called The Karaoke Channel.

Voila, Instant karoke in my living room with a pretty large selection of songs.

SOOO AWESOME!! :)

Olympic Torch Run

2008-04-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

Julia worked in the city today, so she came home for lunch. As we were driving her back, we hit a road block.. Apparently they changed the route for the Olympic torch run, and decided to start it around Van Ness and Jackson.. which is exactly where we happened to be!

Noticably absent were any protesters, with the exception of one woman next to me yelling "Free Tibet". I guess most people were hanging out on the originally planned route along the embarcadero. Apparently, they had the person holding the torch go into some building on folsom, and people waited for her to come out, and the next thing you know she is halfway across town on van ness. how'd they get her out, did they dig a secret underground tunnel or something?? Gavin Newsom is a clever one!

I love how the red boat/car is named "Peking Duck" :)

So long HOTorNOT, and thanks for all the fish!

2008-02-12T09:21:00.000-08:00

It was reported yesterday on Techcrunch that Jim and I sold HOTorNOT. I wasn’t originally going to make a big deal about the acquisition, preferring to go gently into that good night, but a lot of people have been asking questions so I thought I would kind of make an announcement here.

Mike actually got the exact size of the deal wrong, but he was correct that the deal closed on February 8. Where Mike Arrington gets his information I will never know, but man is that guy plugged in!!!

The private investors that bought us out intend to hire up and grow the HOTorNOT brand... basically to do all the things that Jim and I dreamed of doing, but never managed to organize and do! We would love to see HOTorNOT grow to epic proportion, and we are confident that it is in better hands with these guys!

If you run a company that is cashflow positive and may be synergistic with HOTorNOT, and are interested in being acquired, you should definitely contact them! You can see their contact info on their Hot or Not Media website.

I can’t speak for Jim, but he seems to be just as happy as I am about this deal. HOTorNOT was an insanely fun thing for us to create, and we are extremely proud of building a company of its size without ever taking any funding (back when a Megabit/second cost $1,000 a month!). To us, it is yet another example of the ultimate bootstrap, and we hope our story serves as an inspiration for all the entrepreneurs out there who are in the same spot we were in: totally broke and inexperienced, but with a good idea and the energy to start something new.

But all good things must come to an end. Eight years is a long time, and both Jim and I were mentally prepared to move on years ago. With our waning interest, it seemed like the right thing to do was put the company in the hands of capable people who are excited about it and want to take it to the next level. That would also better enable us to move on and focus on other things.

So since I have all this free time now, people have been asking me “what’s next”?

I’ve been just telling people that I’m busy actively helping out various companies I’ve invested in… but to be honest, the truth is that most of them are already doing well and don’t need my help (but everyone be sure to check out my friend Dennis "Thresh" Fong unveil his new company at GDC, next Friday at noon!)

The truth is I have no idea what I’m doing next. While my best friend Max is known for his large scale ambitions with Slide, I am content sitting at a café all day peoplewatching. As far as I know, I have no current plans to start an incubator or become a VC or anything… the only plans I have so far are to hit Vegas next weekend :)

The one thing I DO know is that after 8 years of HOTorNOT, I'm VERY ready for an extended summer vacation :)

G-Bell has a nice ring to it

2008-01-31T16:11:00.001-08:00

what i am about to say is probably obvious to everyone but me, but this morning something occured to me. I might be completely wrong, but:

I was reading the news about google's spectrum bid, and started thinking about it. Many people I have talked to have said "sure they know how to run a million computers, but does google know how to run a phone company?"

Well, it's not clear to me that google sees the 2 as being that different, and I think they would be mostly right. It's not clear to me that if google won, they would start putting up a phone network. They might instead start by just putting up a data-only network, and then start fulfilling phone services using VOIP a bit later.

The spectrum would allow them to set up full nationwide data coverage in the 700 Mhz band. ok, so lets say they do that and now the US has free wifi (protocol TBD).

ok, then you start working with handset manufacturers to start putting out phones that work in the A/B bands (the current cell phone infrastructure)AND the C Band. Now you have a phone that works with your existing carrier, but when you want to access the web from it, it switches to their C band, and you save money. Free, fast web access that you don't have to pay for. seems like a slam dunk in terms of getting users.

ok, now add VOIP, and you can start making outgoing calls over their C band and drop your normal carrier if you want.

But it's still a pain to manually tell your phone to call over some VOIP network versus over the normal phone network, right? what you want is to hit the "dial steve" button just as you normally do today, and have it just work. well, in order to achieve that, it sure would be useful if Google helped create intelligent contact management software for your phone such that when you call someone and you happened to have Google connectivity, the call got routed over their network automatically. If you don't have google connectivity, then it might just default to using your normal phone carrier for that call. But how would Google get this capability into people's phones if they don't manufacture phones themselves? Answer: Android.

For receiving calls, all they need to do is give you a new phone number that can connect to you on the normal phone system AND over VOIP. So basically, the idea is.. you have 1 normal phone number, and that number can reach you whether by forwarding to your usual phone number, or by VOIP directly to you over the google network. Right now, GrandCentral only connects you to other normal phone numbers, but it would be trivial to have it bridge a VOIP connection. How convenient that Google bought GrandCentral last year!

In a nutshell.. "all" google needs to do is:

1. get spectrum and deploy WIFI over it

2. get android onto phones to better control contact management and call routing, to make call routing between the different networks seamless from the user standpoint

3. have grandcentral ready to scale for anyone signing up, to act as a bridge between their network and the POTS network, making call routing seamless from the other caller standpoint.

Of course, these are all big hard steps, but nobody ever said changing the world was easy. Even knowing this plan, I'm not sure what the carriers can do to stop it besides their usual regulation/lobbying games.

as more people are setup on this, everyone will eventually drop their normal phone carrier and get free phone and data access from Google... but the most beautiful part of this plan is that not everyone has to switch at once, because it interoperates smoothly with the existing network. Also elegant is that because the plan presumes that people will maintain their existing carrier for a while as the world transitions to their network (use it when you got it), it means their network doesn't have to be 100% deployed or necessarily high quality all the time from day 1, like the normal phone carriers had to be when they first deployed. They can also make it so if it detects you are moving fast when placing the call, it defaults to the normal phone carrier, until Google's network coverage is 100%. (Note to google: start working on a wifi protocol that handles handoffs more smoothly than 802.11!)

Over time though, i'm sure the word of "free cell phone" will spread. Free is pretty damn compelling.. and that might spell GAME OVER for the big wireless carriers.

I know this was probably obvious to most people already, but i just wanted to write my thoughts down on this one.

I've moved my blog to a new URL

2008-01-31T13:37:00.001-08:00

the new address is http://blog.jhong.org

please make a note of it.

[beep!]

(apache keeps dying on my james.hotornot.com machine, and i'm too lazy to continue restarting it all the time or write a cron job to do it. plus, i presume running on blogger/google's servers leads to a faster site than serving it myself.)

if you subscribed to my blog via feedburner you should be ok. if you subscribed directly to james.hotornot.com, you might need to change your subscription. the feedburner feed to use is, as always: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jhong

Interesting opportunity

2008-01-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

My friend is moving on from his gig as Jet Li's assistant. Interesting position as Jet seems to utilize his assistant in meaningful ways. If I know you (or we know someone in common) and if you fit the qualifications, i can forward cover letter/resume.

Area of Focus:
film, non-profit (in order of work priority)

Location: Based in Asia

Job Description:
You are invited to explore the opportunity to learn and work with high level Chinese celebrity/philanthropist and learn the inner workings of the film industry in both the United States and China. The majority of work will involve hands-on involvement in building a world-class foundation from the grounds up. This will involve meetings with numerous high-level business and government officials to build and develop philanthropy in China and on a worldwide basis.

Employee will perform all the usual and customary duties of a personal assistant, including, but not limited to, review and respond to correspondence; scheduling appointments; translation of conversations and correspondence; organizing personal matters; and other duties that may be assigned.

Please visit one-foundation.com to better understand the world of this high level Chinese celebrity/philanthropist.

Desired qualifications:
-Fluent in Mandarin Chinese and English
-Degree from top-tier university with high GPA
-At least 2 years of work experience in consulting, banking, a large multinational, studio or equivalent experience
-Strong attention to detail
-Strong analytical ability
-Ability to follow through with projects and follow instructions as given
-Ability to travel frequently (50%)

The secrets of running a social network

2008-01-22T16:18:00.000-08:00

I guess the word is out, my best friend Max just raised a $50 Million dollar round on a valuation of about $500 million dollars for his company Slide.

An interesting thing about Max's position as the world's largest widget/app maker is that he has data about all the social networks that nobody else has... what has made some grow, and others not. Max has more data about the social networks than anyone else in the world, and beyond that he has the mind to turn that data into information.

I'm not sure how much he plans to share, but looks like he's starting to talk on a new blog. It will be interesting to see what kind of information he starts to divulge.

I'm not sure how well this idea scales, but..

2007-12-20T11:09:00.000-08:00

A+ for creativity and effort!

Check out FreeRice.com

basically it's a website where you play a word game, and every round you see another ad.. they take the money from the ad to donate money to the world food program. right now, each turn you take accounts for 20 grains of rice. neat!

james

ok, i admit it, i am a starwood points junkie

2007-12-19T22:54:00.000-08:00

last year i realized that all the frequent flyer miles i had accumulated on United Airlines were pretty much useless. I don't have enough status to ever use them, and their allocation for us normal people is pretty limited. i basically decided they were a waste.

so i started looking into other cards. i heard the amex from costco was pretty good, as is the fidelity visa.. but the one i heard about the most, and the one i settled on, was the starwood american express. i calculated that it was the best bang for buck, and you can pretty much use the points any time. on top of that, they will convert 20,000 points into 25,000 airline miles with a bunch of participating airlines.. so if you are into those airlines, there's really no reason why you wouldn't use this card anyway.

if anyone is thinking of switching cards, take a look at the starwood card here... you get 10,000 points (which is enough for 3 free nights at a lower end hotel, or 1 free night at a W in many cities)after you use the card once.. and please use my unique ID so i get some referral points too! :) My unique id code is 3073875980 :) :)

I know, it's kind of pathetic how much i love this card, that i'm basically falling for their multi-level marketing schemes... but really, it's an awesome program! :)

Web 2.0 parties are getting more pimp.. what does it mean?

2007-10-19T12:39:00.001-07:00

Three years ago at the first web 2.0 conference, My friend David Hornik and I both commented, "you know a bubble is coming when you start seeing more women at these things!"... at that conference, the ratio was still probably only 4:1.. but in silicon valley it's noticable when the ratio gets better than the standard 10:1.. (As a society, we really need to do something to encourage and support more women to go into the sciences, but that's another story!)

Whether it is a sign of a bubble or just that our industry is becoming cooler/more interesting to be in.. This week I went to a ton of company parties that also showed signs of something. The Myspace party at SF MOMA looked like they were trying to bring LA to San Francisco, complete with fancy decor, big banners for photogs to take pictures of hot women in front of, and.. hot women (clearly arranged for by the party promoters and co-host 7x7 magazine, because i didn't see any of them at the conference!)

Then last night, almost as if to out-LA LA, SF company BitTorrent had a small party at fluid to celebrate the launch of their CDN network (brilliant business move!). They apparently arranged in conjuction with a local radio station for Ashanti and Sean Kingston to perform to the tiny crowd. I took a picture of BitTorrent's founders Bram and Ashwin to memorialize the moment, sensing that it denoted SOMETHING.. whether it's a sign that the bubble is getting bigger, or the more likely conclusion that techie work is now getting more main stream and therefore a lot cooler remains to be seen! :)

Note: The photo above wasn't the actual one i took with my crappy cameraphone, it is a much nicer version taken by BitTorrent's Pierre Joubert!

Flash Game Developers, Mochi Ads is now open for business!

2007-10-15T17:02:00.000-07:00

You almost can't help but love the guys over at Mochi Ads. They are basically building an Adsense like system for game developers to finally make money off their flash games. Traditionally, all the money in that world has been made by websites that steal (or license for peanuts) the games and stick them on their own site, and they make money showing ads on those sites. In other words, the developer gets little to nothing for all their hard work.

With MochiAds, they stick the ads IN the game, so the developer no longer gets screwed when someone steals their stuff. In a nutshell, the people making the games make money, and they don't get screwed by the big guys anymore. Very cool!

Congrats to Jameson and the whole team there for finally opening up and letting everyone off the waitlist in!

In case anyone wants to play some fun games, here is a link to a page with some games that use Mochi Ads.. I personally like Bloons.

A lesson on life...

2007-09-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

This post is being written more for myself than for anyone who reads this blog.

Work has been pretty stressful lately as we had to make the unfortunate decision to undo going free. There are a bunch of other massive changes that have happened to compound the stress, but i won't go into that here.

What I do want to write about is the story of a trip i took 3 years ago with my friend Camilla. What I learned from that trip is something I don't ever want to forget, and at stressful times like these, it's good for me to remind myself of it.

Camilla and I both pride ourselves on being impromptu adventure travelers. Three years ago, Camilla said she was going to have 4 days off and wanted to know if i was up for a quick trip somewhere. We quickly honed in on Cuba as the destination of choice, bought our lonely planet guide books, and got housing arranged. All was good to go, the plan was for me to meet up with Camilla in Toronto and fly together to Cuba on Air Canada (you can't fly directly from the US to Cuba).

When we got to the Air Canada counter, they had bad news for us. The flight was oversold, and presumably because we had really cheap fares, we were being bumped. The conversation went like this:

"We have another flight available tomorrow that you can go on. In exchange for the inconvenience, we are prepared to give you a $300 Flight Voucher"

"Tomorrow!?!? Tomorrow is no good! We don't want a voucher, we want to get on this plane. It's not our fault that you oversold the flight, and why didn't you OFFER this voucher to other people instead of just forcing it on us???"

"Sir, it's $300! That's a lot of money!"

"I don't care if it's $30,000, we only have 4 days of vacation time, and you are going to make it 3! That's not worth any amount of money to us!"

"Well I'm sorry, but we can't get you on this plane."

"Ok, what other planes do you have going out to that region today?"

"The last one is a flight leaving for the Bahamas, but it leaves in 20 minutes, you won't make it"

"We'll make it, just do it!!"

In reality, the conversation was much more difficult than that. Getting the Air Canada people to do ANYTHING was a nightmare, and every step of the way they were rude and antagonistic. (I have a lot of canadian friends who are really cool so i'm not going to make blanket statements about an entire country.. but i will say that i got an eerie feeling the Toronto Airport does NOT like Asian people. When I returned later, I was forced to go through a higher level of immigration security, and i noticed that everyone else in there was Asian too. But that's another story)

Anyway, out of breath, we got to the plane just as they were closing the door.. we were off to the Bahamas! No plans. No arrangements. Not even a guidebook. Once we were on the plane, Camilla and I agreed that even though things were not going as planned, we would maintain a positive outlook and try to make lemons out of lemonade. We decided at that point that the theme of our trip would be "Go with the flow", having no idea how many more times on the trip we'd have to repeat that mantra.

Once on the plane, we borrowed someone else's guidebook and found that the city we were landing at, Nassau, was NOT where we wanted to be. We wanted to go somewhere with more culture, and less strip malls and resorts catering to tourists. So we decided that as soon as we got off the plane, we would try to fly to a different island.

We ran to the ticketing counters only to find that all the flights were full, and we were like #20 on the waiting list for an already TINY plane.

Unwavering in our resolve to maintain a positive attitude, we talked to the nice lady at the ticket counter and made friends with her. What should we do instead, we asked her? We told her about our situation of not having any plans because we were supposed to be in Cuba but got screwed by Air Canada. We made a lot of small talk with her.

After at least an hour of just standing around, not quite sure what we would do, the ticket counter lady called us over and whispered, "hey, you know what, i am going to get you on this plane. I think some people are not showing up, and i am going to get you there!" This was amazing, this complete stranger basically decided to scrap the waiting list entirely and just give the seats to us. "Go with the flow!" Everything was working out.

So we end up on a flight that landed roughly around dusk. When we landed we started calling every hotel on the island.. everyone was sold out, as it was a holiday weekend. crap.

finally we found one that said they had room. we rushed over in a cab and tried to check in.

"I am sorry, but we do not have any rooms."

"What!??! we just called though!!"

"I do not know.. who did you talk to? they were mistaken because we don't have any rooms available.. but if you would like to use our phone to call other hotels, you are welcome to do so."

It wasn't a huge island, and we quickly came to the conclusion after 15 minutes of calling that we were screwed. By this time, it was like 9pm. We were tired, a bit exasperated from all the changes, but again... we kept telling ourselves that this was part of the adventure. Maybe it might be fun to camp out on the beach or something?

All the roadblocks we'd been hitting all day were becoming almost comical to us at this point, like we were the protagonists of a bad movie where everything goes wrong. The fact that we were somehow stranded on some random island we'd never heard of instead of drinking mojitos at a specific hotel in Havana was a bit surreal.

Then the hotel manager came back.

"It appears that some people did not make their flight here, so we DO have a room available."

Amazing. By good fortune, we had happened to go to the same hotel that was booked by the people that missed the plane, which opened their seats up for us. We were essentially living out their vacation.

In the end, there were a few other things that happened over the trip that did not go as planned, and just like magic, things always ended up working out really well. If we hadn't been so determined to keep our spirits high, I'm pretty certain that trip could have become one of my worst vacations ever.. but instead, it beame one of the best ever.

So just remember.. when life is not going as you planned, don't stress out too much over the unexpected. No matter what happens make a conscious decision to go with the flow and have fun, because life may not always go as planned... but that is precisely what makes it such a great adventure.

On going (NOT) Free...

2007-09-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write a blog post about HOTorNOT's recent action to undo going Free, and i think this blog comment i just got says a lot about why:

"I like what you have set out for hot or not. I am also wanting to thank you and Jim for making it. I meet my soul-mate on hot or not and we want to get married in 2 years and were wanting to know if you two would like to attend?! THank you soo much. sincerely" -Jacqueline Nelson

Our hope was that by going free, we would get more letters like this because more people would be meeting new friends on our site. Instead, we got hit hard by scammers, and we instead started getting more complaints about how the site wasn't working as well anymore.

We tried to fight the scammers, but it's hard to use automation to model and fight scammers when they are not using bots, but have actual people working all day. Its amazing, but i guess in countries where wages are low, it is worth their time to spend all day looking for targets.

The level of sophistication of some of these outfits is astounding. It is not a few amateurs here and there doing it as individuals, they are organized outfits that operate like call centers. We found that there were people whose job it is specifically to get IM addresses out of people, at which point the target is passed along (like a call center escalation) to someone who speaks better english to work on chatting the person up and eventually extracting money. In a nutshell, they train specialists on each step of the scam! Because these are actual human beings doing it, they can pretty much get around automated detection systems, and they usually do the dirty work once they are off our system and on IM (where we can't model them anymore).

We know that fakes are becoming a bigger and bigger problem at other sites as well, and for the time being we would rather go back to a model that works (and reduces economic incentive for the scammers) than be a free but decreasingly useful service. I'm told this is the reason eBay was successful charging (to this day) listing fees... it basically kept the crap out, which made the marketplace work. Apparently the same thing happens in dating.

Every dating site i know and talk to tells me they are dealing with the same issue. Markus at plentyoffish seems to be doing a good job of fighting it, but tells me it gets harder and harder every month to maintain. I agree with him that combating scammers is a competitive advantage in the dating game.

So that is why we are going back to a paid model for the time being. Despite our explanations, only time will tell if people are not super pissed at us for giving them something, then having to take it back. Hopefully they will understand we did it for the right reasons. Our goal was not to make more money, but to make HOTorNOT bigger and hence more useful as a dating service (if were were profit minded, we would have never gone free at all)

Humorously, we've gotten supportive emails from women saying they wouldn't want to date a guy too cheap to spend $6 anyway, lol

In the meantime, I guess we'll have to figure out a different way to reinvent HOTorNOT!

If I could go back in time and change my major..

2007-09-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

One of my friends from business school is a fellow named oren tversky. Oren is low key and modest to the extreme, and he is also in my estimation one of the most intelligent people i know. he thinks about (and worries about) things that most people don't.. which i'm not sure is a blessing or curse, to be honest.

I later found out that Oren's dad was a famous professor named Amos Tversky, who pioneered a lot of research in the decision sciences and would have won the nobel prize had he not unforunately passed away. His partner in crime on the groundbreaking research, Daniel Kahneman (who did receive the nobel prize for their work), spoke at an EDGE conference recently, and they have some transcripts of parts of his talk here. I enjoy reading this stuff so much, i had to link it.

If I could go back in time and change my major, I would absolutely join their field. Understanding their research is probably one of the best ways I can think of becoming a better innovator of products. I also recommend a book called Influence. and The Game (interestingly, pick up artists use a lot of technique based on academic theory.. i recall the author of the game even cites the influence book a couple of times.)

Cute video listing a bunch of funny things on the web

2007-09-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Did I just miss it, or did they forget to include Hamster Dance?