For Entrepreneurs: How to Balance the Productivity rush (Adrenalin) Vs the Fun Rush (Endorphins)

According to Wikipedia:

“The term endorphin rush has been adopted in popular speech to refer to feelings of exhilaration brought on by pain, danger, or other forms of stress”

An adrenaline rush is … one’s body releases dopamine which can act as a natural pain killer.

I am a card carrying member of the productivity p0rn cult. I am always looking for ways to be more productive. I know most of the keyboard shortcuts on applications I use daily. Cut a minute here, a minute there and it all adds up.

To give me a lot more time – to waste.

Thankfully we don’t have a television at home, which was my biggest time waster, but that time is being quickly consumed by Facebook and Twitter. I gave up reading physical print a long while ago, primarily because of the inconvenience of recycling them. But then I found techmeme and hacker news. They now consume 50% more time than pre-1995 when I used to read printed news and paperbacks.

I do like to get a lot of things done. I generally have a list of 1-3 things I want to get done daily, which I work on, early in the day. Post-lunch, when I am more likely to fall asleep, I try to schedule most of my meetings.

I know that doing fun things like reading the 2 millionth post on Steve Jobs does not make me more productive (which I correlate to an adrenaline rush), but I get happy – at which point the Endorphins kick in.

So as an entrepreneur, I am constantly fighting the battle between having moments of fun throughout the day (let’s say 5-10 min every hour) or having lots of fun for an extended period (say 30 min every evening).

For most of my working life as an entrepreneur I have vacillated between the two. I can imagine that at big companies, the bosses want you to be productive so they cut off Internet access or access to things that are fun (I don’t mean that kind of fun, I mean PG13 fun), like facebook.

I realize now that for me (and I suspect most people in technology) periods of intense focus and concentration cannot last many hours. I suspect this is the main reason for the origin of the 1 hour meeting.

So I have followed the method to get small bouts of endorphins (Facebook for 2-3 min every 2 hours) with a good adrenalin rush (getting work done).

This week, though I am trying the alternative, delayed gratification strategy. This equates to 1 hour a day of reading news, blogs, facebook, twitter. My phone is on silent, so I am not disturbed during the day. I am returning phone calls that I missed 3 times a day only and checking email 3 times daily.

While it’s too early to tell (this is day 1) I get a sense that the endorphin rush all day in small bouts is more suited towards my style. I intend to watch this all week and then decide if parts or all of the new approach is better.

Guest post by Mukund Mohan, CEO of Jivity social commerce.

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The Appnomy Conference: Mindblowing Content + Exciting App Demos » August 27th, Bangalore (details). Learn the art of building an 'APP Business'.

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» For Entrepreneurs: How to Balance the Productivity rush (Adrenalin) Vs the Fun Rush (Endorphins) @Pluggd.in.

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Shanda’s Ecommerce Service Pinju.com Went Online

Pinju.com, a late comer to the extremely competitive Chinese ecommerce market curated by Shanda made its debut yesterday with – I knew this will caught many people by surprise – several group buying deals while the site was reportedly positioned itself as an online general store with catalogues ranging from cosmetics, clothes, maternity and baby products, electric appliance, home supplies, health products, 3C products to luxurious brands including Hermes, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Armani, Gucci and so on.

According to its founder Ge Binbin, “We’re doing so to test out our platform and payment system. It looks we have something to improve on. ”

On the first day of its operation, Pinju.com pulled in only RMB 75k (US$ 11k) in sales.

Ge disclosed that starting this November the campaign budget for the new born B2C marketplace will be more than US$ 1.5 million while it’s now looking to raise Series A round of funding.

The marketplace is counting on charging service fee as well as taking between 1% and 4% cut from every transaction it facilitates to make profit.

As we wrote earlier, Tencent is also conducting a trial run of its super B2C platform dubbed QQ Wanggou in Guangdong province.

 

Related posts:

1. Shanda Invests Into Ecommerce Market
2. Tuita, Shanda’s Tumblr and Online Service Aggregator
3. Kaixin001 To Co-operate Group Buying Service; Baidu To Launch Online Recruitment Service With New Domain Name And Branding

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Founders Drinks, an evening mixer with Tim Draper – 14 Oct

e27 will be hosting a special edition of Founders Drinks with Venture Capitalist Tim Draper.

 

Timothy C. Draper is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. His original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses.

 

On behalf of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tim serves on the boards of DoAt, Glam, Meebo, Prosper, SocialText, and DFJ Plug ‘N Play companies. DFJ’s previous successes include: Skype, Overture.com, Baidu, Parametric Technology, Hotmail, PLX Technologies, Preview Travel, Digidesign, and others.

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Event Details

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When: Friday, 14th October 2011
Time: 7pm onwards
Where: The Studio Cocktail Bar, 778 North Bridge Road, Singapore 198746 (Map)
Fee: S$20-S$25
Register here.

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Geek is the new cool

October is an exciting month for the technology and startup scene in Singapore, especially with Geekcamp kicking off the month at Microsoft’s office. Geekcamp, put together by volunteers Jason Ong, Sneha Menon, Chua Ruiwen, Luther Goh, Justin Lee, Laurence Putra, and Shanmugam, was a sharing session in which participants pitch in knowledge about all things code related.

Being one of the few guys from a non-technical background at Geekcamp, the various talks that were revolving around all the programming languages and geeky stuff obviously put me slightly out of place. However, I was absorbed by the awesome stuff that technology can do, and how we can leverage on technology and build things.

A presentation by Mingfei, Microsoft’s developer evangelist, saw her demonstrated how the Kinect was able to capture image stream, depth stream and audio stream and how various applications can interact with it. For those of you who are not familiar with the Kinect, it is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Mingfei presented two Kinect hacks, one of which was to “transform into Ultraman yourself” and also “Kinect with Dragon Ball”. Essentially how it works is to stand in front of the Kinect, allowing it to detect you, and the application transforms you into Ultraman when you do his signature gesture. This wowed the audience, myself included.

I think one point worth mentioning is that, even with a room full of geeky dudes, Mingfei still managed to wow everyone. This shows that geeks do not necessarily be guys, and that more and more girls are empowering themselves by learning how to be programmers too.

Self-confessed geek and passionate coder @hongster presented a session on Andriod security. Hongster shared that android are actually susceptible to possible hacks if a normal user are not vigilant enough. Hacks such as theft of personal info, bank account info, as well as service and system abuse through code modification and network packets tampering are various examples that were provided by Hongster. He subsequently demonstrated a simple hack on PayPal.

I believe that most of the participants enjoyed themselves. Most of the topics were really geeky such as Functional Programming, Hypershell, Parellel Processing with Python, TDD/BDD on iOS, or even HTML5 semantics where most of them are topics that I was clueless about. At the end of the day, I was really amazed by how technology can change the world and make things work, and that geek is the new cool.

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Founders Drinks, an evening mixer with Tim Draper

e27 will be hosting a special edition of Founders Drinks with Venture Capitalist, Tim Draper this Friday, the 14 October 2011. Breaking away from the usual format of startup presentations only, we’ll be having a Silicon Valley style evening mixer with Tim Draper.

The mixer will be held at the newly opened The Studio Cocktail Bar. Featured on The Business Times, Fever Avenue, 8 Days and LifeStyleAsia.com, it’s been touted as one of Singapore’s best kept secrets. The intimate setting in the historic Kampong Glam district will lend itself to an evening mixer of great conversation and entrepreneurs connecting with fellow like minded entrepreneurs, angels and of course Tim himself.

This exclusive, one-time-only, business mixer event will begin at 7pm. Tickets will cost $22 when purchased online and $25 at the door (Cash Only). Ticket includes admission to The Studio and a beer to get your night started!

Click here to get your entry into this exclusive edition of Founders’ Drinks. Hurry capacity is limited!

Tim Draper’s Bio
Timothy C. Draper is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  His original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses.  On behalf of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tim serves on the boards of DoAt, Glam, Meebo, Prosper, SocialText, and DFJ Plug ‘N Play companies.  DFJ’s previous successes include: Skype (EBAY), Overture.com (YHOO), Baidu (BIDU), Parametric Technology (PMTC), Hotmail (MSFT), PLX Technologies (PLXT), Preview Travel (TVLY), Digidesign (AVID), and others.

Tim launched the DFJ Global Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in over 30 cities around the globe. He founded or co-founded DFJ ePlanet (global), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), Zone Ventures (LA), Epic Ventures (Salt Lake City),  Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburg), Timberline Ventures (Portland), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), DFJ Vina Capital (Vietnam), and DFJ DragonFund (Shanghai).

As an advocate for entrepreneurs and free markets, Tim is regularly featured as a keynote speaker in entrepreneurial conferences throughout the world, has been recognized as a leader in his field through numerous awards and honors, and has frequent TV, radio, and headline appearances.  He was #52 on the list of the 100 most influential Harvard Alumni, and #7 on the Forbes Midas List. He was named Always-On #1 top venture capital deal maker for 2008.  He was awarded the Commonwealth Club’s Distinguished Citizen Award for achievements in green and sustainable energy. His blog is featured at www.theriskmaster.com.

Tim is the course creator and Chairman of BizWorld, a 501c3 organization built around simulated teaching of entrepreneurship and business to children. He also serves on the Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors.

Previously, Tim served on the California State Board of Education.  In November of 2000, Tim launched a statewide cyber-initiative on school choice for the California General Election.  He was a member of Singapore’s International Economic Council and Ukraine’s Orange Circle.  He was on the Board of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.  He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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Tencent Launched Open B2C ECommerce Platform, the Battle With Taobao is On

If Tencent’s penguin is hungry, it can be very dangerous and wants to (also has the potential to) eat everything. Taobao has its open B2C platform launched just a month ago, today Tencent’s open B2C platform is also launched, giving the domain buy.qq.com.

Tencent’s B2C platform comes with six categories: 3C, sportswear, cosmetics, clothes, grocery and jewelry, and for each category Tencent will be working with different B2C eCommerce sites and sell their products. For example, Haolemai is one of the most popular site selling shoes so it powers the shoe channel, Yixun is famous for selling 3C products so it enriches the items in 3C category. Now you can just go to buy.qq.com and are able to buy them all. Taobao Mall said it had 38 independent B2C sites integrated when it first launched. It’s not clear yet how many eCommerce site/brands buy.qq.com now has partners with and how many of them will be by end of this year. Considering the huge user base and potentially the massive traffic/transaction Tencent can drive to the partners, I am sure there will be tens of eCommerce services are waiting for the green light to plug into the platform.

Currently, the service is only available for Guangdong province. Obviously, the battle between Tencent and Taobao is on.

 

Related posts:

1. Taobao's Open Platform Is Unique, It Is For The Real Money
2. Tencent Announced “Eight Choices” to Stress Its Open Platform Policy
3. Taobao To Launch Open Platform For TMall; Baidu Launches URL Shortening Service; Kaixin001 Goes Aggressively On Mobile App

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IDG Ventures Invests $3mn in eShakti, Online Apparel Firm

eShakti, an online apparel firm that is targeting Indian market has raised $3mn from IDG Ventures. eShakti makes customized, designer clothes for women and so far has focused on US market. The company plans to use the funding for scaling up operations, expand to new product lines and focus on Indian customers (with launch of new brand Zapelle).

A few days back, Exclusively.in which raised $16mn moved from members to  traditional ecommerce business model:

“We saw the future of sales shifting on our site from a members-only to an open site due to an overwhelming demand for our products that short-lived flash sales could not meet. We felt the best way to service that demand was to move away from a consignment model in order to provide fully curated collections with a much broader selection and a full range of sizing to a wider consumer base.”

And that’s the challenge with niche ecommerce business models in India – that is, you cannot grow the segment exponentially (I shared the sentiment here also: “When it comes to niche categories, you cannot grow the segments exponentially. That’s why people prefer doing everything.”).

Once ecommerce companies raise funding, the pressure is to show sales numbers (i.e. revenue) and not percentage of (niche) category market share. It’d be interesting to see how eShakti keeps the focus given their business model.

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The Appnomy Conference: Mindblowing Content + Exciting App Demos » August 27th, Bangalore (details). Learn the art of building an 'APP Business'.

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» IDG Ventures Invests $3mn in eShakti, Online Apparel Firm @Pluggd.in.

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EasySign Launches Android App–Brings Different Pricing For Android Vs. iOS Appstore

EasySign, the app that lets you sign documents using your mobile phone/touch device has today launched its Android App (earlier the app was only present in iOS marketplace).

The app (also demoed at Appnomy Conference) saves you a lot of time and money by solving the problem of dealing with hassles and frustrations of printing, scanning or faxing while signing documents.

EasySign: Sign Your Documents

A user downloads the App from the AppStore for free and imports a document from an e-mail attachment, Dropbox or other cloud based file storage services. Once the document is imported, you can sign and fill it right on your smartphone or tablet and then send the final document directly (to whoever you wish to).

Key Features of the EasySign App

• Supports PDF document format
• Sign the document yourself or have it signed by clients in person
• Draw your signature freehand using your finger or stylus
• Fill in name, initials, date or any text
• Choose from various ink colors, text styles and date formats
• Import PDF by emailing as an attachment to docs@easysignmobile.com

We tried the Android app (link) and though the team has done a great job ensuring a similar experience (similar to iPad), creating/saving the signature isn’t as smooth as one would expect it to. But once you have passed this step, it’s a breeze. Infact, the team when they demoed at Appnomy Conference also shared that they found it difficult to bring the iPad experience owing to lack of SDK maturity on Android.

What’s interesting is that while the app follows freemium pricing in Apple appstore, the team is charging USD 9.99 (INR 490.47) for the Android app (i.e. paid).

Why so? We asked Sunil Patro, cofounder of EasySign:

Why have different pricing strategy for iOS and Android app?
The issue is how in-app purchases are supported in Android vs iPhone. Due to time sensitivity for being one of the first apps in this category to the Android market,  we made a decision to release the freemium app for android later, likely by the end of the year. The long term plan is that: once Android app becomes freemium also, you can use your EasySign account across our iPhone App, Android App or other platform specific version. So you just buy our plan once, and then use from whichever device you use or switch to. This is the model that Evernote, Dropbox and others follow.

Challenges faced in replicating the same experience (as iOS)?
The complexity of the Android platform, primarily OS / device fragmentation and lack of SDK maturity for advanced technologies.

How are you reaching out to the global market?
Through media coverage and social media ads. We are known in the eSignature scene for the quality of our product. EasySign’s reputation on iOS has resulted in many people writing to us asking for the Android version. These were the first people to be notified of the release, along with media contacts. For the later, we’ve started reaching out to those who have written about the iOS App.

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Do give the app a sign and share your review. We played with the app and must say that its very well done and solves an unstated pain-point.

Recommended Read: HTML5 Vs. Native App Debate – Here Is What You Need To Know

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The Appnomy Conference: Mindblowing Content + Exciting App Demos » August 27th, Bangalore (details). Learn the art of building an 'APP Business'.

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» EasySign Launches Android App–Brings Different Pricing For Android Vs. iOS Appstore @Pluggd.in.

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Singapore’s MoVend adds Alipay and Cherry Credits, hopes to break into China

Mobile in-app payment platform MoVend, developed by Singapore-based Stream Media, has announced on 11th October the addition of two new payment options: Alipay and Cherry Credits.

This brings the total number of payment options supported by the Android and Windows Phone 7 version of the SDK to six. Alipay, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com and widely known as the PayPal of China, registers over 550 million users in China and facilitates more than 8.5 million online transactions daily.

“We are very excited about integrating Alipay as a payment option because it will greatly benefit international developers looking to break into the Chinese market” said Chua Zi Yong, CEO of Stream Media.

“We understand the difficulty developers face in reaching out to the Chinese market due to certain restrictions. This addition of Alipay as an in-app payment option on MoVend will also enable users in China to make in-app purchases using a platform they are familiar with and one that they can trust.”

The other new payment option, Cherry Credits, is a virtual currency used by over a million online gamers globally. It allows them to purchase in-game items on multiplayer online games like Dragon Nest and Storm Online.

Developers using Alipay will receive 70 cents out of every dollar for every in-app purchase while those using Cherry Credits will receive 65 cents out of every dollar.

MoVend’s new release also features a security upgrade that prevents the tampering and modification of an app’s code. Any changes made to the app will be detected and will result in its termination, which prevents unwanted transactions from occurring.

The platform was launched in July 2010 and now also supports carrier billing in over 37 countries and 170 operators. They also help distribute MoVend apps to partners like SingTel, Samsung, Money Online, Sony Ericsson, and more.

In February 2011, Stream Media, MoVend’s parent company, raised S$1 mil (US$0.8 mil) from Stream Global and Singtel Innov8.

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SAP Ventures Invests $10mn in One97

SAP Ventures has invested $10 million in Delhi-based mobile internet services firm One97 Communications.

One97 earlier raised investment from Intel Capital, SAIF Partners and Silicon Valley Bank and the fresh round of funding will be used for expansion in emerging markets like Asia, Africa. One97 is betting big on the emerging opportunity in Mobile Internet Business In India and has also invested in several SE Asian startups like Tencubes (which was acquired by McAfee).

As per ET, One97 crossed a turnover of Rs 200 crore this year (from Rs 11 crore revenues three years ago).

SAP Ventures earlier invested $10mn in Justdial (along with Sequoia Capital).

Recommended Insight:  Smartphone Insights: Indian Users Now Spend More Time On Content Than Voice and SMS

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The Appnomy Conference: Mindblowing Content + Exciting App Demos » August 27th, Bangalore (details). Learn the art of building an 'APP Business'.

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» SAP Ventures Invests $10mn in One97 @Pluggd.in.

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Cloud Based Publishing Platform Genwi Raises $4Mn From Nexus Venture Partners, Launching In India Soon

US based Genwi has raised $4mn from Nexus Venture Partners and will be launching in India.

Genwi is a cloud based publishing platform that enables publishers to create and manage interactive, social, and live media apps on iPad, iPhone, Android, and HTML5.

Genwi has over 1500 apps built using its tablet and smartphone publishing platorm and products include Mobile Content Management Server (mCMS), iPhone, Android, & HTML5 (iSites) App and iPad App.

With the mCMS™ media engine and GENWI’s flexible client architecture, the flow, navigation, and content organization can be revised instantly and made immediately available to app users. Apps do not have to be resubmitted to the app stores for approval and users don’t have to upgrade their apps for small changes and content updates. This allows companies to create apps on mobile devices that are much more flexible and continuously upgradeable much like a SaaS product in the web space.

The company earlier raised funding from Inventus Capital/Quest Venture Partners and the additional capital will be used to build out the infrastructure and an extensive app network to offer more advanced monetization and distribution features for publishers, global expansion and the development of multilingual functionality.[source]

The company is soon launching its service in India, which is quite natural owing to growth in media space in India.

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The Appnomy Conference: Mindblowing Content + Exciting App Demos » August 27th, Bangalore (details). Learn the art of building an 'APP Business'.

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» Cloud Based Publishing Platform Genwi Raises $4Mn From Nexus Venture Partners, Launching In India Soon @Pluggd.in.

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