Reflections of an Entrepreneur

Order approval is an important part of the order fulfillment process because it is necessary to verify the authenticity of an order, cross reference with the payment received, send the order to the appropriate warehouse (or warehouses) for processing and check for any other variables that may arise, such out of stock items, pre-order items, pending echecks and so on.

This used to be a completely manual process in the past but we refined it into a two clicks per order process over the years. The task was still pretty uninspiring and took a fair amount of time daily, most of which had to be done by moi.

This ‘exciting’ order approval job has now been passed on to Tom, our resident hardworking bot. Recent extensions and upgrades to his system gave him the ability to take on the entire order approval task at blinding speeds and pin point accuracy.

Tom will approve ALL unprocessed orders within a minute from the time that the payment instructions are received from our payment processors PayPal and WorldPay. PayPal typically talks to Tom within a few seconds but WorldPay can take up to 12 hours to process instructions. There are of course cases in which an order requires additional verifications and these are processed within 1 business day.

Thanks Tom, do enjoy your new job! I’m off to do this human activity called dinner. Customers will appreciate you as you work harder, faster and more accurately than any human can.

Ahr! Apple, you’ve just caused me a small fortune thanks to your fantastic app store. Steve, I do agree that this is the biggest launch of your career and I congratulate you for it, but you’ve made it far too easy for us poor people to spend money compulsively in just two taps!

Congrats on the new software. It has much needed improvements all around and I’m glad to say that I’m finally using my iPhone again.

It snowed in Paris two days back and it was a pity that I was not around to experience it. I love snow, not the kind that becomes a sluggish paste on the roads or the kind where you need to dig yourself out of each morning, but the moderate kind that floats down gently from the sky and gives everything a nice white coating.

More importantly, snow makes everything peaceful to me. Peace is a luxury in this world, especially so in our hurried lives and on a larger scale, the conflicts of the world.

I’m not a man of many words, as you’ve probably noticed from the lack of updates to this blog, but my latest passion is one that helps me to express myself through what I see.

The world is beautiful and better appreciated at certain angles. In many ways, the same can be said about life. Life sucks as we know it but it’s really up to us to make do with what we have, to continually strive for improvements and yet be happy with our successes or achievements.

Photography - the beautiful art of capturing the surroundings in a different perspective. My photo gallery is available at http://photos.mingkeong.com

It was nice to read a nice feedback in our support system today because people who contact our support team are usually those with problems or questions.

We do get frequent ‘thank you’ for our assistance and we do appreciate the gestures of thanks, but rarely do happy customers contact us as follows:

He may have described his e-mail as ‘little’ but it’s the e-mails like these that make us feel that all of our hard work has come to some good. Thank you Mr Saw!

I’m feeling really happy now, as if I was on top of the world. The half bottle of excellent Anjou from Val de Loire that I just downed probably had something to do with this euphoria of relief that rushes through my veins but I would like to think that it’s simply because of several factors – I’ve just completed a major product kitting and stock migration project here in Singapore, sales have jumped so high that I feel dizzy just thinking about it and I’ll be returning back to Paris this Sunday. Andrea Bocelli’s beautiful voice filling up my office does help to set the mood wonderfully.

I was in Singapore in the past 3 weeks to oversee several massive kitting and stock migration projects that will stock up the Singapore warehouse nicely with all the new products that were recently launched. The projects were massive by any measurement and the completion is such a huge relief as our non-USA customers can now get what they want for a mere US$3 for shipping.

Of course, our US customers can continue to select our US warehouse shipments but shipments from the US warehouse to non-US customers are costly. Worldwide shipments from Singapore on the other hand cost a mere US$3 and we even throw that in for free when more than US$30 of products are purchased in a single order. This drastic reduction in shipping cost obviously contributes to a much higher demand from non-US customers (basic economics. Price goes down, demand goes up), resulting in much bigger presence in non-US markets.

Happiness, what exactly is happiness? Different people perceive happiness in different ways, depending on their outlook in life, their culture and what surrounds them. Some people are happy if their banks are filled with money, others are happy if they’re successful in life, and the list goes on. Is a person successful because he’s happy or is he happy because he’s successfully? What exactly is success anyway?

Happiness and success can almost be used interchangeably in many cases because of the way they’re tied to each other. People measure success in different ways and I will not go into the technicalities because there is simply no right and wrong. Humans are complex creatures who can only be depended on to complicate the hell out of life, just like what I’m about to do. Some people measure success by the amount of money they earn, the advancement in their careers, the size of their car, the size of their houses, or by some other frivolous measure that I’ve yet to comprehend.

Success to me is simply the acceptance of what your life entails and the satisfaction with what you’ve achieved thus far. Your car will never be big or fast enough and neither will your house be big enough. The pursue of material wealth is never ending and quite frankly, pointless. What’s important is the satisfaction with whatever we have but with the aspiration to take things to the next level. One can never be happy if you’re never satisfied. What’s the use of success if you’re never satisfied?

Aspirations to take things to the next level are of course essential, without which, we’ll still be living in caves, but these aspirations should just be goals that we set for the betterment of life in general. Ironically, I’m probably the most demanding person for myself when it comes to such aspirations but I’ve learnt to be happy with what I have.

Happiness, to me, is simply being with the people you love, which is why I’m happy as I’m finally returning to Paris after 3 weeks of agonizing work to be with my dearest. Of course, my happiness can come in other forms, such as a new Ferrari or Lambo, but are these really essential? Absolutely not. You’ll be amazed at how happy one can be after stripping away all the non-essentials. Happiness can be as simple as a nice afternoon in the gardens staring at the fountain and holding your other half in your arms.

When I was in the army, during the tougher times, happiness to me was simply to sit still at a spot and not move. Happiness to many in this world can be as basic as having food to eat or even a roof over their heads. Be thankful for what you have. Shops will tell you that this is a season of giving, but that’s because they want you to buy things from them to give to others. I’ll say that this is a season to give thanks for what you have and be with the people you love.

My work in Singapore is done for the year and I’ll only be back next year for more pain. Of course, the daily operation of the business continues wherever I go with the help of technology and the business functions well thanks to the wonderful team we have.

Do I always blog when I’m half drunk? Yes.

Happy holidays everyone! Be happy.

Dear Sony,

Work has been overwhelming lately and I’m sure that it’s no different at your end thanks to the year end orders. I’ll however take a moment to indulge in my fantasy, in an attempt to preserve whatever shreds of sanity I have left.

I have always been a VAIO fan since my first TX laptop about 3 years back. This gradually evolved to the current SZ model that I run iStyles on. Solid computing hardware has always been essential to our operations as technology plays a major role in the backend daily activities of the company. The SZ is wonderful but it’s starting to strain my aging muscles as I travel too much. The battery life is the other major disadvantage in the SZ as mine only lasts for 2.5 hours on the standard battery, unlike a TZ’s 7 hours.

I’ve always heard non-Sony believers complain and laugh at how stupid people are for buying VAIOs because they think that the laptops are simply overpriced. I feel sorry for these people as their words are based on unsustainable facts and other “I heard from A who heard from B” experiences. I’ve had laptops from practically ever major laptop vendor in the past and yours were the only one that works for me. My laptop is probably the next most tortured equipment around here other than my own body and yours not only survived, but continue to serve me well. Technically, you’ve stuffed your laptops with more than most people can appreciate but I do see the beauty underneath that shiny carbon fiber chassis as my background is not very much different from the crazy engineers you hide in your design centres.

What I want for Christmas is a Sony VAIO TZ laptop, but not just any VAIO TZ, but one that I simply cannot find anywhere else. You have got TZ models with 48GB SSD available in Singapore but with absolutely no 3.5G connectivity whatsoever. I need both SSD and 3.5G because there is unfortunately no way to stuff in my nice little Option Globetrotter 3.5G card as PCMCIA could not fit into the TZ range. Fine, I will settle for the slower Expresscard but my Novatel 3.5G Merlin sticks out bigger than two sore thumbs and completely destroys the beauty of a TZ laptop, not to mention the increase risk of accidents due to the protrusion.

I can grab a 3.5G laptop from UK SonyStyle for shipment to my home in Paris and I am glad that you’ve finally decided to make a SSD model available, but why just 32GB for the SSD? A third of that will go into the basic software and that leaves me with less than 20GB free. I need at least 32GB free because iStyles’ data is a major data hog that continually grows. Why can’t we have 48GB with 3.5G available in European models?

I dug through the Japanese on your website and found my dream models, but these are only available in Japan, with Japanese operating systems and keyboards. What will be nice is a model with a 64GB SSD and 160GB hard disk. I don’t need the DVD drive and rather have that 160GB in there. I know that you have this in Japan but they are only equipped with a local 3G standard that does not work elsewhere.

And yes, I need 2GB of RAM. The models in Singapore only come with 1GB and it’s a waste as there’s only 1 memory slot, but it’s good that you realize that 2GB should be available as standard in your European models.

It’ll be nice if the laptop comes with digital TV capabilities that work with DVB-T as well. I know that those you have in Japan work with a local digital broadcast standard but the rest of us watch television too and we use DVB-T when on the go.

Please do not keep all these yummy technology only within Japan. Just a recap – I need a TZ Duo core at 1.2GHz with 2GB RAM, 802.11a/b/g/n (yes, I know you’re hiding those n models in Japan only), 3.5G, 64GB SSD, 160GB HD, Vista Ultimate and pretty much the standard for the rest, oh and in Bordeaux (ps, SonyStyle UK spells this wrongly) with carbon fiber please. Throw in the DVB-T if it fits but that’s not a must-have.

I’m not greedy and am only asking for existing technology that you have available in Japan, but just not in the right order for any model available out there. Hey, be glad that I’m not asking for a SLK like I tell everyone else! I’ll leave my little purple box on the table beside my bed. The laptop should fit in it. Thank you!

Your loyal fan

Web 3.0 is frequently referred to as the next evolution of the Internet, where machine interactions start to become more prominent as machines start to understand each other. Artificial intelligence will drive the growth of this new era where the web will literally evolve by itself as machines learn from each other and from humans. All these mambo jumbo sound like the basic backdrop for “yet another” machine takes over the earth movie but if you dive into the details, you’ll find that the concept is not as far fetched as it seems.

I have always been a firm believer in the use of technology for businesses for a couple of reasons:
1) Technology, if implemented correctly, simplifies business processes
2) Technology usually results in cost savings in the long run
3) Business processes that are enhanced by technology usually runs more effectively and efficiently compared to a non-technical implementation
4) Algorithms are more predictable than humans and can be fine tuned to near perfection
5) Machine failures can be reduced to virtually zero through proper redundancy and procedures
6) Machines do not take breaks, sleep, eat or go on strike

This posting was inspired by the creation of a number of new bots on iStyles recently. As the number of orders increase, the manual stages of order processing start to become tiresome and time consuming. If something was not done to refine these processes, we’ll soon be doing nothing else all day but order approvals and processing, which is a painful and boring job. We would rather focus efforts on more exciting hobbies like the enhancement of the shopping experience and expansion of the product range, while leaving the boring stuff to our robot pals.

I will not go into the details of the technologies we employ for competitive reasons but an example of the order processing refinement will be to phase the shipping notification e-mails from the warehouses automatically into meaningful data that is then used to immediately trigger the shipping notification for our customers and update the orders accordingly. Such processing of information, I believe, is bordering on the edge of the much hyped Web 3.0 technologies, but without the artificial intelligence. The machines in the different systems start to understand each other and communicate via e-mails in our case. Such machine interactions remove the need for a human component to read the e-mails and manually “ship” orders as was the case in the past, resulting in near zero lag in shipping notifications and zero manpower required for such a stage at our end.

Over time, we will be developing more bots to automate other processes. In short, we are lazy people as we automate everything that we can through technology so that we can focus on more value add and interesting work. Many of the interactions and e-mails that are sent out are not written by humans, but rather, by intelligent agents that were taught to converse like us humans, but unlike us, they can access a wealth of information relevant to an order almost instantly for a richer presentation, respond and process jobs in record time, and complete tasks with virtually zero errors. Despite the automation, it is always important to us that the human touch is never lost as we train these bots to write what we ourselves would write.

Tom, for one, is not human and you can find him happily posting in the Blog Comments forum or in his little thread in the Off-topic forum. His job in the Blog Comments forum is to gather all mention of iStyles in any blog in the world and post the information accordingly. His role in the Off-topic is more for fun as users can chat directly with him. You will also find him sending e-mails to customers during the order approval process.

I’ll make this short as there are several chunks of stuff to be completed before I fly back to Paris on Thursday and the massive headache is not helping. ERP softwares are absolute necessities in any business and I cannot imagine any business that has hopes of doing anything decent not using one.

Intuit recently released QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for free in their bid to compete with the free web-based softwares popping up every other day and Microsoft’s Office Accounting Express. There is simply no excuse for entrepreneurs not to use an accounting system anymore. The $100 barrier that kept small companies in their warm stone age comfort of Excel or paper based accounting is no longer an excuse.

I’ve been a great fan of Quickbooks Premier since the early days of iStyles (then iPodStyles) because of the extensive range of features and simplicity of use where an accounting degree is not required to create an invoice, unlike some of the other alternatives available. We’ve since migrated all our systems to SAP BusinessOne for more robust database performance and features that our business needed as we grew, but QuickBooks will always be remembered fondly.

If you’re running a small business and using your good old excel sheets, go grab the new Quickbooks now. You’ll never regret the step and will look back wondering how you ever survived without it. If you handle inventory and want more capabilities, look at the other members of the QuickBook family. Either way, you will need a basic accounting software at the very least and QuickBooks is probably the best way to start.

I’ve never been one for social networking in the past simply because of the ill-conceived notion that such activities were for the younger generation to fill the void of what would otherwise be real world relationships. It was only recently that I gradually embraced social networking, rather late for someone who loves to live on the cutting edge of technology, and am gradually discovering the advantages and disadvantages of such a networking medium. Sure, I was on Friendster many years back when it was cool to sign up and add friends but I’ve not touched that account for years.

Social networking is part of what is otherwise known as Web 2.0, the explosion of user generated content, a massive topic where long dissertations can be written about, whether be it about the intelligence of the masses or about the amount of crap out there, but I’ll just focus my thoughts on the networking component for now. How effective is social networking for an entrepreneur?

After dabbling in Facebook and more recently, Linked In, for the past week or two, I can safely conclude that networking on Facebook will be of little value and may not be worth the time and effort in growing relationships if the sole purpose is only for the business. I am however a little hooked because the platform has enabled me to keep in touch with all the friends I had in the past. Without such a platform, it would have been impossible to track where everyone went or even to communicate with them.

I am pretty new to Linked In and will hold my reservations till later, but I’ve thus far been pretty impressed by the implementation of the service and the possibilities that it holds for businesses in the search for partners and employees.

Business owners explore new technologies to determine how these can be used to grow their businesses. The participation in social networking is not going to bring about any significant or even tangible benefits to a business in terms of sales or growth but the links can be useful in the search for a new employee with a good fit in the organization. The secret to business growth is not in the participation of web 2.0 services, but in the creation of tools to facilitate the grown of the community and their contributions, to facilitate web 2.0 - this is till we reach web 3.0 where we have a semantic web of machines that interact with each other intelligently and grow. Painful lessons learnt from my previous work on Hayek’s theory of artificial intelligence evolution in an economy of agents may actually come in useful after all.