If you can do them all, you are one web2.0 super cool urban-geek.

• Instead of doing things silently, record whatever you are doing on Twitter, Facebook and other status sharing services so that your friends know, in case they are bored and have no thing else to do. If you get used to it, you can even make your own slice-of-life novel out of your tweets!
• Instead of reading newspapers and printed books, read them with the Amazon Kindle.
• Instead of reading comics, magazines and color printed books, read them with the Apple iPad.
• Instead of listening to the radio, go to NPR (National Public Radio), Last.fm and several other online radio services. To listen to radio on the go, just use any mobile device that has 3G capability.
• Instead of buying music CD, go to iTunes Store to purchase and download songs, or go to Spotify to listen to music for free.
• Instead of going to a store to buy gifts for your friends’ birthdays, purchase some virtual gifts and send to them on Facebook. If you prefer physical gifts, there are plenty of online stores where you can find unique gifts for your friends, such as Etsy.
• Instead of looking at a recipe book to cook a great meal, it’s faster and easier to browse through social cooking sites such as Allrecipes, TastyPlanner. Remember to take pictures of your cooking and share on Flickr!
• Instead of taking notes of school lectures on the paper, record the whole thing with a hand camera and upload to YouTube. Oh, and do you know that you can add notes into your online videos with YouTube? There are also some online video sharing services that allow you and your friends to make notes on the same video.
• Instead of asking friends for advices about dating, finding new music etc, post them on Yahoo Answer or Mahalo Answer and invite your friends to answer them there. You’ll love the game point ranking system of these services.
• Instead of taking sleeping pills, read CSS tutorials until your mind unconciously tells you that it needs to rest. w3schools is a good place to start. Remember to bookmark your progress on Twitter!

Suppose you were chosen to represent your company to make a presentation in front of hundreds of people, at a big event or competition. Suppose you have never done it before… How can you overcome your introvert self and gather enough courage to deliver a good speech?

One of the biggest fears inside each human being is the fear of public speaking. There are several reasons for you to feel like vomiting whenever you think about having to talk in front of a crowd. First of all, the intimidation one can feel from being looked at by so many people at once. Second of all, the expectation one set for him/herself before going on the stage. Physical condition or the amount of practices also contribute to the overall performance…

But that’s normal. Almost everyone gets cold sweat before giving a public presentation. Anyhow, be assured that by following these 10 guidelines, you can conquer the fear inside and shine at any public speaking event:

1. Plan carefully. Understand how much time you have for the presentation. Write down every key points you want to deliver to the audience. Prepare and polish sentences to support those key points.
2. If the presentation includes visual support (e.g PowerPoint), make sure that each slide has fonts bigger than 20. It’s also important to find and use nice graphics in the presentation, too.
3. Familiarize yourself with public speaking by watching videos of famous public speakers. A few examples would be Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, Barrack Obama…
4. Practice the presentation 10 times a day. 2 when wake up, 5 during the day and 3 before going to bed. For better result, multiply the numbers by 5 or 10.
5. Learn about body language and notice how your body moves in front of the mirror when practicing the speech.
6. Keep your body as healthy as possible. Eat healthy food, sleep 8 hours a day, do exercises 1 hour daily,
7. Before the presentation, familiarize yourself with the stage before the audiences come inside the hall.
8. If there are other people presenting before you, ignore them and go walk around outside. This would help calm you down and prevent you from being distracted by the others’ speaking.
9. Before going on the stage, breath deeply and keep this thought in your mind: “I love my audience. I will make sure they have a good time listening to me.” You have made a lot of effort for this day, so just go out there and have do it like you have always been practicing.
10. After the presentation, if there is any difficult question that makes you scratch your head, the first thing to say is “That’s a (very) good question.”. After that, either you can or cannot answer the question, it’d be all ok. You have acknowledge how important the issue is; that’s what matters most.

Having applied the above rules before, I was able to win an award at Mindtrek Startup Launchpad 2008 for my team. At a personal perspective, that was a big leap in self-development for me. I’m not yet a professional public speaker, but I’m confident about such future. And should there be any public speaking event, I’d know that I can perform well with sufficient preparation. The same goes to you, too. Good luck!

I’ve always respected those who can both work hard and keep themselves visible to others on social networks, forums and blogs. They are just simply incredibly good at managing their time and disciplining themselves.

Keeping up with countless piles of school/company tasks while maintaining a continuous timetable for blogging requires a highly effective self-management. So, after the first month of this year, I’ve come to the point where both my mental and physical state are good enough to do what I want to do with my own blog, while still able to finish my responsibilities.

Next post will be about the lessons I have learned doing public speakings.

Looking at the management of a company, an outsider’s perspective can be far different from that of an insider. People tend to paint roses on success stories, but few can imagine the hardship those insiders have to overcome.

The more famous a company is, the more people from the outside think differently about its management comparing to those who are in the inside. Even the insiders have to talk and act so that their company’s image can stay positive in the eyes of the public.

There can be countless of magazine articles and books writing about how great a successful enterprise or celebrated individual has been. However, it’s just one side of a coin. On the other side, there can be also negative emotions, struggles, confusion or even frustration…

People don’t just laugh at challenges bravely or conquer their fear easily at a blink of an eye. They also have hard times, disappointments, disagreements… In order to understand fully how innovation and management work in a company, we need to look at both sides of the story.

Working on a medium-large client project is like participating in a long distance running. You can make a short dash without water. But a marathon requires people riding motorcycles besides you or kiosks at specific milestones to supply you with water.

Similarly, you can do a small client project for free (either for portfolio additions, for personal preferences or for business relation building). But a medium-large project (i.e building a “Facebook of…” type of application) requires payments at specific development milestones, most of the time.

Medium-big project development is like marathon running

CC attribution kk+

Bad pricing and timing in such project is like bad calculation of how much water you need to supply the runners, or how far the distance between each 2 milestones is; in a marathon, that is. Never let personal issues get on the way of deciding the price and time for a project. You’ll just die of thirst before being able to call for more water; let alone changing the milestones.

Lately I’ve been into playing Poker with my friends in the weekends. And the more I play it, the more I think of how similar it is between Poker and building up a business. I keep seeing those cards being placed down the table as people and opportunities around a startup company.

"The poker strategizing experience would prove helpful when I got into business." - Bill Gates

CC attribution niallkennedy

Bill Gates once said: “In poker, a player collects different pieces of information—who’s betting boldly, what cards are showing, what this guy’s pattern of betting and bluffing is—and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand… The poker strategizing experience would prove helpful when I got into business.”

I don’t know how much that is true, or Bill Gates was just bluffing :P. One thing I do know, that if you look at Poker with a startup perspective, it’s pretty damn correct!

There are many way to compare playing Poker with building a Startup. But this is how I see it:

1. At the start of each round, each player receives two cards. Think of them as the team you have. One card represents business side and one card represents technical side. The stronger your cards are, the better. Just like the more talented and experienced team members you have, the higher your success rate is.

Having high cards on your hand is equal to having good team members

CC attribution rosswebsdale

2. When the 5 other cards are placed down on the table, think of them as potential partners, resources and chances on the market. The more powerful your combination is, the better. Just like the more relevant you put all the pieces of opportunity, facility and people together, the higher your success rate is.

3. With the above 2 basic ideas, we can derive even more details:

- Even if you have an Ace (really good team members, e.g. in technology side), when the other card is weak (not quite good team member in business side) the chance of winning / your success rate is some how lower.

- Even if you have a pair of Ace (either from the beginning, or from the whole combination), it loses to any 2 pairs. This means even if you have an all-star team in the beginning or there is a very good execution, it can not beat a relatively good execution with the right marketing at the right time, in the right place.

- Also, the more money you have, the more advantageous you are. You can put in higher bets to prevent others from pursuing the pod to the end of a round. The rule, in general, is that you have a good insurance (a good pair or high cards in the beginning, a good combination in the Flop - 3 out of 5 cards on the table are revealed), and guts! It’s quite similar to how investors (sometimes founders) would put in more cash and resources (time/energy) to raise the startup’ competitiveness. Of course, if the other player (competitors) have the same financial/resource capability, the competition will also be based on luck.

In general, we can understand why having the 2 high cards (highly talented/experienced founders) in the beginning is more preferable, even though that is not always a golden rule to win. The risk is still pretty high if the other pieces (opportunity, facility and people elements) are just not right.

The "dream team" and the "perfect combination". Still, it cannot beat a 'straight flush'. (Also, Google can be considered a "Royal Straight Flush")

CC attribution eduardo_inflames

This way of thinking may be useful to those who are building a startup, or even investing in a startup. I wonder how good VC folks play Poker, but if they are good at what they do (calculating risk vs. chance and understand people’s behavior), they should play Poker well! For startup folks, it may as well be fun as a team activity.

Just stumbled upon a nice book of HTML, CSS and XHTML . Have to admit that sometimes reading about something you’ve already known in a different angle / book may bring in some new perspective!

Q: Who decides what is “supported?”

A: There are standards committees that worry about the elements and attributes of HTML. These committees are made up of people with nothing better to do who generously give their time and energy to make sure there’s a common HTML roadmap that all companies can use to implement their browsers…

“With nothing better to do”. Simply hilarious

We can imagine just how a perfect hard worker in today’s web industry would look like.

That’s the internet usage growth of Vietnam from 2000-2008 for you! Take a look

The original idea came from the Guy. Notice anything interesting?

Last week was one hell of an experience. First of all, I sleepwalked and stepped on my laptop, crushing the poor thing. It was…unexpected of me. But at least it cost me only 98 dollars to change the screen. Now the second thing is an expected one.

It took me half a day in order to find an “honest” repairing service to change my laptop’s screen in Ho Chi Minh city. And this was the first time I’ve ever had a chance to compare the different “layers of services’ quality” in my own home town.

Normally, it’d take only half an hour to do the work. However, at the first building I came into, the one who’s in charge tried to take advantage of the situation. He mumbled “Hmmm… I wonder what size this screen is.” and took my laptop upstairs. I was told by a friend before, that in this kind of situation, most likely the guy is trying to cheat you (aka. take the good components inside your stuffs and replace them with cheaper or broken ones). And to my surprise, when I told him that I’d come upstairs with him, he refused immediately, returned my laptop, and said: “Sorry, we don’t have this screen size here.”!!!!

I thought to myself: “If you’d known there hasn’t been any spare here in the first place, then why the hell did you want to bring my laptop upstairs?”, but couldn’t say it out loud. I took my leave and went to the second building.

There’s a young guy who threw an ice-cold statement at me: “Leave it here for 1 day, or we don’t take the job.”!! Oh, now this one is much, much more obvious. “Noob. I’ve seen worse. Bye bye then.”. Again, I thought to myself and said to the guy “Ok, then I’ll take my leave.”

The third one I came into was on a different street. This is a real honest firm. 40 minutes, 3 months guarantee, no tricks, no pretenses, just plain laptop preparing service. Here’s a shot of this lovable firm.

In the end, I think it’s true that my home town still has many vicious firms like the 1st and 2nd ones I visited that day. But there are always good and honest businesses here. We just need a better system (online, most likely) to record and inform each other. For now, if you ever visit Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam; and if your laptop ever need some repairing or upgrading, remember to come to this one.