The World In and Around Us: 2011

American Airline: Chapter 11 Restructuring?

Two days ago, I tried to change my American Airline ticket to an earlier day. The agent won't change it for anything less than $650.

I tried to explain to her that the new flight is flying in a few hours, the seat is a perishable good that she is unlikely to find any taker in the meantime, any new money I give her is pure profit for them (free money with almost no incremental cost to AA), and they get to relinquish my original seat with a lot more time to re-sell it to someone else.

She asked me if I see other flights from another airline. I told her that Delta is offering me another flight for $450 and they will have to at least match this price to make any sense for me to switch. I can even overpay a bit because I have a partial refund from the original ticket.

She said - "But we already have your money". I thought I mis-heard her because I feel a bit being held as hostage. But she said it twice!! Basically, she told me to pound sand. Anyhow, I bought from Delta in the end.

Today, I got an email from AA about their Chapter 11 with a nice video from their Chairman.

It's true that AA already has my money, but they could've had my money twice AND re-sell my original seat once more to someone else. I talked to another agent later and turns out that the agents don't get any commissions from making a sale. No wonder why they weren't more aggressive to earn my business and the attitude seems a bit "arrogant".

Extraordinary Individuals from Business Schools: INSEAD, Harvard, and Stanford

I had dinner with the President of INSEAD North America few nights ago and I learned that the North America alumni forum is coming up. The forum list reads like a group of really accomplished and well known people.

This got me wondering. How many alumni from business schools will actually make it big? Who will be truly world famous?

Unlike many business school ranking on career satisfaction survey or international metrics, this has a bit of raw, cut to the core, kind of feeling to it. Fashionable MBA ranking metric changes every year (to sell more papers???). This metric tends to be more stable overtime. Having said that, this doesn't measure the ROI of a particular MBA program or the responsiveness of the alumni network. If you're interested in which school you should apply to, you can read more from my classmate here.

Rather, my goal here is very simple - which business school is graduating extraordinary individuals - ignoring whether the school is really nurturing them or just simply good at picking them among the applicants.

To find graduates who have made it I ran a search on how many executives with profiles on Forbes and Businessweek with mentions of each institution. I only ran this for INSEAD, Harvard, and Stanford. I was going to do Wharton, Kellogg, and IMD too, but these schools have names that are a bit harder to filter out (e.g. Wharton has a huge undergraduate program). Feel free to add these in the comment section.

This is the raw data:

You can use this method to do it for your favorite school with these keyword combinations - e.g INSEAD, Harvard, or Stanford with their many strange name combinations (is this an intentional branding strategy...?)

Note that this method includes everyone with references to the school (e.g. who worked for the school or graduates with EMBA, PhDs, etc...). I also included the # of alumni and the size of the class in case you want to figure out the "efficiency" of a school at churning out extraordinary people. MBA/year is taken as of 2010. For INSEAD, this has increased gradually over time from ~50 MBAs/year five decades ago to 980 MBAs/year today. What I really want is number of living alumni who are between 40-65 years old, but I don't know how to get that.

If anyone knows a cleaner data source, a more global data source, or a more comprehensive data source (e.g. includes politics) feel free to leave me a comment :-)

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Using Machine Learning to extract topics from a 650 page book.

[This post is continuously updated since I just bought it last night from feedbooks...]

The goal is to allow me to get a quick overview of this 650 page book and figure out where to read (since I know the Steve Jobs story pretty well and I'm more interested in some of the key short stories that I didn't know already).

This is the first try. Haven't used any external data. Didn't model the correlation among topics and changes over time. Software ran for about 1M iterations.

Me: @kinwong
Design Advisor: @inasee
Technical Advisor: @seannyg

0 pixar disney katzenberg
1 baez young egan
2 gass share unix
3 raskin project jef
4 lasseter smith software
5 blue box dylan
6 brother levy hawaii
7 ipod fadell music
8 intensity drop vegetarian
9 perspective objects emotionally
10 einstein heroes ceo
11 music itunes ipod
12 board ceo financial
13 apple company product
14 phone touch glass
15 devices cloud hub
16 sculley macintosh division
17 paul education electronic
18 gates microsoft windows
19 disk frogdesign susan
20 atari alcorn bushnell
21 dylan bono ipod
22 truth campbell levitt
23 markkula ii mike
24 flew release rights
25 costs struck casual
26 macintosh ibm ad
27 coleman players stand
28 macintosh hertzfeld mac
29 reed father erin
30 options stock price
31 kottke friedland zen
32 hewlett book packard
33 sculley pepsi marketing
34 express interfaces intensity
35 suit perfection leaving
36 powell cancer health
37 iger eisner deal
38 intel sec grant
39 wozniak woz personal
40 father school electronics
41 college lsd campus
42 romantic attention condition
43 laser mr ideas
44 ipad digital apps
45 ad commercial ads
46 imac drive tray
47 computer computers show
48 google iphone android
49 murdoch books dinner
50 parents joanne paul
51 amelio woolard ellison
52 lawsuit smartphones steel
53 filter trait maintain
54 eason information hormone
55 powell laurene smith
56 mountain boy pot
57 lisa father simpson
58 jobs steve time
59 raise childhood assistant
60 wayne hp keyboard
61 perot rand lewin
62 stores store johnson
63 rounded fonts bauhaus
64 hurt carrot fasts
65 cancer cook rubinstein
66 people make made
67 debi paris france
68 house found family
69 software products system
70 crowd feet thrown
71 reality distortion field
72 design products simplicity
73 lisa sony drive
74 palo alto wife
75 metal semiconductor feet
76 cook airplane players
77 xerox atkinson parc
78 ive product jony
79 brennan relationship calhoun
80 clow crazy licensing
81 public ipo shares
82 audience onstage appeared

Digital Media 101 for Writers - What you can do in the next 60 minutes

(I wrote this post for my author friends)

Why you should care?

Your online presence is a long-term asset that stays with you even when you move across jobs, projects, companies, and books. It accumulates over time.
Building a passionate community allows you guarantee sales of your book, build up future pre-orders, and have the opportunity to mobilize your community for meaningful purpose. (I'm also writing a post with examples of authors who are leveraging their community for the greater good)

What you can do in the next 60 minutes:

This becomes your permanent space online. Make sure that people can subscribe to your blog via RSS and comment on it.
(Optional) Get a domain name with your name (e.g. blog.rickykinwong.com).
(Optional) Integrate it with disqus commenting system. See the posts on my blog as an example.

Signup for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

(Optional) Use Tweetdeck or Seesmic to follow your friends.
Post interesting short content on twitter/facebook/linkedin “updates”. Occasionally post updates to link back to your blog to buildup your “space”.

Subscribe to popular blogs/sites in your topic with a rss news reader.

Recommended: Google Reader
Search for other blogs in your topic - Google Blogsearch or Technorati

Write posts that are designed to be shared and link generously to other bloggers so hopefully that they would link you back.

You can start by linking to this post here :-) http://blog.rickykinwong.com/2011/02/digital-media-101-for-writers-what-you.html

Seth Godin's Domino Project

What is the future of books? It's a big question with big and bigger conferences and I plan to talk more about it in future posts. But this one is about Seth Godin's Domino Project. Seth Godin said that he has given up on publishing, but looks like he is becoming a publisher himself with the Domino?

My understanding is that he is trying to get folks who already have a small audience, help them self-publish books that are shorter, and then allow small scale, personal gifting to tap into word of mouth to grow it into a big audience.

Would it work? Can we find the right balance for a book that is short enough that a lot of people would read it and long enough that people would want to pay for it? This could all be speculative because I've never met Seth Godin and don't have any private information about the Domino Project.

It isn't the first time folks try to create shorter content (the Economist sells a bunch and TED is trying to do the same with TEDBooks). What's new here is that in the ebooks world, the incremental cost of "printing" a book is essentially zero and we can let readers gift additional copies cheaply, as long as the "gifter" doesn't gift it to people who would've bought the book in the first place (i.e. you don't want to eat into your own sales). I suppose that's where the concept of tribes comes in. We need a way to differentiate the original book from the one you get as a gift. e.g. a special, collectible edition of the book for true fan and basic electronic version that you can give out for free or at a discount. It's not a leap of faith. Musicians have experience doing this already. The Grateful Death lets tapers share personal (i.e. low quality) concert recordings and so does Lady Gaga.

My minor disagreement is that I think the future is bright for traditional publishers too. If Seth's venture does well, traditional publishers can figure out which "short" book takes off and help the author expand those into a full book.

MobNotate - Very Early Alpha Version

The last two weeks I had some time to push out an early alpha of mobnotate. You can find it at www.mobnotate.com. Basically, you email us any html webpage at post@mobnotate.com and we will reply you with a link to your document/ebook hosted for free with added features such as reader annotation capability and integration with Facebook (e.g. any contribution by anyone will get broadcast to their wall if they're logged in).

This is a very very small part of what I want to accomplish with ebooks (which is a much bigger vision and involves more with mobile phones and tablets). The goal of this web version is to find out if we can use social media to help authors enrich content and increase the engagement from the readers. My success metric is to help writers (that's you!!) to get 10X more readers or 10X more engagement :-)

Current feature list (suggestions appreciated!!)

Email a html webpage attachment to post@mobnotate.com and we will reply with a link. That means you can use any offline editor you want and just export it to html before emailing us.
Click in the doc anywhere to contribute content. Paste a link to an image or youtube video in the comment box to automatically embed multimedia.
If a user is connected to Facebook, any comment he/she makes will show up in their Facebook wall so that your book/document would get some viral marketing benefit. This also makes your content more social and personal.
A "Top contributors" ranking on the right to encourage participation from your readers.

Some sample documents,

Art of War - Sun Tzu
Alice in the Wonderland
FCIC Report (fresh off the press!!):

If you're a reader, try reading some of the ebooks above and help enrich the content. Or if you have original content yourself (either you wrote or is in the public domain), email it to post@mobnotate.com as an attachment and share the reply link with your readers to jumpstart the community. Feel free to email me anytime if you have any suggestions and ideas. By the way, if you have content that you expect to get a lot of readers let me know so I could try to prepare for it first :-)

Ricky Wong

Hey there!!

You can call me Ricky. I'm a technologist, business person, and a student of life. This blog documents my observations and discoveries. I worked at Google, studied at INSEAD and UCSB, and have lived in France, Hong Kong, California, and Singapore. My passion is in building (hopefully useful) things. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Please don't feel alienated because of this "global digital native" persona. I actually prefer talking to people directly. Oh, btw, "Kin" is my cantonese name. This is how you write it "键". I can tell you what it means next time we meet.

Nice to meet you too :-)