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Showing posts from November, 2011

How about solving a bigger problem

The Existing Great Pain In China, writers can hardly survive. As one famous Chinese writer, Han Han wrote in his blog that: “Most writers in China can create one book in two-three years’ time. Normally, they can earn 10,000-20,000 Yuan(which is around 4,000-8,000 SGD) for each book. It’s like 800 Yuan/month(160 SGD/month) salary. They’ve got no social insurance and they have to pay taxes. Most Chinese writers have a very low income, except for some very popular ones. Many writers would have to write 10,000 words/ day on websites to make a living. They can earn 2 Fen(0.4 cents) for every 1,000 words downloaded. In Qidian.com alone, there was more than 150,000 writers writing online to make a living( Qidian , 2008 ). 大部分作家两三年才写一本书 , 一本书就赚一两万 。 这些写作者们可能才年薪一万块啊朋友们 , 月薪八百啊朋友 , 没有社保啊朋友 , 还得交税啊朋友 , 比你更惨啊朋友 , 除了几个顶级畅销书作家 , 中国作家绝大部分都收入微薄 , 很多网络作家更是一天要写一万字 , 靠着千字两分钱的下载收入维生 . Say a book cost 10 Yuan. A writer can get 1 yuan, publisher 1-2yuan, raw cost(paper, printing,etc) is 2-3 Yuan and the s...

About Value

Say, you gave birth to a kid who's very talented in music. However, you do not have the money( or else) to find a great musician to teach the kid. Just then, a local musician sees the talents of your kid. He is willing to teach the kid for free, on the condition that the kid will have to stay with the musician forever(of course you have to right to visit the kid any time). The musician is not a talented,  but at least he can teach.  Will you make the deal? It's the case with our final project, Yun Reading. We're facing the problem with the future development of this app. Our money is dying out and our team mates will probably be too busy to continue with the monetization part next semester. We know our app is having a great potential, like a talented music kid. But we've got no time and money to make the talents shine. A ebook publishing company seems to be envision the value of this app in the future. The company want to acquire this app when its value i...

Farewell-CS3216

As stated, CS3216 will become a history forever from tomorrow onwards. Wish the spirit still keeps going on. Honestly, I like the course very much. Not only because I met and worked with so many astonishing people in the class, but also because the course changed my perceptions and probably my life. Before writing the personal statement, I already prepared to die in the class. I knew the nasty course will be very challenging and bring me many sleepless nights. The reality turns out to be better than expected. Yes, it is challenging to me and I worked late at night, but not as bad as worked overnight. It's a pity that Prof. Ben will never teach the course any longer. I'd like to recommend nasty courses to friends who really want to learn sth. Actually I've already recommended some of my friends to take CS3217. Hope they'll be brave enough to take the challenge. I find people who have attended that course are much stronger in programming skills and more...

Contents and users are the most important keys for the IT industry today

I got a bit discouraged when I contacted the ebook retailer last night when he said technicians are not that important in the IT industry. He said contents and users are the most important keys for the IT industry today. Well, that's somewhat true, but that's just too discouraging for us technicians. The guy is actually my first entrepreneur friend and I find him quite trustful.  However, we had conflicts when we discussed whether to make it a platform for all or simply an app for his company. Honestly, I wish we can make it big by allowing many people involve in the content contribution, either by allowing all users to upload and share or allowing retailers to sells their books on our platform. As I know from Shucang's CEO, it's legal for a site to reformat, save and share. We can handle the conflicts if people claim for abuse(delete the database immediately). However, if we try to allow retailers to sell books on our platform, we've got to develop secure DRM syste...

Long Long Way to Go

Honestly, our group is doing pretty well in this project. Though we thought we are a bit slow at the pace, we managed to show most of the functions in this week's class. Thanks to all the testing people who have gave us many feedbacks and nice suggestions, our app now has a much clearer logic flow.We kept on changing and changing, from the UI, the javascript implementation to the logic flow. We're still changing according to the feedbacks. The offline reading implementation has been changed three times. Initially we planned to store the latest 10 books the user read to the local storage, that might be good for the user if they want to read the books offline. However,that may consume too much money for them if they are using paid services to download the data. That's also slower for the loading as some ebooks can be pretty big(like 1MB). Then we changed to only download the current book. That's not nice, either. What if the user want to read another book, or else the boo...