WoonZai

Singaporeans are complacent and greedy?

Somehow, I believe we have this problem too. High pay, low working hours etc. Resonates very well with what I sense around me.

mollymeek: Send this to the ST Forum 5: S’poreans Complacent and Greedy

Singaporeans are becoming more and more complacent. They think that the government will take care of them. They are unable to go through hardship and are unwilling to work 18 hours a day. They are so greedy that they think they are entitled to overtime pay when workers are supposed to do work and not suck money from employers who are kind enough to give them work to do.

Posted in Singapore, Society | No Comments »

Further advancements in RFID software technology

It appeared that previously, RFID tags can only identify groups of objects. Any attempt to track objects individually (for example a specific bottle of shampoo as opposed to the entire brand of shampoos on sale) was costly and ineffective. The advancement in RFID technology now solves this problem.

RFID reader can now identify velocity, position of tags

The new software will be able to discriminate between different bags, and provide such information as where the bag is going and whether a certain piece of luggage is supposed to be searched by Customs.

Alien’s new software, a free update available for the models ALR-9900, ALR-9800, and ALR-8800, also has a flexible reader distance, ranging from just millimeters to 100 feet.

“You can also use it in the military,” Stelter said. Helicopters picking up cargo can use a reader to locate the load, an often arduous task when visibility is poor. The reader distances have increased fivefold during the last five years, according to the company.

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Comparing Google’s App Engine with Amazon EC2

An excellent graphical comparison between Google’s App Engine and Amazon EC2. Google seems to offer a better whole product solution that Amazon EC2 because of their ability to leverage on web frameworks, toolkits and their social graphs.

Amazon seems to be stronger on the infrastructure side - The flexibility to integrate with most client-side codes (as opposed to Google’s sole support for Python) and their S3 + SimpleDB database.

How Google App Engine Stacks up to Amazon EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon’s approach to providing infrastructure services to Google’s. He found that Amazon’s set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google’s App Engine.

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Does a Business Guy have a place in Software Startups?

Valid points made. But it does not address one key issue - how difficult it is for business guys to convince smart hackers to work together.

Does a Business Guy have a Place in Software Startups? - Tony Wright dot com

It turns out that it’s not so simple as that. Startups are diverse– each startup has different needs. How do you think SalesForce.com would’ve done if it’d been started by a bunch of hackers? How do you think Zappos.com would have fared if it wasn’t started by a zealot for customer service and support? There are plenty of examples of great software startups with a critical founder who wasn’t really a technologist (arguably, Apple is a great example of this).

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Technology | No Comments »

YC Clone in Singapore?

Y Combinator is a venture firm based in the States which provides funding, networks and mentorship for early stage web technology startups. The underlying philosophy of the founders are that young hackers are smart, and should start their own company than to be miserably stuck working in cubicles.

Peter Christensen toyed around with a few concepts to expand the YC philosophy to other niches. What struck me was how Singapore was one of the countries off the top of his head for a YC clone to be set up. And Singapore is the only Asian country that he mentioned in the list. Not China. Not Hong Kong. Not Taiwan.

I know I might sound childish here. I should be asking him the questions directly as opposed to blogging it but I’m lazy to do so. Wow - Has Singapore made a name for herself in the web technology space? Has he met any Singaporeans? Does he know anyone from NUSEA, ruby-sg, Singapore PHP, garag3? What have he heard about Singapore so far? Or was it just a coincidental random call?

Can YCombinator Be Beaten At Its Own Game? » What’s In Peter’s Head

The other discussion was about selecting founders to fund. I summarize YCombinator’s selection criteria as: “Young, Smart, Cheap, Determined, Acquirable”. This fits in with Paul Graham’s philosophy and worldview, and by focusing on these kind of founders, they deliberately pass on many other ideas and founders. Are there any other investment niches in the space ignored by YCombinator? Of course, but it will take another creative individual to come up with that business model. Here are some ideas:

* A YC clone in (Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Helsinki, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, etc) for founders that can’t get US visas. US immigration policy keeps lots of smart people out of the US, so that’s an unexploited opportunity

* A hardware-centric fund that funds quick, small solutions based on FPGAs instead of burned-in hardware

* Focus on revenue generating startups as opposed to acquirable startups and collect dividends instead of exit payouts. This would create completely different companies than the ones YC has funded

* Encourage teams mixed with technical and business/marketing people to promote faster adoption people. Test the hypothesis that business adds value to early-stage startups

* Target more experienced professionals that are farther along in life and wouldn’t live on such a small amount.

Posted in Singapore, Technology | No Comments »

Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities Check-List

A good checklist to guard against cross site scripting attacks. I believe most of the web frameworks (especially RoR, CakePHP and Django) out there should have in-built protection against all these attacks?

XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Inspiring Videos

Two inspiring videos. A father who went all out to give his son a normal life, and a young girl who has a talent for playing the piano.

Dear parents. Before you start worrying about how badly your child did in school, and whether you need to schedule more tuition lessons to give them a better life in future - Please remember that the most important thing is for your child to be happy today. Spend time with them, and listen to their never-ending fascination about life. The most important thing you should treasure at all times is that your baby is alive and healthy. That is nature’s greatest and most magical gift.

YouTube - Team Hoyt - Dick and Rick Hoyt

The real story of a inspirational love between a father and a son.

More info at www.teamhoyt.com

YouTube - Yeh Eun - the 5 year old Blind pianist Genius

Yeh Eun is 5 years old and she was born blind. At the age of three, she heard Fur Elise on the computer and suddenly, she was able to play it on the piano. She’s able to listen to any type of music and play it on the piano. (less)

Posted in Lifestyle | No Comments »

Google takes down HuddleChat

I’m not sure whether this news is positive or negative. On one hand, Google is making everything free for everyone. On the other hand, free web applications edges out small web startups who needs the income to sustain themselves. It’s interesting to observe how sustainable a business model based on advertising revenue can last - For Facebook, Myspace and Google.

Google Rips Down HuddleChat

Some bloggers noted that the application was a rip off of Campfire, a 37Signals product. And 37Signals CEO Jason Fried used HuddleChat as a PR opportunity, telling ReadWriteWeb “We’re flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout…We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for.”

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

A Wikipedia for Data

Bret Taylor suggested having a Wikipedia for Data. It’s not a novel idea, considering that Freebase is up and I have meddled around with a similar idea concept that I submitted to Y-combinator earlier.

Adrian Holovaty, founder of web framework Django and programmer-journalist, also suggested something similar when he proposed a radical approach for newspaper sites to evolve from a story-centric style of news reporting to a data-driven approach.

The main barrier for a “data-driven Wikipedia” will be the privacy issues when data concerning contact information is up - But I don’t think anyone can stop that from happening.

We need a Wikipedia for data - Bret Taylor’s blog

Imagine what amazing applications would be created if every programmer in the world had free access to all of these data sets:

* Map data for all countries in a relatively uniform data format

* White pages data (names and addresses) for all cities of the world

* Stock data for all major exchanges for all time

* Movie showtimes data for all cities in the world

* Television schedule data for all cities in the world

* Sports scores and stats for all sports in the world for all time

* Rich meta data for all musical albums and movies from all labels for all time

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Joyent Offers Unlimited Web hosting in Exchange for Customer Data

Joyeur: Joyent’s Garden of Eden for Python Web Applications

Joyent’s “Garden of Eden” program provides you, the python application developer, with unlimited on-demand compute, storage, memory, bandwidth for your python application (besides the nude, and buffed people everywhere).

All these in exchange for customer information and click-stream data. I wonder how developers taking this offer will write their terms and conditions.”By using this application, you are granting XXX the right to surrender and give all of your information and site activities to Joyent.”

A very risky bet for any developers company given the stigma and privacy issues associated with selling customer information.

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