Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out. I have been waiting for this release for a long time.

Warran Buffett:

When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. You’ll probably do things a little differently if you keep that in mind.

Eliot Spitzer:

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail.

Po Broson:

Check with the wife

More golden rules.

Jeff Jonas at IBM is working on new technology that will allow companies to mine personal data while maintaining privacy. Reading the article, I wonder what kind of problems will we face when companies begin to tag our personal information with semantic web languages such RDF and OWL?

One thing is clear — it will be easy for companies to mine our personal data once the semantics of data are explicitly represented. For example, URIs will allow companies to identify people and their personal data with extreme accuracy, logical inference will help them to discovery new information that was difficult to mine in the past, and shared ontologies will make the exchange of consumer data between multiple enterprises a easy task.

This sounds kind of scary, don’t you think?

I would like to start a company of my own sometimes in the future. The biggest question that I haven’t answered for myself is that why do I want to start a company? The first thing that comes in my mind is potential financial rewards. Often I was told that this is a not good reason to start your company. Bill Joy reiterates on this issue:

FC: What’s your career advice to people who want to start out in the tech business?

Joy: Understand the technology, even if you’re in management. And before you go to business school, get a feel for what it’s like in a company of moderate size, where you can really see what the processes are. If you want to start a company, you should do it because it’s an idea that you’re very passionate about, without any financial expectations. You’re not anticipating failure, but you have to accept that if it’s worth doing, and it’s hard, you can’t be guaranteed of success. You have to be doing it for the right reasons.

What do you think?

After Apple had announced that its iPod nano was a top-selling on Amazon.com, its stock climbed 3.3 percent on Nov. 26, 2005, hitting a 4-1/2 year closing high. Why do people believe that the selling of iPod has anything to do with the sustainable profit growth of the company?

The answer to this question lies in the understanding of some basic economic concepts — complementary goods and substitute goods. The idea is as the follows. In life, some things just go together. For example, hot dogs and hot dog buns; hamburgers and ketchup; shoes and shoelaces. Typically it’s more pleasing to purchase and consume these things along with the other member of the pair. An interesting thing about complementary goods is that changes in the price of one complement affect the other complement. For example, if hot dogs are on sale, not only people buy more hot dogs, they also buy more hot dog buns.

In the context of Apple, it’s hot-selling iPod complements many of its own products. These include iTune Music Store (MP3 song downloads) and Apple computers (iMac, Powerbooks). Because iPods are cool, more and more people buy iPod. As an result, iPod owners are likely to purchase other Apple’s product to complement their favorite gadgets — purchase more MP3 songs from the iTune Music Store, buy more Apple computers to go with their iPods.

There is no magic in running a profitable business. Sometimes basic understanding of economics can help us to decipher the business model of a company.

“RFID in Japan” reports that zapped-it.net has a map of various RFID applications that are currently deployed throughout the city of Tokyo. Some interesting applications:

• Using RFID cards to control the game characters in a video game.
• The shoe department of Mitsukoshi use RFID to tag all their floor models. Customers can see if a certain shoe and size is in stock. After the use of RFID, service time reduced by 50% and sales increased by 10%.
• RFID is used in several research projects that track tuna fish in the Tokyo Bay in order to prevent over fishing and illegal trade.

Many signs indicate that the housing market is cooling down — at least in my area. If someone wants to buy a house now, where are good places to shop for affordable homes? Peter Coy at BusinessWeek believes that if you don’t mind long commute, or can telecommunte, then mid-size and small-size cities are good candidates.

I think there is a downside to buying homes in those less demanding areas. If the market cools down, housing prices in the high demand areas will become more affordable. These are the places with most job opportunities and well developed community facilities. If people have the money to buy houses, they probably will first snatch up homes in the high demand area first before they look for homes in the less desirable mid-size or small-size cities.

Buying homes are kind of playing Monopoly, I think. When playing Monopoly, while you can buy different kinds of properties and build as many hotels as you want, but there are only few properties can generate extremely high returns. Typically these properties are the most expensive properties on the board.

Location! Location! Location!

What do you get when you hand 320,000 employees the tools and corporate podcasting guidelines to internally publish their audio creations? In IBM Corp.’s experience, lower phone bills and better, more informal internal communication.

Read more at InfoWorld.