It's Rishi

Happy 2007 everyone! This year, new years eve wasn’t very exciting for me. I’ve had a pretty bad case of the flu for the past 3 days and as a result have been stuck at home. Clearly 2007 hasn’t gotten off to a great start for me but I’m sure the rest of the year will be much better.

So let’s see, as one of you pointed out to me, it’s been almost six weeks since my last post. As I said in that last post, I was leaving for a family vacation to Germany and India. The trip was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring a camera with me so the only pictures I have are those off of my sister’s camera. I’ll post a link once my sister puts them online. Germany struck me as the most similar to the US compared to the all the other European cities I have been to. In terms of tourist destination, Germany is not really that great in my opinion. My sister and I agreed that Munich looked like it was one big Disneyland set. The reason is that while much of Munich is newish construction, the architecture is made to look very classical German. So what you get is a bunch of new, old-looking streets. As for Berlin, the (20th century) history in the city is pretty amazing. Our hotel was literally spitting distance from what one of the last remains of the Berlin Wall. All over the city you find points of recent historical signficance. After Germany, we spent time in India visiting family.

One thing from my time in India that really struck me was how the Internet is still just beginning to make an impact in the daily life of the average college-educated young Indian adult. In India, you’re basically looking at 100kbps DSL as the best broadband in the home – and from my experience it’s flaky even at this low speed. Few of my cousins – even those that are in the tech industry – blog or socialize much online. Sharing photos much less videos on the Web is not big at all there, I’m assuming because the Internet speeds at home are so poor.

From a mobile standpoint they are quite advanced though. It’s typical to see that every family member has a cell phone and in fact many households use a wireless local-loop service that replaces the land-line local loop provider (many buildings have really poor phone wiring which makes having a land-line phone pretty useless). Because most homes are built with steel+concrete walls, it seems like 802.11 is basically nonexistant. I didn’t see a single wi-fi hotspot the entire week. Instead, for the few business professionals who need it, tethering your laptop to your cell phone is more the norm. What’s intersting is that Airtel, one of the popular mobile carriers over there, has a wap portal called Airtel Live, which I noticed many of my relatives using via their cell to get news, stock market notifications, movie times, etc.

It’s almost like India is kind of leaping over terrestial datacom infrastructure and going directly to wireless/cellular infrastructure. Once wireless/cellular broadband shows up in India, I think we’re going to see a really massive explosion in Internet consumption amongst the typical middle-class Indian young adult population – which at xx% of 1+ billion people represents a group of people that likely approaches or even exceeds the entire population of the US. The opportunity over there is pretty mind-blowing.

Anyway, enough about India. Let’s talk 2007. One resolution of mine is to blog more frequently. In the past I’ve tried to put some real deep thought into most of my posts. Sometimes that has meant each post taking several hours to write. This has often discouraged me from blogging. While blogging is something I enjoy, I often am short on time. Instead, from now on I intend to post more of my daily observations and when I do feel like writing in-depth about a topic, I will break it up into a series of posts.

Actually, I have more updates for y’all but in accordance with the aforementioned resolution, I will save it for my next post. =)

As you’ve probably noticed, my post frequency has dropped off significantly for the past couple of months. The reason mostly has been because I’ve been working hard to finish Stuffist, the new “stuff”-oriented social site project of mine.

Stuffist is based on two basic premises.

The first is that when you buy something – say a new shirt or a new cell phone – part of the excitement is showing it off to your friends and colleagues. There’s nothing better than showing up to class or the office with your new shirt on and getting compliments. In the online world, driven by this same motivation, people post pictures and descriptions of their latest purchases on their MySpace page, blog, forums, etc. On Stuffist, you can post your latest purchases for everyone to see. Others rate and comment what you posted.

The second premise is that when shopping, an important consideration in your purchase is what others will think of your purchase. Few people go to the mall themselves. Instead we go with others in order to feed off one another’s opinions. Similarly, before buying something online, you’ll often send the product link to a few other people to get their validation. Many stores provide a “most popular items” in order to help guide you to a purchase when you are unsure. The bottom line is often times, we just wanna know what the hot new stuff is. The goal of Stuffist is that you can search for “women’s jeans” and see what jeans other women have bought recently and how each was rated by the community. Or in your spare time you just can browse around by categories and tags to see what other people are buying.

Anyways, I’ll write when I return from the trip. In addition to Stuffist, I have a long backlog of topics I want to blog about. I’ve been neglecting my blogging activities lately and I’m not happy about that. I’m also going to be reading some selections from the Personal MBA reading list during the almost 40 hours of flight time so I’ll have some book reviews & notes to share. Have a nice Thanksgiving!

In the past 24 hours, Its Rishi was visited by readers from over 18 countries:

• Australia
• Poland
• Germany
• China
• Sri Lanka
• Pakistan
• Finland
• Ireland
• France
• United Kingdom
• Brazil
• Netherlands
• Canada
• Indonesia
• Denmark
• Italy
• Viet Nam

..and of course the USA. How cool is that?! I’m honestly not sure why all of you international foks are coming (OK, that’s kind of a lie because I have analytic software that tells me) but it really is pretty amazing to me that you do. When I started this blog in November ‘05 I had 2 readers on a good day.

One of my more popular posts for the past couple of weeks has been MyTube = YouTube Ripper. Concrete evidence of the worldwide popularity of YouTube. I didn’t expect that this post would be that popular but I’m more than happy to get the attention. =)

I accepted an invitation to be on a “Young Entrepreneurial Careers” panel taking place during a week-long entrepreneurship summit organized by the Asian-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society at Stanford. The description of the presentation is:

What does it mean to be a young entrepreneur? Hear from panelists with recent entrepreneurial experience, people who still remember the trials and concerns that come with starting up a venture for the very first time. They will discuss some of the issues that young entrepreneurs face, such as making the first leap to entrepreneurship and balancing a “normal” job and life with the entrepreneurial venture. We will also hear from panelists who will discuss what embarking on an entrepreneurial career entails.

Many of the events on the schedule for Summit 2006, which takes place from April 10th to 15th, are open to the public, including a keynote speech – that I’m looking forward to – by Peter Thiel. For more information about Summit 2006, click here.

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and covservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man, than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes froms our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

– Christoper McCandless (click on the link and you’ll see that this man truly lived his words)

My buddy Rob is a cooking machine. He wanted to start a video blog on cooking. Since I haven’t messed around with producing digital video in a long, long time, I decided it would be fun to help him out. The result was Yummy in my Tummy, Episode 1. The theme of this first episode is easy-to-prepare, great tasting Super Bowl food. We had some awesome plans for the show but due to significant time and resource constraints…well…click the link below and watch for yourself. Here’s some things I learned:

1. Image stablization technology in today’s digicams is awesome but still it’s not a tripod substitute. Much respect to professional cameramen who can hand-hold a camera with little to no shaking. I was the cameraman for this video and even while I thought my hand was fairly steady, it was not. The scenes we did with a tripod yielded far superior results.
2. Setting up the lighting for a scene is very difficult. Having taken photography courses in the past, I thought I knew a thing or two about studio lighting. However, setting up the lighting in Rob’s kitchen so that it was bright but diffuse and without shadows proved to be an impossible task for us. In some shots it looks like a flashlight is being pointed at the subject and in others it’s either too dim or too bright. Sigh..
3. Digital Video for the PC has come a long way. I remember taking a course several years ago on multimedia production. Back then, just the first step of getting the raw video transferred to the computer and digitized was a non-trivial task. For even the most basic editing tasks, you had to fiddle around with Adobe Premiere and have a top-of-the-line workstation to get the job done. And even then, rendering the video involved clicking “Start” and a long nap. This time around, we did the entire job with a 12″ Apple iBook using the bundled iMovie. I brought my much more powerful Windows laptop on which I installed a copy of Adobe Premiere, but we did not use it. Admittedly, if we had more time, we would have done some fancier editing and effects with Premiere. But still. We filmed the video with the camera. Plugged it in to the iBook via FireWire and fired up iMovie. It could not have been easier and I was amazed at how smooth iMovie ran on the iBook’s anemic 4200rpm harddrive.
4. Video Blogging/Sharing will be big. Podcasts are great, but video is really where it’s at. Furthermore, a nice digital camcorder costs less than $500 these days and, in fact, many of the latest digicams can record 640×480 30fps. Heck, I think I even saw a Sony HD camcorder on sale for around $1500 at Fry’s a few weeks back.
5. Broadband upload speeds suck. The typical DSL connection is 1500kbps downstream, 128kbps upstream. To upload a 100MB video at 128kbps, you’re looking at around 2 hours. For most people, upstream speed isn’t something they care about but in order for the sharing of multimedia content to be an everyday activity, we’re gonna need way faster upstream.

Okay, and now for the video:

http://www.youtube.com/?v=smRE6qHZv4I

It’s 2:15AM, one last check of Memeorandum before I hit the sack and what do I see? My last blog post, “How real-time is the blogosphere?” is on Memeorandum!

Admittedly, my post is clustered with the thread on Google’s earnings announcement and even though my post did back-link to the AP article at the head of the cluster, my post was pretty off-topic. Nonetheless, it’s my blog and I’ll cheer if I want to. Besides, who knows if this will ever happen again. =)

Gabe, I am not worthy.

I hope everyone had a great holidays and new year’s celebration. This year I didn’t really do anything too exciting, but I got a chance to hang out with friends and family and that more than made up for it. Anyways, I am predicting that 2006 will be a very interesting year for myself. The fate of my current company, Revunity, will be known and I have a few other ideas in my head that I want to explore in the coming months. On the personal side of things, I’m definitely going to take a vacation this year. I’m not sure where and I’m not sure how elaborate it will be but I really need one… a long one.

As for this blog, well, 2006 will be very exciting also. I’ve got a ton of things I wanna do with it. My main bottleneck is time, of course. But, I’m going to make a concerted effort to dedicate more time to this blog. I’ve only had this blog for a couple of months now and already I look forward to blogging. I’m constantly jotting down notes on topics I want to blog about. On at least a few occasions, I’ve hopped out of bed at night to jot some thoughts down. I scribble all my notes using Notepad into a sophisticated plain-text file. This file has quickly grown to be freakin huge. The problem has been that the rate of thoughts going into this text file is way faster than the rate at which I am pulling them out and blogging about them. I’m going to be doing my best to catch up.

Some things to expect in 2006 on this blog:

• Rishi’s thoughts on technology trends – I love technology. I love talking. I love talking about technology. Few things get me more excited then when light bulbs are going off in my head as I contemplate the “next big thing”. Anyone that knows me has heard several of these pitches. I pride myself on not being someone who’s just a talking head. I rarely take anything at face value, instead I’m always digging deeper. I’m also a big student of history. I enjoy looking at how the past can be used to predict the future. Thus, I feel like when I am talking about technology, and future trends of technology, I’m a force to be reckoned with. Anyways, a lot of my notes are about my thoughts on various trends in technology (mostly surrounding computing) and you’ll be seeing many posts talking about them.
• Business Book Cliff Notes – Ever since I got my Bachelor’s degree from Cal in 2001, I always assumed that at some point in the not too distant future I’d go back to school and get an MBA. Well, it’s still something I think about, although as time passes, I become less and less keen on the idea. I do know that there is much to the world of marketing, finance, leadership, etc. that I have yet to experience and learn. Since who knows if or when I’ll actually goto B-school, I’ve decided to start a reading curriculum for myself based on highly-rated-in-Amazon books covering various topics in business. Everything from marketing to how a hedge fund works. However, I’m not just going to read these books cover-to-cover. For each book I read, I’m going to write down what I learned from the book and what questions arose in my head while reading the book. I hope to sort of create my very own cliff notes to business. Obviously, business is best learned by doing. But, we’ve only got a limited amount of time on this planet so learning from knowledge and experiences of others will hopefully be a shortcut. Anyways, the best part for you guys is that you’ll be able to read and reference my cliff notes. Hopefully, both you and I, will find value in them.
• Side Projects – Like I said, I don’t really know what I’m going to be officially working on in 2006, but no matter what, I definitely hope to scrounge together some time to dedicate to some pet projects. One of the really great things about software these days is the richness of both tools and resources. In literally a few hours, you can whip together some pretty cool stuff. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my work with all you guys.

As you can tell 2006 is going to be super busy for me, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. =)

2005 was an interesting year for me. I spent the majority of my time working on Revunity/Dontbuyjunk which has been some combination of stressful, rewarding, fun, tiring, and (most importantly) educational. While I’d be lying if I said that I’m perfectly content with my life, I have realized something. I’m pretty damn lucky. Why? Two simple reasons:

1) I’m alive.
2) I’m healthy.

With all the violence, disease, and poverty in the world, what else can I really ask for? Sure, wealth, success, love, etc. are all bonuses but compared to the two aforementioned items, they pale in importance.

I seem to meet a lot of people these days that are in such a rush to improve their situation whether it be their career or personal life. Yet what they probably don’t realize is that they’re pretty lucky to be in the situation they are in at present. Furthermore, most of the time, the problems we face or our percieved inadequacies are relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things, even though at the time they may seem dire.

My new year’s resolution is even in times when I feel stressed or unhappy, I’m going to take a step back from the situation and remember that as long as I’m alive and healthy, I’m blessed. Believe it or not, I’ve done this a few times already in the past couple of weeks and it really does lighten up my mood. Give it a shot!

For geeks only: another great New Year’s resolution.

You’ve Opened the Gift. Now Give It a Review.

I sort of wish the reporter had followed up with us to let us know that we were going to be in the article because Andrew and I had some fairly significant UI changes that we were going to be pushing into production next week for both Dontbuyjunk.com and our community product, Turf. Had we known about the article, we would have cranked to get it out last week.

Nevertheless, even though it was just a couple sentences about what Dontbuyjunk offers, it was awesome that we were included in the article and compared to much more well-established competitors. Thanks Kate Murphy!