If Macworld didn’t exist and die-hard Apple fan girls and boys couldn’t come together for such an exclusive geekfest, I’m sure Apple wouldn’t have such loyal customers today. Is there ever a Microsoft World? No. Because everyone has a PC, I have brand options, and I’m not inclined to try Windows 7, just because it’s the “latest and greatest”.

Let’s flashback to 2008 to find out why Santa Steve would cancel Christmas and mark “the end of an era”:

Apple is pulling out of Macworld as its retail stores grow rapidly: The corporation has expanded from just two stores in 2001 to 240 retail locations worldwide to date. Before the proliferation of Apple stores, Macworld Expo was Apple’s major outlet to make contact with the public and give exposure to its products. Since the Apple brand has become so popular, the company has been scaling back on trade shows, which is why Apple plans its final appearance at Macworld for 2009.

—Brian Chen for Wired

Seriously, who doesn’t have a Macbook or iPhone these days? Suddenly, it’s not that cool to be sporting the Apple logo anymore and everyone’s showing up with the same prom dress—minus the drama. Hardcore Apple fans like Violet Blue (who I got to meet briefly!) aren’t so rare anymore…even 11-year-old Max can tell me about the iPhone ergonomics.

Regardless of what Dr. Mac said, Macworld this year sucked. No Moscone South, no hype and excitement, and nothing particularly innovative. What was I to do without an iPad to try out? Perhaps I’m just bitter for not getting any free schwag this year, but what’s the point if the only expo product I really wanted was Beats By Dr. Dre?

Daniel invited all of us at Intel Youth to attend the Teens in Tech Conference, so that’s where I spent my Saturday: in the SF Google office with a bunch of kids my sister’s age. Never have I experienced a greater abuse of the Twitter hashtag, especially when the tweets were displayed as a backdrop during breaks and slideless presentations. Not gonna pretend like I didn’t contribute my fair share of inspirational spam either.

As Dave Spark says, sometimes it’s nice to attend a tech conference with an atypical crowd–because it’s refreshing to see new faces (though there was still the Scobelizer, Michael Arrington for a bit, and the Woz). To contemplate what I learned or gained from this conference was a bit challenging, considering that many of the speakers were talking about college life, social media, and design sensibilities…what else was there to extrapolate from besides the “been there, done that…why am I here again as a 21-year-old”?

And in the end, it comes down to Gladwell again: brains that are at least “smart enough” + incredible opportunity & a dash of luck + 10,000 hours of practice = guaranteed success. The earlier you can get the 10,000 hours in, the earlier you’ll become incredible and the more hours you’ll get in your lifetime; and if you’re more than just “smart enough”, a talented genius with interests in a field that’s a trending topic…Woz wants to meet you when you’re bright-eyed, bushy tailed, 100% passion-driven with no rent checks to pay.

Gladwell’s examples of “incredible opportunity”: Bill Gates got unlimited time-share terminal access and started his 10,000++ hours of programming at age thirteen, because The Mother’s Club decided to fund a computer lab in 1968 when most people didn’t even know what a computer was. The year the computer center opened at the University of Michigan, Bill Joy stumbled in at age 16–by accident. (That computer lab also happened to be one of the most advanced in the world.) Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got free spare computer parts from Bill Hewlett to tinker with in high school, when others had to pay premiums for computers. (During a lecture at Haas, Woz mentioned how he would also collect computer manuals, so instead of having a mentor, he had parts + manuals + many hours of “practice”/fun in the garage.)

Gladwell’s example of “birthdate luck”: “If you were more than a few years out of college in 1975, then you belonged to the old paradigm. You had just bought a house. You’re married. A baby is on the way. You’re in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit. So let’s rule out all those born before, say, 1952. At the same time, though, you don’t want to be too young. You really want to get in on the ground floor, right in 1975, and you can’t do that if you’re still in high school. So let’s also rule out anyone born after, say, 1958. The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it. Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955.” Paul Allen: January 1953. Steve Ballmer: March 1956. Bill Joy: November 1954. Steve Jobs: February 1955. Eric Schmidt: April 1955. Bill Gates: October 1955. You get the point.

Teens in Tech attendees’ examples of “incredible opportunity”: Let’s start with Daniel. At Intel, Teresa asked him how he got started in tech. His answer went something like, “When I was thirteen, I hung out in my dad’s office all the time, and one day, one guy working there was sort of drunk and he joked that he should just give me a job since I was always there. That night I asked my dad to help me write a resume and the next day, I asked the guy for the job he said he should give me. He had no choice but to give me something to do!” His brief stint with TechCrunch was also pretty good luck (and any kind of press is good publicity), considering that he’s only 17. If we look at the speakers panel, Adam (also 17) gets to work alongside Gary Vaynerchuk, someone who has a seven-figure book deal thanks to his superb grasp on personal branding and marketing. That’s an incredible mentor to have. Danny was picked up by Digg at age 17, Vitor works at Twitter, Joey has worked at Google, Yahoo, Revision3…and more.

The opportunity given to the “social media generation” is this: we can market ourselves effectively and efficiently without spending anything other than time. Only a few years ago, you had to pay to build a website (unless we’re talking Geocities and Homestead, which was only popular among my friends in 7th grade for ~ShOuTouTs & QuOtEs~), you had to pay some more to print portfolios, business cards, brochures, fliers…and you were a nobody until maybe college when you started making “professional friends”. Post-college if you were antisocial and a straight-up nerd. Now with Coroflot, Behance, Flickr, Wordpress, Tumblr—you name it—you can easily have your own portfolio or website, and then market yourself and make friends with people in your field via Twitter. After a few private DMs (or not), you’re now “professional” LinkedIn friends and people are recommending and referring you left and right, if your work is good enough. Other incredible opportunities include 1. the endless amount of tech conferences where you get to meet influential people IRL and 2. venture firms like Y Combinator, which give the baby startups a real chance. Living in the Bay Area would be a third opportunity.

As for “birthdate luck”, you only have to be young enough to have all the time in the world to spend all day on the internet and old enough not to befriend spammers and confuse posts with pages or tags with categories. Heck, you can be 11-year-old Max Swisher who has his own blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and even business card. You don’t have to be a genius, but it wouldn’t hurt to be one either. Kevin introduced his Stanford buddy, Suril, as “the guy who has his own wiki page“…who passed the Sun Java exam at age 10. As for my friends who have their own startups, they’re young enough to not have to worry about family and sleep, though most have at least finished college (for time and serious dedication more so than credibility and maturity…though those all factor in).

If I did have to guess an average for this conference crowd though, I’d say 17. I gifted my sister her own domain & hosting for her 17th birthday today.

Teens In Tech Conference 2010 from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Learning from teens at the “Teens in Tech” conference by Dave Spark

Arielle, Giannii, Kevin & me forming the “older crowd”

What was supposed to be liveblogging turned into live-tweeting…and now extremely delayed blogging (better late than never though, right?). To start off, here’s a video (courtesy of Arielle) about our thoughts on Intel:

In summary, most of us relate Intel with microchips and processors and then we don’t know much else about the company, because Intel is “just a sticker” or “inside of another product”—another brand we’re more familiar with. I mean, how would a regular consumer know that Intel does augmented reality research in the tera-scale lab and video-game efficiency testing in the gaming lab?! Why would I ever google “fiber optics” or “usb4?” or even know that silicon photonics was possible, let alone happening in the Intel research labs?! I’m not nerd enough to ever consider the computational possibilities with getting light (via fiber optics) into a piece of rock (silicon) and somehow encoding data (without blowing anything up); nor would I ever just somehow know that the next generation of fiber optic usbs would change the design possibilities for say, a laptop (because the vga (monitor connector) and the ethernet are currently the biggest limitations for thickness and an optical usb could potentially replace all of that). This stuff needs to be taught to me. It makes sense then, that Intel would spend so much on publicity on youth like us, who can then share with our audiences in “normal people talk”, not 133t sp34k jargon. Light Peak, say whaaa?

Aside from educating the public about Intel’s research and innovations, I think Intel should also publicize readily accessible services to spread brand awareness. In the video above, I come in at 3:54 and mention the Intel Dispute Finder, which currently has a working prototype as a Firefox plugin and a database of about 3000 disputed topics (but Intel labs & Cal grads are working on it). I briefly explain in the video that this is a service, not a hardware product, and because we’re a generation of prominent service users, this makes a lot more sense to us (e.g. research paper helper!). When Intel becomes this relatable, it no longer seems like an obscure brand where we can’t see the “Intel Inside”.

Of course, the easiest way is still to demo a bunch of products that do have Intel inside and develop the brand by association.

Here’s Intel’s Home Energy Management System designed by IDEO! (video courtesy of Fred)

It’s still a prototype but as I’ve mentioned before and I’ll repeat again, high-tech homes is where the future’s at!

Here’s the WiDi, which is actually an Intel product, not just “Intel inside” (video courtesy of Arthur)

You connect your laptop to your TV via wifi and stream video and audio without too much latency. Huge potential for gaming geeks in the future, I guess.

Lastly, here’s a picture I took of the Dell Adamo XPS (with an Intel core 2 duo inside) compared with my iPhone (uncased).

Clare’s got more pictures on her blog post!

I’ll be in Santa Clara later this evening and all day tomorrow for the Intel Youth Rock Stars Summit held at the Intel headquarters. Other bloggers attending include:

• Daniel Brusilovsky of Teens in Tech
• Chaim Gartenberg of TeenTechBlog
• Arthur Klepchukov of ST@B (and yes, Outspokes)
• Chris Lesinski and Kelly Sutton of HackCollege
• Corvida Raven of SheGeeks
• Arielle Patrice Scott of GenJuice (and internshipIN)
• Teresa Wu of College Candy (and of course, Wuink!)
• Clare Xu of The Present Future
• Fred Zaw of Infrediblog

Stay tuned as we liveblog throughout the entire event via the Dell Mini netbooks provided by Intel and OgilvyPR. We will be touring Intel’s museum as well as the tera-scale lab, learning about the 2010 core processor family along with new gadgets and tech including the much-gossiped WiDi, and of course, talking to true rockstars, like Mario Paniccia. I know you’re jealous.

That’s Paniccia. [edit] I’m listening to him speak right now…that’s not him.

That’s the cake we had at the Uber10 Awards event a few months ago.

and that’s the video you’ve all seen before.

(now getting ready to rock out.)

Forgive me for disappearing again; I spent the end of November and all of December in Taipei, Hangzhou, and Shanghai and then last-last weekend in LA and last week in New York and Boston…I know. I know nothing about the tech/startup scene in Taiwan and China (nor could I really sense its presence on either shores…or even in LA), but I did get to meet up with a few friends in New York who are truly making things happen.

Only two days ago, this article on “Why Tumblr is Kicking Posterous’s Ass” became all the rage, as the author’s reason was, “Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.” In his other words, “Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.” Gobry makes two audacious points:

1. “New York has truly come of age as a startup hub, with its own “style”, its own way of doing things, its own mindset, which can sometimes — not always, but sometimes — kick Silicon Valley’s ass.”
2. “For consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology” because “technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps”, it’s design (UI/UX design, social design, business model design).

He goes on to prove why Tumblr is better designed than Posterous.

As someone with a design background and continued interests in design, I find this fascinating, because 1. The Bay Area is also a major design hub home to the world’s best design consultancies like IDEO, Smart Design, Frog Design, Fuse Project, and 2. New York is known for fashion design and media, but…tech? So I did a little research and surprise, surprise, my favorite artsy communities & companies really are based in New York: Behance, Carbonmade, Etsy, Squarespace (to name a few)…and all you thought of besides Tumblr was Vimeo and Foursquare (all equally “cute” and well-designed).

I think I need to move to SoHo.

The main reason for my New York trip was simply to say hi to my friend and attend his startup party for Postabon. Postabon hasn’t really picked up anywhere outside of New York City yet (although you may post your own bons and start a trend!), but it has been featured in PCWorld as one of the “10 Sites and Services That Will Matter in 2010” and on TechRadar as one of the “8 Really Useful Websites You’ve Never Heard of“—yet. Postabon has even been picked up in China and Brazil—impressive for something that has been around for less than a year.

Check it out and download the iPhone app!

I also got to meet up with another friend who’s launching another startup in TWO WEEKS, SO STAY TUNED. (I’ll probably do a blog feature then.)

For those interested in learning more about New York’s startup scene, subscribe to the Startup Digest! My friend curates for the NYC newsletter and lists out weekly events.

As someone who is an avid tweeter and tumblelogger, I’m really into the latest microblogging services. For the record, I once had Pownce, Plurk, and Identi.ca accounts in addition to Twitter, and as much as I love Tumblr, I plan on using Posterous to update Twitter and Facebook for me while I’m in China. I also believe that many bloggers are shifting from traditional blogs to tumblelogs for convenience’s sake.

Today, Six Apart came out with TypePad Micro, a free microblogging service that’s nearly identical to Tumblr, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Upon login, here’s what the dashboard looks like:
There’s a “Quick Compose” for Twitterlike updates, a stream of “Recent Activity” including friend’s upates, important links under “Manage my Blog” in the top right corner with a simple graph of my stats, a bookmarklet, and an extremely long and unmemorable private email address. (I like how I can just email Twitter@Posterous.com…so easy! I don’t want to both copy/pasting/saving c1b3d…@typepad.com.)

I like the “Quick Compose”, I like the “Recent Activity” stream which also shows the number of favorites and comments each post has received, but I don’t like how unobvious the links are under “Manage my Blog”. Perhaps I’m just used to Tumblr’s giant visual icons for updating or perhaps I expected something like Wordpress’s intuitive column, but those links might fare better being up in the bar on top as well (or just as they are when I’m composing, checking overview, comments, etc. — screenshots coming right up).

When I scroll down, there’s a “Question of the Day” that I can answer, an ad, and most unobvious of all…featured bloggers/recommendations.
After I click “Find out more…” I get:

which doesn’t even show me any of their content.

I guess since TypePad Micro just launched today, they can’t do much, but it’s defnitely lacking some “social community” aspect to it. Tumblr does a great job of showing popular posts visually along with what’s “on their radar” and worth reading.

When you click on one of the featured bloggers, you end up at that person’s profile, not his/her blog, which is also a little bit different:
It’s very…FriendFeedy.

Now to the features!

very traditional textbox/compose screen, no specific photo/audio/video uploading screens like those on Tumblr…you have to insert/embed via the tiny media buttons which auto-format the html. This can get annoying if all I want to post is media and no text. Cool feature: I can add Technorati tags (separate from keywords), although I might just end up copy/pasting from keywords to tags, which can also get annoying after a while. I guess this makes the service feel more…traditional than “micro” and simplified. [edit] I can add photo and video via the “Quick Compose”, but that’s about it.

I really like the built-in analytics, which is what a lot of microblogging platforms don’t provide. I’m so used to using Google Analytics that it surprises me to see stats right away. Tumblr has their “Tumblarity” which only shows my number of posts, followers, likes and reblogs — and that’s about it.

The “posts” and “comments” tabs are very intuitive, just not very…pretty, but that’s not the point. (I could also say, I hate olive green and that completely doesn’t matter.) There are only two themes to choose from right now, but after I upload a banner image, TypePad suggests three new color schemes that all match my upload, which is nice. My past themes are also saved in a list, so I can change back to an older design whenever I want to. (I’ve had problems with saving Tumblr themes as html files and then losing them later.)

Under settings, there’s built in SEO for entering in meta data, I can enter in my Google Analytics UA identification under “stats”, and I can import a blog from TypePad, Moveable Type, or Wordpress.

Overall, TypePad Micro feels like a more traditional blogging service with newer “micro/social” features, like an activity stream, a reblog button, a favorites button, email updating…with oldschool features like a profile page and one textbox for all. I would still prefer Tumblr and Posterous over TypePad for their simplicity and design aesthetics, but TypePad could potentially become more powerful, since it integrates features I keep my Wordpress for — SEO, analytics, posts & comments management. We’ll see how popular Micro gets within the next few months.

Addendum
Hmm, no meta links! (log in/out, admin, dashboard…) from my blog. There should at least be little buttons like those in Tumblr’s top right corner. I had to click on my missing avatar to get to my profile to get to my dashboard or click on “powered by TypePad”.

What started out as a class project at Cal for Professor Brewer soon turned into reality the summer following graduation. Arthur Klepchukov, one of the seven original projectmates, decided he’d take the project a little further with the help of his good friend, Jerry Cheung.

Arthur and I had met a few times at ST@B mixers, and then I briefly saw him again at the DropBox party two weeks ago, so last week, I decided to interview him regarding his pet project, Outspokes.

Arthur, since you were one of the original team members, how did you guys think of the initial idea and what were some features the team thought of but threw out or modified and built into the final product? What were some of Professor Brewer’s reactions and feedback?

The initial idea was inspired by the freelance web design experience of the original team members on the project. We wanted to create a better way to get feedback on your web site. So, when you have something to show to your client or boss, they can visit the site and easily make comments, right in our widget at the bottom of each page. We thought this was much easier than writing long, ambiguous emails or trying to do a call or meeting.

Our original vision included a separate tool to get feedback on images (like mockups or wireframes) but we dropped that because of time constraints.

At the end of the semester, Professor Brewer encouraged us to add a way to actually edit things on a web page. This became our current designs feature and Brewer was impressed that we got it done in the last 2 weeks.

We became a company this summer because I had Jerry and Sean, great friends who believed in the vision, to help me as soon as I graduated. They idea clicked as soon as I showed them a demo.

Introduce the team! When did Jerry, Sean, and Nikki join in and what were everyone’s contributions? (Sean told me a while back that he was working on a startup with you, but he never told me any details.)

Jerry’s our rockstar engineer (I’m an engineer too but a ninja, not a rockstar). He’s been involved part-time since early summer and came on full-time in mid-September after quitting his job at Coupa.com, just in time for TechCrunch50!

Sean’s done everything from business development to interaction design to dealing with our lawyers to perfecting our deck. He graduated when I did (this May) and came on full-time in early July. Sean’s been great but is unfortunately reducing his involvement because he’s in a different place financially than the rest of us.

I couldn’t have turned a class project into a company without Jerry and Sean.

Nikki just joined as our marketing intern and she’s currently trying to drum up some press for us in other blogs.

And I’ve been here the longest, doing a lot of coding & design as well as anything else that absolutely needs to get done.

Awesome! I see Outspokes as a valuable widget if I’m designing a brand new website with bugs, navigation issues, organizational inefficiencies, but once I’ve finished my last iteration and reached a final design that everyone is satisfied with, I no longer see the need for Outspokes. Because Outspokes charges a monthly fee, do you guys plan to keep the same clients or do you see this as more of a one-time product that people pay for only when they need it?

Great question. Like you noticed, most changes happen when creating a new site (or radically redesigning an old one). So who regularly builds new sites and redesigns old ones? Freelancers and consulting firms, which is exactly why we’re targeting them. We think there are directions our technology can go to help people throughout the entire lifecycle of a web site but right now we’re staying focused on who we know we can help month after month: people building great web sites for others.

The hardest part of every startup is to develop its user base. I understand that Outspokes has presented at SF New Tech and demo’d at TC50 this year. Were you guys able to get any funding and what was the general feedback from the public? How else do you plan to market Outspokes?

We were thrilled to be in the TechCrunch50 DemoPit and on stage at SF New Tech! I’ve never pitched that much in my life. We actually weren’t looking for funding then but we found our first paying customer at TC50 and got some great feedback on where to go next. We learned it definitely wasn’t a product for everyone but Outspokes clicked with people who worked on web sites for others like freelancers and web consulting agencies.

We’re experimenting with a bunch of social media marketing at the moment: Twitter, a Facebook page, and blog posts like this one. Word-of-mouth is more genuine than ads and fits our bootstrapping budget.

So what do you envision for the future of Outspokes, and where would you like to see Outspokes five years from now? Any last comments?

In the immediate future, we’d love to be part of Y Combinator for their Winter 2010 season. We applied and have an interview scheduled, so wish us luck!

Long term, I’d love to wake up one morning knowing that our tool plays an essential role in our customers’ success. I want our tool to be so helpful in their daily workflow that “Outspokes” will be the first word that comes to mind when they start building a new web site. We want to create something so useful that our customers forget how horrible web development collaboration was before Outspokes existed.

Readers, I’m sure you’ll also love to wake up one morning and realize…OUTSPOKES IS GIVING AWAY FREE PREMIUM ACCOUNTS! Outspokes just tweeted a few minutes ago, now it’s your turn to retweet! Here are the details:

Outspokes Tweet-a-palooza: Free Premium Accounts!

Get a $10/mo premium Outspokes account for free through January 2010!

Outspokes is a great new collaboration tool for anyone involved in creating or managing a web site. Whether you’re a freelancer with an outspoken client, a consulting firm dealing with design by committee, or just a remote team all producing the next great web application, Outspokes can help you communicate faster and more clearly.

Just follow @Outspokes and tweet the following:

Excited to get my free premium @Outspokes account, thanks to this tweet!
RT to get yours: http://bit.ly/3RSgrP

Then we’ll message you to confirm your account and get you on the premium plan!

What happens in January? If you love us, please stay on our paid premium plan. Otherwise, we’d be happy to provide you with our current free plan.

Yesterday morning, my dad forwarded my mom a chain-mail with an year-old article on mobile trends, which my mom forwarded to me with this email:

1. If we’re talking about mobile web browsers, Flash doesn’t even work. (Websites for mobile browsers are just stripped down versions of regular websites though.) If we’re talking about mobile apps, I wouldn’t know but I heard the iPhone SDK is fairly easy to learn (for coders, at least). If I wanted to learn how graphics/multimedia worked for apps, I could easily ask one of 10293824 friends who builds iPhone apps for fun.
2. Still debating; would rather stay in the Bay though. (I don’t think tech anywhere else beats tech here in the Bay Area—err, unless we’re talking about Japan’s mobile technologies. Nothing beats our social media craze and database of iPhone apps though.)

I spent some time translating the outdated article anyway, so here it is:

手機廣告終於起飛，全球成長3倍！
Mobile advertising finally takes off, tripling growth globally!

行銷業過去常常表示，行動電話廣告正在興起，但這次他們可能是對的。行動廣告業龍頭AdMob表示，過去12個月裡，它們在全球發送的廣告成長達3倍。主要原因在於，很多行動廣告的阻礙都消失了。
Marketers in the past constantly say that mobile advertising is on the rise, but they might be right this time. Mobile advertising giant, AdMob, has tripled their company globally these past twelve months, since many roadblocks for mobile advertising have disappeared.

硬體是其中之一。許多年來，手機上網非常麻煩，螢幕太小且操作不易。但新一代的智慧電話，例如iPhone、Google的G1和黑莓機已經解決了這個問題，它們擁有夠大的觸碰式螢幕，可以完整的呈現網頁和廣告。
Hardware is only one aspect. For many years, it was really difficult to go online via a cell phone, because screens were too small and interfaces were difficult to use. Now, those problems no longer exist; we have a new generation of smart phones such as the iPhone, Google’s G1, and Blackberry phones, which have large enough touch screens to display webpages and advertisements effectively.

網路速度提升，費率下降也有幫助。下載廣告的時間長，而且還得付費，很難讓人對廣告裡的產品留下好印象。速度提升，加上「上到飽」的付費方案，使行動服務和應用更受歡迎，也更能靠廣告資金來營運。
Internet speeds have increased while fees have decreased, which also helps. [In the past], downloading ads took a while and you had to pay a fee, which left users a bad impression of what was actually advertised. With faster [internet] speed and “pay as you go” plans, mobile services and applications are becoming more popular, so companies can continue to operate with advertising revenue.

最重要因素，也許是行銷業者開始找出何種廣告方式最適合手機。新成立的公司Amobee，讓客戶可以在手機遊戲等其他軟體中放入廣告。
The most important factor is, perhaps the sales industry is also looking for the most suitable mobile advertising platforms out there. The new startup, Amobee, lets clients [advertisers] display ads in the middle of mobile games and other software.

另一個方式，則是提供服務來吸引注意。行動業者Blyk，也對16到24歲的用戶提供每個月217封免費訊息和43分鐘的通話，條件則是每天收6封廣告。方案在英國推出1年後，用戶達20萬人，是Blyk目標的兩倍。
Another method is to offer services to attract attention. Mobile company, Blyk, provides 16-24 year-olds 217 free [characters for?] text messages and 43 free minutes every month, the catch being that users receive 6 ads per day. After using this strategy for a year in the UK, the company reached 200k users, which was twice their original goal.

還有一個方式，就是整合行動服務和真實世界裡的事件。行動行銷仲介Phonevally，在今年夏天推出了一項服務，讓朋友間可以在他們支持的足球隊得分時，進行電話會議，這項服務則是由運動用品商Puma贊助。
There’s yet another method, which is to combine mobile services with realtime events. Mobile marketing company, Phonevally (pretty sure they meant Phonevalley…), came out with a new service this summer, which lets friends conference call when their favorite soccer team scores. This service is sponsored by the sports brand, Puma.

行動廣告和社交網站一樣，有風險但也充滿機會。風險在於它會出現在非常私人的情境之中，可能會讓人有被侵犯的感覺，但這也是它吸引廣告商的地方──前提是廣告商必須展現同理心。
Mobile advertising is like social networking, it’s dangerous yet full of opportunities. The risk lies in that they [ads] appear in very personal settings [on a user's personal phone], which could make the user feel violated, but this also attracts the advertising market—the prerequisite is that these ad companies must be sensitive to people’s needs.

(original source here)

I remember having a discussion about Asian mobile technologies in my Haas marketing class a while ago. The lure is, China has 1.3 billion people, 20% of the world’s population. (New York City has what, 8 million people? Shanghai has 20 million.) One out of every five people is Chinese—yet not every Chinese person can afford his/her own personal computer. However, many Chinese do carry around cellphones, and that’s why everyone wants to tap the Chinese mobile industry. (I was in Taiwan all summer, and my phone bill was something like $8/month with some first-time registration discount. Still ridiculously cheap for a basic plan with no internet. Taiwan’s standard of living is also much higher than that of China’s.)

Apparently, mobile advertising is completely insane in Asia. Our professor said that in Japan, once you walked near a restaurant, you’d receive a coupon via SMS right away. (That’s obviously a complete invasion of one’s privacy. Imagine walking along a strip mall, lol. And you thought voluntarily notifying others of your location on foursquare was bad.) On the other hand, Japan also has some pretty cool mobile technologies, such as purchasing vending machine drinks via one’s phone—we’re finally catching up with the Starbucks Card Mobile app, sort of. Here, we just have innocuous ads embedded in free apps, which we can get rid of if we buy the premium versions of the apps—not bad, not invasive, not even that noticeable. In Taiwan, I constantly received ads via texts at odd hours, which got pretty annoying after just a week. Blatant text spamming would never fly in the US—but I guess it’s lucrative in Asia (although do consider the last line in that article: be sensitive!).

When in doubt, think like Americans (heh). Smartphones are inevitable. How many desktop users do you know who still don’t have laptops by now? None? How many people will be without smartphones five? ten? years from now? None? If mobile advertising is getting out of hand, “hide” the ads in applications like we do and stop spamming people with texts! The iPhone didn’t seem that popular in Taiwan while I was there (it also costs 3x more…); but then again, Taiwanese people aren’t very Apple-friendly in general and youngsters aren’t as obsessed with tweeting and facebooking 24/7. However, my boss had some HTC smartphone, which seemed equally powerful. Taiwan is only a tiny island; China, on the other hand, is not. China has produced clones like iiPhones, iPhons, TPhones, liPhones, EPhones, and many more…they know what’s up. Asians really like Sony Ericsson, Nokia, HTC and Samsung smartphones, in my opinion. (I traveled to six major Asian cities this summer, although I’m sure a simple Google search would reveal some actual stats. Hmm, CNET Asia says people really like the Sony Aino.)

Since my parents have apparently invested 15k in some Taiwanese mobile tech company, I might as well pimp the company, right?! From my limited understanding, 行動 104 creates software applications for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Nokia’s S60 platform, and Sony Ericsson’s (and Motorola’s?) UIQ platform. According to them, this accounts for 65% of the Taiwanese mobile market. (This makes sense since I said the iPhone wasn’t popular in Taiwan.) Some of their paid apps include GPS maps to train timetables to zodiac constellations fortunetellers…while free apps include sudoku, iChing divination, and the Bible…I have no clue.

My only major concern is, why are they focusing on Windows Mobile?! (Read their blog.) Perhaps the market is different in Taiwan, but usually the US market is a pretty good indicator for the rest of the world (particularly since Microsoft is an American company…). Microsoft’s mobile marketshare keeps dropping (here are some pie-charts). Palm doesn’t like Windows Mobile anymore and neither does Acer. Good luck. Project Pink sounds ambitious, but I haven’t heard much about its promise—a comeback seems unlikely, in my opinion.

I guess if HTC smartphones remain popular in Asia, Windows Mobile will be okay, but HTC is also warming up to Google’s Android. The T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) uses Android, obviously. If HTC decides to shift all of their future products to Android only, I think Windows Mobile (and this company my parents just invested in) will be screwed, lol. The brand-new Droid just came out two days ago, and it’s already Dave Winer’s favorite phone. Uh-oh. (Honestly, no one should compete with Google anymore. The end.)

(I missed the bottom line…the bottom line is, Taiwan is a small island, China is not! …so figure out what the Chinese like. They seem to know how to copy Americans very well. Americans love Microsoft…but not IE, not Outlook, and not Windows Mobile. Americans love Google products though. If the Android OS really is like old-school Microsoft according to Scobleizer…行動 104 should shift towards the Android without too much difficulty.)

My last 2 cents, Taiwanese companies should also consider building Facebook apps, because I see that catching on even faster than smartphones. In the entire Living 3.0 office, my boss was the only other person with a smartphone. However, I convinced everyone else to create a Facebook account, and somehow, they all got addicted to ELEX’s 開心農場 on their own. (The game is a ripoff of Zynga’s FarmVille, the #1 game on Facebook right now.) The younger Taiwanese consumers probably can’t all afford smartphones just yet, but they sure play a lot of social games. Taiwanese people are also extremely viral. One of my past colleagues “liked” someone’s note, so it appeared in my NewsFeed. The person who posted the note had only 320 Facebook friends, but that one note on a divorce story(?!) received 114,484 likes and 29,641 comments (within one month). WHAT THE HECK?! (I’m sure Zuckerberg’s own Facebook doesn’t even get that much attention!) I thought some spammer (or multiple spammers) had gone through and ruined her note, but no, they are all authentic comments. (I’d hate to receive nearly 1,000 email notifications per day (42 per hour), LOL.)

As if that weren’t convincing enough, I am Facebook friends with four uncles, one aunt, even one great-aunt—all residing in Taiwan. (What, your parents are on Facebook? Well, so are mine, but so are my Taiwanese relatives—some twice-removed.)

Addendum
Apparently, reports of Window’s Mobile’s death are greatly exaggerated and I also failed to catch one MAJOR DETAIL, HTC is Taiwanese, which means they will always remain popular in Taiwan (which also explains why I thought I saw so many HTC phones in Taiwan, LOL). D’oh.

The author of the crazy popular Facebook note is “anonymous”.

The news just broadcasted how the unemployment rate is above 10% for the first time since 1983, how it’s even higher for teens and twenty-somethings, how it’s really a depression rather than a recession for us. I’m lucky that I’ve been interviewing with a few options to choose from, but as someone who also freelances web and graphic design, crowdsourcing design still breaks my heart.

Most designers are notoriously poor to begin with, and even more are not paid for their work. At a geek party a few weeks ago, two of my friends were talking about how much they paid their last designer for just a logo. One guy at a startup said he submitted a logo design brief on crowdSPRING, received thousands of submissions to choose from, and then only paid the winning design a few hundred bucks. The other guy, who worked at a major tech company, said his team paid $1200 for a professional logo design (with limited options), so he was envious that his team had not heard of crowdSPRING earlier.

For companies looking for contract designers, sites like crowdSPRING and 99designs are awesome deals; but for freelance designers like me desperate for work in tough economic situations, I’d be doing a lot of work for free. Because designers are desperate to win the “cash prize”, they put in their best efforts…for usually nothing. Designers constantly do this (myself included) to build up their portfolio, but at some point, we need bread money.

Successful companies like Threadless also use the crowdsourcing model, and to be honest, when Teresa and I were brainstorming ways to expand to merchandise for My Mom is a Fob, we considered asking for submissions (for essentially, a design competition), rather than designing the shirts ourselves. As a business model, it just works really well; but as someone who can sympathize with business-minded companies and designers, the concept just tugs on my heart strings.

Lastly, I feel like more and more designers are being replaced with tools like, Design to Wordpress Theme and Drawter. They don’t work that well and don’t necessarily make work any easier or more efficient, but if more design products streamline the design process* and become good enough in the future that most companies no longer need professional designers…I sense some danger. (One could also argue that this weeds out the best…and the world only needs the best. *Sigh*)

*I would argue that a company should not streamline the design process for efficiency’s sake, but rather work together with the designer on iteration after iteration to get the best product possible. (If you end up hating your design, you’re just going to have to hire another designer or submit another design brief.)

Addendum
My friend who told me about crowdSPRING clarified a few points for me in an email, which I figured I’d share:

Hey, I saw your blog post and I absolutely agree – the setup sucks for designers.

Just a minor correction though – we got ~200 submissions, not thousands.

Also, on crowdspring at least, we did get to iterate on designs. We could write feedback on logos that the designer could see and, almost without fail, the designer submitted another logo that incorporated our notes.

I don’t think good designers are really affected by this sort of thing (just like good programmers aren’t really affected by $7/hr coders on elance). I know a couple of designers who bill at  ($50-$100)/hr and are so busy they have to turn down clients (our actual designer is one of those).

As someone who has blogged since elementary school, I’ve been part of blogging trends from archaic Blogger, Xanga and LiveJournal to oh-so-popular Wordpress (service and software) to various forms of microblogging, including Tumblr and Twitter.

Many personal bloggers who don’t have the professional need for the powerful Wordpress software have turned to quick and easy “tumblelogging”, namely, Tumblr and Posterous. (For those looking for something even more professional than Wordpress, check out Squarespace, but for those looking to blog for fun, read on.)

The lure of Xanga and LiveJournal was the social aspect of the “friend’s page”. Before people subscribed to blogs in RSS readers and before “web 2.0” and “social media” were even coined, people were networking in LiveJournal communities and checking their “friend’s page” of updates obsessive-compulsively. When Wordpress claimed the King’s throne in the blogsphere after Moveable Type users migrated over to what was free, RSS readers became much more popular and soon replaced older, limited forms of aggregators and communities. Then came Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous—the “you won’t understand it until you try it” gang of microblogging services.

While Twitter has its 140-character textual limitations, Tumblr and Posterous don’t. While Wordpress is a powerful but “lonely” software with no “social” community aspect to it, Tumblr and Posterous do. So why are David Karp, Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan so successful? Because anyone can “+ Follow” Mr. Karp and “like” his entries, and keep track of other fellow Tumblrers and Tumblrettes on personal dashboards. It’s like I have my handy dandy “friend’s page” all over again! If I were constantly on the run and traveling from place to place, I’d love Posterous for its ability to post via email. (Apparently, that’s the easy way to tweet from China, since Twitter is banned and Posterous is not.)

For me, I still update my 1337 blogs and keep the content I post on my Wordpress and Tumblr distinctly separate. 100% original, well-crafted, [mostly] error-free entries in paragraph form appear on my Wordpress blogs while “reblogs”, spontaneous thoughts, picture-only posts, and favorite conversations and quotes appear on my Tumblr. Some people describe tumblelogs as “scrapbooks” or an online “stream of consciousness”. Not many people use tumblelogs “professionally”—unless you’re NonSociety, but I sense the tides changing.

Just last month, four or so friends neglected their Wordpress-powered blogs and turned to Tumblr for all of their blogging needs. The obvious answer was, “It saves time,” but I decided to ask a few anyway to get some feedback to share with those who are new to blogging.

My fobby partner-in-crime, Teresa Wu, once had over 400 subscribers reading her Wordpress blog; then she decided to stop all of that and even forwarded her old domain to her current Tumblr, by teresa wu. Here are her reasons for doing so:

1) Access to community.
2) It takes 230492830428 clicks to get my post up on Wordpress, but about three to get it up on Tumblr. I also do minimal formatting on Tumblr, and things come out looking nicely.
3) I rarely have time to write long-form posts anymore, and my short blurbs and uploads just seem more appropriate on Tumblr’s platform.

Annie Tsai, better known to the e-world as “Annieisms”, was among the first wave of video bloggers back in 2005. She has since joined the world of Tumblr after finding it tedious to update her Wordpress (but Tumblr makes perfect sense for a videoblogger and media creator, when there’s the simple video embed feature). Here’s her explanation:

“I’ve had a Wordpress blog for a while now, and the updates really slowed down because I found it really tedious to post in. Yes, “Tumblr is just easier and faster,” but I can’t quite figure out why. Perhaps it’s because the creators of Tumblr have purposely stunted its posting ability? Wordpress seems almost overwhelming in comparison.

I never really saw the draw of Tumblr until I created an account… no one told me about the backend (the dashboard, likes, reblogging community)! Of course, I see it as a double-edged sword, because I’m afraid my Tumblr will become just reblogs, with no original content. Ooh, there’s a difference between Wordpress and Tumblr — I’d never reblog on my Wordpress, I would link.

Another point: Tumblarity. I have a love/hate relationship with it — I’ve never used blogging software that made my self-esteem fluctuate like crazy and determine my self-worth. haha.”

For clarification’s sake, “tumblarity” is a fluid number denoting a Tumblr’s popularity, derived from that blog’s recent activity (posting frequency, number of reblogs and likes). Very witty and manipulative, Mr. Karp.

Joseph Rosario, another long-time blogger and web designer, explains his blogging history and ultimate decision to use Tumblr, in detail:

“I first started blogging with MoveableType back before it was bought out by Six Apart. At the time there weren’t really a whole lot of choices. All I wanted was some kind of CMS that saved me from manually editing HTML whenever I wanted to post an entry. It was quite a learning process trying to figure out all the syntax to convert my page to MT templates, but their documentation made it reasonably easy to figure out. I have to admit that once Xanga and LiveJournal came on the scene, I was envious at the ease of setup. But the customizability that comes with using a self-hosted CMS remained a major sticking point for me to continue with MoveableType.

A few years passed, and then all of a sudden this Wordpress thing shows up and takes the blogging world by storm. The seemingly limitless supply of plug-ins, themes, and tutorials was a breath of fresh air. Based around the same syntax concepts that MoveableType had, I was really eager to replace it on my server. So I did. I think it was the themes that really drew me in, because I hate creating designs from scratch. I’m a lot better at editing pre-made designs than typing them up from scratch by myself. So I spent a good year to two years messing around with a bunch of random sites and wordpress installations. Not many of which I would actually use, but rather just enjoyed setting up. I stopped having the need for so much customization and configurations. Not to mention, I truly hated logging into my account every day only to find that 4 plug-ins needed to be updated.

I personally still love the Wordpress schema, but for my own blog, I prefer the simplicity of a Tumblr or Posterous. I originally began with the latter, but made the switch to Tumblr for quite a few reasons:

• the categorization of each post (photo, link, video, etc),
• the ability to style each type of those posts,
• cname forwarding my domain to my tumblr blog,
• managing the whole tumblr blog from one template page,
• and rebloging and following are pretty cool too.

Tumblr really seems to be geared toward short and simple posts, which I absolutely love. My daily life is pretty consistent these days, so trying to create new content can be a real pain. So for my personal blog, I normally just want to share a few random things that I come across during the day. And Tumblr is perfect for that. But if I were to create another blog with fixed content and lots of interactivity, I’d most likely choose to use Wordpress (or Drupal/Joomla if I could figure out how to use them). You just can’t match the functionality that plug-ins can add, completely changing the way the site functions.

Anyway, I guess I see the differences pretty similar to the way you do. Wordpress being for ‘professional blogging’ and Tumblr being used for ’social blogging’.”

With all of that said, I have high hopes for Tumblr and Posterous, so if you’re a VC, consider investing so that avid users like us can get new features! Time to Tumble a pulled quote from this post for y’all to reblog and link, hehe.