Greek Complexity

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

This is an auto-generated post from my reading list courtesy IFTTT. See http://ifttt.com

How One Man Turned Himself Into a Publicly Owned Company

Excerpt: "Mike Merrill was thinking of pumping up his workout regimen with mixed-martial-arts classes and boxing lessons. The scheme would involve seven and a half hours a week at various gyms—a big commitment. So he put the matter before his 160 shareholders."

More here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/putting-the-i-in-ipo/309255/

This is an auto-generated post from my reading list courtesy IFTTT. See http://ifttt.com

The Green Pod - ideal bike parking?

http://www.gizmag.com/green-pod-bicycle-parking/14790/

Could do with this in Singapore. Also has self-cleaning showers and storage for your cycling clothes. Solar-powered and appears to be unmanned.

Electricity from thin air

An elegant innovation:

A student at the University of the Arts in Bremen has built what he calls an electromagnetic harvester—it converts electromagnetic fields in the immediate environment into electricity to recharge a common AA battery.

More here.

Now let's see it scaled up.

Disrupting the business school

Two days ago, we talked about ripping apart and rebuilding the very idea of what a bank means. Let's do the same thing with business schools today. Free b-school, anyone? There are a couple of fallacies in this piece, one of them potentially fatal, but worth a read nevertheless.

The fragility of old data

Over the weekend, I took it upon myself to get started on a much-procrastinated project: retrieving a couple of hard disks from an old desktop PC and pulling the data off them.

The first thing I had to do was to get an external casing with a built-in power supply unit. When I went to the stores and asked for a casing, I was offered a small casing by default, the sort used for laptop hard disk drives. Cue general bemusement when I said this was for the larger desktop variety. "Old school," whispered one chap to himself.

Another question that came up was, what the capacity of the disk was. When I told him, one held just short of 10 GB and the other 8 GB, his eyes nearly popped out of his head. I guess we're from different generations!

Coming to the point of this post, I was actually a little nervous about whether the two drives would even work. I had a lot of old data (photos and so on) that I really wanted to retrieve but I hadn't even turned on my old computer for at least five years. In the meantime, it had endured being stored in a forgotten corner gathering dust and being transported twice by a moving service. I wasn't that worried about retrieving my data as long as the disks would still spin.

But, glory be, both drives actually started spinning with that familiar but long-forgotten whir. When I connected them to my laptop, reading data wasn't a problem either. I was mighty impressed with the engineering that's gone into this, no credit to me for the sheer neglect.

I quickly backed up my files, then started going through my old treasures at leisure. Everything just worked. Even that Word document from 1998, those photographs from 2001, that music from 1999... I was even more impressed by this.

Hang on. Everything? No. Real Media files don't work. Is it because I don't have the right codecs installed? No, I checked that I have the latest versions of everything. They just don't work. Maybe that's the problem. I have the latest version of the codecs not the prehistoric versions. Who knows?

You know that external hard disk you've invested in to backup your stuff? Or that cloud-based service? None of that can save you from this fate. You'll have all the data you ever had and be unable to use some of it.

The sort-of-solutions to this are:

1. If possible, work with data that use open file formats. This doesn't guarantee that your file will still be usable 5 years from now but at least it raises the odds. [Aside: Microsoft Office isn't truly open but it's become a de-facto standard now and I think backward compatibility is reasonably assured going back to Office 97.]
2. Keep old software installers handy. This isn't always possible. Your old software programs might have been installed off the web. Or they may have come on a CD-ROM that you have long since turned into a coaster.
3. Learn how to write software of your own!

These are only sort-of-solutions because you need to be a bit of a geek to make any of this work and, unfortunately, the world isn't only composed of geeks. Or you could go out and get your own captive geek to take care of this for you, but that only works for some people. What about everyone else?

Path Dependence and the Stupidity of LED Light Bulbs

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27841/?p1=blogs

I'd like to see a company tackle this problem. Developing countries are a natural fit. Which of course doesn't mean that that's how we'll see things evolve. Keeping my fingers crossed anyway.

Business opportunity for mobile game developers

Mobile gaming companies in Bangalore or other parts of India who have content that they would like to expose to a large, established base of paying subscribers in emerging markets, please ping me.

A different kind of start-up event

I was attending a closed-door, fairly free-wheeling discussion last week here in Singapore hosted by one of our coopetitors when someone brought up the topic of events for VCs and entrepreneurs. Now, if there's one measure of commercial activity in Singapore that's always flashing bright GREEN, it's the number of conferences, seminars, fora and networking events held for tech start-ups. So when this person asked the rest of the group whether, in our opinion, Singapore has a sufficient number of platforms for VCs and entrepreneurs to meet each other, the answer seemed pretty obvious. Even if one doesn't go to all the events, going to a few every year is sufficient to get to know pretty much everyone else in the space. Singapore's VC industry isn't that big after all. It's essentially the same in India as well.

But it struck me that one thing I (and my portfolio companies) continue to find difficult is finding good mid to senior staff to join existing start-ups. I think there's an opportunity for a platform specifically targeted at people who want to move into the tech start-up space but don't want to start one of their own for whatever reason. Yes, this exists to a small extent on online fora but I have yet to see an event specifically created to allow start-up teams to get to know their brethren from larger organisations and vice versa. The opportunity exists across all roles -- sales, finance, technology, HR, operations, you name it. Put a critical mass of qualified people in a room and I can practically guarantee that it won't be seen as yet another start-up networking event.

Who wants to do this?

Bringing banking to the masses via technology and telecoms

Here's a massive opportunity for technology companies serving the financial services sector: roving bank tellers serve rural India. Has the potential to be a great "Bottom of the Pyramid" success story. Opportunity across several areas including banking software, analytics, security, mobile payments, CRM and so on. I imagine a similar opportunity exists in nearly every emerging market, not just India.