Oil Price

Figure 1: The oil price in the last 25 years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brent_Spot_monthly.svg

Figure 1 shows us how the oil price has behaved in the last 25 years. The best time for outsourcing was 1993-2003, where the oil price is stable and only around 40-50$. However, in the last few years, we have seen a new average oil price which is around 80$ and at sometime, the highest price is 140$, when the war in Iraq and then Libya happened.
Chinese and General Asian Labor Cost

China Labour Cost

Figure 2: The GDP per capita for China in the last 7 years

The labor cost in China has increased 3 times since the last 7 years, going from 1500$ to 4500$. This cost has been marked into the cost of good sales for all companies.
Total Landed Cost-Saving
According to McKinsey (2008), the total landed cost for outsourcing to China has changed significantly since 2003 to 2008

Table 1: The Total Landed savings for midrange server has changed, from a positive to a negative number.

These total landed cost has been affected by the increase in annual wage in China, the cost of shipping and energy. Now, company has suffered 16$ lost when outsourcing the midrange server manufacture to China.
The Effects on Sales, Customer Service and Brand
Outsourcing has a problem, you have to ship the components to the assembly line and then ship the completed products back to US to sell it. There is a cost in this delay. Transportation is usually varied and currently, the transportation has become congested that delay is come more usual. This delay leads to various problems:

• Over stock or out of stock: this could cost the retailers money when they are over stock and have to pay more for inventories. If they are out of stock, the problem can become worse, they can lose the customer and hurt the brand name.
• The problem of delay manufacturing. If there is a big delay happens to the factory, the workers will have nothing to do for some days and then have to work overtime in other days.
• The probability of accident and natural disaster: when the disaster happened in Japan and Thailand, the supply chain management is broken and people need to wait for the products to come out.
• The global gridlock: there is a traffic congestion by train, truck, ship and air recently. This leads to a delay time in transporting the products to the right place. Actually, the company also needs to rethink between cost of air and ship shipping as shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Comparison between Shipping By Sea and Shipping By Air, which leads to a winning for Shipping By Air

• There are some critical products that could not be delayed, especially health care system of the government. If they could not deliver the vaccine or the drug in the appropriate time, people could die. For example, in case of the heath care vaccine distribution program, the manager said:”It was clear that if a nationwide emergency, such as a bird flu epidemic, put pressure on the vaccine supply, the CDC couldn’t respond the way the public would demand”.

Recommendation
With these problems and effects on the business in the long term, this is the time we may need to rethink about the transportation and outsourcing. The real cost is increasing while the hidden cost of brand name and customer experience becomes more important in this competitive world. We need to start thinking about moving the factories out of China and move it back to near the main sales and distribution place. Mexico could be a good place for U.S. market and European Center would be a nice choice for the whole Europe market…

 References

- Barboza, D.2010, Supply Chain for iPhone Highlights Costs in China, The New York Times.

- Winter, 2008, Time to Rethink Offshoring, McKinsey on Business Technology.

- Stalk, G.2009, The Thread of Global GridLock, Harvard Business Review.

- Copeland, M.2008, How the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revolutionized the way vaccines are delivered, Smarter Medicine.

- Zappos.Com: Developing a supply chain to deliver WOW!, Stanford, Graduate School of Business.

- Schreibfeder, J.2011, Why Is Inventory Turnover important?, Effective Inventory, viewed on 18/02/2012,

<http://www.effectiveinventory.com/article2.html>

- World Bank Data, viewed on 19/02/2012,

<http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?page=1&display=default>

Spacing And Formatting

Second Prize Medal

The picture is the medal that I got for the Second Prize in Ho Chi Minh city Mathematics Olympiad. It has always been in my desk since that time. Not because it is the greatest thing I have ever done. It is there to remind me of one of the biggest failure in my life. It is there to remind me what I did and felt when I was in 11th grade.

My feet were off the ground
The second highest winner in the Southern Mathematics Olympiad turned out to be a bad motivation for me. It killed my love with maths. It made me feel that I am too special. It made me overestimate myself. I believed that I couldn’t fail. That was a big mistake.

I didn’t prepare well enough and didn’t try hard enough on the next city contest. The result is: I couldn’t step into the next round. My friends and family wouldn’t know what happened. But I knew what was wrong. I put myself off the ground!

This failure led to the next big failure.
Depression

Now, imagine that everybody is looking at you; the next second, nobody gives you a shit. That was what happened to me. I felt totally useless and lose my orientation. I did not know what to do next, if I should continue studying maths or focusing on other subjects to pass the university entrance exam. I did not know what to do when losing all the attentions people gave to me. I was thirsty for that fame.

This made me lost my focus, forgot what was good for me, what I would like to do. It cost me 4 months living in jeaulous feeling with winner guys before I could realize what was meaningful to me. It was maths! Not the prize, but maths! I felt good that I recognized it early enough to be back on the right track and focus on what I love.

Both of them gave me a difficult time, and always kept reminding me of what is my true value, what I should aim for.

The purpose of this post is to try to remind me of what happened in the past. I know that people are talking a lot about me right now, but keeping my feet on the ground, being focused on my long term goal was the highest priority work.

Watch this video:

With all the automatic supports and tracking tool, we can finally reduce the efforts for testing and bug tracking in our company now. I am still in the trial mode, but I think this tool is amazing and offers us a lot of help.

AutoScreen Release

We also just released a new product called AutoScreen, and putting it ON SALE as well. Save battery! Turn off the screen! WITHOUT THINKING. It just got all the hard works done for you. BUY IT HERE.

Stanford in iTunesU

It would be so surprised for me that very few people ever knew about iTunes U. Come on, what’s wrong here? It is a great place for you to study through Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. And all courses are free. Many people dream about these universities, so I think it is worth my efforts giving an advertisement and some introduction.

1/ Open iTunes and choose iTunesU

Select iTunesU

2/ Select the university you want to learn

iTunesU

3/ iTunesU has a lot of cool universities: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, CMU

iTunesU Schools

4/ Courses at Yale

iTunesU Yale

5/ Download the video you like

Yale - Game Theory

Pro iOS Apps Performance Optimization

 


Today’s iPhone and iPad apps developers are often running into the need to refine, improve and optimize their apps performances. As more complex apps can be created, it is even more important for developers to deal with this critical issue.

Pro iOS Apps Performance Tuning and Optimization covers many common but difficult problems when tuning and optimizing performance for iPhone and iPad apps and how to resolve these problems efficiently. This book gives you the following:

• Basic knowledge on common problems in iPhone apps
• Advanced knowledge over data structure, algorithms, multithreading, and network data in iPhone apps
• Comparison with problems and solutions for Android and Windows Phone apps

After reading this must-have book, you’ll be ready to make the most of the processing power of the iPhone with your apps performance optimization know-how.

What you’ll learn

• Benchmark your apps using emulators and real device tests
• Increase and optimize UITableView performance in your iOS apps
• Increase your app performance using image and data caching techniques
• Tune your apps using algorithms and data structures
• Improve your parallel data access using multithreading techniques
• Optimize memory usage for increased battery life and better apps performance
• Use native C code to address memory leaks or EXEC_BAD_ACCESS

Hearie - News Aloud

I have just released part of my source code in the Hearie project to be open source, this project will do the html readability parsing by objective-C. It still has some issues over threading, performance and may not work with all sites.

Feel free to use it and contact me if you have any issues

Hearie gets rid of distractions in webpages. Also, a high quality voice reads the content for you.

How many times have you complained your iPhone screen is too small to read? Hearie removes all useless contents including advertisments, links and more. Open your Safari, go to New York Times, tap our button and enjoy.

Hearie reads the content for you with human voice. Free your hands and eyes. Plug in your earphones and hear the content.

Success is moving from failure to failure

So, today is the end day of my second year of professional working. As normal, I take a look back my career and see how it is going, what has happened over the last year and if it is going well with my old plan here.

What did I do?

I planned to learn more and work more in the technology, gain skills in Artificial Intelligence, Web and Mobile development. Almost all of them fail. All reasons started from this CMU scholarship admission that brought me back to Australia.

It was a huge chance, a chance that I had been dreaming for. It was not just the excellent environment of CMU, it was not just the reputation of this university, it was a chance for my own business. Coming back to a good market, having chance to work with smart people and starting inside a uni was a good chance.

So, I spent my time here studying finance, economics and entrepreneurship. I also spent most of time building up and trying different things, from outsourcing, writing book to product development. Lots of lessons, lots of new things and lots of failures as well. I again, grew up much faster than I ever did, just as the first time I went oversea to Melbourne. A lot of pains, but also a lot of gains.

What did I learn?

Well, I learnt something more about finance, economics and accounting. That helped me to solid my money management skills a little bit. It is better not to be fooled by those financial and business guys ). I learnt from both the theory inside CMU and both from the work. And I sometimes had to pay more for the real life to learn.

I also learnt about sales, marketing and investment for both Android and iPhone apps. Go over 2 markets, learn different techniques, become a salesman and a customer support sometimes, all are painful when all look like a new job for a geek.

Management is also something I learnt more from real life than some boring courses in CMU. Painful and stressful sometimes, but I got lessons out of it, adjust more for the real life and moving forward.

Working deeper in some iphone and android project. I also gained and solid my iPhone skills after writing the book about it. Starting to learn android development. That’s all for my technical skills this year.

What will I do for this coming up year?

I now look for more chances to grow rather than just outsourcing and earning money. I am now working on a new and innovative project called Hearie (that I will write about it soon). I still need to figure out a good market for it but I still love doing it and it is moving ahead. That’s good.

A good fact is: failure always hurt, sometimes it damn hurts, but I learnt from it well.