Greek Complexity

Sogou uses Chinese input method to expand its search footprint

Sogou is a company that is best known for its software that helps people use a standard QWERTY keyboard to type Chinese characters. They recently integrated search results into their typing software interface and a Tech in Asia blogger writes that, "I think this move has the potential to change the way Chinese users search, and maybe even the way they interact with their computers on a more fundamental level."

He says further that:

"Sogou’s current implementation of input method search is limited to specific kinds of searches, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. In fact, it doesn’t have to stay search-oriented at all. Imagine simply typing the name of a brand’s product and then purchase that product directly from the desktop in the input method GUI. Or typing the name of a friend from inside any program to bring up a video chat with them, or even share your screen with them. The possibilities are virtually endless, and in moving into input method search, Sogou may have taken us one step closer to a world where users interact much more quickly with the web by not using a browser at all."

Removing the need for a browser is one of the things apps do. Still, he is right that Sogou's method makes the process of interacting with one's device even easier. For one thing, you don't need to search for, download and use a dedicated app -- that just replaces the browser with an app.

I'd like to see whether some Western company picks up this idea and runs with it. Imagine seeing search results while you were writing an email in Outlook or composing a blog post. Yes, it sounds messy and reminiscent of Microsoft's "Smart Tags", but done right, I think it could be quite a useful addition to all computers. All you'd need to interact with your computer or phone would be one simple empty text box into which you typed in commands, friends' names, things to shop for, places to search for, whatever, and it would pull up the appropriate application, search result, map, video-calling service... No more folders, icons or browser tabs to open.

I certainly wouldn't have appreciated why this Sogou development was important if not for taking Chinese language lessons myself.

More: Why Sogou’s Input Method Search Could Change the Chinese Internet (and More)

The CEO’s Weekly Checklist

What should CEOs of young businesses do every week? Here's a great list. Not only for tech companies.

Excerpt: "As a first time CEO, there were times when I would sit at my desk and think, “What should I be doing today?” This feeling was especially strong after every financing round closed. After our seed round, we had defined the product and the engineers were coding it. I didn’t code."

More here: http://scott.a16z.com/2012/05/14/the-ceos-weekly-checklist/

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

Excerpt: The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette. The most “intuitive” thing we know how to do–move our own bodies–reduced to an awkward, device-mediated pantomime: this is “getting technology out of the way”?

More here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514136/your-body-does-not-want-to-be-an-interface/

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Here is how Zopnow delivers orders in 3 hours in Bangalore

Excerpt: "As logistics continues to be a challenge to major ecommerce players, a tiny startup in Bangalore is promising intra city delivery in 3 hours. Zopnow, the grocery retailer has managed the feat. The online store, facilitates delivery of almost 95% orders within three hours!"

More here: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/zonow-express-delivery-297/

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Y U No Lean Your Bike Properly

"There are always at least two ways to accomplish any task: properly and improperly. Drinking beer from a glass, not the bottle; carrying a full umbrella instead of a miniature fold-up; stirring your gin martinis, not shaking them; wearing french cuffs with a suit, not button cuffs."

More: http://www.velominati.com/etiquette/la-vie-velominatus-lean-properly/

How emoji conquered the world

Excerpt: "In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji."

More here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/3966140/how-emoji-conquered-the-world

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Schlep Blindness

Excerpt: "There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task."

More here: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

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Why the Largest Social Network in 2015 Won’t be Facebook, and Will Be From Asia

Excerpt: "We’re all familiar with the major social networks in the U.S. (FB, Twitter, etc.) as well as which ones are up and coming (Vine, Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp). But what are not talked about a lot, are the social networks out in Asia that are growing insanely fast — like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE."

More here: http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/04/why-the-largest-social-network-in-2015-wont-be-facebook-and-will-be-from-asia-2/

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India, Long the Home of Outsourcing, Now Wants to Make Its Own Chips

Excerpt: "The government of India, home to many of the world's leading software outsourcing companies, wants to replicate that success by creating a homegrown industry for computer hardware. But unlike software, which requires little infrastructure, building electronics is a far more demanding business."

More here: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/business/global/india-known-for-outsourcing-now-wants-to-make-its-own-chips.xml

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Peter Thiel's 3 Rules for Starting a Business

Third rule: make sure ownership, possession and control are aligned. "Bonuses and cash salaries produce opportunities for misalignment. Salary caps are very important. A categorical rule of thumb that Founders Fund has developed is that no CEO should be paid more than $150,000 per year."

More: http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/peter-thiel-3-rules-for-starting-a-business.html

Moore's Law and the Origin of Life

Excerpt: "As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself."

More here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/

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Governments should clear the decks and let entrepreneurs drive their own destinies

Excerpt: "Over the last ten years I have worked with something like 35 different government agencies in the UK, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. All are trying to support early stage business through economic intervention of some kind. I am struck by the fact that arguably the most successful country at entrepreneurship in the world — the United States — offers very little public support to entrepreneurs. It just clears the way for them to get on and do the job themselves."

More here: http://sgentrepreneurs.com/2013/04/16/why-governments-should-clear-the-air-with-less-entrepreneurial-initiatives/

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Why I Sold Zappos

Excerpt: "Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it? The first time Amazon.com tried to buy Zappos, we said no without even thinking."

More here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html

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Facebook Shatters the Computer Server Into Tiny Pieces

Excerpt:

When you sit down with the burly Texan, inside Facebook’s Northern California headquarters, he takes the Open Compute philosophy to new extremes, revealing the blueprint for a computer server that doesn’t even look like a computer server. This design lets you add or remove a server’s primary part — the processor — whenever you like. Nowadays, if you want a new processor, you need, well, a new server. But Frankovksy and the Open Compute Project aim to change that, sharing the new design with anyone who wants it.

“By modularizing the design, you can rip and place the bits that need to be upgraded, but you can leave the stuff that’s still good,” Frankovsky says, pointing to memory and flash storage as hardware that you don’t have to replace as often as the processor. “Plus, you can better match your hardware to the software that it’s going to run.”

More here: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/facebook-server-pieces/

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HP’s Project Moonshot and its competition

HP has announced "a new server designed for high-volume internet data centres, the result of something it immodestly termed Project Moonshot."

However, "some potential customers for the HPs and Dells of the world now prefer to buy the components and build their own machines" and software-defined datacentres are coming soon.

All interesting stuff. More here.