Research, Dev and Share

The outsourcing trends started with manufacturing in 1990s and then this trend happened to software industry. This trend helped the software industry grow really fast, creates a lot of entrepreneurs that can only have a small fund to invest. Through freelancers and outsourcing websites, small entrepreneurs can cut cost and outsource parts of their projects to China, Vietnam or India to get their work done with almost the same quality.

And now, this trend has been back to manufacturing industry, where small companies and entrepreneurs can outsource the works of manufacturing to China. Do you have a good idea? No problem, you outsource to China to produce some amount of the products, as small as hundred or thousand products for a tiny cost. There is no need to have a factory and the inventory. You only need them when you have the customer orders.
This new trend will bring more innovation from anybody within the U.S., as long as you have a good idea.
Easier to access the workers
In the past, to get your idea implemented, you need to have at least hundreds of thousands dollar initially. It is also much more risky when you have to order at least tens of thousands of products so that the factory can start manufacturing your products. Lots of people fail when they do not have enough money to start or they could not sell all of their products.

Now, things have changed. Based on sites like alibaba.com, U.S. entrepreneurs could get access to a pool of talented manufacturers. These manufacturers accept to work on anything, ranging from a small contract of 100$ to 10,000$ and they could deliver your products quickly. This lowers down the barriers of entry for new entrepreneur and creates more chances for people to step in.

Alibaba business-to-business model has been a huge success, with around 500 companies do their business in alibaba.com. The revenue of the company has grown from 48 million USD in 2004 to 183 million USD in 2006 and it still keeps growing up. The platform of Alibaba allows U.S. companies to hire any Chinese manufacturer they need for a tiny cost. An instant translation service will help both of them communicate with each other accurately.

Lowering down the cost
This not just helps the entrepreneurs but also the small and medium enterprises as well. This lowers down the cost as well as the risks for any companies to invest into their new ideas.

Bdier, a graduate student at M.I.T Media Labs, quitted her job to become a new-age manufacturer. She designed a protocol for making electronic components into Lego-like bricks that could be used by anybody. She then gave the protocol design to the Chinese manufacturer to make it for her.

There are more case studies that people can work on their garage has a good design and then send it to a Chinese manufacturer to make the actual product. This could save these entrepreneurs a lot of money and they can finally create what they love.

Easier to sell and do marketing
Due to the nature of the Internet, it is now easy for a good product or idea to spread out. Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and Youtube now help companies to do viral marketing with a very small cost. People observed the success of many small companies that have cool products and do not need to spend much money on marketing.

Google, Alibaba, and then Dropbox has been successful in the same way. They make good products and then give it out for the world to try it. Then people will tell their friends, and the product grows by word-of-mouth.

References

-Why the Chinese web portal is giving up its stockmarket listing, So Long, For Now, The Economist, viewed on March 6, 2012 <http://www.economist.com/node/21548253>

- Secret of Alibaba’s success is team work, sense of mission, Monster and Critics, –Business News, viewed on March 04, 2012

<http://news.monstersandcritics.com/business/news/article_1371368.php/Secret_of_Alibaba_s_success_is_team_work_sense_of_mission>

- Giridharadas, N, 2011, The Kitchen-Table Industrialists, The New York Times, viewed on March 3, 2012

Disclaimer: This blog post is from my assignment in the Supply Chain Management course. It is copied from here

The long-term strategy of a company will reflect on how product of that company is designed, how people in the company work together to achieve the same goal. This long-term strategy brings the company ahead of other ones, creates innovation inside the company, and makes a huge profit for the company while others still suffer the economic recession.

http://www.onedesk.com/2011/05/product-strategy-tips-for-success/

Cost Cutting Innovation
IKEA
The last year was an economic recession year with unemployment above 9 percent and housing is 73 percent below the 2006 peak. Given the furniture is one of the worst categories of retail sectors, the support from government and Barack Obama in jobs help did not push this furniture sector much. In this difficult time, IKEA finds it easy to cut down the price of its products. In contrast to this move of IKEA, almost all other commodity prices increase.

Based on interviews with IKEA CEO Mikael Ohlsson, the whole company culture focuses to produce cheaper products. They set the target price for the product first, and then, by any means, to achieve that price. By improving the efficiency in product design, factory manufacturing and then distribution and delivery, it can cut a significant amount of cost.

http://noellebullock.posterous.com/?tag=ikea&page=2

However, one of the key factors is via its supply network, when it can try to use the least sustainable materials in this world. This may mean some long-term impact but that is acceptable for IKEA to reach their long-term goal: cut the price.

Tata Nano
Tata Nano has innovated a new “Open Distribution” system. This system operates by a modular design approach. Every product is designed in terms of modules, or components, which can be built and shipped separately to different assemblies around the world. This helps Tata Nano to achieve its goal.

By using this Open Distribution approach, it allows suppliers to compete for better qualities and lower price to bid for supplying. To push this even more, Tata Nano has its own internal suppliers. These suppliers need to compete fairly with the outside suppliers, so the general competition level is increased.

These innovations help these companies to move forward faster, affect all of their product designs as well as the process to manufacture the products and ship them to assemblies.

Environment Safety First

In contrast with the approach to cut the cost by all means, there are companies that focus on making value and meaningful social responsibilities. These companies also gain high returns through social values, which would enable them to follow these values in the long term.

There is a trend in designing, manufacturing and distributing new products with the most sustainable materials. These materials help companies to achieve its environmental goals.

Herman Miller
The goal of Herman Miller is explicitly stated in its website:

We put Herman Miller’s corporate environmental goal quite simply: to become a sustainable business – manufacturing products without reducting the capacity of environment to provide for future generations

That’s clear. It is the goal of all employees and all products of Herman Miller, to create a sustainable business. That is a meaningful value for everybody, so all employees are proud and happy to work at Herman Miller, to create a social value.

An example of this strategy is when they make a decision about choosing between PVP and TUP. PVP is cheaper, easier for suppliers to work on and there are multiple existing suppliers. TUP, though, is more sustainable for environment but is a new thing and few suppliers are able to provide to Herman Miller with low price. They finally choose to implement TUP since the new product, so they do not have to redesign the existing product and they can be proud about this new product.

This environmental safety first also puts them ahead of other competitors. Due to the strict environmental regulation rules of the governments in product manufacturing, their competitors find a hard time to follow what Herman Miller does.

http://www.hermanmiller.com/about-us/things-that-matter-to-us.html

It also helps Herman Miller to get the best employees for their business, which put them in a competitive advantage position comparing to other companies. The Youtube video clearly demonstrates how Herman Miller could make their employees proud of what they are doing.

These examples give us a broad view of how the company’s long-term strategy and objective affects all their business: from product design to decision-making process to the culture of the company. IKEA has chosen the price to be their competitive difference, and then ignore the environmental side of their works. However, Herman Miller focuses on building sustainable products and business. Both long-term strategies put the ahead of their competitors and make a difference in their business.

References

1. Tutle, B.2011, Everything at IKEA is getting cheaper, MoneyLand, viewed on 06/02/2012

2. Hamilton, S.2011, IKEA cuts price of US shelves as outlook dismiss, Bloomberg, viewed on 07/02/2012

3. King, B.2011, IKEA cut shipping costs with switch paper pallets, Sustainable Brands, viewed on 06/02/2012

4. What matter to us, Herman Miller, viewed on 06/02/2012

http://www.hermanmiller.com/about-us/things-that-matter-to-us.html

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.

I just came by this qaSymphony site few days ago while looking for a new Testing tool for my next web project. The video looks attractive for me and I can tell you that it is amazing.

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.

You can read the Vietnamese version here

Many software engineers and IT professionals dream of developing a ‘killer App’ for popular products like the iPhone, which will make them rich. Other people dream of one day having a book published. Not many achieve either – and even fewer do so in their early 20s. But Vo Duy Khang (formerly student 3184092), an alumnus of RMIT Vietnam’s Bachelor of Information Technology program, has hit the jackpot with success in both of these areas – and now has the makings of a successful business spanning both Vietnam and Australia. Khang graduated from RMIT Vietnam in November 2010 and travelled to Adelaide, Australia, where he is now completing a Master of Information Technology with Carnegie Mellon University, under a full scholarship. With the benefit of the scholarship, Khang has been freed up to apply his own financial resources fully to get a small business off the ground while he also continues his studies. His hard work and talent have been recognised by US publisher Apress, which has just decided to publish a book by Khang on how to build better iPhone applications. Khang’s book, Pro iOS Apps Performance Optimization, fills a need in the market for more practical guidance in this booming area of consumer technology. Khang’s creativity and expertise has also been applied to a new business start-up in this field which already has five people on staff in Australia. Khang has been visiting Vietnam in the past month seeking further talent from Vietnam to join his operation. Almost all his development team to date are RMIT students or graduates. “They speak English well, and they all have a good understanding of what is needed,” Khang says. According to Khang, the basis of a good user experience of any iPhone or iPad App is good performance. There is enormous potential in helping social networking applications such as Facebook to provide a better user experience by moving data in a quicker and smarter way over the net. Apress has been impressed by his thinking in this area, as shown on his own website and as shared amongst the online community overseas. One of Khang’s mentors has been Barend Scholtus, Academic Services Manager for the Bachelor of IT program, and the two continue to discuss shared interests regularly. “We hope – in fact we are pretty sure – that Khang’s learning experiences at RMIT Vietnam have made contributions to his achievements to date, and we hope the best is yet to come.”   Khang (sitting) sharing knowledge with friends in Barcamp 2011   Khang’s book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Apps-Performance-Optimization-Professional-Apress/dp/1430237171/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321662306&sr=8-1 Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/vodkhang Contact info: Phone +61 478146872  Email: vodkhang@gmail.com

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.

Biggest lesson this year

My learning progress this year has been increasing so fast, many things change in my life for the last 3 months. I changed to new living environment, new learning environment and start up my business when I came here. There are lots of lessons that I learnt as a manager in my new startup and a student in CMU. I think the 2 biggest lessons I have learnt so far this year are: planning and time-management.

Plan and Vision

Let me tell about my story first. My plan has been changing every month since the last November. The event that I went to CMU has changed my plan for my master degree and my career. You can read over my past plan here. I had a plan to work hard and plan for the master degree 2 years later. Then that plan changed. Next, I plan to study hard in CMU. Then, chances came and plan changed.

The main point that I want to get is my visionary. My vision and objectives over all of the plans do not change. I want to become an entrepreneur and build something that can change the world, something innovative in terms of technology and business. Planning is a tool for me to set up my vision, to see what will happen for me and other trends and I am more than willing to change any plan when necessary.

I have learnt significant lessons over financial planning in my CMU, which will help me over my company growth a lot. I think that this is what I lack from my undergraduate career. Money. Financial. These are important for any business technology people. I believe if you want to be successful, you have to understand about 3: Money, People and Technology.

Time-Management

The last few months, I ran in a crazy way, not like ever before. Look, everybody, who knows me, will know how fast I learn, implement new ideas and improve myself. However, I never see I learn and work at that crazy speed before. Lots of things got done, lots of breaking news. And I am still looking for more.

There are a couple of issues and lessons I learn from that fast moving. Time-management. I got a few problems at the first time when I have too many things to do than the time I can have. Then, I try different approach to optimize my time, calendar, todo list and time saving strategy. I now work much more efficiently than months ago and can really focus on a thing that I do. That’s why I love moving fast. Only by moving fast, you can learn really fast.

Again, what I want to say is you have to focus, and have a good timing management skills to control your time. Time cannot be bought!

freelancer jobs

As my plan in Adelaide, I want to get some job to earn money as well as keep me up to date with industry technologies. However, this turns out to be much harder than I believe when Adelaide is such a small city that does not have many IT companies here.
Then, I started my second option in my plan to looking for freelancer jobs and going to websites that offer freelancer jobs to see what I can get from there, and things are growing up fast enough and I learnt some key lessons over the my new job.

Price

Price was my first concern over deals and bid to get accepted a project. However, I can see that most of times, price is not the top priority for employers. What they care is they can have a high quality product in a short amount of time with a reasonable price. My strategy is to pick a fixed hourly rate for myself when competing and then just calculating over the number of hours I need to work and give them a general price.
I try to convince people about quality, in many terms: communication and product. I think it is true for any work with clients to try to exceed their expectations, try to understand their problems well and do exactly what solves their problems. The price can be higher but we can save time, money and make people feel safe, they would hire us. So, don’t aim for only price. Put one that is reasonable and prove clients that it is worth every penny

Outsourcing

This is always a way to cut down the business cost. People hire me because they want to look for more reasonable price with the same quality. And I can make another step to outsource them back to Vietnam developers. It cut down the price for me and the client and I can save my time to more important jobs, such as studying in my university (Supposed to be the most important one)

There are certainly more aspects about management when you have to do outsource and communication with customers when both of these are remote only. I don’t forget about technology lessons that I learnt and expect to learn and work over these freelancer works. These will be shared on the next entry.

References:

Image source: http://freelancejobfeed.blogspot.com/

There are always people keep asking me the same question: “Why do I actively join free community like Stackoverflow/BarcampSaigon/MobileDevCamp/My Blog/Top Coder? What is the value and the benefit?”. It is nice that people ask this question and actually think about it. And I hope that I can answer them fully with this post somehow.

1/ Fun.

It is fun. Really? Yeah, it is actually fun. Wait a little bit, why is it fun for working? I love playing game, I love to see my level going up and my mark changes everyday, I love beating the top challenging problem. It is just so fun there. If you still suspect this for somehow, I would rather ask you why you play football and play guitar in the church outside of working time. If you think this is not a good example because people don’t have headache over those things, then we take a look at some others. Do you play chess? Why do people play chess and what is the value and benefit when playing chess? If you can figure out the answer at this point of time, then we are done. It is fun, that should be it.

At this point of time, if you still don’t feel anything fun to do so, I don’t know if you should continue reading about other benefits: brand advertising, learning and contributing. If you don’t get fun out of the work, especially the overtime work, it is hard to persuade the goal just by other visible benefits. Moreover, these benefits are only long-term seeing and require lots efforts and time.

2/ Brand Advertising/Social Networking & Trust.

WordPress Sharing

Brand Advertising and Social Networking is important. When you actively join communities, you get to know more people and more people get to know about you. Nobody knows if these people turn out to be your next employer or your next friend that can help you out in the difficult situations.

I partly believe in the theory that sometimes, we should hire people that we are familiar and can trust rather than hiring some talented stranger. So, when people can see how you engage to help the community, people started to trust you. The more people know about you, the more people may trust you. And when people can trust you, they can give you the chance to work together or hire you as an employee or even work for you.

Moreover, these things are not built overnight, there is no overnight success. It may take you couple of months, or even years to write a blog and only your friends read it. It is the same with answering on stackoverflow, topcoder. It takes years for you to reach to an acceptable point that people start to recognize your name/your company’s name.

3/ Learning & Contributing.

GNU Open Source

Now, we go to the last reason. It is the last not because it is the least important reason, it may be the most important reason for many people. However, many people want to see the something visible, something that either gives them lots of money or reputation to move forward to their career first. So, I just leave them read things they want to read first.

It is so obvious. When you answer something in stackoverflow, it is either help you to solid your knowledge or help you to think deeply to debug. I really like debugging on stackoverflow, it is challenging. You have to find the bug as soon as possible, and sometimes, you don’t have debugger, you don’t even have IDE to help you. You just read over the code, verify each line of the code and try your best to guess the part that can create the bug. That’s challenging and fun, actually.

References:

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/12/non-deterministic-problems-aka-finding.html

Image Sources:

http://stackoverflow.com/users/flair/227698.png

http://en.flossmanuals.net/floss/publish/WordPress/rsrc/WordPress/Introduction/icon_big.png

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQj7UR1webcv1NlEzFaRpAUeudZjWyOYYAA27iiaxot4X9vdDa2

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Running And Failing

I am extremely happy these days, I got a full scholarship of CMU – the first one I got after, uhm…, 10 or more scholarship submissions. This one goes by some luck. You may not believe in that, I don’t either till it happens. I started applying and the decision is out for less than 2 weeks and I had no plan for this scholarship until the chance came and I took it seriously. Here are 3 things I learnt from this happy event.

1/ Keep trying, you do not know what happens next.

Some people love perfection and are scared of failures to try. In many cases, trying does not cost you much except, some money and efforts and in some cases, it is free to try. One important decision I made is to talk and then email CMU representatives to ask some information about my specific case with important background. That let me know some important information about the admission process and I took advantage of it successfully.

For things that are uncertain, the only way you can be sure about is to try it. Start up, scholarships and R&D job is like this. Sometimes, things go out of your hand and strategy, then you just keep moving fast to the next goal.

2/ Everything you do, either succeed or fail make you one step further

I am happy that I tried to apply for President Award of RMIT Vietnam although I didn’t get it. It was a huge step preparation for me for the scholarship. There is no way that I can prepare all documents like transcripts, recommendation letter in around 3 days without any earlier work.

Another thing that I learnt from the fail of President Award is that my approach is kind of not correct. I tried a with a crazy approach in the award essay just to see what happens. And, I think the result gives me some feedback over the approach for the next one.

3/ Fail and run again

I mean RUN, actually run not just to go ahead step by step. I am willing to fail while I am running rather than moving slowly to the goal without any failure. For some people, failure is not an option, you are not allowed to fail. However, in my opinion, passionate is necessary but not enough for people to be successful; sometimes what matters is to keep the highest motivation for long time. Only challenges keep me motivated and moving with my best skills and efforts. That’s why I love the Google quote: “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary” (Don Dodge’s blog) . Here is what you get from that kind of fail, you know that you did a great thing, you are motivated about what you do all the time and you know you are doing something only a few, the best people can do.

And I always remember the Edison quote, you don’t fail 1000 times, you just found 1000 ways that things do not work, and I am happy to get a confirmation if a way is a fail as soon as possible.

CMU Students

Just some information about CMU and my courses there:

- Top 6 in 2008 in Engineering and IT QS World University Rankings

- Top 12 in 2010 in Engineering and IT QS World University Rankings

- #1 in Computer Science Schools (US News and World Reports)

I hope that this is a great step to the next big goal:)