Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Disclaimer: I didnt come up with these.. but I thought it was quite good (:
http://www.life123.com/relationships/communication/conversation-topics/funny-conversation-starters.shtml
What superhero would you be and why?
This is an absolutely silly question that is perfect if the mood’s too serious and needs a little humor. The question can lead to playful debate and help everyone feel a little more relaxed.
What did you want to grow up to be when you were little?
Everybody wanted to be something when they were little, be it a teacher, fireman or rock star. This little question can be greatly expanded on and the answer can lead to all sorts of jovial conversation.
If you could trade places with anybody in the world, who would it be and why?
This is one of the more funny conversation starters to answer, as it allows for lots of creativity and personal reflection. The answer says a lot about the person without being intrusive.
What kind of music band would you be in?
Almost everyone has wanted to be a rock star at one point or another. This question brings in much more digression and discussion than just asking what music a person likes.
What color do you hate?
This is a plain fun question that has no real significance other than being different. It gives everyone a chance to get creative with their wording and vent a dislike for something very minor and meaningless.
What was your favorite toy as a child?
This is one of those simple questions that everyone can quickly answer. It may have been a cherish doll or a toy truck they always wanted, but this usually makes a great interlude question between more serious topics.
What is the most disgusting food you’ve ever tasted?
Everyone has, at least once, tasted something that was truly terrible. This funny converation starter helps you compare and contrast your experiences while offering the perfect opportunity for each of you to tell a funny story.
If you were in a circus, what would your job be?
Hey, we’re all allowed to daydream, and the answer to this question can be somewhat telling. The conversation can evolve into why they would be the clown, strongman, ring master and so on.
Saturday, October 17th, 2009
Prediction Market first gained some fame when Google (who else can it be…:) announced the positive usage of the concept to allow their employees to ‘bet’ on predictions - such as certain launch dates, choice of project ideas, etc. Prediction Market has been slated to be an exciting, new technology for many years now, but until Google came out in 2007 and again in 2008 to announce the benefits, it was in realistic, imminent danger of becoming an almost-there-but-lets-RIP-it technology.
A quick primer on Prediction Market is probably helpful if you have not already wiki it: Prediction A, B, C, and D are listed in a virtual stock exchange, with a price of $1. You are informed that you can buy shares in each prediction stock, and the prediction stock will be priced at $10 if it happens, and $0 if it doesnt. (implicitly each of A,B,C and D has a 25% of occuring, and only 1 will occur). The price also changes according to market demand and supply matching, just like real world stock exchange.
When Gartner listed PM in its famous technology hype cycle chart, I had to admit my cynicism at first. For a start, how can a betting platform qualify as a technology? At closer look however, a technology empowers the organisation as well as bring new dimensions to the business process. A Prediction Market fulfills this; by incentivising a crowd to bet on predictions, an organisation can expect the following:
- Instead of merely expressing an opinion, the speculator now makes his choice based on what he believes will happen. The fundamental difference lies in what a person believes if he was or not rewarded.
- The speculator may also make his choice by ‘timing the market’. That is, he buys a prediction when it is underpriced, and sells it when it is overpriced. If he wants to benefit from groupthink, he may buy the prediction that everyone believes in irrationally, and sells it just before the final outcome of the prediction
- Participants are also naturally more interested in such platforms than standard surveys and questionaires.
It is thus no surprise with such compelling composition of data that companies such as Inkling, Crowdcast have already jumped onto the bandwagon in enabling enterprises to tap on “Wisdom of Crowd” for collective intelligence. However, there are some pre-requsites that has to exist for this predictive technology to work. 1) Sizable crowd 2) Incentives and Motivation 3) Ease of use. (Now you see why PM is easy to deploy in Google; 1) thousands of employees 2) huge chest of cash 3) super smart employees who would have no issues with simple math). In some cases, data may also be meaningless from frauds and extremely biased (see http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/JC14Cb01.html)
In my next post, I will discuss some possible configurations of Prediction Market that would address these issues. As you may have realised by now, I am a huge fanboy of PM 
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
First up, some references:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=278451
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1232366
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490
http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html
After sloughing through silos of Google results, I summarize my findings as below:
1) When you first get your battery, do a calibration. (go to pt 3).
2) Also, calibrate at least once a month. (go to pt 3)
3) You can calibrate by first charging to its full capacity, and leaving it in this state for 2 hours. Then, perform a full discharge. Leave it for 5 hours after your MBP sleeps… (save your work!) Next, simply leave your connector in until battery is fully charged.
4) Ensure 2 discharge cycle twice a week at least - i.e. make sure u earn 2 discharge cycles a week. 1 discharge cycle can span over several usage without the connector plugged in. You can verify this with programs like iStat.
Voila… now let me come back to this post 6 months later (;
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
There are rarely successful businesses that followed through what they had wanted to do originally. See Facebook - if you have seen the original interface at thefacebook.com (its original name), you will know Facebook was meant for college students in the early days, particularly for Harvard students. Apple changed its name from Apple Computers because they realised they have evolved from just selling computers. Yahoo was supposed to be a directory service, and Google’s page rank algorithm was pretty much the only USP. Dell remains pretty much a JIT operation but they are now better known to produce cheap business desktops. Saying all startups should be adaptable, agile enough to adjust to the business climate and needs of the market is akin to saying the Moon is round. The room to evolve is critical for a startup because great ideas do not happen overnight, and instead many times through much trials, pain and even dark moments to finally get the right mix. Other times, its purely luck that the right person comes along to join your team or to refer you a great deal.
In itself, evolving a product is an art. There are many evolution outcome of a kickass idea:
1) Vertical Evolution - Your idea evolves in a manner where you start earning bucks off the guy up/down-stream of your supply chain. For e.g. if you originally planned to sell cupcakes, you need flour and sugar. If your business begins selling flour and sugar as well, that is vertical integration, and if you decided that flour and sugar are much more profitable, that is when your business will evolve vertically.
2) Horizontal Evolution - This is a much more common form of evolution; using the cupcake example, you may decide to sell brownies, pizzas or even coffee instead. Your business model may change a little, but you are still generally making money from almost the same group of consumers, or similar consumers.
3) Business Model Evolution - Instead of making money from the consumer that stops by your shop, your sales may from from mainly corporate customers. Your cupcakes may instead become complementary products for other cafes. You may even give cupcakes for free to the public and instead ask people to donate to your piggy bank, or even request them to do a survey, and get paid for the surveys from a research company.
4) Radical Evolution - Now, your cupcake business is not really selling cupcakes anymore. Instead, you have decided to become a school teaching how to make cupcakes. Your business model has changed, your staffing needs are adjusted, and even your supplier is no longer the flour man, but an Internet marketeer.
5) Bad Evolution - To be honest, this really isn’t a brand new category of evolution; it really is a bad evolution that can happen from any of the above strategic decisions. Bad evolution happens in many cases, such as when your competitor squeezes you out of the original domain forcing you to adopt poorly thought business models or diluting your brand by doing selling desperate products you have poor knowledge in. In a nutshell, bad evolution is an evolution of an idea which is not properly controlled and ill-managed.
I come up with the EVO rule which I hope some can find useful for managing this process - namely Establish, Verify and Optimize.
ESTABLISH your needs, your weaknesses, your strengths and the market conditions. Establishing the status quo in a wholesome manner is beneficial to seeing the whole picture. There are many ways you can do these: Porter’s 5 Forces model, or a simple SWOT analysis. Is there an opportunity you should exploit, or is there some fundamental weakness in your startup which no VC can agree with? With the cupcake example, you may want to establish firstly that your sales are bad not because you suck in baking, but that the recession is looming around. Back such statements up with good data, such as focus groups and conversations with peers in the industry.
VERIFY comes in after you decided to evolve. Verify that you have not steered off into a road where you have no competence in. If you have been baking cupcakes your whole life and that is the only thing you know, do not sell brownies just because it is the trend for the year. If you indeed possess the expertise to make brownies, verify that this is the new startup life you want to lead; pretty much selling anything that is in trend, and getting ready for more evolutions. Ensure also that the evolutions you have executed do not confuse your current customers, and articulate the new offerings clearly. Be sure that your passion has not been led astray, because without passion your startup life is going to be very very miserable! Lastly, verify that your evolutions are meaningful, financially of course. Run them through your potential customers, in networking sessions and your board of advisors. After implementing them, monitor them closely and note the progress.
OPTIMIZE your knowledge/intelligence in the new inroads you have carved. Bearing in mind you are almost starting all over again, you are slightly disadvantaged compared to your peers. You can expand such business intelligence through more reading of books, blogs (of course!), or get a team member/intern/consultant to run through such research in a dedicated manner, and impart to the team afterwards. Employ someone who is already experienced if you have the money is definitely the optimal solution.
I know I am being generic here about the EVO rule, but someone has to start somewhere (; Please feel free to drop me some comments.
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
I recently attended a session by Mr Joichi Ito on the topic of “Consumer Web in Focus” , and those who are lucky enough to get selected to pitch should know exactly why I haven’t stop praising the man since with the one-on-one session on FAME. I tweeted immediately on the most important takeaways on that day; #1 Develop a Scientific Approach (A/B) for Testing #2 Establish that WOW factor in the first 5 mins #3 Ensure Survivability in our game for all players.
In the talk itself, Joi spoke about the different stacks in the Internet, different tiers of VCs and how good products do not necessitate good a strong traction. The best lesson of the day imo to most aspiring entrepreneurs is on how startups should really “just do it” because it may cost more to find out if a product is really feasible than to work on the actual application suite itself. And to do that, your development methodology has to be agile and iterative.
Meet Extreme Programming (XP), one of the Agile methods Joi spoke about. The most “notorious” rule in XP is the arguably the concept of Pair programming. Most of my peers swear by the inefficiency, but they also tend to overlook some core benefits. Having multiple pair of eyes on the same screen in theory can produce better codes and applications in the long run. The programmer becomes disciplined while getting the occasional slap-on-the-wrist from his comrade. The comrade provides a second opinion on the functionalities, style and refactoring method that the programmer coded. The end result is both of them learns from each other and one can be sure pretty sure that the codes do what the client requires because 2 heads think better than 1. Still, time is an expensive commodity in the IT industry, and people gets edgey over such perceived redundancy. I would suggest that pair programming can evolve into 2 developers sitting alongside each other with their own macs, constantly checking on each other’s progress and using Subversion to sync their codes. (I will talk about SVN in another post) - lots of communications take place verbally to ensure the requirements are “what they are”.
The most important rule of Agile Development is probably the iterative nature where you can expect many many releases. Again, having multiple releases (not of the whole damn suite, but instead of individual components) again reaffirms the product development guy’s vision, as well as allowing the marketing person to track with his focus group. Any cost in changes is limited to between T=0 and T=1, where 0 marks the start of development and 1 marks the first release. At the end of the day, it’s about coding that “thing” quickly (e.g. with ROR) and roll it out to the market quickly in anticipation of Change Management. In Joi’s view, this makes much more sense than trying to figure out if your product works. Doing it on the cheap is feasible compared to 10,20 years ago (think waterfall approach, gasp*)
I would like to take the liberty to suggest an extension; Invest in refactoring your codes and deploying elegant framework (MVC is a nice pattern). While Joi is right about developing a product quickly to feel the market pulse, that does not mean you prioritize speed over scalability and elegance. I propose the 40/30/20/10 rule; Spend 40% of your development efforts coding, 30% testing, 20% refactoring, and 10% documenting and making sure others understand whats going on. The Web is an amazing paradise to launch products, only if one can scale and adjust at god speed.
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Reference from url below:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8633568
If you realise you can no longer resize icon size in Finder, do not panic and start cursing Apple’s latest update yet. Nobody broke your touchpad. Go to Finder, Preference, Advanced. There you should enable “Zoom using Touchpad”.
(;
Friday, August 15th, 2008
Project Management suites are, in my own words, absolutely essential for application development companies. They empower project teams to manage documentations, plan milestones, organize meetings and facilitate communications - and more importantly, involves our precious clients seamlessly so you don’t have to waste too much managing tedious, angsty, never-ending back & forth communications. I can now claim myself to be a real matter expert in this field because I have tried all of the above mentioned applications before settling for 1 for my purpose. I must say there is no 1 single perfect suite for my needs, as they certainly have different offerings and features. I certainly have my preferences though. While the above apps are not the only one, (there are others like 37signals’s basecamp which cost quite a tidy sum.. you try them and let me know how they fare), they are certainly free at least to a reasonable certain extent. Without further ado, there is the lowdown on them:
Codebeamer
This is the very 2nd project management tool I have ever used after Project-lifeline, a now defunct project management tool developed in house by SMU Students. Codebeamer, developed by Itland, does not come cheap for its commercial version. Its free version allow only up to 5 users, and with many functionalities disabled. When I contacted the salesperson to enquire about the cost, they give me the impression of being rather shady - they evaded a question I have regarding whether the free version had a certain feature (which he told me its only available on paid for version, but I later discovered myself that the free version had that feature), and quoted me quite an astronomical price - about USD$1,000 for about 100 users (though my company has obviously not grown that huge)
Service aside, Codebeamer has a subversion integration capability that allows administrators to set up SVN easily. Under documentations, ACL is nicely implemented. You can even plot sequence diagrams and other uml notations with text. CB has a very nice interface which is using to create your own wiki blog, and a nice integration workflow structure which allows linking of documents to everywhere else. Like Zoho, Codebeamer has a forum functionality and notification mechanism for new documents and forum post.
What I do not savor however is the lack of Calendar function. Codebeamer has a tasklist and milestone feature but for me that is insufficient. Codebeamer, which is being supported by JavaForge, may be well-liked by big software firms but for my purpose, I needed something that is easier to use and integrates well with word documents. One more thing; it looks horrible on Safari and Firefox 3.
Google Docs & Calendar
My pursuit of an integration tool with Calendar and Documents bring me towards exploring Google’s offering - Docs and Calendar. Now there is a huge problem 2 hrs into my experiment; Google Doc does not offer project management features at all. Instead of a many-users-to-1-portal-with-many-docs model, they use a many-users-to-many-docs model. Meaning, documents are being shared at a user level, instead of at a project level. Thus, it becomes difficult to manage these documentations. A solution would be everyone share a single Google account to log into the portal, but this opens a can of worm on audit trail issues. Without any doubt though, Google Doc is easily the best in the office suite in terms of usability.
On a separate issue, Google Calendar is just beautiful to bits. It is easy to move and drag events, and has a nice reminder feature (I heard if you are in States, you get SMS reminder service). Google Calendar allows users to share calendar and to publish their own. I will be looking closely at Google’s foray into project management aspects.
Dotproject
This is an open source project from the land of Mercedez (and CB). The best part of it? It is free, deployable on your own server (like Codebeamer), runs on PHP so you can just use some webhosting companies and has many plugin availables from the OS community. However, the userablity of Dotproject has a lot of room to improve; In an age where AJAX is so commonly used, Dotproject lags far behind in user interactivity.
gForge
To be honest, I only tried gForge, which is vastly similar to Codebeamer in its core features for a while before I give up. I cannot comment much except that it is free, and allows users to set up SVN and track bugs easily - just like Codebeamer. What stops me from proceeding further with it is in its lack of abilities to allow me to write documentations immediately without having the need to upload.
Zoho Projects
I love Zoho to bits. Ive told many friends about it, and even the forum moderators in Zoho. To me, Zoho projects is almost on the brink of perfection, except for some minor bugs and wishful features I really want; such as integration with Zoho Calendar (which is nice to drag and drop), and offline synchronisation of documents. Zoho projects is Google Docs in a project management suit. It has a wonderful multiple portals and projects management which allow users to change portals and projects easily. The calendar features is easy to use and Zoho Write (MS version of Ms word) and Zoho Sheet (MS version of excel) is very friendly (:
Another article about Zoho that gives you a better idea on the office applications:
http://www.twistermc.com/blog/2006/06/20/zoho-online-office-applications
I feel Zoho Projects has huge potential, with its killer low price and responsive replies response from its support. With its all round integration functionality, the value curve offering, imho, is a notch above others.
Thats all folks. Please leave me a comment if you disagree or if you like what you read (:
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Something very funny happened before Damon, my trusted sidekick, and myself headed to Swissotel for the iJam networking session (announcing launch of iMatch) yesterday. We happily walked towards Raffles City and go up to the ballroom in Swissotel. What followed was a series of confused hotel staffs not having a clue of any IDA event when we couldnt spot nor sniff a single clue of any IT geeks. It turned out we were at the wrong Swissotel (as Damon put it,”Oh there are more than 1 Swissotel!” and to which I replied,”*gasp*”). We were supposed to be at Swissotel, Merchant Court. Nice.
Ok so lets move on to discuss more serious “Series” - Series A, B, etc funding. These are terms use for different stage of fundings for startups by Venture Capitalists (sometimes jokingly nicked Vulture Capitalist - credit to my portfolio management professor, whose identity i shall not divulge :). First of all, I must say that it was a fruitful talk which was worth all the hassle Damon and I experienced prior to it. The panel boasts of a excellent concotion of local and international VCs and Technology experts - notable attendees: Ms Lauren Liang, Mr Pierre Hennes, Ms Ong Siu Leng. While they offer some pointers which many of us would have already known, they reinforce some beliefs in myself and offer new perspectives to what VCs want to see in young startups.
Some important takeaways buried deep in my head:
1) Early stage VCs look not just for a great idea. The assessment team plays an important part.
- How creative is the team?
- How is the synergy and energy of the team?
- The character of the team: Are they determined enough to walk the talk throughout? (without falling for the temptation of bigger money and job elsewhere?)
- Keith: An academia pointed out in a research that a trait of successful startups is that it has more than 1 founder, between 2 to 5, while 3 is the optimal number.
2) Localisation or Globalisation? The panel is quite divided on this. However, they all agree that it is important to focus on a segment of consumers on whatever choice you make. More importantly, get your first dollar in quickly, at least to assure your backers.
- Keith: Bear in mind Singaporeans being Singaporeans, we are a very unique breed of citizens compared to many others in the world (just hear our accent, our English, our love for durian, our loyalty to the ruling party :P). E.g. We can largely generalise consumer habits of Malaysians and Indonesians, or Taiwanese and Japanese, but what works in an already small Singapore market more often than not will not work for many other countries. Be prepared to customize radically when scaling abroad.
3) Be prepared to sacrifice, even if it means you being the CEO. When big brother wants to bring in someone more qualified and experienced to be the CEO, you should let go.
- Keith: Which is why, please hedge yourself with an MBA education (:
4) VCs require that the team has enough stakes nonetheless, so to ensure they remain motivated and responsible for their gains and losses.
5) Cold Calling the VCs may work, but networking would speed things up to establish a relationship between the VC and the Startup team. No one said it better than Mr Pierres when he said it is “like a life long marriage”. Relationships, or guan xi always work like a charm.
- Keith: I have to admit that I’ve never enjoyed networking, so I always go in with a mindset of making friends for learning, rather than other tangible benefit. It helps.
6) LIVE: One of the panelist said a rule of thumb of a successful product encompass the following attributes: Lively, Interactive, Visual, Experiential.
7) Me-Too Products - VCs generally do not require startups to be a from-scratch-innovation based company. Me-Too products can equally be, if not, more successful and astute investments for them.
8.) Are Singaporeans really that un-creative and un-innovative? Mr Douglas Abrams from Expara disagreed, and had seen his fair share of innovative local start-ups. Singapore, while not comparable to Silicon Valley at the moment in terms of the eco-system of funding, has good potential with our good infrastructure, supporting government schemes and growing amount of wealth (especially private) in Asia.
- Keith: I suppose the link to how growing wealth in Asia equates investing in Singapore startup is this: 1. Singapore being a financial hub for Asia 2. It is easier to manage startups in Singapore if the money comes to Singapore 3. Thus, with 1 and 2, go for local startups.
9) The question of IPO came up when a gentlemen asked what are the other exit points other than IPO and M&A? I didnt really get the answer other than a brief remark on convertible debt aka convertible bond (which I don’t think have to be these 2 exit points anyway), a panelist cautioned startups not to be overly confident and declare “I will be IPO-ing in 2 years”. No one can guarantee an IPO.
10) This has to be the best advice all day: You will always need more money and time than you think. So plan carefully and do not overspend. The worst mistake that can occur to a startup is to hold multiple series for extra funding when they realised they do not have enough. A business should be focused on the product, and not funding at all times.
Please feel free to comment on any points (:
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
When releasing a product (especially innovative ones) in the IT domain, just how important is it to do it right the first time?
The experts are divided on this: Some would advocate the importance of showing others something that works and impresses, and emerge from your dark garage with a huge big impact that gets everybody’s jaw open - at the expense of time/effort and perhaps lost ground to competitors.
Others would tell you to build a community with a beta launch early, get their feedback and consistently improve. The latter situation helps you gain a first mover advantage, gain some sort of credibility as a company that delivers gradually, assures your VCs, but as you would have guessed, the wow effect would have been subsided. In terms of branding, your company is gauged accordingly to that buggy beta launch you have. In terms of marketing, you could miss out on the advantage of viral marketing (my reasoning is that if you potentially lose part of your community with a less than perfect application and miss out leveraging on their “word of mouth”)
I do not believe dude-my-solution-works-for-you-and-all exists. As usual, I listed down some guidelines that will help a startup determine its strategy, and end off with a possible solution startups can consider.
1) Can you foresee competitors that are already working on something similar?
If you do, you probably should release your application in iterations, even if it its less than perfect. First mover advantage has so much benefits that you simply can’t miss out in the fast moving IT world, and building a community with your beta can lock them into your application. Releasing early iterations also place pressure on competitors, forcing them to show their hands with less than perfect applications. You are better off than ignoring them and run the risk of competing with a even better application which the world saw earlier than yours.
2) Can you decide well enough what is good for the community? (Do you even know em?)
One of the best lesson I have learned in many years is from the trendsetting guru, Mr Steve Jobs, who quipped that focus groups are useless because most of the time, your customers does not know what they want. However, if you feel pretty inadequate in deciding what THEY want, you are better off releasing your early versions of your ugly application to them. Who knows, they may be more than happy with that! Also, if you are still unsure about your target market, an early release may help you decide. It is common in every business to evolve and adapt to the market pays you more.
3) Do you have enough engine and dolli?
The later you release, the less confidence your investors will show in your company, and so will you to your corporate bank statements. Slow release may also result in demotivated staffs who have been waiting to capitalize on their equity stakes. You run the risk of your best programmer quitting you for another company just because the work they do don’t seem to see daylight as the days dragged on with another of your “Oh I think it will be great to add this function!”. At the same time, releasing your application gives potential new talents a preview of what great idea you have, thus attracting them towards you.
In a nutshell, the 3 questions above in fact are point to the same rhetorical question: Just how important is your product coming in with a BIG BANG? (Kaboom and Cracklings)? If it is a matter of life and death (which is implied from your answers from above posers), and yet the disadvantages bother you all the time, you can consider what I call a ring-fence launch.
In a ring-fence launch, you ensure that competitors and general public are not able to access the application. Get only friends (preferably close ones) to see your application, as well as reiterate to them the importance of keeping to themselves. Explain to them your motive, and ensure that this is far from being the final product, and that their word-of-mouth help is critical to success when you eventually do the final launch. This is helpful because you do not want them to ignore your fiinal product due to boredom and lack of excitement.
Personally, I would chose to launch something that is 50% completed - with quite a different look to the final look and feel. I would even use a slightly diff name for this application in my url ,e.g. such as myproduct_beta such as as myproduct. This is to illustrate the key difference in both releases to the test community.
In my next post, I will discuss the different kind of beta launch and more strategies in doing so. Please feel free to comment on this post!
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
Before you gogoo “Not another Mac vs PC arguement”, I need to state upfront I am writing only to to glorify my choice. I’m truly grateful that I made the switch over to Mac 3 months ago - my x41 IBM was close to dying of slowdom then. Speaking of which, I had to admit I was stupid in installing Vista in Bootcamp, because there really is no use for it. (If you really want to run a windows environment, I suggest you use a simulator tool like VirtualBox).
Though I really miss the 1.2kg weight of that little machine x41, my heavy MBP made sure I had not carried the extra 1.5 kg everyday in vain because:
1) Expose is really fun for me to change windows, and I sometimes do it for fun. And I like going to desktop with a single quick movement.
2) Front Row shows me latest theatrical trailers - nice! & I can play with Apple Remote.
3) Audium and Growl notification are so pretty.
4) I can do 2 finger scrolling. Trust me on this one, it does not get better than this.
5) I can switch tabs while browsing with swiping using MultiClutch, and back/forward with rotating. MultiTouch is more useful than I originally thought.
6) Photoshop and Illustrator loads very very very quickly.
7) Girls notice me a little bit more in Starbucks (I think).
8.) I am encouraged to use Terminal to do my work. And talking about work, you can only develop iPhone applications on Mac because Apple says so. (SDK only works in MAC OS)
9) My Mac has crashed just once in the 3 months despite my rough approach in installing stuffs.
10) Overall productivity increase by about 10-20% for me, since I can multitask better now because of many reasons cited above.
Alot of people “thinks” others buy Mac to show that they are really cool, fashionable and even stupid. I have to agree partly - many individuals I know buy Mac because they are attracted to the interface and designs, but as a business owner, getting Mac for the whole IT department saves much trouble in IT issues such as virus outbreak or hdd crash. (My MBP auto defrags all the time). From another perspective, there are so many Mac OSX developers that you have a good chance of getting some applications you fancy in Windows already.
I have to do virtual meetings over the net and my partner and I work through iChat with remote desktop presentations as well - thus we do not have to invest in other software. Thus economically, Macbooks make alot of sense too.
If you disagree with any of my reasons, comment and let me know now!
