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. 

Summer time (some news updates and thoughts)

As more and more attention shift from traditional media to new media, it's no surprise to see some old media companies struggle  from recent earnings announcements.  There's no question that mobile ads will grow as more and more people adopts smart phones. some recent news that caught my eye
Is Apple's iAd dying a slow death? 7/8/2011
Steve Jobs Says 'Most Mobile Advertising Really Sucks' 4/8/2010
It doesn't seem like Jobs has figured out this one. But Apple's recent financial performance has sent the company on the trajectory to be the highest market cap company. The #1 right now is  Exxon Mobile ($419B). Apple right now is $364B. Google right now is $199B.

Here is Google's very own Vic Gundotra's Mercedes-Benz ad:

A few interesting articles

• if you only advertise on iAd, you're only reaching 27% of the market according to tech crunch.
• No body is buying your app now what? 
• For as little $50, you can test out names with AdMob
• What do Warren Buffett and Marisa Mayer have in common? They both invested in getaround according to WSJ

p.s. if you haven't read in the plex, Charlie Munger recommended it at Berkshire's annual meeting. 

bonus video Jawbone boombox. It's a really good portable speaker. I tested one out at San Jose airport.

Android gaining ground

I was surprised by Android's success a few times this week. One is from a youtube video visualizing activations over time.




Another one is after Gingerbread release hit my Nexus One Android phone, I posted a twitter message. Within a day, a few people replied my tweet. I've never got much response from my hundreds of past tweets. I was surprised to find out there're people out there who cared about Android OS releases on Nexus One.

I've also played around the Xoom tablet. It's pretty sleek. However, I'm still gonna buy an iPad2 when it comes out next week. Pretty similar reason why even though I have 2 Android phones (Nexus One and Nexus S), I still use iphone 4 on a daily basis.

bets on mobile

Entrepreneurs in technology industry like to make bets. They bet on technologies such as PHP, JSP, ASP/.Net; Oracle Database, MySql; iPhone, Android...They bet on the kind of business to go into.  Perhaps the most important decision an entrepreneur can make is what business to go into.

I recently read Tony Hsieh's book: Delivering Happiness. In The book, he mentioned that the most important decision a poker player can make is which table to sit down. I really agree with that.

In retrospect, I think Tony didn't pick the best table to play his cards. He mentioned that Zappos made $100 Million in enterprise value annually on average. It translates well in to its $1 Billion sale to Amazon 10 years after it was founded. $100 Million a year seems to be a really big number. But when I look at a few companies in the mobile space, I realize wealth was created much quicker there.

For example, Admob was acquired by Google for $750 Million less than 4 years after it was founded. On average, it created about $200 Million a year. Twice as much as Zappos.

After a few months working in the Internet industry, I'm convinced that there're still a lot of money to be made in this industry.