Mind of a Young Undergrad Entrepreneur

When I was young, I read a lot. I mean A LOT. My mother made daily visits to the library when I was young, and naturally my brother and I would tag along. I’ve read all the books in the kid’s science section and half of the books in the adult’s science section. I love to learn, and books are just another method of doing so.

What does this have to do with this post? Well, when you learn about the mechanics of something that is intrinsically human (such as walking), it can really mess up those mechanics if you pay enough attention.

In my high school years, I took an interest in the mechanics of walking after watching an episode of Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel (my favorite channel btw). I learned about how we walk and the mechanics of walking. I also learned the roles that bones, muscles, tendons and joints play while you walk. I’ve even carefully studied a 15-sec video of a person walking for hours straight.

Soon enough, the mechanics of walking was constantly on my mind. It became so obsessive that I would analyze the movement of each step I took as I walked. And because I had thought that a reversed-pendulum (it’s the way you move your legs) was a funny concept , I began experimenting with different “ways of walking.” Just for kicks, an example would be to lift your legs with the heel of your foot and to land on your toes instead of lifting with your toes and landing on your heels.

After a while, I started walking abnormally because so much was going through my head as I walked. I had to consciously think about walking in order to walk without looking like an idiot. This lasted for about 3 years…

In a way, I overrided parts of my mind that should be so natural and intrinsic to a human-being that it shouldn’t take any thought to perform.

You can read more about the basics of walking here: http://www.rubberbug.com/walking.htm - just try not to think about it too much while you’re walking

- Peter Kao

I am looking around for a web designer right now to develop my online advertising corporate website (InfluenzaMedia.com), and have posted on popular freelance websites such as Elance.com or Guru.com.

I’ve gotten over 30+ bids for the projected - all with reasonable quotes. However, I have noticed that out of the 30 something companies I looked at, only about 2 or 3 produce decent websites. Most of them claim to be web designers, but I don’t see any design in their work. They all look like cookie-cutters to me…

Maybe Guru.com or Elance.com isn’t the right place to look for talent, despite so many articles proclaiming that they are the prime place to look for online services…

- Peter Kao

A little over a month ago, I had said that there would be some design changes for the website.

Now, it’s here!

Every month or so, I will be changing the background image to something that I have drawn. I call this the blackboard background design (BBD for short ;))

- Peter Kao

This makes me really mad. Microsoft has done it again. Over and over again they prove to be deceitful, which just shows that they are a company without any sense of moral value. I can’t believe that the world’s largest and most influential company can be so evil. Okay fine - evil might be an overstatement, but I really hate how they conduct business.

I was reading a research paper produced by the Atlas Institute from Microsoft. They are part of Atlas - the advertising section of Microsoft that produces research data to help advertisers [convert into paying-suckers for Microsoft’s overvalued products]. The purpose of the research is to show how the Atlas platform is able to more closely predict actual reach with projected reach. They even had the balls to put this up on the first page of the paper:

So what was in the research paper that made me so mad? This…

At first glance, it looks like any digestible graph, however, upon further inspection one can see that the axises (Actual Reach) and (Predicted Reach) do not start with the same distances from the origin. In fact, the bottom axis (Actual Reach) starts slightly to the right of the graph. This would be okay if you were comparing two completely different kinds of values such as time with temperature, but we are talking about the same kinds of numbers here - we’re talking about the number of audiences. To make matters worse, the scale is on a log10 scale! That means the increments in the axis increase logarithmically (with base 10)! A slight shift in the graph would mean HUGE inaccuracies in the graph.

Before I go any further, note that the closer the samples (presented as dots) are to the solid line, the more accurate the prediction reach is to the actual reach. Microsoft has skewed the solid line so that it better matches with the actual numbers!

So, I took the liberty to fix the graph a bit so that the line looks like how it’s suppose to look like:

The blue line that I have drawn is the actual line. The closer the dots are to the line, the more accurate the data is. At the bottom in green, I separated the increment of 10 million into smaller increments of 800,000 to show how off Microsoft was in their mistake.

They were approximately off by 800,000 to 1,500,000 audiences! That’s a huge difference.

Screw you Microsoft. I’m not going to use your stupid-ass Atlas product.

Note: I’m sure that this mistake has gone unnoticed for most executives/managers. Not everyone has the time to look at the graph carefully. And that’s exactly what Microsoft counts on…

- Peter Kao

It’s been a while since my last post…hope this will make it up.

Today, I want to talk about an article a good friend of mine sent me. I’m a big fan of Wired (but never have subscribed :P) and this article reminded me how great the magazine is.

The article was written by the editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson and talks about how all digital products will ultimately become free. The production costs and overhead for producing these digital products (such as software) will be so cheap that [digital products] will become free. And the success of online businesses will be determined by the effectiveness of converting free users to paying users via bait-and-switch methods.

Although I disagree with Chris that ALL digital products will become free (since not all forms of online businesses can survive on the bait-and-switch model), I have, however, learned an important lesson.

If you are offering a product for dirt cheap, might as well make it free and find some ways to turn that free customer into a sale.

The reason for this is that when you offer a product for cheap, the image of the product will also become cheap (like the price). But by making it completely free, not only does the user start to rely on the product, but they associate positive feelings toward the company that produced it, reducing the need to PR the hell out of your company. As a bonus, you also get more eye-balls on your product, which may lead to more conversion of sales.

Read the full article here - Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business

- Peter Kao