At the time I helped helped a lot of people in my environment with running their webshop or e-service. I earned some cash on the side but one day decided to approach it in a professional matter. “I got it! “ I’ll find new customers and write a ‘SEO’ report about their site, then I can attach an invoice to that!

At the time I was very enthusiastic about my idea, so I wrote a businessplan and discussed it over lunch with Sheridan Tatsuno, one of my mentors at the time. We met at a steakhouse in Jönköping, Sweden and discussed the plan.

The American was the first that really gave me honest feedback. He foresaw a lot of problems which I never had seen before. Mainly, scalibility was the issue, but also revenue wise, my plan didn’t make a lot fo sense. It was harsh, really. I expected praise but he surprised me with the truth. My castle in the sky was blast gone, and I opened my eyes. I’m happy I never started that consultancy business, as going from door-to-door finding business in SEO is hard business these days.

I was blinded by passion, almost in love. Didn’t consider the negative aspects. In more recent years I had similar experiences with entrepreneurial startups. What I can say is this: Entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic. The direct environment of a entrepreneur isn’t likely to be critical at all times too, take the spouce for example, probably critical at first, but likely to crack after many passionate dinner-table pitches by the founder. The few ‘smart money’ investors will be critical and add valid points to the table, but a good investor like that is hard to find.

What’s left is nothing but appreciation and and agreement in your environment. Some say “When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”, what you need is someone that won’t beat around the bush, what you need is someone who sees what’s wrong and dares to say it. No limits, no emotional connections, a coach that helps you with discussion. “Yes, but Joe worked 500 hrs on this!”, “no, it sucks, it has to go!”

In the startup phase, a coach forces you to make difficult decisions. Meeting one can be tiresome, but improve the speed of your company.
How to find a good coach? Perhaps you are thinking about a certain famous entrepreneur you know, but that’s not necessary. Relevant experience are key features. Besides, someone who dares to be direct, so a direct character is important. (I regard Americans to be direct in these things, a key role for a coach)

Find your coach and have a heavy discussion at least every month, let the coach tell you your products suck. That’s a better motivation than hearing it’s great.

Picture by spencerfinnley, cc, 2008.

At the kindergarten down my street in Shanghai, I’m seeing the same. In the last few months, slowly Mercedes has become the standard and Bentleys, Maybach and Maserati’s are appearing more and more. What a display (Circus) of wealth every day…

Update: Related article in Shanghai daily: Rich getting richer faster as wealth gap widens

First picture taken bij Marc, used with his permission.

Whilst I follow this news and seen some of Belgium a few times, it never so clearly showed to me how divided the country is until unitedstyles was featured in a article (click here to read) on de standaard, a Flemish tabloid sized newspaper.

At unitedstyles, and most other webshops, we use software to track where our visitors come from, in our case Google Analytics. You can see your visitors per country, but also per city. When I was just browsing around and took a peek at our Belgium traffic, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing:

I figured when the article came out, visitors would mostly come from the Flemish side, which is Dutch speaking. But besides one single dot for the French speaking part, all our visits came from the Flemish north!

Ofcourse I hope the country will stabilize and  ’L'union fait la force’ will return, just thought this was a interesting stat for others to see.

Philosophy wise, Google+ is different then many other websites out there. it launched without any programmer hooks involved. A lot of people were disappointed with this news at the launch, and nothing changed as of yet. My guess is that Google want’s to get it right from the start and take it step by step. To everybody’s joy, Google added 3rd party games to their platform two weeks ago. A good sign.

However, even if they open to developers, Google+ would not be like Facebook. Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president of engineering for Google, stressed that the games “are there when you want them and gone when you don’t.”. They won’t be appearing in timelines like in Facebook.

What you can expect if you would be able to launch a Google+ application? At this point it’s only speculation, but approaching a different demography then Facebook or Twitter would be one. Also, Google might also have different idea’s about monetizing commercial users. It would be interesting to see if they would allow adsense, which I doubt. However, products like Google App market and Checkout might appear.

Currently there is almost no information regarding Google+ projects. Some whisper that developers might be forced to use Caja to write apps. I did some research earlier and Caja is great – basically a secure iFrame. if this is the case, the sky is the limit. Others mention Opensocial. Nobody knows and all developers are out in the blue.
On the bright side: Google did open a mailing list for developers hunkering to know more. ““To stay updated as the Google+ project develops and get a heads up when we have more details to share about Google+ developer opportunities” If you are interested in developing for the platform in the furture, you can at least leave your details here.

Do you have any idea’s what a possible Google+ developer suite will allow you to do develop?

But Adobe (owner of Flash) recently announced they will launch a HTML5 building tool that would work simular to flash, called edge. It seems clear then right? We’ll say goodbye to flash and embrace HTML5.

No. That’s what I thought in May and it’s false. The HTML5 standard isn’t officially completed for the next decade.  However, there is a silent voice in the Flash VS. HTML5 debate called SVG. With little effort, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) can do most things Flash and HTML5 can do. Yes, even audio. And best of all, it works on the iPhone. Whilst Flash is in the past, and HTML5 the future. SVG is the best what the web can offer today.

When I started a new web project last May, I seriously considered Flash, Canvas (HTML5) and SVG. Whilst all of the could do what I wanted, all had advantages and disadvantages. In short:

• 1) Flash doesn’t’ work on iPhone, proprietary and slow.
• 2) HTML5 is too vernal – ready for mobile but not for desktop – and
• 3) SVG skilled programmers are hard to find in China.

In summary: Three months into the development project with SVG, i’m happy I chose to go with the third option during the time. The learning curve is low; SVG is easy to interpret and can be controlled by JavaScript.  Just like flash it’s vector-based and can be animated.

The downturn (compared to HTML5) is that SVG requires a plugin, just like flash, the difference is that most modern browsers (Firefox, IE9, Chrome & Safari) support some degree of SVG directly. To support the older Internet Explorer browsers, there is a great plugin called SVGweb that renders SVG in Flash. SVGweb mentions on their site: “Using the library plus native SVG support you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.” I tell you, it was a breeze to get most browsers on board.

Developers: Don’t fall back to flash in your wait to HTML5 and CSS3,  SVG is gaining popularity fast and is a great way to get things started. Today, most vectorized pictures on Wikipedia are already in SVG and recently Google added SVG to their image search. I see HTML on the pipeline, but for now I will use SVG, saying good bye to flash forever. (Oh, I actually blocked Flash on my browser using Flash Block.)

Sources:

1. The defacto standard for anyone learning canvas – Dive into HTML5
2. Google diving into SVG – Search engine land
3. A older (but still! valid) SVG versus flash – itl.edu
4. The SVGWeb plugin - Google Code

Official Android SDK showing whatsapp

Some people like to chat on their phone’s. Some people don’t. One of the people that like to contact by SMS/Whatsapp is my sister. She contacted me and we had a chat but I realized typing on the iPhone (with it’s pesky autocorrect) isn’t a lot of fun.

So I wondered: can’t I install a desktop client on my MAC OSX Lion? In short: You can but it sucks. Why? It’s terribly slow. But until Whatsapp changes their mind and creates a desktopapp, or at least open up their walled garden, this has to do.

For those of you wondering what I did:

1. Go download and install Androids SDK

2. Create and download a proper AVD (I choose galaxy tab Android API 8)

3. boot android on your desktop

4. Allow unknown sources

5. Place the whatsapp apk into the android/tools directory, and install it with:adb install [apk name].apk (adb is on your own computer.)

Verification process of whatsapp using the android SDK

6. Sync your contacts: Download your Google contacts in vCard format. Execute the following command: “./adb push <location of your vcard>.vcf  /sdcard/contacts.vcf” (adb is on your own computer.) Then find contacts in the android emulator and click import. Select your SDcard. Contacts should import now.

7. Launch Whatsapp and chat.

Actually, after this success I realized it’s a bit too slow but it works. So I actually had two trials today. The second attempt however, failed. I installed Android on the desktop using a ISO from the http://www.android-x86.org/ project. This is much, much faster then Google’s own SDK.

After some time I finally am able to play with android on my desktop at almost native speed, which is cool. But whatsapp would not be installed due to a problem identifying the device. At that point, installation could only be achieved by restoring already installed whatsapp copies but I didn’t look further into this.

http://www.android-x86.org/: We can't identify your device. Please turn off the phone, take out the battery, restart it and try again.

The take away of today’s weekend project is that I am actually able to chat with my sister on my desktop now, using whatsapp. It’s painfully slow (typing appears in a lagging matter) so I won’t likely to use it at all. Time wasted but an anwer richer. If anyone has more success, please let me know. I suppose I will use my efforts with the SDK and the ISO for some actual android development in the future.

Sources:

Stack overflow post on how to sync contacts from desktop to emulator:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1114052/importing-gmail-contacts-on-android-emulator

How to install APK in the SDK:

http://nerdposts.blogspot.com/2009/12/android-install-apk-on-emulator.html

Android X86:

https://code.google.com/p/android-x86/downloads/list

Image by samwebster (CC,http://www.flickr.com/photos/samwebster/4378872439/)

A quick guide for those distributing large amounts of audio on the Internet: As you know, audio services are great but are also costly. Consider hosting the files yourself on Amazon S3 and potentially save a lot of money. In my case I have sliced next year’s cost by at least 30%. It’s a little bit of a geeky guide but I managed to go through the installation steps myself within one hour. Ofcourse you can leave your thoughts or ask questions in the comment section.

Let’s make it a hypothetical case: I am hosting a podcast called joopspodcast.com – which is entirely about myself LOL. Amazingly I have about 50k downloads a year. We will compare a well known audio hosting service which shall remain unnamed; let’s call it AudioHoster INC. for now, with amazon S3. We compare with S3 because I build some experience with the service and it’s my gut feeling it’s cheaper then hosting it on AudioHoster INC’s servers.

Comparing the two options:

Advantages of using AudioHoster INC.

1. They take care of your offsite backups (If they are professional service)
2. Statistics about the users behaviour
3. Cool flash players for users to play the files with

Advantages of self hosting on S3

1. Amazon S3 is likely to be cheaper to host
2. Cost based on actual MB’s served
3. Able to cancel contract at any time

Thinking about it, I am sure we can offer all 3 advantages of the AudioHoster INC. on our self hosted environment. More about that after the following cost calculation:

Worth the trouble? – cost calulation

Comparing potential cost of both services.

Whilst hosting audio with AudioHoster INC. is great, but I paid €29 a year for a ‘lite’ account which provided me with 4 hours of audio hosting. This was fine at first but within a year we had to move to a premium account – even though this particular audio hosting service was kind enough to sponsor me with a trial of their premium. Premium will be around €79 per year for 12 hours.

Comparing the prices is hard. After all, we suddenly need to pay for the amount of users that download our content per megabyte. All kinds of variables come in to play like the amount of visitors and the amount of data they copy. The only thing one can do is underline that this is a loose calculation on a sunday afternoon and is based on a hypothetical case. But enough data to base our decision on:

Calculating hosting costs for Amazon S3 goes as follows: (cost for total GB hosted + puts = costs). On average, a minute of MP3 (128kbps) is 0.91MB. Amazon charges $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests. In the case we will host 4 hours (240 min) of audio.

Case 1: 4 hours

We have about 4 hours of audio data with about 50.000 downloads a year:

Total GB of audio: (240 minutes * 0.91 average MB for minute of mp3) = 218MB (0.212 GB)
Hosting costs: 0.218 Total GB of audio * $0.093 price per GB = $0.02 * 12 months = 0.06
Average audio time: 5 min = 4.55 mb. Serving that to 50k people equals 244GB.

Data transfer costs: 243 (estimated MB – free first GB) * 0.120 (from here) = $29.16
Puts: 50000 * ($0.01/10000) = $0.05 * 12 =

Total cost per year: 0.06 (Hosting costs) + 29.16 (Data transfer costs) + 0.6 puts = $29.82

Case 1: 12 hours

We have about 12 hours of audio data with about 100.000 downloads a year.

Total GB of audio: (720 minutes * 0.91 average MB for minute of mp3) = 655MB (0.639 GB)
Hosting costs: 0.639 Total GB of audio * $0.093 price per GB = $0.06 * 12 months = 0.72
Average audio time: 5 min = 4.55 mb. Serving that to 100k people equals 444GB.

Data transfer costs: 443 (estimated MB – free first GB) * 0.120 (from here) = $53.16
Puts: 100000 * ($0.01/10000) = $0.1 * 12 = 1.2

Total cost per year: 0.72 (Hosting costs) + $53.16 (Data transfer costs) + 1.2 (puts) = $65.99

Summing up

As said, AudioHoster INC. charges:
4 hours for €29
12 hours for €79

Hosting on S3
4 hours for €21*
12 hours for €45*
*converted on 21/08/2011 dollar to euro exchange rate

making hosting 4 hours about 74% of AudioHoster INC’s price, 12 hours about 56% of the price.

It seems to me, as benefits are marginal on 4 hours but at 12 hours become worth while. Guess our trouble become valid after about that time. SInce I passed 4 hours i’m gonna say: screw AudioHoster INC. for now and we will set it up ourselves on S3.

How to do this?

Before we start, make sure to check at least the following isn’t a problem for you:

1. Credit card for subscribing to S3
2. basic knowledge about Linux
3. For statistics, we need install rights on a (linux) webserver. In my case I used an ubuntu server, the one that hosts joopspodcast.

So, we setup S3 but we don’t stop there. We want to install the domain’s DNS for better URLS, and add statistics to keep a close eye on potential costs and visitor data. We then covered most of the advantages of using a subscription service. Perhaps some other day I will add how to add cool web players.

For joopspodcast.com, I want to host the files in a subdomain called media.joopspodcast.com, not in amazon’s created URL’s. Why? Two reasons: People linking to your files link to your domain, which equals increased pagerank. Secondly, the amazon URL’s are super long and hard to remember!

Setting up Amazon S3

1. Navigate to https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home?
2. Sign up/login to the S3 service
3. Create a so called ‘bucket’ – you NEED give it your full intended URL in my case: ‘media.joopspodcast.com’
4. Copy your podcast files onto your bucket. You can use the online version but I used transmit (mac).

Setting up DNS

1. Navigate to your domains DNS panel.
2. Add a CNAME. In my case: Recordname ‘media’ value “http://media.joopspodcast.com.s3.amazonaws.com.)
   (don’t forget the dot at the end and if you are an European user, use s3-external-3.amazonaws.com. instead)

Now everything in the bucket http://media.joopspodcast.com.s3.amazonaws.com can be addressed with your new shortURL media.joopspodcast.com.

Setting up analytics

1. Go to your webserver and install AWStats I also installed freegeoIP tools to track where people came from (guide)
2. Install Johan Steen’s get-aws-logs.py script (link)
3. Configure according to Johan Steen’s recommendations (link)
4. Some pointers that got me further were:
S3 AWStats LogFormat
LogFile="/var/log/apache2/media.joopspodcast.com.log"
LogFormat="%other %extra1 %time1 %host %logname %other %method %url %otherquot %code %extra2 %bytesd %other %extra3 %extra4 %refererquot %uaquot %other"

Offsite backup

Will happen on my own terms. Usually before I upload audio files I will make a backup and save it within my document backup environment. Offsite backup arranged!

Credits:

Thanks to Carlton with help setting up S3 DNS: http://carltonbale.com/how-to-alias-a-domain-name-or-sub-domain-to-amazon-s3
Johan with help getting analytics logs imported: http://wpstorm.net/2010/11/aws-s3-logs-boto-python/ http://wpstorm.net/2011/01/awstats-amazon-s3-cloudfront/

As we were almost half a year past the wedding, it was time to go on a honeymoon. Something I could cope up with all this time because of a mad bachelor party in both Barcelona and Milano with my friends, but was long due. As the destined country was set by generous (wedding-gift) givers, we only needed to narrow down the exact hotel we wanted to stay. Friends & Twitter pointed us at Langkawi Kedah an Island in the some 30 km off the mainland coast of northwestern Malaysia North west of malaysia, where we found the humble Mutaria resort.

This particular resort came with it’s own beach, live music bar, pool, palm trees, all for a reasonable price in the low season and we got upgraded to a sea view bungalow when we mentioned our honeymoon! Very kind staff who would deliver sangria to our beach chair and enjoy a dance with the guests late at night (but not in a corny way). During our stay on the island we visited other resorts including the Sheraton and the Datai but ours was definitely better aimed for European visitors and more fun for a mid twenties couple like us.

Chilling on the beach, reminds me of living in Barcelona. Never saw such a classic beach though.

The Langkawi island is full of wildlife. Before landing I told Suna that I wanted to see at least one animal in the wild, but we’ve seen many: monkeys, gekko’s, buffalo, bats, snakes, wild pigs, eagles and others. A true tropical paradise. Besides the night market, we’ve seen a cement factory and small shops, but didn’t see many other commercial activities besides tourism and nature.

There are two types of monkeys in Langkawi. This is the breakfast stealing one ;-)

At this point, both of us realized that a typical resort (swimming & reading) holiday isn’t something our personalities can handle. Instead, we rented a car and did activities everyday, followed by some swimming and reading on the beach. we also did some activity packages including mangrove forrest visiting and coral riff snorkeling. All interesting activities were great but can be done within a week. Trips that were less worth while mentioning were the cable car, the harbor city and commercial parks.

Trip to the waterfall (Temurun), snorkling (do you notice the small terrifying shark in the bottom?), and stingray feeding.

All and all, a great honeymoon. Above expectations. Slightly off topic but a realization for myself: Inspired by a book I haven’t even read yet, I didn’t use the Internet for a good week. This mission was set just a few days before the holiday and I loved that I decide to do this. The laptop I brought for emergencies luckily could stay in my bag and I read from a paper book. (my Kindle has gmail access!) The non internet thing was amazing – I noticed that time took longer as I wasn’t constantly checking my mail and generally had much more time on my hands. Unplugging feels great and I will try to implement that (somehow) in my lifestyle a little more. Now my energy is recharged, i’m ready for action back in Shanghai.

Read more about it on my wife’s blog.

I want to thank those who helped making our honeymoon possible!

Holland town is actually one of many ‘international satellite cities’. Shanghai’s city planners are carrying out an ambitious scheme to relieve population pressure: They are resettling 500,000 people in nine new towns in the suburbs. Others include Swedish town, an Italian and an English town. There are plans for more, adding an American, German and a traditional Chinese town to that list.

Back to Holland town. The peace and quiet is quite unique for Shanghai. Thinking about it, Holland town is a real estate investment project and a photo scenery at the same time. Many Chinese newly weds probably had their wedding pictures taken in this scenery.

Suna and I took a stroll around the area, we started at the church, walked down the mainstreet had a look at some villa’s, and walked back to the windmill. There are a few places for shops, but not all of them are operated.

Here’s a question: What does Holland town (CN) have, what real Amsterdam (NL) doesn’t have? ;-)

1. Excellent photo opportunities for newly weds. – Photo studio’s everwhere, you can even take a picture from a windmill. (We kindly asked and could just walk everywhere. A professional photoshoot cost about 600 dollars)
2. Smog – Contrast to Amsterdam, this place features a nearby nuclear plant, harbor, factories and the close town of Gao Qiao.
3. A quiet place – Try sitting in the heart of Amsterdam without getting your bike stolen, harassed by a dog or being annoyed by all the noise. For that matter, more places to relax in Holland town.
4. Church bell – The church bell sound goes on for twenty minutes straight and it’s a CD, not a actual bell
5. A mixture of cultures – Holland town mixes Dutch architecture with Chinese habits. Think: Kite flying grandpa’s everywhere, laundry hanging on bamboo from the Dutch houses, Chinese street names and ofcourse little differences like aircon’s hanging on all the buildings.

It’s quite nice actually. We were gonna stay a little while but decided to stay and read a little in front of the church. In front of me is a grandpa with kids playing with a kite, girls studying and some couples in the grass picnicking.

If I haven't told you this was China, you would have thought it would be Europe right?

A Dutch windmill in China.

Good old Shanghai Holland town... The high rises being developed in the back of the picture gives away the true location.

Unlike Last year’s visit in June, today’s weather took a turn for the worse. It was cold, foggy and it rained a lot, but we couldn’t resist the outdoors on this day outside the office.

Todays destination was the Chongming Dongtan Birds Nature Reserve 崇明东滩鸟类自然保护区. An 13 acre wetland on the east side with the extraordinary amount of millions of birds on their way to the far south of Australia during the fall and spring season. The park build bird watching towers and other facilities, like a earthquake measurement tower.

The route, we took the red route

We went to ZhongShan Park. Zhongshan Park was established in 1914 by the Shanghai Municipal Council as “Jessfield Park”. Before then it was a private garden owned by H Fogg, a British property developer. It’s huge and very calm, even though it’s in the middle of the city. We watched people camp out on the field, some foreigners enjoying wine and bread, Chinese people playing with their kite’s, and a lot of kids running around.

Later, we went to Taikang road (arts and crafts enclave) where we enjoyed some coffee at a Japanese restaurant. (café Dan) Interesting concept, you choose your coffee by the country, I picked a coffee from Papua New Guinea, and Suna got one from Kenia, then they roast it, and bring it to your table. The smell of the roasting was something to get used to but it’s very nice to see the process. We sat in the spring sun, Suna was improving her sketches and I took some time to read my book.

We had friends come over and we prepared ‘Raclette‘ for them. Even though we got a hint of the warmer, longer days to come, we like to pretend it’s still mid-winter.

I remember that day in preliminary school when my teacher said that a Chinese family was moving into our small Dutch village to start a Chinese restaurant. Their eldest son Jing would be placed in my class. I already knew about the Chinese but had never met one, meeting this boy from far away intrigued me and soon we started to become good friends.

10 years forward, I believe I had experienced unique Chinese culture at a young age for a Dutch boy; I learned to eat real Chinese food with Chopsticks, was influenced by Chinese culture by observing them and their tv and had been thought my first Chinese words.

My parents took pride in their son opening up to new cultures and had gained an interesting role in this sino dutch/chinese relationship as well. My dad learned my Chinese friend to cycle on his bike, play soccer etc. and my mom was unofficially involved as a private junior high school counselor, reading teacher’s notes to my Chinese friends parents. This shows that my parents were also intrigued with this family and soon they were also invited to intimate family gatherings like Chinese new years and also received help from time to time.

One day when I was 14 years old, the parents of my Chinese friend asked me if I wanted to come to China with them for a holiday some day. My enthusiasm was soon calmed when I reported this to my parents at home, China being far away and dangerous and all. However, two years later I was allowed, I had saved enough money and got my parent’s agreement since the two families had become trustable friends.

This picture was taken about 10 years later