Beautification of geeks

Beautification of geeks: I just finished writing a Nikkei Business Online column (Japanese), which will be up on Friday.  This time, I wrote about Marissa Meyer.

As you may well know, she is a new-type geek - cute and fashionable.  The image is somewhat different from the "traditional" geek girl stereotype - no make-up, t-shirt and sweat, and thick glasses.

I sense that there are more of these new type geek lately - not only girls but also for boys - than before.  I was discussing this "beautification of geeks" issue with my friends and we came up with a theory.

Actually, I wrote about the start of this trend circa 2006 in my Japanese blog, when Web2.0 was a trendy buzz word.  At that time, I thought it was because Web world crossed the way with advertisement/media world.

But this time, we concluded that the trend is caused by "San Francisco move".  Now a lot of web/mobile start-up is located in San Francisco, where young engineers live, rather than the traditional South Bay area, more family-friendly-but-boring neighborhood.

People in the big city are more fashion conscious to begin with.  In addition, in San Francisco, they've got the most fashionable species in the world - gay people, and they have become more and more important in this geek world for user interface/design skills.

So now, San Franciscans are the trend-setter in the geek culture, thus beautification.  For me, who is no makeup plus sweat pants type, the center of the geek world is becoming more and more alien.  Sigh...

Pitfall of mobile generation

Pitfall of mobile generation Again, my son gave me quite an interesting insight about his generation's use of technology.

Today, he had to call a customer service.  The company's website did not take his user ID, so the plain old telephone was his only option.

After a few minutes, I heard him literally kicking and screaming and swearing upstairs.  Then he came downstairs, so I asked him what had happened.

Son "I called their 877 number from my iPhone, but the call dropped for 3 times.  I thought maybe I had to use a fixed phone, so I used the home phone.  But it connected to a school or something, again 3 times in a row!  Why doesn't the fix phone work!?  Their phone system is broken!  Their customer service is so bad!"  (BTW, I edited out all his f-words.)

Calmly I replied, "son, did you dial '1' at the beginning?"

Son ".....  Whaaaaatttt?  That is the country code of USA!  I don't have to dial it in this country!"

............

I did not dare to explain.  Obviously, he was too upset to endure my lecture about the U.S. telecommunications history of "equal access", and the lack of it in mobile.

Amazon heading into Palm's trap?

Amazon heading into Palm's trap?: My Twitter TL is filled with Amazon's smartphone entry rumor, and it makes me wonder.

I don't have Kindle Fire but my husband does, and this is all what he has told me - not my FIRST HAND experience, and I am not sure if it is just him.  Please let me know if you have any insight about it.

He LOVED Kindle Fire at the beginning.  He liked the price, size, weight, integration with Amazon account, and he started buying stuff from Amazon like crazy (I know for sure about it, because HE USED MY PRIME ACCOUNT!! o(｀ω´*)oﾌﾟﾝｽｶﾌﾟﾝｽｶ!!)

And a few months later, now, he says he is disappointed about it.  He thinks that Amazon is not maintaining its software appropriately.

Maintaining OS (in this case, I am not sure if I can say OS, as it is based on Android, but Amazon version of it..) is a lot of work.  He says that there are bugs here and there, but Amazon does not fix it quick enough.  There has been no significant update either.  He believes that the early OS is not stable and it has to be updated to fix bugs and add features in a timely manner, so that Amazon used all the resources just to launch the product and has not enough talent to maintain the OS.

If they are working on smartphone, it may be that everyone in Fire team got transplanted there, but it would exactly be the proof that Amazon does not have enough power to maintain their own OS and hardware.

It is a deja vu for me.  Decades ago, I was an early Palm smartphone user (remember Visor?) and endured all the problems for a few years, until I finally gave up and switched to Blackberry.  Palm did not have power to update their OS in time to fix all the problems.  At that time, my industry friend who had business with RIM was telling me that even RIM was having problem maintaining OS, as it REALLY exhaust human resources.

Now that giants like Apple and Google are in the reign, Palm is long gone and RIM is getting out of breath.  They cannot catch up anymore.  So I am REALLY wondering if Amazon has big/good enough team to have this tough race going for an extended period of time, and otherwise, they may get into this Palm's trap again.

Hydrangea Revolution via Twitter

Hydrangea Revolution via Twitter There is a weekly demonstration going on in Tokyo every Friday in front of the official residence of Prime Minister, to protest against the government's move to restart Oi Nuclear Power Plant.

In Tokyo, Thousands Protest the Restarting of a Nuclear Power Plant

According to my friend Satoshi Nakajima's blog, the movement has recently been given a name "Hydrangea Revolution" - quite an elegant name, right on the season.  In a  hydrangea flower, many little flowers gather in one place to form one big flower, thus this grassroots movement name.

Japanese people have been known for indifference to the political issues, and such "political demonstrations" are considered limited to the "professional extreme activists", far away from their "normal, everyday" life.   But this time, the demonstrations include salary-men on their way home from work and home makers with small children.

The demonstrations have been shut out from the mass media until last week, when finally major TV news covered it, but the crowd is getting bigger every week, mainly due to the power of "social" - Twitter.

In my book "Secluded in Paradise" (2008), I argued that Japanese people would benefit more from such Internet/social tools than US/Western people in organizing such event to express their opinion publicly (I called it "clusterization"), because they have been shy to do so in other method in the past but Internet/social tool would lower the barrier, while our US/Western friends have already been doing it even without the help of Internet/social.  Interesting to see it really happens, even in such a heavily political issue.

Nexus Q - Made in USA

Google's new little "Death Star" - NexusQ is made in the U.S.  That mark was shown on the big screen at Google I/O today. Whether this black and sphere shape media center or new GoogleTV catches on or not is not clear - it looks to me that MS and Apple have been struggling so much to sell such type of device, and the newbie Google never had much success in hardware anyways.

But it is interesting that all these software giants are coming back to manufacturing, all of a sudden.  And Google's stress on "made in the US" sounds like a sarcasm against Apple.  (See my previous post.)

In Your Face, Apple!

Anonymous - "Oops, wrong Kasumiga..."

Japan is working on the new copyright law to press criminal charges against illegal downloads, and recently the infamous Anonymous declared Cyber War against Japanese government. Japan's equivalent of "Capitol Hill" is "Kasumigaseki", a district in Tokyo where all the government buildings are gathered.  And of course, Anonymous attacked...

"Kasumigaura River Management Office."

"Kasumigaura" is a dull and polluted lake in northeast of Tokyo, approximately 2 hours away.  Oops...

Source:  2 channel (^^)v

A teen runs chased by zombies, funded by Kickstarter..

I have a teenage son.  He teaches me a lot of things how young people nowadays interact with technology. Recently, he started to jog quite often.  Before, he hated it because it is boring.  He says now it is fun because of a new iPhone game called "Zombies, Run!".

It is a real-world role playing game, with a pretty elaborate story.  Voice tells a story of a post apocalypse world where a whole bunch of zombies roam, and humans live in a colony.  The runner is supposed to pick up food and supplies for the people in the colony, outrunning zombies.  (Zombies' brains are dead so they don't have good coordination and cannot run fast. ^^;)

And he says he "funded" the game creator, through Kickstarter.  He paid a few dollars from his allowance because he thought it was a great idea and wanted to play the game.

Wow, how did he found out?  Of course, through his favorite podcast.

OMG, young people nowadays...

Facebook/Social IPO review is on NBO

フェースブックと他のテック系IPO「あの人は今」、日経ビジネスオンラインに掲載されました。 http://business.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/world/20120531/232783/

My monthly column on Nikkei Business Online is up now.  This month's topic is the comparison of Facebook IPO and other recent social/tech IPOs.

Amazon is to start data MVNO in Japan

According to Nikkei newspaper, Amazon Japan is planning to provide mobile data service as an MVNO. It has been rumored that Amazon will start selling Kindle in Japan for some time, but this article refers not to Kindle, but just "SIM card".  It says the plan is a prepaid plan with 1980 yen per month (approx. $23) for 500MB.  Base service is provided by NTT DoCoMo, and Amazon is buying the capacity from its MVNO, Japan Communications (so Amazon will become a grandchild of DoCoMo, so to speak), and it can be used by any DoCoMo smartphone/tablets.

That means Kindle will most likely be DoCoMo-based, one way or another.  Kindle is said to be coming out this summer in Japan.

Nikkei does not specify any source on this article (typical for their Sunday speculation article), so please take it as a grain of salt.

Michi

IPO winners and losers in Social Media 2011-12 so far

 

People talk about Facebook IPO as "failure" so much, but I kept hearing the same story - disappointing IPO of social media stocks - since last year, so I went ahead and made this chart.  There were 19 "social media" IPO's last year according to Mashable, and I also added Yelp and Facebook which went public this year.

My impression was right, most prominent IPO stocks have not been doing well.  Among them, LinkedIn and Zillow are the stellar exceptions.

It makes me happy to see the very bottom pair, FriendFinder and Jiayuan are both dating/adult sites.

Of course, Facebook IPO is in a totally different world, as the sheer size ($16 billion) is more than 10 times of last year's biggest, Yandex (Russian search engine, which raised $1.3 billion) and the impact is so much bigger.  It is just one week from IPO, so things may change over period of time.  But still, the Wall Street side story sounds very different from the dot-com bubble time.

In the meantime, over here at Silicon Valley, the air feels bubbly.  So many insiders made money out of these IPO's, and the housing market is soaring again.  Things look differently from this side of the coast, as usual.

Michi