I'm not an economist by training, but I've spent a long time observing markets, and I've often wondered what the great economic thinkers of centuries past (Marx, Smith, Keynes, others) would say if they were alive today and could witness the transformations that have been caused by mass media (radio, TV, print) and the Internet. The Internet, in particular, has had a transformative effect that will doubtless be studied for hundreds of years to come.One of the things that can be said about pre-Internet markets is that most markets permit the emergence of two or three major winners (a primary wi...

Everyday when I surf the Internet, I find much news about new smartphones andAndroid, iOS apps. Also I can find many people use iPhones and othersmartphones with Android OS. Apparently we are now in Mobile era. People canfind tons of news that says how Mobile has changed our life, made our lifesimpler and how easy we can know the world with mobile technology. Yes, it'strue, now we only need to press a button, we can know what happens in USA whichis thousands kilometres away from us. We can easily get to know what new promotionsthere are from different retailers. All these are hard to believe d...

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity.Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it.Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live your life out of plain text files, use gmail to communicate, turn off tasks and chat, leave things in their de...

Back in mid-2006, I documented my fairly dramatic weight loss in a series of blog postings. I went from a high of 224 pounds to a low of 164, which made for a total loss of 60 pounds (I’m about 6 feet tall). It’s interesting to go back and re-read what I wrote back then:Diet Tips or How To Lose Weight with a Spreadsheet and a Web SiteThe Diet Plan and The Three HabitsThe Diet SpreadsheetDiet Tips: How To Eat LessFast forward to January of 2011, and I had gained back about half the weight. I was hovering just below 200 pounds and had needed to purchase larger jeans a few times d...

The tail of 2011 has gone through my heart silently, Year of 2012 is coming with mystery. Looking back to 2011 and looking forward to 2012, it's time to record something...In the past 2011, nothing specials happened in my life. At the beginning of 2011, I was a college student with full of passion, while at the end of 2011, I am an engineer with 5 month's working experience. At the beginning of 2011, I was struggling through my Final Year Project and job hunting, while at the end of 2011, I am preparing for all kinds of hands on and objective tests before working onsite. At the beginning of 20...

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine thing and may arrive in Go one day, or may not) but about imagination, or at least what passes for imagina...

Even though it recanted (somewhat unconvincingly) its support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), domain registrar GoDaddy continues to lose thousands of domains as an online campaign to punish GoDaddy is proving highly effective.The boycott campaign began on reddit on December 22. A day later GoDaddy announced its withdrawal of support for the House legislation it actually helped craft.And still GoDaddy has lost more than 70,000 domains in less than a week, with the prospect of more if the reddit-inspired day of boycott set for December 29 goes off as planned.GoDaddy goes from...

For the whole past night I lay awake without sleeping a minute, mostly because I am still fully jet-lagged from the move to Europe yesterday. For some reason, the one thought that entered my mind was one about what it means to be happy.Yes, of course, being on an exciting startup journey, there are other goals which are more in the foreground. There is creating a product users love, getting funding or earning enough money to sustain yourself.Whilst I greatly enjoy this product and user focus, it is fantastic to take a step back during these more quiet days and reflect on life more widely.Perso...