Willem's Planet

My colleagues and I are shocked by Facebook’s US$16 billion acquisition of the text message application WhatsApp, announced on Wednesday. The little application sells for $0.99 in the USA. It’s used on smart phones for free text, voice, video and picture messaging, and works over wi-fi connections.

It seems to me before Wednesday that most technology analysts believed with 450 million users world-wide that WhatsApp was worth oh, somewhere north of US$ ONE billion.

And who are the founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton that struck it so rich?  Here is what I gleaned from Wikipedia and Forbes magazine :   Jan Koum is Jewish and grew up in a village outside Kiev in Ukraine. He moved to California with his mother and grandmother in 1992.  Brian Acton was the 44th employee at  Yahoo. In 1997 Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the dot-com of 2000. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook.  “We’re part of the Facebook reject club,” Acton says. Koum was eating into his $400,000 in savings from Yahoo, and drifting. Then in January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited the home of Alex Fishman, a Russian friend who would invite the local Russian community to his place in West San Jose for weekly pizza and movie nights. Up to 40 people sometimes showed up. The two of them stood for hours talking about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter.

.. depends on what you know down there, says the home page picture of one of the oil well data management systems that we are working with.

It is important to get the surface data (oil wells, attached equipment, makes and models) accurate in one’s systems.  But it is even more critical  to get the sub-surface data correct and complete as the equipment and infrastructure goes in during construction.  For the stuff above ground, one can usually make corrections and additions with an audit.  But once equipment and pipelines are buried, and that oil well starts gushing all kinds of hydrocarbons, it will be near-impossible to know what’s down there.  Or to go in and find out !

My Monday started out early and rainy, but later in Denver it was a gorgeous, mild weather day. It was so nice outside that it was hard for us to go back to the office after lunch.  It went up all the way to 67 °F /19 °C.  Denver boasts around 300 sunny days per year on average, compared to Seattle’s 71.  (Source : Wikipedia’s entries for the two cities).

My headline of the day from Sochi :

I-Pod¹ used the YOLO² to claim the half-pipe³ gold⁴ over Shaun White⁵.

¹Apple’s music player, or the nickname of Russian-born, now Swiss, competitor Iouri Podladtchikov (yes, that is definitely not a Swiss name).

²Stands for ‘You Only Live Once’, I-Pod’s signature flip

³Snow-boarding event, done in a half-pipe of iced surface.

⁴Olympic gold medal at the 2014 Sochi Games

⁵American professional snowboarder and two-time Olympic gold medalist.

I watched the Games’ opening ceremony that ran on NBC here in the USA on Friday night, and I have to admit I liked the artistry and cultural images and pageantry.

So .. the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi is under way.  Will gay athletes get in trouble talking about gay rights? (In July 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill banning the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors”.   ‘Propaganda’ being open to interpretation by police and vigilante citizens, of course, and encouraging violence against gay people).  Assurances have been given by Russian officials that the law will not be enforced on athletes at the Games.

And what does the Olympic Charter have to say anyway?  Well, nothing specific about sexual orientation (this falls under the phrase ‘other discrimination’ in Principle 6 of the Charter). It’s just disappointing that the International Olympic Committee did not take a stronger position, or made much about it publicly (at least not that I’m aware of).

We threw in the towel this morning, and took a shuttle van that the hotel provided for us, to work.  It was -13 °F/ -25°C outside.  I see the Wall Street Journal reports that we all are ‘obsessed with the weather’ and ‘reveling in winter’ .. hmm.  I’m not so sure about ‘reveling’!

And then at work, it was a very unsettled day.  Our Basis team set up the SAP systems that we use, and then the Functional teams configure its functions.  So these two parties had a disagreement which almost got out of control. But we found a solution, and set up the SAP access and controls in a way which was acceptable to both parties.

*SAP stands for Systems, Applications and Products and is the world’s most popular system for the finances, supply chain logistics, work management and human resources of large companies.

We are at zero here in Denver (that’s 0 °F/ -17°C), but my colleague and I were up to it to walk the few blocks back to the hotel.  We brought wool sweaters to pull over our dress shirts (with a stuffed overcoat), and heavy wool hats to pull over our heads and ears.   I covered the rest of my face with my gloves as I walked. Yikes! You have to!  The cold is stinging. The real hazards to watch for though, are the slippery sidewalks and street crossings.   Watch for cars at the intersection.  You may have permission to ‘Walk’ from the green man on the traffic light, but incoming cars may not be able to stop!

I read about Imgur (say ‘imager’) in today’s issue of BloombergBusinessweek. The company only has 11 employees, but the start-up is already profitable thanks to a stream of display ads from movie studios and video game makers.  It gets more than 120 million unique visitors a month posting images and searching for jolts of humor and insight.  About 1/4 of the user-submitted images feature cats or dogs.