Quitting is never easy, people told me that quitting is the easy way out and it’s a loser’s way of taking care of a problem. Well I disagree, quiting is hard, and it doesn’t solve the problems of those that you leave behind.

Nevertheless quitting is infact necesarry. Maybe it’s because of the countless disagreements, lack of appreciation, the long hours of meetings, the pointless bickering, the feeling of going nowhere.. But I guess it all comes down to the different personal vision about the business.

It may look like all the work you did in the past is such a waste but it’s better to waste the past that you can never get back rather than wasting the future that you can actually fix.

At this moment of time. I believe it is better to go separate ways and hope each other the best. So here I am hoping the best for Anang Pradipta which will be leaving his position as Partner and Chief Marketing Officer of Gantibaju.com.

Things will change, and things will change for the better.

Good luck and Na zdorovie!

Well anyway,  I’m still writing for dailysocial.net (since I’m under contract) and here’s last week’s writing about the grim reality of newspaper digital distribution

The push for digital in the US is so heavy that it forces traditional newspapers to either go digital or go bankrupt. But then again the push for digital posed more problems than solutions for the business owners as they’re still finding it hard to find a profitable business model. For every $1 gained in digital, $7 are lost in print revenue.

You can also read it in Bahasa Indonesia here. Thx for translating it guys

~cheers

What I do with every important email is turn it into a task on my favorite to do app or put it into evernote for archiving. The rest of the email that doesn’t get into the to do app is pretty much useless. It’s just there as an archive just in case I need to get back at it.

So what’s going to happen after you delete all your emails? A peace of mind. If an email is important enough and you actually miss it, it will come back eventually. What you lost will be the things you’ll never read or things you’ll never reply.

If you happen to use Gmail, it does a very good job at archiving all the emails you have deleted, so it’s not really gone. It’s being archived in Trash folder. So you can still be at peace even if you delete it. Thank God Google for 8GB of free space on Gmail!

For me having a 0 unread email is important for the peace of mind, it’s probably the same as having zero task on today’s to do app. It helps me focus on the important things today and forget about everything else. Tomorrow’s task is tomorrow’s problem, don’t bother thinking about it today unless you have to.

Of course I would only comment on things that I’m interested like creative business model, digital startup, and Indonesia-related scene and environment. It doesn’t have to be a startup idea, it can be some marketing strategy you would like to try, a launch plan, a new business model from existing business, etc.

This is basically from startup to startup, I’m a practitioner myself building startups from scratch. This is not me acting like I’m better than anyone, I just love helping people out and listening to great ideas. This is also a learning process for me.

Would gladly help if I can introduce you guys to some contacts I knew if I feel that it can help materialize and excel the idea even further.

If I think I’m not familiar enough with the field and your idea intrigue me then I would ask help from fellow businessman, investors and my other contacts. Don’t want to name drop so I’ll leave it as it is.

Just a reminder that I’m a very honest person, so if you can’t handle the truth then don’t bother emailing.

My only condition is that you would let me use your use case as a material in my blog so that everyone can join the discussion and learn from your ideas as well. I’ll be sure to leave out the top secret part of it of course.

So hit me with your best ideas!

I didn’t sell my Playbook though. Contrary to the iPad, the Playbook fits nicely for my needs. It has the books that I want to read, the movies that I haven’t watched and the games to keep me occupied. I’ve been using it for months and unlike all my other friends, I love my Playbook. You want to know why?

Perfect form factor

I thought 10″ is the best form factor for a tablet but after using 7″ for months, I changed my mind. 7″ is perfect on the go. It’s tiresome to carry a 10″ iPad on the go, especially if you need to bring your laptop at the same time.

Btw it’s really a bad idea to read on your iPad while sleeping. It fell on my face more than once T_T..

Judging on my experience, I dare say that on March 7th, Apple will release a 7″ iPad. It’s a perfect move to block the massive growth of the Kindle Fire and to introduce an entry-level tablet experience to price-sensitive consumers.

Great media player

I hate the fact that I can’t just copy my movies onto the iPad. Playbook accept any format I throw it so far, be it avi, mpg, even a full HD mkv file works flawlessly. I believe I speak for a lot of Indonesians that we’re are in the habit of collecting movies and music in our hard drive (which we copy from ORIGINAL and LEGIT sources of course *ehem*) so I’d rather copy those movies directly and watch it on the go.

I never bought a movie digitally because the whole movie and music store ecosystem of iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and also Amazon is unavailable in Indonesia.

I also bought the HDMI connector for $10 (CHEAP!) so I can watch it on the big screen whenever I want to. $20 cheaper than the iPad HDMI connector.

It’s just so easy to plug the Playbook with USB cable (or wireless transfer) and copy it like your usual thumbdrive. No uber-long syncing just to copy some files or doing time-consuming video conversion. No conversion means I can just copy it back again whenever I want to.

After the Playbook OS 2.0 update, it now supports A2DP bluetooth which is pretty awesome to use with my Jabra Halo or other bluetooth external speakers like Jawbone Jambox or Nokia 360 Play.

I tried using VLC for the iPad (which is not available anymore on iTunes) but my first generation iPad isn’t powerful enough to play HD movies. Bummer..

Best price-by-value

I got mine for free at Blackberry DevCon Asia, but the official price for the 16GB is $199. Super cheap! So cheap that I bought my sister one. I found one priced Rp. 2.499.000 at blibli.com that you can buy right away.

At the similar spec, the iPad is priced at $499, that’s more than 2 times more expensive. Samsung galaxy tab is about $399, even Acer Iconia is about $349.

Nothing came close with that price range, except for Kindle Fire of course. But again, it’s not available in Indonesia and the whole Amazon ecosystem is useless here.

On a personal note, I hate the Android platform (haven’t tried the ICS 4.0 though) so the thought of buying a more expensive Android tablet is beyond me.

I dare you to find any other tablet with this specs and built that is better than the Playbook. I sure as hell can’t find it.

Good for e-Reading

Super sharp resolution means better reading experience. I use Kobo mostly because I already bought a couple of books in there. Kobo also has a lot of free books which I downloaded like crazy. Kobo is also multiplatform so you can use it on iOS, Android, Playbook, even Mac and Windows.

Kobo supports paypal so it’s a good choice if you don’t have/use credit card. I don’t have a credit card so this is a big deal for me.

Even if you don’t use Kobo, you can use Adobe Reader. It works as advertised and it’s free.

Document editing on the go

Playbook comes with DocsToGo, great for editing Office files on the go. It would be cooler if it supports Google Docs syncing like on the iPad.

Well to be frank, the DocsToGo App is not better than the same app on iPad. It’s pretty much barebone in the Playbook but it works.

I don’t use the Office feature very often but sometimes I need to review some documents and this feature comes in handy.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, I still hate Blackberry phones and I still think RIM is screwed. But my hate for Blackberry phones doesn’t affect my frequent use of Playbook.

I’m also not implying that the Playbook is better than the iPad or any other tablet. But it’s the one best suited for me for the condition that I’ve mentioned above.

Playbook also have it’s weakness. The usual rant is that the app is not that much compared to the iOS library and there’s no 3G model and RIM is going bankrupt, etc. My complains is that the Playbook sucks at Map App, the Message, Calendar and Contact app do not support Portrait mode and.. well that’s just it for now.

Well I have all the app I need for now, I don’t need another phone bill every month so WiFi works for me. It fits into my needs and I won’t complain on the things that I don’t really need.

I don’t want to argue about the continuity of the platform, the developer not building apps on it or whatever. It’s mostly certain that I’ll exchange my Playbook for a better device in about a year or two anyway. So why would I care about the features I need to use in the future? NOW (at least this year) is the only time I care when investing on a device.

In conclusion, it’s an awesome entertainment app if you can get the movies, music yourself (which most Indonesian can). It’s great for reading books and casual playing (Angry Birds, Cut the rope, etc) and the best of all: It’s cheap. I’m a sucker for cheap and free stuffs.

Then it hit me, is $1.78 per hour cheap? The workers work 12 hours a day, let’s assume that they work 5 days a week. That would make about $1.78 x 12 hours x 20 days equals $427.2. That’s bigger than my first salary at an IT company in 2004! Not to mention it’s still a starter salary for most small companies in 2011.

Read more here

Here’s the 3 main reason why you should just leave your email alone and get back to work

1. It’s a major distraction

Unless your main job is replying emails, checking emails or getting email notification too often is a major distraction. Every single time you check your email, you literally stop working.

So step 1: when working, put all notification to silent.

2. Email doesn’t need immediacy

The thing that I love about email is that it is asynchronous, it doesn’t need both party to be available at the same time. In essence, it doesn’t need immediacy. You have the freedom to reply it whenever you want, so use it wisely. Besides, If it’s important then they’ll use a more disruptive method: Phone calls.

I usually limit checking my emails 3 times a day at max. Which is in the morning when I start working, after lunch and at the end of the day to check if I miss anything. Now I’m not the one to receive massive amount of emails everyday, maybe just about 10-20 important emails per day so it works.

Step 2: Limit your email checking.

3. It’s mostly spam anyway

I wish there’s a technology to detect which emails are important to me and which are not. Gmail actually did a decent job with priority inbox but after using it for about 3 months, I periodically miss a couple of important emails. I guess the algorithm isn’t perfect so I switch back to classic.

Most of our emails are spam, junk, mailing list and daily deals subscription anyway, no reason to jump right away to look.

Step 3: Relax, it’s probably spam

Conclusion

So to recap things, here’s the steps:

1. Put all notifications to silent
2. Limit your email checking to 3 times per day max
3. Relax and don’t over-think it, it’s probably spam anyway.

If you’re applying these then let me know how it works in the comment sections. Would love to hear your feedback.

What’s with the obsession about being the first? Did you know that being the first sucks? Being the first means you have no idea whether what you’re doing is right or wrong. You can’t learn from something that does not exist since you’re actually the first of its kind (assuming that you are, not just you claim it to be) . You’ll be doing a lot of trials and errors, and I bet it will be mostly errors.

We all know how Google gets bested Yahoo. Friendster who was the first social network site got forced to pivot into a social gaming site by Facebook. MySpace got sold for approximately $35M in 2011 after the whooping $850M acquisition by News Corporation in 2005.

Being the first means you’re being a guinea pig for the next company which will learn from your mistake and past you by. Don’t be obsessed about being the first, be obsessed about being the best.

Content is often the most overlooked element of a startup. This usually happens because most founders are techies and techies concentrate on what they know best: Technology. They can tinker days and months perfecting their code, playing with the test unit and scaling the servers like crazy. Yes, playing with technology is awesome but content is King.

Read more here

Before I got married I just put all those stuffs in my apartment. I hate the idea of selling it back then because maybe it would suddenly be useful somehow. Yeah it’s a wishful thinking but since I bought it, I must have bought it for a reason, right? Well apparently not really. After moving out to my mother-in-law’s house, I learn to live without a lot of stuffs. The funny thing is, it doesn’t really bother me that much. Not having an Xbox and Wii means playing more on the PS3 which means getting a bigger price-by-value on a single game. Not having an external harddrive means being efficient in managing space. Having less stuffs means spending more quality time on another activity, which is nicer in the end. I learn to live with the things that I have and to forget about the things that I don’t have. Sometimes we are to focused on the things that we don’t have that we forgot about the things that we do have.

Long have I cluttered my life with things I hardly use just to have my options open just in case I need it later on. It’s not really healthy at some point, especially to my savings. So my 2012 resolution is to live with less items, be minimal, rethink the stuffs that I really need and set aside things I don’t. All my action figures are all boxed up and put in my parents house, TV and Xbox already sold and the rest of the stuffs are already put on sale in Kaskus and Twitter. If you’re interested in buying one of my stuffs then feel free to contact me. I’ll gladly sell to a friend rather than a stranger.

After selling all this stuffs, will I clutter myself with new items and complain about the same thing next year? Yeah maybe LOL, but it’s a fix for the present. We’ll see how it goes from here. But one thing is for sure, from this experience I learn that we don’t really need that much in life.