Five Step Question Meditation
I learned this at a business seminar in Shanghai a few years ago, and no longer remember the source, but it’s proved extremely effective for me. I’m a bit of a perfectionist workaholic, and have been advised repeatedly to balance my life, get in touch with my emotions, and so on and so forth. I even took a meditation class once, but found the experience unbearably painful. This five step meditation, however, isn’t painful for me, and not only does it calm my mind, but it also serves a second purpose of giving me answers to questions. So I don’t feel that my time is being wasted. Efficient! I’ve done this standing up, sitting down, and lying down. Standing up works fine, if you’ve got room to take five steps forward, and there … Read more »
Dabble Postmortem
Tomorrow is the last day for Dabble DB, an online database services on which I ran my company for the past few years. The migration to other platforms has been painful, to say the least. Several years after Dabble first launched, no other provider comes close to matching Dabble’s price, features, or its amazingly wonderful user interface. I’m sorry it was bought up by Twitter. It should have been bought by Apple and incorporated into the iPhone, iPad, and any other product they’ve got. We really, really, REALLY love the user interface. We used it for our editorial workflow, for bookkeeping, for HR, to collect survey data, to gather statistics, and for any other company function that involved gathering and managing data. After Dabble announced its impending doom, we tried out every other platform out … Read more »
Give me that old-time COBOL code
Just take those manuals off the shelf I’ll sit and read them here all by myself Today’s software ain’t got the same soul I like that old time COBOL code Don’t try to talk about OOP What are those objects supposed to be? In ten minutes I’ll be out the door I like that old time COBOL code Still like that old time COBOL code That kind of coding just soothes the soul I reminisce about the days of old With that old time COBOL code Don’t give me .Net or php C# and Ruby are not for me One sure way to get me coding now Ask me for old time COBOL code Call me a relic, call me what you will Say I’m old-fashioned, say I’m over the hill Today’s software ain’t got the same soul I like that old time COBOL code Still like that old time … Read more »
Maria and Fons on the radio
My business partner Fons Tuinstra and I were interviewed today by David Iwinski of American Entrepreneur Radio on his The International Capitalist radio show. Iwinski was great to talk to — and the guy is an international entrepreneur himself and really knows his stuff. He’s the managing director of Jin Fu Consulting, a firm that is focused on cross-border merger and acquisition research, guidance, negotiation and execution between firms in the United States and China. Fons and I talked about how we first met in Shanghai, and Fons explained how the China Speakers Bureau works. We talked about how we started the China Speakers Bureau, and how we run the company virtually — using Google Apps, Skype, and an online workflow system running on DabbleDB. And we also talked about our … Read more »
The Media versus Marginal Cost
If you have two companies producing the same product then, over time, the price to the consumer will eventually start to hover just above the incremental price of each additional product. Not the price it costs to produce products — but the price it takes to produce one more product. Say, for example, you have two newspapers in the same town producing almost indistinguishable products. And it costs, say, $1 dollar to print and distribute one additional newspaper. The newspapers charge $2 for the papers — $1 goes to cover the marginal costs, and the rest is divided between fixed costs and profit. By fixed costs, in this context, I mean the money it costs to produce the first copy of the newspaper — the salaries of the editors and reporters, the rent of … Read more »
Free content isn’t killing journalism
Another one of our clients — a Wall Street newspaper — shut down publication this month. A couple of staffers were reassigned, the rest laid-off. We lost our anchor client, the client we launched our company with. In the journalism community, it’s common to hear that the problem is with our readers, that they’ve gotten used to getting news for free on the Internet, and these readers need to be re-educated, marketed to, manipulated into somehow paying for content again. Before the Internet, the story goes, people paid for their news. The Internet spoiled them, turned them into free-riding leeches drinking our nation’s media dry. When the media are all dead, they’ll be sorry. Readers will be stuck with shallow blogs that refer to one another in an endless cycle of navel-gazing, without any … Read more »
Two paths from DabbleDB
Over the past few years, my company has become very dependent on DabbleDB, an online relational database run by a Canadian startup — since sold to Twitter. We run our workflow systems, our accounting and billing, our recruiting, and our customer relationship management on DabbleDB. We use it as a back-end database for the China Speakers Bureau website. And, of course, we also use it for its intended purpose — to set up and manage data sets quickly and easily. The interface is so easy and intuitive — and the cost so low — that we’ve grown to rely heavily on the platform. With the purchase by Twitter, DabbleDB will either be closed down, or sold off to another company. We’re getting ready for a possible forced migration to another platform. We looked … Read more »
Working in the sun
I do not, normally, consider myself a low-energy person — I am, after all, running two companies (Trombly International and the China Speakers Bureau) and starting a third (Hyperica). But I do notice that my energy flags at certain times — such as when I’m in Moscow. And I’m full of energy in other locations, like Tajikistan or Shanghai or New York. Working inside, at a computer, slows me down. Working in the garden revs me up. Worst job of my life? Programming in the basement of a building during the winter. Best job? On the front lines in Abkhazia, on the Black Sea. I naturally assumed from this that I was an adrenalin junkie who hates routine and loves strenuous physical work. Then, this past spring, in my doctor’s office, I reported … Read more »
Migrating away from DabbleDB
DabbleDB, the online relational database platform that our company runs on, has been bought by Twitter. And, according to Dabble’s founders, Twitter has no interest in running a database company — they bought DabbleDB for the brainpower of the team behind it, not for the product. We are promised 60 days notice before the service shuts down. We love DabbleDB. We use it to run our editorial workflow. To collect research data. For customer relationship management. And to do our bookkeeping. The only things we don’t do on Dabble are email and our website. Everything else – Dabble. We would rather not move. But if the founders can’t figure out a way to keep the service going, we’ll have to start looking for alternatives right now, since it will probably take a while … Read more »
How to Become a Shanghai Entrepreneur
This article originally appeared in Shanghai Expat. By Maria Korolov Trombly I’ve seen a sharp influx of potential entrepreneurs to Shanghai when I was in town the last couple of months. As the U.S. and European economies head south, I guess that people are looking at the growth numbers, noticing that China is still in the positive digits, and hopping a plane over here, hoping to get something going. Starting your own company is hard. The vast majority fail quickly. In China, in particular, there are all sorts of regulatory restrictions about starting companies, and what foreign-owned companies can do, and how much money you can take out of the country if you do manage to make it. Read original article (paid subscription required) . Did you like this article? Contact Maria Korolov to find out … Read more »