I paid the price of "goofing-off" last weekend as I started working on the assignment from hell - Engineering Risk-Benefit Analysis (ERBA) assignment #4. With 8 hours spent sketching the product concepts for Product Design & Development the prior night, I was further delayed in working my ERBA homework. Furthermore, when the best of minds in class were publicly confessing that they were having difficulty in doing the homework, I became even more worried. But being indoctrinated in the values of teamwork during our SDM orientation, a few of us got together 12 hours prior to the submission of assignment and put our minds in solving the problem set. Thanks largely to Matt and Dave, the collective efforts was a huge success. We completed the entire assignment, including heinous problem #4, in 9 hours. So far, much of my experience in team-based exercises at MIT SDM program has been positive. I am definitely an advocate of team collaboration.

Now, let's talk ERBA. It's not surprising that the last assignment had generated a lot of impromptu discussion among my fellow SDM students about the class. Many voiced that there is little practicality of the topics being taught so far and a few insisted that the class content was poorly delivered to the students. My argument for ERBA has always been that the concepts taught in ERBA help engineers/managers to make better decisions in systems applications through the use of probability and statistics. Moreover, how can we leave MIT without getting slaughtered by Math? But I do agree with John who argued that the delivery of lecture and recitation has room for improvement.

I am loving the music from Crowded House and the Finn Brothers even more now that I have been listening to their music since last weekend. Also, with ERBA assignment out of the way, I can finally watch the Daily Show tonight.

3/2/2005 5:32:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [9]

School

Give 1 million virtual dollars to a Sloan student and see how much he/she can gain in 10 weeks by trading in a virtual stock market. And that was what I signed up for the 1st Sloan Trading Competition. The competition starts today but so far, I have not made any trade yet. I have been a little out of touch with stock trading and with a short time horizon, none of the "buy-n-hold" strategy works. I think I'll check with Sloan IS department tomorrow to see if there's any technical stock analysis tool that is available to students for free.

3/1/2005 12:53:15 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

School

On the school front, things are getting more exciting in Product Design & Development (PDD) as we get into the product concepts phase of our team's semester-long project.

On other news, I have been long-time musical fan of the Finn brothers who are better known as the founding members of the music groups, Split Enz and Crowded House. So I was delighted when I learned that they will be playing in the Somerville Theater on March 2. Unfortunately, as hard as I tried, the tickets to the gig were completely sold out by Saturday. I am very disappointed and so far my luck in procuring tickets to the shows that I wanted to see this year has been dismal. Anyway, here is the playlist of my top 10 favorite songs by the Finn brothers.

1. Better be Home Soon by Crowded House (Temple of Low Men)
2. I Got You by Split Enz (True Colours)
3. Private Universe by Crowded House (Afterglow)
4. Dont' Dream it's Over by Crowded House (Crowded House)
5. Only Talking Sense by Finn Brothers (Finn)
6. Distant Sun by Crowded House (Together Alone)
7. Recurring Dreams by Crowded House (Afterglow)
8. World Where You Live by Crowded House (Crowded House)
9. Where is my Soul by Finn Brothers (Finn)
10. Last to Know by Neil Finn (One Nil)

2/28/2005 11:57:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [12]

Music

In my quest to create what I would call the ultimate personal blog site that I can live with for a long time, has made me jump from one blog solution to another in the past month. In order to blog, you either need to have blog software running on your web host or utilize some of the commercially available web hosts available on the Internet. I was using a .NET open-source blog solution called BlogX from 2003-2004 on my website but it wasn’t as stable as some of the more popular blog software like MovableType. My laziness aside, the lack of good editing tools on BlogX was one reason why I didn't update my blog for almost over a year prior to 2005. It was only coming to MIT that Matti and especially Yoav profoundly influenced my decision to share my thoughts and life with other people online.

To save time, I decided to use a blog host for my blogging needs a month ago. My first free blog host is Blogger, which I still high recommend to people who wish to start blogging online. It was free, easy-to-use, and fast, but I wanted more features, in particular, category. So I went to Modblog, which has more features but a lot slower and restrictive on how you can customize your blog. Along the way, I tried other free blog hosts like My blogsite and Typepad but none met my needs. My blogsite impose an online ad on every client's blog, it's ugly but the blog hosting is free (well, sort of). Typepad is cool but it's not free and it's really not as good as Blogger IMHO. I don't know why I was so insistent on the feature of using icons along side with blog categories (like slashdot). Despite the shortcomings of BlogX, I was able to modify BlogX source code and implemented what I the icon-category feature quite easily. Fed up with the inadequacies of these free blog hosts, I decided to download the latest version of BlogX and create a completely revamped blog site on my own website.

When I downloaded BlogX, I was quite surprised to find that BlogX is now under new management by Newtelligence who has done a good job in maintaining the software and the software has now been renamed to dasBlog. Anyway, I hacked the source code to implement what I want and completely redesigned my website to come out with what you currently see the past weekend. There are still bugs and as usual, this project is still a work-in-progress but I am mighty proud of it. I have managed to transfer my previous blog entries but the timestamp for each blog entry was lost during transfer. So without further ado, may I present to you Cybersam's blog version 4.0. Suggestions are most welcome.

2/27/2005 9:11:28 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [13]

Blog

We have a wonderful guest lecturer in today’s Innovation in the Marketplace class. He guest lecturer was Ken Morse who co-teaches the Entrepreneurship Lab course and a class in high-tech sales. His fame prior to MIT as he claimed at the beginning of the lecture was he played a critical role in launching 6 MIT-related high-tech start-ups, which 5 did well. He thought he delivered his 2-hour highly-condensed lecture very well, in which he covered some of the material from both his entrepreneurship and sales classes.

His one big tenet that he asserted during his lecture was managers have to focus about delivering value to customer and be passionate in doing it. This is especially true for startups and small enterprises because they can't get funded if they don't have customers. From a sales/marketing perspective, you need 2 people to play the role of executive manager and sales/marketing in the early phase of a new enterprise. The president of the company has to be passionate about delivering value to the company. The sales/marketing person has to be demanding and cares about customers, not internal politics. When it comes to sales, engineers are among theworst. Engineers can demo the products very well but they can't sell. Your customer, especially the finance guy, wants to understand payback and risk, not demo or benefits. You have to explain the Return On Investment (ROI) in less than 1 minute. Unfortunately, if you look at many of the successful companies right now, it is good selling strategy that beats superior technology. While the knowledge on entrepreneurship and selling is valuable, I thought the most insightful remark from this lecture was his career. If you are in a "cost center", it's time to move to a "profit center." The closer you are to the customers the higher the advancement you can achieve. Simply put, which brings more value to the company - gaining revenue or saving money?

2/25/2005 3:06:53 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

School

I have been very quiet on cyber blogspace the last 3 days. It’s not that I have nothing to contribute to my blog, but I was simply overwhelmed by a business proposal that I need to compose for the 50k competition that was due earlier today. 2 days ago, I was contacted by a semiconductor research scientist at MIT whom I met at last week's 50k smoozing session about his interest in entering the 50k with me. I wasreally planning to enter the 50k competition next year when I would be better prepared for the competition after completing a few essential management classes. But the scientist's idea was simply too good to pass up. Our idea for the competition is to create a business venture to commercialize semiconductor material that is based on his research. After all these years working in the wafer fab as a software engineer, I actually learned more about semiconductor in the past 2 days while writing the executivesummary for the 50k entry than I ever did in my entire career at Analog Devices. You are generally more motivated to learn new things in graduate school while you tend to work on a need-to-know basis unless it's a task that you are directly responsible for.

I was glad that our team had managed to submit our entry successfully by the deadline. I'll cross my fingers and hope that our business proposal will go make it to the finals, which should make the 50k experience much more interesting. Regardless, this is a great educational venture for me whether we win or not.

2/24/2005 3:05:41 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

Entrepreneurship

I remember seeing this creature in a TV commercial during the Super Bowl 2 weeks ago. It is a bison-like robot that you can ride on. The commercial didn't catch my attention then since I didn't know what it was trying to convey. I saw the ad again earlier today and I still don't know what it was trying to convey. However, this time it did manage to spark my curiosity. From the commercial, it looks like people are getting into a rodeo ring to ride this mechanical beast as they would a bucking bronco. The ad ends with the narrator saying"Anybody can ride an Esuvee, but not everybody rides it right." For a moment, I honestly thought the narrator was asking me to test drive a mechanical wooly beast that I can ride on the road. So I went to the website to find out more about this new product. I was struggling to understand what the website is about. There is neither any product information in sight even nor background information about the Esuvee. Everything on the website is about SUV safety. It took me 20 minutes before I realize what the Esuvee is about. To my chagrin, Esuvee is pronounced as "SUV." The website is nothing more than a campaigning tool that is paid for by Ford Motor Company to educate SUV owners how to drive their vehicle safely. But I think behind all the fluff, it is also a good marketing campaign to convince people that they are not invulnerable when they get behind the wheel of a SUV. Alright to be fair, I think educating the public about car safety is a good service but I really think that the marketing strategy of featuring a product-like mascot is not only misleading but ineffective. People don't change their behavior just through education from an ad. What a waste of my 20 minutes? Can you say ASS-U-V?

2/21/2005 3:04:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [18]

Rants

Now that I have started school and didn't have the time to organize social activities for the gang, Milt took over the helm in organizing a dinner with the Hudson's and friends from 217, both parties whom we have not hung out for a while. We had great Irish fare at the Phoenix Landing where we met up with Michelle and Paul. With the exception of Paul and the Hudson's, we continued the night as participants ofan ongoing pub crawl event that a friend of ours had organized. We were joined by some SDMers and their significant others - Dave, Britney, Patty, Chris, Matt, Spiros, Ilana, and Eve. In all, it was good to hang out with old and new friends in one night.

2/20/2005 2:59:09 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

Social

Yoav, Matti, and I mentioned about the incident at Muddy Charles last Friday where Matti was denied admission to. Matti asserted that the bouncer should have used his/her judgment on Mattis obviously mature looks as an indicator of being over 21 years of age. Yoav argued that U.S. is overly litigious and relying on appearance is a risk too much for businesses to bear. I think Yoav has a good point but I cant help but to wonder where do common sense and human judgment have in todays society? Are we so enslaved to rules and so sensitive of mitigating ones liability that common sense and human judgment are merely after-thoughts. Case in point, read the following news where an ambulance was clamped down for parking in an parking spot reserved for emergency use at the Dublin Airport. Even if the ambulance was violating the no-parking rule, a simple phone call could have been made to the ambulances company for verification.

2/19/2005 2:58:36 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

Thoughts

The topic of today's Marketing class is "Do most innovations come out of systematic thinking or a "spark of genius?" I really enjoyed the last 2 marketing classes by Professor Ariely. As usual, Professor Ariely kept the class lively, which made the 3 hours lecture a little more tolerable. Anyway, the crux of today's lecture was about how most people are able to recognize good ideas but aren't able to come out with ideas, hence the common phrase "Why didn't I think of it myself?" So is creativity intrinsically a product of a genius or can we become more creative through systematic analysis of products and their attributes? The lecture went on with the notion that businesses can’t just use market research to come out with very creative ideas. Sometimes, users may not provide enough insights. Perhaps this is the reason why the most innovative ideas are the result of the so-called "spark of genius." So for the rest of us, there are many systematic methodologies to analyze the market and create innovative products. In closing, the later half of the lecture focused on 2 specific mechanisms in systematic marketing creativity - attribute dependency and replacement.

Anyway, here are some of the really funny and creative advertisements that the professor showed in class.

2/18/2005 2:57:36 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [0]

School