Colin Wong - Latest Comments

Re: How To Evaluate Early-Stage Web 2.0 Companies

facebook-664103792 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:24:25 -0000

So what are you looking for? People?

In a great HBR article, William Sahlman wrote: "When I receive a business plan, I always read the résumé section first. Not because the people part of the new venture is the most important, but because without the right team, none of the other parts really matters."

Re: How To Evaluate Early-Stage Web 2.0 Companies

Jay Liew — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:27:15 -0000

Reminds me of another post I read by Steve Blank about market risk vs invention risk:

http://steveblank.com/2009/05/...

Cheers!

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

colinwong — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:50:09 -0000

Ah. Drink the teh tarik! ;) Sounds like a blog post for another day.

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

Hanson — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:49:36 -0000

Great post Colin. You have some great nuggets of thought and perception that I have not seen as-well-articulated in any other articles. I'm going to bookmark this so that I can come back and visit it when I need to check my "level of Kool-Aid"....

You might want to consider having a Malaysian version - "drink the teh tarik, maybe...." ;-)

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

colinwong — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:26:01 -0000

Thanks Robert!

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

robert beeson — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:20:44 -0000

Loved this Colin. Great observations and simple suggestions. I believe!

Re: Delighting In The Lord

Colin Wong — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:19:14 -0000

LOL! My mistake :) Re-tagging it now to 37.

Re: Delighting In The Lord

Ben Ting — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:57:09 -0000

Just curious. Why is the article tagged under Ps 23 when ur main Scriptural reference is Ps 37?

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

BenTing — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:32:58 -0000

...so there will be a Kool-Aid session at 0800 - 1200 daily from ur time of stay at TW... be prepared....

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

colinwong — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:32:13 -0000

All thanks to you ;)

Re: What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

Facebook User — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:04:07 -0000

Awesome post Colin, You make some really good points here. It's very important to have people who are honest with you to give you direct feedback on the business

Re: Running on God Time

Ben Ting — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:01:54 -0000

What if human can live "as long as" God? Can we attain the same level of "enlightenment"? I doubt it. For the simple reason that we are not designed as such. Our 8oz brain is just...so....so...8oz...

Re: Running on God Time

Colin Wong — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:17:56 -0000

Agree on both points - that more is revealed when more is learned, and we will also inevitably relearn lessons of the past.

Re: Running on God Time

Colin Wong — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:15:48 -0000

Agree with you that the pursuit of God should be our primary aim for all the obvious reasons.

The point I was making is the multi-generational issue. Despite everything you learn and gain in wisdom, you will still be unable to effectively "transfer" it to your descendants to have them "pick up from where you left off". They are destined to have to re-learn in on their own. Now obviously as a father, you can guide your children. But in all history, from Israel, Moses, David, Solomon etc. all great men of God, still had children who did evil in the sight of God. Is it for lack of parenting ability? Or is it simply that wisdom is a path every person must walk through with their own feet.

If we unable to pass wisdom to the next generation, then we cannot possibly achieve the same level of enlightenment as God because even assuming He is not infinite (70 trillion trillion years old) we will still never be able to reach where He is because compared to Him, our greatest and most enlightened person in all history is still nothing but a "fly".

Re: Running on God Time

BenTing — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:33:45 -0000

My random thoughts:

Time is definitely A factor but not THE factor. Pursuit of wisdom & knowledge for most of mankind is for the primary purpose of survival, or the "advancement" of survival. And even that, most giants of wisdom & knowledge lived either a short life or the "spark of inspiration" happened in a relatively short time span. Time IS a factor, but NOT the factor in achieving our "potential".

On the contrary, I would suggest most flies lived their "full" potential. Reason being, they live "fullest" to their Maker's design & purpose. Same goes for the mice & dogs. But what about HUMAN?

Rather than living "fullest" to our Maker's design & purpose, most of us are pursuing the "animal life" - eat, sleep, procreate, die. But since we ARE designed differently than the animals, our other attributes kicked in to find this - purpose of life. And cuz of our fallen nature, we used these abilities to pursue a vain life under the influence of Satan.

So how shld mankind live to the fullest within the time span alloted? Pursue God. That shld be our primary aim. That's wisdom.

Just my random thoughts...

Re: Running on God Time

Mike — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:05:21 -0000

Interesting point. There is also the how we deal with the revealed things (in this case the knowledge and wisdom) - whether we learn it quickly, so that God can reveal more to us. Or we keep on learning/relearning the same thing over and over again like the Israelite. Though sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as learn it quickly. Hm.

Re: Q Conference Takeaways

BenTing — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:47:17 -0000

I am interested to know more about this "Evolution of the Gospel." What exactly is "current interpretation".

Re: How Twitter Reply Works

Colin Wong — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:53:37 -0000

Nice. That makes a lot of sense, especially for the less tech savvy post-Kutcher post-Oprah crowd.

Re: How Twitter Reply Works

Kamal Fariz Mahyuddin — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:50:32 -0000

Twitter removed that confusing option today http://blog.twitter.com/2009/0...

Re: The Medium Is The Message Part 1

John — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:14:38 -0000

Looking forward to part 2

Re: How Twitter Reply Works

Colin Wong — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:49:29 -0000

That too ;)

Re: How Twitter Reply Works

djchuang — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:31:05 -0000

Plus one small exception: someone may randomly catch this tweet on the everyone page at http://twitter.com/public_time...

;)

Re: Charging Money For Your Website

Jay Liew — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:19:19 -0000

Degradation of the quality for the freeloaders. This reminds me of how you can read books for free, via Amazon's book preview and Google Book Search - but the user experience is not great, e.g. you can't highlight a body of text, copy/paste, .. it's just cumbersome to navigate. After I scope out a book and decide I like it, I just go ahead and buy it - because of the annoyance in the user experience to read the book in those "preview" modes, even if I could read the whole book for free that way.

I guess what I was saying before is, if there's 1 active contributor, 1 passive contributor, and 98 passive blackholes, if the 98 blackholes went away, as either the remaining 1 active or passive contributor, I know that if I contribute into the system, only 1 other person will be able to enjoy my contribution, where previously there was 99. Thus, since not many people would see what I post anyway, I might stop posting :/

I'm thinking of my Flickr experience. For the longest time I just posted my photos on Flickr, free-loading. Then came the period where I just started taking more photos of more events, I wanted to share more of my daily life (e.g. to the folks back in .my), and suddenly the free account's 100MB xfer quota was in my way. After hitting it a few times, I paid up - and I've been a Flickr paid user for a few years.

I feel like this is a more positive way to convert users, since they understand that in order to get the positive incentive, they have to pay up. Just to contrast that with bombarding them with so much ads, that they have to pay up, just to make the negative deterrent go away.

I guess it's just a preference; I know there are plenty of business online that do the "pay us to make the annoyance go away" thing, and it appears to be working for them.

Using Flickr's positive-incentive idea, I wonder if Digg has thought of coming with a system like for instance, if you are a blackhole consumer, you can view the top most popular post, but only from the 2 page and later - so, if you want to see the first page there the juiciest content are, you either have to pay, or start to contribute passively. Even for the extremely broke and can't afford paying, this would mean that you'd have to start passively contributing, .. and this would be good for everybody on the whole platform.

I'd imagine that Digg's 1st page of top most popular posts probably follow a 80/20 "interestingness" rule, so being able to access 80% of the total best content on the web on the first page is a real incentive, even for the freeloaders to stop being lazy :)

Cheers!

Re: Charging Money For Your Website

colinwong — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:50:47 -0000

Jay,

Good question. Let me put more clarity of the difference between "Passive Contributing" vs. "Passive Blackhole".

I define "Passive Contributing" as folks who mostly consume content on your website but they do provide some value in the form of comments, re-share, voting etc. Hence their presence has value to other users on the website.

"Passive Blackhole" users are folks who do *not* provide any value to you or to other users. These folks do not contribute comments, or re-share your content to other people, or rate the content to help others etc. In other words, if you were a user on my website, you would not even notice these "Blackhole" users at all. While they consume, they have no presence.

For these folks, especially if they do not click on any ads, all you're doing is serving content to them but you're not getting anything back in return. I propose that you might as well charge a fee to these folks because if they leave, your serving cost goes down and it improves your bottom line and also provide a better performance experience for the others.

The way I look at a content-oriented site like Digg is this.

The guys who do all the discovery and sharing of content into Digg, you do everything you can to make them happy. Don't charge them for anything.

The guys who don't really share but come to Digg to consume the content only, you show them ads to monetize on them. And you *only* charge for specific "premium" services if the consumption or non-consumption of these services do not detract from the user enjoying the free services. In other words, the free services must have enough merit and value that even if I don't pay for premium, I will still come back just as often.

Next I would split this group further into two.

For the folks who actually increase the "value" of the site, by contributing comments, or re-share or voting, they're good. Show them just enough ads that it does not detract from the overall user experience.

But for the folks who consume and do nothing but consume only, show them way more ads than normal. It will affect their user experience somewhat but hey, you need to recoup your operating cost. If they leave, you don't loose. If they stay, the increase ad exposure *may* improve your revenue. I'm saying *may* because there is ad fatigue after a certain point.

Hope this helps.

Colin

Re: Charging Money For Your Website

Jay Liew — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:21:54 -0000

Hey Colin,

Just a thought - but another question I would ask is, "in absence of the passive blackhole users, would my active users and passive contributing users go away?"

I myself am somewhere between a passive contributing and passive blackhole; occasionally posting/sharing new content, but if I knew that passive blackhole users were completely decimated (e.g. by a subscription fee?) - that's a real bummer and that's less of an incentive for me to contribute or interact.

I guess what I'm saying is, maybe the active and passive-contributing are there only because the 99% passive blackholes are there - so the blackholes might be a necessary cost, even if one is not able to monetize them at all.

Cheers!