I am a keen follower on the IT startups. I like to read about them and have some critical thoughts as a hobby. On my RSS feed reader, I have subscribed many startup news blogs such as Techcrunch, Mashable, Gigaom, Ycombinator News , Startupping forum and many others too long to list. After subscribing to so many of these feeds, sometimes it's pretty hard to search back a discussion or news thread regarding a particular startup from a while back. I found that using the general Google search engine is not an ideal solution, since it also shows search results which are not from the startup-focused websites I have read from. Therefore I have created a startup-focused search engine powered by Google Custom Search. I have exported my RSS feed list from Google Reader and added the relevant feeds' mother blogs into this customized search engine. Other than the websites I have listed above, I have also added a lot of other blogs focusing on startup news, but also personal blogs which (potential) entrepreneurs would mostly be very interested in. Some examples are: Personal blogs

• Guy Kawasaki
• Paul Graham,
• Joel Spolsky
• Niall Kennedy
• Mark Fletcher
• Don Dodge

Startup blogs

• 37Signals
• Micro ISV Journal
• Plenty Of Fish

Venture Capital blogs

• Union Square Ventures
• A VC

And a lot more of others sites were added - at the moment 82 and counting... I have also created a few "labels" such as "News", "Venture capitals", "Forums for startuppers" and "Reviews" which can be used to refine your searches towards your desired knowledge areas on the search result page. Certainly this search engine is still a work in progress. If you have any suggestions or feedback for me to tweak this search engine better for you, feel free to leave a comment under this blog post. So, give it a try here :)

How can Google Apps attract more small businesses and enterprises to come on board without a management feature for the most fundamental asset in communication? What is the most important thing on my mobile phone? Sim card? No, Address Book. What is the most important thing in my Gmail account other than the emails? Email addresses on my Contact List. Now how can I keep my mobile phone's Address Book and my Gmail contact list consistently and merge into a unified and consistent address book? I can't. Hang on, you would say I could synchronize my phone's address book onto Microsoft Outlook and then export a csv file onto Gmail, or vice versa in reverse, right? No. I can't. It's too hard. I'm too lazy to. Do you always meet a bunch of people in one go and exchange addresses every once in a while only in life? If you look around, there were people attempting to achieve the holy grail of Contact Synchronization here, here and here with Gmail but they all ultimately cannot get around the missing synchronization feature and could not have the same ending as the Da Vinci's Code. Mobile phone and sim card are replaceable. Emails can be deleted (remember the good old 4MB Hotmail storage limits?). But without your contacts, you cant call, can't email and can't even drive to a friend's place (not everyone is on Facebook you know...) Google Apps, which is my daily "Web OS" tool that manage my domain emails (thru Gmail), calendars and documents, do not provide Contacts Synchronization even for PAID accounts. No matter what positive message the slogan on its front page is being sent across, the lack of proper contact synchronization capability is the massive Achilles' heels of such service to even attract small businesses. At the age where we can have gigabytes of email storage, access to our emails from anywhere around the world through an Internet browser, the death of Desktop RSS feed readers and the raising popularity of online feed readers, it is quite disappointing that we still need to rely on a desktop application (Outlook or Address Book on Mac) for contact management mediator. Actually, if you look around, Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail is in a similar state in terms of the continuous disregard of critical user data - Contacts. Missing Benefits for Google Considering the importance of contextual advertising in the search engine market and also the reliance of personalization techniques in order to produce more informative ads, geographical and relationship information such as job title, physical addresses and phone numbers (area code) can be very useful data to improve the advertisement's relevance and quality to the users. Hence making people upload their contacts easily should be as important as the easiness of mail thread reading, friendly AJAX-enabled user interface and generous initial email storage which all made Gmail so appealing when it was rolled out back in 2004. Message Please Google/Yahoo/Microsoft, give us a Contact Synchronization API, especially Google Apps. Let us have our own Web 2.0 Address Book. What do you think? Do you have similar need as well? If so, please leave a message in the comments so I can be certain that I'm not the only mad person that would appreciate such a feature.

I was given a free ticket by a friend to go to the "Sony. Experience More" at the Sydney Convention Centre in Darling Harbour - basically a marketing event showcasing the cutting edge electronic products by Sony. The following are a few impressions I made. 1. OLED TV There were probably a thousand products on the floor but this was THE ITEM. At first I thought these were laptop elevating stands (?!) but when I saw the very crispy and sharp image quality it was playing I was instantly impressed, yet the thinness was much less than maybe 0.5cm. It is probably still in R&D and not yet for production such that they had ropes around these precious cuties. I am looking forward to the day it is ready for laptop and later big screen TV. 2. FREE FREE FREE Free cap. Free T-shirt. Free sweets (see below). Free drinks. Free finger food. The most important of all, free photo printing with these: I have to say the picture output quality is quite good. Mental note: be more prepared next time when similar events are on - bring a memory card full of photos for "Product Quality Evaluation Process"... 3. Where is the "Play" in Playstation PS3? There were about half a dozen PS3 units that I noticed. They let people play a couple of action-style PS3 games. However on the floor they use other units to demonstrate the ability of showing High-Definition Blue-ray movies, or reviewing photos and an interesting feature - pause the HD video and prints a (partial) screenshot straight to the photo printer. I wonder, "Play" does not certainly imply "Games" as certain as in the past. 4. Where the bloody hell are you, PSP? It is normal that there is no PS2 in sight, however I only saw ONE TURNED-OFF PSP sitting next to a PS3 and no others. I am amazed that Sony did not bother to show off the primer portable gaming platform to the consumers. 5. Sticky Sweets Sony has hired these "sticky" people to make small bags of sweets that marked with the words of "Sony" or "FULL HD" on each lolly. They actually setup a stand to make it during the show and the marketing gimmick is that their stand was surrounded by 20 Sony HD video cameras which everyone can try out the recording quality of these equipments. The lollies tasted very good. Most often than not, their stand was the most crowding of all on the floor. 6. Booth Babes You think I mean this. No, there was none like that. The best I could find was this: Overall It was a good visit, as a geek and a graduate student, to have FREE entry to play around with gadgets.

OLPC is a great initiatives for producing US$100 laptops for the education of the children in third world countries. Lately, there are words about it to be made available for consumer market at US$350 or US$525. Considering the mass (as in producing in millions) manufacturing cost is reportedly at US$175. Maybe the 100%+ markup sounds a bit expensive. Anyway, if they can keep the price really at US$350, I think it can potentially fill a consumer market segment and make an impact in the rest of the word. Why? Cost Let's dive into the bottom line. For people, like my parents who just do web browsing and typing a few Word documents, If they are looking for a simple, light-weight portable computing access, how much will it cost? For a Palm Folio, a lightweight smartphone companion running a customized Linux at ~<1kg, is priced at US$499. For a Dell M1210, a full Windows-powered laptop at ~2kg, starts at ~US$1000. OLPC, at ~1.5kg light, clearly has a price advantage in the portable computing market segment where you pay much more $$$ for a lot less weight. Desktop-like Web Browsing Experience From the OLPC wiki, OLPC is running a browser that shares the same core of Firefox and is capable of running Adobe Flash and Java. These are all key web browsing enabling technologies and with the rising popularity of web applications, consumers will not miss a bit by running OLPC. What's in it for me? It looks like a perfect laptop for casual web browsing on sofa, most importantly, bed during a chilling winter night (oh, and bathroom too). Of course the fact that it is a great initiative, basing on open source software and a lot of attractive features that I haven't mentioned here, certainly create interest. Personally, I would hope that the price could be a bit cheaper like US$200-250 and then it can make a negative impact to my wallet and, of course, a positive impact to the consumer world.

Actually rather the first post of the new Australian financial year. I have been trying to blog for a number of times but every time I am not persistent enough and given up very shortly after starting. But as I am distancing myself from being young (aka getting OLDER), it seems that I always cannot remember a lot of my thoughts from the past. So this time, unlike other times, I set my goal as to document some thoughts on everything and make them as my analytical exercises. And in future, who knows, I can read and been impressed by some good stuff that I think I could not have written, or laugh at my stupid grammatical mistakes. It does not sound like a bad thing either way?! So this time I will make a difference and keep this blog alive for ... one month?