In an earlier post (“The Fall of Facebook…”), I began an analysis of reasons Facebook and other digital media giants may eventually fall using the disruption framework pioneered by my Harvard Business School professor (and nicest guy in the universe) Clay Christensen.  I said that there were many users who were being over-served by Facebook’s continually evolving product which opens the door for those users to be attracted to the simpler, more streamlined, focused offerings of low-end disruptors.

Enter Instagram.  Instagram focused on making an incredible photo product that allowed users to simply take and share beautiful photos, which began attracting users (many if not all existing FB users) at an incredible pace.  By April 2012, they had 30+MM users adding more than 50k users a day.  Instagram most certainly had been on Facebook’s radar for some time given that photos is such an important part of the FB experience so why didn’t we see Facebook competing with Instagram earlier?   Many people scoff at the acquisition and say Facebook should have competed; they should have gotten 13 stud engineers and worked on their mobile photo product and come up with something to cater to users who were flocking to Instagram.  Students of disruption will tell you, however, that this is near impossible for an incumbent like Facebook to do.  An incumbent will find it difficult to come up with a new product offering at the low end because their systems, processes, and infrastructure are already geared towards optimizing for customers at the high-end of the spectrum where their margins are highest.  In the context of Facebook, these are the users that are spending 2 hours a day on Facebook, updating statuses, commenting, poking friends, scheduling events, playing games, AND viewing photos.  Any new product Facebook develops has to be integrated into this complicated product platform which is the exact opposite of the draw that the streamlined Instagram product provides: an app for simply taking and viewing beautiful photos.  So what then could Facebook do? While we can debate the $1B sticker price, Facebook made the right move.  The only defense against the dark art of disruption for an incumbent is acquisition.  They had to acquire or else watch the disruptor innovate at a faster, more efficient pace and risk being overtaken in the end much like the seminal disruption examples of disk drives and digital photography.

While I applaud the strategic acquisition of Instagram, it’s important to note that the fight for Facebook is not over.  There are other competitors playing at the low end of social networking that will have to be acquired let’s take a quick look at a few.

A product focused specifically on “likes” and viewing other “likes”.  A dead simple idea but one that has already allowed it to grow to the #3 social network.

Looks to focus on sharing things with your closest friends.  Streamlined for a network of 200 “real” friends (easy to share everything because you don’t have to question whether or not you want one of your 1000 “friends” to see it).

A little late, but Facebook should have been more serious about acquiring this low end disruptor which focuses on small text updates and nothing else

What about other areas for low-end competition against Facebook?  I’m looking for great products to come out for events and a simpler version of Path (product that focuses on connecting your closest friends). Would love to hear what other people think about biggest opportunities to compete with Facebook.

Related articles

• Path raising $40M round led by Redpoint. No, it will not be the next Instagram. (venturebeat.com)
• News on Facebook Instagram dedicated mobile phone (phonesreview.co.uk)
• ass#5 Facebook bought photo-sharing service Instagram (cis428fidelmichael.wordpress.com)

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Jeremy Lin is my Homeboy

Wanted to put a short post out there to describe how big the Jeremy Lin phenomenon is for the Asian American community. I was in NYC right after his breakout performance against the Nets where he came off the bench to score 25 pts and lead the Knicks to victory.  This was before his week of incredible play including a monster 38 pt game against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers removed any doubt to whether or not he was the “real deal”.  This was also before sites like linning.com started covering Jeremy Lin and the linning meme.  Anyway, I walked into a room of about 5 of my white friends and told them that this was the biggest story in Asian American history.  Not biggest story in Asian American sports history…Asian American history. Period.  There may have been a little hyperbole involved here, but the other event in history that I would point to which has had as large of an impact in tearing down racial stereotypes would be the election of Barack Obama.  It is so weird to have so much pride around a person who is not related to you at all.  Granted, Jeremy Lin is Taiwanese like me (台灣加油!!!!) and went to Harvard like me, but other than that there is no connection.  Yet, I literally cannot stop grinning when I watch him play ball.  He scores and I am ecstatic like I had just knocked down that open jumper.  I’m not even talking about cheering when he hits an incredible shot like the game winner against Toronto - I’m talking about cheering when he hits a mundane bucket to start a game.

I’ll probably add to this post later, but I’ll conclude for now saying this.  Jeremy Lin, the pride and joy of Taiwan and Asian America, is the real deal.  Here’s to his long and successful career and continued LINNING.

Related articles

• Asian-Americans feel a real connection to Jeremy Lin (mercurynews.com)
• Michael Chang: The Asian-American Who Changed America Before Jeremy Lin (sbnation.com)
• Asian-American Inspiration: How Jeremy Lin Is Changing Hoops Culture (newsfeed.time.com)

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What are some great ways to promote a new free SDK or API? Write an answer on Quora

What are some great ways to promote a new free SDK or API?

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(this entry was done haphazardly with no screenshots because I don’t have my own Windows 7 machine to double check.  i wanted to at least post something now so i didn’t forget the steps.  I’ll clean up and add screenshots later.  1/22/12)

While on a trip to India in January where only one person had a laptop and 4 others had iPhones and iPads, it was really important for us to be able to share the internet signal we were getting into the laptop.  Internet came from 3 different places at different times during the trip 1) Ethernet Cable 2) WiFi signal and 3) USB 3G Internet Connection from Vodafone (also called the 3G dongle)

With #’s 1 and 2, a great solution that requires little to no technical knowledge is a product called Connectify.  Install Connectify by downloading the application from www.connectify.me

I was a little skeptical that  this would work when the primary internet signal you were receiving was through the wifi adapter, but Connectify delivered.  What I found out after doing some research is that Windows 7 has a cool feature that allows the system to spin of a virtual wifi adapter so the primary wifi adapter can receive the incoming internet signal and the virtual one can broadcast it like a wifi router.

Unfortunately, when we tried to use Connectify with the Vodafone 3G USB stick, there was a conflict between the two.  Connectify has problems and doesn’t work with the Vodafone dongle.  I’m not sure this is universal (couldn’t find documentation of it online), but Connectify changes some settings (maybe dynamic vs. static IP?) which breaks the Vodafone 3G USB stick.  With Connectify installed, I couldn’t connect to the internet at all from the laptop let alone share it with others.

Here is the process to manually firing up a shared wifi signal – it’s not super complicated, but there are a couple steps where I ran into problems and took forever figuring out a solution

1) You need to have internet sharing enabled for the network adapter that is receiving the network connection.

One problem I ran into was that there was no drop down in the sharing to select any other network adapter.  This means your virtual wifi adapter either hasn’t been activated or is having problems

2) Go to the device manager and other network adapters, see if the Microsoft wifi miniport adapater is there.  If it’s not there or it’s there but has an exclamation point next to it, there is a problem.  Fix it by right clicking on the main wifi adapter, selecting ‘disable’ from the menu, then right clicking again, and selecting enable.  This should launch a new virtual wifi adapter.

3) Select the virtual wifi adapter as the network connection you’d like to share through (it will probably be wifi 2)

4) Launch the command prompt in administrative mode (this must be done to execute the commands in the following steps) by searching for the app ‘cmd’ in the start menu and hitting control+shift+enter to launch.

5) Enter in the following command in the command prompt: netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=NAME_YOU_WANT_TO_SET_FOR_WIFI_SIGNAL key=PASSWORD_YOU_WANT

6) Then enter in the following command: netsh wlan start hostednetwork

As long as your internet is running, you should have created a second wireless network signal that others can sign on to!

Nice.

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Just got back from a trip to India. Taj Mahal is a must see and incredible impressive in person.

Check this photo my buddy and I took in front. This was a first take photo courtesy of our friend Rika with an Instagram filter. Epic!

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Every time I learn something new about egg preparation, I write a post on it thinking I have finally found the most convenient and tastiest way to prepare an egg with a runny yolk.  My goals are quickness of preparation, ease of cleanup (minimizing dish/apparatus washing), and quality/consistency of egg (runny yolk, not over cooked).

I have written 3 posts on how to prepare eggs because I keep thinking I found the answer until I learn something new.  Although the onsen tamago egg (#3) will probably always be the best in quality/consistency category - it's fucking hard to do.  Totally fails in the quickness of preparation category.  The over easy egg (#2) is also very good in quality/consistency, but the addition of oil makes it less healthy AND more annoying to cleanup (oily pan).  The microwaved egg (#1) was good in practice and KILLED it in the quickness and cleanup categories, but I could never get the consistency down which made it sub-optimal (way too many hard boiled egg results) - eggs would be either super undercooked or explode and overcooked.  All options had some positives but at the end included some sort of negative.

After experimenting a bit more, I think I have the ultimate method which is an update to my original microwave poached egg method.  While the microwave egg cooking device I panned in my onsen tamago post really did suck, the instructions did have a couple gems that have made all the difference in the world.  The first thing it said is that you only need a few teaspoons of water to cook the egg.  Wow - i always thought you'd have to completely submerge the egg so i used a full cup of water.  This definitely added to inconsistency.  Then, it said you should pierce the egg yolk a few times with a fork before heating up.  At first I thought this was a dumb idea because the egg yolk would then mix with the white and then ruin the point of a poached/softboiled egg.  What you find happens though is the yolk still maintains its shape and the holes in the yolk help with a more consistent cooking in the microwave and avoids any explosion of egg (a problem I ran into which resulted in overcooking with my own microwave method).

So here's the newest bestest way to poach an egg in a hurry:

1) 2 teaspoons (just a splash from the sink really) of water in a mug (narrower bottom is better)

2) crack egg into mug

3) pierce egg yolk with fork a couple times

4) add another splash of water (2 teaspoons) on top of egg

5) microwave for ~30-35 seconds

DONE!

Note: Don't be fooled by the look of the egg when you take it out of the mug.  The yolk kind of sinks to the bottom so you'll think it's undercooked since you see it being so yellow, but when you cut into it you'll realize that it's cooked and perfect.

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I recently spent a lot of time trying to create a template in Powerpoint where a few elements were in the background of the slide master and thus uneditable (untouchable, permanent).  Inserting an omnipresent logo and positioning a new text box was easy - dropping them in the master slide made them appear on every slide created and i couldn't touch them in normal view.  When I went to insert page numbers, I ran into a bit of a headache.

Problem: Inserting automatic page numbers into a template still allowed them to be moved and accidentally deleted on new slides create.  Doesn't matter if you insert page numbers into the slide master or if you go through the headers/footers menu.  Both created editable page numbers on every page.

Solution:

1. Go to Slide Master
2. Create a NEW TEXT BOX
3. Insert -> Page Number (INTO THAT TEXT BOX)
4. Reposition to where ever you want
5. DONE

Additional notes - if you want to make sure the page number isn't displayed on the title slide, go to the specific slide type template (title slide), check the box that says "Hide Background Elements" (this hides any elements that were inherited from the parent slide template), and then re-add the constant elements you do want (everything from the original Slide Template except for page number).

When you go to create the first slide, make sure it uses the Title page layout.

Hope this helps and saves someone time!!

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After having an egg brunch with a friend where we tested out a less than stellar egg poaching device, I remembered I should post my youtube video about Japanese softboiled eggs.  Back in 2007 while living in Tokyo I came across a crazy Japanese softboiled egg that cracked open like a raw egg but slid out like a softboiled egg:

If you look at the comments on youtube you can see that I was completely confused about how they did this for the longest time.  I finally figured it out after a couple of years but never documented it here.  Better late than never…

So it’s called a Japanese Onsen Tamago (Hot Spring Egg) and is prepared by taking advantage of the fact that egg whites solidify at a lower temperature than egg yolks.  By soaking eggs in a non-boiling pot of water (about 70 degrees Celsius) for like 15 minutes and then soaking in cold water till cool, you get the effect of the egg in the video above.  There are some japanese videos that I don’t understand which recommend adding potato starch to the water but I’m not sure that’s necessary.

so freaking oishi.

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One of the many joys of having an iPhone is always having a pretty decent digital camera on me at all times (aside from low light situations…i can’t wait for the iphone that has good night time photo taking abilities!).  Since I got my first iPhone in 2008, I have been snapping away and documenting my life in photos.  The whole time I’ve used iPhoto to manage my photos – both the importing and on computer viewing/sorting of my photos.  iPhoto does this thing after it executes an import of photos where it asks you if you want to delete the photos from your iPhone.  Up until now, I’ve always said ‘no’ because I enjoy having my photos on my iPhone at all times – all 6, 968 of them.  The one annoyance that I’ve had is that every once in a while, iPhoto won’t recognize the fact that I’ve imported a big chunk of photos so when i check the “Hide photos already imported” box it still shows the photos in the import window.  This is annoying and makes it a little more bothersome to tell when a photo on your phone needs to be imported or not.  I did some searching online to find an answer to how to fix this and finally realized after doing research what the problem was.  The problem is that this is most likely a bug and there is no real fix for iPhoto every once in a while thinking there are some photos in your Camera Roll that haven’t been imported yet even though they have.  The solution though is actually to start using the Camera Roll the way it was designed.  So it turns out that even after you delete your photos from Camera Roll after import, they still exist in your Photo Library album as long as you sync your photos to your iphone!  Clearing out your Camera Roll also greatly improves syncing performance so there are lotsa benefits to doing this.

Get that?  The fix is to delete all the photos from your camera roll after import.  You won’t have to deal with seeing duplicates again. They’ll still be on your phone after syncing photos from your library.

The caveat is if you take a lot of videos on your iphone, you probably don’t want to store those on your your phone since they will take a ton of room.  There is an option to not sync videos.  If you think you want to have access to some videos on your phone, definitely keep those in your Camera Roll…

Hope this helps!

EDIT: If you are like me and didn’t click Delete Orginials after every import, you’ve probably realized by now that iPhoto doesn’t give you a way to select all camera roll photos and delete them.  You can do it one by one in iPhoto but the easier way to batch delete is to use the Mac Program “Image Capture”.  This program allows you to easily select all photos on your iPhone and delete.  Woo!

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“Your Name” <yourname@domain.com>      

I am in the middle of writing a script that takes in emails and saves its content to a database.  The location in the database depends on who the sender is which I determine from their email address.  The problem is sometimes the email address in a header more often than not doesn’t not come in the clean format of yourname@domain.com.  More often it’s listed out as “Your Name” <yourname@domain.com>.  This is very annoying if you’re looking to search for matches on just the email address.

Using a few simple string manipulation functions though, you can quickly modify the string if necessary and strip out the unnecessary characters:

$search= strpos($from_address,’<’); 
//this looks for the instance that the email address is in the format “name” <name@domain.com>
if($search){
//if there was a ‘<’ in the from_address this means it’s in the crappy format and we need to trim it down
$from_address = substr($from_address, $search+1);
//this starts capturing the email address from right after the opening <
$from_address = substr($from_address, 0, -1); 
//this trims the last character from the string..in this case it’s the closing bracket >
}

You can check out the documentation for the different functions i used here: strpos() and substr()

EDIT: For some reason, emails sent via hotmail in my testing have an extra < in the beginning of the email address so after running this script I think you end up with something like “<yourname@domain.com”.  If this happens to you during testing the workaround is to test for the first character being ‘<’ and deleting it if it is.  if($from_address[0]==’<’){substr($from_address,1)}

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