Stairway To Heaven

Our team went for the exhibition in the RISE conference organized by Web Summit. It was fruitful to learn from entrepreneurs and investors in the community. During this event, we demoed our newborn product, Tutormy , which is a mobile market place for tutors and students to meet and communicate. Some highlights: Regarding products: We visited most educational related product booths during the event. There are basically three types of products in the market. Dashboard management system for schools to better manage their internal resources, including teachers, students, courses, etc. The system also serve as a engagement tool for schools to communicate with parents and other relevant entities. Most teams who are doing this kind of B2B systems are mostly working on domestic markets(spotted some teams from Delhi and one from Philippines). Some have already been quite established and looking for new opportunities(Found one Norwegian company). Marketplaces. There is a HK based st...

I attended the Echelon Asia summit on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was nice. Echelon this year comes with an app which help attendees better connect with each other. It's indeed pretty helpful. In a situation when I cannot find a speaker in the back stage, I connected her with the app and it really helped out. Top highlights:  The talk about scalability: How HotelQuickly manage to launch 6 countries all at once and scale so fast all across. Speakers: Tomas from Hotel Quickly and Suhair from Google. The talk about relationship between southeast Asia and China. Managed to talk to Thomas Tsao and William Bao Bean.  Learnt a lot from them and got to know how VCs think. The talk about relationship between southeast Asia and Europe. The story about freelancer.com. I posted my request to do SEO for my websites. Within minutes, I received 10+ free lancers asking to provide SEO service for me. Unfortunately, the one I chose with high rankin...

It was quite a coincident that this week's meetups all lead to the topic of innovations in health. This Thursday, I attended a luncheon with Ms. Tin Pei Ling who is the youngest member of Parliament. She has a deep knowledge of health&health care related politics including the CPF medical schemes(medisave, medifund, medishield), government's attitudes towards mentor health, etc. I raised some questions regarding healthcare innovations especially for the aging population. It is an important topic in the Smart Nation speech delivered by PM Lee which I attended last year. Ms. Tin gave some suggestions and encouragements. Really appreciated. That same evening, I went to 237.io in China Town to attend a health related event named Smart Health coLAB which happened to be a hackathon briefing. I've got to know people from that industry and the pains people are really facing. The event organisers invited some industrial people to share their solutions to the current...

I attended the innovFest 2015 event. It was quite eye opening. Besides the booth, some topics in the forums also interested me. The first topic I joined was the Kopi Chat with Yossi Vardi, a famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor. He is straightforward and humorous. When talking about the most important reason why people wake up with a great idea but ended up sleeping without executing anything, he collected answers from the audiences. One answer pretty much fitted his appetite-- "People fear about losing faces". He shared his opinion with the quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually st...

Fooyo recently received a request to make a news classification app. It sounds quite challenging and interesting. We feel excited to solve hard problems. The request is a bit too urgent, but we managed to deliver it with good feedbacks from the client. The requests is to crawl news data from various news sources, delete the duplications, classify the news into different categories and then display them on a mobile app. It sounds quite straightforward, however, each module actually involves quite hard components that need deep knowledge/understanding to solve them. In summary there are four components: 1. A web news crawler 2. A duplication deletion mechanism 3. A news classification mechanism 4. A mobile app which interacts with the server A web crawler is used to crawl news list data and the corresponding page links. The web contents of the page links are then saved into the server. There are quite a few good open sourced crawler out there, e.g., scrapy .  Some...

I officially quitted my job in ViSenze in Feb 2015 to chase my little dream -- to create a lean tech startup that can make the world a better place. In fact, my cofounders and I started working together in the early 2013 where we developed  an iPad clock game which solves a small problem in a fun way.  Ever since then, we have never stopped our passions in making products that can benefit people. Though we worked on many projects in different teams in the past two years, we still cannot forget the most memorable days when we worked together in the midnight in School of Computing and go for supper together. That was the best time in my life so far. On a usual day in April 2014, I proposed the idea to make a small and beautiful tech studio that makes elegant apps/products.  A lot of feedbacks came. Most feedbacks are just comments without any actionable suggestions. Only one friend, Rick(one of the cofounders) who was exchanging in Switzerland(ETH) saw my posts and th...

A lot of things happened in the year 2014.  A lot of people to thank to, also a lot of people to apologise to... Thanks to ViSenze who gives me various chances to learn different skills. I worked out my first java project with highly professional team members.  I learnt how to translate business requirements into user cases, how to initiate execution plans and prioritise, how to design a system in a more elegant manner, how to code java properly, Spring, Akka, Unit test, Angular.js, etc.  I worked out the first version of iOS sdk based on the Java sdk and Faceplusplus iOS sdk .  I worked out a demo site based on the PHP sdk and fixed a few bugs in the PHP sdk. I learnt to be more careful implementing front end CSS and HTML and be a more detailed person. Thanks to all the helpful people in the company who would like to share their knowledge and expertise, especially to Guangda who helped point out my problems straightforwardly no matter how naughty I am, to ...