Digging through history. What eventually became 1 billion dollars!
A Google Interview Question
I recently interviewed with Google for a product manager position. I wasn’t really looking since I have been actively working on my startup. But since the Google recruiter found me on LinkedIn and reached out to me, I went ahead and gave the whole interview process a shot. Overall, the process was professional and well organized. I thought I answered most of the questions well except for this one:
For any given day, calculate the total number of miles traveled by all the passengers using the subway.
Just want to share this!
You don’t need an app for that: how band promotion turned into a startup idea!
My friends have a garage band called Morning Side (http://www.thisismorningside.com/). They are constantly looking for venues to play at so that they can showcase their work and engage with their potential fans. As a good friend, I find myself constantly helping them to promote the band. We would painstakingly make thousands of brochures and CDs to distribute at venues in hope that people would go to the band website/Facebook/Twitter or listen to the CD when they get home. We had very limited success with it and we were still struggling with bringing awareness to the band. We needed a way to engage the audience right there at the venues so they could listen to songs, become friends with the band on Facebook, and follow the band on Twitter. Since everyone has a Smartphone these days and all we hear in the media is app this and app that, we figured why not having a simple band showcase app for people to download. We had very simple requirements: the app needed to play songs from uploaded mp3 files as well as playing music videos from uploaded mp4 files and YouTube; the app also needed to show band biography as well as allowing people to connect with the band on Facebook and Twitter. We went to a friend, who specializes in mobile development, and the quote we got back was around $3,000 just for iPhone. After all this is a garage band and we just couldn’t justify spending this kind of money trying to build something like this. So we set out to build something quick ourselves since we are all pretty technically capable.
In order to build something quickly and it would work on variety of Smartphone, we decided to build the whole campaign using html5 instead and would distribute it using a QR code (we would hand out business cards with QR code at venues so people could listen to songs, friend the band on Facebook, and follow the band on Twitter right away). Frankly, we didn’t need an app for what we were trying to do. We hacked together a quick html5 media player, added some additional band info, linked it up with QR codes, added some analytics tracking, and we were off to show the world. People loved it and were very receptive to the whole idea of engaging with the band you love using a quick html5/QR code campaign. We were like the cool kids on the block. We wanted to do more campaigns like this to promote the band but don’t want to build something from scratch every time. We also figured that other people probably needed something like this as well. We started building a web app, which we would eventually name SnapHop (you snap a picture of the QR code and hop to the destination campaign), so that we could build mobile campaigns like this all the time with ease. After two months of hard work, we finally launched the first beta version at http://app.snaphop.com. We have many ideas on how we can expand on this web app to build variety of campaigns including integration with SMS and social check-ins. We are getting really excited!!!
Some screenshot: http://societaslive.com/post/11867131946
My frustration with files
After years of working in consulting, one skill I “learned” really well was coming up different ways of naming my Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. I would try to squeeze all sorts of meta information such as document title, client name, engagement date, last a few editors’ names, version (V1, V2, etc…) into the 255 characters limit of Windows filename. I literally became my own document management system. Almost all consultants I knew (from analysts all the way up to managing directors) did this. We had EMC Documentum but people would literally use it only for archiving final deliverables. Personal computers have been around over 30 years and one of their original purposes was to help us manage our data. So why are we still spend so much time each day try to manage our files? Should the concept of files even exist for average users?
In an ideal world, I would start typing and computer would figure out what I intend to do. A document would be a document and I’ll never have to worry about whether it’s from Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc… . The most important of all, I’ll never have to name or version a document artificially. All the meta information on a document would be updated continuously as I work on it. The computer can even analyze my facial expressions and the strength of my key strokes at the time to capture the mood I am in. When I need to bring up the document again, I would just tell the computer some words I could remember from the document and/or the mood I was in. If I need to extract a particular snapshot edit of a document, I can easily do so with a single mouse click. A user will never see a single file on a computer.
Online office suites such as Google Apps and Office 365 are the first step towards this direction but they are far from it. They are still very much file centric and require users to manage their own documents. Back in the days, I could imagine Xerox PARC working on problems like this. Who is the new PARC?
