Shu Wu

While still frustrated about Airmail keeping so many features in its “premium” subscription, I happened the realized that my favorite calendar app Fantastical would go for subscription business model as well today.

What’s gone all wrong for these app makers? Do they really think this is the future, to make every customer pay for a set price monthly for each of their daily apps?

First thing first, I am not against the subscription business model. Instead, I think it is a great way to motivate developers to keep up their great work, as long as the pricing is reasonable and they can thrive to their commitment. However, the reality is going nowhere if everyone only cares about their own business. To start with, let’s consider how much you are going to pay monthly if all your favorite apps go subscription-based, let’s take mine as an example – 1Password $2.99, Fantastical $3.33, Airmail $2.99, Ulysses $4.99, Moke 3 $0.99 and potentially so many more. Each one of them claims that the price of a cup of coffee a month is all they want but none of them think about paying tens of developers (with number increasing) is getting more and more absurd.

Truly there’s a third party curator service such as SetApp which does a great job in serving as a cluster. You pay $9.99 monthly to get access to hundreds of apps, but what you need might not be in their stock, and they might also provide you with plenty of apps that you don’t need – at the end what you want is A la carte. Moreover, many of the apps are essentially nice supplements to system-shipped free version, and I wonder how many of them really deserve to be paid regularly.

Not planning to offend any developers here, I know how difficult and how cumbersome it is to solve countless bugs in order to ship a complete software, since I work on coding too. But I am becoming more and more reluctant to pay for an increasing number of apps, and I started to hate whoever that adapts to his model without considerate thinking, wholeheartedly.

I just hope SetApp or any other platform can be the middleman in this game, since paying for every app monthly (at least this is the trend I observe), is definitely not the way to go – WE ARE NOT THAT RICH YET.

I have been a long time US TV fan ever since I started my study in USC back in 2015. Around that time I was living in a property with free TV service so that I got the chance to enjoy the true variety of American TV shows. And yes, I love that.

Watching TV shows is just such a great and entertaining way for one foreigner to get a bit of taste on how the language is like in real life. I come from Guangdong Province in China, and not everybody in there can speak Cantonese, but thanks to the satellite TV channels from Hong Kong, almost everyone is able to understand or even speak some Cantonese. This would have been impossible for Guangdong people without the help from Hong Kong TV channels.

And in the US I feel the same that watching TV is a great way to learn English. On BET, I can get to know ebonics and it has driven out my love for Hip-Hop later; on ESPN / FS1 / NBCSN / Tennis Channel, I have been able to explore the sports world freely with high quality commentators; on CNN / FOX / ABC / CBS / NBC, I can expose myself to fake or genuine news, whatever it is; on Cartoon Network / Travel Channel / Paramount Network, I get to know life is fabulous as it is.

American TV shows are simply amazing and I would recommend everybody I know who wants to learn real language to go to. But on top of that, people need the access to it away from home, and that is when I started to look for an Internet TV service so that TV is always on-the-go. Sling TV was my initial finding and I loved its stable service in the summer of 2016. However, I can still remember the day when I know DirecTV NOW was going to launch at the end of 2016, and how exited I was. Satellite TV is contracted and it has bundled a lot of unnecessary things together, and it was not really the way to go in a streaming world. As soon as DirecTV NOW was doing the initial round of rollout, I signed it up.

Its introductory pricing was so shockingly good with a free Apple TV 4 and 3 months of subscription service for $120. Basically with my choice of package GO BIG costing me only $35 a month, I actually got a free Apple TV 4 with $20 off, plus a year of HBO for free. The channel lineup was comprehensive, and its pricing was so competitive. Due to these reasons, I switched from my beloved Sling TV. DirecTV NOW soon became my go-to place for streaming, even above Netflix and Hulu, because I love the vibe of watching real and live events and it could put me into the most harsh listening environment without subtitles.

The first year and second year have made me completely into TV, and I can’t remember how many times I have recommended DirecTV NOW to my friends. Unfortunately, gradually the service started to change, like, with more and more aggressive pricing.

Around the end of 2017, the free 1 year of HBO ended, but I chose to keep the $5 add-on not only because I loved HBO shows, but also signing up HBO on its official website would cost me $15 – that is $10 more! I have no reasons not to have it added on with my current GO BIG package. But sometime around mid 2018, the price increased again, and they even have gotten rid of my current package (GO BIG was still available to existing customers though, but their pricing already started to bother me for a bit). My monthly subscription by then had increase from the initial $35 to $55. It sounds absurd, but it was a value that was still competitive with its channel lineup plus the cheap HBO subscription price. Around that time it was also when Youtube TV, Hulu TV live and some other streaming services came out, so the market suddenly has become more competitive.

My friend started to lure me onto other platforms like Youtube TV, which has increased the monthly price from $40 to $50 shortly after launch, but DirecTV NOW’s channel lineup was still simply the best around that time, if one wanted to get as much exposure to different kinds of shows as possible. However to be honest, at $55 for a month, its price was already hanging around the cap of mine, if I wanted to keep my expense reasonable.

Sadly, yesterday when I was reading tweets I found out AT&T NOW (they rebranded the name for another increase in pricing earlier this year in 2019) is again increasing its price. I was like “No, not again to your existing loyal first-day customers!”.

But they plan to do it any way.

It is going to be an astounding $25 increase to my current bill, which if you calculated, is a 50% increase, to one of their earliest subscribers. AT&T has changed my impression on how American companies would do business to existing customers, because its strategy on this service is quite confusing – they probably just want everyone voluntarily out so that they can close this service without being critiqued by critics.

But wait, “Ain’t customers gonna whine about that?”

“What’s the point? I can get a fxxking cable service with $80 a month, and I don’t have to be afraid of the cable company increasing the price from time to time!”

Anyway, after all, I’d like to thank DirecTV as a company (especially before acquired by AT&T) because it was the one who brought me into this colorful world, but unfortunately it is not going to be my last as well. I am planning to switch to Playstation Vue with the same $55 monthly subscription fee for a similar channel lineup.

Good night, DirecTV NOW. I’ve loved you til you died.

It’s been quite some time since my last English article, and the reason is mainly because I have been thinking about my choice in future career path in the past couple of months. I have left Xiaomi Finance as well as Beijing in May, and hopefully I’ll be on my next journey soon after some solid consideration.

Okay it could be a huge title but in fact I am not going to elaborate the reasons from a general view, since there are tons of well-written articles already around the web dissecting it from all possible angles. Instead, I want to talk about it from a tiny little detail that I have experienced yesterday, and it might draw out the whole picture from an unexpected perspective.

The story goes from my purchase of one microphone on Taobao, because in the past three months I have been working on my Youtube channel in the part time, and the audio quality issue has been driving me crazy. After some initial research, I decided to buy a wireless microphone for my mirrorless Sony Camera. To be honest I know not too many of you will be geeky enough to be willing to know the details of my choice, so in short the wireless microphone for DSLRs is kind of a new area where few companies have technology to tap into, so it is a small, niche and competitive market.

I bought a Sennheiser wireless microphone from the only available seller on Taobao, and it is quite costly with a $350 price tag. In the meantime another brand called Rode from Australia has a competitor product coming out next month, and it is considered better but with a $200 price. So the background is the Sennheiser one is likely to be overshadowed by the Rode one very soon, but out of the love and trust for Sennheiser mic system, I decided to give it a try. I received the product yesterday, and after some brief trial, I chose to keep it and commented about the pros and cons in the product page, as what I would do usually.

Purchasing goods on Taobao is a very personal experience, because you will need to talk to the merchants directly asking whether the products are in stock, any details you’d like to know in advance before you click the “Buy” button. Unlike Amazon in the US, there’s no direct chatting feature available for you, since Amazon considers all useful information is already there, no communication is needed, and the price is the price, the package is the package – that is to say, there’s no room for negotiation. (Amazon has pulled back from China last month, “announcing” their failure in competing with local giant JD.com and Taobao, and it could be another interesting case for businessmen to look into.)

No negotiation could be a huge problem in China, or similar in most other developing countries. For those who have travelled to developing countries, for example, China, I bet most of you have the idea of bargaining. Especially for stalls on the street, if one merchant sells you a T-shirt for 50 yuan, you know it is highly possible for you to take it away with 30 yuan, and that is a shocking 40% discount. While some might not like bargaining, it does give others lots of fun during the process. Along the process you and the store keeper might act a little bit, showing your cards one by one, and eventually reaching a win-win price – it is quite an interesting journey if you like shopping. Okay, you got the idea that on Taobao you can do this all day. For example, if you buy in large quantity, you can negotiate with the merchant for a lower unit price, or ask the merchant to give you some extra stuff in the packaging.

Back to my Sennheiser microphone example, after I posting the neutral comment, the merchant came to me saying they could send me some useful accessories for free and a 50-yuan gift card for future purchase in his shop, in order to thank me posting the first comment for the microphone. The owner is really nice, but he is not the only one who is this nice to me in my Taobao purchase history. I still remember when I purchased my second acoustic guitar from another merchant, the specific model I want is out of stock, and I was a bit angry that the guy who chatted with me lied to me about this fact. However before I made any act, the shop called me apologizing about their carelessness and gave me a free leather guitar case, a box of picks and a tuner, all being extremely useful to me. And I can raise numerous other similar cases from my own experience on Taobao.

And the core of that is one thing, that all is negotiable, and all is personal. It is like dining in a local, crowded but cheap restaurant compared to a McDonald’s drive-through. You can’t imagine negotiating with McDonald’s staff on a drive-through lane, can you?

But China is still kind of like a developing country, because in many ways standards have not been set, or more sarcastically, not been met since there’s still plenty of gray area to operate on. Taobao has successfully inherited this cultural message by transforming our love in negotiation on the streets since ancient time to a modern, high-efficiency web portal. The model could be possibly successful in some other developing countries, but I could hardly believe that it can be used in developed countries, where everything has a standard and the standard has to be met.

Ironically, that also makes China, as a country, attractive, at least I love that. 🙂

I am an Apple fanboy, if you have an opportunity to ask any of my close friends, and I guess I will still be a slave to Apple, because the phones and laptops are just too great to escape from. People love to talk about “ecosystem” when it comes to Apple, for example, iMessage is a service you will miss when you switch to Android phones.

Recently, Huawei is quickly gaining its place in smartphone market, and it has even been risen to a level that Huawei represents China and Apple represents America. As far as I am concerned, this comparison is quite confusing, and dangerous. Some Chinese companies produce decent hardware, for instance, DJI which makes drones, Huawei and OnePlus which make smartphones, Xiaomi which makes smart devices. But none of them is even comparable to Apple’s “ecosystem” at this time, and the incentives to include countries behind them are unnecessary. It will only do harm to both companies, when China and US governments step in this issue.

China is soon becoming the largest market for Apple, and the success in the US is the ultimate destination for all electronic device makers, including Huawei and other Chinese companies. Companies, as an independent identity, are often at stake when customers suspect it having relations with the government, especially after the Snowden incident and GDPR policies being rolled out in the Europe. What I’ve seen so far is whenever Huawei has some problems overseas, Chinese government will seemingly help Huawei out of trouble, sometimes too directly. I don’t believe it is the right way to help Huawei or other companies overseas, to be accepted by foreign customers. It will enhance the suspect that these companies have unusual connections with the government.

On the other hand, I can see countless examples for Apple to try getting rid of the impact from US government. I am not saying that Apple has no connection with NSA at all, because I am not Tim Cook. But Apple constantly states publicly that the data is stored somewhere safe, and nobody except itself can decrypt it. Previously even FBI got rejected by Apple to help them get access to a phone from a suspected terrorist. Unfortunately, I can’t find the actual endeavor from Huawei except useless statements.

For Chinese companies to go abroad successfully, they need to be independent, strong and stable, just like all those legendary multinational companies in the history. Huawei has been out there for so long that it often gives me an image contrary to that, and probably it is not due to itself, but the eager-to-be-helpful government that hopes its children to be successful.

I believe every person who has been into Youtube or other video sites would have found vlog is gaining its place gradually. Let it be a lifestyle one, tech review one or other genres, it seems to suit everybody’s desire at this time of age. Would it be the next generation of social media? Very likely.

But seemingly, if one decides to shoot vlogs for living, it could be extremely difficult to pay off the efforts. Let’s put celebrities away first since they get all the attention wherever they go. For normal people, nobody will be interested in seeing how they live their lives, unless they are living very exotic ones, such as living in the North Pole. For them to succeed, they need to have a very specific theme, at least at the very beginning, to gain enough solid audience before they start to record their “boring” daily life.

Apart from the toughness to get initial audience, it is the personal character and the video quality that eventually get vloggers the attention they want. One might initially attract lots of viewers by his/her looking, but it is not everlasting if he/she doesn’t have a personality that goes along with audience. It is probably a talent instead of a skill that can be acquired. Additionally, the video quality has set a high standard on vloggers’ skills in video editing, so those famous vloggers often have background in directing or have a team who works on this.

Being famous is not easy, especially when there are over 6 billion people living on the earth, and most of them have free Internet. But I guess vlogger’s hard work will have its meaning for their colorful life at last as long as they don’t shoot videos out of the desire for money. Please, do it with joy. #SaluteToLife

If I am not working in this field, and work as a general tech guy in a tech company, I would have been overwhelmed by this trend as well, seriously. While the world is promoting AI (specifically, tech companies), few people really understand the techniques that are in the center of play.

Machine learning, AKA modeling, has been in the field for a much longer period, and its base on mathematics and statistics has made it a very powerful tool for statisticians and engineers to train computers to help their business. Deep learning, which is signified by the development of computing power in neural network models, has become the hottest topic in recent years, followed by the successful stories of AlphaGo which has beaten one of the best Go players in human history.

If you look closely, though, or if you work as a data scientist like I do in one of those “big” tech corporations, you would soon realize that deep learning can quite often give you worse results in reality. In other words, deep learning is not for everyone in every situation. Neural networks have been great in three specific fields. Firstly, it is an excellent tool for computer vision. The development of new network structures such as convolutional neural network has transformed the way machines see pictures, thus giving it a pretty decent accuracies in fields like object detection and image recognition. Further more, text analysis, such as machine translation and word prediction have been enhanced by recurrent neural networks, in which the structure can remember previous occurrences for a specific event. Lastly, reinforcement learning(which is basically machine learning new things by exploration or exploitation) has seen its biggest enhancement followed by the help from deep learning. AlphaGo uses a more complex type of this network setting to succeed in overcoming the difficulties to defeat human top-notch Go players.

However, if you are in a traditional field such as anti-fraud, and you have about 20 features with slightly over 100,000 observations, you would be amazed by the fact that as simple as a model like logistic regression can serve you better. Theoretically, though, deep learning has the power to imitate any linear or non-linear models, but setting the hyper parameters just about right is an art instead of science. Quite often, at least to me what happened is tree models(gradient boosting machines, random forest) or linear models(logistic regression, elastic net regression) have better predictive power and easier to be interpreted. Does it mean some mistakes in my deep learning experiments? I used to think so, until I realized that the inner drawback of deep learning: it can’t replace math and statistics in modeling! Especially when you are dealing with a highly imbalanced dataset, using deep learning models would easily make it overfitting or less predictive than math models, and this has been exemplified by some practices of mine in my daily work.

So don’t be fooled by any crazy promotions of AI. It does have change some fundamental ways for machines to learn new things, but it can’t guarantee you good results when it comes to modeling. A lot of companies are using this as a trick to attract new fundings, just like what Bitcoin has been to our world. You won’t assume there’s a Swiss knife for modeling, won’t you? LOL.

Not long ago, world’s fourth biggest phone maker – Xiaomi, has successfully held its IPO in Hong Kong, marking this newly-rising Chinese giant company a new milestone in its journey. It is hard to categorize Xiaomi as an Internet company, like how Google is, when the primary profits of it still come from its low-end smart phones.

I work for Xiaomi as of now, and I am proud to see its rapid but huge development in different areas, although I am indeed not convinced by its decision to go public. But I also understand that was probably not a perfect timing for the board, either. China has tighten its control on financial area recently, and as visionary as a CEO could be, he should realize that missing now probably would cause missing the future. Therefore, it is not really a multiple choice question. Instead, all would tend to do it as soon as possible before everything else goes wrong in the bigger context.

We all know recently America has been impacting the world economy aggressively, with the latest example being Turkey getting crushed in its financial section. When people rush to Istanbul to purchase luxuries, they need to realize that thing could happen anywhere any soon around the globe. For Chinese Internet giants or startups, they could be witnessing an approaching storm in funding area very soon. For giants, they could just hang in there for several years and then make it till next spring; for startups or unicorns, it would be a different story, since they still need tons of funding to support their great ideas and visions.

How does the storm come anyway? I guess it can’t strip away the relation with the real estate market, which is worth trillions of dollars today. It has become the centerpiece of the underlying problems – the ever-growing real estate market has taken away all the investment that should have gone into other industries, thus creating probably the biggest bubble in financial history. Other than that, it has also brought a lot of corruption because the land is controlled by the state, so it means by selling more land, local governments can increase their profits in the financial sheets. There are some other problems as well, but none of them is quite comparable to the one we just mentioned, which has taken years to form. Internet companies, which have enjoyed rapid investments and funding, inevitably would be impacted by the real estate market. On the other hand, employees of those Internet companies, many of them are strongly talented, are starting to feel huge pressure in terms of apartment rentals. The rents in Beijing area have gone up by a growing rate, and many of my colleagues are under pressure with limited payments from the company. It drives, instead, the companies to seek more funding from possible sources.

Although some of the Chinese tech giants originally copied their business model from foreign companies, I have to admit that in terms of localization they are far better than the original idea-holders. The CEO of Baidu just mentioned that if Google wanted to come back to China again, he has the confidence to win again. That is not completely bullshit, because the vast majority of Chinese netizens are not what we believe they are.

Anyways, the economic conditions are still not yet clear, but it has reminded me to be careful with what decisions I make, especially for financial decisions. Obviously more Chinese Internet companies will go for IPO soon, but we all know it is not the signal that the economy is going well.