Tuesday, March 25, 2014

How a high school dropout became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur

Born in 1980, Haruhisa Okamura (pictured above) is the founder and CEO of Adways, one of the largest tech companies in Japan that focuses on online advertising. Adways also has its own ad network, internet services, and mobile games. Today, it employs more than a thousand employees worldwide and recorded revenue of over JPY 22.6 billion (US$221 million) last year.

What’s most impressive, however, is that Okamura is one of the youngest founders to bring a company from zero to IPO in Japan.
His success is only possible because Okamura started his career early. At age 16, young Okamura decided he was too cool for school. He opted to drop out of high school to join a company as a salesperson.
“I couldn’t make friends in school so I chose to work early,” he says.

(See: Razer CEO tells students it’s okay to waste time, get an ‘F’)

Okamura’s sales performance saw him rise through the ranks. He was so good at selling door-to-door that he became the company’s top salesperson on many occasions. At 16, Okamura was already displaying signs of a good entrepreneur. He had at least proven that he understood the art of sales.

Intrigued by internet fever

In 2000, Japan was hit by the internet craze, which saw many internet companies go public. Okamura was fascinated by the industry and wanted to be a part of it.
“I saw the CEO of CyberAgent [Mr. Susumu Fujita] on TV and I was very inspired,” he says.
He didn’t know much about the internet back then and laughed, saying he thought “CyberAgent was the internet.”
Okamura tried to apply for a job at CyberAgent but was rejected. With few other options left, Okamura was determined to start his very own online marketing company.

In February 2001, Adways was born. With just one million yen (US$10,000), Okamura spent his first JPY 300,000 (US$3,000) on a computer. The rest of the money was to be invested to build an email marketing software. In search of talented developers, he went to engineering colleges distributing flyers and randomly pitching to students to convince them to build him the system. He eventually found one who did it for 500,000 yen (US$5,000), but the product turned out to be unusable.

Okamura didn’t give up despite hitting the bump. Rather, he went to a top engineering university and continued pitching to students. He was almost broke. So instead of offering straight cash, he offered 30 percent of Adways’ sales margin if the engineer could deliver the software he wanted.
With some luck, Okamura met Sanki Nishiguchi, a talented engineer who agreed to help Adways. Nishiguchi later became Adways first CTO. “I was so determined to find good talent to work with that I even go to [the] bookstore searching [for] and stalking good engineers,” he says.

Zero to IPO

Under the leadership of Okamura together with Nishiguchi’s technical talent, Adways grew quickly and went public in 2006. The IPO made Okamura one of the youngest entrepreneurs to list a company in Japan at that time. When asked what made the company grow so quickly, Okamura told Tech in Asia three key points:

Adways started with an affiliate model, which means clients only pay for actual results. Many clients felt more comfortable with this model and were therefore willing to pay.
Despite starting out targeting the PC market, Adways switched to mobile marketing after four months to catch up with the trend. It turned out to be a good choice.
Adways always insists on hiring the best engineers in the company, which helped to build the backbone of all its products.

Okamura, now 33, has grown Adways from a small startup to an international corporation with over a thousand employees around the world. Outside of Japan, Adways has offices in China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, the US, and Singapore. Revenue outside of Japan makes up 10 percent of the company’s revenue, but the figure has grown over 50 percent in the last few years. Apparently, Okamura doesn’t just want to be successful in Japan. He is hungry for success across the globe, too.

“Now in Japan, we are the biggest in ad network business and we want to expand all over the world, especially in Asia. We want to be the top smartphone ad network in the region and we also want to build more new [services] for mobile users.”

Adways also invests in other promising and interesting tech companies. Its latest investment was Gumi, the social mobile gaming company behind the popular Brave Frontier mobile game.

(See: Having struggled through a tough year, Gumi bounces back stronger)

“We are in a good position as mobile marketing company throughout Asia and we want to be number one in this field. But it is impossible to do this by ourselves so we are always looking for partners to work together. We are willing to make investments to achieve our target,” says Nobu Noda, head of global business development group at Adways.

Okamura is encouraging the new generation of entrepreneurs to be bold, especially in the internet industry. Walking the talk, Okamura shared that more than 60 percent of Adways’ sales revenue generated now comes from businesses it created three years ago.

“We have to read the trend in the internet industry. Everything is fast and going up and down. Entrepreneurs need to go with the flow,” says Okamura.

The post How a high school dropout became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Jet Fell Into Ocean With All Lost, PM Najib Says - from The New York Times

Jet Fell Into Ocean With All Lost, Premier Says

By THOMAS FULLER and CHRIS BUCKLEYMARCH 24, 2014

In Beijing on Monday, relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysian plane after Malaysian officials said all on board died. CreditMark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PEARCE AIR FORCE BASE, Australia — A British satellite company has solved one crucial aspect of the mystery surrounding the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared on March 8, using a complex mathematical process to determine that it ended its journey in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean.

Guided by a principle of physics called the Doppler effect, the company, Inmarsat, analyzed tiny shifts in the frequency of the plane’s signals to infer the plane’s flight path and likely final location. The method had never before been used to investigate an air disaster, officials said.

The first definitive news of the fate of the Boeing 777 jet brought heartbreak to the families of those on board as Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, announced on Monday that no one is believed to have survived the flight.

“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” a somber Mr. Razak said. “It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

Mr. Najib appeared eager to bring some finality to the families of the passengers, who had complained for more than two weeks about the incomplete and sometimes contradictory information they were getting. Two-thirds of the plane’s passengers were Chinese citizens, and the flight was bound for Beijing when it took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, after midnight on March 8.

But many furious Chinese relatives and friends of passengers refused to believe it, wailing with anguish and screaming that the Malaysians were lying and hiding what they knew.

“The Malaysian government is not telling the truth,” said one woman among the relatives of passengers who gathered at the Lido Hotel in Beijing to wait for news of the flight. “All governments are corrupt. The Malaysian government is hiding something.”

Relatives of passengers of the Malaysia Airlines flight missing since March 8 reacted to a news broadcast from Malaysia in a Beijing hotel on Monday.CreditRolex Dela Pena/European Pressphoto Agency

The announcement did little to solve the deeper mystery of the plane’s disappearance, shedding no light on why someone with detailed knowledge of the plane’s navigation and flight systems diverted it radically from its course. Investigators said they have looked into the backgrounds of the 239 people on board, including the two pilots and the crew, and have so far found no answers to that central question.

However long expected, the news that the jet was lost came as a body blow, dashing the hopes that many had clung to with increasing desperation that somehow the plane had been hijacked and taken to some obscure spot where the passengers could still be alive.

A few people in the hotel ballroom in Beijing collapsed and were put on wheeled stretchers and taken to the parking lot, which was full of police cars and ambulances. Inside the hotel, police officers in navy-blue uniforms stood guard every few feet and blocked scores of jostling journalists from entering the ballroom. Several women emerged sobbing so hard that knots of friends and family had to help them walk to the elevators.

Where Objects Have Been Found

In the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

“We demand the truth,” said a young woman in a red ski jacket. “The Chinese government should step up and find out the truth for us. Nobody cares about us. Nobody cares about the lives of our family.”

Li Chengpeng, a popular Chinese social critic, gave voice to the deep skepticism held by many Chinese of the official announcement. He posted a message for the seven million followers of his microblog, calling Mr. Najib’s news conference staged theater. “Just now, they were not actually publicizing the truth but were merely giving a show of publicizing the truth,” he wrote. “It looks like there are traces of rehearsal. Politicians are shameless! Keep investigating!”

The Malaysian prime minister based his announcement on a new analysis of satellite signal data that ruled out any chance that the plane had flown north, toward land, from its last known position on March 8. It had to have flown south, the analysis found, and by the time of the last recorded signal, it would have been nearly out of fuel over a rough, deep ocean, more than a thousand miles from anywhere it could have landed safely.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, center, after announcing that no one aboard the flight is believed to have survived.CreditRahman Roslan/Getty Images

The search focused more tightly on that area on Monday after an Australian military search plane spotted several floating objects that could be debris from the plane, and ships raced to investigate. On Tuesday, officials said, search flights were called off because of bad weather.

One of the assumptions in the analysis was that for the final few hours of the plane’s flight at least, it was cruising at a fairly constant speed and direction, suggesting that it was being flown by the autopilot system. Experts said it was certainly possible for that to happen.

A former Boeing instructor pilot, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said, “ ‘Heading select mode’ is dumb,” referring to one way the plane’s autopilot could be set. “It doesn’t know anything except, ‘maintain this heading.’ ”

Tracking Flight 370

The sequence of events known by the authorities, in local times.

The instructor, who has trained Boeing pilots at airlines around the world, said that in that mode, the plane would probably fly on steadily until one engine’s fuel supply was exhausted, but that after that, the plane would probably soon become destabilized and crash without a skilled human pilot at the controls.

The plane took off with ample fuel to fly to Beijing, more than 2,500 miles from Kuala Lumpur, with a margin of safety. Based on that, Malaysian officials have estimated that it could have stayed in the air until about a half-hour after the last satellite signal was recorded.

The floating objects were spotted on Monday about 1,500 miles southwest of Perth, Australia, by the crew of a P-3 Orion surveillance plane from the Royal Australian Air Force. An Australian naval survey ship, the Success, was directed to try to find and recover the objects, the Australian authorities said. A Chinese military aircraft also reported a possible sighting of floating objects in the search area, but that sighting was at a different location and was much more tentative.

The search for the aircraft’s fuselage, and other bulky parts of the jet that probably sank to the bottom of the ocean, is likely to be focused within a limited distance from the suspected flight path. But the search for floating debris is likely to be widespread.

Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales who studies and has conducted experiments on the flow of water around Australia, said the conditions of the southern Indian Ocean are “extremely hostile,” with large waves, swirling currents and winds that are among the strongest on the planet. Currents in the southern Indian Ocean could scatter floating debris, he said.

“The whole ocean down there is like a pinball machine,” Dr. van Sebille said. “It is difficult to track or predict where water goes, or do what is really important now, which is to backtrack where water came from.”

Finding the plane’s flight recorders, or black boxes, will be crucial to determining what may have caused the plane’s disappearance. The devices are designed to transmit signals to help searchers locate them, but searchers have only about two weeks left to find them before the devices’ batteries run out.

The United States Pacific Command said Monday that it would move a Towed Pinger Locator System, capable of locating a black box to a depth of 20,000 feet, into the region. “This movement is simply a prudent effort to pre-position equipment and trained personnel closer to the search area, so that if debris is found, we will be able to respond as quickly as possible, since the battery life of the black box’s pinger is limited,” Cmdr. Chris Budde, a Seventh Fleet operations officer, said in an email statement.

#CHANGE

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Justify travel on rakyat money

IN early February, 2006, I decided to wait at the KL International Airport for the arrival of Flight MH9042 from Mauritius. I had wanted to talk to some members of a delegation from the Selayang Municipal Council which included nine councillors, the president, the secretary and his wife, two officials and four businessmen who had contracts with the council.

They had been away on a week-long sojourn in South Africa and Mauritius on what was termed as an educational trip, which in Malaysia is often referred to as lawatan sambil belajar.

News of their departure had already made the news, and as if it was pre-arranged, many of them gave me the slip, but my former colleague, Maria J. Dass managed to corner one councillor – G. Kohilan Pillai, who later went on to be appointed senator and deputy foreign affairs minister.

He was brutally frank with his answer – they visited various cities in both countries, among others, to study how public toilets are maintained and kept clean.

Unknown to them, their itinerary was already in my pocket. Subsequently, I wrote outlining their programme and asked what they had learnt when they were out shopping and sight-seeing all the time. As usual, the silence was deafening.

I have been chided, albeit in jest by my good friend and retired politician, Lee Hwa Beng, for preventing members of the Selangor Public Accounts Committee from enjoying a belly dance performance in Egypt on our expense. Their intended vacation had to be abruptly cancelled after it was highlighted in this column.

Previously, I had exposed a group of Klang municipal councillors who had gone to South Africa and spent most of their time in Sun City. Joining them were their wives, some of whom who had discarded their headgear for the tables and machines at the casino.

It is not an obsession with these excursions but the issue of spending people's money on a holiday on the pretext of education can only be described as a deception and breach of the public's trust.

The "mother" of all these trips had been a delegation led by the former mentri besar, Dr Mohd Khir Toyo, to study the waterways in Holland and Austria with a view to "study ways to use the rivers in the state" to ease the congestion on our roads.

Now, there's a new contender to that title. Terengganu Mentri Besar Ahmad Said recently led a delegation of eight on a research trip to Antarctica to study "climate change".

The trip cost RM846,328.26 with an average cost of RM105,791 per person. One may argue that there's no shopping or entertainment in the snow, but there was a stopover in Chile.

Our ambassador in Santiago, Ganeson Sivagurunathan, joined the trip and I am sure he would have taken the liberty to show them the sights of that great city.

What did they learn from the trip? How have Malaysia and its people benefited? We are close to the Equator and what could they have learnt from a mass of snow on ice which can be applicable locally?

How do you expect the public to stay silent when the government does not practise what it preaches? It goes around (and spends millions in campaigns) asking us to tighten our belts and be prudent in our spending.

We have been asked to shop around for bargains and eat that leafy vegetable, (it's a dreaded word and not politically correct to mention it for which I may be accused of being a traitor to the nation) the prices of which have come down. Some people are able to buy chicken for RM1 but many of us do not have access to such privileges.

Many commute to work daily in ramshackle buses and trains packed like sardines. There are many who have no roof over their heads, sleeping in cardboard boxes under bridges and viaducts. Some live below the poverty line in squalid conditions.

The gallivanting on public funds is becoming routine. It has to stop. If anyone wants to travel or go on holiday using the "lawatan sambil belajar" tag, it is no longer acceptable. Perhaps, like many of us in the private sector, civil servants and politicians should justify any requirement for travel.

Let us look at curing the ills of our tropical country before venturing into climate change in the cold.

R. Nadeswaran understands he is perhaps shouting at a group of deaf and dumb people and hopes those who know sign language will help them with the messages. Comments: citizen-nades@thesundaily.com

Monday, March 17, 2014

Kos ke Antartika cecah RM800,000 - dari Sinar Harian

Kos ke Antartika cecah RM800,000

Menteri Besar Terengganu, Datuk Seri Ahmad Said (tiga, kiri) bergambar bersama peserta ekspedisi ketika mengadakan lawatan ke Antartika baru-baru ini. - Foto Bernama

< 1 / 1 >

KUALA LUMPUR - Ekspedisi saintifik ke Antartika yang dianjurkan Kementerian Sains, Teknologi dan Inovasi pada Januari lepas membabitkan kos sebanyak RM846,328.26.
Menterinya, Datuk Ewon Ebin berkata, ekspedisi itu disertai lapan delegasi diketuai Menteri Besar Terengganu, Datuk Seri Ahmad Said.

Beliau berkata, ekspedisi itu dibiayai tiga pihak iaitu Yayasan Pendidikan Antartika Sultan Mizan (YPASM) sebanyak RM209,873.72, kerajaan Terengganu (RM239,254.54) dan Institut Penyelidikan Antartika Chile (INACH) sebanyak RM397,200.

"Kos ini termasuk penginapan dan makan sepanjang ekspedisi, kos perjalanan kapal dan kemudahan bot serta kakitangan sokongan bagi melawat beberapa buah stesen penyelidikan di Antartika.

"Secara puratanya kos yang dibiayai oleh YPASM dan kerajaan Terengganu bagi setiap delegasi ialah sebanyak RM56,141," katanya dalam jawapan bertulis kepada soalan Sim Tze Tzin (PKR-Bayan Baru) di Dewan Rakyat, di sini, hari ini.

Tze Tzin ingin tahu kos ekspedisi selama 15 hari ke Antartika yang dianjurkan kementerian dengan kerjasama YPASM dari 18 Januari hingga 4 Feb lalu serta senarai nama peserta dan jawatan selain rasional mereka menyertai rombongan itu.

Lawatan atas undangan INACH itu bertujuan membuka laluan bagi membantu kerajaan menubuhkan sebuah stesen penyelidikan bersama INACH. - Bernama

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

#PRAY4MH370

Malaysia Failing to Manage Crisis Exposes Leadership Limit

Save

Malaysia, aspiring to become a developed nation in six years, is finding that more than 50 years under one coalition and tight control over information is a mismatch for handling a rapidly growing crisis followed across the world.

China is calling on Malaysia to be more transparent as Prime Minister Najib Razak lets his cousin, Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, be the face of the investigation into why a Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS) plane vanished on March 8. It was en route to Beijing with 239 people on board. Investigators from at least nine countries are trying to locate the jet.

Najib’s United Malays National Organisation leads the coalition governing the Southeast Asian nation. Only in recent years has it seen a move toward more competitive elections, in some districts, that put a premium on public speaking. The government’s lack of a clear message, compounded by a series of false leads on the plane’s whereabouts and questions on coordination, risks undermining its image internationally.

“They’re handling a huge global issue as if it was domestic politics,” said Clive Kessler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who has analyzed the nation’s politics for half a century. “With the cause of the disappearance still unknown you can understand the need for discretion and caution but it’s being perceived in Malaysia and elsewhere in the region as a bid to hide the truth.”

‘Doesn’t Work’

Najib’s administration is sending the message that people should let the “government tell them what they need to know, when they need to know it, and not before,” Kessler said. “That’s the way they’ve acted for generations and they are starting to find out it doesn’t work anymore.”

Many newspapers and television networks in Malaysia are controlled by the government directly or indirectly. And Najib, 60, has yet to make good on a pledge to replace the nation’s Sedition Act with legislation that would protect free speech while preventing incitement of religious or ethnic hatred. The law, which dates back to 1948 when Malaysia was under British control, mandates jail sentences of at least three years for words deemed seditious, including those that “excite dissatisfaction” against the government.

Government-controlled Malaysian Airlines said in a statement yesterday it would “continue to be transparent in communicating with the general public via the media” on all matters affecting Flight 370.

Stolen Passports

Nations searching for the plane had little to go on with no distress calls, emergency-beacon signals, bad weather or other signs why an airliner would lose touch in one of the safest phases of flight. Air patrols resumed for a fifth day as planes and ships prowled waters on both sides of Peninsular Malaysia after failing to find debris along the jet’s route. The discovery that two passengers boarded the missing flight using stolen passports raised concern about Malaysia’s immigration security practices.

“The Malaysian side cannot shirk its responsibilities,” the Global Times, a Chinese government-controlled newspaper, said in aneditorial on March 10. “The initial response from Malaysia was not swift enough. There are loopholes in the work of Malaysia Airlines and security authorities.”

Faced with pressure from families of the 153 Chinese nationals who were on the flight, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang for a second day yesterday noted the lack of progress in finding the Boeing Co. 777-200.

Urging Malaysia

“We once again request and urge the Malaysia side to enhance and strengthen rescue and searching efforts,” Qin told reporters in Beijing.

“The Chinese government is under quite a lot of pressure,” said Xu Liping, senior fellow at the National Institute of International Strategy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Ordinary people in China feel the investigation “has not been professional.”

Broader ties between Malaysia and China probably won’t suffer, he said, citing a phone conversation between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Najib on March 8 about the missing flight. “This channel has been unimpeded.”

Cautious Personality

China accounted for 8.262 billion ringgit ($2.52 billion) of Malaysia’s exports in January, the second-largest amount after Singapore. Malaysia approved $920 million of foreign investment from China in the manufacturing sector in 2013, up from $646 million the year earlier, according to the Malaysian Investment Development Authority. Najib’s government has a $444 billion 10-year plan to build roads, ports and utilities plants to elevate the country to developed-nation status by 2020.

It is understandable that Najib doesn’t want a high profile in this situation given his cautious personality, according to Joseph Liow, associate dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“He’s not one who would go to the front of the camera and do lots of chest thumping and wave the flag and all that without being certain that there’s substantive” progress in the investigation, he said. “Hisham is very different from his cousin. He’s someone who is not uncomfortable with the limelight,” he said, referring to Hishammuddin.

Hishammuddin, 52, has been the acting minister since a general election last May. He is unable to formally take the role given internal coalition rules on which party assumes particular posts in cabinet.

Other Leaders

Other Asian leaders have faced questions for not reacting to crises immediately. Philippine President Benigno Aquino was criticized for taking two days to visit victims of Super Typhoon Haiyan last year. So was China’s former premier, Wen Jiabao, when he took more than two weeks to visit the site of the country’s worst snow storms in 50 years in 2008.

In the U.S., President George W. Bush was criticized for his handling of damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 after he remained on vacation as New Orleans flooded. He cut short the break by two days to survey the damage from the air, something he later said was a “huge mistake” since it made him look “detached and uncaring.”

Najib needs to assure Malaysians and the international community that his government is doing all it can, said Vishnu Varathan, an economist at Mizuho Bank Ltd. in Singapore.

“What could have been done was the prime minister delegating the transport secretary to locating the plane and assigning one other person in charge of investigating the security breach and another to handle international relations,” he said. “It’s not easy to convey all that is happening in the background and the government needs to highlight these things.”

Airline Statement

Compounding the image that authorities leading the investigation are struggling to communicate effectively, Malaysian Airlines issued three versions of a press statement yesterday to correct several errors. One was a reference to an “expensive” rescue operation, which it meant to call “extensive.”

“There are big issues -- transparency, information sharing, questions associated with security,” said Bridget Welsh, a political science professor at Singapore Management University. “They are not in control of the discussion and the problem is they’re not instilling confidence. Everyone wants to give them the benefit of the doubt but this is a crisis of credibility for the administration.”

Najib postponed a trip to Mauritius, according to the state-run news service Bernama. He also met the families of the crew from the missing plane at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, his press office said on Twitter on March 8.

‘Everything Possible’

“I assure you we are doing everything possible within our means,” Najib said on Twitter on March 9. “We thank you for your prayers, assistance and show of solidarity.”

Najib’s office directed queries on China’s concerns about the handling of the incident to authorities involved in the investigation.

Hishammuddin, who is also defense minister, was elected a vice president of UMNO in October, putting him in line to possibly succeed Najib. He is the nephew of Malaysia’s second prime minister, Najib’s father, Abdul Razak Hussein.

“It’s a lack of experience, anybody would be tested,” said SMU’s Welsh. “This is Hisham’s test, and Najib’s government’s test.”

Mahathir Years

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who led the country through the 1998 Asian financial crisis, “was a stronger leader,” said RSIS’s Liow.

Mahathir responded with capital controls when investors fled Asian economies during the crisis. He called billionaire financier George Soros a “moron” who was trying to destroy growth through speculative attacks on the currency.

Farizol Mansur

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

How a high school dropout became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur

How a high school dropout became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur

Intrigued by internet fever

Zero to IPO

Monday, March 24, 2014

Jet Fell Into Ocean With All Lost, PM Najib Says - from The New York Times

Jet Fell Into Ocean With All Lost, Premier Says

Where Objects Have Been Found

Tracking Flight 370