Tag Archive for 'HanMeta'

Josh Kim: Co-Founder of StatusFix

Published
by
jk
on January 14, 2008
in HanMeta
. Comments

I’ve heard about this state of realization I’m in during my Entrepreneurship class, back in my senior year of Illinois.

StatusFix is no longer mine. It’s ours. I’m glad that it is, even though initially, it hurt a bit.

Dose of Reality

It was an idea I’ve had for a while. The Entrepreneurial Beast inside couldn’t wait any longer on the ideas I’ve carried in my brain and my notes. I‘ve had some inkling as to what should be done, and so, going by the book, I’ve shared my ideas with close friends and colleagues.

At that point, I still thought it was my idea. While I was sharing about the multiple ideas I’ve been scheming and listening to comments and suggestions, I thought that I was laying foundations for something… greater than me.

Hilarious: Creating something greater than me, and thinking that it’s still mine. Silly me.

Tangent: Facts I Cling To

  • Less about the Idea, More about the People.

  • Most likely, someone else had thought up your idea, too.

  • A great leader enable others.

Back to Your Scheduled Post

Even though I’ve had these facts seared into my brain, I couldn’t apply them with StatusFix.

It’s a paradox, really. I never thought of my friends as free slave labor to my riches. I wanted everyone to be fairly compensated. But at the same time, I wanted my vision to permeate within StatusFix. I wanted my DNA to be implanted into this thing. I wanted to lead.

Initially, I was really excited to have people onboard. This being the first time working with a group outside of school or work made things refreshing. Also, I was surprised that others actually believed in this idea. Enough to use some of their time, skills, and effort to bring it to fruition? Awesome.

Then, reality kicked in. Sometimes I was wrong. But rather than admit defeat, I would stand by them for the sake of standing by them. (I do this alot.) Silly me. Sometimes I was right, and I would have to defend my position. All in all, these discussions were the process that brought our team of five to this place in time.

There seems to be no end in sight for learning and growing, just like other areas in my life: I can be wrong, I just cannot forget to learn.

The truth is, though, I brought these guys together, underneath the banner of StatusFix. I’m managing my own resources as well as StatusFix’s. I feel like a manager at times, but I must “know my role”. I am not the “leader”. I am the facilitator.

Always bear in mind, Josh Kim: Without the people, StatusFix is nothing but another page in your idea notebook.

Now What?

I’m one of the 5 co-founders of StatusFix. I am also the founder of HanMeta.

StatusFix is only a sub-project off of HanMeta at this point, until it gains some momentum (momentum meaning… profits). If it does, then we’ll actually create a company, and divide up the profits/losses.

Creation/Upkeep cost of HanMeta is 100% my own. Eventually, hosting and domain registration costs will be divided along the percentages agreed to at an earlier meeting. (JUST for statusfix.com and slicehost).

Now I can sleep better at night, knowing that when that day comes when we make our first $1, I know how to divide it up.

Footnote: “Secretary”

A nickname I had in high school was the “Secretary”. I will not going into details why, but I think it’s apt to write that here.

If any of my high school friends want to comment on this, go for it.

Josh Kim: Founder, CEO, Developer of HanMeta, LLC

Published
by
jk
on January 10, 2008
in HanMeta
. Comments

On paper, this was a fact on December 17th, 2007. I am the proud owner of a sole-member LLC through the state of Delaware.

But now, after having thought about it for about a month, it really really hit me: I own a company. After months and months of reading and learning… I did it.

But enough of resting on my laurels (I did so about 5 seconds)… I have taxes to worry about. I have costs and profits (no profits yet, but hopefully profits more so than costs in the future) to project. I might soon be having actual employees, to whom I will pay nothing because I have nothing to give them: Just baskets of hope, and an awesome rollercoaster ride of a good time.

Heck, I might end up founding yet another company with the project I’m working on.

What Do You Do?

“Internet Application Development” is what I told Uncle Sam.

No, I’m not just going to “manage”. But alas, I love the business side. I love the numbers, the rules, the forms… it’s like a perfectionist’s dream.

At the same time, I love the art of programming… of diving deep into the sea of code, manipulating the bits, the lines of code to get something useful out of the electrons.

Basically, my goal is to be the ultimate technical manager possible. Tech first, than manager. This is extremely important to me.

Yes, I’m sure you know that we’re working on a project. But in case that doesn’t go well, there are other things coming in the pipeline for HanMeta. For one, I hope to start up another blog with more of a web development/business focus… not so technical as I get here with some of the nerdier things, but maybe even a chronicle of how things are coming along at HanMeta. Another, maybe possibly restart that freelancing/consulting side of my life I stopped a couple months back.

So What?

The reason why I write this is because I needed a summary of the situation for me. I was having a real hard time dealing with how I should continue with the project HanMeta is working on. I was so caught up with the roadblocks of keeping the company aligned with the rules and regulations of this fine country to realize a little too late (or maybe it was just the right moment…?) that I need to get back to programming.

With this blog post, I hope to cement the title of this entry in my head.

I am Founder. I am CEO. I am Developer.

Now time to be one.

Assembla: “Backpack” for Software Engineering and FREE

Published
by
jk
on January 9, 2008
in HanMeta and Web Applications
. Comments

I’ve found myself need a full toolkit for software development as I move forward with HanMeta. This list includes goodies like:

  • Wiki/Documentation
  • Bug Tracking
  • Source Code Management
  • Chat/Communication Tool
  • AND something to put all of this together.

Assembla has been working well. It’s kinda like basecamp for software developers. The application just screams Rails and lickability.

I have a couple of issues with using Assembla though. For one, I don’t like how I’m not in charge of my own data. Sure, with Subversion and Trac, I can just export the codebase back out using the standard interfaces they offer, but they have their own built in wiki and messaging system. I don’t see an easy way to export that data, because it would be nice to have a backup of the data… I don’t know how that would look like, since all of this data that exists on their servers is going to be in some proprietary format anywa.

The funny thing is for my job at NCSA, I had to do the same thing for the Blue Waters Project. I was in charge of looking into some project management, bug tracking, source control system. In the end, the suite of applications at Atlassian seemed to be the best bet. Since money wasn’t a problem, this was the valid choice.

Since all the funding for HanMeta is coming out of my pockets, it’s pretty important for me to keep my costs down. Using Assembla, I can effectively outsource all of the pain of maintaining and dealing with multiple tools. Plus, it was easy to get started.

I bet I won’t be saying the same when the Assembla servers go down… but that’s another story.

Your data. YOUR.

Published
by
jk
on January 4, 2008
in Web Applications
. Comments

In light of some of the more recent things that have been happening…

I really have to get a couple things off my chest. Also, it’s kinda funny how all this flurry of activity is happening as I’m trying to do more research in this area of web applications.

HanMeta is embarking on creating a service that might ease or further instigate the situation. More on that later.

User data should be the user’s.

It is my firm belief that people should own their own “stuff”; physical stuff as well as digital data. Sounds pretty trivial, but in terms of data, this isn’t happening. Silos are building up, where information is just begging to be freed.

Some services are offering APIs to facilitate this, but the larger players (both Facebook, AIM, and Google, as well as others) aren’t playing ball with the standards bodies. They’re moving towards it, but we’re only getting a subset of the data.

Now, am I advocating all-out accessible stores of data? I think I might be. I don’t want to get inundated with comments in the future when this isn’t the case… But I feel as though this makes the most sense to me as I sit in this chair today.

I feel like in the future, all people will have access to all their data at all times. Be it through some kind of external device like a PDA (or some kind of breakthrough Internet device… coughiPhonecough) or some kind of internal device like an embedded chip, we will constantly be connected to the Internet. It would send data like where you were standing or what your friend’s dinner plans looked like.

That is the future I want. It would be a privacy nightmare if incorrectly implemented, but this future is likely. Heck, it’s already here: It’s just not used by the majority of the population just yet.

Internet is distribution. Just like how the rest of the Internet would run just fine without Google (although, it’d be a little messy getting around) and its servers, there are standards in place for how routers should be passing packets around from senders to receivers.

The point that I’m trying to make is that there should be a place for a person to have their data “in the Clouds”, but there should be an ability to take that data elsewhere. Like taking your money from a bank and moving it to a cooler bank 2.0.

Did I just freaking type “bank 2.0″? [svn co hari-kiri]

Services having user data is a privilege, not a right.

Services should be providing the people with information that can be based on that data. Services should NOT bully people into using a crappier service just because the data is stored there.

Now I’m not saying the services should never retain the data. However, I feel as though the ability to take your data out of any service is very important.

For example, let’s say there was a site that tracked all the movies I’ve seen. If this information was open (APML, it looks like) I would be able to add to this data from movie rentals at Blockbuster, match it up with IMDB, and have it available on my Flixster Facebook Application.

The long stretch: RIAA and Facebook

Competitive advantage by locking out users to use your service… This is just like the MPAA/RIAA/Every OTHER Freaking Middleman Media Company wanting control of people’s “stuff”.

I feel like in this digital age, all of this is retarded. All this effort will be made pointless due to the fact that your users, your customers, want to do so much more with their stuff. They want to do mashups with their music and anime shows, have their favorite song playing on their profile (with no legal constraint), be branded by their favorite computer company…

I should be able to export all the email I have from Gmail and take it to another service if I wanted to. But I have no reason to, because Gmail is far better than anything I’ve used previously, and I don’t have any glaring issues with it to look for an alternative. This is where services will win: Make it awesome.

What happened with Scoble and Facebook

Scoble was trying to import names, birthdays, and email addresses of his friends on Facebook to Plaxo by using their optical character recognition technology. Which got his account temporarily disabled, and he got it back soon after agreeing not to run the script again.

My two cents: this is pretty borderline stuff. Scraping pages have always had a stigma because it’s a not-so-normal way of getting to the data. I had no problems scraping course data from the University of Illinois course page (of course, later I found out that there was an XML version of it… that’s besides the point) because there was no way of getting to it other than by scraping. But here, this was flagrantly against the Terms of Service.

Services like FriendCSV abides by the ToS by getting only the data that is accessible by the API provided by Facebook. But what Plaxo did was gutsy: they attempted to break open the Facebook silo.

Is this legal? Well, it did go against Facebook’s ToS and therefore I’m more willing to side with Facebook. But should that last question even be valid, meaning shouldn’t this data already belong in the hands of users to being with? I don’t know. It’s hazy.

Facebook owns the mapping of people to people. There is no doubt in my mind that Facebook has got people together into a huge social… dang it… “graph” (sigh). That is amazing. It’s what they’ll do with this data that’s going to be even more amazing.

So… HanMeta?

The project at HanMeta is trying to merge the silos just a little bit. Initially, we’ve decided to take a bite out of statues. To capture birthdays, names of family members, number of McRibs eaten this past McRib season (4, by the way), maybe even email addresses for the networks that gives us that data… that’ll all come later.

But after all is said and done, our data will be portable. I don’t intend on holding back the Internet any more. I would like to create a network using as many open standards as possible (dataportability.org).

It’s just the question of when this will happen. Most of our resources at this early stage will be used up on actually getting this information and ensuring privacy limits are set correctly.

I’m feeling a bit like Skullbocks…

If you get that reference, I should give you a cookie.

Are we building a Synapse? Uh oh… heh.

FRICK, Focusing is HARD

Published
by
jk
on January 2, 2008
in Personal
. Comments

Seriously. I’m writing this as an effort to get me back on track.

At least, with working out, you didn’t really have to think. You’d count, and memorize. And push yourself to your limit. But there wasn’t any of this planning or thinking or critiquing…

Programming with the crew at HanMeta is FUN. But man, it’s freaking draining after a day of work at NCSA. I might be able to get a few hours in every night, plus all the other personal crap I have to do.

And just because it’s fun, it doesn’t mean it’s draining. I guess I signed up for this when I made HanMeta anyway. My eyes hurt immensely.

Yeap. That’s all that you’re going to get from this blogger today. Wee.