Mingtiandi » management

Mingtiandi Uses RSS Magic to Bring You Daily China Real Estate News

Michael Cole — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:31:14 +0000

About one month ago I started publishing weekly newsletters of China real estate information here on Mingtiandi and the response has been stronger than I imagined. More users sign up every day from several countries around the globe, and more than 30% of our 1830 readers are reading every edition.

So if response is that strong to a weekly update then, what could we do if we gave readers daily news? But Mingtiandi is not a direct revenue earner, so to start doing daily updates I needed a way to gather, edit and distribute information that wouldn’t take significant time.

The answer that I came up with is RSS. For those of you who are less technically inclined RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and most every website has an RSS feed of their content which allows them to distribute their information automatically.

But what I set out to do is to use RSS to collect, curate and publish information, and by using a variety of tools, I am now able to publish daily newsletters on China real estate without spending more than 20 minutes a day on the project. So here’s what I set up over the last few days.

Google Alerts to Collect Information

For years, I have been using Google Alerts to gather links to news on relevant keywords about real estate and other important topics. However, I recently changed these alerts to send information to their own RSS feed rather than send me an email notice.

Yahoo Pipes to Aggregate Alert Feeds

Because I have about 30 different Google Alerts set up, checking each of these individually could take too much time and include too many duplicate links, so I used a tool called Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all of my China real estate alert feeds into one big feed which is sorted by publication dates and duplicates removed. It can even translate the titles and descriptions of Chinese articles to English. After this process, Yahoo Pipes then republishes this information as a new RSS feed.

Curating Links with Google Reader and Diigo

Now that my aggregated RSS feed is set up, I can review all of the news in Google Reader, to choose the most interesting stories for publication to my newsletter. Once I find a qualifying story, I can bookmark it using the online bookmarking utility Diigo. This utility not only makes it easy to find these relevant stories later, but it also creates another RSS feed of the stories that I have tagged for publication.

Creating and Publishing Newsletters in Mailchimp

Perhaps the biggest time-saver of all are the RSS-driven email newsletter campaigns in Mailchimp. The Mingtiandi newsletters are created from HTML templates which automatically pull the content from my RSS feed of stories that I tagged for publication. No cutting and pasting, no uploading — I just program the application to publish a newsletter from the template at the time I want and out it goes.

Now the difference between these new daily campaigns and my weekly campaigns is that they publish only a digest of web links and don’t have Mingtiandi’s original content (which you get in the weekly mail). But until I cash out of RightSite for trillions of RMB, I have a job to do every day, and it doesn’t leave much time for updating a blog several times a day.

So the actual time required to create Mingtiandi’s daily email campaigns is just the 15-20 minutes required to read through the stories from the aggregated news alert feed and choose the stories for publication. Lots of information, daily broadcasts to a couple thousand readers, and just a little RSS-magic.

New Mingtiandi Logo

Michael Cole — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 03:27:55 +0000

Today is Monday at Mingtiandi, which means that like senior-level professionals everywhere, I have been looking for some way to avoid doing real work.

The result is the new Mingtiandi logo.

The sunrise in the logo is meant to reflect the first two characters of the website’s name in Chinese (明天) which together mean tomorrow.

Originally, the site had a simple text-based logo which reflected the three minutes of time I spent on creating it. However, now than we have around 100 people a day reading the blog and 700 very bored individuals perusing the weekly newsletter, this project richly deserves its new 60 minute logo. Here’s the old logo in case you have forgotten. Look now, for you shall never see it again.

Yup, it doesn’t look like much, but there is not much point in spending time on a corporate identity when there is no corporation.

In other Mingtiandi events, I spent some time this weekend developing new topical pages for the site. You can now see at the top of this site a set of links to dedicated pages containing posts on real estate, entrepreneurship, management, web development and marketing — the topics that I write about most frequently. Not more information — just easier to find.

Oh, and in case you are wondering why I call the website Mingtiandi. As a straight-forward name in Chinese, Mingtiandi can mean either “land of tomorrow” or if the linguists out there will cut me some slack, “the future of real estate.”

Also, since I am a raving ego-maniac and this is my personal blog, Mingtiandi is meant to be a play on the second character of my Chinese name, 高明 (Gaoming), and the annoying set of XX-tiandi’s put together in China by a certain mid-range Hong Kong real estate developer in China. (I thought Xintiandi was a good name, but when they beat that into the ground with Xihutiandi, Wuhantiandi, and Hongqiaotiandi then they become ripe for caricature).

Maybe I should add a topical page on brand consulting to this site?

Hundreds strike at Singapore-owned plant in China

Michael Cole — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:34:15 +0000

More than 200 workers at a Singapore-owned electronics plant in Shanghai remained on strike for a third day on Friday to denounce what they said was a management plan for mass layoffs, the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China.

Blue-jacketed workers, chanting slogans and holding aloft banners demanding management explanations, blocked the entrance to the factory owned by Hi-P International in the Pudong district of China’s commercial hub.

Hi-P is an electronics contract manufacturer whose customers include Apple and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, according to media and analyst reports.

The workers first stopped work on Wednesday, denouncing what they said was a plan to relocate the plant to a Shanghai suburb and demanding compensation for layoffs. Workers said the company planned to hire new staff.

Hi-P International denied that it had fired workers.

“The company is currently in discussion with the workers with the support of the authorities and the labor union,” the company said in a statement to the Singapore stock exchange. “The matter is expected to be resolved shortly.”

It added that “there is no material impact” to the company’s production due to the strike.

Strikers told Reuters they had refused to sign agreements stipulating that their jobs would be terminated by the end of the year without compensation. They said the plant employed more than 1,500 workers, most of them women.

Dozens of police officers kept watch on the workers. Workers said police had beaten up some protesters on Wednesday. Calls to Shanghai’s public security bureau went unanswered.

“Give me justice!” workers shouted. Banners held up by strikers included: “We want an explanation, we want the truth.”

“They are moving the factory but I don’t want to go there,” said one worker surnamed Zhang, 28. “Now they just don’t want to compensate us. They do not want to even give us a single cent.”

Workers planned to press their stoppage through the weekend.

Hi-P International’s shares had fallen 2.5 percent on Friday in late afternoon trade but recovered to close down 0.8 percent — compared to a 0.4 percent rise for Singapore’s Straits Times benchmark index.

Strikes this year have pitted workers frustrated about rising costs against companies struggling with an external economic slowdown. The ruling Communist Party fears public discontent could erode its authority and alarm investors.

In factory towns across the export powerhouse in the Pearl River Delta, strikes have been triggered by a cycle of slowing orders from the West and pressure for pay rises.

Thousands of striking workers have crippled production for Western brands at shoe and bra factories in Guangdong province and watch, sport and electronics plants to the south and west.

Stoppages disrupted production last year for automakers, including Toyota and Honda, exposing the demands of 150 million migrant workers. Many provinces boosted minimum wages.

But businesses struggling with razor-thin profit margins, may have difficulty increasing pay this year.

Source: Reuters

Foreign firms best on pay raises

Michael Cole — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:03:52 +0000

SHANGHAI’S foreign-invested companies have outperformed their domestic counterparts in giving pay raises to their employees this year, a survey by the Shanghai Statistics Bureau said.

The real-estate sector in Shanghai has offered staffers the biggest raises despite the property market turning sluggish.

The bureau’s survey covered thousands of local workers from various industries. The survey showed that 65.5 percent of respondents hired by foreign companies said their salaries had improved from a year earlier, 26.3 percent said it was the same while 8.2 percent said their salaries actually went down.

Companies funded by Chinese private capital followed the foreign firms as 47.7 percent of their workers reported pay hikes. Trailing were state-owned companies, where 44.9 percent of the workers received higher salaries this year.

The bureau analysts concluded that foreign companies could best afford pay hikes because of their more flexible business practices.

The survey found 61.9 percent of the workers from real estate development and management firms gained more income. The next best, respectively, were the manufacturing and IT industries.

Sectors such as cultural, educational, sports and entertainment were the least likely to give raises. Only about 31 percent of workers from these business operations reported receiving a raise this year, according to the survey.

Source: Shanghai Daily

Mountain View Chapter of RightSite Fan Club is Formed

Michael Cole — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:33:54 +0000

Independent market data, while still unconfirmed by external sources, indicated a sudden interest by team members at Google headquarters in studying potential acquisition targets in China’s real estate media market. (Or at least we at RightSite sincerely hope so).

While we were reviewing our weekly web traffic report at RightSite today we came across what appears to be a rabid RightSite fan club in Mountain View, CA — some group of folks at Google spent more than 178 hours visiting nearly 200 pages on RightSite last week. Now I’m a big fan of our website, and of industrial development in general, but this seems perhaps a bit fanatical.

Thanks to the wonders of Google Analytics, we are able to get copious data on what people do on RightSite, and to some extent, who they are — or at least where they are and what service provider they are using. When our marketing team mentioned today that someone in Mountain View was spending a lot of time on RightSite last week, I immediately thought of the Big G.

Sure enough, if we filter our pageviews from Mountain View by the service provider (usually this gives you the name of the ISP used, but in this case Google is their own ISP) then we can see this surge of traffic from someone at Google.

In examining the pages that this user was looking at, it seems they are not only viewing the articles, property listings and companies on RightSite, but they are also viewing in both Chinese and English. Seems they have a good bilingual team in Mountain View. Here are a few key statistics on our traffic from users at Google Inc last week:

Days measured: November 8th to 13th
Total time on site: 178 hours
Total visits: 21
Pageviews: 227
Unique Pageviews: 221
Average Time on Page: 54 min, 52 seconds
Average Time on Site: 3 hours, 24 min, 38 seconds

What all of this means, is anyone’s guess. One of the reasons that we aimed for an industrial niche for RightSite is that a small startup like ours needs to beware of venturing into consumer giants such as Google tend to launch ventures. So I doubt that Google as a corporation has suddenly taken an interest in China’s industrial real estate sector. At the same time, with this many hours over such a brief time span, it would have to be a team of people involved. (And as far as I know, Googlebot does not spend several minutes on each page).

So what does it all mean? Is Google planning to make us an offer for RightSite? Is someone working on their 20% time project thinking of venturing into China’s industrial real estate market? We will keep studying their visiting behavior, but any insights from readers are also welcome.

Google Smartens Up — Starts Copying RightSite

Michael Cole — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:14:43 +0000

There was big news in the tech world today as sources within Google let it be known that the company was moving away from using Windows on its workstations. At RightSite, we can only say, “What took you so long?”

As reported today in the Financial Times, Google has put in place measures that make it difficult for employees to get a Windows machine and encourage users to rely on either Mac OS X or Linux for their workstations. As reported by the FT,

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

At RightSite, where we are big proponents of free, open-source software (FOSS) we applaud this move. But we also have to wonder what took them so long. Virtually since day one at RightSite we have been using Ubuntu Linux workstations, and there is very little that would make anyone on our team miss Windows.

And there is a whole lot more that makes us glad that we don’t use the world’s most security-exploited operating system. One reason that RightSite goes open-source is because we are a poor startup operation that wants to stay legal. But an even bigger reason we forgo Windows is that we don’t want the security hassles that come with Bill Gates OS baby. Viruses, malware and other nasty stuff are very common in China, and instead of chasing staff to be careful about what they click on or hiring a squad of geeks to keep everyone’s machines clean, we just avoid most of the problems by not using Windows.

Not very often does RightSite get the jump on Google, but it’s nice to see those guys in Mountain View starting to catch up in the innovation game.

Try downloading Linux for your machine and see you next time here on Mingtiandi.

Idiot-Proofing, Dropbox and the GFW

Michael Cole — Tue, 11 May 2010 09:24:12 +0000

Most folks can only count on death and taxes. If you are managing a startup, then you get a bonus — you can count on death, taxes and at least one system failure a week.

By necessity, most startups run on the cheap. We forgo expensive systems and big teams in favour of lightweight, low-cost solutions that keep our fixed costs down and keep our companies “agile,” “lean,” or one of the many other euphemisms for flimsy. If you have been working at this game long enough, however, you will learn that running things lean may save you costs, but it can also end up wasting your time, unless you can find some low-cost ways to build in redundancy.

Today at RightSite we were deprived of one of our major systems when the file-sharing service Dropbox was suddenly blocked by the infamous Great Firewall of China (GFW). We regularly use Dropbox as a combination of online backup and file sharing. The service allows us to collaborate on files, such as editing the stories for our website, without having a physical file-server in our office or relying on emailing files back and forth.

Of course, we could rely on other services such as Google Docs, but the immense popularity of Docs means that it has always been too tempting of a target for potential blocking, so we have steered away from it for this reason. Dropbox was innocuous and, I would have hoped, obscure enough to avoid the wrath of the authorities. However, it seems we were wrong. I don’t know what exactly the issue is, and no statement has been issued about the blocking (there never is) but I suspect that some naughty individuals were using the service to share anti-government materials.

Does the government have a legitimate beef with Dropbox? Probably not. But you have to remember that decisions on what gets blocked are not made at the politburo level. Nope. It’s some little guy in a room someplace who probably has never heard of online backup, or even offline. He just knows that somebody somewhere did something bad using Dropbox, so he hits the big BLOCK! button and you wake up with one of your favorite resources unavailable.

For the guys who work at big companies, this is just another thing to moan about in the bar, but if you are running your own company then this kind of down-time can mean a loss that you can’t afford. So we have to look for cheap ways to build redundancy into our systems. By planning for alternate backup and filesharing systems in advance, at RightSite we already have Jungledisk installed on all of our workstations to replace Dropbox. Now we are busy looking at Opera Unite as a new alternate system.

So while the finance guys and bloggers will keep telling you to keep your company running on the cheap to make it financially viable, you will also have to look for ways to ensure that your company just keeps running when things go wrong. By the way, today is the day that we produce our weekly newsletter at RightSite. Because we have alternate systems at the ready, our newsletter will get distributed tomorrow morning on schedule. Our customers are counting on it, so we are glad to have systems (and planning) that we can count on.

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RightSite Rejects Harvard PhD as Underqualified

Michael Cole — Sun, 09 May 2010 14:53:21 +0000

As many of you who have read this blog may know, at RightSite, we take our recruitment very seriously. However, in case there are any would-be applicants out there who are unaware of our stringent requirements for new team members, I would like it to be known that today we rejected a Harvard PhD as lacking the necessary qualifications to make the cut at RightSite.

Here is actual proof of our selectivity in action:

Yup! Smart, beautiful and educated just isn’t enough to land a job at RightSite. You have to show some style too.

Until next time, enjoy life in China and keep looking for the fun in every situation.

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Setting Up an Intranet with Open Atrium

Michael Cole — Wed, 05 May 2010 02:28:09 +0000

One of the key factors in the whether a startup is successful is how effectively the team collaborates in accomplishing their goals. At RightSite we are a small team producing a very big website so we are always looking for tools that help us to share information and work together more efficiently, and setting up a company wiki or intranet is one of the key steps in attaining collaboration nirvana.

We use our intranet to share materials, especially documentation, on how RightSite works. Like any organisation in China, or team is constantly changing and we try to document all processes in the company and make sure this documentation is easily accessible and constantly updated. Over the recent May holiday I downloaded Open Atrium and found it to be an easy to set up, free solution for building your own intranet in an afternoon.

Before you run away screaming, “I’m not a tech person,” let me add that I have no tech skills myself, and if you can set up a WordPress blog and have a hosting package somewhere, or even a server in your office, then you can set up Open Atrium without help. If you can’t muster that much tech savvy, then get your office tech guy to set it up.

Open Atrium is a pre-packaged installation of the Drupal CMS that comes set up with a blog, a project management system, a calendar, an email notification system and a user management system. When I was working at Global Sources about 10 years ago we had a three person team developing an intranet system for our company. The project lasted several months and I’m not sure the product was anywhere near as powerful as what you are now able to download for free and set up in an afternoon.

Prior to setting up Open Atrium, RightSite had been using Google Sites, but that later was blocked in China. We also looked at using Zoho’s Wiki app, but found that the free version had a ridiculously low storage capacity (we store a lot of reference documents) and the paid versions quickly started costing about US$20/month. Considering that the server that hosts RightSite costs less than US$100/month the Zoho solution seemed too expensive.

Now we were able to get the entire system running in an afternoon, on the same server that hosts RightSite, and we will be set to start working more effectively. Specifically, I am hoping to reduce the training time for new hires, ensure that we stick to best practices more effectively and allow all team members to contribute ideas about how to run our company better.

There is no technology that can give you an effective company culture, but smart managers need to be on the lookout for easy to use tools that will help keep their companies on the right track (without costing them more than a new salesperson).

If any of you have input on Open Atrium, or on setting up Wiki systems, then I invite your ideas.

Advice On Getting Hired in China

Michael Cole — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:01:11 +0000

Not This Kind of Reference!

Much is happening at RightSite these days. We are cashflow positive thanks to some strong sales this year, RightSite now ranks among the 5,000 most popular sites in China according to Alexa.com, and we have been putting countless hours into recruiting new team members so that we can grow even more. (Which might be why I haven’t updated this blog in so long).

In doing all this recruiting, on top of the hiring that I have done in previous years and at prior jobs, I have learned a great deal about the hiring process in China, and would like to share some of this wisdom with both employers and job-seekers.

Despite whatever economic downturn may have occurred in China and all the newspaper stories about unemployed university graduates, 2010 seems to have brought the most competitive hiring market for employers in recent memory. Job advertisements bring in fewer applications and employers who attempt to follow methodical recruitment processes will find the most desirable candidates snatched up before their process is complete.

At RightSite we follow a fairly involved hiring process for a small firm. We require all candidates to fill out an application, insist on resumes in English, do pre-interview screening by phone, have skills tests before interviews, face-to-face interviews and reference checks after the interview before we make any offers to candidates.

And it is this next to last step — the reference check which seems to be a rare creature in Shanghai. After being an employer in Shanghai for eight years and employing somewhere north of 300 people, I have only been contacted for a reference twice. Even with the advent of online tools like LinkedIn.com which make it considerably easier to track down and contact former employers, virtually no one gets in touch.

Which leads me to my advice to job-seekers. Feel free to inflate your resume. Pad your educational criteria. Fib about your employment history. Even mislead people about your skills and experience. Because no one is really checking.

While every foreigner in the pub has heard stories of dishonest staff and companies being bilked of large sums of cash by sneaky team members, the main reason for this has nothing to do with any tendency towards dishonesty in China. Instead it has everything to do with employer carelessness and sloppy procedures. If you leave cash lying on the sidewalk, people will pick it up. And if you give people the opportunity to make more money by falsifying their employment history, then they will take advantage of it. So taking a chance on inflating your qualifications on an employment application is a safe strategy in China.

But not if you apply at RightSite. Although we are a small company without full-time HR staff, we believe that ensuring a qualified team is the best way to build our company. So we check references for managers, interns and even the ayi. Last week we asked for references from four employment candidates. Two of them we never heard from again. I am sure that those two people will have no problem finding jobs elsewhere. And I’m also certain that RightSite will be better off with having these reference-less individuals working for someone else. Hopefully our competitors.

Until next time, enjoy the Expo fever and see you again soon on Mingtiandi.

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