Category: Life

Categories
Startups Taiwan

First sale of an ebook I helped to publish

Recently I was helping a friend to publish the ebook version of his paper book, called How to Start a Business in Taiwan. About 50% the reason was that I like the book and hoped to get into more people’s hands, and 50% I wanted to see what is it like getting an ebook out the door and bought by people.

Just a while ago, it had its first sale (hopefully the first of many:). *champagne!*

How to Start a Business in Taiwan on Kindle
How to Start a Business in Taiwan on Kindle

I guess it is a very humbling experience that it took some 5 days of promotion effort to make that sale. That is even before I count how much time I have spent converting the Word doc into Markdown, and tweak the looks. The technical details to that I have written up in a guest blog post on the books website.

The marketing side is still under development, and the numbers are too low to draw a lot of conclusions from. The most surprising thing to me is how many people actually click the “buy this book” link and then they don’t follow through. Then also the half a dozen people who I followed up on earlier discussion to tell them about the ebook version, they say “ah, it’s awesome, I’ll go get it, I’ve been waiting for it” – then nothing happens.

Of course, there can be a lot of reasons for this, here are some of my guesses:

  • The website UX does not work well for them (ie. the are put off by the process)
  • People don’t know/like Leanpub
  • People are lazy
  • The price is too high
  • The sales copy is bad, so people don’t think a business book can worth that much for them (ie. price is perceived to be too high)
  • Spreading the word at the wrong places, thus wrong audience

… and probably a hundred other reason that I wouldn’t think of – or 171, since the book’s page had that many unique visitors in the last few days who left empty handed. I wonder what would be a natural next step to improve on this conversion rate.

It was a very fun thing to do, though, and got me psyched up to get my two idea-stage books going. And about ebook publishing in general, will definitely try to get more people onboard who have writing tendencies.

Also, this invaluable learning, as I’m setting up my startup now, a good reminder that people will not easily/often buy into my “awesome” idea, will have to work cleverer on that. Rejection therapy in its earnest.

(Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in the book,  ie. I won’t get any of the sales, which makes things even nicer. I received one original paper copy last spring to review and edit.)

Categories
Life

On Going Fast Nowhere

I do feel like I’m deceiving myself. It feels such that the problems came and pulled me under even before they existed. Like time-traveller problems: come back from the future and they prevent their own birth, by making me put off entrepreneurship, and look for something else. Like open a coffee shop. Or go back being a post-doc…

It’s of course very harsh on those problems, since it’s me who created them, by becoming the not-at-all mythical “wantrepreneur”. I keep talking that much that I convinced a lot of people that I am up to more than I am actually accomplishing. It’s not for the lack of trying, mind you…. depending on the definition of “trying”.

If reading stacks of books about the subject of entrepreneurship counts as trying, then I’m pretty darn hard at work. If networking, or going to events, hearing other people’s experience, asking them for advice counts as trying, I’m still right there in the middle of the pack. If the only thing that counts is whether I made a sale of any kind – well, I got nothing. Let’s even be more generous, count learning as trying in the Lean Startup way – still got nothing. Have plans to have more than nothing, but those “urgent” plans are at the same stage as they were a month (maybe even two months?) ago.

Main conference room on the second day with speakers
APEC Startup Accelerator Leadership Summit 2013

This is all not because I’m stupid, I’d like to believe: my shoelaces are correctly tied  (just checked now), I regularly converse in languages other than my native tongue, and I can keep up a conversation pretty well, according to others. But still, sitting at Starbucks, just having put down the most recent book I’m reading of “this is how you do your business”, I have to ask myself – why am I doing this, and what’s “this”?

Maybe it’s all just fear, fear of the unknown future, where those time-traveller problems come from. Or maybe I don’t care enough. Or maybe I’m holding it wrong. Or maybe I’m just taking this all too serious? Premature optimization of things, before I haven’t tried anything? Waiting for others to show my path, and in the same time rejecting pretty much everyone else’s opinion as they cannot possibly understand and have the same amount of passion to my idea(s) as I have? That even if I yearn for the opposite, I’d rather spend an evening in with the sci-fi novel I’m reading (and which is brilliant so far), than push the limits by testing out the great ideas I convinced myself to have come up with?

My guess: all of the above, and then some. So many rhetorical questions, good grief…

That’s the current status, being full of aspiration and total helplessness. Seeing a lot of great examples, and thinking “I could do that!” and “I could never do that!” in the same time. What causes this? Can all this reading and preparation instead of helping, just piled up inside of me as intellectual pus? That might fit – something that tries to help me, and I have to get rid of to be okay.

Okay, boy. Let’s try something different: I’m calling in a learning ban, and get out to where the real action is, where the real fighting goes on with real bullets. What good is your runway, if you never spin up the propellers to take off?

(May I still finish the one I’m reading now? ….  Fine, but that’s the last one.)
(What if I could avoid some common mistake if I just have read X by Y? ….  Fuck it, use use your common sense instead)
(But, but ….  No but, can go back to your books when you have something exact to learn. You know enough. )
(H…..  Shut up.)

 

Categories
Maker Taiwan

Taiwan’s Open Hardware movement gets a boost

I sure felt different yesterday morning waiting for my turn to give my 30 minutes talk, but in retrospect I’m really glad to have been invited to the Boost Open Source Hardware Movement event, organized by the CTIMES magazine over here in Taiwan. It was the second time try, after Typhoon Soulik cancelled the original event.

CTIMES personnel introducing the Boost Open Source Hardware Movement event
Kicking off the event early Saturday morning

There were 8 speakers scheduled from different companies and background: RS Components, Via, Broadcom, Motoduino, TMI Holding…. and me from Taipei Hackerspace. First I was wondering how do I fit in there, and maybe my talk *was* out of place a bit. Most talks were in Chinese so I could grasp only basic stuff from them, although the slides helped – most people made slides following the “slides are my notes” style, which is not my style, but was welcome this time. It was also great to see seasoned speakers like Richard from Via, and Lucas from TMI giving fun (and informative!) talks.

I did feel I’m in the right company, though. Open Source Hardware is becoming more and more of my focus – or maybe I’m just realizing it now that what I do is called such. Part of the audience were industry professionals and part enthusiastic hobbyists & students, and I had some great chat in the breaks with both kind of people.

I heard about the National Science Fair here (what? I got to check that out!), and how much interesting work people do with interactive hardware and elementary/high school kids. There is waaaay more going on that I can imagine, and there’s a lot more potential to tap into.

Had a chance to gather some industry experience too. Naren from Broadcom, who was responsible for getting Raspberry Pi into production was telling the story how they were expecting only 10,000 orders altogether and got 350,000 on the first day (sold 1.8 million to date), so they had to scramble an entire new supply chain. Thought that came to me was that maybe that’s one of the biggest value of  Kickstarter/Indiegogo is to be able to get an order of magnitude estimate of the demand.

Also heard about Via’s experience in pursuing new design and materials with their APC platform (such as using paper for housing), and interacting with their community. Heard a lot from RS Components how they are building tools for their community, and building the community itself. The demo was fought with technical difficulties (first rule of presenting is not to assume a working/fast internet connection), but it was inspiring nonetheless, and gave me some big (and difficult) ideas for my project: have to see if there’s any good community for scientific/laboratory electronics and hardware building, and if there isn’t then build one.

View of the room during the break time
Break time between the talks, everyone’s scrambling for chat and cakes

One of my favorite part in these events though to meet friends’ friends. This time was no exception, even if there was too little time to talk, I left with quite a few people in mind who I will need to contact soon, because they are doing something awesome and connected to my area of interest, either in hardware or in startups. This is one reason I’m trying to be really generous with my time and making introductions between people who I recon would hit it off well: I was the recepient of that so many times that I got to give back too.

My talk

I was scheduled in the middle of the afternoon just before tea break, and I was one of two people who used English for their talk (out of the 8 speakers). I was more nervous

I’ve uploaded the slides used for the talk in advance as well, so now it’s all out in the open.

My favorite part writing this talk was probably the attempt to summarize the philosophy and values of the maker movement, in a way that would inspire others. Some bits:

  • Don’t accept crappy – everything can be changed and improved upon.
  • Aim for collaborative creation. Celebrate the weird. Don’t mock.
  • Do and then share the results for everyone to learn from it.
  • For things to happen, you have to show up. Don’t wait for someone else to start, build up and inner motivation
  • Everyone’s values are different, a ‘space is often a different canvas for everyone.

So far the feedback I got about the talk is that I should have mentioned the projects people were working on in the ‘space, and upcoming events. That would have made a better ending for sure, and I had an extra 5 minutes or so to do that. Definitely going to emphasize the practical aspect next time.

Another thing I noticed listening to (a bit of) the video is that I need to use much less “ehm” and “ahm”… I certainly don’t remember using any, and consciously trying to avoid it in my talks in the recent years, I guess I need to listen more carefully (and prepare better).

Any more suggestions? What else wasn’t good? Bring it on, I want to become better at this.

More about the Taipei Hackerspace is on the mailing list, which is open for everyone to sign up, ask questions, show their projects, and hear more about what’s up.

Categories
Programming Taiwan

Barometric recording of Typhoon Soulik

It all started a few weeks ago with Sparkfun having “20%-off” day, when I got myself (among other things) a BMP085 barometric pressure sensor. When it arrived, I have soldered some pins on it, and set it up with an Arduino Nano, to have the readings off it easily.

View of the circuit
BMP085 barometric pressure sensor breakout board from Sparkfun

Originally all I wanted is just some laid back pressure recording, so maybe I can use that to predict the weather a bit. “Pressure falls: bad weather comes, pressure rises: things will clear up”. I was recording for about a week, and nothing really noteworthy came out of that.

Then it was the news, that the year’s first typhoon is on the way to Taiwan, and it was supposed to be a big one. Obvious that I will try to record the barometric pressure pattern of its passing, but wanted to make it more interesting and informative. More visual than just the timeseries plot of pressures.

The Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) is a good place to watch for information about typhoons. They list path prediction, typhoon properties like strength, wind speeds, and central pressure, have satellite imagery. Putting these together, two days before the typhoon arrived, I set up a script to download the satellite imagery as it became available.

Satellite picture of Typhoon Soulik and location of Taiwan on 2013-07-12 morning
The morning before the typhoon arrived

The JMA publishes usually 2 satellite images in an hour for our North Western Quadrant (at :00 and :30), one of them covers the whole area, the other covers just the top 80% or so, leaving a dark band on the bottom. Nevertheless, matching up the pressure reading with the satellite pictures would be a good little project for this time.

Friday came, the government gave the afternoon off, though it turned out no landfall happened till everyone supposed to be off anyways, just a bit of on-and-off rain. People stocked up on convenience store food (I now have a good supply of instant noodles:) and water, taped over their glass windows, take in their plants and BBQ equipment from outside – well, those who have planned.

Around 10pm the big rain has arrived, here’s a video of how it looked from my window. Went to sleep later, and got woken up around 3:30am by the rain having changed into pretty darn big wind. Here’s another video of the violent part of the typhoon that time in the morning, that doesn’t even really do it justice. The houses around here are pretty tall, and I wonder if they have protected from the wind, or been artificial canyons channeling it. Some things got broken, though not as much as I expected – which is a very good thing.

In the meantime by the power of the Internet I have checked out the pressure reading, how is it going a few miles away in the Taipei Hackerspace, where I have left the barometric pressure sensor (the geolocation is 25.052993,121.516981)

Here’s the entire recording of the approximately 2 days of typhoon. It was pretty okay weather in the start and end of the plot.

Plot of pressure readings
Pressure reading during the passing of Typhoon Soulik, recorded at the Taipei Hackerspace

The readings have been corrected to sea level (from about 20m height, where the Taipei Hackerspace is), should be good within 1hPa or less.

The the pressure was indeed dropping like a rock, and the dip on the graph coincided with the most violent wind that woke me up. According the JMA, the central area of the typhoon had pressures down to 950hPa, which means that core must have passed pretty close to here, having readings below 958hPa, though probably not directly, as it didn’t stay down there for long.

I made a video syncing up the pressure reading and the satellite picture. The red dot on the video marks the recording location. (Watching it in full screen and HD makes it clearer.)

I would wonder what was the flat part in the readings while the typhoon was leaving. Maybe sign of changing direction, by the look of it.

Either way, this was fun to do, and I am glad that only a few people got hurt here, much fewer then even during the less powerful typhoons. Maybe getting people scared a little (like with this “super typhoon” stuff that went on) helps them keep safe? Just don’t use it too often.

Extra material

I put almost all material used here into a gist: the satellite imagery download script, the plotting, the movie frame generation, the movie generation script, and the complete barometric recording. Because this last part is pretty big (5Mb), Github truncated the rest of the scripts. I guess it’s okay to check check it out. Will add the Arduino sketch to read the sensor and the logging script later.

The satellite imagery weighs about 60Mb, so don’t put it online, but if anyone wants them, let me know.

Keep safe!

Categories
Life

Counting down to the next

Since living in Taiwan, the Western style new year feels a bit arbitrary for me. The Lunar New Year is at least tied to something, it is easy to define, even if it’s more complicated in its own traditions. Nevertheless, I like the New Year, and it’s good to have some periodic semi-forced review time. When it’s cold, it’s even better (sorry Southern Hemisphere).

Sunset over Taipei
Sunset over Taipei

This year felt a bit like growing up. I was grown-up before (can’t afford not to be at the age of 31), but my way of thinking have matured a lot, and it feels like that happened because of all the limitations and stress and projects and winding path I took on.

In 2012 somehow extended on the projects I worked on, like building a certain portfolio. Ignite Taipei is still there (maybe the main drive behind my experimentation), while it got company in the form of Future Shorts Taipei, the continuation of the Geek Dinners, later OpenHack Taipei and the (preliminary) Taipei Hackerspace. They seem to have a common theme – building local events related to technology, innovation and art. I hope I can continue with this theme, and see where it takes me. Kickstarter, social networks helped a lot to expand my world in these directions. Not sure if all these projects will survive next year (at least not with me at the wheel), but will definitely learn from all of them.

There were some really good books this year, discovered Pynchon, Tolstoy, and Calvino, as well as many smaller ones. Keep rediscovering Tolkien, Asimov, Murakami, Vonnegut, Beckett. Had a lot of brainy-books too. My shelf is still totally full, I can be sure, that the next year will be just as busy in terms of reading and just as mind-blowing.

In research I wasn’t that successful, though I have learned a lot. Will see what can we do in the next year in the lab. We were building a new experiment and it is not a real surprise that the results are still ahead. Whether my true way is down on academia lane or not, that remains to be seen.

I have a lot of startups related influence around me, and for years I’ve been hatching plans without any results. Next year supposed to see me set some hard deadlines for decisions (different visa for Taiwan, that lets me do more, for example).

There were some great travels this year, a big European tour for the first time since I moved to Asia, and in Japan for the first time ever. No plans for travel for the next year yet, maybe more within the country and more purposeful choices of destinations? Though I like quick changes of plans and surprises. And visitor friends from countries are good too.

This time it feels strongly that I’m in “in-between”, with choices ahead. The Sun is already setting on 2012 here, let’s make 2013 count.