economy is pretty unstable

Nothing much to update lately. Economy seems to be very unstable lately. Wall Street had a couple days loss then up and downs. Over all pretty bad performance on stock market.

London has suffered from riots all over the city. My colleague who moved to California last year told me he and his wife used to go to some of the places where riots happened.

Summer is almost over. A couple of interns last year returned as full-time employees. Current interns will be going back to school soon. We'll have enough snacks and food in the cafeteria soon :).

I've hit my one year mark at Google in July. So far so good. Interesting projects, smart people. I've learned a lot, especially in internet and mobile advertising space. I like this space because a lot of innovation can happen. The barriers to entry is still not very high. I often tell people that :" you & I can sit down for a few hours and start an internet advertising business.". It's not rocket science, publisher sends a request for an ad and ad server respond with a creative. Real ad serving is not that simple ( you have to deal with tracking, reporting, frequency capping, targeting etc). But you get my point.

Rumor says iPhone 5 or 4GS will launch next month. My AT&T iphone4 still has 1 year contract. So I'll skip a generation as planned.

Things move relatively fast. So we'll see what happens in a year.

HBO channel showed Katherine Heigl's movie "life as we know it" on Sunday afternoon. I watched a little but didn't finish it. Her last movie I saw was "the ugly truth". She seems to be good at playing sweet yet kinda tough girls. 

jobs at Google and DTS

A Google mobile ads product manager I work with is trying to hire a few product manager in mobile ads. If you think you're qualified, please drop me a line.

My friend's company DTS (Dolby Lab's competitor) is hiring a couple of PM, Biz, tech positions in LA http://www.resumeware.net/dts_rw/dts_web/job_list.cfm. Let me know if you are interested.

Some updates

There has been a lot of changes in my life. I don't really know where to start. So basically I studied 3 years Engineering in lovely Belgium. After getting my Bachelor and Master's degree I returned to Shanghai as a software engineer. After 3 years in Shanghai, I decided to get a MBA in the U.S. After 2 years MBA school, I finally got my MBA degree last Sunday.

When I look back, it all start to make a little bit more sense now. Just like Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford Commencement speech: "you can only connect the dots when you look backwards".

So much for my student life. On the technology front, I recently started using a macbook pro. After many years struggling with the PC, I have decided to make the switch. It surprises me that Mac has became a very versatile platform both for daily internet use and development. I've been using the macbook pro for over a week now. Didn't miss my Dell laptops a bit.

I don't have my windows 7 setup on the Parallels Desktop yet. So occasionally I would go back to my old laptop for school email, play music at the background stuff. Now it's summer, my dell xps laptop gets very hot. In case you didn't know, I had the hard drive, mother board, lcd screen and heat sink replaced in the less than 2 years time I owned the xps m1330 laptop. Dell's 3 year extended warranty is good. But it's a poorly engineered laptop. Latitude line seems much better. But it wasn't available at the time through my business school's purchasing program.

Another surprisingly pleasant benefit on mac is that it's super simple to setup Android, iPhone and PHP development environment. I used Ubuntu on my dell Inspiron 510m before and had a lot of problem with the upgrades since I don't upgrade regularly. So I had to revert to Debian on the Inspiron. However, Debian requires a lot of time to take care of the hardware drivers and setting up the system. So long story short, I've setup an Android, iPhone and PHP development environment on my MacBook Pro in less than 2 days. I can also do my day to day internet stuff. MacBook Pro has acted as a versatile platform. The best computer experience I ever had so far. Don't see myself going back to PC anytime soon.

Since I have the Nexus One, I am trying to see if I can develop some simple app for fun. Let me know if you're an android developer as well. We can share some learning experience and bounce ideas off.

Talk with general manager and Harvard Business School Reception

Today I got my Nikon P3 digital camera. I won't buy any accessories from them, cause since they sell the camera at this price and they charge a lot for the accessories, I will buy a 1 GB sd card and get me off ground.

Then in the afternoon I got a chance talking to the general manager of the innovation center I am currently working at. Basically we exchanged ideas on what I will do in 2007. At last he casually asked how I was doing, and I said I got my self some new nice gadget and did some serious thinking what I want to do in the near and far future. Then he said, care to share some thoughts ?and I said I was thinking about going back to school to do a Ph.d. Then he really gave me some good hints, he said I should picture what I might be doing in 5 years, and then try to put that image on myself see how happy I would be in that position and how much satisfaction I could bring to my self, and he said if I want to start a company of my own or bring more money probably a MBA is better(like my ex-boss is doing).

I registered a HBS (Harvard Business School) MBA reception in Shanghai few weeks ago, and it's tonight, I went there, it was MUCH more formal than the MBA reception of University of Chicago. I asked 2 questions
1. How many China Mainlanders they admitted last year
the guy is from career service department and the alumni are not current students so they guess the number was about 8-16.
2.Give 2 or 3 points what they like the most and hate the most about HBS
of course the answers vary.
I got the feeling that the competition's gonna be really tough there, there is a detail I noticed during the Q&A session, each of the 5 alumni has a mic and one of the alumni's mic wasn't working, 4 others sit there and did not offer to help, then the career service guy just couldn't watch it anymore and came up to offer a help.

Since I got the camera, I will try to take pictures from now on if I go to events like this. Excuse me for this time, I didn't charge the new battery ;).