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.

The best way to predict the future is to create it

No surprising, one of the most risky situation in IT is to try to invent some new product. People may or may not adopt your product, you may not find any users. And nobody may believe in your idea except yourself.

Improve Google +1 and Social Network

Google is now losing the social networking battle to Facebook’s hands. That is undeniable. Although Google try his best to improve and create many social platforms and integrate many social ideas, Google still fails. Look! Google Wave, it disappears after couple of months, Google Buzz, nobody hears about it in the media world now. And what happens to the next Google approach, Google +1.

I keep asking myself what Google + 1 is actually trying to do, is it a better search or a better social network or anything else. At the current state, here is what I see about Google + 1.

• It is actually not a bookmark or read it later service like the way Delicious works.
• It is not about sharing when one user likes the page, none of his friends may know.
• It is not creating any connections or interactions between users.
• Does it bring more benefits to Google rather than to users with the machine learning algorithms?

I don’t think that in the general strategy, Google integrates +1 button for the machine learning algorithm. It already keeps track of what users click, what users see and what users behave when they do search. The +1 button may help a little bit over the algorithms but not much. So, I believe that Google does this for social networking efforts and to beat Facebook and Twitter.

In terms of social networking, my biggest question for Google + 1 is: how on earth, does a user want to click the +1 button? Look at the Like button of Facebook, I think that button is so successful because everybody wants to share, wants to let people know that they like this page. This acts as a virtual award for them. “Look, friends! I have this page for many of you”. Google +1 needs something like this. The content is created by users and needs to provide to users real or virtual benefits.

In brief, here are some ways or problems I think Google has to do to improve +1:

• Attract and give users awards for their efforts
• Attract 3rd party providers to integrate +1 button into their website
• Boost up Google Buzz and willing to cooperate with other services.
• Identify the market niche in social networking that Google can come in.

Social - Attract and give users awards
The last time I tested the Google +1, I cannot see any of my friends +1, and only a few from strangers. Here is the problem. In social, we have 2 concepts of friends sourcing and crowdsourcing. However, the friends’ sourcing is always more important than the crowdsourcing. The recent time is also important to let sharing between friends happen. If some of a user’s friends like an article 3 years ago, it does not affect much the current decision of that user.

Look at Facebook and Twitter where timeline is important. It is about if users can see what their friends are doing, liking and working on recently. If we want to improve our Google +1, we have to customize the Google Page Rank algorithms in such a way that can take the time dimension into account. It is also really important that I can see my friends’ rate for page more often when I do search. This is hard because searching is sometimes more random than keep surfing around the timeline of Facebook or Twitter.

Integrate +1 button into their website/chrome/android

Now, if we assume that users are willing to click that button to help their friends. However, will they do it before or after viewing the content of the page? The answer will be after. There is no point for them to rate it good before they actually see the contents of the web page. And we should not expect them to press the “Back” button in the web browser to come back just to rate +1 for the web page they like.

So, we have to take advantage of our current network of effects into users. There are 2 ways, browser and the web page. Browser is actually inside our control and web is not.

Chrome is taking more and more market share in the browser market. This is a huge advantage for us. We can integrate our +1 button somewhere in the browser so that everytime user search and go to a page, they can press that +1 button. Ping! We got data. And we got data not just from searching, we got data from every users enter any web page, any link, any article. We conquer the web.

But not all users are using our Chrome, we have to help them to have a more convenient way to rate our page. Just like facebook, we need to help them to put +1 in websites, a +1 button for every articles and pages inside that web page. We may not beat Facebook in this area but we can use it along with Chrome. Facebook and Twitter do not have this advantage. This button will be a great marketing tool for all websites to have.

Social Network Integrations – Buzz, Orkut and more

There is no doubt that Google Buzz is losing, it is nowhere near a success and nobody talks about it anymore. Orkut is successful in India and Brazil but is losing its market share now (only 38% market share, June, 2010). However, it would be bad idea if we do not try our best to integrate our new +1 into these services. Anybody who login to Google Account and press +1 for the web page or search result will appear on their Buzz and Orkut social network.

This will be where the friends come from. However, that would not be enough. This will be always an egg and chicken problem for Google. Will Google have a big user base first to spread out the +1 button to the whole world? Or will the spread of the +1 button help Google to have a bigger user base? I would suggest Google to use integrate with Facebook. In other words, allow users to post data from +1 to Facebook. That would be a big deal when Facebook can control and can know what Google’s users do. But, we can do it only for a short amount of time, when we need to grow Buzz up to the same level of Facebook.
After all, what are wrong with all Google efforts to go into social network?

• Google Wave was a success for me at the beginning but then some mistakes like private invitation makes it fail.
• Aadvark was also good but it can not go up too much.
• Youtube is an excellent video sharing service, but not much social there.
• Google Buzz is a nice try to integrate with Gmail, to utilize the current user base, but will fail because it is the wrong market segment. It also serves nothing else a news feed like Twitter.

• Orkut turns out to be successful in India but then get lost in the battle with Facebook.
• Android, why Android here? Because we have a strong userbase that can turn out to be a big value for us if we can create a social network there.

What is my thinking is that if Google can integrate and connect all of these platforms that it has in hand to create more connections, it can have some big social network. Imaging that every of its users have an Android phone, connect, chat and share together through Buzz, watch videos, recommend and share to every friends through YouTube. Ask and answer questions in Aadvark in the idle time or while waiting for the bus. If it can do that, this would be huge. Look at Microsoft and Facebook, they tie into each other. Microsoft and Nokia are the same. Facebook will be present in all Microsoft devices and in all Nokia devices. Even though Microsoft does not have a strong market share in smartphone now, it will keep growing up with these things.

Google has to create a bigger ecosystem and +1 should be improved to become a nice fit into the whole picture.