If you are a fan of Douglas Adams, the first thing you will notice that the whole biography of Steve Jobs is written in 42 chapters. The author started the book with an introduction to how the book came to be. In the whole book, Isaacson undertook the tough task to reconstruct the life of Steve Jobs through the lens of many people ranging from his family, his friends, his fans and his competitors and forty over interviews with the man himself who was dying of cancer. It examined the legacy of Steve Jobs and provided a glimpse on how he perceived the world. It sheds a lot of details behind the creation of various innovations that Apple has produced from the personal computer Apple II to the iPad. While I have read two other unofficial biographies of Steve Jobs, this biography has shed a lot of light on how Steve Jobs has made his manoeuvres to come back to the company which he co-founded.

Throughout the book, Walter Isaacson built an interesting contrast between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Despite their complex love-hate relationship, they both eventually came to the realization the different business models they each have on software were right in their own way. Probably, life is fair in such a way that if you truly believe what you are doing, you will probably show that your model dominate for a period of time, but a competing paradigm will eventually take over for a different time. Isaacson has built this contrast between both men very well as he traced the history of their rivalry from the 80s all the way to the present.

Probably, here are some interesting tidbits of the biography which I thought might be interesting for reflection:

• The importance of building a great team and how the Apple pushed Steve Jobs back: The interesting back story in how his team convinced him to build a iTunes and iPod support for Windows was probably extraordinary. Despite how much he did not agree based on his own personal bias, he was able to make the decision to let it happen. Probably, in the whole book, Tim Cook has summarized elegantly, “I realized very early that if you didn’t voice your opinion, he would mow you down … He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”
• The trials and tribulations of building a product: Probably the story on how the iPhone was built remained an interesting tale for all of us who have witnessed how it changed the mobile industry. The backdrop on how Steve Jobs betted on a touch screen design was probably something that it was easy to judge now on hindsight, but tough at that instant of time.
• There’s just one more thing – Steve’s last word: In the last part of the book, Isaacson provided Steve Jobs the platform to summarize what his philosophy in life and why he was driven to do the things that he did. It might be an interesting reflection for us to think about some of the things we do in businesses and acknowledge that building one is difficult. Steve Jobs provided his final thoughts on why companies such as Microsoft and IBM failed to innovate based on the reasons that they relied more on sales to drive revenues rather than building great products.

Whatever it is, if you are passionate about building a product or business, this is probably one that you should read. Steve Jobs is not perfect but what made him different is that he has managed to engineer a comeback which not many people can in the face of their failures and built interesting products that have changed the world across three decades. That, in itself, is why we come to admire and mourn his passing.

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• The Winklevoss twins’ claim to Facebook: Honestly, before the movie and even from reading the accounts about the lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra to Mark Zuckerberg, I do not think that they deserved the payout of US$60M. The idea of a social network as conceived by them was in existence such as Friendster, MySpace and even exclusive social networks such as A Small World. While I do not condone what Mark Zuckerberg did to stall them, they probably should have the brains to quickly engage a developer to work on the idea instead of depending on one person. In the web-tech industry, speed and execution are the essential ingredients of success and having the idea is just not enough. However, there are lessons to be learnt from the incident that Mark Zuckerberg should not have even bothered to agree to work with them in the first place. So, we learned that providing commitment to a project could actually lead to consequences that can bite you in the future.
• The lawsuit from the perspective of Eduardo Saverin: On the other hand, Eduardo Saverin has a stronger case given that he had a hand in investing in the social network and also worked on the initial stages of the company. We can see the contrast between the characters in the movie between Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker, where one is the down to earth business man and the other a clear Silicon Valley type of entrepreneur. Eduardo paid the price of not taking the risk with Facebook but he did not deserved the ending that he had with how his shares of the company got diluted. The lessons to be learnt from his mistake is that he should have made sure that he read the legal agreements carefully. Whatever he has settled for in the end, I think that the verdict is fair for him because he has contributed to the company in its initial stages.
• Building a great product vs a great business: A hidden theme which I believe that the movie has told us, is how Facebook decided to be a great product first before becoming a great business. It focussed on making sure that the growth of the social network did not compromise with the monetization. It is only until the last two years that Facebook has properly structured its monetization model in the realm of social advertising and virtual currency. However, the key is that not a lot of companies have that kind of leeway as compared to Facebook. Most of us who worked in the web-tech space will know that if monetization don’t come sooner, the company will cease to exist because it does not have a proper revenue model.

On the whole, I thought that Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin are pretty impressive given that you can see their evolution from being good friends at the start to the point where they sat against each other with the lawyers. Probably, given that I know that the movie did not really depict all the facts correctly, as a piece of romanticized version about the founding of an interesting company, I will say that it’s good fiction. I do highly recommend young tech entrepreneurs out there to watch this movie.

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The second book is split up into a couple of threads based on three central characters and the antagonists of the story. While in the first book that Daniel Suarez portrayed Matthew Sobol as an evil genius who conceived a deliberate plot that murdered many in the process, the second book took a different perspective by taking on the theme of necessary evil. Freedom explored the breakdown of our modern day civilization and the Daemon took on the establishments from Wall Street to the power brokers of multi-national corporations. While the war between the Darknet (on the Daemon front) and the establishment were on-going, Peter Sebeck was tasked by the late Matthew Sobol to go on a quest to find the Cloud Gate, similar to how modern day gamer would do in MMORPG games like World of Warcraft.

The most interesting feature of the book is the use of augmented reality and how the online world interfaced with the real world, in particular, the D-Space in Suarez’s book. Of course, if you are a fan of online gaming, you would see how the characters are ranked by gaming mechanics and level of the profession he took. The irony that Loki, one of the main characters of the book, who was known to be the deadliest of the Daemon operative, was given a level 10 sorcerer and extremely low rank of trust. One probably pondered the author’s intentions to integrate social interactions within the Internet and focused on how Daemon attempted to change and redistribute the way how the human civilization.

While the book reached a probably satisfactory ending, one might wonder if there will be a sequel. Of course, the most exciting part of the book is when Sebeck succeeded in the quest and to make a decision on the whole of human civilization. What’s the question that one might probably ask? I would let you to follow the excitement in reading both “Daemon” and “Freedom”.

P/S: This is the first fiction e-book that I have completed reading on my iPad.

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In some sense, the book kicked off with an anecdote from the author in his meeting with China’s Vice Foreign Minister, He Yafei. The Chinese minister kicked off with a rhetorical question that have taken into the context of the recent global financial crisis triggered by the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection of Lehman Brothers on Sep 15 2008. In his words, “Now that the free market has failed … what do you think is the proper role for the state in the economy?” Through six long chapters, Bremmer described the emergence of the new strand of state capitalism which authoritarian governments have learned to compete internationally by embracing market driven capitalism. In some sense, these governments has managed to utilize wealth creation to show their legitimacy of their rule in the country. China and Russia have successfully incorporated state capitalism after the end of Cold War.

While the author weaved the story with a brief history of capitalism and how the markets have failed through the madness of crowds and herd behavior following bubbles that drove economies near the brink of collapse, for example, the Wall Street Crash in 1929 that led to the Great Depression. With each crisis, the state introduced regulation into the system. It also attempted to debunk the myth that democracies and free markets are interwined and how state capitalism can still provide a semi-free market to function within a government tightly controlled environment.

By clearly demonstrating the fundamental differences between free-market & state capitalism, the author showed that the latter is not an ideology bur rather a tool for retaining political control. Policy makers do not embrace state capitalism as a knee-jerk reactions to rebuild or jump-start a new economy out of recession but rather a long term policy choice. Second, the state capitalists view markets as a tool that serves the national interests of the ruling elites rather than an engine of opportunity for the individual that is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations 1776).

In the final part of the book, the author warns that the free market is likely to meet its end, when countries with such economies start closing door on trade, investment and immigrants. He also pointed that the dynamics between US and China has to be balanced without compromising their values for example in the protection of intellectual property rights and currency issues. He also made it clearly that if corporations (such as Google) has to taken on state capitalists, it is likely that Google will lose as compared in the past where the British East India Company has managed to secure control of India in the 18th century. However it does not clear up the issue on whether corporations have the propensity to be a state of its own. It’s a book that is highly recommended for policy makers and economists to get a clearer look on how economies are run in this century and where it is all heading on an macro-economic scale.

You can watch the video of Ian Bremmer giving a talk about his book here:

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The story invokes the concept of daemons (condensed from the word Disk & Execution Monitor), which are computer programs running continuously in the background and performs specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events. The concept is essential and you will see how the concept of Daemon unfold that transits from an online to offline world. The novel starts with the obituary of Matthew Sobol, a brilliant architect of computer games and that sets off a dormant daemon that unleashed into our world where it recruits, corrupts and kills people. The protagonist of the story, Detective Peter Sebeck has to work out the entire malevolent, self-replicating virtual enemy and comes to grips with the actual motivation of the Daemon program in the end.

What I liked about the book is how the Daemon launched from the creator was able to set off a series of events that led the protagonist towards a state which one door closes and another opens. Only till you are close to the end of the book, the chain of events you traced thru the eyes of Peter Sebeck becomes inter-connected and it made one terrified that how much we have given up our privacy and data to the Internet. With social networks and location based services, one do wonder if the Daemon in Suarez’s book is unleashed thru an online gaming landscape. It also reminded me of Hari Seldon in Asimov’s Foundation series where he put up videos of himself making several predictions to the people in the future and advising what steps to take. It also reflect how a genius can turn the online world on its head with the use of the Red Queen hypothesis and prepares a series of complex programs that led to the extermination of spammers. In consequence within the book, that action unleashed by Daemon reduced 80% of the spam in the Internet.

You will probably wonder after reading the book that such a reality can happen in our real life.

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Introduction

FourSquare is a New York based company, co-founded by Dennis Crowley (who founded a similar service called Dodgeball which was acquired and then abandoned by Google) and Naveen Selvadurai. At the same time, it has obtained an early stage investment from Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter and Union Square Ventures (with an initial investment of US$1.35M). Initially, the service is launched in 100 cities within US and Europe and subsequently opened itself worldwide in the major cities in Asia, South America, Australia and Middle East on 20 Nov 2009. At the moment, the application is distributed through the smartphones, Apple iPhone and Google Android phones, and the company is trying to extend the app for the Blackberry and Palm Pre platform. For most Blackberry users, they can use the browser to access and use FourSquare like the iPhone or Android users.

Product Description and Features:
FourSquare allows users to register and connect with each other like a typical social network. In addition, the platform allows the user to check in upon an update of his or her present location via the mobile application. The users have the option to update their twitter status or facebook status upon checking in to the location.

The user can gain points when they do the following: (1) add information about a new venue using a crowd-sourcing strategy on the users (2) checking in at a designated location. While being in that location, the user can add a “tip” to the venue such that the other users within the vicinity can read it, or create a “to-do” list for their own purposes. If the user acquires enough “check ins” on a location that will be automatically calculated by the platform, he or she will be made “mayor” of the location. The “mayor” can acquire special privileges in the form of coupons or affiliate-marketing offers pushed through the foursquare app from the advertisers. Note that one viral element of FourSquare is that the users are constantly competing for mayor-ships across different location.

Since the FourSquare app is constructed for the user close to a social game, the user can also earn a series of badges for uploading new locations to the platform or check-ins to unique venues and revisiting previous locations. FourSquare also opens its API for third party developers and based on the current model, they follow similar trajectory like twitter in acquisition of users first before thinking about monetization.

Hacks and Tips on using FourSquare:

• Gaming Check-ins: In the current form, even the app is able to work out the exact location via GPS, the users can game the system in several ways. If the app is idle about 5-8 minutes, the user can repeatedly check in to other locations in where he or she is not around. One can check in 5-6 locations within a specific period of time and then wait for a while. While we did this for stress-testing, we note that the FourSquare also impose time-based check-ins and will cease to award points upon checking in too many times. Somehow, Android phones allow you to do that many times until you have exhausted the patience of the FourSquare servers.
  
• The geo-location search is better on an Apple iPhone 3GS than Android phone: If you use the search or nearby functionality of FourSquare, you will find that the iPhone 3GS will zoom into the region of interest which you are around much quicker as compared to a HTC Dream Android. While traveling with both phones from the central to the west of Singapore, by continuously doing search, the Android can sometimes throw out results which are further than the iPhone 3GS. The reason is that the iPhone 3GS has an upgrade of SkyHook that automatically detects your current location and pushes the maps application default to that point. SkyHook functions by triangulating your position from a number of cell towers and from local Wi-Fi signals in your location (GPS coordinates) with the cell tower service provided by Google and the Wi-Fi positioning system by SkyHook. While Apple absorbs the Skyhook costs for the consumers, Android phones do not have that capability, and hence the geo-location search for Android phones do not perform well for FourSquare as compare to the iPhone 3GS. Of course that leads to the following loophole.
• An Android Phone is better than an Apple iPhone in terms of checking in and getting points: One of the key discoveries made is that if you use an Android phone (HTC Dream) to do check ins, you get more points than you use an iPhone 3GS. I have done this experiment a couple of times (with different people holding on both handsets independently), by checking in simultaneously on one specific location (e.g. Hackerspace.SG) with both phones (dual sim capability) turned on. You will find that the Android FourSquare app will give you significantly more points than the other.
• Uploading locations on the web interface often runs into SQL problems as compared to the mobile interface: I have tested uploading several locations using both the web and mobile interface. In the web interface, there is a tendency to get load errors. This suggests that the data uploaded via the web interface have difficulty in syncing with the server. On the other hand, uploading the locations via the mobile interface is relatively easy.
• Nomenclature on Locations: If you read the support forums, the suggestion for locations for FourSquare is that you list it as the name of the place and then add its address. The best example to illustrate this is that the right convention to display Starbucks Cafe in Vivocity should be just “Starbucks Cafe” and then add the address into the location entry. However, it has that problem that what if there are multiple Starbucks Cafe located within Vivocity, and adding the unit number does not enhance the search in Google Maps. Hence a better nomenclature is to use the variables “place – location” rather than “place”.
• Privileges only available to users in US and sustaining users in other countries where mayors get no advantage: The success of FourSquare in US is the integrated of location based social networking with social gaming elements and rewards from the platform (for those who become “mayors”). Currently, the privileges are only available in US, and not available elsewhere. In fact, Daniel Cerventus (my colleague in This Week in Asia and owner of Malaysia Entrepreneurs) and the dudes in Hackerspace SG are trying to add mayor privileges to specific locations to see how the mayor privileges might just serve up in both Singapore and Malaysia. To scale up the usage of the app, there must be an automated and scalable way to get retail and food & beverage vendors to be able to utilize the FourSquare service.
• Lack of Social Bookmarking Features, for e.g. categories of locations: Currently, the user can only post a tip or reminder on the location where he or she checks in. The information on the locations on FourSquare is badly organized due to lack of social bookmarking features. At the moment, only tagging via the web interface is possible. To enhance credibility ratings of a physical location, they should implement social bookmarking features such as share or like into the platform.
• Analytics with FourSquare: In the web interface, the analytics of FourSquare is presented in Nicholas Felton’s way of reporting. At the moment, it records the number of checks ins, discoveries of new places, the usage behaviour across the week and your mayorships.
• FourSquare and Augmented Reality: Integration of Google Maps Street View and addition of augmented reality will enhance the user experience with FourSquare. That will be a future direction to go. Of course, FourSquare can also be viewed as an app for discovery and hence the users can actually use it to connect with other people within the location and also push conversations across.

Monetization on the FourSquare App:

The most important strength of the FourSquare app is that the app incorporate social gaming elements that encourages more users to sign up with the app very quickly. In the US, given that attaining the mayor-ship of a location come with special privileges, there is a race for users to continuously contribute to the location where they can engage in a form of social gaming with the app.

Here are some impressions, hacks and muses about the app which I have discovered.

• The App is only available for smart-phones with 3G connection: Currently, the Foursquare app is only available for smart-phones, for e.g. iPhone and Android phones. The current extension of the apps is moving towards Blackberry (where it can already be accessed via an opera browser) and Palm-Pre. One possible extension is to get the app into Nokia Ovi Store, where the Nokia handsets have dominated the Indian (85% based on sources from Nokia) and Chinese markets (40-50%) but mainly in the 2.5G space. With the 3G launching in China, there will be increasing adoption to 3G phones in the market, and hence implementing a J2ME or Symbian OS version of FourSquare can help to increase the number of users in the emerging markets.
• Business Model for FourSquare: For the app moving toward monetization, it is likely to go via affiliate marketing or cost per action business model. One possible way to improve the app is not to allow a user to check in onto another location that is not localized by the GPS of the handset. At the moment, FourSquare has not monetize its services and the focus is to scale the app with more users and it’s probably taking the same approach with Twitter and Facebook. The problem is because FourSquare needs to have an inventory of ads and services to distribute across the platform. However, Dorsey’s recent launch of the Square platform allows a user to pay quickly and securely whenever he is, and probably a disruptive technology that blends well with the large distribution of FourSquare. Note that Dorsey is also the investor of FourSquare.

Update 1: FourSquare for Blackberry is almost there as reported by GigaOm

Update 2: The leaderboard for the top users in Singapore will reset every Monday from now. Hence it will make the social gaming part fairer.

Update 3: You can request to add mayor advantage if you own a venue by sending your request via this form.

Update 4: There is a place in Singapore which has a mayor privilege for FourSquare and here are the pictures which depict how it looks when I got the mayorship.

Acknowledgements I thank Saumil Nanavati, my friends in Hackerspace (Ruiwen, Neng Giin, Adrian, Alex Toh, Daniel Tsou and many others) and TWIA (Daniel Cerventus and Mike Foong) for endless discussions on the many ways which we stress test and work out how the app really works.

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