Crystal Hayama Chen

January Jumpstart

Crystal — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:49:03 +0000

Hello,

January really flew by and was probably the shortest month I have had in California to date, especially with such an incredible number of events I attended. Let’s dive in:

CES (Jan 7-10, 2010)
With over 120,000 attendees this year and 2500+ exhibitors, the Consumer Electronics Show’s main venue, the Las Vegas Convention Center, was filled to capacity with gadgetry and electronic accessories. The Convention Center is at least the size of three football fields, so you can imagine just how much there was to see. The most apparent observation from the show was the 3D TVs and Internet TVs being heavily pushed by the television industry. My photos from CES are here.

SOCIAL GAMING IN 2010 (Jan. 21, 2010)
Hosted on the Google Campus in a meeting room adjacent to their enviable Dance Studio, this panel featured five leaders in the gaming industry who represented Zynga, RockYou, ThreeRings, and two other local gaming industry entities. The purpose of the event was to hear and discuss their predictions on where social gaming would go in 2010. All the panelists seemed to agree that Facebook is currently the best distribution platform for social games and that growth in the industry would continue. Specifically, the panelists also predicted:

* the re-definition of “digital goods”
* more cross-platform games
* more sophisticated ad strategies in game mechanics and in payment mechanics
* continued Facebook growth
* even more “social” in social games
* more ad revenue experimentation
* mobile app developers might surprise the social gaming industry this year

DESIGN 4 DRUPAL (Jan. 23, 2010)
Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) which I strongly believe will become the system small-to-medium-sized businesses and communities go to for their website solutions in the coming 2-3 years. In my quest to become a Drupal “Ninja”, I attended the Design 4 Drupal Camp at Stanford University. One of the positive outcomes of the conference was a small group initiative to organize a weekly training course, possibly in Mountain View. If you are interested, let me know. If you’d like to learn but can’t make the course, I highly recommend starting off with “Using Drupal” from the O’Reilly series.

GIT CATALYST CONFERENCE (Jan. 26, 2010)
In exchange for volunteering to edit the conference video footage, I was given a free ticket to attend the Catalyst Conference in San Francisco. Hosted by Girls in Tech and largely billed as a “women-only-please” event, the conference featured top women (and one or two men) sharing their tips/thoughts on Branding, VC, Negotiation, Social Media, Developing, Gaming, Social Causes and Innovation. It was excellent having the company of 300+ women all day and any conference that provides peach smoothies and Boudin box lunches is tops on my list. To see the tweets from this event, search under #gitcc.

GOINGS-ONS
Two weeks ago, I began doing some work for an internet company in Mountain View and have since decided that I must cut down my 3.5 hour/day commute. I’d like to move to the Palo Alto, Mountain View, or Sunnyvale area immediately. If you know of any potential housing situations available there, please put me in touch!

Lastly, I have an extra hardcopy of Tim Ferriss’ “Four Hour Work Week” so if you would like to have it, let me know and I’ll make sure to get it to you. Thanks so much and have an amazing February ahead.

Warmest wishes,
Crystal

What I Learned from CES 2010

admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:08:07 +0000

1. 3D TVs (with and without 3D glasses) and Internet TVs are being pushed heavily by the television industry.

2. Even wearing sneakers, my feet were tired and sore from a day of walking. Spare yourself, don’t even think of wearing heels or formal shoes.

3. Besides the general “word-on-the-street”, Twitter and Facebook were key for being in-the-know on the location of show and social events.

4. It’s great to be a blogger at CES. The CES Blogger’s Lounge provided breakfast, lunch, refreshments, wi-fi access and even nice shoulder bags for bloggers.

5. Driving through Death Valley at sunrise is amazing.

December Tidings

Crystal — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:00:05 +0000

Hello Friends,

I hope December so far has brought you more quality time with loved ones and a near endless supply of delicious gingerbread man cookies! I am just reaching my 100th day milestone here in the Bay Area and can’t wait to share with you the highlights of the past month.

BAY AREA STARTUP WEEKEND (NOV. 20-22, 2009)

I had heard some buzz about startup weekend through a couple sources, including a worthwhile book I read by Bob Walsh called “The Web Startup Success Guide” and Women 2.0, an organization that hosts a similar Startup Sandbox weekend. (They are hosting their next one Feb. 5-7 and I will definitely be there). What it is is a weekend workshop where bunches of people work madly to bring the most compelling pitched ideas to life in just 54 hours. Wanting to participate, I contacted one of the the international organizers and he gave me the green light to shoot video there. With my friend Niten hosting, I put together a short segment about the first night. Here is the video which also got posted on the bayarea.startupweekend.org page as well!

AGILE DEVELOPMENT

As I’ve traveled along fifteen years with the “development” of web development, I’ve found that there is now a distinction of sorts between “Waterfall Development” and “Agile Development”. Waterfall development is a top-down management type approach to creating web/technology products and is considered the common standard. However, in the Bay Area where web developers are king and startups are in abundance, agile development has caught on, primarily because it keeps developers happy and keeps the organization’s approach lean (and therefore competitive).

Recently, I’ve joined several developer groups, including the PHP-developer group, MySQL group, and the Drupal group to actively address the skills I have that I want to improve. This week, I attended a joint-group session called “Going Agile with Scrum” where I learned that “scrum” is an organizational framework for managing complex work such as new product development. The main part of the meeting was a company, genius.com, demonstrating a case-study of themselves prior to adopting a scrum framework and after. I found the evening greatly enhanced my understanding of development processes and enjoyed the company of a very good-natured developer crowd.

GETTING REAL

Just weeks before the that meeting, as if in anticipation of it, my extraordinarily talented web app developer friend Allen recommended I read a free e-book called Getting Real. This e-book, while a little extreme and limited in scope, was a fantastic introduction to what it means to ‘be and think agile’ and how to be agile when developing something, particularly a web application. If you don’t want to spend the day reading it, I’ve created a list of what I found to be the most important takeaways which you can read in less than a minute!

CES

In a couple weeks, I will be indulging the geeky part of me and fulfilling another small personal dream of mine to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. CES is the biggest electronics trade show in the US that I know of and a gadget lovers dream! If you are attending too, let me know as I am still in the process of arranging travel and accomodations. If you want me to look into anything for you while I’m there, let me know. Also, if you know of any company or organization needing some footage from the event, I can do that as well! Just have them email me directly. A big thanks again to my wonderful friend who leveraged a ticket for me (you know who you are!).

GOINGS-ONS

Besides these highlights, I am still the social media intern at the startup with the heart of gold, everywun.com, my last film processing and editing project for asiapacificfilms.com wrapped, and I am working on a couple very small web development projects. I have made positive strides with my own small startup and am at the stage where I am creating HTML mock-ups of the first, simple version of it. It feels incredible just to have made it to this point!

I’ve met some amazing people this past month including:

* a seasoned audio engineer who’d like to get more into post-production
* a radio producer intern who appreciates tribal belly dance
* a strategizer in the gaming industry who also takes wedding photography
* an angel investor
* a user interface designer
* a Google Wave developer

* a life-storyteller who is extraordinarily generous in sharing his know-how

* a jazz singer who is also Marketing Director for a music industry startup

INSPIRATION

Lastly, I finally had a chance to read Randy Pausch’s, “The Last Lecture”. Professor Pausch was an honest man with many of the traditional common-sense values that propelled a post-WWII America into its position as world superpower. Goodness knows a little of that common sense in these modern American times now goes a very long way. One of the “Pauschisms” I enjoyed most was:

“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the OTHER people.”

So go take a look at your brick walls and figure out which ones you want to take a bulldozer to. I’ll come help

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

That’s it for this past month! Thank you for being a part of my monthly emails; if you no longer want to receive these anymore, just reply with the word “unsubscribe” in the Subject line. If you have any comments or suggestions for me, by all means, get in touch!

Have a wonderful, beautiful winter holiday. May yours be filled with much joy and blessed with peace.

Sincerely,
Crystal Chen

Top Takeaways from “Getting Real”

Crystal — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 05:10:19 +0000

How to “get real” while developing your web application/website/anything.

GETTING STARTED
Keep your product simple and manageable so you can love working on it.

STAY LEAN
Keep your organization light, open, and able to wear many hats.

PRIORITIES
Focus on the vision and forget the details. Stay in the present.
Deal with future problems and issues in the future.

FEATURE SELECTION
Build half of what you want to have.
Say no to new features A LOT.

PROCESS
Brainstorm, sketch, mockup HTML screens, code.

THE ORGANIZATION
Make sure to celebrate the small victories.

STAFFING
Look for quick-learning generalists who are happy, reliable, and good writers.

INTERFACE DESIGN
Start with the interface of the core function first.
Context over consistent design.

CODE
Less code is best.
Let the programmer decide what tools to work with.

WORDS
Documents for websites are inefficient; create stories, sketches, and prototypes instead.
Give your site a personality and voice.

PRICING AND SIGNUP
Give away something for free.
Let users come and go easily and give them full access to their data.

PROMOTION
First put up a teaser and invite the mavens, then put up a promo site with a tour and highlight the monetization areas. Last, launch and communicate progress.

SUPPORT
Build a product that doesn’t require training. Do your own support and respond quickly!

POST-LAUNCH
Stay active on your site and stay aware of your competitors.

CONCLUSION
Success is about great execution so focus on your weakest links.

November Blessings

Crystal — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:00:28 +0000

Hello and Happy November everyone!

I hope you all have had a month filled with great opportunities! Since my last email nearly a month ago, I was fortunate enough to come across an abundance of amazing experiences, notably these two:

BIZTECHDAY 2009
I had the good fortune to be able to volunteer as a videographer for BizTechDay 2009, a 2-day business technology conference for small business owners and entrepreneurs. During the opening speech, the speaker spoke of how our country was founded on the principles of small business. He also emphasized that there was no better time in recent decades than now to start a small business. The conference inspired me to delve deeper into my own entrepreneurial ideas and the energy and enthusiasm from everyone speaking and attending elevated my thoughts to a state where I literally woke up days later with an idea for a startup. In typical entrepreneurial style, I have been thinking feverishly through the business plan and reading books pertaining to the particular kind of website and business I want to launch.

CHIC MEETS GEEK
A week after BizTechDay and thanks to Carol Tran, a geeky litigator and an impressively chic woman, I attended a social event she presented called “Chic Meets Geek” in collaboration with the SF Opera Bravo Club at Pier 38 in San Francisco. They had plenty of VIPs present, a salsa dance performance, and even an a cappella performance by Randi Zuckerberg and friends. I re-ran into plenty of people from BizTechDay there including @EdithYeung, the Executive Producer of BizTechDay 2009 as well as the man “behind the scenes”, Andrzej Buszko. I also bumped back into @ColinAC, the man behind the BizTechDay UStreams (that’s a link to just one of the many seminars during the conference), the BizTechDay photographer, Tim Wagner, and the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. I enjoyed Matt’s down-to-earthiness despite him being one of the biggest forces behind blogging as the world knows it today. The party itself was an exercise in contrasts (geek and glam, high culture meets code culture) and made for a surprisingly uncontrollable amount of conversation. Food and drinks were in good supply and it was a stimulating balance between socializing, speakers, and performances.

GOINGS ONS
Besides my current work and various projects, I am also now the intern behind everywun.com ‘s Twitter presence, @everywun. Everywun is a philanthropic startup working to bring more good into the world. I manage the company’s account, grow relevant followers, engage with them through DMs, and keep on top of the latest advancements and uses for Twitter. I believe this will be a great experience and stepping stone towards my ideal work at a tech company someday.

AND YOU…
Two people I know personally are actively looking for new opportunities in their fields:

* A Software Development Manager with 11+ years of extensive software development experience spanning startups to established public companies. Roles have encompassed hands-on development, technical architecture to engineering and project management. He enjoys yoga and meditation.

* A Business Analyst/Project Manager in the computer software industry with demonstrated ability to lead complex projects and full-cycle implementations. He loves helping others.

If you have any interesting stories you’d like to share or events to recommend, please send it along to me and I’d be happy to talk about it in my next email.

I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Plan your holiday now as there are only 10 days left! As I won’t be going home to Hawaii for the holidays, I will be delivering meals in San Francisco through the Little Brothers organization, SF chapter. You are all of course most welcome to join!

Sincerely,
Crystal Chen

Top 10 Takeaways from BizTechDay 2009

Crystal — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:56:55 +0000

10. Consider advisors. Advisors can contribute their experience towards your startup, helping you to avoid potential pitfalls. Compensation can take the form of a small percentage of the startup.

9. Reliability first, then skill set. Hiring the right people means valuing dependability over ability.

8. Blogging is for keeps. If you maintain a blog, keep in mind that your posts should become MORE valuable over time.

7. Have a bootstrap mentality. Keep your startup costs down. Buy all your office equipment used. There’s plenty of supply if you look on Craigslist or in Sunnyvale warehouses.

6. Know your Cost Per Customer. If you can calculate the exact cost of acquiring one customer, you’ve got a pretty good handle on your business.

5. Define, Test, Measure, Feedback. Rinse and Repeat.

4. Social issues make for media relevance. To get publicized, tie your business to a larger social issue and the media outlets will be knocking on your door.

3. Think Cash Flow ASAP. Getting to cash flow should be the number one priority for a startup. It’s also a key metric of success.

2. The market is now a conversation. Join that conversation. Yes that means nurturing your Twitter community and Facebook Fan Pages.

1. If it’s your passion, follow it. follow it, follow it.