Kelvin Low

Singapore MBA student @ Harvard Business School. Passionate about technology, social media advertising, venture capital and startups! Follow me on Twitter: @low_kelvin Email: lowkelvin [dot] com

[lowkelvin]

Back in Cambridge!

It's been a month long hiatus as I finished the summer internship with Compass Labs and took off to Europe for a few weeks of travel. Now I'm back on campus for the 2nd year at HBS, and boy what a change it is from the 1st year!

It's less crazy, and I love the fact that we have so much more control over our own schedules in this 2nd year. I'm loving it! The last few days have been busy getting the house in order and fixing up  schedules / sampling classes, but after this weekend, it's all systems go!

More posts to come soon!

[lowkelvin]

The online education scene is an area that has been rapidly changing in the past few years, and last week I read this incredible New York Times article about the promises of using Big Data on campus.

Some of the stuff may be hype about the powers of technology to change the education sector drastically - while others are downright creepy (using student ID swipes to track social behavior and recommend friends to students based on similar interests and habits??).

However, there are also enough initiatives described in the article which could be incredible for a public college possessing limited resources and serving  40,000-60,000 students where Big Data usage and knowledge would boost effectiveness in helping the educational institutions meet their students' needs. 

Remember that it's only been a few years since my fellow HBS alumnus Salman Khan (MBA '03) set up the Khan Academy, and think about how much progress has been achieved in that time. I wonder what college will be like when our kids go to school in 20 years' time?

[lowkelvin]

Check this out! Hot property of the year Pinterest is now bigger than G+ and Tumblr for Brands. Hard to imagine that its explosive growth in the past year has helped Pinterest to overtake some of the big whales in this space. Of course, Facebook is still the 800 pound gorilla in the room, but who knows for how much longer if FB doesn't continue to innovate?

At the social media advertising company where I am a Product Manager intern, we've known this accelerating trend for the past few months but this is the first tangible call to action to do something about Pinterest. Our mountains of data are based on user profiles whom we've crawled for publicly available info based on actions they take on the thousands of brand pages that we monitor on Facebook. I can only imagine the 3x more of data we will get from Pinterest once we have the APIs to add them in as a new data channel too...

[lowkelvin]

Every once in a while, I get asked the question "what is Big Data?" Well, the best way to think about it is not in terms of data size (terabytes or 1000 GB), but the potential impact of understanding and drawing insights out from all that data.

The bottleneck was once enterprise and consumer computing power. After all, how many companies or people have IBM's resources? Today, in the age of Amazon Web Services and elastic cloud computing, that constraint has all but disappeared.

I found this link above to a short story of how companies are sitting on so much data that previously could not be parsed or computed, which is now being used to improve our lives. Check it out!

There are other more complex examples, like the company I'm working for as a Product Manager this summer, where we do a whole lot more with this data. Clicked on this link? Liked this item on FB? Well, we can collect publicly available info that helps our customers generate better quality, more highly targeted ads to you. This helps you find the stuff that you want to find more easily, or helps you complete what you didn't get round to doing in your last search query.

As it is, we are sitting today on a mountain of Big Data that is of huge potential commercial value to marketers and brand agencies, our main customers. The trick is unlocking the door (natural language processing, machine learning and computational modelling) to that room of massive data, and extracting what's relevant while putting aside what's not (data mining and clustering). The team I'm leading this summer is focused on exactly those tasks.

Big Data is here to stay - to me, the only question is who's on the boat to learn and who isn't... it's been a helluva ride learning so much in just this past month!

[lowkelvin]

Blast from the past!

I used to work in marketing and strategic planning with a top Asian carrier - so I always have an interest in the industry, sunset as the airlines may be.

Here's a cool infograph on the larger travel ecosystem today, and the players that have emerged to serve specific niches in the market since the early days of travel. How things have changed with the advent of the internet!

[lowkelvin]

Facebook recently announced a new weapon in the toolkit for app developers, that will also boost its data collecting capabilities - a little innocuous "Like" button that can be added into mobile applications. Sounds small?

This is huge, actually, as I've been learning this summer in the world of online advertising, Big Data and social media. What happens when you click on the like button? It's an "action" where data is collected on your, all with your permission that was granted when you signed up for a fb account - companies like the one I work for as a summer PM have the ability to crawl pages, collect publicly available information on your profile and timeline that includes your interests, behavior, preferences, etc. and we now can aggregate all of that information to help marketers and brand agencies. As long as it's public, we can capture and aggregate it.

This is peanuts, even as Facebook now retains the ability to send marketing feeds over to you related to what you just liked. Better yet, Sponsored Stories will explode with this new little button that app developers can now install - i.e. your friends can now see what you liked and it will appear on their feed. Mobile will just fuel this explosive growth further. The developers with the best apps that garner the highest responses are likely to become some of the most prized ones in Facebook's preferred community.

Cool huh? Win, win, win for everyone around - developers get their apps out, Facebook gets the data they need to collect to feed marketers, marketers and brands have greater ability and reach to target an audience, and hopefully you get better ads tailored towards what you really want! Just be aware of what happens when you click on the little 'like' button...

[lowkelvin]

It's been a tough two week cramming in mySQL, Vertica, relational databases, Hbase, Hadoop, Flume and tomorrow I'm learning how to index tables with Lucene. Sounds wonky? Welcome to the world of Big Data terms for the uninitiated, which I definitely fall into!

This article caught my eye - check out the large number of Boston based startups who have moved quickly into these spaces to serve the explosion of Big Data and ever changing requirements. One includes Vertica's former CEO and another has Vertica's co-founder - wonder how things will pan out? Can't wait to see what happens!

[lowkelvin]

I've spent a tremendous time learning how to be a Product Manager these past few weeks, as I now have a team of 2 undergrad interns working together with me as we work towards creating a refined Big Data product in the social media space. All I can say is that startups provide unstructured but tremendous learning opportunities - because of resource and manpower constraints, I feel that I'm learning at 2-3x the speed that I would have had in a similar role at a much larger organization! Today we were discussing cosine equations and K-means at work, which is something I would not have expected when I took this job on some months back!

Anyway, I took a break to check out what the next Class is looking like; and what HBS applicants for the upcoming session will face.

Wooaa! Firstly, the class is getting bigger, again! 925 enrollments, across 10 sections that get ever larger. A 13% admit rate, which has crept up from 11% only two years ago. Female admits remain at an all-time high of 40%, like my year. The Dean's experiment continues... See the current and historical statistics here:

http://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/class-statistics/

http://www.hbs.edu/about/statistics/mba.html

Next up - a big shift in the HBS application! Only two essays of 400 words each this time, which scares me plenty if I were applying this year. It was tough enough creating 4 essays of 400 words and being selective about what to talk about. Now, everyone is going to go even more crazy about the limited real estate space on the application. The 500 character statement that just got slipped in doesn't even let you say much! But there's a nice wild card in play for people who receive interviews - they'll now have a chance to write a reflection, which I think is an awesome idea. How many of us have left an interview thinking that we nailed it all and whole? Definitely not, there's always something that could have been clarified or brought up - HBS now gives those lucky enough to get an interview this chance.

Looking back, time flies so fast. I recall when I received my admit in Dec as an early X'mas gift and it's some 18 months from then. Now I'm now married and in a loving relationship with the most wonderful woman in the world, I have spent two summers in the awesome Bay Area, survived my first Boston winter, celebrated my first wedding anniversary and who knows where we will go from here. I can only say that life is good, and I definitely hope it will get even better. C'est la vie!

[lowkelvin]

Social media advertising - start to a summer of intense learning!

I'm here in San Jose working for a startup this summer as a Product Manager. It promises to be a great, intense summer of learning, and I want to shift gears and post 2 info graphs from what I've learned from readings these past few weeks.

1. Ad-marketers are NOT normal people - see the infograph below

2. Facebook has IPOed and apparently fallen flat on its face. It hasn't figured out how to monetize as well as Google, no doubts there. Here's a cool info graph I found that compares the two Giants and their ad display networks (fb should qualify as a would-be giant beside Google). 

[lowkelvin]

It's graduation month! I chanced upon this article from one of my favorite writers, Charles Wheelan, whose posts on Yahoo Finance I used to follow fervently. In this link, he writes about the 10 things graduates really need to hear at commencement, beyond the usual hullaboo and optimism.

I'm also thinking ahead to my HBS graduation next year. The school's motto is to develop leaders who help to change the world. There's plenty of truth in that; but I wonder if the actions of the few have tainted the rest of us in the public' eyes far more than one could ever imagine, living in the HBS bubble. Only time will tell!

[lowkelvin]

I've heard the word 'bubble' used 3 times today in reference to the tech sector and I thought it would be appropriate today to borrow some of the thoughts from Chris Dixon's blog, where I agree with him why we are not in a bubble (yet).

To me, the real revolution taking place today isn't on wall street or main street, but in Silicon Valley. Having spent last summer with a seed VC firm in Palo Alto, my sense is that it's broadly true that lots of investments have moved down the chain to seed in the past year or two, as VCs desperately try to get into the game either very early or late. I guess this plays to Chris's point about certain stages of valuations do seem to be overpriced; and how seed is getting expensive alongside how the jump to Series A in follow on funding is trending down. Lots of value is being created though, and entrepreneurship is alive and kicking. 

Time will tell how this plays out and I hope to be part of this tech 2.0 revolution

[lowkelvin]

This update is a month behind, but remains an important development, as Twitter rolled out its self-serve ad platform last month with launch partner American Express.

This is a first volley of shots fired by Twitter in the online advertising war today. While this platform remains exclusive today to Amex card members and merchants, expect more partners to roll on board if the platform proves to be a hit. Facebook and Google - watch out, here comes another player to the field of online advertising!

More posts in the future with other material I've saved - till then, enjoy!

[lowkelvin]

What's the big deal behind Facebook's upcoming IPO? Why is it important? What's beneath the hood of the huge numbers being talked about?

This is a cool post that I've read and would like to share, which breaks down the significance of the customer data - not the customer or the customer's value - and why it's shaping out to be the Holy Grail for marketers for years to come. In the age of Big Data, this is the biggest of them all, about to come onto the marketplace at a pretty price =)

[lowkelvin]

It's been a long time since I had the chance to post - I've been saving lots of material, so here goes! I recently activated Timeline, whose creator and designer Matt Brown I had the chance to meet back in Nov 2011. It's awesome, and I found an infograph here with a pretty cool overview visualization chart. Enjoy!

[lowkelvin]

Back from spring break and catching up on my reading on tech, I stumbled upon this article by Gartner that outlines the future of cloud and how we are truly in a post-PC world.

My personal view is that adoption of the personal cloud will take longer than the article's authors propose, as security and privacy issues will remain a huge obstacle to the private consumer. Google Play and the ICloud is paving the way, and strides will be made, but in my opinion, the biggest play in the market remains the enterprise space, especially B2B enterprise applications and services that are popping up all over the place to help other businesses reach consumers more effectively and quickly.

Also, I think the PC world still has space to grow, as there will always be a place for desktop computers, especially at large corporations where IT infrastructure has already been built. The march towards cloud adoption for these large companies will be slow, but because of their scale, they still form a chunk of the market that cannot be ignored. So the PC market will only become more fragmented, alongside similar developments in the enterprise and video gaming space, with a convergence towards cloud-enabled platforms in the near future ahead.

[lowkelvin]

Entrepreneurship and interest in e-commerce start ups is alive and kicking - check out the 160+ people crammed into the HBS classroom (seats 100) where I led an Internet and Mobile panel, with representatives from NEA, Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Ascent Venture Partners, Almaz Capital and Finam Capital! We were ABSOLUTELY packed to the brim.

I'm in the far corner at the front of the classroom, sitting below one of the the screens, and absolutely thrilled to have so many guests and panelists show up for what is usually a PE dominated event (at the HBS VC and PE conference)

[lowkelvin]

VC legend Richard Kramlich of NEA opens HBS VC and PE confernece to record attendance

Yesterday 18th February was an awesome day at Harvard Business School! I organized the morning keynote session between VC legend Richard Kramlich (Chairman and Co-founder of New Enterprise Associates) and Professor Josh Lerner. We had more than 800 people turn out by mid-day to join us at HBS.

Dick was a simply fantastic person to be around - I had the privilege of dining with him and his wife the night before, and they are such fantastic, fabulous, generous and humble people. Perhaps most telling was the Timex watch that Dick wore on his wrist - symbolizing his emphasis and NEA's firm culture of remaining low-key and understated, despite the tremendous success and wealth creation they have generated. In tech and finance, this is becoming rare indeed. 

I firmly believe that life is colored by the people one meets, even if only for a while. It was a great pleasure to cross paths, even if briefly, with such a legend in the technology and venture industry. After working with the legendary Arthur Rock, Dick co-founded NEA in 1978 and became an early investor in Steve Jobs at Apple, and helped to commercialize everything from the Ethernet at 3Com with Bob Metcalfe, to balloon angioplasty with Dr. John Simpson at Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, as well as Forethought, the company later acquired by Microsoft and originally responsible for Powerpoint. Even our keynote speaker from Friday night's events, Alex Navab of PE firm KKR, was super excited to see Dick sitting in the front row while he spoke.

For this morning keynote session, we had > 700 ppl come out to listen to Dick at 9am on Saturday morning of a 4-day long holiday weekend. That speaks volumes in itself. =)