Archive for November 2013

The rise of VC

Via: Inside the mind of Marc Andreessen – Fortune Management: “I never heard the term ‘venture capital’ until I got to California. I got a job and landed in Silicon Valley, and I found out about this venture capital thing. And I was dumbstruck. ‘You mean there are people who will give you money to invent new things and start a company? Really? Seriously? It’s like wow! That’s really cool!’  And of course we got lucky.”

Caught in the middleThat was 20 years ago. There was a lot less media coverage of VC, deals, angels, etc.

What would be an interesting exercise is to see when VC firms in Asia started? Is it all pushed by the democratization of media?

The fact that today, media is cheaper – everyone and his uncle has started a publication of some sort. In tech, it seems that most of the media will only cover VC-related stories (i.e. money driven). They’ve forgotten real tech.

MAVCAP, the largest VC fund in Malaysia, only started in 2001. A mere 12 years ago! Singapore’s first firm started in 1984 – Seavi Advent Private Equity (29 years ago) – though I’m not sure if they deal with tech much.

So is this the rise of VC/angels/incubators/etc. or the rise of media?

groonga – fulltext search library for cloud & web

This is an incomplete fragment from 2011. Figure its worth publishing this now, considering MariaDB is likely to get groonga in the near future. The groonga team have released MariaDB 10.0.6 binaries as well. This is all part of the mroonga project.

These were my quick notes from the groonga talk at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011. I haven’t tried it yet (and don’t know if it really is faster than Sphinx), but its something I definitely want to play with. Maybe even get a MariaDB tree going.

groonga is a fulltext search library for cloud & web.

groonga is easy to embed & is scalable. It is written in C.

Highly precise search for any language. Fast searching and indexing in realtime.

PostgreSQL bindings are also available. Can be used with Spider storage engine. CPU scalable. There is also a Ruby binding.

“100x faster than Sphinx in practical use cases”

groonga components:

  • groonga core – embedded search engine
  • groonga column store – data store, strings, numeric values, geographic values. None of the existing engines were good enough for typical search engine queries. Typical queries hits large number of records, filtered by multiple conditions (liker range queries) and then you group by sepcific conditions, order by a dynamic condition, and sometimes output limited number of records.
  • groonga storage engine – pluggable storage engine to mysql

Spider can be used for data sharding on top of it. It is not a component of the groonga product, but works well with it to make it a distributed search engine.

Works for unsegmented languages (like CJK). No whitespaces in CJK.

groonga supports full inverted index (for unsegmented languages). Highly compressed index (no stop words are needed). They use Patricia TRIE lexicon (partial string match on lexicon). Inverted index is designed to reduce disk I/O.

Web is growing and searching & indexing must be performed simultaneously.

Tritonn – patched mysql, myisam and groonga

http://www.twistimage.com/

Problems with it?

  1. MyISAM based – table lock (when updating table, read accesses are blocked)
  2. Patch based – patch maintenance and building patched MySQL is messy

New solution? Groonga storage engine. Uses the new column store instead of MyISM. And it’s no patch any longer — it’s a pluggable storage engine

https://github.com/mroonga/mroonga

Advantages?

  • table lock free – column store is lock free
  • only accesses columns required – not row-based
  • easy to build now

Includes some optimisations:

  • count(*) optimzation for queries like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table where MATCH(col) against (‘query’);
  • Works also with ORDER BY score and LIMIT optimisation

The groonga storage engine has fast phrase search, fast index update (realtime), inserting records doesn’t block reading records

Spider is a storage engine for database sharding transparently.

Benefits of Spider + Groonga:

  • optimisation of fts with sorting by score
  • optimisation for the sorting by range partition key column
  • optimisation fts with filtering by partition key column

groonga.org – they are all based on mysql 5.5 (packages available)

Contact Team Groonga: bit.ly/fSs5vx

 

Online business models around content

We’ve taken a scare resource and made it infinite, an idea by Adam Curry. In the print world, you had n-number of ads. In the online world, you can place any amount of banners on your site, or there are a multitude of sites serving such banners. This is why its hard to generate revenue.

Robert Scoble brings up a great point on TWiT#423 – tech journalism is everywhere. Its hard to make good quality tech content because it costs money. A good article on how an iPhone is made involves you to head to China to visit the factory floor, and can easily cost $10,000. However when you write a (blog) post, what can you make on viewership in terms of CPM? $5? $15? It is a tiny amount which is why many tech journalists/bloggers end up repackaging press releases.

Worlds that haven’t been touched negatively seem to be fashion & cars. But tech is clearly affected.

Evan Williams gives us tools to express ourselves – Blogger, Twitter, Medium. He’s made tonnes of money as people have been willing to create content for free. How do journalists make a living? Leo Laporte suggests that the Internet has arrived – you figure out to make a living.

The problem is people doing it for free. It devalues the work of people doing it for bucks.

What about the CPM for location based ads? Today you get so many apps that give away the location, with users opting in. 

Attitude matters

I recently read a plea by a fledgling entrepreneur trying to build a global company, who’s been through a bunch of startup competitions, “But struggling on getting grants or investments from local VCs/Angel.”

I recently saw a customer get annoyed with a service provider she had been using at length, only to rally a “hate page”. However it never garnered too much as there was an odd flair to the way she wrote.

In business or in any inter-personal relationship, attitude matters.

You may have the best private security system out there, but if you have a shoddy attitude, you will get no users. You may have the best cause out there, but if you have a shoddy attitude, you will not get followers. You may have the best piece of software out there since sliced bread, but if you take on an aggressive attitude, you may not get as many users as you had hoped for.

Think about how you portray yourself to others, and if need be, improve your attitude. People are a forgiving and forgetful lot.

Malaysian cyberspace & unsavoury content

This week has been nothing but disturbing following the happenings in Malaysian cyberspace. So much has happened and there will be much to learn from it, lest we forget what to do the next time around. This is broken up into pieces: Timeline, A Warning, What’s wrong with sweetyoungmalaysiangirls?, What about obscene images, What can you do as a victim/concerned Netizen?, What else to note?.

Timeline

Sunday – Netizens notice a blog, sweetyoungmalaysiangirls.blogspot.com and an Instagram account gadismukabukumy. They’re not too happy. Enough noise is made, The Star covers it: Blog with picture of young Malaysian girls, many of them minors, riling netizens.

Monday-Tuesday – (due to updates on initial posts) – The site goes down as many over-zealous Netizens click the ‘report to blogger’ button. Blogger ToS does not permit making money this way. The Star writes: Website hosting pictures of Malaysian girls taken down. But the best read from this is actually Harinder Singh’s account, Who’s behind these blogs. This is a must read – it’s a detective takedown story with a great amount of sleuthing and even entrapment (the video is golden – since been removed but surely archived somewhere). There is some back & forth here in the official statement about how he got hacked.

Wednesday – By then, the Netizens are all riling against this chap, Dustyhawk/Serge, pasting his WHOIS information in public, etc. His comeback is a little quirky: How to lose friends and make enemies – A social experiment. Harinder calls this Grasping for air. Wesley Chung writes an open letter which is also an interesting read. And a victim shares that her pictures were never public, they were just for Facebook friends, so by letting him into her circle, he transgressed her privacy.

Thursday – Dustyhawk/Serge posts An Apology and Asking for forgiveness while getting a few things off our chest. Before that, The Ant writes: Techie sheds ‘light’ on who’s behind offending blog site.

As I write this on Friday, it is worth noting that lawyer Foong Cheng Leong, who specialises in IT/cyber law writes about The law and the Sweet Young Malaysian girls blog. Another useful read!

A warning

Be very careful with what you share on social media or the Internet (this includes blogs, sites like Picasa or Flickr, etc.). Anything in the public eye can be saved (even if you disable saving there can be screenshots) and reused or aggregated later on. If you don’t want it to be public, do not share it. Be aware of those applications like Dropbox, Google Plus, etc. that auto-upload pictures – yes they put them in private by default, but if your accounts get broken into, these pictures can become public.

I am all for free speech on the Internet, but I draw a line at child pornography. Nudity, nude models, etc. may be obscene and against Malaysian law to some extent (which isn’t sensible), but child pornography is not tolerated in any jurisdiction. 

What’s wrong with sweetyoungmalaysiangirls?

Nothing. It is definitely in bad taste, but nothing is really wrong assuming these were curated images from the Internet. The images were re-blogged. Sure he slapped advertising on them. So that can be copyright infringement. 

There was once an estimate that about 5% of Tumblr blogs were nude/adult related. Recently Yahoo! removed them from public search. They still exist, but you’ve got to find the links elsewhere.

If the images were stolen from private Facebook profiles or a private Twitter feed, they are definitely not good. This is morally reprehensible and I would encourage the victims to make a police report immediately.

What about obscene images?

Nudity apparently may not be tolerated in Malaysia. Section 292 of the Penal Code says its an offence to post obscene pictures. Famously, this charge was a thought for using against the couple Alvivi (it wasn’t, they’ve been slapped with other charges). We also have the all encompassing Section 233 of the CMA 1998.

What can you do as a victim/concerned Netizen?

  1. Victims, make a police report (if you’re over 18 now, you don’t have to inform your parents)
  2. Victims or concerned Netizens might want to make a complaint to MCMC/SKMM. They have a content code, and Section 3 focuses on Obscene content that includes explicit sex acts/pornography, child pornography or sexual degradation. However, is a blogger a content provider? Or will this form of reporting just mean ISPs block offending URLs like they do for many porn sites? More on complaints to here.
  3. MyCERT/Cyber999 is not a bad place to make a complaint (victim or concerned Netizen). Their definition of incidents are wide & varied, with cyber harassment to content related issues. Reports can be lodged here.
  4. Complain to the abuse@ alias of the web hosting provider that the blogger is hosting at. They can either be DMCA takedown notices or just abuse notes. 
There are things to do, before causing a major cyberstorm, thus getting Blogger, and the blogger in question to remove content that was suspect.
 
It is not determined what Malaysian law can do as the web hosts are overseas. That doesn’t mean you don’t report it.
It is not determined what can now happen considering offending content has been removed from the Internet. Maybe the digital evidence gathering could have been more fruitful had a complaint been made, first.

What else to note?

Freedom is a double-edged sword. One person’s morals cannot be imposed on another person. We want the Internet to be free, but within acceptability (so nudity, ala Alvivi is fine between consenting adults but not child pornography). The last thing we want is censorship of the Internet.

Don’t call people a pedophile. Or a sex offender. To be a sex offender, one has to be charged and convicted of the crime. Its easy to name & shame, but last I checked, that is defamation. Please re-read the opinion of lawyer Foong Cheng Leong.

Tell young kids and yourselves to be mindful of what you post on the Internet. Look at the selfie search on Twitter. Or the amount of detail you can get from an Instagram search.

Back then, it was camwhoring. In 2013, selfie is a dictionary word!

Be mindful of what you post online.

The Google Chromecast – use your TV more again

New 37" LCDI recently kitted all the TVs in our homes with a Google Chromecast. It streams content from YouTube very well, and if you want content from other services like Vimeo, etc. you use a web browser (Chrome) to do the task.

I see it as a great productivity gain. You make playlists or say you want to watch videos later on YouTube. You use your phone or tablet as a remote and just watch content on your terms. You can then go on and read on the tablet, or work on your laptop. If you use the Chrome browser plugin for desktops, you can’t work on the machine at the same time as Vimeo or another video source will take the full-screen (though this isn’t a huge use case for me).

Sara had a party recently and part of the attraction was that people picked their music videos and added them to the playlist. So there was not only music but music videos. Naturally, they were all adding to the queue using her iPad.

Suddenly I understand why Android has the option for Users. This is a missing feature on iOS. Tablets are personal devices with a lot of private information on them (think Evernote, 1Password, etc.). Sure you can setup individual passwords, but the option to have a “guest mode” makes a lot of sense. It is something Apple clearly needs to work on going forward.

That said, for $35, the Google Chromecast is a great little device. Well worth it, and provides hours more TV usage. I’m thinking of getting a TV in my office room again!


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