Honorico’s Blog

Mascone Center has huge signs hanging saying “Mac OS X iPhone” so what’s novel about the new iPhone is not only that it will be 3G, but also that it will be based on Mac OS X. I checked if the old one was running on Mac OS X, and there are some posts that say no. So that’s one of the new things about the new iPhone it looks like.

I think Nokia N95 still is a better phone, until iPhone supports 1-a 5MP digital camera and a powerful flash + video recording 2-a GPS 3-3G 4-an easy way for people to install applications 5-an easy way for people to roam to other countries and be able to plug in whatever SIM card they want in.. I don’t think I will switch. But we’ll see tomorrow.

We often don’t evaluate things we do in our daily lives from the perspective of usability. We typically evaluate products, processes, websites and technology and usability has become more closely tied to that.

I ran across a picture on fffound.com which is a collaborative image discovery tool /showcase. It applies usability to fruits.
I always think of how hard it is to peel fruit. and I typically don’t eat apples because they are too hard to peel, so I got a kick out of seeing this.

Check out the usability of fruit.

I followed the “meme” on “Paul Graham’s (Ycombinator) claim that VCs are no longer bold enough and that there needs to be VCs filling in the investment gap between the seed funding (50k) and the real VC funding stage (1 million+) at around 200-500k range. It is true that more investors who invest around 200-500k range would be great, but I think the comment about VCs not being bold enough with their investments does not sound exactly right and I think it’s heavily biased being who he is and having a particular investment strategy. I think Paul Graham should accept that not all the ideas that he invests in — and he invests very little money — are going to be VC-worthy. Considering that he’s taking a very small risk, I think he should be ok with it, so I don’t really understand the logic there. It’s almost hypocritical to invest 10k in many me-too ideas, and ask the VCs to invest 250k, 500k, and 1m to top off the deal for the startup.

Looking at Paul Graham’s own YCombinator’s investment portfolio, it does have leave much to be desired in terms of boldness. I feel that for someone asking the VC industry to be more bold, you’d expect that they’d be contributing more funds and taking on more risk. And… how much is a typical YCombinator investment again? 10-20k? Wow! That’s a lot of money. Especially for a new college grad, that is, -which is the typical participant in the YCombinator program-. The 10-20k guarantees a banana and ramen noodle diet for these founders for severals months for sure, until they get the VC funding that they’re expecting. What I don’t get is, the Ycombinator partners are millionaires already, and they have already had several exists. Instead of expecting the VCs to top off the investment, why don’t they reach their own pockets and re-invest some of the money they got from their previous exists? Maybe they could fill in that 200-500 range gap, at least for their own “ycubated startups” ?

And when it comes to complaining about the non-existence of the new Googles of the world, you’d expect some world-changing ideas that they invested in. I didn’t see a single one. One would really expect some bolder investments when someone makes such a statement, if they are really believing in what they are saying and if they’re not in it for the easy exit. Is there a high-technology startup in YCombinator’s portfolio? Maybe Parakey could have been one, but it got sold to Facebook before even it could see the light. It seems like most YCombinator startups don’t go beyond being a feature of a feature, waiting to be acquired by a company that doesn’t have the time to develop that feature. Auctomatic.. Reddit, Scribd… and many others…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator These sites were never meant to have a business model. The business model in them is the potential of an early exit. That’s it. So Ycombinator is acting more as a product incubator not as a business incubator, but it is expecting to get funded as a company and maybe some VCs are just not buying into it. After all, Paul Graham himself doesn’t seem to be buying into it either, otherwise, he sure would invest more than 10k if he knew they were going to turn into the next Google right?

To follow the meme:

Dogan Holding’in Turkiye’de rakibi olma ihtimali olan butun sirketleri kotuledigi ve piyasayi medya gucu ile manipule ettigi haberlerini sik sik duyuyoruz. Turk Medyasinin coguna sahip Dogan Holding gazeteleri dahilinde, gectigimiz senelerde, Yonja disindaki sosyal networkler hakkinda haber cikmamis olmasi, hatta Azbuz ve Gayet.net’i satin almalarindan sonra, Turkiye icindeki hic bir sosyal network haberini yayinlamamis olmalari da enteresan.

Facebook, bu ambargo’dan Shock and Awe taktigi uygulayarak, bir anda cok hizli yayilarak ve de yabanci bir sirket olmasindan ve radar’in altinda gitmesinden dolayi kurtulmustu…. Ancak oyle gozukuyor ki, gectigimiz gunlerde Facebook aleyhinde yayinlanan yazilara bakarsak, Dogan Holding, simdi buyumesine izin verdigi canavar’a bir kere daha bakarak, sanirim bu canavardan korkuyor. Son zamanlarda yayinlanan butun haberler, Facebook’un kotu yanlarini one surer durumda. Facebook mukemmel bir sistem degil ve aciklari var, ama bu 180 derece donus Turkiye’deki medya gucunu bir kere daha analiz etmemizi gerektirdigini bence bize bir kere daha hatirlatiyor.

Son gunlerde sik sik rastladigim negatif haberlere ornek bir negatif haber:
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/teknoloji/8688899.asp?gid=229&sz=53515

Ben ne beklerdim?
Dogan Holding’in daha etik ve daha demokratik habercilik yapmasini umardim. Ozellikle, Begum Dogan, bizler gibi Stanford’da okumus, Silikon Vadisi’nin mantigini sahsen gormus bir kisi olarak, Dogan Holding’in daha kaliteli urunler yaratmasini amac edinmesini, ve de ellerindeki enerjilerini dogru kanalize etmelerine etki etmesini beklerdim, onun disinda, sirket urunlerinin yani sira, ayni oranda, rakiplerinin urunlerinin de haberlerine yer vermeleri, Hurriyet ve Dogan holding’in daha yapici bir medya olmasini saglardi..

Update April 14th 2008: Bir de blogumda disclosure gerekiyor, Zurna.com sosyal networking sitesinin sahibiyim ben.

Judge decides in France, that a user-generated website fuzz.fr is responsible of the content they host when Oliver Martinez sued them that his private life was disclosed when a link was put by users pointing out that Oliver Martinez (an actor) was dating Kylie Minogue…. The Fine… 30K euros.
See Le Monde article.

It’s about time companies figure out a sustainable strategy to edit user generated content, instead of trying to wash their hands clean by stating that the users are responsible.

Everyone has ideas and some people are very good at pitching those ideas. They have the looks, they have the charisma, they have the reputation to support the pitch, but execution is a totally different thing and unfortunately not everbody realizes this. A lot of people are disillusioned by the pitch vs. the execution.

I recently came across several American Idol videos which could be a great analogy between American Idol contestants and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Please spend the 10 minutes and watch the two videos and analyze the audience reaction, the judges, and the contestant (think: users, VCs, and entrepreneur/startup for the sake of the analogy) and derive your own conclusions about the pitch and the execution.

The first video is of a girl who appears on Bulgarian Idol. Watch her “pitch”, and her performance.

The second one is Paul Potts who appears on Britain’s Got Talent, a show run by Simon Cowell himself in the UK. Paul Potts is a carphone warehouse mobile phone sales person. Watch his “pitch”, and his performance.

This is an article by Yulia Samus written for What’s on Kiev.

The story of Roxelane / Hurrem Sultan, shows how even as a slave in the Ottoman Empire, the Empire presented a land of opportunity for people who had talent and who wanted to achieve. And it’s inspiring to see someone who was brought over as a slave to demonstrate good spirits…

Slavic girls are famously popular among Turkish men, but only one of them ever managed to influence the workings of the mighty Ottoman Empire.

That was the legendary Roksolana, the 16th-century Ukrainian slave girl who became the only legal wife of the Ottoman Emperor Suleyman the Magnificent, influencing his policies and becoming his closest advisor and confidant. It’s one of the most fascinating, and unlikely, stories in Ukrainian history. Born 70 kilometers south of Lviv in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, the girl who would become known in Istanbul as both Roksolana and Khourrem was really named Anastasia Lisovska.

Her father was a priest in the town of Rohatyn, at that point a major Galician city. When the girl was fifteen, the region was invaded by a party of Crimean Tatars, who captured her and sent her to Istanbul, where she was put up for sale at the slave market. Considered ‘exotic goods’ because of her red hair and green eyes, Roksolana was purchased for the emperor’s harem. The slave-traders were amazed by her good spirits. Unlike most people sold into slavery, the girl was full of laughter and high spirits, leading them to rename her Khourrem, or ‘The Laughing One’. The name stuck, and it was what her royal husband would call her until she died.

No real sources exist to explain how Roksolana distinguished herself from the harem to catch the Sultan’s eye, but there is a legend about it. When the new batch of slaves, many of whom were more beautiful than Roksolana, were presented to the Sultan, the Ukrainian girl startled him by pushing the dancer who was amusing him out of the way and bursting defiantly into a Slavic song. The court eunuchs didn’t know what to do, and waited for a signal from the Sultan that they should take the audacious slave away and strangle her. But the Sultan was impressed. He gave Roksolana his handkerchief, a sign that he wanted her in his bedroom that night. Thus the relationship began. Observers who took note of this unusual coupling began to refer to the girl as ‘Roksolana’, a name which was a corruption of the words ‘rossa’ and ‘ruziac’, meaning ‘Slavic’. The Sultan was also attracted by the girl’s reserved character and by the fact that she asked for permission to visit his library – the story has it that when he returned from a military campaign once, he found Roksolana speaking a couple of new languages. Historians say she actually spoke Turkish, Arabic, and Persian in addition to Ukrainian, but linguistics weren’t her only strong point. She also became a good dancer, a fine judge of art and literature, and a shrewd politician. She understood that the first rule of her new home was the fittest survives, and she lived up to it. After Roksolana adopted Islam, Suleyman married her in 1530. That raised a few eyebrows, as it was the first time in history a Sultan had married a harem slave. From then on she accompanied the all-powerful autocrat during affairs of state, and she earned the respect of both foreign rulers and conservative Islamic figures.

When the royal treasury was empty after the Empire had to suppress a number of Persian rebellions, and her husband was away on a campaign, Roksolana knew what to do. She ordered the opening of wine stores in Istanbul’s European residential areas and at the seaport, which raised revenue from among non-Muslim foreigners. She also enlargened Istanbul’s port facilities, thus broadening the market. In short, she made important decisions in her husband’s absence. She used some of the revenue she earned to build new mosques, palaces, hospitals and schools. Roksolana gave birth to three sons as well as a daughter, but the true heir to the Ottoman throne was Mustafa, the eldest son of Suleyman’s other wife, Gulfem. The primacy of her rival’s son was a real threat to her and her kids, given the viciousness that characterised court intrigues. So Roksolana took steps to consolidate her power. Her first victim was Suleyman’s Grand Vizier Ibrahim, whom she had assassinated in 1536 for scheming to usurp the Sultan’s power. Yet Mustafa still remained. The sly Ukrainian girl convinced Suleyman that Mustafa was plotting against his father to seize power, with the result that the emperor had the boy and his brother strangled with silk lace. Gulfem went mad in the aftermath and soon died. It might not have been the most pleasant or least stressful way to live for 30 years, but Roksolana did well at it, fighting tooth and nail for power on behalf of herself and her son - who did, in fact, succeed Suleyman as emperor. Not that she saw that happen. Roksolana died in 1558, eight years before her husband did, ending the story of the humble Galician teenager who ascended to the pinnacle of power in a mighty empire.

I have noticed Orkut-like trends on Facebook in the past 2 months, where Facebook’s Turkish traffic skyrocketed suddenly, drawing people from other local social networks in Turkey: Yonja, Zurna (my own), 80630 and dating sites such as Siberalem, Istanbul.net and uniting them on one site.

This rapid expansion into the Turkish market is going to be an interesting cultural test for Facebook and will make its mark on its global expansion plans. Facebook’s privacy settings and rules have worked out great for the English speaking world, but how will Facebook fare in Turkey, which is a country where the East meets the West, Islam meets Christianity, Traditionalism meets Liberalism, Urban life meets Rural? How will Facebook deal with something even the EU could not deal with?

In Turkey, there are two distinct populations. First off, there’s a huge education gap between the top 20% and the bottom 80% of the population. Second, the top 20% of the population earns 80% of the GDP in Turkey, putting this 20% of the population at par or above European income averages. If the 20% were admitted to the EU as a country, the country would rank better than some prosperous nations in terms of GDP, while the bottom 80% ranking the lowest. Third there’s the urban secular people and the newly urban traditionalists. And between these two populations, there are huge sociological differences in the ways they communicate with one another. As it seems so far, Facebook currently has attracted the top 20% of the population which also speaks English. If Facebook decides to launch a localized Turkish version of the site, the uneducated 80% will start to infiltrate the site, especially the men, who come from traditional hijab-wearing households with oppressed women, will start messaging the girls with obscene or unacceptable messages, leading to the exodus of the creme de la creme; with nobody (or no respectable girls) remaining on the site to message locally, then in the next stage, the Americans and Europeans will start getting random messages from these Turkish guys, leading to a linguistic and social armageddon. And that’s when Facebook becomes like Orkut.

Turkish Internet usage is quite interesting. If you look at Alexa rankings, you will see that there aren’t many serious sites in the top 100. Turks love Youtube, Turks spend a lot of time on chat rooms, dating, friendship, social sites. According to some of my friends, the average work day starts with 2-3 hours of newspaper reading, tea drinking, and email forwarding in the morning, then people take a lunch break at noon that lasts until 1PM. Before 4PM, when they get tired, they accomplish the bulk of the work for the day and then head home to rest at 5. And on Zurna’s Google Analytics, this techno-social observation reflected itself with ups and down throughout the day, which we called the “Elephant”.

I am very curious to see how Facebook will cope with all these cultural adventures as it becomes popular in different countries. Turkey is an adventure, Pakistan and Egypt might be even more interesting, where the largest population is not as “open” socially.

I have been curious about how Facebook has been growing internationally and today, I ran across country statistics on Facebook’s own newly-launched targeted advertising platform sub-site which helped me look into detail how Facebook is doing internationally. I combined the data with Google Trends and Alexa and country statistics and came up with the following analysis:

What I have noticed:

As an English-only site, Facebook is growing faster in English-speaking countries.
As a site that required .edu email addresses, Education & Colleges still influence its growth internationally.
The Law of Social Networks / 6 degrees of separation are still in effect in Facebook’s international growth.
Higher Internet penetration is helping its propagation rate.
There’s faster growth in countries that typically send students to study in the United States and also faster growth.
Facebook grows faster if there’s a void in the market place for a communication tool.

According to Facebook’s own data, Facebook is very popular in Canada with a 20% country population penetration. In the United States, the penetration rate is quite low, it’s only 5.7% of the population and most likely most of the facebook population is from colleges, recent grad circles and of course our very own Silicon Valley crowd. I don’t know how to explain the fast growth in Canada.

In China, India, Brazil and Japan, which are all big countries, Facebook has a very insignificant penetration. Most likely the penetration is among the US-educated elite who went back, or people working in Technology.

Sweden has a small population of only 9 million, but until recently when an even smaller country - Estonia - passed the computer and internet penetration rate of Sweden, Sweden used to be the most connected country in the World; also Swedish people learn English at a very young age, which can explain Sweden having a very high number of users on Facebook, especially considering the small population of the country. Google Trends shows that Swedish as the 2nd most popular language, searching for Facebook on Google.

Norway follows a similar trend to Sweden, as a highly connected, small country with a large English speaking crowd has the highest penetration rate at 18.9% of their overall population. Norway should perhaps consider joining the FU (Facebook Union) before joining the European Union.

Korea doesn’t send that many students outside the country to study, so the growth has been limited in Korea for Facebook.
OECD stats list the countries that send the most students to foreign countries.

Growth in Germany is limited, and in Russia, there’s no presence, which might explain that there may be some alternative sites that are providing the same service to the users locally. In Germany, there was StudiVZ, which was acquired by a large media company. And in Russia, there are many other local alternatives. Russians also like to express themselves differently, via blogs. That’s why SixApart’s LiveJournal is so big there.

Turkey comes in with at a surprise. Turkey has the 3rd largest penetration rate at 15%, and has the highest non-English speaking native population of 1,221,420 people. So Turkish automatically becomes the 2nd largest language on Facebook after English. The people using Facebook until September, according to my observations have been mostly the US-educated users, the geeks in Turkey, and people who had friends in the US. In the past 2 months, Facebook had tremendous growth in Turkey, causing yonja, Zurna, 80630, Mondus to all lose traffic. It appears this all happened on its own without Facebook doing anything, although the #4 employee of Facebook himself is a Turk. Large media companies helped spread the word and now Turkey is the new Brazil. Yonja.com which was the dominant player on the market, limited people’s messaging capabilities, and offered little service in return for people’s enthusiasm, so there was a big void in the Turkish market for a new social networking site, which Facebook has filled quite well. MSN offered a widespread messaging service, but didn’t offer an easy way to network socially. Zurna, appealed to a different crowd compared to Yonja and also Facebook, although Zurna did have many highly usable and free functions. It’s also a bit ironic, Orkut.com which has a Turkish creator (Orkut himself, whom I know from Stanford) and a Turkish name, hardly has any Turkish users; but Facebook, launched many years after Orkut has won Turkish hearts really quickly.

Here is also the table that I created:

Facebook Population Country Population(million) Penetration Language
17,291,140 United States 301 5.7% English
6,692,540 Canada 33 20% English
6,984,820 United Kingdom 60,7 11% English
1,842,500 Australia 20,5 9% English
1,221,420 Turkey 71 15% Turkish
978,760 Sweden 9 10.8% Swedish
870,620 Norway 4,6 18.9% Norwegian
617,520 South Africa 4,5 13.7% Afrikaans/English
475,320 Colombia 44 10% Spanish
410,160 Egypt 80 5% Arabic
623,720 France 60 10.4% French
431,540 Mexico 108 4%
322,580 Germany 82,4
329,800 India 1119 insignificant English
264,100 Singapore 4.5
248,640 New Zealand 4
217,700 Spain 40.5
198,360 UAE 3 6.6%
170,820 Lebanon 4
167,920 Ireland 4
165,680 Israel 7
148,840 Italy 58
147,860 Malaysia 25
132,860 Switzerland 7,5
116,300 China 1321 insignificant
105,840 Japan 127 insignificant
134,560 Netherlands 16
123,360 Pakistan 165
119,720 Saudi Arabia 27
53,740 Korea 50
31,940 Dominican Republic 9

The information gathered here is approximate, as reported by Facebook itself on their newly launched targeted advertising system. The population of countries are from Wikipedia, rounded to the million. The penetration rates are not taking into consideration the Internet usage in the country, or diaspora populations.

Great article analyzing how Silicon Valley people are…

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/technology/05rich.html?em&ex=1186545600&en=b0da90172897e340&ei=5087%0A