Video from Startup School Conference

Startup School is a great conference for people who are interested in startups. It is great that a video is available for people to watch online.


Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv



[Update: full-length videos at Omnisio.com. It is very cool that the slides are being shown at the same time!]

Listening to UC Berkeley's Search Engine Class

I have been learning and researching more on search engine lately and I am glad to found out that there is a free 2007 class online on this subject from UC Berkeley, one of the best university in the world.

UC Berkeley Webcasts | Video and Podcasts: INFO 141

I wish they could also post the slides for the class as well so I could visually the algorithm that they are talking about.

The internet has really changed how people learn.

I am currently taking classes from two different universities in HK, yet at the same time I am also listening to this class from UC. All the educational information are available now and the only one stopping me to learn is myself.

I could still remember how difficult it was to find out information on game programming when I wrote my first game using QuickBasic (Yeah...it was a long time ago...). Now, there are so many learning opportunities now and the key is information discovery and filtering.

We are living in exciting time.

[Updated: this 2005 version of the class with Video. I remembered I blog about it before too]

Chinese Handwriting Recognition for iPhone

Check out IPhone: Handwriting Recognition for iPhone Now Available

This is very cool! I will give it a try when I have time to load it up in my iPhone.

What to do when you are busy?

See this comic about what you should do when you are busy. Funny.

Seriously, Twitter is getting really popular for people to draw comic about.

Another startup lessons from the net.

Very interesting discussion and advices from the founder of the Gridjit site.

I like his discussion on the business model, where he is saying that you may not have all the business model figure out yet.

"So, I’m not saying you have to figure out your business model right away. I certainly don’t have mine completely figured out...What I am saying is that, given the direction things are going, you’ll want to do everything you can to make your business self-sustaining along the way. But only do that if it doesn’t compromise the quality of your product. Embrace constraints, as they say, and deliver a quality product that people want."

I think it also means that you should still give it a shot and figure it out later, if you believe your service is valuable. That's kind of true, Google didn't figure out his real business model until later on.

The key is to make it self-sustaining so you are still ok if it doesn't work out.

Twitter and the Open Sea

I have a Twitter account for awhile, but I don't use it simply because I don't think it is useful.

I read about the Adobe AIR Twitter client called Twhirl a couple days ago and I decided to try Twitter again. I than tried to follow some well known people on the internet. To my surprise, they also follow me back! Although I don't think I could contribute too much back to them.

Now I see the value of Twitter, it could definitely make the distance between people much closer than before. I could read about them in their blogs, or listen to their podcasts from time to time, but using Twitter you know the person more in a totally different way.

My only problem with Twitter is that I only have 1 friend in US using it, and none of my friends or family use it. It is like shouting to a an open big sea....