James Zhuo 卓宇翔

 
Great talk for entrepreneurs.

On a more personal front. I used to go through emotional ups and downs a lot more. In retrospect, this was probably because of fears, fear that while others make money in a full-time job to pay off their house, that I would come out of it with nothing. These self-doubts can sometimes kill one's entrepreneurial spirit, I am just glad that I no longer seem to suffer from these mental struggles.

Using python decorators you can easy do inject behaviours through declaration.
A good example of how this might be used in an web application is as follows

@authenticated
def home(request):
  """ a function to handle web request for the home page """
  .... code to handle web request ....

@authenticated injects authentication functionality through a decorator implemented
as either a Python decorator function or decorator class. Here's a great 3 part tutorial on
python decorators http://muharem.wordpress.com/2006/10/18/3/

One of those lovely things about python.

How's this for a way of differentiating yourself? With all these video sites around, people's got to find a way to differentiate themselves somehow. I guess this is how idkwtf.com does it.

This was some python geek's signature in a python mailing list that I've recently joined. I thought it's quite funny.

"Thus spake the Lord: Thou shalt indent with four spaces. No more, no less. Four shall be the number of spaces thou shalt indent, and the number of thy indenting shall be four. Eight shalt thou not indent, nor either indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Tabs are right out."

http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff261/ikaika_34/check.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U
    

This TedTalk is pretty average but Al Gore was being really funny.
You wouldn't think a presidential candidate has the funny side in him.

  

Now if you want an interesting TedTalk and has 20 minutes to spare now, "Classical Music with Shining Eyes" by Benjamin Zander

  

Glassdoor.com is a really cool site. If you are like me and constantly try to understand how companies and businesses work. Glassdoor enables (ex)employees to reveal a different side of every company. These reviews are subject to individual opinions and experiences but taken together they are a great insight into a company and its culture. For example, Google has been seen as this great company to work for that does great things, but perhaps they are more like the next Microsoft than most people think, here's a few extracts


See for yourself here.

PS: tradevibes.com is another great site, a new startup trying to be wikipedia but for information related to startup companies, they seem to be attracting enough people to their site to get the whole movement going. This is another 1 dollar bet for me and Michael. I think they might just make it, though they do have a formidable competitor - crunchbase.

Everything about Google looks so promising, bar the following Google sued over 'unwanted ads', or more specifically the fact that their revenue relies solely on online Advertising which is unreliable and potentially a bottomless pit hole. Perhaps I am overly concerned since Google's revenue has been steadily increasing despite these lawsuits. But instinctively I see no substance in Google's online advertisements. I've asked many around me and none of them pay any attention to Google's text based ads, their acquisition of DoubleClick is probably a good sign that they've realised this. Personally I am much more inclined to click on ads with pictures or Flash similar to TV ads and even then I might click on at most 3 ads every year (yes I can count the number of times I've clicked).

What's most promising about Google for me is their push into software as a service (Saas). I can see Google becoming a leading enterprise software maker in the not too distant future. In fact I would argue that they already are, Gmail is the proof. But there are also Google doc, Google site (wiki), Google reader, Google calendar and let's not forget their newly launched App Engine service. We are boot-strapping our startup operation using all of these Google technologies and we see absolutely no reason to use anyone else. In a sense we are at the bleeding edge of using all these technologies and we see many others following swiftly in the same direction. This is really the root of my optimism about Google.

Google may face competitions from Microsoft in all of these areas, but I just can't see Microsoft transitioning from their existing business model to the new cheap, on-demand, commodity based, enterprise, web solutions model. It's the culture of these companies that ultimately dictate what they become and I think Google's culture is much more well-suited to the new economy built around the web.

Having said all of these, is $552.12 USD at a P/E of 38.81 a good buy given the current state of the US economy? Or would you buy Apple at a similar P/E, an equally promising company with arguably less risk and more prospects for growth? Or Amazon with a P/E of almost 70, again very promising with the release of Amazon Kindle and Amazon web services. I think in the long term all these companies will be good buys, for me it's just a matter of what price to buy into them. If you've any valuation model to share with me, I would love to see it.

JZ

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97862/DHH_Talk__Startup_School_2008

This is definitely one of the better presentations that I've seen from DHH.
He sounded a lot more matured and his arrogance seemed to have subsided.
But great advices on how to build a startup. I think many internet entrepreneurs
or indeed any other entrepreneurs would really appreciated this information.
DHH was just being honest and trying to help, which is really good to see :)

Great video!