Teng Siong Ong

Introducing FLOChip

2011-09-01T00:00:00-07:00

Recently, if you have noticed, I have stopped writing on this blog. In fact, I have slowly shifted my writings to my new blog at FLOChip blog. FLOChip in fact is the company that I started and have been working on for the past year. It is basically a web workshop that explores the local internet market in Malaysia/South East Asia.

Projects

Some web apps that we have built are:

WeiLangWang – an online Chinese radio
dearppl – Brighten Someone’s Day, One Apology At A Time.
31Storey – Ebay + Facebook. A social platform for anyone who likes fashion.
SlurpMAG – Online food magazine in Malaysia.
PuffyLAB – Online tees branding.

Btw, we do take outside contracts as a source income to support our exploration on the web.

Contracts

Contracts that we have worked on:

ShoonFatt Biscuit Factory – Web design, content management system and Facebook page management.
Genting Casinos – HTML/CSS Conversion and some basic javascript widgets.
iBilik – Web redesign.

As you can see we are pretty everywhere related to web technologies, email me siong [at] flochip dot com if you have an interesting project that you want us to work on. :)

Big Companies Beat Small Companies?

2010-12-04T00:00:00-08:00

People always ask me.

“Why can’t Google creates this X product to kill this X company?”

When Netflix started, many people think that Blockbuster can kill Netflix easily. But, just a few weeks ago, Blockbuster declared their bankruptcy and Netflix is growing like crazy.

Why?

Because:

Big companies especially listed companies has to care about their investors money in their companies.
There are many factors other than money to create a successful business, for example, talents, relationships.
Bureaucracy in big companies.

What do you think?

AR Pacman

2010-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

It is an Augmented Reality Pacman working on the iPhone, viewing realtime via the web browser.

Hack

It was a 24 hours non-sleep hack that we built overnight with an idea in mind.

How

We built the server side using Node.js and the client side using the network library in iOS. The web browser uses HTML5 (Canvas) to display the pacman maze overlaying on a Google Map. It also uses Comet (long-held HTTP request) to retrieve information from the server in realtime. We use Socket.IO here which provides fallback mechanism that depends on the browser. For example, Safari will use HTML5 Websocket, Firefox will use Flash socket, and Chrome will use long-polling.

We use JSON to communicate between the web server and the web clients.

Team

My team consists of me, Yo Han Ko and Sukolsak Sakshuwong.

Demo

Github link is here.

jQuery in Rails 3

2010-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

Recently, I see more and more people start using Rails with jQuery. The Rails Core team actually maintains a jQuery rails.js file. But, Rails 3 doesn’t have an option for you to start with jQuery as the default Javascript library.

Patch

Hence, I decided to patch this feature myself. With my patch, you can start a Rails 3 project with jQuery as the default Javascript library with the -j option. And, it accepts both “jquery” or “prototype” as its parameter.

How

In short, you can start a Rails 3 project with jQuery in this way:

rails new my_cool_project -j jquery

And, to skip Javascript at all. You can do:

rails new my_cool_project --skip-javascript

which I think is better than the --skip-prototype option Rails 3 provides now. Want to see this get into the future Rails 3 release? Do +1 here at Lighthouse.

Edit: Finally, the commit is in.

Set Yourself An Hourly Rate

2010-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

To be a startup founder is hard, you have to work on so many stuff like coding the backend, designing the website, deploying the server, etc. All these things take time.

In fact, there are many things that you can do to be more productive. Over the years, the most important productivity tip that I learned is to set yourself an hourly rate.

How

So, how this actually will save you time? It’s really easy. Think about the jobs that are currently on your to-do list. Think about the hours that you have to spent on each job.

For example, a job called “design the frontpage” might take you 5 hours to complete. Let’s say that your hourly rate is USD30 per hour. This means that you will have to spend a total worth of USD150 time to finish this particular job.

Now, if you outsource the job to an outside designer, you may just have to spend USD100 to get the job done. Indirectly, this actually helps save you USD50. But, do remember to calculate the offset time you might have to spend to communicate with the designer.

The time that you save will become even more significant if you apply this tip on stuff like cooking(2 hours spent = USD60) vs eating out(1 hour spent = USD30), walking(0.5 hour spent = USD15) vs driving(10 mins spent = USD5), etc.

So, set yourself an hourly rate!

Photo from ckaiserca.

Virtuous Investment Circle Sounds Fishy

2010-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

Virtuous Investment Circle is a new angel group in Malaysia. According to their mission statement:

The Virtuous Investment Circle (ViC) is an independent non-profit organisation that aims to create a vibrant ecosystem for angel investing in Malaysia.

So, they are supposed to be an independent non-profit organisation. But, later in their FAQ, they stated that:

Charge

There will be a nominal fee of RM500 for each investment proposal to be submitted to the ViC. There will also be a 3% to 5% commission for projects that have successfully received investments from ViC angel investors.

So, it seems like there is a nominal fee of RM500 that they charge for each investment proposal. And, each successful investment that is made throught VIC, there is a 3% to 5% commission. Are they going to use this money for good causes? Or, are they just going to split this money among the people in VIC? So, basically, this means that as long as the organisation is not making any profit(because the money has already splitted among the people in VIC), you can claim that you are running a non-profit organisation?

Before I move on, let’s do a simple math here. VIC charges RM500 for each investment proposal. In US, incubator like Y Combinator gets around 1k application per round, which is about 2k per year. Let’s assume that VIC only gets 10% of this number, which is 200 per year. They are making an awesome amount of RM100k per year just by reading investment proposals by poor entrepreneurs like you and me.

Bullshit Reasons

According to their website, they also said that:

The reason we charge a nominal RM500 fee for each submission is that we want to ensure that the companies who are applying to ViC are really serious about getting funded by angel investors.

Actually, there are many ways to tackle this problem. I have a simple solution here. Since they claim that they are a non-profit organisation, I suggest that they can ask each entrepreneur to attach a RM500 World Vision Malaysia donation receipt with each investment proposal submitted to you.

Commission

Now, let’s talk about the 3% to 5% commission that VIC are going to take from each successful investment. How are they going to spend the money? There is no clear explanation on their website on how they are going to utilize the money. For all the investors who are interested to invest through VIC, please think twice, your investment will get sliced out by VIC before it gets to the hand of your shiny new investment. Btw, if you are interested to invest in local companies, you can contact me. I know many local entrepreneurs who actually want your money without the 3% to 5% cut off.

On their latest PR stunt on Sin Chew, they claimed that about 200 new companies were created by the investment from about 40 ex-googlers. But, you have to know that these ex-googlers don’t charge people to pitch to them. And, VIC do. There is a huge difference here.

Before I end this post, if you are people from VIC reading this post:

Drop the Charge

Seriously, VIC, drop your RM500 pitching fee if you really want to help local entrepreneurs. And, if you do want to charge a 3% to 5% commission, don’t claim that you are a non-profit organisation. One last thing, be transparent with what you have. You sound really fishy to many of us.

Update(Sept 3, 2010, 10.50am): Response from ViC. Not even a linkback?

Photo from |[ sykez ]|.

Git Based Wiki - gollum

2010-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

Github has just launched a new interesting project called gollum. gollum is a Git-based wiki that works like, yeah, Git.

Installation

Installation is as easy:

gem install gollum

Once you have installed gollum, go into any git-based repository and run gollum. Bam. Now, your repository is a wiki. And, collaboration can happen like any Git repository.

As a sidenote, I personally use gollum as my personal wiki. : )

Photo from cogdogblog.

Repost from My Friend

2010-08-17T00:00:00-07:00

A post from my friend that is really worth reposting here.

From Arius Lee

三个月的打工经验，很轻松，但差点忧郁自杀死掉。

每天大早起身，走路一个钟到工地，開會打瞌睡，喝早茶，走走站站，睡午覺，走走站站，喝午茶，走走站站，走一個鐘路回家，晚餐，看戲，睡覺。每一天的行程完全一樣，很輕鬆，但人生的三個月完全每貢獻，沒提升自己，沒學新東西。三個月，忘了笑。崩潰了，放棄2500－2800新幣的高薪（算高吧？）逃回KL。

現在的時間表，完全沒行程。高興就睡，餓到要死了才吃，無所事事，發呆。卻學了讓人問我：“你是讀design的吗？？“的 illustrator 技巧。才学了两个礼拜。我设计了整个网页，和logo。还有，天天在笑。

很多uncle aunty告诫我，要趁年轻努力存钱，老了才有保障。我沉默。除了我妈，从来没叫我要做什么，只要当个好人。

人生在世，是期盼成果，还是享受过程？

如果要遵行那“为了老时有保障”的时间表，代价是我的笑声的话，那不等于我的大半生是不快乐的吗？那还没到老就半途死掉的人真可怜。

现在搞的生意，未必在短期内达到RM2500的盈利，但快乐。

不是说每个人打工都不快乐，而是要找到你当下就快乐的工作。不是未来，而是现在。

赚钱存钱是为了快乐，所以要为了快乐而工作，不是为了赚钱而工作。当你快乐了，钱自然伴随。

死了，只有开心或伤心鬼，没有有钱鬼或穷鬼。

不要说身不由己，生活逼人！

用一个礼拜学Photoshop，就饿不死了。三个月学写网站，随时发达。天天化装研究美容，可以写书或blog。兴趣什么就干什么，只要天天把自己升值。

怨天尤人的人，天怒人怨。

只要不弄到别人不开心，做人，开心就好。

My First Post

2010-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

This is not the first time I actually want to get myself on serious blogging. I moved from Wordpress to Posterous. Now, I am running this on Heroku with toto.

How to use Toto?

If you are looking to setup something similar like this with toto, you can refer to Dmitry Fadeyev’s Getting Started With Toto.

Why Toto?

There are a few reasons that I picked toto:

version control with GitHub
written in Ruby(I know Ruby pretty well.)
easy deployment via Heroku
HTTP caching via Varnish(Heroku supports it.)
lightweight blogging platform(Wordpress has too many features that I don’t want.)

Okay. Done with my first post. Please tell me what you want me to write about in the comment area.

Photo from Compound Eye.