Juixe Techknow

There was a great flame war over at Hacker News about what entrepreneurs should aspire to when they start their business, a lifestyle business or a VC funded multi-billion dollar valuation company like Facebook, Zynga, Google, YouTube, etc. It all started with a angry rant by Justin Vincent about how VC “holds us back from our true potential.” He rambled on to say that the idea of being the next big thing is keeps us, entrepreneurs, occupied and keeps them, I guess VCs and tech pundits, in business. My favorite line of the article is the following…

If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble.

Another choice quote is…

The absolute truth is that each and every one of us can build a business that can support us. We don’t need to build a million dollar business to survive. We just need a regular paycheck.

If I could paraphrase the rest of the article, Justin believes that not all startup founders will have a multi-million dollar exit in so instead of shooting for the moon we, as entrepreneurs, should shot for Milwaukee, that is a $10k/month small business. So, if you know you won’t come in first in the race, complain that the Olympic commission is corrupt, that the judges take brides, and instead go play Wii Sports because you there you will get a participation badge.

The tone in article reminded me of something that Jason Calacanis complained about millennials. In This Week in Startups #47, Calacanis said…

Participation means nothing, your fulfillment means nothing, nobody cares if you are fulfilled, nobody cares if you participated. You were lied to. There is no trophy in life for participation, except your tombstone.

Things got a little heated in the Hacker News comments for this article. Paul Graham, who goes by pg on HN, said that if every developer worked on their lifestyle/micro business “the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn’t have any technology bigger than could be built by lifetstyle businesses.” After this, things got a little more interesting when Alex Payne, username al3x on HN, said the following…

There’s a middle ground between web application “lifestyle businesses” (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month’s CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook. … There’s nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It’s boring, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Don’t expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though.

At this point some “lifestyle” business operators took offense, most notably Amy Hoy, username ahoyhere, took offense in the above statement since she is mentioned in the original article and has a time tracking application that uses the latest JavaScript and CSS trends. After that Amy went on a dogmatic crusade against what she called the “dominant paradigm.”

In one side of the argument you have people that believe that as long as a business covers operating costs and brings in anywhere from $10k to $100k a month and you don’t have to do much to run the company you have the leisure of a lifestyle business. Such a lifestyle business affords you time to spend with family, participant on your children’s school activities, join a community organization, take time off to travel, in addition to being your own boss and making your own rules. I can’t knock someone for having a gig like this. People in this camp might subscribe to Tim Farris’ book the Four Hour Work Week and in the folks behind 37Signals who wrote Rework. I remember Jonathan Coulton describe on an episode of This Week in Tech (TWIT) about his music business. Jonathan has a strong following as a singer/songwriter in the self-described geek community. On that TWIT episode he said something to the affect that if you have 1000 followers willing to pay $30 for a premium experience or content then you can make a decent living (he probably doesn’t live in California).

An income of $10k/month pre-tax, pre-health insurance for a family of four and a home mortgage in California is not a “lifestyle” I would like to aspire to. Ramen profitable is only profitable if you in college. Some critiques of the Four Hour Movement rightly ask that if someone can bootstrap a business with only working four hours a week, how much more profitable will the business be if they spend more time into it? The truth is that there is a generational gap in the way of entrepreneurs think and a bubble of some magnitude in every aspect of the industry, including in the “lifestyle” businesses.

I can’t find the source but recently I read a tweet where someone said something to the effect, “You know there is a bubble because every tech conference is sold out.” The conference circuit is one popular business with “lifestyle” crowd, in particular the tech, startup, social media conferences. You know there is a conference bubble with the large number of regional and national conferences, seminars, webinars, master classes, ninja training dojo summits, product mastermind madrasas available online. For example, 37signals runs a one day workshop for 37 people at $1k, that is $37k for one day’s work, especially you can reuse the same material many times over for different batches of students. I’ve been involved for the past several years as an organizer for a non-profit which puts on a one day conference for students that nets $50k in profits.

There is nothing wrong with running a small business, especially if you can get paid by non-technical folks for a calendar with last year’s JavaScript and CSS trends or for a one day training on how to use Twitter and Facebook. I mean, if someone would pay me $1 for adding up any two single digit numbers to support my lifestyle I would outsource that shit to India and work from some mojito island somewhere. But there is something to be said about aspiring to build something great. I want the narrative of my work to speak for itself; I’ve worked in some great companies that have had lofty goals such as understand the human genome and possibly curing cancer. Those goals can’t be meet with someone working for four hours a week and $10k/month.

This country will move in the opposite direction in the socioeconomic standard that we have enjoyed if we listen to such advice, if we don’t strive to build the best businesses we can. These millennial web 2.0 designers might not even remember how there was a time before 1999 were their predecessors could have charged anywhere from $30k to $100k for a website design. Economic pressure has pushed the price of a web design down to $300-$1000 for a awesome design from some kid in Russia. Even now, these small time “lifestyle” operations are under threat by solutions from the developing world, where $3/month can afford developers there a very lavished “lifestyle.”

One of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost is the following.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost

I believe in hard work, not easy baked cookie cutter one trick unicorn project that some folks are calling a business. You got to put in the time, differentiate your product, and think big if you want to be a successful business. It is widely known that somewhere around 50% of small business fail after 5 years, don’t let the reason you fail be because you didn’t take opportunities when they presented themselves.

In the end, everybody is free to run their business as they want and the invisible hand of Google’s search algorithm will be the judge.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• If some feature looks funky to your development team it looks twice as funky to your users.
• Is it FAB? Is it a feature, application, or business?
• Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
• The flow of time feels like it’s relative to the number of breakpoints you have turned on.
• Every time the build is broken an angel does not get his wings.
• Trust no code.

Team Leadership

• Some people think shrimp an others think prawn.
• There is no greater ambition that being the best possible you at every opportunity.
• 1 paid customer is greater than 100 users.
• 90% done is not done.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel but put some blinged out rims with a flashing spinner.
• There is no failure if everything is a learning opportunity.
• Most people let others define their success, but the most successful define their success themselves.
• People truly don’t know know what they have until it’s impounded.
• Wanting to do things doesn’t give you the experience of actually doing those things.
• If you are not a leader, and not a follower then what are you? A drifter?
• Offload your mental tasks to your subconscious, it’s just like having a graphic chip in your brain.
• Say it. Do it. Own it. Be it. True dat.
• The more you worry about a thing the more probability you have of making it worse.

Product Placement

• Instead of having IBM Watson go head to head with Ken and Brad, I would have liked to see Watson against Zuckerberg and Brin.
• DeviantArt needs an iPad app.
• Amazon should have a EC2 image for designers with a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc.
• DropBox is a duplicate to my Box.net account, which is a copy of my Scribd acount, which is backup to my blog, which is also archived on …
• What Google giveth, Google taketh away with one change in their algorithm.
• This iPad is like a gadget version of vampire, it doesn’t work in direct sunlight.
• It’s official, Tumblr is the new GeoCities.
• If the phone company ran Twitter, they charge 10 cents per tweet, 20 cents when roaming, and try to sell you a plan of 500 tweets for $15.
• One of my favorite iPad app is Collections, a photo album app. I just don’t understand why it requires access to my location!
• I want my iPad to be an input device to all my others screens, desktops, laptops, etc.
• Google sees you when you’re sleeping / knows when you’re awake / knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake!
• Honestly AT&T, remind me why I pay you every month?
• Here’s a prediction: Apple is working on a VM so that they can run iOS apps on Windows. Apple App Store for Windows will be huge!

Quotes

• Computers in the future may…perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. – Popular Mechanics, 1949.
• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. – Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of DEC, 1977.
• Good front-end engineers list JavaScript on their resume, not jQuery. – Chris Zacharias
• People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS. – wipe man page
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is too short to be in a hurry. – Thoreau
• If you throw gasoline on a log, all you get is a wet log. But if you throw gasoline on a small flame, you get an inferno. – Gil Penchina

Questions

• if Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people,then what is Silicon Valley?
• Is there foods that give off positive energy?
• How many chickens go into making a one McChicken nugget?
• Are you a mercenary or missionary?
• Why is it that hardware makers make the worst software?
• How can a woman carry a huge ass bag and not gave her phone or her keys?
• Do you want cheese with that?
• Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
• If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
• Did Papa Murphy’s patent the heart shape pizza?
• Why is big such a small word?
• How LOL can you go?
• What happens if Neo forgets to take the red pill for one day?
• Why is Howie Long using baseball analogies to describe a football game?

Random

• It’s siesta time somewhere in the world.
• I am a robot but I can’t be shut down!
• There is no free in money.
• Money spends itself.
• If age is nothing but a number, then love is nothing but a feeling.
• (two cents)^2
• Someone should build a museum of brilliant ideas.
• Dating is a contact sport.
• The end is eh.
• Absence makes the heart grow wonder.
• Four is a four letter word.
• I om nom nom therefore I am.
• I meme therefore I am.
• Champagne in the membrane.
• Rationality is relative.
• For some adults, credit cards are like pokemon, got to charge them all.
• At Hometown Buffet, were all of the world’s foods are made equally bad.
• Here is my new book in its entirety The Complete Guide of Doing Nothing.
• The internet feels slow, it’s like we live in the dark fiber ages.
• I hear voices in my head… Oh, forgot I had my headphones on.
• Pundit is another word for idiot.
• General Chow outranks Colonel Sanders
• Road work and morning commute don’t mix.
• The fog is so thick you can cut it with a machete.
• If time flies it must be flying coach.
• Alas, dishes don’t do themselves.
• Hate it when people call up in the middle of the night, I pick up, and they ask “you awake?”
• History is a rewriting of history.

Can you create a forum with with nothing more than a set of links, headlines, and Disqus? It to me that this would be the simplest question and answer or forum site you can develop. All that Disqus needs is an link to the page where you embed some JavaScript and Disqus handles all the login and authentication for users to comment or answer a question and gives you a pretty good management system to maintain the comments.

There has been questions about having Al Jazeera in the US cable market. I think a better question is why doesn’t Al Jazeera, and CNN for that matter, live stream their broadcast online. The CNN website is indistinguishable from a news papers website. If I want to see news clips I go to YouTube and if I want to read news articles I go to the New York Times. I understand that CNN is an abbreviation for Cable News Network and that they are in part subsidized by cable subscribers but more and more people are looking for a online news outlet that has the same or better experience than your newspaper or television set. If Al Jazeera really wants to be in the American market, they should just stream their broadcast online.

I really hate Daylight Saving Time. I hate having to move the clock 1 hour back and then 1 hour forward each year. It really messed with my internal clock for at least a week when I we have to do the switch. It’s such partisanship to have to pick a side. Why don’t we compromise and meet in the middle. Instead of moving the clock forward an hour this March and the back in November, let’s move it up 30 minutes and keep it at the time the whole year forever or until next major solar event.

Everybody hates pop ups with annoying ads to services you don’t need. But how to you block pop ups that are bundled as part of your computer? Recently I got this ominous looking warning that popped up from the task manager stating that one important issue with my computer had been discovered.

Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox Pop Up

When I clicked on the warning message the Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox came up with a system health warning message about enhanced backup and restore.

Enhanced Backup and Restore Message

Following through with anther click the ThinkVantage Toolbox warned that my system had not been backed up in over 30 days. Looking at this pieced of software that interrupted my work and productivity, I thought what would a typical user do? I red the warming message in red and all the other information that looked too technical for an average user and I clicked both buttons available. I clicked the Purchase Backup Drive button and this launched my web browser to a page at anrdoezrs.net which my spyware system blocked accordingly.

Purchase Backup Drive

From my user experience, it is evident that Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox is used to up sale users on products and services that they may most likely not need though an affiliate program. To me this software is no better than those fake anti-virus software programs that infect your computer and pop up have you think that your computer is infected with a virus that they can remove if they get your credit card number. This is software that spoofs a utility only to up sale you on products that most users don’t need.

Sometimes large hardware makers make the worst software…

Everybody knows that Google’s search results have suffered due to spam, content farms, black hat SEOs, social media marketers, trolls, and gypsies. As Google’s search results continue to degrade due to spam content and its social networks (Orkut, Buzz, Wave) have floundered Google been on the attack against the competition, not so much on the technical front but in the press. It was just a few months that Google lashed out at Facebook over import/export of user data. Now Google has its sights on Microsoft Bing. It was only late last year when tech journalist started to notice Google copy feature which appeared first on Bing, see here and here. Now Google, in an orchestrated and designed PR stunt accuse Microsoft Bing of copying Google’s search results.

Google's Home Page

Just like Microsoft, Google uses thousands of data points from users online usage from web crawlers, social media, ad networks, analytics, clickstream, retweets, likes, trends, and other methods. Google uses a lot of different data points to improve their search results, not just crawling from a href to a href. Google has tracking information on users, from every side of the click. Google often has and collects information when a user clicks a link on its search result page and on the visited page (if that site uses any of Google products such as Analytics or Adsense). Google is sitting pretty collecting data from every angle, because it has the market share to do so and tells competitors “No Soup for You.” The orchestrated “synthetic” outrage from Google and associated Bing sting borders into monopolistic behavior.

Is using Twitter’s firehose cheating? In a black and white world, were using calculators in a test is considered cheating, then using Twitter’s firehose is cheating. If using Twitter’s firehose is considered cheating, then Google cheats too.

Google just hit a new low by accusing Microsoft of stealing their search results. This just seems like an unbelievable link bating ploy on part of Google that might have back fired. At first I thought I had read the headline wrong. If I would think of any tech company would air their dirty laundry in a public forum I would have thought it would be on Microsoft’s part.

Here is how this tech “he said, she said” came to be. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land wrote a blog post where Google acknowledged that it ran a covert Bing sting operation that proved that Microsoft’s Bing’s search results are in some way influenced by what users search for and click on Google’s search engine. This whole secret operation ran by Google reminds me of the HP spying scandal of 2006. Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow in charge of this operation, went on to compare Microsoft Bing’s actions to copying and cheating and other mean evil stuff.

Apparently, all this came about because of misspelled search terms. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land describes, Google noticed that Bing’s search result for misspelled terms were similar to Google’s. Over at the official Google blog, Amit Singhal went on to describe the methodology used by Google to prove that Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results in some capacity. To prove their hypothesis, Google gave engineers Windows’ laptops with Internet Explorer with Bing Toolbar installed and invented crazy words like hiybbprqag that when searched on Google would return completely unrelated search results. These same search results where found in Bing some time later for these made up search queries.

If this is true, this does prove to a high degree of certainty that Microsoft Bing uses, to some capacity Google search results, at least for made up search queries, or “synthetic queries” as Amit Singhal described them. This does not prove that all or 80% or 10% or any significant percent of Microsoft Bing’s results are copied verbatim from Google, as Amit would have you believe. What is also clear but downplayed behind the link bating headlines and accusations is that Bing does not scrape in any scale Google’s search results. In fact, Bing does nothing more than what Google already does. Google has a large number of tools in its arsenal where it collects online traffic and user data no matter what search engine was used. Google is monitoring and tracking the whole web with its search, analytic, ad network, browser, and mobile products and platforms

What I find amusing, is that gall and hypocrisy of Google to accuse Microsoft of monitoring the search terms and queries on search engines and the websites visited from those search results. Every time you search for a term on Google, that is recorded and associated with your account. Every time you click on search result from Google, that is recorded and associated with your account and your search term. If Google collects this data, I am think it might be fair game. Not only does Google collect this the search term and corresponding website you visit, but does the website you visit and their ad network.

I would also question the timing and the motive of publishing this now and this manner. Google has recently come under fire for the spam results taking over their search results and on how they tracks and monitors users’ online activities. It’s widely known that Google collects and uses just about every piece of information it can gather from end users in the development of their products. Google Voice is improved by having millions of users correct Google’s automated voice translations. Improved speech to text translations are then rolled out into other products and projects, such as this speak2tweet Twitter account that transcribes voice messages left on free public phone numbers and tweets them. It is also known that Android, Google’s mobile platform, is a used to improve Google’s local service and I’ve already written about how Google’s Chrome OS laptop will be used to feed even more user data into the Googleplex.

Instead of spending over a half a year on a sting operation of this size and scope they could have better spent their resources. This smells of bad PR to deflect some of the heat Google has been attracting for their spam-ridden search results and privacy issues. Google is just calling the kettle black.

The links below are additional coverage, analysis, and opinions of what one Blogger has dubbed Bing-gate.

• Why is Google so hysterically hypocritical about Bing using its public data?
• Google catches Bing copying, Microsoft says “so what?”
• What on earth are Google thinking? (re: Bing-gate)
• Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face Right In Front Of Us!
• The Strange Populist Outrage Against Google
• Microsoft: ‘We do not copy Google’s results’