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.

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For those of you who are newcomers to this blog, RightSite.asia is the industrial real estate website operated by my company, RightSite. We are an online B2B platform for owners and occupiers to exchange information and arrange deals, as well as providing resources for facilitating real estate transactions.  But mostly we have listings.  Lots of listings. And this translates into a big site.

Big site in terms of lots of information.  RightSite now has more than 2700 detailed property listings, as well as listings of nearly 2000 industrial parks and economic zones all over China.  Put together, all of this information makes for a very large site. As of the latest count, RightSite had nearly 40,000 database nodes and the actual size of the database was more than 1 GB.

So does that make RightSite the biggest Drupal site in the world? I can find any data on this at this point.  But I would be willing to wager that we are still the biggest Drupal site in China.  And China is not a small place.

So does RightSite being big help you at all?  Not directly.  But by filling RightSite with this much data, we hope that we have established an important resource base for facilitating industrial real estate transactions. Now we are relying on the members of our community to keep contributing so that the site continues to support economic growth and industrial development across China.

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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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1. Problems Accessing Google Docs in China

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.

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At this time, we are able to access the main Google docs page (docs.google.com), and access to text documents seems fine. However, the majority of attempts to access spreadsheets created in Google are futile. We are also unable to create new spreadsheets through Google.

We say the majority of attempts because my assistant was able to access one of our crucial spreadsheets this morning, which we downloaded from Google and then uploaded to Dropbox.

Since Google Sites (which we use for our RightSite Wiki) is still blocked we will have to migrate our wiki over to Zoho’s wiki app as soon as we have the chance.

No idea why we were able to score this sporadic access, but if you can pry your precious spreadsheets out from behind the GFW then Dropbox is a good stopgap measure for document sharing. It doesn’t like having multiple users editing at one time, but is a good solution for less active sharing of docs and provides a good revision history.

We will let you know if things come back on line.

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All part of life at a start up.

When starting up a company we operate on the lowest possible budget that we can until we start generating a profit. That means that we often overwork our teams, our equipment, and even our offices.

So the office decided to fight back a bit this week.  On Tuesday the power suddenly went out at lunchtime, and after several adventures with circuit breakers, UPS, and shutting down the mail server, the phone server and the router, and some consultation with our neighborhood electrician, we figured out that one of the air conditioners had gone evil. (Air conditioners routinely double as heaters in China). At least by isolating the problem we were able to get electricity restored, although some of the team had a chilly afternoon.

So after the electrician was sent away, the air conditioner repairman was summoned. When he finally arrived the next day, and after blowing out the circuit breakers a few more times, we were able to find out that the air conditioner had lost a capacitor (or at least it kind of looked like a capacitor, but I’m not sure of the Chinese for capacitor)

Just imagine what we could have done under reasonable working conditions.

Our other victory of the week was resucitating my old desktop PC to put it to work as another server.  With the advent of our RightSite Pro products we will also be putting into place a training server that we will use to train our new staff and do testing on new features.  So the team from our IT vendor, Fusion were kind enough to help us fit out the machine with some new hard drives so that it could be set up for its new duties. Total cost of hardware — RMB 386

Once the new hardware was in place, we set up a server installation of Ubuntu Linux, Apache webserver software, MySQL and PHP. So now this old PC is running a LAMP stack and is ready for its new role as an in-house web server.  Total cost of software — RMB 0!  (Take that Bill Gates!)

There are things that RightSite willingly spends on — the development of our website, professional hosting of RightSite and the training and development of our staff. But in non-core areas, we don’t spend money that we don’t have.

Of course, working with equipment like this puts us in danger of more equipment adventures like we had earlier in the week, but that is part of the deal with start up. When we start bringing in more money, we start spending on more expensive systems.

In any case, this gave us an idea for another story on our website.  In the coming weeks, watch RightSite for a feature on crisis management planning in China!

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China Turns on the Sun

One of the benefits of building RightSite has been getting the opportunity to find out more about some of the intense industrial development going on in China.  During the last two years China has made a dramatic shift towards developing new energy and is starting to make progress towards establishing energy independence. I recently added a forum post on our RightSite forum that tells more about what is developing in China’s solar power industry, and I hope you will check it out if you have time.

After a short break I will be back with more updates on what’s been going on at RightSite.

See you soon…

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Just Make Sure Not To Use This In Your Name

The highways of China are littered with the roadkill carcasses of foreign Internet giants who stumbled, staggered, and got left for dead in their quest for the world’s biggest Internet audience. eBay, Google and Yahoo have all had heaping helpings of humble pie in the Middle Kingdom, and some of them keep coming back for seconds.

At RightSite we don’t plan to join this Internet Abroad Slow Learners Club, and to help avoid this fate, we constantly re-examine our assumptions about our audience and look for ways to make our site friendlier to local users.

As a bi-lingual site, RightSite has to make its content and services work for both local and foreign users, however, most of our revenue will come from local businesses, and since my eyes are round and my hair (even before it turned white) was always a few shades short of black, so this is major challenge.

One big step we have taken to allow local users easier access to our site is adopting a Chinese character domain name.  Most people know about getting a .cn or .com.cn domain name, but this is a very different issue. What many foreigners don’t know is that you can buy a Chinese character domain that represents a URL just like your Western character domain does. We purchased our Chinese character domain name from ZhongZiYuan (中资源网络服务有限公司) in Xiamen, the same registrar where we bought our .cn and .com.cn domains. The cost of the Chinese character domain is RMB 320 per year.

Our Chinese character domain name represents the Chinese name for our company, 领业.中国.  (Our Chinese company name is “Ling Ye” which roughly translates as “high-level assets.” The characters for China are added on the end to make sure that you know we’re in China, I guess).

If you’ve ever laughed at foreign tourists at the Great Wall or YuYuan Gardens who think that by speaking English loud enough and repeating the same sentence enough times, that Chinese people should understand them, then you should laugh at foreign businesses who try to create an online community without a domain name that Chinese people can understand.  And, in case the nitrous oxide hasn’t worn off from your last dental visit, most Chinese people don’t speak English.  Yeah, your tour guide could talk great, and the staff at 5 -star hotels sound like they just stepped off the set of Desperate Housewives, but out in the ‘zhou’s’ where real people live, it’s be Chinese or be gone.

I know because, we almost made the same mistake.  I chose the domain name, rightsite.asia, thinking that the words involved would all be simple enough for most people in China to recognise.  OOPS!  After a few weeks of listening to my staff try to pound out our Roman character spelling over the phone to industrial zone employees in Changshu, Changzhou and Changle, I knew this wasn’t going to work.

The traditional approach to making an easily recognisable domain name in China has been to make your domain a number instead of a word. Thus, 163.com, 126.com, and 51job.com. That’s cool for reading to someone over the phone, but if you’re trying to build a brand that can be differentiated from the crowd, it is pure evil.

So we went with the Chinese character domain name. Now, our team only has to read out the words “领业.中国” over the phone, and anyone, anywhere in China can bash this into their browser’s address bar and get to RightSite right away.

Better still, we have set up a .htaccess file on our webserver that directs all traffic to from our 领业.中国 domain to our Chinese version at RightSite.asia/zh-hans.

Technology and language working together — two of my favorite things coming together to help more people get more out of RightSite. Another reason for a good week at RightSite.

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Because No One Builds Traffic Alone

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals worldwide.  It provides people with the opportunity to share knowledge, promote their credentials and keep in touch. At RightSite, it is providing us with free tool for increasing our referral traffic by more than 50% in a one month period. If you have a job and you haven’t checked out LinkedIn yet, then don’t think about leaving that job to start your own business.

At RightSite, most of our referrals (traffic to our site from sites other than search engines) now come from LinkedIn.  This is a tremendous source of traffic and it’s all free. If you are starting your own business, or you’re interested in promoting the one that you work for, then here are a few tips.

The easiest people to reach in LinkedIn are members of your own network.  If you are an entrepreneur or marketing professional then you should have a good-sized network.  If you don’t have at least 100 folks in your LinkedIn network, then consider a career in Library Science.

Beyond your own network (who probably know about what you’re doing already) there are a lot of other tools available for letting people know what you’re doing and driving traffic to your site.

General Pointers

• Join as many groups as possible that are related to the industry that your B2B covers, your media (such as the Internet, B2B trade media, etc), the locations that you focus on, or investment/business in your area.
• Be sure to include a link to your site in every post
• Be helpful – don’t just use LinkedIn to pimp yourself or you will build up annoyance rather than goodwill.  Give people information they can use, or give them the opportunity to promote their knowledge both on LinkedIn and on your site. If you provide a real service, then you will get real results from LinkedIn’s users.
• Try to make your posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays.  You will get more response when your input is fresh, and users are much less likely to use LinkedIn on busy Mondays or Fridays.

Groups

• LinkedIn has thousands of groups for diferent professions. Find groups related to the media industry or related to the industry that your B2B covers
• Join as many groups as possible, and be an active, helpful participant
• If your contributions make it onto your group’s email digests, then it will be pushed out to all the group’s members.  If you join the right groups, that can mean reaching thousands of professionals every week for free.

Discussions

Discussions is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use Discussions to get advice on sourcing an outside consultant or service
• Use Discussions for finding experts eager to contribute content to your site

News

News is a section available in LinkedIn’s Groups section

• Use the news section to share your editorial content with professionals who may be interested in such information.  Be sure to post each story on relevant groups only.

Answers

Answers is available to interact only with people in your direct network.

• Use Answers for technical questions that you can’t solve yourself, or to source vendors

What are you working on now?

• Use the “What are you working on now?” tool to make small announcements that will let people know about your progress on an interesting project, or to solicit help on finding staff, a computer supplier, or other routine items.

Later I promise to give a few tips on using Xing, Plaxo/Pulse, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and about 50 others, but this is all I have time for today. Look forward to seeing you next time on Mingtiandi, and happy Easter.

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The RightSite Wiki in all its Glory

We are wrapping up a busy month at RightSite and the focus this month has been on team-building. We’ve added three new team members and interviewed more than 60 people.  But as always, we have tried to do all of this team building in an organised way that let’s us grow as quickly as possible without losing track of our goals and our core mission.

One of our major tools in keeping our company on track has been our RightSite Wiki.  While we put the super-trendy “Wiki” name on it, this is really just a site where we share information.  We store training materials and references on the Wiki, and documentation on how tasks should be performed at RightSite is all stored on the Wiki.  When a new intern shows up for work on their first day, their training program is stored for them to download on the Wiki.  If anyone wants to know the best way to write a description of an industrial zone for a new listing, complete guidelines are stored on the Wiki.

Our wiki is a pretty simple site created for free on Google Sites.  I am not sure that this is the best product for creating a wiki, but since it’s free and easy to use it meets my two most basic requirements.  On the downside, the formatting tools for pages are clunky – no tools for creating h1, h2 or h3 styles or other simple CSS type elements that I can get in OpenOffice?  Boo!  Hiss! Still, I continue to use Google Sites in the faith that they will improve the product soon.  Right after they take over the world.  In the meantime, you can feel free to look at competing products like Zoho.

Today’s entries into the Wiki (yes, even on Sunday) included

• Project lists for the week (our weekly set of tasks for everyone in the company)
• This week’s data entry goals
• Revised standards for creating complete industrial zone, property and company listings
• Guidelines for writing effective descriptions for industrial zone, property and company listings
• Guidelines for Mike to get a life and stop working on weekends (Ok, this last point is pure fantasy)

I don’t kid myself that documenting everything on the Wiki will solve all of our problems, and it does require an extra investment of time. However, taking this little bit of extra time to write down how things should be done will help us stay on course as we grow and make sure that the great intentions of our startup days get translated into a pervasive company culture as RightSite grows and prospers.

See you again soon on Mingtiandi!

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