Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

When it comes marketing and commercial, sex sells. The Internet is flooded with marketing campaign and commercial ads. If a business wants to make known its products and services, it must be innovative.

Try marketing your products with French Maid TV.

French Maid TV is a Video Podcast of How To’s taught by Sexy French Maids. It’s where we teach men the important things in life.

This is how the show works, I think. Companies have products they want to market on the Internet. They pay French Maid TV to produce shows based on the products. For example, BarterBee.com pays the French Maid TV to make a show about bartering, and the show features French maids using BarterBee.com. For men who are attracted to watch the French maids, it’s likely that they will also go visit those websites visited by the Frend maids.

Since the boom days of the Internet, people have been focused on E-commerce, M-commerce and digtal media markets. One market that hasn’t been fully explored is higher education (i.e., university and colleges).

iStrategy Solutions is one of the few companies that target the data management needs of universities and colleges. Their HigherEd Analytics Suite provides higher education analytic reporting and data warehouse solutions. In a nutshell, it’s a tool that solves common problems that are created by PeopleSoft software (read more).

When building a startup company, finding a niche in the market is a key to success.

Many people think that having kids is natural for all married couples. Whether to have kids or not is a decision that must be made by the couples themselves and not by anyone else (i.e., their families, their religious leaders or their friends).

There are many natural reasons why people should have children, to continue the family genes, fulfill their religious obligations etc.. However, there are many pragmatic reasons why a no-kids lifestyle makes sense, especially for young couples in the 21st century.

Why I argue for a no-kids lifestyle: Read the rest of this entry »

A new version TiVo Desktop will allow users to download TiVo recordings to be played in mobile devices — iPod, PSP and Treo. Previous TiVo Desktop programs only allow users to play downloaded recordings in their desktop computers.

I think this new feature will help the sales of TiVo since the idea of being able to take TV shows with you while you are riding on a bus or a train is very appealing. Maybe it’s time to replace Gigi’s old iPod with a new video iPod.

The story was spotted on TiVoBlog.

This Wired News article reviews the status of the current browser war — IE7, Firefox, Flock, Opera etc. Here is a quick summary:

• IE continues to lose its market share, down to 90% from 97% in two years.
• Firefox’s share has steadily increased to 9 percent.
• While Opera tries hard to come out with new features, it’s share hasn’t really increased (Opera, who?)
• Flock is a new kid on the block. It’s a Web 2.0 browser. Built on the Firefox source code, its target customers are commercial companies who want to bundle technologies in a for-profit version of the Firefox browser (podcast).

I don’t think there will be an end to the browser war. The war will continue until the end of Internet (if there is a such day). I also believe that there will never be one browser for everyone. It’s a competitive market. New browsers will be developed because someone spotted a niche in the market.

Innovation is the key to a sucessful business. BusinessWeek is launching a new quarterly magazine called Inside Innovation (IN) that is dedicated to the study of innovation.

Our goal is to make a meaningful difference in the difficult journey toward building innovative business cultures. IN hopes to inspire, to provoke, to teach, and to be a trusted advisor and guide.

In the first issue of IN, the focus is on “Champions of Innovation” — people who drive innovation inside big corporations. These people include Marissa Mayer (Goggle), Sam Lucente (HP), Tina Zinter-Chahin (Mattel), Ivy Ross (Old Navy), Johnathan Ive (Apple), and Claudia Kotchka (P&G). You can read about these people and many others here. Also, there is a podcast on IN.

I think BusinessWeek has done a great job picking “innovation” as the subject of their new magazine. Many business people are talking about innovation these days, but only few understand how to build innovative business cultures. Not that I think building innovation business is an exact science, but definitely it’s something that every business manager can learn by studying the past and current successful examples. The IN magazine should be of interest to those want to learn.

People are excited about Web 2.0. People are excited about Ajax, Flash, tagging, social network, and web services. From a business point of view, is Web 2.0 really that much different from Web 1.0?

In his article “Web 2.0: Is It Really Different?“, Win Treese overviews the key components of Web 2.0 (i.e., Ajax, Flash, tagging, social network, and web services). Like many others, Treese believes that it’s difficult to define exactly what Web 2.0 is, but certainly we can talk about its properties.

Pinning down Web 2.0 is like trying to scoop up water with your hands. You can’t really hold onto all of it, but after most of the water runs through your fingers, there’s still something left.

Read the rest of this entry »

We often learn something new when tracing our family trees. But what’s possibility that you are the decedent of Genghis Khan?

Here is a true story.

The first American to be able to claim descent from Genghis Khan has been discovered. He is Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

Dr. Robinson’s descent from Genghis Khan emerged in a roundabout way. The Y chromosome of that Mongol emperor was identified in 2003 by geneticists at the University of Oxford in England. Surveying the chromosomes of Asian men, they noticed a distinctive genetic signature in populations from Mongolia to Central Asia. Their common feature was that all but one lay within the borders of the former Mongol empire.

The geneticists concluded that the far-flung Y chromosome must have belonged to Genghis Khan and had become so widespread because of the vigor with which he and his sons labored in their harems, a fact noted by contemporary historians.

This story is interesting not only because of the surprising genetic relationship between a US professor and a 13th century conqueror, but also because it’s another real life example that shows the power of modern science. In science, I believe.
Source: In the Body of an Accounting Professor, a Little Bit of the Mongol Horders, NYTimes, June 6, 2006.