My most admired entrepreneur Recently, I came across an exhibition in the National Library showcasing the contribution of a prominent entrepreneur and philanthropist, Mr Tan Kah Kee and his son-in-law, Mr Lee Kong Chian.Just a little background on Mr Tan Kah Kee:Tan Kah Kee was born in Jimei, Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, and went to Singapore in 1890, when he was 16 years old, to work for his father's rice store. After his father's business collapsed in 1903, Tan started his own business and built an empire from rubber plantations and manufacturing, sawmills, canneries, real estate, import and export brokerage, ocean transport to rice trading. His business was at its prime from 1912-1914, where he was known as "Henry Ford of Malaya".With the profit that he made from his business empire, Tan contributed greatly to the community, both in Malaya and his native Fujian Province. He set up the Jimei Schools (now Jimei University) in 1913. In 1919, he set up The Chinese High School, now named Hwa Chong Institution in Singapore, while in 1921, he set up the Xiamen University and financially supported it until the Government of the Republic of China took it over in 1937. In 1920, he married his daughter Tan Ai Li to Lee Kong Chian, who worked under him and who later became a famous Singaporean philanthropist and businessman.The part that I admired the most about Mr Tan, is his relentless effort in contributing to the society while he himself leading a frugal lifestyle. From the documentary, I remembered there was one incident when Mr Tan’s business was not in a good shape and his advisors had advised him to stop his funding to the schools and used those funds to help the business instead.However, Mr Tan did not agree. He said that his objective in doing business is to contribute to the society, especially education. If he cannot continue to contribute to the society, there’s no reasons for him to run business. Afterall, he is leading a very frugal lifestyle and he can live with eating just plain porridge every day.In a society where we measured everything by its practical and monetary benefits; In a society where most people, be it elites or commoners, are being motivated by only the most pragmatic factor, that is money, I really wonder how many people can be like Mr Tan?The exhibition is still open, at 10th floor of the National Library, until 31st December 2008. I would highly recommend people to take a look, especially entrepreneurs. My encounter with MLM people Recently I received a call from an acquaintance, saying that she had a business proposal to discuss with me. I was rather surprised as I did not know her very well, so I was quite curious about the business proposal that she mentioned. Over the phone, we arranged to meet up one day to talk about the proposal, as she claimed that it was difficult to elaborate over the phone.However, on the actual day, I had another last-minute appointment and wasn’t able to meet up with her. So I sms her about it, and requested for more information to be sent to me via email. She was quite reluctant to email any info to me, and suggested to arrange for another meetup. I was rather busy if my company stuffs and told her that I would like to know more about the business before commiting time on it. So in the end she said that she would drop-by my office to discuss with me and pass me some materials.At this point of time, I began to suspect that the business proposal was actually some MLM scheme. I do know that MLM people like to refer themselves as business man / woman, and like to claim that they are running a business when they are just sales people or recruiters. So I purposely left my office early and instructed the receptionist to collect the materials on my behalf.Anyway, when I looked at the materials passed to me, its all about network marketing and how people have misconception about the business model. There wasn’t any information on the products or services offered by the company, as those stuffs seemed to be of a lower priority to them. It seemed to me that it doesn’t matter what they are selling (otherwise they would be promoting to me how good their products are). The only thing that matters is to get more downlines and train their downlines to get even more downlines. Products….who cares?So in the end, I told her firmly that I wasn’t interested in MLM stuff because I was too tied up with my own company. I didn’t tell her that MLM’s model is against my business philosophy of focusing on offering the best products/services, as I can sensed from our conversation that she is being thoroughly brainwashed already. An interesting story I have heard of this interesting story recently:There are two brothers living in a condo unit at the 80th floor. One night when they were going back home, they found that the lift was under maintenance. The two brothers looked at each other and thought, “Well, guess we will need to slowly climb the stairs.”So the two brothers started to climb the stairs with their backpacks. When they reached the 25th floor, they began to feel very tired and decided to put down their backpacks. They stored their backpacks in one corner and decided that they will come back and collect them once the lift service resumed.So the two brothers continued to climb the stairs without their backpacks. The next few floors were much easier without the burden, but as time passed it became more and more difficult to climb even without the backpacks. When they were reaching the 40th floor, the two brothers started to blame each other for not noticing the life maintenance schedule. The squabble eventually ended when they reached the 60th floor, because they were both too tired to quarrel and decided to climb the rest of the stairs peacefully.Finally, when the two brothers reached the 80th floor, they discovered something terrible: their door keys were left inside the backpacks at the 25th floor!***Updated:***The eighty-storey building symbolizes our entire life. Most of us begin our life with lots of enthusiasm, dreams and passions. However, when we start our working life at around mid 20s, the burdens of new commitments and social expectations begin to exert pressure onto our shoulders. Many of us decide to put aside our dreams in order to pursue other materialistic aspect of our life. We think that we would come back and pick up our dreams one day.As we are reaching 40 years old, the burdens of life become more stressful. The uneasiness within our hearts is growing despite the fact that we are more well-off than before. Whether we have achieved those materialistic gains or not, many of us would inevitably start to question or even blame the society and people around us. But not many of us would have thought of picking up the dreams that we once thought we would pick up one day.When time goes passed, we stops the questioning and blaming and begin to place our hopes on retirement. We decided that the most important thing is to enjoy a peaceful life after retirement. But when we are reaching the end of our life, many of us start to remember the dreams that we once had, but abandoned at the 25th floor. We had so many chances in life to pick up our dreams again, but it always seemed to be placed at the least priority. And some day, we might totally forgotten about it, only to remember when we are approaching the end of our life. It’s important to ask the right question Recently, a friend W asked me which programming language is the most popular one as he planned to learn programming. W is an IT administrator with very little programming knowledge, and I was quite surprised at his sudden enthusiasm in programming.So I asked him why he intended to learn programming. Basically from what I understood, W was feeling a bit stagnant in his job, and therefore wanted to learn something new to have some breakthrough in his career, and perhaps to have some extra means of income.Well, if W’s intention was to learn programming and eventually take up some freelance projects to supplement his normal income, I would advice him to spend some time to turn his current hobbies into an income source instead of spending time on something which he had neither flair nor passion in. For example, W had passion in photography, and was rather good in it. He went for photo shoots events regularly so obviously he quite enjoy it. Thus, I would advice W to hone his photography skills, build up his own portfolio and offer his freelance services to bridal studios. He could also setup a website to showcase his portfolio to other potential clients. From there, he could extend his services to videography, photo/video editing, etc. Of course, all these are easier said than done, but at least I felt that he would have a better chance to succeed in freelancing his photography services than programming services. Even if eventually he can’t get much income from this sideline, there isn’t any loss as he is doing something he enjoys and would have do it with or without monetary benefits.If W’s intention was to have some breakthrough in his stagnant career, I would also not suggest him to learn programming. He would be better off getting professional certification like MCSE, which has direct impact on his current job. If he intended to climb up the corporate ladder, he could take up courses like project management. If he intended to stay as a technical staff but increase his employability, he could take up related courses such as information security, or even courses on other operating system admin such as Linux, UNIX, etc.So basically, neither W’s problem nor solution involves programming. Yet, he posed a question to me based on a flawed solution. A lot of people tend to ask for the wrong advice because they have put themselves into an unnecessary constraint build up by a flawed solution to the original problem. In W’s scenario, his problem is his stagnation in his job and income, not what programming language he should learn. He thought that picking up programming skills is the solution to his problem, and unknowingly shifted the domain of his problem. As for whether a breakthrough in his job & income would bring about more happiness, that would be another question.The first step to solve a problem, is to identify your problem, and then, ask the right question. Where does your passion lies? Quite interestingly, more people likes to talk to me, ever since I started to set up my own company. Maybe to some people, I am quite a rare breed because I gave up a decent and stable job to pursue my dreams and passions. Maybe to them, I am doing something that they had long wanted to do but do not dare to take that first step. Thus, it would be intriguing for them to watch closely how I fared, or failed.One interesting thing I noticed when speaking to people who wanted to startup their own company is that, they rarely talk about their passion, let alone their vision. Most just wanted to be a boss. Any kind of business, as long as they are the boss. To them, becoming a boss is merely a way of breaking the salary ceiling to achieve financial freedom. Just a means to an end. The means doesn’t matter much, at least not as much as the ends, that is, achieving financial freedom.The same goes for some existing business owners, and venture capitalists. I once had a chat with a business associate. I told him about the financial strains during my early days of startup, and how I believed that having passion in what you do is important to an entrepreneur. He didn’t quite agree with me, as he himself didn’t have any passion in the businesses that he involved, except for the passion towards earning more money.What exactly is passion, one might ask? Just imagine you strike a lottery one day, or inherited a large sum of money from some distant relative. You have the money to buy everything you desired, to tour around the world, and still have enough money left to support you and your family up to two hundred years old. What would you do next?If you are a software developer, would you continue to write software? Or would you uninstall every single compiler and IDE on your computer?If you are a writer, would you continue to write your novels? Or would you just stop writing because writing is just a tool for earning money?If you are a chef, would you continue to explore new flavours or methods of cooking? Or would you stop cooking because cooking is never your passion?In an ideal world, people would pursue their passion and earn their keep while fulfilling their potential. In a pragmatic world, people earn their keep while doing something that is probably neither their passion, nor fulfilling to them, so that they can pursue their passion after work, or after they retired, or never.Think about your passion. Think about what you really want to do. I got a new office! I had been looking for an office for the past few weeks. Ever since I moved out of my first office in the year 2006, I had been a mobile entrepreneur in the sense that I did not have a fixed place of work. I would always carried my laptop with me, and did my work in either some café, or in the library, or any places with aircon, internet access, and preferably a/c power supply.The mobile office concept suits me well since the bulk of my work can be done on a laptop. However, now that I am starting to expand my operation a little, I feel that it is about time to get a new (small) office.The reasons why I wanted to get a new office:1. To have a fixed place to hold meetings with my sales people. Although I could hold meetings in some café, but it would be very dependent on how crowded the café was. Moreover, I would like to have some privacy when having meetings with my colleagues.2. To have more freedom in managing my time. If I worked in some café or libraries, I would have to be restricted by their opening hours.3. Better facilities. By having my own office, I would be able to do printing/ scanning/ copying/ faxing, as well as having reference materials or books to refer to.4. Better focus. Having my own office would allow me to have better concentration on my work, compared to working in a café where there are people walking in and out all the time.5. Place to store my inventory. Right now, my bedroom is filled with my inventory, and in one or two weeks time there will be tens of thousands of brochures coming in. I needed some place to store all these things and cleared the space of my bedroom.6. Place to meet customers. Most of the time, I would offer to meet customers at their site. But sometimes, some customers would suggest to come to my office, probably due to their own office under renovation, or they themselves are also using home office. At times like this, I would have to suggest to meetup at some café. Now with my own office, I would be able to have more choices on where to meet the customers.However, since the property prices in Singapore are still very high, right now I can only afford to have a tiny office. This new office that I have now is about 3 times smaller than my first office. It is about 5 to 6 times smaller than the laboratory which I worked in during my last job as an employee.But to me, this is a new milestone. My first step towards expansion. Patent Story 2: A peep into the Patents Act I had originally intended to give a deeper analysis on the patent “Method of locating web-pages by utilising visual images” and how ridiculous the Vuestar’s claim was. But, now I decided against it, because:1. I had stumbled upon a website that had done a great job in analysing and refuting Vuestar’s claim, with some examples of prior arts. It has already covered most of what I had originally wanted to write, and much more. So interested personnels are advised to visit this website.2. I felt that the patent itself is really not worth any further analysis. In fact, I am contemplating on sending Vuestar an invoice for wasting one hour of my life going through a worthless 29-pages article. Alright, perhaps it is not exactly worthless, at least not in the eyes of its “inventor”, Mr Ronald Neville Langford.So, instead of writing about some silly patent, maybe I shall write about some interesting parts of our patents act.Any person can applied to revoke a patent, according to subsection (1) of section 80 of the Patents Act:Subject to the provisions of this Act, the Registrar may, on the application of any person, by order revoke a patent for an invention on (but only on) any of the following grounds:(a) the invention is not a patentable invention;(b) the patent was granted to a person who was not entitled to be granted that patent;(c) the specification of the patent does not disclose the invention clearly and completely for it to be performed by a person skilled in the art;…………Note that a patentable invention is a product or a process that is new, has a non-obvious inventive (improvement) step, and has some form of practical application. So if it can be proven that at least one prior art exists, or the invention is obvious to a person skilled in the art in that technological field of the invention, the patent can be revoked based on the “invention is not a patentable invention” ground.Section 77 of the Patents Act is also quite interesting to note:Where a person (whether or not the proprietor of, or entitled to any right in, a patent) by circulars, advertisements or otherwise threatens another person with proceedings for any infringement of a patent, a person aggrieved by the threats (whether or not he is the person to whom the threats are made) may, subject to subsection (4), bring proceedings in the court against the person making the threats, claiming any relief mentioned in subsection (3).And finally, subsection (1) of section 99 of the Patents Act states that:If a person falsely represents that anything disposed of by him for value is a patented product, he shall, subject to this section, be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $10,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to both.Last but not least, I urges all victims of this patent troll to come together and seek legal advices on how to deal with it.P/S:(1) I am not a patent lawyer, and all of the above should not be taken as any form of legal advices.(2) I am not one of the victims, or in any direct relationships with any of the victims. I am just a concerned entrepreneur who thinks that patent troll is a bane to innovation and society progress. Patent Story: A little background Recently, a local company (Vuestar Technologies P/L) sent invoices (ranging from hundreds to thousands of Singapore dollars) to numerous website owners. Basically, the company claimed that those websites are infringing their patent, and thus requesting for payment for the license fee.Before we look specifically into the Vuestar scenario, I think it would be better to have a little more background knowledge in patents.What is a patent ?From IPOS (Intellectual Property Office of Singapore):“A Patent is a monopoly right given by the Government to the owner of an invention to enable him to prevent others from using, copying or making the invention without his consent in the country in which he has obtained patent protection.”What is patentable ?“A patentable invention can be a product or a process that gives a new technical solution to a problem. It can be a new method of doing things, the composition of a new product, or a technical improvement on how certain objects work.”According to IPOS, for an invention to be patentable, it must in general satisfy the below three key criteria:1. New:The invention should not have been made known to the public in any way, anywhere in the world. An invention is not new if it has already been made available to the public by word of mouth, or it has been commercially exploited, or it has been featured in an article or advertised in the press, or it has been demonstrated. Such disclosure may be novelty destroying and forms one of the grounds for the revocation of a patent.2. Inventive Step:The invention must be something that represents an improvement over any existing product or process that is already available. The improvement must be non-obvious to a person who is skilled in the art in that technological field of the invention. If an invention is new yet obvious to a person skilled in the art, the invention would not fulfil the inventive step requirement.3. Industrial Application:The invention must be useful and have some form of practical application. It should be capable of being made or used, or achieving a concrete end result in any industry.A little background on the companyNow that we have some basic ideas of what is patent and what is patentable, let’s go back to the Vuestar scenario. A little search on ACRA will reveal that it is a private limited company registered in the year 2006, formerly known as Blue Steel Dragon Pte. Ltd. Its managing director is Paul Smith, while the patent “inventor” is Ronald Neville Langford. Don’t quite sound Singaporean? Right, from what I know of, Ronald is an Australian. In fact, the patent in question is first filed in Australia in 2001.The patent in questionThe patent which Vuestar Technologies claimed to be infringed, is titled “Method of locating web-pages by utilising visual images” (Patent publication no. 95940).From the 29-pages full specification of the patent, the patent is basically talking about:An improved method of locating web-pages and/or web-sites, as described in the following steps:1. User submitting a search request to a server-side application via a terminal.2. The server-side application searching a database in accordance with the submitted search request.3. Identified database entries being transmitted to the terminal as a search results list, each entry containing a hyperlink to a web-page and visual content related to the web-page.4. The user is able to view the visual content without being required to activate the hyperlink to obtain the visual content.5. Contact information (telephone, fax, email, etc) for an organization is also provided as a component of an entry of the search results list.So basically, he claimed that in prior art (search engines before application of patent), the previous search engines only returned text information and hyperlinks upon a search request, which is not very useful to the user. Thus, in this “invention”, he proposed that the search engine stored visual content along with other information of the websites in its centralized database, and returned these visual content as a component of the entry of the search result list.There are other specific embodiments written inside the full specification, but basically it revolves around how the visual information should be presented to the user, and how the website should react upon user’s actions.To my disapointment, there are very little (if any) technical details or innovative algorithms on how to implement this “invention”. The idea of this “invention” itself, I would say, isn’t really impressive and probably quite obvious to a person skilled in the art.Vuestar’s claimsAccording to Vuestar Technologies website, it claims that:“A web site which has been developed by or for a URL addressee/ owner and uses visual images to hyperlink to other pages in which any first or subsequent page provides the contact details of an Organisation would in Legal terms appear to use the steps and methods outlined in a claim of the Patent .”If you have read the full specification of the patent, you would probably be as baffled as me. Contrast Vuestar’s claims and what I have written in the previous section “The patent in question”, it just doesn’t match. The methods outlined in the patent is about presenting of visual content as a component of each entry of the search results list. Yet, Vuestar claims that “using visual images to hyperlink to other pages” is an infringement to the patent, which I seriously cannot agree with.*****************************************************I shall just stop here for the time being. In my next post, I shall go into more detailed analysis on the patent itself, and what I think of the infringement claims in various scenario. Serenity I attended a gathering recently. It lasted for only a few hours and basically we just played some games that I hadn’t been playing for years. On my way back, I was thinking about the gathering and the games, and smiled to myself. I suddenly realized, that I had not really enjoyed myself for a long time.Ever since my company became an OMO (One-Man-Operation), I had been doing things all alone. I met my customers alone, I ate my lunch alone, I planned my company’s direction and strategy alone, I did all the coding and debugging alone. For more than two years, I had been fighting a lone battle and unknowingly accummulated loads of stress on my shoulders.Whenever I meet up with friends, one question that they bound to ask would be: “How’s your business?” And sometimes I really do not wish to answer. I think I am just doing fine, but I don’t really have much to show. I had no problem surviving, but there are a lot more to think about than merely trying to survive, especially when you are in your third or fourth year of business.One reason why I really enjoyed the gathering was that the people there didn’t know I am an entrepreneur. It was a mere few hours when I can immerse myself in the games and totally forgotten about the burden that was on my shoulders. And nobody would ask about my business. It was kind of like a few hours of mental spa to rejuvenate my spirits.I am gonna put down some of my loads. I am gonna learn how and when to take a stroll. The view may be captivating at the top of the mountain, but I must first learn how to appreciate the scenary along the way. There’s still a long way to go. I met my ex-director… Haven’t been updating this blog for some time. Somehow, I have lost some of my initial enthusiasm in blogging. Or perhaps it doesn’t exist in the first place. Of course, part of the reasons (for the lack of updates) could be that I am currently quite busy with a few plans going on simultaneously. Will probably talk about all these some time later.Just recently, I attended an event and was surprised to meet my ex-company director Mr C there. Obviously, he was surprised to see me too. I could still remember the smirk on Mr C’s face when I told him I wanna startup my own company a few years ago. It’s no surprise to me that he still look as detestable as before.Mr C was a typical management level person who strived on impressing his superiors to work his way up the corporate ladder. I used to be a project leader under him. He was the first technical director I worked with who didn’t bother to read my design document, just because he claimed he didn’t have the time. But the truth was he couldn’t understand the technical details that I wrote.Some of my ex-colleagues commented that people like him wouldn’t go far. Well, it actually depends on one’s definition of going far. I personally think that people like Mr C would survive very well in the GLCs, because no matter how technically challenged you are, there will always be some clueless people above you that thinks very highly of you as long as you are able to string some buzz words into a sentence and paint some glamourous big picture.I don’t really like to attend all these so-called networking events, where I can see lots of Mr C walking around wearing a fake smile. But sometimes attending such events is inevitable if I wish to grow my company.In the end, I left the event early. I am still not quite used to it. The air is fresher outside. The vision became clearer too. Looking back 2007: My life . My company . My future Time seems to pass faster ever since I graduated from university, which was some seven or eight years ago. Many of my peers are having the same sentiments, and I actually had my own explanation for this phenomena. Although time remains consistent as ever, the post-university phase of our lifes had somehow lacked prominent milestones. Most of the people, after a few years of work, began to lead a monotonous lifestyle of work-sleep-and looking forward to weekend. Life had become an auto-pilot journey while time crept away without anybody noticing. Another reason could be the feeling of under-achievement. As the best part of our life kept ticking away, the possibility of achieving what we wanna achieve in life become slimmer. Instead of the “I wanna earn my first million bucks before 30” wish that you have when you are 20 years old, you slowly find yourself need to compromise to more realistic expectations. And as time passed, when people find that even the more realistic expectations are hard to achieve, the notion of time passing much faster than before will come in.My lifeThere isn’t much changes in my life for 2007. It’s the first full year of my life as a blogger, and I also started a chinese blog which does not have much readership. I had grown accustom to the lifestyle of an entrepreneur, as it was already my third year in entrepreneurship. Life as an entrepreneur can have the freedom that many working class craved for, but at the same time it can be very lonely. While many of my ex-colleagues are envious of the kind of freedom I am enjoying, I am also quietly reminiscing the times when I could just hop over to the pantry have a coffee and chat with other colleagues. As time goes by, I had gradually shed away most of my programmer’s ego and become more like a businessman. I noticed that I see things differently than before, and my perceptions of a lot of things had also changed.I had read a lot to both deepen and widen my knowledge. I believe, whether you are an entrepreneur or not, one should always look to improve himself. As an entrepreneur, I had more control over my time and thus I always tried to allocate some slots for learning new knowledge. For the past year, I had been reading up on topics like company law & contracts, marketing, philosophy, strategy, and a whole lots of chinese novels. This is in addition to my usual dose of technical readings in programming and computer science.I had participated in several volunteering events and am looking forward to more participation in 2008. And of course, like many others, I was addicted to facebook for quite a while.My companyMy company remained as a one-man-operation. The annual revenue for 2007 is better than the sum of first two year, but that’s not something to brag about since my first year (2005) revenue was pathetic. Towards the end of 2007, my focus shifted from the local market to the international ones. I had just signed a distributor agreement with a foreign firm, and is looking towards signing more of this to push my product to different overseas.I started year 2007 with a few ad-hoc projects that pay rather well, though I always want the main focus of the company to sell its own product rather than doing ad-hoc projects. Towards the second half of the year, I was doing much less development work. More time was spent in planning, marketing, sales and negotiations of collaborations. And I do notice that I become more willing to spend, from both personal and company aspects, which is probably a good sign.My futureMy future is still uncertain. The only thing that changed is that I am getting used to this uncertainty. The financial stress is lesser as I had been drawing a reasonably comfortable director fee since the beginning of 2007, but the expectations are only getting heavier, especially when I saw my peers advancing in their own respective careers.I have many plans for 2008 but I will not list them down in this blog. I know I will be leading a very different life compared to most people. Its afterall my own choice, and no matter how difficult it is I will continue to embrace it. Some advices on Entrepreneurship Year 2007 is coming to an end, and many people are starting to make new year resolutions for the coming year. Perhaps one of the resolutions in some people’s list is to startup a company. As an entrepreneur myself, I think perhaps I can give some advices to those who are thinking of becoming an entrepreneur. Although I don’t see myself as a veteren or some successful entrepreneur, I believe I had more exposure than maybe a normal nine-to-five office worker. For the past few years, I had seen entrepreneurs come and go, some struggled and some are still struggling. I had seen people leaving the entrepreneurial scene with a bad taste in their mouth. Many people entered the scene with lots of enthusiasm and dreams, thanks to the constant glamourization of successful entrepreneurs and over-emphasis of success stories in the media, but leave the scene bitterly with a dose of reality.So perhaps I would just list out a few things which I think can be useful to an entrepreneur here, as an end-of-year present to all those avid readers who have been reading my plain little text-only blog. It is heart-warming to know that people are willing to spend their precious time reading a stranger’s rant.1. Make yourself comfortable, even if you are coming out of your comfort zone.Don’t believe in the myth that entrepreneurs are all struggling to make ends meet. Don’t believe that entrepreneurs should live miserably before they see any glimpses of hope. Entrepreneurship is long journey. If you are making yourself miserable and uncomfortable, how long do you think you can last ?But how to make yourself comfortable? Reduce uncertainties to the minimum. You need to make calculated risks before diving into the uncharted waters. Take into account your normal monthly expenses, plus your expected monthly expenses of your company, and make an estimate of how long you can survive without income. If you cannot survive at least one year, perhaps you should save up more or get external financial investments.Apart from financial aspects, there are also the mental aspects. Try to do something you truly enjoy. It will enable you to persevere through hard times. And don’t make yourself miserable by working 24 hours, unless you are a workaholic.2. Maintain a good healthA healthy body is the foundation of every entrepreneur. If you are not able to take care of your own health, how can you take care of a company? So, do exercise consistently, eat healthily, and you will find yourself having more energy to take care of other stuffs.3. You don’t have to own 100% of your companySometimes, you may need to sacrifice some of your shares to bring in capital or expertise. But of couse, not to the extent that you become a minor shareholder that can’t make any decisions.4. Separate your personal and company accountsEven if you are a sole proprietor, it is advisable to separate your own personal accounts and your company accounts. Things will get real messy if you are paying your baby’s diapers and company’s inventory all from the same account. At the end of the day, you don’t even know whether you are truly earning lesser or simply because your personal expenses went up.5. Mix with the right peopleThe people around you can have positive or negative effects on you and your company. There will always be people who are eager to offer their advices. And there will always be people who can’t wait to bring you down. Make your own judgement who you think is credible, and who is just NATO (No Action Talk Only).Beware of those who are indecisive, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic, NATO, constant-whiners and forever-disgruntled. Take whatever they said with a pinch of salt.6. Don’t enter entrepreneurship because you wanna avoid somethingBe it stress, work, nasty bosses or responsibilities. Chances are you will get more of those in entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial scene is not a place for people who wanna seek refuge. If you cannot leave your previous stage as a victor, don’t expect to come into entrepreneurship and emerge as a winner. You’d probably run away from the same problem again.Ok, that’s all my crap advices, and remember to take it with a pinch of salt. Wish all have a fulfilling 2008! My dreams I still remembered the very first job interview I had after I graduated from university. It was an interview for an IT post of a MNC, and the interviewer was an american. After some routine technical questions, he asked me to talk about my dreams. I did not know any “model answers” for such questions, and being a naïve fresh graduate, I just answered it from the bottom of my heart.Well, people who only know me via my online identity would probably guess that my dream is to set-up my own company and be a successful entrepreneur. Or something along the lines of becoming a great software developer and creating some killer software products. But those weren’t the answers that came to my mind at that point of time.Admittedly, I am quite a dreamer. I had a lot of dreams. To setup and grow my own company is one of them, to achieve breakthrough in my personal research in a specialized area is another. But when the question was posed to me, only one prominent dream came to my mind.I told the interviewer that my dream is to build a farm cum animal shelter. Thousands of animals had been abandoned every year in this tiny island alone, and most of them had to be put to sleep. I wanted to create a haven for these helpless animals, whose only wish is to survive in this world that is dominated by human supremacy. I knew it would take a lot of money to fulfill such a dream, but I will still work towards it no matter how long it takes.I did not get the job eventually. I did not even get through to the second round. I did not know whether it was due to my over-idealistic answer. But at least I spoke from my heart, and I would still give the same answer today. The only thing different is I had quite a couple of additions to my dream list, and most of them are not easily attainable.Many friends that I know of, had in some way or another given up on most of their dreams. It seems that the older they grew, the more dreams they discarded. Somehow, as you grow older, pragmatism will inevitably override idealism.I am still working towards fulfilling my dreams. And in the process, adding new ones. If I am able to live till 85 years old, I would still have more than 50 years to achieve my dreams. That’s a hell lot of time, so why give up?P/S: I have added a “Support these Causes” section on the right panel of this blog. Those are free ads space for charitable causes. Feel free to click the links. I will be adding more in the future. Brief updates: On distributionship, rebranding and my one-year-old blog Hadn’t been updating this blog for weeks as I was rather busy with some other things. Firstly, I had been preparing the distributionship agreement for my product, both the exclusive and non-exclusive versions. Secondly, I was also busy with some rebranding work on my product. Due to the recent advancement in distributionship talks with B, I had made a change in my original roadmap for my product.My original plan was:1. Upgrade my product to version 3.2. Freeze the baseline and rebrand the product3. Repackage the product4. Revamp the product page of my website to be more interactive5. Actively look for overseas distributors and more local resellers6. Continue to upgrade the product to version 4However, I figured that the upgrades to version 3 might take quite some time, so I changed my plan accordingly:1. Revise the features to be implemented in version 3. Implement one small portion of it, scrape one portion of it, and move the remaining portion to version 4.2. Follow steps 2 to 6 of previous plan.In this way, I would be able to push my product to overseas market much faster than I originally planned. In fact, I should have pushed my product overseas much earlier, as the local market is too limited. However, the engineer side of me had always put product enhancement on top priority, and kept delaying the business aspect. It was this engineer side of me that was always feeling insecure about my product, and wanting to build it to perfection before I introduced it to the world. But the fact is, you need not be the best in order to fight the international competition, as long as you know where your strength lies. The international market is big enough to sustain many players.Company’s matters aside, this blog had quietly marched pass its one-year-old birthday. My initial objective of creating this blog was to record down the thoughts and experiences during my entrepreneurship journey. When this blog was first created, I had just bounced back from a very difficult period in my life. I did not know how far I can go, or how long I can survive in this lonely voyage. Thus, I created this blog, so that if I eventually failed, I would still be able to remember all that I had went through. Slowly, as this blog had gained more readership, I began to share some of my thoughts on the local entrepreneur or IT scene and other stuffs.However, I still had this strange feeling that I wasn’t really a blogger. Perhaps it was due to my low frequency in updating this blog (I still couldn’t understand how some bloggers can churn out posts everyday, or even multiple posts per day). Or maybe it’s due to my lack of participation in any bloggers’ communities or activities. Or maybe because I do not know any bloggers in real life. But whatever the reasons, ironically speaking, the importance of this blog had slowly grown in my heart. Although I had been blogging behind a moniker, there was a certain portion of my identity embedded into this blog, which effectively made this blog an extension of my true self. So I guessed, whether I feel like a blogger or not, is no longer important. At least, this is my true voice. Sailing into International Waters…. I just received an email from a prospective overseas distributor B. Apparently, after testing out our product, B was very satisfied and requested to become our distributor. In fact, he had already placed orders for my products, while we worked out some final details in our collaboration. I couldn’t really describe my feelings when I received his email. It was probably the same kind of feeling when I first setup this company, or when I first entered university, or when my crush first agreed to my date.Over the past few years, there had been quite a number of people and companies that requested to be my product’s reseller or distributor. But none of them really materialized, because of various reasons. Most of them didn’t look serious, and didn’t really have any track records or concrete plans in pushing my product in their respective countries. This time round, B seemed to be a serious distributor as we had actually corresponded intensively for the past few months.The collaboration with B wasn’t really a smooth sail. When B first contacted me with his requirements, I thought it was straightforward and my product could easily achieved that. After a few email correspondence, B requested for a trial version of my product. I tweaked my product to create a trial version which I was confident that it couldn’t be easily hacked, and sent it over to B. However, my trial version couldn’t work with B’s existing system and B emailed me with the error message displayed by my trial version. Initially, I thought it was just some connection problems so I adviced B on how to troubleshoot and rectify it. However, the problem persisted and I had a hard time trying to find out the problems because I did not know the actual environment of B’s site. I could only asked B over the emails to carry out my test instructions and try to deduce the cause of the problems. Eventually, I managed to find out the cause of the problem and the trial version managed to integrate with B’s existing system.However, the problem didn’t stop there. After some initial simple testing, B found out that my trial version still couldn’t work to his expectation with his existing system. This time round I suspected there were still some problems which might not be easy to figure out if I continued to troubleshoot through B. So I asked B to turn on the logging function of my trial version and emailed me back all the logged information. After going through the logged information, I suspected that the problem might lie on B’s existing system and told B about that.However, B replied me after a while that he had tried out a similar product offered by a company from his country and the product was able to work with his existing system. After checking out the product mentioned by B, I noticed that the product could only fulfill part of B’s requirements. However, since that product was able to integrate with B’s existing system while mine couldn’t, it was natural that B was thinking of trying out other alternatives. I replied to B that I could loan him a full system (including components that could replace the functionality of B’s existing system) for two months, so that he could use it for demo to his customers. There was a certain cost and risk for loaning B the full system, but I decided to go ahead to offer B the loan because I knew I was at the verge of losing a potential overseas distributor that could potentially contribute hundreds of thousands of revenues per year. B accepted my suggestion and I immediately sent the full system over to B.But the problems just didn’t seem to let me off easily. B tested the full system sent by me and still encountered some problems. I spent nights trying to figure out what exactly was the problem, going through hundreds of thousands lines of codes and logged information. Finally, I realized that the difference in some third party environment could be the source of problem, and emailed B the remedy to it. It was my last straw of hope and I kept my finger crossed after sending B the email. To my relief, B replied me that after following my remedy, the entire system could work properly and he would proceed to test the more detailed features of the system.And now, you could imagine the kind of satisfaction I got when I finally received B’s email that he wanted to buy my product and become our distributor. This is my first voyage into international waters and I knew it could be a very different ball game altogether. The local market is too small and restricted. In order to grow, I knew that sooner or later I would need to venture into overseas market, and now is probably the right time to do so.The sea monsters lurking under the international waters are probably fiercer than I could ever imagine. But I just had to venture into it. I need to be stronger. For my passion, my dream, my belief.I just need to be stronger. Why hackers cannot survive in Singapore I remembered watching a scene in a Hong Kong drama series “Net Deception”, where a hacker (or cracker to be exact) played by HK actor Wong Hei was intruding a system using his laptop in a café. Apart from the unethical actions of the cracker, that scene looked cool though.Now imagine, transfer the entire scene to Singapore. Cracker Mr C was hired to intrude a certain company’s system. Knowing that the local ISPs are always very cooperative in revealing customers’ information, Mr C decided to perform his cracking at a café instead. Afterall, the much celebrated success of the island-wide Wireless@SG had made his job much easier, he thought to himself.So Mr C, sitting in a café sipping his favourite ice mocha, slowly opened his laptop and waited for the bootup and internet connection.“In ten minutes time, I would be able to intrude the system.” Mr C let out a confident smile as he thought about it.But alas, Mr C got a shock as he turned his face towards his laptop screen. The words “limited or no connectivity” was shown when his laptop was connected to Wireless@SG.“Nevermind, there’s another café across the street.” Mr C kept his cool, packed up his laptop and slowly walked towards the other café.Luckily, the Wireless@SG internet connection at the other café was alright. “Nothing can stop me now.” Mr C smirked while he quickly connected to his target system and launched a brute force attack at the first layer password system.“Shit!!!” exclaimed Mr C, when the internet connection dropped after a mere 2 minutes. After several tries, Mr C was finally convinced that the internet connection could not sustain continuously for more than five minutes.Again, Mr C moved to yet another café, only to find that the speed of the Wireless@SG connection was comparable to that of a 14.4Kbps dialup connection.Not accepting defeat, Mr C tried out a few other cafés and fast-food restaurants, only to encounter the same problems. Finally, with some divine intervention, Mr C managed to find a café with proper and sustainable Wireless@SG connection. Mr C let out a relief sigh, and just when he wanted to launch his attack, his laptop was shut down. Apparently, his laptop had run out of battery after running for a few hours without any AC power supply. Mr C changed his job the next day.P/S: This post is written after several frustrating experiences with Wireless@SG. My way of categorizing IT personnels Over the years, I had the chances to work with a lot of people, both locals and foreigners, in the IT/Engineering fields. Most of them are software engineers, while some others are system engineers, network engineers, IT administrators, system analysts, etc. And slowly, I deviced a way to categorize these IT personnels according to their abilities and ego :Category 1 - High abilities, Average egoCategory 2 - High abilities, High egoCategory 3 - Average abilities, Average egoCategory 4 - Average abilities, High egoIt may be a bit of generalization here but most of the overseas-based foreign IT professionals I had worked with belong to categories (1) and (2). Of course there are always some clueless IT professionals no matter where you go, but I am speaking from my general impression after working with some of these germans, russians and israelis professionals. It could be due to their education or environment, most of these people have in-depth knowledge in their own specialized fields instead of having superficial knowledge in many areas yet expert in none. And some have very high egos while some are reasonably humble.On the other hand, the Singapore-based foreign-talents that I had worked with mostly belong to category (3). Most of them can boast knowledge of a dozen programming languages in their resume, but in reality their abilities are just average. Fortunately, most of these people whom I had worked with do not have high egos, and thus can still get the job done, albeit needing more guidance and supervision.Lastly, the forth category is the category that I feel, the most difficult to work with. Unfortunately, quite a number of locals belong to this category. They have very limited abilities, yet possessing super high egos. Even when they are young and inexperienced. Even when they really have got nothing to show for. For this category of people, I can only say, the moment you acknowledge how average you are, would be the moment you can truly start to improve as a real professional.P/S: There are good and humble local IT professionals too, just that a bit few and far between. A tale of two companies Once upon a time, there was a company S whose key business was delivering technological and engineering projects. Since company S was closely-related to the local government, most of company S’s projects were also government or military related.And then one day, there was this multi-million-dollar project opened for bidding. Company S was interested in the project, but did not have the technological abilities to develop it. Thus, company S decided to partner with an overseas company X, even although company X did not have a ready solution at that point of time either. As a result, the two companies secured the project, with company X as the main contracter and company S as the sub-contracter.Company X then started with the design of the architecture down to each individual components. As fulfillment of the partnership requirements, company S sent a few young software developers over to company X to assist the developments. These young developers of company S were then deployed to work under the various group leaders of company X, throughout the development stage. However, due to the lack of experience of these young developers, they were not involved in any software design and rarely touched on the development of the core components of the system.After the project was delivered, these young developers returned to company S and were subsequently dispatched to other different projects. Over the years, most of these developers eventually left company S, or proceeded their careers as managers. On the other side, company X retained all the architects, designers, technologists and developers of the project, and immediately proceed to develop version two of the system.A few years passed by, and the customer decided to upgrade their existing system. This time round, company S and company X approached the customer separately. Company S presented to the customer their ideas and past track records. Company X also presented their ideas and past track records, but on top of that, they also gave the customer a demo on the version two of their system, which was a much improved system that met most of the customer’s requirements. When asked to quote for the project, company S quoted a figure and timeline equivalent to that of developing the project from scratch. Whereas company X quoted a much lower figure and timeline, due to their possession of an advanced system baseline. Needless to say, company X got the project.The mistake made by company S was what I had often critised about. That is, they failed to capitalize on their initial advantages and build up their own technological and intellectual assets. Company S managed their company from a short-term business aspect, while company X managed from a long-term technological aspect. Many local companies that I have seen are making the same mistake as company S, just that most of them don’t have the financial backing and customer relationship of company S to survive the mistake. Entrepreneurs also have comfort zones Just recently, I read paddy’s post “Complacency, a big price to pay later”, which talks about how some employees tend to stay in their comfort zones, live from paycheck to paycheck, and face problems when they get retrenched. I believe the tendency of staying within one’s comfort zone, either knowingly or unknowingly, is a common trait among most working class people. So what about entrepreneurs ? Does entrepreneurs also have comfort zones? I believe the answer is yes.Normally, one would think that entrepreneurs are highly-motivated risk takers. So how does being a risk taker corelate with a person who stays within his comfort zones?An entrepreneur’s comfort zone usually originates from a self-perceived sense of security. At the initial stage of startups, entrepreneurs are normally driven by their passions and enthusiasm. They would probably work almost 7 days a week and not feeling tired. When time goes on, some survive and some fail, some struggle while some manage to achieve stability. The problem is, upon achieving a certain level of stability, some entrepreneurs may gain a false sense of security. And that false sense of security may eventually lead to complacency, or what I called, an entrepreneur’s comfort zone.Very often, we have heard people saying that a certain entrepreneur had survived for a couple of years and thus his company is already quite stable. However, being around for a long time does not necessarily mean that a company is in a stable state. Or in fact, is there really a stable state for a company? Personally, I have seen companies that had been around for more than 10 years being closed down, due to various reasons.So what exactly would happen if an entrepreneur stays in his comfort zone? Firstly, the entrepreneur would probably be contented with the status quo, instead of looking at how to expand his operation or thinking about possible future challenges. As a result, the decisions made by the entrepreneur would most probably be geared towards short-term gains and immediate monetary rewards. This can become quite dangerous as we all know, the world is changing very fast and sometimes it takes only a subtle change in policy or technology and whatever competitive edge you possessed can dissappear within a blink of the eye. Similar to an employee who lives from paycheck to paycheck, some entrepreneurs live from project to project without seriously considering building up the intellectual and other intangible assets of the company. When times become bad, these entrepreneurs may be surprised to find out that the foundation of their companies are actually much more vulnarable than they thought. Feeling underpaid ? Assess your actual value from an employer’s perspective A lot of people would like to think that they themselves are underpaid, and their roles in the company are very important. However, your actual value may not be as high as what you perceived.A logistic manager F from my ex-company, who was around fifty years old, was being asked to leave. He was being replaced by a thirty-year-old guy whose salary was just slightly more than half of what F got. Moreover, the new guy was able to work for longer hours. F may claim that he had twenty years more experience than the new guy, but in reality F’s experience may not be as valuable as he thought.Thus, your actual value (to your company) does not equate to the amount of money you are drawing, or the amount of experience and qualification you possessed. Your actual value is in fact the amount of money your company has to pay for the next best alternative to do the job that you are doing. If you are a software developer drawing S$3K per month doing some software development, while an indian IT professional is able to do the same job at the same quality drawing only S$2K per month, then your actual value is probably only S$2K. If you are a manager drawing S$6K per month doing some project management job, while a young manager with 3 years of experience can do the same job at S$4K per month, then your value is actually being inflated. If you are just doing a data entry job, it doesn’t matter that whether you are holding a first class honour degree or not. The fact that you are handling a million-dollar project doesn’t mean that you are worth a million dollar. You are worth the amount your company has to pay for the next best candidate who can handle the million-dollar project equally well, or at least at a standard that your company is willing to accept.So, by assessing your actual value, you can have a clearer understanding of your actual worth (in the eyes of your employer). If your actual value is higher than the salary you are currently drawing, then you probably are eligible to ask for a higher pay. If your actual value is lower than your current salary and you feel that your abilities are not fully utilized, then you may want to seek greener pastures or request for an upgrade of job scope, because it is very likely that one day your employer may realize they are paying more than they should for that particular job scope. When that happens, you may either be asked to leave, or have your pay stagnant for a long time. If your actual value is lower than your current salary and you feel that you have already applied most of your abilities in your job, then you should start to do something about your future rather than whining about being underpaid. Seven habits of highly defective co-workers (3) – Mr KIA strikes again I had several projects with Company Y and inevitably sometimes I needed to work closely with Mr “Know-It-All”, much against my wish. His boastful character had been quite notorious within the industry, yet he still managed to work his way up the corporate ladder.Apparently in late 2006, my company was again engaged by company Y for this particular ad-hoc project which required us to do some enhancement on one of their existing software. This particular software was developed by one of their in-house engineer a couple of years ago. The engineer had left the company and there wasn’t any design documents around. The only thing available was the source codes (with minimum documentation) and the executables.As usual, Mr KIA claimed that the task was very simple and he could have done it himself easily, if he wasn’t so busy. He tried to describe the software features to me, and told me that a large portion of the software was making use of a particular “D” library. I got the source codes, executables and some verbal requirements from Mr KIA, and proceeded back to do the enhancements. However, when I went back and browsed through the source codes, I realized that it wasn’t the correct version which I was required to do enhancement. The source codes that Mr KIA had given to me was in fact one of the earliest version which was very different from the latest one. Then I tried to run the executables and received an error saying unable to find a certain “O” library. I proceeded to download the “O” library from the internet and eventually managed to run the executable successfully. Apparently, the executable was the correct version while the source code was one of the earliest version. Thus, I was quite certain that the correct version of the software was making use of the “O” library and not the “D” library to perform the tasks.So, I called up Mr KIA and informed him that he had passed the wrong source codes to me. Initially he refused to believe me but I managed to convince him when I told him I could show him the exact source codes that he had passed to me and verified with him on the spot. Then he told me maybe it was because there were too many different versions lying around and the previous engineer had a very messy way of organizing things. In order to help him identify the correct version, I told Mr KIA that the correct version was using the “O” library, not the “D” library that he claimed.Then when I went over to Mr KIA’s office to collect the correct source code, Mr KIA said something which was out of my expectation. He said that the software was using the “D” library, not the “O” library which I claimed, and that I had given him wrong information to mislead him and wasted his time. Well, I was actually quite sure that the software was using the “O” library, but since I had not seen the actual source codes of the latest version, I couldn’t refute his claim that the software was using “D” library. Since the “O” library and “D” library are performing very similar tasks, normally developers would use either one but not both in the same software. However, I reckoned the previous in-house engineer may had rather weird preferences in developing software (due to the constant bad-mouthing from Mr KIA), so there might still be the possibilities that both libraries were being used. I did not wish to get into any arguments with Mr KIA and so I just kept quiet.However, when I reached home and looked at the latest source code, I found out that the software was indeed using the “O” library only. There wasn’t a single trace of code that indicates it was using the “D” library, as claimed so by Mr KIA. Apparently, either Mr KIA could not understand the source codes and made a stupid and erroneous claim, or he just couldn’t accept being proven wrong and blatantly lied to me. Either way, I told myself, in future I am not gonna believe anything said by Mr KIA, and hopefully do not have to work with him anymore. I’d never thought I could do sales…. If five years ago anyone told me that I would be doing sales, I would probably brush it off as a joke. I had been a software engineer all my life, and the time I spent in front of a PC is much more than that of facing another person. Add to the fact that I am a rather introverted person, the scenario of myself doing sales is a rather unthinkable one.When I first started my venture in 2005, my job nature did not really change a lot. Most of the interactions with customers falls on my then-partner K’s shoulder. I would only attend occasional meetings when technical details were to be discussed. However, ever since I parted ways with K in 2006, I had to do every single tasks all by myself, and that included doing sales.I could recall the first few sales demo that I was doing, they were more like FYP presentation than sales pitch. All that I did was to illustrate the functionalities of my product. In my mind, I was thinking of quickly getting over with the sales demo and went back to do my development work. To me, doing sales was like doing homework for a subject that I disliked. As a result, there wasn’t much success in sales.I remembered there was this incident last year when I was on my way towards a prospective customer’s office. Normally I would travel via MRT or bus to my client’s place to do sales demo. As this client’s office was some distance from the MRT station, I decided to walk from the MRT station to his place. However along the way, it suddenly rained heavily and most of the people on the streets ran to the nearby shopping malls to take shelter. Knowing that I was already running out of time, I decided to take out my umbrella and continued walking towards my customer’s place amidst the heavy rain. As I was walking, I noticed that I was all alone on the whole stretch of street. A sudden feeling of loneliness crept into my heart, and I started to wonder why I was doing all these when I can choose to have a comfortable and regular paycheck working in an aircon room. Why do I choose to face nasty clients when I can just concentrate on my software R&D, working as a software engineer? If my passion is in doing software, why am I doing sales and marketing?As I was walking, my mind kept churning out new questions. I thought I already had the answers for these questions, but whenever a new storm came about, the ghost of uncertainties will come back haunting me. I realized that the feeling of loneliness will always be there, as I continued my journey in pursuing a dream that isn’t shared by anyone else.In the end, I reached the customer’s place with my shirt all wet. I do not know whether it was due to the rain or the sweat for walking long distance. I managed to close the deal eventually, and sorted out how I should do my sales more effectively and efficiently in future, instead of running away from doing sales. Looking back, I would always remember those days when I braved through the storms in pursuing my dreams. Ping.sg Advertisement - Meet Furry TGIF ! Just created a simple advertisement for ping.sg .No animals are harmed in any way in this advertisement.The name is faked in order to protect the identity of the animal and the people around him.See original ads at Ping.sg Advertisement v2 Seagull steals potato chips from shop! A seagull has regularly been walking in to a Scottish store and stealing bags of potato chips. The bird just walks in the open door, hits a nearby shelf, and then heads back out to the street! The employees have since nicknamed the seagull "Sam", who has become so popular with locals that they have started to pay for the bird to have its daily supply of crisps. Once outside, the seagull rips the bag open and shares the chips with other birds. It’s a strange week …. A couple of rare events happened this week:i. A prospective customer who “disappears” for a few months suddenly contacted me to order my products. The last time I talked to him, he and his partners said that they were evaluating some other systems. After months of disappearing acts, I did not expect them to recontact me, let alone confirming their purchases.ii. A friend’s friend contacted me to discuss about some collaboration projects. Apparently, this guy was looking for people to develop some systems. The odd part was, the last time we communicated was like more than half a year ago. Then he “disappeared”. And now to my surprise, he reappeared and contacted me directly.iii. An ex-colleague who had lost contact with me for seven years suddenly approached me to talk about some project collaboration also. Apparently he had just setup a company and was looking to outsource most of his software development jobs. On top of that, he was also very interested in being a distributor for my products using his overseas distribution channels.iv. One of my advertising medium company offered a complimentary advertisement placement (worth S$1500) to my company. I did not ask for that.v. Bumped into my JC classmate who had lost contact for about eight years.Other than the above-mentioned events, I had also received more sales and distribution enquiries than usual this week. It just feel so strange that all these happened within the same week. A small step forward I received a cheque from a customer recently. The amount wasn’t huge, but to me it signified an important milestone.Apparently, this customer X is the owner of a rather well-known company. Several weeks ago, I received an email from him requesting a trial version of my product. Normally, I would not give out trial version as I was quite paraniod about piracy and hacking. So I offered to go down to his office to give a live demo of my product. Upon reaching his office, I gave X a demo on my product’s functionalities and he was quite impressed. But X seemed to be a rather cautious person and requested that I tested my product with his company’s database. So he led me to his desk and I proceed to install the system onto his PC.To my surprise, I saw a few of my competitors’ software on his desktop. Obviously, X had researched and tested quite a few of my competitors’ trial version before he came to me. This was rather uncommon to me because most of my customers would not do that much “homework”. So after the installation, X proceed to test out my product with his own database and much to my relief everything worked well. After the demo, I had a chat with X. Apparently X had previously bought a similar product from one of my competitor but only to find the product extremely buggy. I wasn’t surprised as this competitor’s product is the cheapest amongst all, and I myself had tested it before. Thus, this time round, X was more cautious and decided to test out a few similar products before making the decision to purchase.A few weeks later, I received a purchase order from X. Though the revenue from this single deal wasn’t much, I viewed it as a significant victory because X had decided to purchase from my company after some detailed comparison among my competitors. It shows that our product is able to withstand competition from some of the bigger and older boys in the industry.Sometimes, I feel like a toddler who is curiously and eagerly exploring the world. Every little step forward is a significant moment. Seven habits of highly defective co-worker (2) – Mr Know-It-All Mr Know-It-All (KIA) is not exactly my co-worker. He used to work in another department of my ex-company. During my time in the ex-company, I seldom had the chance to work with him luckily. But I did hear a lot of bad things about Mr KIA, particularly about his boastfulness.After I set-up my present company, I had taken up a few ad-hoc projects to supplement the revenue of the company. One of my customers, Company Y, is a company that is in the same sector as my ex-company. Apparently, Mr KIA had joined Company Y, and unfortunately is the highest ranking technical person of this company.My first assignment with Company Y was to enhanced one of their existing software within a short time frame. I was then engaged by their AGM, and this AGM ordered Mr KIA to assist me by providing the relevant specifications. Mr KIA claimed to know the system very well, but eventually the specifications that he gave me was full of errors. Nevermind, I fully expected that to happen and I managed to deliver the required tasks despite of the obstacles.One thing I wasn’t quite happy about Mr KIA was that, he persistently claimed that the tasks assigned to me was very simple and he could have easily done it, just that he was too busy with other works. However, from my many years of experiences, I could safely gauge that the tasks had a certain level of difficulties, even to an experienced software developer. Furthermore, Mr KIA is a hardware person with very little software knowledge and experience. I was highly skeptical that he could even understand the design of the system in the first place, let alone implementing any enhancements. Moreover, the assignment was already lagging behind their promised schedule and absolutely nothing was being done. If it was so easy as claimed by Mr KIA, shouldn’t he put aside other tasks and delivered this assignment first?Anyway, when I delivered the system, the AGM requested that I port the software over to one of their existing PC. However, I do not know about the environment settings required for the software to run. My development work was done on a laptop supplied by the AGM, with all the required environment settings preset by Mr KIA. So obviously, I would need to ask Mr KIA about the required environment settings. To my dismay, Mr KIA ignored my requests, claiming he was very busy. So eventually, I had to trial and error, meddle with the registries, run into a lot of errors, just to get the software working on the designated PC, all because Mr KIA was “too busy” to tell me the required environment settings.In the end, I spent one whole day in their office to settle the configuration and environment settings all by myself. At the end of the day, when the AGM came to ask about the progress, Mr KIA suddenly turned very helpful and asked me whether I need help, in front of the AGM.Furthermore, during the few meetings I had with Company Y, whenever the AGM asked for my opinions, Mr KIA would try to interrupt and eagerly offered his opinions before I could say anything. I figured out that Mr KIA perhaps felt a bit threatened by my existence, and thus tried to make things difficult for me and at the same time hope to impress the AGM. But I was just an external consultant, not a colleague in direct competition with him. Why should he feel threatened by me? One explanation would be, it was just his nature to try to impress people at all cost.My subsequent dealings with Company Y had further unpleasant experiences with Mr KIA. But that was another long story. Customized or COTS software ? Some of my customers don’t quite understand the difference between customized software and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software.Customized software is a software that is built to cater to a particular customer’s needs. Normally, the process involved would be requirements gathering / analysis, software/system design, coding, integration, testing, deployment, etc. Due to the details of customization, customized software usually cannot be transferred between projects, though some components may be reused. Such project would normally be charged according to the number of man-hours / man-months. For example, let say a certain customized software project required two engineers to work on it for a total of three months, the number of man-months required would be six. If the total cost of one engineer is S$4000 per month, the cost of the project would be S$24,000.On the other hand, COTS software is developed without the intention to meet specific customer’s needs. Such software is normally built to fulfill the basic needs of majority of the customers in the target sector. Thus, the price of COTS software is normally much lower than customized software, except for some very specialized COTS software. The downside is, you will have to accept whatever the COTS software provides you. Some example of COTS software would be Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc.Sadly, some customers that I met want the best of both worlds. They want the software to be customized to their specific needs (with functionalities that are normally not present in similar category of software), yet compare the price with COTS software like Microsoft Office when we talk about the customization charges. In cases like this, I would have to patiently and painstakingly explain to them the complexity and effort involved in implementing the customization they required, and the man-day charges of my company.Customers are not always right. Sometimes, they also need to be educated. Apply OOP techniques in answering difficult questions from customers Some of my customers liked to ask questions beyond the scope of my product, especially when they found out that this is my own company. However, not all questions can be easily answered without exercising a bit of selective truths. Well, in object-oriented programming we called this “Data Abstraction”:Simplifying complex reality by modeling classes appropriate to the problem, and working at the most appropriate level of inheritance for a given aspect of the problem.Below are some of the difficult questions and its corresponding abstractions:***************************************************************Question: How many people are there in your company ?Answer: Currently there are five of us, plus some temp staffs.Abstraction : In the “MyCompany” class, there is 1 director and 3 other passive shareholders. To simplify things, the class only exposed the attribute “people”, which is the total number of active and passive headcounts, to outsiders. Hmm…did I mention my pet ?Question: How many customers from my sector are using your products ?Answer: (Insert a respectable yet reasonable number here)Abstraction: In the “MyCompany” class, there are 3 private attributes concerning number of customers: “total customers”, “potential customers” and “existing customers”. However, we only provide accessor method for the attribute “total customers”, which is the sum of “existing customers” and “potential customers” multiply by a random constant.Question: How long has this product been in the market ?Answer: Around 2 years.Abstraction: Well, the first version launched 2 years ago is far inferior to the current latest version. But the truth is, it is really in the market for around 2 years.****************************************************************Well, it would be rather suicidal to reveal to customers that this is an OMO (One-Man-Operation) company. They would most probably not give you the chance, and instead opt for an inferior product from a bigger company. Or in some case, they would try to “eat” you by requesting a lot more features while reducing the price.As for question two, nobody wants to be the pioneer to try out a new product, even though it had already proven working in some other sectors.I guess sometimes in life we need to be selective in what to say and what not to say, even though we may not like it, as long as we are not hurting anyone in the process. Applying “data abstraction” techniques is just one way of doing that. Seven habits of highly defective co-workers (1) - Ang moh accent VP I remembered bumping into my ex-VP at the pantry, when I was still working in my ex-company. Apparently, my ex-VP tried to be friendly by striking up a conversation with me.“Hello Nk, jiak ba buay (hokkien: have you eating already) ?”I looked at him blankly. I was trying to figure out which was more absurd: Speaking hokkien in a fake ang moh accent, or acting friendly with someone you don’t even know his name ?“Oh, you are Nk or CS ?” my ex-VP somehow sensed that he got my name wrong.“Neither. I’m XXX.”The conversation ended abruptly.Lesson 1: You don’t have to call the name of the person in order to act friendly. It may just bring about unnecessary embarassment.Lesson 2: If you are a low-profile engineer, try not to go pantry too often.