Essays and longer write-ups. For the short stuff, see Notes.
First time in my life winning a big toy in those UFO catcher machines :D Went to the new SEGA arcade in Akihabara tonight with AniDotMe [http://www.ani.me] founder Mike Prasad and he taught me the trick to winning this gigantic Glommy plush toy cushion! ¥500 for 3 tries, the trick is to hook its tag!!!!!!!! Definitely a bit a beginner’s luck there but hell yeah it was epic when the claws pick the whole thing up!!! :D
Read MoreHa! My first “Top n whatever list” topic to lure readers :D … Well, this is just a list I got from Startup Weekend Tokyo, Guy Cihi, CEO of AGS Capital came to share his experience from both the Startup side and the VC side, to show us the key elements that make up a good pitch! Afterwards we got to pick his brain some more and he had good conversations with many of us. This is part of the benefits you’ll gain by participating at Startup Weekends!
Read MoreJust came back from the 1st night of the 2nd official Startup Weekend Tokyo. 90+ people this time! Majority Japanese!! Most of them pitched about the problems they wanna solve!! This is gonna be even more awesome than last time!!
Read MoreAlmost 2 years ago in August 2009, I moved to Tokyo to work for CUUSOO.com, an innovative “crowdsourced product design” web company. The reason why I joined CUUSOO was because of its vision - users submitting their wishes up front, others declare their intention to buy that product at a certain price, thus creating a market demand signal. Consumers become co-producers to make the perfect products for themselves. I believed that by making this system successful, on a small scale, independent makers and small workshops can produce just the right amount of highly customizable products for the local market, while on the large scale, manufacturers can know upfront the market demand for a product before it’s made, hence lowering the risk of wasting raw materials and natural resources to produce crap that nobody wants! (See event I organized to promote CUUSOO) I wanted to work on something that would make the world a better place and CUUSOO.com had the right idea!In these past 2 years, I had initiated many projects to try to make CUUSOO’s original idea work. When I first joined, after evaluating the legacy system and the company’s goals, I suggested creating the English version of LEGO CUUSOO as a new, simple website (the term “Minimal Viable Product” wasn’t invented yet) using one of the new web frameworks like Drupal, forget about the old Japanese contents and concentrate in the US market. Once we build up a healthy community in the West, we can then migrate our old Japanese contents & users from the legacy site. When that got rejected, (after weeks of persuations and arguements) I started an open source project called Open Hippel. I went out to social events and talked to people about my idea - an open user innovation system, in which CUUSOO can be its first commercial user, but the software is free for all to use. I even started a P2PU course to teach Drupal through building Open Hippel! Pairing the software with a 3-tier business model - a top layer of independent communities using Open Hippel to bubble up ideas, and a bottom layer connecting to my inventor friend in Hong Kong, sourcing the manufacturing to the experts, thereby creating a whole eco-system around CUUSOO and Open Hippel in the middle. It was grand!The friends I’ve made through the Open Hippel project have been truly inspirational! We share the same passion and we pushed each other to work hard on developing the open source platform and the new eco-system. Although the plan to use the system for CUUSOO failed, the seeds we had sewn, the work that we had put in are not lost. My friends continued to follow our common goal and a couple of new startups were spawned! One of which is Makible.com, which I’ll be joining as… hmm… I don’t even know what to call myself! I guess I’m “the guy who connected the dots and pulled the people together”.
Read More▶ YouTube video 星期日檔案：車衣女工 1 ▶ YouTube video 星期日檔案：車衣女工 2 http://mytv.tvb.com/news/sundayreport/117624#page-1 (Original - not viewable outside of HK)Wife just showed this to me. Back in the heights of 70’s ~ 80’s, 1 in 10 worked in the textile industry in HK. They learned a set of good skills and even though the businesses had moved North into China, a portion of skilled workers remained in HK to tough it out!These are now the elders who’re passing on tangible, valuable knowledge to the next generation… These are the “Makers” we need to value! (I’ve said so before when I organized this event.) This is what I’m dedicating my time to - helping the “Makers” take back our communities from Wall Street and large corporations!
Read MoreAfter the magnitude 9.1 earthquake on Friday, March 11, 2011, life in Tokyo changed forever… unless you’re a salaryman, then you are supposed to pretend everything is normal and go to work! On Monday, March 14th, even though aftershocks continued to hit, the Fukushima nuclear plant up North was blowing up and Tokyo Electric Company enforces blackouts in Tokyo to save energy, people continued to go to work like it was just another normal Monday! The news on TV was widely reporting how the train services were significantly cut back and people have to queue for more than 2 hours to get into OR out of the train station!! I couldn’t help but thought: “What are these people doing that are so important, so meaningful, that they need to continue doing it at a time like this?!”
Read MoreThe largest earthquake ever in Japan’s recorded history hit 373 km NE of Tokyo on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:46pm. I was in a meeting with two Japanese colleagues at our French partner’s office in Higashi-Nihonbashi. Most of the guys there are Europeans, so they had never been through a severe earthquake before. We decided to flee when the earthquake didn’t subside but actually began to strengthen! As we were running downstairs, the shaking really got violent and we began to hear the building walls breaking and tiles falling! We’ve never run down staircases so fast in our lives!
Read MoreSome photos from the Meiji University last night.
Read MorePhoto from Fast Company article, by Casey Lau from NeonPunch Back in the middle of 2010, I went to Hong Kong to meet with Jon Buford, I’ve known him since a few years back from Agile Hong Kong meetings, where he had talked about the design, manufacturing and marketing processes in the toy industry. He had just organized the first Startup Saturday HK event with a huge attendence of more than 400 people!
Read MoreJust heard a terrible news, one of my wife’s close friend who own(ed) her own sourcing company in Hong Kong and a factory in China has just lost everything and declared bankrupt.
Read MoreOur baby the LEGO Shinkai 6500 Adventure set has finally opened publicly for sale yesterday, Feburary 17, 2011. A bunch of Japanese magazines coming out this month will have coverage on this event. I’ve scanned a few of them we received, check them out.
Read MoreOur user generated Shinkai 6500 Adventure set is the featured model on the cover of the Danish AFOL magazine. Thanks to @VirtualPeter for the image.
Read MoreCompletely forgot how I stumbled upon this book… I probably saw someone tweeted about this: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/ The last time I installed Redmine on Linode, I wanted to stab someone in the teeth! Somehow I’m tempted to relive that experience… now.
Read MoreBeen wanting to share this but couldn’t until now! Early this week, the official announcement for the LEGO Shinkai 6500 Adventure Set finally went out from Cuusoo.com and from LEGO Japan. We here at Cuusoo.com are all very proud of this achievement! In a sense, this is even more impressive than the best selling MUJI bean bag sofa, as that was designed by a professional designer. This LEGO Shinkai product wasn’t created by some LEGO professionals or even an AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO) member, there’s actually a very interesting story behind this, the creator is actually more interested in deep sea life forms than the submarine itself! More info will be published by my friends at Brick Journal and XL magazine soon.
Read MoreThis is a great, short little slides that talks about 10 awesome business models in 2010. http://www.slideshare.net/boardofinnovation/10-business-models-that-rocked-20… The listed 10 business models are: PatientsLikeMe.com Flattr.com Groupon.com Spotify.com PayWithaTweet.com HumbleBundle.com Free with in-apps sales
Read MoreThis is part of the personal greeting I’m sending to my friends this holiday season. First of all, THANK YOU! Really! I moved to Japan for work following a visionary idea, but it is you, my friends, who had helped me make progress in life and made me feel appreciated here! So, I feel it’s appropriate to give a little summary of the time and events we shared in 2010.
Read MoreLooking back makes me sad to see how much and how often I had tried to push this company forward. I was constantly initiating actions… too bad management prefers to stand still…
Read MoreA few minutes ago, I signed up at Quora with Facebook Connect, then connected to Twitter to follow the people I’m already following who are on Quora. Picked a few topics it cleverly suggested, probably by cross referencing the kinds of topics the people I follow are interested in. Done! I’m kinda amazed to see the list of questions & answers presented to me by a service I had only just signed up for!
Read MoreLast Friday we got the first lot of our user generated LEGO set in the office. We spent the whole day unboxing, wrapping and reboxing them for shipment to fulfill the pre-orders. It was an interesting experience… especially when compared to America. (I spent one summer assembling Preston snowboard bindings in Preston, Washington.)
Read MoreWife and baby arrived in Tokyo last Thursday. OMG! How do you people raise a kid without a domestic helper?! This made me think today, a couple of weeks ago @HKGCIO went to a Startup Monday event at BootHK and my friend @jonbuford was asking on Twitter how the HKG gov can help promote Startups in Hong Kong. There were some good answers: … but right now I’m thinking childcare benefits!!
Read MoreEven faster than The Glif… and even cooler! The “TikTok and LunaTik simply transform the iPod Nano into the world’s coolest multi-touch watches.” 3 days since it was posted on Kickstarter, it went viral and got close to $200K!!!
Read MoreThat was the title of the email I got from my manager, ‘coz I was 1 minute late… LOL Don’t have time right now ‘coz my top priority is to get this new business model running on the new Open Hippel platform… but later on I’ll need to change the corporate culture! The human side of things!! E-mails and rules like these need to be abolished in order to improve staff morality.
Read More“To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).”
Read MoreFirst time in my life winning a big toy in those UFO catcher machines :D Went to the new SEGA arcade in Akihabara tonight with AniDotMe [http://www.ani.me] founder Mike Prasad and he taught me the trick to winning this gigantic Glommy plush toy cushion! ¥500 for 3 tries, the trick is to hook its tag!!!!!!!! Definitely a bit a beginner’s luck there but hell yeah it was epic when the claws pick the whole thing up!!! :D
Ha! My first “Top n whatever list” topic to lure readers :D … Well, this is just a list I got from Startup Weekend Tokyo, Guy Cihi, CEO of AGS Capital came to share his experience from both the Startup side and the VC side, to show us the key elements that make up a good pitch! Afterwards we got to pick his brain some more and he had good conversations with many of us. This is part of the benefits you’ll gain by participating at Startup Weekends!
Just came back from the 1st night of the 2nd official Startup Weekend Tokyo. 90+ people this time! Majority Japanese!! Most of them pitched about the problems they wanna solve!! This is gonna be even more awesome than last time!!
Almost 2 years ago in August 2009, I moved to Tokyo to work for CUUSOO.com, an innovative “crowdsourced product design” web company. The reason why I joined CUUSOO was because of its vision - users submitting their wishes up front, others declare their intention to buy that product at a certain price, thus creating a market demand signal. Consumers become co-producers to make the perfect products for themselves. I believed that by making this system successful, on a small scale, independent makers and small workshops can produce just the right amount of highly customizable products for the local market, while on the large scale, manufacturers can know upfront the market demand for a product before it’s made, hence lowering the risk of wasting raw materials and natural resources to produce crap that nobody wants! (See event I organized to promote CUUSOO) I wanted to work on something that would make the world a better place and CUUSOO.com had the right idea!In these past 2 years, I had initiated many projects to try to make CUUSOO’s original idea work. When I first joined, after evaluating the legacy system and the company’s goals, I suggested creating the English version of LEGO CUUSOO as a new, simple website (the term “Minimal Viable Product” wasn’t invented yet) using one of the new web frameworks like Drupal, forget about the old Japanese contents and concentrate in the US market. Once we build up a healthy community in the West, we can then migrate our old Japanese contents & users from the legacy site. When that got rejected, (after weeks of persuations and arguements) I started an open source project called Open Hippel. I went out to social events and talked to people about my idea - an open user innovation system, in which CUUSOO can be its first commercial user, but the software is free for all to use. I even started a P2PU course to teach Drupal through building Open Hippel! Pairing the software with a 3-tier business model - a top layer of independent communities using Open Hippel to bubble up ideas, and a bottom layer connecting to my inventor friend in Hong Kong, sourcing the manufacturing to the experts, thereby creating a whole eco-system around CUUSOO and Open Hippel in the middle. It was grand!The friends I’ve made through the Open Hippel project have been truly inspirational! We share the same passion and we pushed each other to work hard on developing the open source platform and the new eco-system. Although the plan to use the system for CUUSOO failed, the seeds we had sewn, the work that we had put in are not lost. My friends continued to follow our common goal and a couple of new startups were spawned! One of which is Makible.com, which I’ll be joining as… hmm… I don’t even know what to call myself! I guess I’m “the guy who connected the dots and pulled the people together”.
▶ YouTube video 星期日檔案：車衣女工 1 ▶ YouTube video 星期日檔案：車衣女工 2 http://mytv.tvb.com/news/sundayreport/117624#page-1 (Original - not viewable outside of HK)Wife just showed this to me. Back in the heights of 70’s ~ 80’s, 1 in 10 worked in the textile industry in HK. They learned a set of good skills and even though the businesses had moved North into China, a portion of skilled workers remained in HK to tough it out!These are now the elders who’re passing on tangible, valuable knowledge to the next generation… These are the “Makers” we need to value! (I’ve said so before when I organized this event.) This is what I’m dedicating my time to - helping the “Makers” take back our communities from Wall Street and large corporations!
After the magnitude 9.1 earthquake on Friday, March 11, 2011, life in Tokyo changed forever… unless you’re a salaryman, then you are supposed to pretend everything is normal and go to work! On Monday, March 14th, even though aftershocks continued to hit, the Fukushima nuclear plant up North was blowing up and Tokyo Electric Company enforces blackouts in Tokyo to save energy, people continued to go to work like it was just another normal Monday! The news on TV was widely reporting how the train services were significantly cut back and people have to queue for more than 2 hours to get into OR out of the train station!! I couldn’t help but thought: “What are these people doing that are so important, so meaningful, that they need to continue doing it at a time like this?!”
The largest earthquake ever in Japan’s recorded history hit 373 km NE of Tokyo on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:46pm. I was in a meeting with two Japanese colleagues at our French partner’s office in Higashi-Nihonbashi. Most of the guys there are Europeans, so they had never been through a severe earthquake before. We decided to flee when the earthquake didn’t subside but actually began to strengthen! As we were running downstairs, the shaking really got violent and we began to hear the building walls breaking and tiles falling! We’ve never run down staircases so fast in our lives!
Some photos from the Meiji University last night.
Photo from Fast Company article, by Casey Lau from NeonPunch Back in the middle of 2010, I went to Hong Kong to meet with Jon Buford, I’ve known him since a few years back from Agile Hong Kong meetings, where he had talked about the design, manufacturing and marketing processes in the toy industry. He had just organized the first Startup Saturday HK event with a huge attendence of more than 400 people!
Just heard a terrible news, one of my wife’s close friend who own(ed) her own sourcing company in Hong Kong and a factory in China has just lost everything and declared bankrupt.
Our baby the LEGO Shinkai 6500 Adventure set has finally opened publicly for sale yesterday, Feburary 17, 2011. A bunch of Japanese magazines coming out this month will have coverage on this event. I’ve scanned a few of them we received, check them out.
Our user generated Shinkai 6500 Adventure set is the featured model on the cover of the Danish AFOL magazine. Thanks to @VirtualPeter for the image.
Completely forgot how I stumbled upon this book… I probably saw someone tweeted about this: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/ The last time I installed Redmine on Linode, I wanted to stab someone in the teeth! Somehow I’m tempted to relive that experience… now.
Reached 3200 tweets. Kinda wanna stop tweeting :P i
Been wanting to share this but couldn’t until now! Early this week, the official announcement for the LEGO Shinkai 6500 Adventure Set finally went out from Cuusoo.com and from LEGO Japan. We here at Cuusoo.com are all very proud of this achievement! In a sense, this is even more impressive than the best selling MUJI bean bag sofa, as that was designed by a professional designer. This LEGO Shinkai product wasn’t created by some LEGO professionals or even an AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO) member, there’s actually a very interesting story behind this, the creator is actually more interested in deep sea life forms than the submarine itself! More info will be published by my friends at Brick Journal and XL magazine soon.
This is a great, short little slides that talks about 10 awesome business models in 2010. http://www.slideshare.net/boardofinnovation/10-business-models-that-rocked-20… The listed 10 business models are: PatientsLikeMe.com Flattr.com Groupon.com Spotify.com PayWithaTweet.com HumbleBundle.com Free with in-apps sales
This is part of the personal greeting I’m sending to my friends this holiday season. First of all, THANK YOU! Really! I moved to Japan for work following a visionary idea, but it is you, my friends, who had helped me make progress in life and made me feel appreciated here! So, I feel it’s appropriate to give a little summary of the time and events we shared in 2010.
Looking back makes me sad to see how much and how often I had tried to push this company forward. I was constantly initiating actions… too bad management prefers to stand still…
A few minutes ago, I signed up at Quora with Facebook Connect, then connected to Twitter to follow the people I’m already following who are on Quora. Picked a few topics it cleverly suggested, probably by cross referencing the kinds of topics the people I follow are interested in. Done! I’m kinda amazed to see the list of questions & answers presented to me by a service I had only just signed up for!
Last Friday we got the first lot of our user generated LEGO set in the office. We spent the whole day unboxing, wrapping and reboxing them for shipment to fulfill the pre-orders. It was an interesting experience… especially when compared to America. (I spent one summer assembling Preston snowboard bindings in Preston, Washington.)
Wife and baby arrived in Tokyo last Thursday. OMG! How do you people raise a kid without a domestic helper?! This made me think today, a couple of weeks ago @HKGCIO went to a Startup Monday event at BootHK and my friend @jonbuford was asking on Twitter how the HKG gov can help promote Startups in Hong Kong. There were some good answers: … but right now I’m thinking childcare benefits!!
Even faster than The Glif… and even cooler! The “TikTok and LunaTik simply transform the iPod Nano into the world’s coolest multi-touch watches.” 3 days since it was posted on Kickstarter, it went viral and got close to $200K!!!
That was the title of the email I got from my manager, ‘coz I was 1 minute late… LOL Don’t have time right now ‘coz my top priority is to get this new business model running on the new Open Hippel platform… but later on I’ll need to change the corporate culture! The human side of things!! E-mails and rules like these need to be abolished in order to improve staff morality.
“To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time).”