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Facebook macht ernst in Sachen Transparenz und Politischer Werbung

Ich hatte gerade folgende E-Mail von Facebook in meiner Inbox:

Das bedeutet, dass Facebook insbesondere mit Hinblick auf die Europa-Wahl im Mai diesen Jahres mehr Transparenz in Werbung auf deren Plattform bringen will. Das finde ich gut und hoffe es schafft wirklich auch mehr Transparenz.

 

Die gesamte E-Mail liest sich wie folgt:

Hallo,

uns ist wichtig, zur Sicherheit und Transparenz rund um Wahlen beizutragen. Deshalb haben wir im Vorfeld der Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament mehrere Neuerungen veröffentlicht, die Wahlwerbung sowie Werbeanzeigen zu Themen mit besonderer Relevanz innerhalb der Europäischen Union (EU) betreffen. Wir möchten, dass Menschen wissen, welcher Werbetreibende für eine Werbeanzeige verantwortlich ist. Um dies transparenter zu machen, führen wir einen neuen Autorisierungsprozess ein. Dieser umfasst die Verifizierung der Identität des Werbetreibenden im jeweiligen EU-Land sowie die Kennzeichnung mit einem „Finanziert durch“-Disclaimer in den Seiteneinstellungen unter „Autorisierung“. Zudem werden zukünftig alle Werbeanzeigen sowie detaillierte Informationen dazu sieben Jahre lang in unserer neuen Werbebibliothek sichtbar sein.

Um politische Werbeanzeigen weiterhin schalten zu können, müssen Sie beide Schritte bis zum 15. April 2019 erfolgreich durchgeführt haben.

Weitere Informationen und eine detaillierte Anleitung finden Sie in diesem Leitfaden und in unserem Hilfebereich. Unter facebook.com/id können Sie den Vorgang direkt starten.

Identität verifizieren

Alle Werbetreibenden, die innerhalb der EU Anzeigen mit Bezug zu Politikern oder Parteien, zu Wahlen (einschließlich Kampagnen zur Erhöhung der Wahlbeteiligung) oder Themen von besonderer Relevanz in der EU (Einwanderung, politische Werte, Bürgerrechte und soziale Rechte, Sicherheit und Außenpolitik, Wirtschaft, Umweltpolitik) erstellen oder bearbeiten möchten, müssen ihre Identität verifizieren.

Diesen Vorgang können Sie auf einem Computer unter facebook.com/id oder in den Einstellungen der Facebook-App durchführen. Ausweisdokumente zur Verifizierung Ihrer Identität werden innerhalb von 48 Stunden geprüft. Wenn Sie Anzeigen mit politischen Inhalten schalten oder in Zukunft schalten möchten, empfehlen wir Ihnen, den Autorisierungsprozess sobald wie möglich zu durchlaufen, um Verzögerungen zu vermeiden.

Anforderungen für die Verifizierung Ihrer Identität:Folgende Anforderungen müssen erfüllt sein, damit Sie Ihre Identität verifizieren können:

  • Aktivieren Sie die zweistufige Authentifizierung für Ihr Facebook-Konto.
  • Wählen Sie eine der folgenden Optionen, um Ihre Identität zu verifizieren:
    • Amtlicher Lichtbildausweis
    • Zwei offizielle Dokumente
    • Notariell beglaubigtes Formular, herunterzuladen unter facebook.com/id

Auf jedem eingereichten Dokument muss der Name des ausstellenden Landes aufgedruckt sein. Es muss mit dem Land übereinstimmen, in dem Sie für die Schaltung politischer Werbung autorisiert werden. In unserem Hilfebereich finden Sie eine vollständige Liste der als Identifikationsnachweis akzeptierten Dokumente.

Disclaimer für Werbeanzeigen

Um politische Werbung schalten zu können, müssen Sie zudem einen „Finanziert durch“-Disclaimer für die jeweilige Seite erstellen. Rufen Sie dafür den Tab „Autorisierungen“ in den Einstellungen Ihrer Facebook-Seite auf und verknüpfen Sie die Werbekonten, die Sie verwenden möchten. Die Einrichtung eines oder mehrerer Disclaimer erfolgt auf Seitenebene, nicht auf Anzeigenebene. Diesen Schritt können Sie nur in einem Desktop-Browser durchführen.

Anforderungen für den Disclaimer:

  • Genaue und vollständige Angabe Ihres Namens
  • Keine Abkürzungen
  • Keine URLs
  • Darf nicht die Worte „Finanziert durch“ enthalten
  • Einhaltung der Facebook-Richtlinien zu Disclaimern.

Optionen für den „Finanziert durch“-Disclaimer:

  • Name des Seitenadministrators, wie in offiziellen Dokumenten angegeben
  • Seitenname
  • Abweichender Name der Organisation

Zur Verifizierung des im Disclaimer angegebenen Namens benötigen wir unter Umständen weitere Informationen wie eine Telefonnummer, eine E-Mail-Adresse, eine Website oder eine Postanschrift. In Frankreich muss zudem das Pflichtfeld „Unternehmensgegenstand“ ausgefüllt werden.

Anzeigenbuchung

Sobald Ihre Identität verifiziert und Ihr Disclaimer genehmigt wurde, können Sie politische Werbung auf Facebook schalten. Bei der Anzeigenerstellung sehen Sie das Kontrollkästchen „Bei dieser Anzeige handelt es sich um Wahlwerbung oder Werbung zu Themen, die in der EU relevant sind.“ Aktivieren Sie dieses Kästchen, damit Ihre Disclaimer-Informationen in Ihrer Anzeige enthalten sind.

Zusätzlich zu dem oben beschriebenen Autorisierungsprozess muss politische Werbung in der EU – je nach Land – in Euro oder einer anderen akzeptierten Währung bezahlt werden. Das Werbekonto muss zudem eine Zahlungsquelle mit einer Adresse in dem Land nachweisen, in dem Sie Anzeigen schalten möchten. Die Währung des Werbekontos muss der örtlichen Währung entsprechen.

Anzeigen können nur in dem Land ausgeliefert werden, in dem der jeweilige Werbetreibende für die Schaltung solcher Anzeigen autorisiert wurde.

Wenn auf der Seite der Anzeige oder im Profil der Person, die die Anzeige schaltet, ein Land genannt wird, muss dieses dem Land entsprechen, in dem Sie sich autorisieren.

Werbebibliothek

Facebook hat eine Werbebibliothek entwickelt, um Nutzern mehr Informationen über einzelne Anzeigen und die finanzierenden Werbetreibenden zu geben. In der Werbebibliothek werden Anzeigen mit Bezug zu politischen Akteuren oder Parteien, Wahlen und Themen von besonderer Relevanz in der EU sieben Jahre lang gespeichert. Sie enthält alle Anzeigen mit einem Disclaimer. Anzeigen ohne Disclaimer, deren Inhalte später als politisch eingestuft werden, werden ebenfalls in die Werbebibliothek aufgenommen. Zudem enthält die Bibliothek Informationen zur Auslieferung einer Anzeige, darunter die Anzahl der Impressionen, Informationen zu den Kosten sowie Angaben zur Demografie der Zielgruppe und zu erreichten Standorten.

Indem wir Werbetreibende autorisieren und Anzeigen transparenter machen, möchten wir eine externe Einflussnahme auf die Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament verhindern.

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Neue App: Fuel Usage Tracker — Auch in Deutsch

Nachdem es bei der letzten App ja etwas Feedback gab, dass wir doch mal unsere Apps bitte auch in Deutsch online stellen sollen, jetzt hier heute also die Ankündigung: Unsere neue App “Fuel Usage Tracker” gibt es jetzt in Englisch und in Deutsch.

Fuel Usage Tracker hilft dir den Überblick über deinen Spritverbrauch zu behalten und ihn ggf. zu optimieren. Bei mir funktioniert das einwandfrei und es ist ein bisschen fast eine Challenge. Frei nach dem Motto: “Vielleicht schaffe ich bei der nächsten Tankfüllung doch noch einen halben Liter weniger im L/100km Verbrauch.”

Fuel Usage Tracker steht ab sofort zum kostenlosen Download bereit: https://fuelusagetracker.page.link/download

Wer die offizielle Ankündigung auf der Webseite lesen möchte, kann sich dies gern antun. Ist allerdings in Englisch: Fuel Usage Tracker Launched – Find out what your car’s real fuel consumption is

Aktuell werden Fahrzeuge mit Benzin und Diesel unterstützt. Bald sollen auch EVs folgen. Es können auch mehrere Fahrzeuge in einer App verwaltet werden, allerdings ist nur ein Fahrzeug kostenfrei. Sollte jemand mehr Fahrzeuge verwalten wollen, dann ist das Upgrade für €0,99 nötig. Des Weiteren erlaub Fuel Usage Tracker es, die Tankfüllinformationen als CSV Datei zu exportieren. Diese Dateien können dann ganz einfach in Microsoft Excel importiert und weiter verarbeitet werden.

Hier gibts noch ein paar Screenshots zum anschauen:

P.S.: Wer noch eine Kfz-Versicherung benötigt, kann sich gerne hier einmal umschauen: Günstige Kfz-Versicherungen.

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Aphrodite.ai Updated with Mr. Trump

We recently updated our Aphrodite.AI website with a new model for Mr. Trump and also with a couple of other user interface improvements. A while back I wrote about our first test version that went online back then. We’ve made some improvements (mostly under-the-hood) and the entire system runs more smoothly now.

My smile is indeed quite OK when it’s not my face, isn’t it?

As you might notice, Mr. Trump is not in the screen shots of me. It turns out, the face swapping with Mr. Trump’s face is not working as well as it should be. It always turns out quite smudged in the end. Not sure whether that’s due to my face or the target face? Hmm …

Aphrodite.AI recently got some great coverage on Y Combinator’s Hacker News and also made it onto Product Hunt. Even in Japan some folks found it real fun to try our service. Have a look here: aphrodite.ai 凄いな。

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New productivity app to reschedule tasks with fixed time spans

We recently launched this new app called ARS, which stands for Auto-Re-Schedule. It is a very niche productivity app for people who have tasks that need to be done at fixed time spans — starting from the time the task was completed.

Traditional productivity apps like Apple’s “Reminder” app, Google Calendar or the like, usually pre-schedule tasks for a certain date/time. For example, every Monday morning 8:00 am “Bring child to kindergarten”. Just an example, not that I would forget that 🙂 So technically, all future tasks of that one thing to do, are scheduled in advance for every Monday morning. There was simply no need for us to create another app that can do exactly the same.

Download & Full Announcement: ARS – Auto-Re-Schedule Launched – Reschedule Tasks with Fixed Time Spans

ARS is different. At ARS you can schedule a task for Monday 9:30am as “Pick up mail from postbox” and you can set a fixed time span, for example 7 days. So when you complete this task, it will automatically re-schedule itself 7 days after you have completed that task.

Early Completion. So if you pick up your mail early, say on Thursday morning 9:30am, you can mark your task as completed. It will automatically be re-scheduled for the next Thursday 9:30am, i.e. 7 days later.

Late Completion. Should you miss your time and complete the task two days late: Wednesday 9:30am; then you mark the task as “done” and it will automatically re-schedule itself for the following Wednesday at 9:30am, i.e. 7 days later.

Again, ARS works differently in that sense. Of course, you could keep using the existing Calendar/Reminder app and will work just as fine — as long as you manually edit the next alert time if you’ve completed your task early or late.

Use Cases. ARS only makes sense for very specific tasks, like emptying the postbox here in Germany. I have a maximum of 7 days I can keep my mail there before the post office ladies will send it back to the sender. So I’d like to make sure I pick up my mail on time. Same counts for pre-paid SIM cards in certain countries. In Hong Kong at Smartone for example, pre-paid SIM cards can be topped up and from the time of last top-up the card is valid for 180 days. If you top up early, that 180 day counter resets. So you got to make sure your SIM card is topped up on time and if you top up early, that fixed time span is being kept and the reminder to top up is being set properly.

ARS can be downloaded for free. Your first 3 reminders are free. If you’d like to use more, you can purchase the upgrade through the app for $0.99.

Download ARS here

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Earning Money by Blogging: +1,000% Ad Income

From time to time I get to hear some criticism about having ads on my blog here. I can understand the dislike of advertising and I myself do click ads away or try to close them where ever possible and most importantly if they’re annoying. Yet at the same time, I do also have ads on my blog.

Having ads on kozen.de is in part an experiment to see myself if I can somehow be able to finance the hosting costs for this blog through such ads. Sure, I’ll have to create content that is interesting to people to come here, have a read and get some value out of it. While I believe there is an audience out there that might find my content useful, I am also sure that there is a rather large audience that finds my content not useful at all. And that is entirely fine with me.

Today when I logged onto my Google AdSense account to check on this blog’s recent performance, I noticed this little notification at the top right and after opening it, it showed me that my ad income performance went up by 1,000% per cent. Granted, I have started from low levels. This blog had not been updated for several years before I took up blogging again.

I’m not even constantly blogging right now. As you might have noticed (or not noticed :)) there are some weeks when no blog post is being published. There are just some weeks when I don’t really have a topic to talk about or when I simply don’t feel like blogging. More often though, I am just not in the mood to blog. It is a great luxury to have that choice, though.

Perhaps some day, I will be able to simply cover server hosting fees just through advertising income on this blog. Hopefully, some of my content will be valuable enough to my readers to keep coming back from time to time and be timeless enough that it is not outdated in the second it was posted here.

There’s a long way to go and blogging helps to get through that process.

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Machine Learning to Stream “DeepFake” Videos in Real-Time

Machine learning is one of the major goals of the more general term of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year I read about so called “DeepFake” videos on the popular German computer science news service Heise. While the entire topic in that article is a bit sleazy, I was intrigued by the possibilities of that technology.

Basically, the “DeepFake” technology uses existing machine learning / deep learning algorithms to create models that can manipulate data in a certain quite predictable way. If you input a headshot photo of a random person, that “model” can make that person look like a very specific person. That sounds very abstract.

An example:

If I take a photo of myself, the “Nicholas Cage” model can make me look like Nicholas Cage!

In the case of those DeepFake videos, an entire video scene was processed by a certain model and basically made the actor look like a very specific different actor. So as a result, you would get a video where the actor looks very different from the one who was shot in the original film.

Real-Time is Key

For quite some years we’ve been working with streaming video for our Sky Drone products, which come in many different flavors. As a result, we have a bit of experience on how to stream video real-time. Then we thought further on how that technology of “deep faking” could work with real-time video chat. As a result, we used all the technology knowledge at hand and created a small web service that allows you to video chat with yourself. Yet, you won’t see your face, but the one of a person you choose to be. This is how it looks like:

The small website is not fancy nor is it easy to use. It just works — if you use it the right way. If you’d like to try it yourself, you can follow the instructions we posted on Reddit.

TRY HERE: Reddit – Video Live-Stream DeepFake Testing

Here is a video of a user in India who gave it a try:

How it works

You can see yourself through the webcam of your computer. That video is being streamed to a cloud computing cluster we operate. On that cluster, the “AI model” for the selected person is being applied. The resulting video is then being streamed back to your computer and shown on the screen. As a result, your face looks quite different from your actual face.

You can try to smile for example, and the model will modify the smile to a smile that celebrity would do. This includes the kind of teeth that celebrity has, the mouth and lip shape, etc.

For example, this is how it looks like when we smile while being Nicolas Cage:

Of course, a photo of a computer screen is not that nice and it does especially not show how movement in the video shows you as a “different person”. Yet, it can at least give you an idea on how that might be. Feel free to give it a try yourself.

The Future

We have some ideas on how this can be used in future – for legitimate purposes, of course. As I don’t want to spoil your thoughts … What do you think this can be used for?

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Storing Large Amounts of Video Data Efficiently, Redundantly and Quickly Accessible

I am writing this down because I read about 50 blog articles and how tos on the web regarding this topic. Yet, I couldn’t find any good advise that fit my video data storage issue.

Like I mentioned before, I am also involved in Slate Takes Limited – a boutique video production company based out of Hong Kong. Slate Takes is currently finishing up the last touches of a 42 webisode travel series for The Vagabond Project (more info and the official trailer at their Vagabond Blog), working with clients like Red Bull at events, assisting in shooting movies, and helping international brands to turn their vision onto moving pictures. As all of our work is done at least in Full HD, you can imagine that there is a lot of data that needs to be handled, stored and backed up.

In matter of cost efficiency, nothing beats magnetic drives — still. The difference is not as big as it was some years ago, but it is still there. However, such “tapes” don’t really perform that well. Working video projects is not just about saving the final video somewhere. It is all about storing the “raw data” that comes from the camera consistently and easily accessible. If you need one day to find a tape, copy data from that tape to your computer, and then find out that the tape was damaged towards the end of it, you are f***ed. Yes, tapes do definitely provide a longer durability than hard drives or CDs, but in order to achieve redundancy, you would need to have at least two copies of each tape. We don’t even want to think about the speed if you need to access data quickly and get things done.

I have always been a fan of hard drives and RAID systems in general (about 8 years ago I had a server with 1 TB storage at home — I thought I’d never get that filled up!). We have been using a 4-bay Synology NAS loaded with 4x 2TB hard drives for about a year now. Running in RAID 5 they provide some data protection in case one hard drive has an hardware defect. On top of that, the system comes with a 1 GB/s LAN connection which allows fairly quick access. In fact, it is possible to edit videos using Final Cut Pro 7 on Mac connected to the NAS via a GigaBit switch — of course not as fast as accessing the data on a local hard drive nor on a local SSD drive; but it works. If that’s not fast enough, the GB/s connection allows quick data transfer to your local machine.

Now, one year after its incarnation, we had to look into expanding our storage again. 8 TB were filled up (from which about 6 TB were usable due to RAID5) and data kept flying in. All options were on the table, but I decided to stick with Synology and only upgrade to a 12-bay NAS which can easily be extended by another 12 bays to store up to 72 TB. Synology’s “DiskStation” software is easy to use, yet quite feature rich and low in maintenance. Furthermore, the same partitions that had been created on the first 4 TB could be kept; making the transition easier. The new setup looks like this:

The great thing is: this unit even has 2x 1 GB/s LAN connections which allows more than one user to access files with maximum data transfer rates. Two additional 2 GB hard drives were installed to increase our storage by 50%. The transition to the new system was pretty straight forward if you follow Synology’s Migration How To. This setup allows us now to expand the NAS by up to 6 hard drives at any time without worrying about needing to expand it to fit more drives. Now the “expansion process” is running and from the progress it shows so far, it might run for a while.

In case you are looking for a similar setup, here a quick wrap-up of the costs:

We will see how long this setup will last. At least for now, it comforts me that there is gonna be at least a year or two until we have to think about an alternative storage system. For now, this should be sufficient and price-wise it was well, required.

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Building a Company Targeting Consumers versus Targeting Businesses – From an Online / Social Media Perspective

A couple of years ago when we started building mobile apps for BlackBerry® smartphones the majority of BlackBerry® users were business people. They used their devices because they got them from their employer. The biggest BlackBerry® app buyer group back then were businesses who wanted to improve their business processes and bring more functionality to mobile. Obviously, we could have gone the way of building applications and services for those companies. As we weren’t the best B2B sales people, we were in not in the best physical location (Kunming, PRC) to meet up with business decision makers and we couldn’t be bothered to nurture business relations and attend ‘networking events’; we chose the path of targeting consumers directly. In a sense, it’s more fun anyway.

By targeting consumers we have to focus on moving at a faster pace. We need to bring updates of products very frequently, we need to publish new products often and we have to hit the sweet spot of what people really want, and so on. On top of that we have to establish a proper relationship with our users. This includes multiple communication channels like email, direct instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Since the launch of S4BB’s Facebook page back in October 2011, we could grow our fan base to over 120,000 fans in less than 6 months. Most recently, we are pushing this a bit more and are seeing tremendous interest. To our marketing interns: Great job so far!

Building a huge fan base is usually one of the main goals of consumer companies when it comes to social media like Facebook for example. Every marketer you might want to hire, keeps telling you: you need a huge base (newsletter subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, feed subscribers, etc.) and later on you just need to “activate” them to sell products and services to them. That does sound good in theory, but let’s be honest here – what’s happening in the real world? In fact most companies spent a lot of money on building up huge online / social media properties with Facebook pages and communities way bigger than our S4BB Apps. Yet, most of those brands utilize their social media presence in the traditional “one-way direct marketing” kind of sense by kicking out a discount voucher once a week and publishing news about their products. Hoping these initiatives pay off. Yes, we do that too and yes, everything can be tracked to ensure proper ROI. But the truly big thing is: social media actually allows us to have a direct bi-directional communication with our brand’s audience. “Social Media Gurus” can talk you to sleep about that topic. Yet, nobody has an answer on how to manage bi-directional conversations with hundreds of thousands of fans and followers who have different views about different topics, products; speak different languages, live in different time zones and countries, and could all talk at the same time — to you.

At S4BB Ltd. and Skylab Mobilesystems Ltd. we are building products for consumers in a large scale. We target global audiences in any country in the world with any mobile platform they prefer. At TreeCrunch Ltd. we are actually building a platform for companies which have huge online properties with many customers, followers, fans; simply users, I like to call them. TreeCrunch’s direct customer-engagement platform allows us to overcome these challenges in communicating with our audiences at S4BB and Skylab, but it also allows any brand like yours to do the same. Is your company up for that?

More to come. Stay tuned and subscribe to my RSS feed.

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Scaling a Web Server to Serve 165 Million Ad Requests per Day


I am usually not the kind of guy who likes to boast with numbers, but in this case I believe it helps to put things into perspective. For over seven years I am in the mobile app business targeting consumers directly. Over the years we have created thousands of products, most of them paid, some completely free and some with ads.

For years, I did not believe in monetization of apps through advertising. Even today, I am still very skeptical about that because you need to have A LOT of ad requests per day so that any significant income can be generated from that. At the moment, our few (around 10) mobile applications that sport ad banners, generate up to 165 million (165,000,000) ad requests per day. That makes up to 5.115 billion ad requests per month. If you compare that to a fairly large mobile advertising company like Adfonic with their “35 billion ad requests per month” (src: About Adfonic) we are doing quite alright for a small app company. We are using a mix of different ad networks depending on what performs best on which platform. Besides that we are breaking it down into country/region to use appropriate ad provider that is best for that region. Part of that also involves ad providers who do not support certain platforms natively. So built server-side components to handle such ad requests in a “proxy” kind of way that still allows us to get ads shown in apps on a certain platform that is not officially supported by the ad provider. Basically, we have a mini website that just shows an ad; and we can have hundreds of thousands of mobile devices accessing this website from all over the world at the same time.

Using cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, or others any can serve a virtually unlimited number of requests these day. It all depends on your credit card limit. There are obviously usage patterns of programs of applications and over the course of the day, we have ups and downs. For example, at midnight GMT most people all over the world like to use our applications and therefore they request more ads. Five hours later, we experience the lowest traffic. Depending on application store release schedules, promotions, featured listings, user notifications, external promotions like on blogs or elsewhere, unexpected sudden spikes in traffic can occur any time. “Automatic Scaling” in combination with “Load Balancing” seemed to be the magic solutions for this.

After months of running a bunch of server instances behind a load balancer we were quite happy with the performance. It was easy for us determine usage patterns and see how many servers we need to serve the average maximum number of requests without our service to fail. We didn’t think that much about cost-optimization because our cloud computing bills weren’t that high; so we didn’t really work on such auto scaling components. That had two main disadvantages: Firstly, we spent more that we needed to as we probably didn’t need half of the server that were running while we had low traffic. Secondly, we were not prepared for sudden massive spikes in traffic. With TreeCrunch on the other hand, we are building a scalable system from the ground up.

So early this week I took three hours and looked into how to implement such auto-scaling. Actually, it took me two hours to install the tools properly. However, as you can see in the above charts, the current systems works in a way that if we hit a maximum amount of average traffic per server, a new server is being created and added to our load balancer — it then immediately starts serving ads. If the average traffic falls below a certain threshold, a server is being terminated and therefore stops serving ads. To minimize server load, we run really tiny PHP scripts that are extremely optimized just for the purpose of requesting an ad the desired ad company and delivering such ad to the client (mobile app). As web server we are currently using lighttpd which is very lightweight indeed. Interestingly, we noticed that there is not really a problem with “normal” system resources to handle a lot of requests. Our CPU usage is fairly acceptable (constantly around 50%), we don’t need any hard drive space as we are just proxy’ing requests and we don’t even run out of memory. The first limitation one of our ad servers hits, is the maximum number of used sockets which is by default around 32,000 (or something like that) on Debian-based linux. That’s more or less an artificial limitation by the operating, but we didn’t play with adjusting that one yet.

Summary: In a fairly short period of time, we managed to set up a proper auto scaling policy that allows to scale up to virtually unlimited numbers of ad requests. With fairly low budgets companies nowadays can setup proper data centers, serve millions of users and maintain their infrastructure with a few very talented people and without purchasing any hardware that would be obsolete a year or two later.

I love the time I am living in. Every single day something new and exciting pops up.

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Traveling the Silicon-Valley-Style Tech Startup Road

Though, I don’t find much time to write articles these days, I believe I should write down my experiences as long as I still remember them properly. My fellow regular readers might have noticed a slight change in logos on the right sidebar which now sports the TreeCrunch logo; a company I co-founded a couple of months ago. In a nutshell, TreeCrunch is a social, viral, open-ended customer engagement platform with an incredible potential to influence companies and society.

From the beginning, we wanted to form a company that accomplishes four major goals:

  1. Build a successful tech company with global reach based out of Hong Kong.
  2. Help companies understand their social media audience and improve their business.
  3. Create a workplace where coders are kings and everyone loves to come to work.
  4. Expand as quickly as possible by raising funds internally and externally.

Building a tech company in Hong Kong is not easy. Yes, infrastructure is incredibly good — super fast non-firewalled Internet connection (that’s actually all a hacker needs), according to OECD most economic freedom, considerably low tax rates, access to all kinds of conveniences in life, a very good life style and any kind of beer your can imagine (important for us Germans) over one hundred “AAA” rated beaches. Yet, there are disadvantages and obstacles to overcome: recruiting of the best programmers available (remember, we are in competition with banks, hedge funds and property companies that are loaded with cash), high cost of lodging, cultural differences (to most uni grads is not as “cool” to work at a startup as it is silicon valley for example).

Helping companies understanding their social media audience is not the big problem. Our technology is superior, our prototypes are working, our first clients have committed to enjoy our services and work with us; growing with us.

Creating a great workplace for hackers is also the easier part for us. Over the past years we have been gathering a lot of information about how to make a programmer’s life fulfilling and fun. It can be quite boring when you are cramped in a 2 sqm area behind a tiny desk right next to the guy who showers once a week. Let’s start with small things like free soft drinks and snacks, free Friday lunches, air hockey tables, going over to purposely not enforcing too harsh deadlines (taking off pressure) and ending up in private rooms for each developer with two 23 inch (or bigger) monitors and the fastest desktop computers money buy. It is a very “not typical HK style” workplace and it is obviously not the right place for everyone. We believe the ones who like to work without too much supervision, but a lot of responsibility and creative ownership – those will change the world and they will change other people’s worlds.

Expanding as quickly as we can is not easy either. With S4BB, Skylab and Slate Takes (the other logos on the right) we have always pursued the way of self-sustaining growth without external funding. So for years now, our strategy has been exclusively: get profitable first; then spend money. That came with a lot advantages like not being in debt, having complete control over the direction the company and its products need to go. For example, a couple of years back we decided not to do any contractual mobile development work with S4BB and Skylab which obviously had a negative effect on cashflow in the short term. We decided to spend our time (==money) to build our own products that became assets of our business and have helped us a lot over the long term to create sustainable constant income to fund the creation of an awesome hacker workplace. On top of that, I don’t like to bring someone else’s dream to life.

With TreeCrunch on the other hand, we are going down the typical “Silicon-Valley-Style Tech Startup Road” with a slight twist. We are three co-founders that invested their own money, have a unique vision, developed superior technology, come with over 30 years of combined industry experience and (most importantly) we have run companies before; without going bankrupt. Even though we had enough ‘internal’ funding that we wouldn’t need to raise more, we are still doing it. Everyone knows this, but sometimes it has to be spoken out loud: “You got to raise money when you don’t need it.” That is one of the reasons why we are about to close our first pre-seed funding round raising our cash reserves by about 50%. Furthermore, TreeCrunch just got awarded the Cyberport Creative Micro Fund which comes with a grant of HK$100k.

With TreeCrunch we joined several programs so far, these are two:

Fund raising in Hong Kong is an interesting challenge. There are plenty of semi-governmental funds (like CCMF), fully covered government schemes as well as private companies (like Microsoft) with their programs. These are great opportunities which we will look and enter into when it makes sense. There are also a lot of wealthy people and families around who made a fortune with properties, stocks and other businesses. The usual way of investing their wealth is not related with startups – and the sub-group of tech-related startups is even further away from that.

For example, you won’t believe how incredibly hard it seems to be to set up a simple thing like a “shareholder’s agreement”. In the U.S. there are templates for this, you can go to almost any lawyer in the bay area and you will get a template for a couple of bucks or shares. For those who don’t know: Hong Kong’s economy is built on two major pillars: the property and the stock market. Other major factors of Hong Kong’s economy include the financial industry, import/export and tourism/retail. Then, for quite a while there is not much coming along the list of important industries and at the further end of it some creative industries like movie production, media or IT are popping up. Hong Kong is an incredible place for business and life – yet it surprises me again and again that there are not that many companies actually creating assets like intellectual property for example. We want to create a successful tech company with global reach and along the way help transforming Hong Kong into a more diversified economy and create long-term highly qualified jobs.

We know that our biggest assets are our co-workers and we hire only the best we can find. This is where we put our money and it will help us fulfill our dreams and help our customers to solve their problems.

More information about TreeCrunch Limited: www.treecrunch.com

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