Startup

A few months ago, I blogged about my frustrations with logarithmic progressions with weightlifting. I highly enjoy linear progressions – who doesn’t enjoy work that is easy? But I was wrong about one thing: I hadn’t hit the logarithmic progression part. In fact as at the time of writing of this blog post, I am still firmly in the linear progression phase.

So what went wrong? The answer is form. I was basically squatting with exceedingly poor form. I was using all kinds of stabilizer muscles in an unbalanced way that left me injured often. I took notes and noticed that it was at around 55 to 60kg that I kept getting injured about and hence the weights I squatted lingered around there. There is an old saying goes: “Practice Makes Perfect”. That is wrong. The phrase that should really be passed around is “Perfect Practice Makes Perfect”.

The breakthrough came when I got got my partner to record me squatting for the first time. I had religiously read /r/fitness and /r/formcheck, so I had a fairly good idea of what good form is. I thought I had good form – I didn’t. One of the first things I noticed was that I wasn’t squatting anywhere near deep enough, despite the fact that I had all along thought that I was doing an ass-to-grass squat.

After years spending seated in front of the computer, I had no spatial awareness of how deep I was squatting. I had to learn what a deep squat was (learning the flexibility to do that is a tale on its own). I taught her how to check for correct form: the hip crease must go lower than the top of the kneecap to be counted as a good squat. And so she began to spot me. But this wasn’t fair for her as it was eating into her training time. So after a couple of sessions, I went about developing an app that used computer vision to determine if I was squatting with good form.

The thing about computer vision is while it’s easy to start, accuracy is a Difficult goal with a capital D. One indeed can spend a lot of effort to boost the accuracy a very miniscule amount. I cut down a lot of that by using various hacks like coloured sticker dots on the hip crease, knee and barbell tip to increase the accuracy of the app. By and large, I got it working, for me. But it wasn’t working for my partner, or a colleague who had begun to be interested about the app (he had separately approached me about the feasibility of an idea similar to SmartSpot, whose idea I love). The killing blow, I think was that I had irritated some fellow gym-goers by my wrapping of a gorillapod around their racks or bars in order to set up a static filming point.

And so it transpired I would need a new app. The app would have to do these things in order to teach me to have a better squat form:

• Monitor my form as I squat
• Inform me when I have hit a good form
• Only one person involved – no interfering with anyone else in the gym

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I run in multiple circles of acquaintances. Amongst my circles of acquaintances, one is a heavily transhumanist/futurist/post-human circle. I would often engage in discussion – over drinks usually – about the Singularity and what’s to come, our minds would meander amongst the hopeful and not so hopeful futures. There were many ideas floated. Most were interesting, but few were realistic. Being around transhumanist acquaintances gives me a feeling of hanging out amongst science fiction authors of the 1950s. [Read More]

A very simple way of looking at the world is to consider a binary option. One can put out statements like “there are only two kinds of people in the world…” and make a gross oversimplification of the nuances that is life. With that preface, I’m going to state that there are two kinds of people in the world: hackers and engineers.

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Last week, in the Pressyo chatroom, we were discussing the idea of resonance. Resonance happens when a driving force is applied to a system with a frequency that is the same and in phase with the system’s natural frequency. The result is that the system oscillates at a much higher amplitude than normal. A typical example used in high school physics classes is that of a swing. Imagine a child on a swing and is being pushed by her parent. [Read More]

This morning this video caught my attention:

It is a heart wrenching tale of a man so passionate about his ideas and gave up so much. Yet despite all his convictions and effort, he pretty much failed.

I posted this video not to point and laugh at Marc, nor do I intend to elicit pity for him. Rather, I’m sharing this video because it serves as a cautionary tale for the intrepid entrepreneur.

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There are many changes afoot Pressyo, my startup. This afternoon we were discussing business models, in particular, a deep discussion of the ad-supported business model. It is by coincidence that I work in online advertising as well, so here I will share some insights to the ad-supported business models. I will discuss other business models in future posts* If you’re a long time reader of this blog (one of the two who are not my parents), you may note a change in writing styles. I am writing this on my own free will. I swear Larry Page is not standing behind me with a gun pointed at my head.

Say you want to start a startup. Your investor asks you: what’s your business model? And you answer: oh it’s simple – advertising. You see your investor’s face go from 🙂 to :(. You wonder what’s up.

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I read this from Dan Crow, about how Apple has hit its peak this morning:

Steve was famous for his “reality distortion field”. I saw it up close and personal, and it was amazing. But Steve knew that when he turned on the hype, he needed an outstanding product to back it up. The reason he could seemingly bend reality to his will was that products like the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad really were exceptional, breakthrough products. Steve’s showmanship was justified

I followed with a discussion with Simon about this issue. He agrees with that statement whereas I mentioned that all Apple has to be is be outstanding enough, where as other companies won’t do well with just being outstanding enough as they lack Apple’s reality distortion field. He then brings up the fact that ‘outstanding’ means a different thing to different people. Which was what I disagreed on.

Coincidentally I was reading Dustin Curtis’ blog post about seeking the best. In the HN discussions, he too brought up that ‘the best’ means a different thing to different people. Again, on this, I disagree.

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Sometimes I wonder, what it is like standing in the precipice of changing the world. Do those people know they’re changing the world? Did the Dutch parliament in 1602 know the significance upon the world when they decided to charter the Dutch East India Company (hereupon I shall use VOC – Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie – in its stead)? Was it merely driven by pure capitalism and a drive to compete against the English East India Company? [Read More]

This post is a rant. I need to get it off my chest – it may disappear in the future if I deem this post’s tone too negative. Increasingly and lately, I have come to realize that not everyone shares your passion or commitment towards something.

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As many of my readers know (that is, 5 out of 5 who read this blog), I’m actively involved in the startup space – our startup is Pressyo, and we have a couple of projects sitting on the launchpad, some with ignition already. My startup team is a very good team. We’ve went through multiple projects, failing most of the time (and the occasional success we’ve had rapidly degenerated into failures), and undoubtedly, we will fail many times to come in the future. For every failure we make, we dissect the failure, and find pain points, and fix them with tools. We argue a lot over why we failed, but the important thing is that we learn. This article is >2300 words long. If you want, you may jump to the TL;DR of Polish, Passivity, Privacy, Pressyo instead.

Polish, or the Cool Cam

One of the things we recently argued about is with regards to polish – as in, a product must look polished in terms of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). One of the things we agreed upon early in the inception of the company is the unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. And it was my argument that polish was not part of the philosophy. I argued vis-à-vis project success, that polish was not necessary. Google was just a simple HTML text box with a button* Google will of course later be hyper obsessive-compulsive about everything ; Reddit still looks terrible, but accounts for a majority of web traffic users; Facebook looked terrible when it first began… and so on and so forth. The counter argument was Apple. iPhones were terrible. They did not have all the features of contemporary phones (and still don’t, really, if you really want to compare). But they did one thing really well: user experience. If they did another thing really well, it was marketing.

My father, ever the gadget lover, used a smartphone before the phrase “smartphone” existed. Remember the O2 XDA? He had one of those. He went on from smartphone to smartphone, from O2 XDA to a HTC Touch to a HTC  Diamond 2, which was last stolen in Dubai. Then he switched to an iPhone. Despite the lack of features, he had still found it a better phone, simply because the iPhone does what it is supposed to do very well. The user experience for the iPhone  surpasses anything my dad had ever used.

I too, had been using smartphones from the time they were called PDA phones. My first was a HP h2210 hacked together with a CF-based GSM receiver. I then moved on to other phones, and finally settling on a HTC Desire. If I ever upgrade any time soon (damn you Telstra and your restrictive contracts), I would probably upgrade to a similar Android device. Because to me, Android phones do one thing really well: flexibility. Heck, I once pulled data off a csv off my work email and wrote a regression analysis while en route on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane on my phone.

The difference between the iPhone 3Gs and my HTC Desire? They cater to different people.  The chrome of the polish shows differently to different people. I like to tinker * and while doing that I sacrifice artifacts with stuff. I am tolerant of terrible user experiences – the worst of my smartphone experiences comes from dropped calls and terrible hacking of my HP h2210 (I literally took a program* PocketPC and Windows mobile programs were called “programs” not “apps” apart, figured out what was wrong with it and tried to recompile it to no success) – even my Symbian experiences with Nokia, whilst traumatic, wasn’t as bad. My HTC Desire has been a far cry from all that. Were I to present the modern day Android phone to someone of my father’s caliber, he would, I guess instantly like it, but probably not as much as the iPhone. Likewise, while I like the iPhone, I find it frustrating at times given that I can’t hack around to make it do things the way I want it to.

So you see, polish is not a single facet (as my prose may have led you to think). Androids are polished on their flexibility end. iPhones on the other hand, are polished on the UX end. If I were mean, I’d say the UX of the iPhone is the sizzle that sells the slightly-overcooked steak; while the Android is a perfectly cooked steak but because it was cooked _sous-vide_* which for the record, in my opinion is the best way to cook steak , has no sizzle.

Despite this, I agreed thoroughly with the counter-argument. The crux of the argument is that polish is necessary, and whilst I don’t agree that the polish on the UX is as necessary as the polish and chrome on the actual features, I have come to learn that UX can more often than not, act as the cool cam.  I don’t think I will ever place as much of an importance of the external polish factor as Steve Jobs put, but I’ve thought through this myself long and hard, and concluded that UX (and other external polish like cool interface etc) are required, even at bare minimum. I think of it exactly like the situation as described in the Daily WTF, except, instead of board members, executives or investors that you’re thowing the product at, the people who judge you are your users of your product. Give them a cool cam, and they will shut up for a bit while they learn the ropes of your system.

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