Steven Loi » Mobile http://www.stevenloi.com My personal thoughts on mobile, technology, finance, and opportunities. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:34:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Betawork’s Shareholder Newsletterhttp://www.stevenloi.com/2012/01/30/betaworks-shareholder-newsletter/ http://www.stevenloi.com/2012/01/30/betaworks-shareholder-newsletter/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:32:46 +0000 Steven http://www.stevenloi.com/?p=171 This newsletter is too good to not share on my blog. I underlying themes John Borthwick’s highlighted in detail are so spot on and it’s the very reason why I jumped head first in current opportunity in my professional career two years ago (mobile & payments).

Betaworks Shareholder Letter

]]> http://www.stevenloi.com/2012/01/30/betaworks-shareholder-newsletter/feed/ 0 Product Analyst at Monitise (Foster City, CA)http://www.stevenloi.com/2011/12/05/product-analyst-position-open-at-monitise-foster-city-ca/ http://www.stevenloi.com/2011/12/05/product-analyst-position-open-at-monitise-foster-city-ca/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:04:49 +0000 Steven http://www.stevenloi.com/?p=153 Come work with me and explore the world of mobile banking, mobile payments, and making accessing your money easier! You get to work in a dynamic and small team in Foster City along side Visa, Inc. Exciting projects with the backing of the market leader in payment networks! The job description is below. If you have any questions, ping me or @stevenloi!

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Monitise, Inc

Your Role:
You’ll be helping the product team at Monitise, Inc in developing the next set of product features that will make an impact for our partner, Visa, Inc. You love working in teams with great engineers, designers, and other product team members. Teams may be remote, but that’s not a barrier to great products. You’re scrappy, very detailed oriented, works great under pressure, and care about delivering results. A positive attitude is an absolute must to conquer the opportunities ahead and have meaningful impact to the products you help build.

Why is this important to us and how will it contribute to our success?
We are looking for a young person with a passion for contributing to great products that will help us reach our lofty goals. Our global platform is the choice of many high profile financial institutions across the world. It’s also the reason we have a huge opportunity to build upon our game changing technology for advancing the way we all interact with money. We think we’re in the right position to help Visa bring immense value to millions of mobile users, reduce the cost of money movement, and discover new ways to move money while also making a profit along the way.

Job Responsibilities:

  • Design how new mobile services work (native applications, mobile websites, and traditional websites)
  • Work with internal and external customers to understand their needs and facilitate the translation of those needs into specific, actionable, functional and non-functional requirements
  • Write solution overview documentation in response to those requirements
  • Produce product design specification documents, including wireframes and use cases
  • Work with engineering and test teams during the product development lifecycle


    • Job Skills:

  • At least 1 year experience in product management, product design, or business analysis developing Internet technologies
  • BA/BS in technical or related field (Technical experience is not required but you should understand the technical implications of product decisions)
  • Strong analytical, organizational, and communication skills (verbal & written), attention to detail a must
  • Demonstrated experience in contributing to a successful project or product in the past
  • Familiar with HTML, CSS, and Photoshop
  • Enthusiastic, performance-driven self starter and team player – results oriented and desire to win
  • Excited for mobile finance and how mobile technologies can be the enabler to change how we manage and transact money
  • Bonus points for experience in mobile, finance, social, and/or local technologies


    • What now?
    To apply, send me your resume (steven.loi [at] monitisegroup [dot] com) and a quick note about why you’re excited about helping build mobile finance products at Monitise.

    ]]>     http://www.stevenloi.com/2011/12/05/product-analyst-position-open-at-monitise-foster-city-ca/feed/ 0     Thoughts about Palm. And its failures.http://www.stevenloi.com/2009/12/18/palm-wont-win-too-bad-they-dont-even-know-how-to-get-in-the-race/ http://www.stevenloi.com/2009/12/18/palm-wont-win-too-bad-they-dont-even-know-how-to-get-in-the-race/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:55:14 +0000 Steven http://www.stevenloi.com/?p=32 read more »]]> When you are not the market leader (Palm) and can’t bully the competition or your audience (Apple & Google), you have to act like a startup in order to survive. That means, customers first. Empower your small audience to like you. Give them a superior product. Superior service. Engage. Give better technical support to independent developers that want to build on your platform to make fancy apps. Don’t charge a dime for building platform ($99) — they are enriching your platform. That’s cheap labor! Even consider recruiting startups to build apps for your platform. That’s what Apple did. And I think it worked quite well for them and those developers.

    This is about winning enough market share and a pay wall hasn’t helped with their apps selection. Run contests to entice developers (Paypal, Amazon) and offer awesome prizes for the best apps. Solicit feedback and iteriate on the feedback you get from developers on how to make your tools and development kit better. Win the time, wallets, and more importantly the trust of developers and your audience. Without them, you have nothing but a soon-to-be-obsolete brick and lines of code — a device and technology capable for so much, yet no magic key to unlock that power.

    I spoke to a person at Palm recently on the phone. He gave me a synopsis about Palm and their modile device/webOS strategy. He even bragged about how great their platform is and how it’ll be great for the future of modile devices. He mentioned how awesome their newest phone is (Pixi). But, I think Palm has it all wrong. Even if they believe their technology makes the most sense, it doesn’t mean the mass audience cares. Sure, I took a look at their website to learn more, but the problem is, I have an iPhone and there hasn’t been enough rave, mass adoption, or reason to even consider going to the store to check it out.

    The mass audience doesn’t give a crap that uses webOS uses web technology such as HTML 5, JavaScript, or CSS. Nor do they care that the web browser uses WebKit layout engine. Those are things developers care about. The mass audience care about what cool apps they can download, what games they can play, what their friends are up to on Facebook, how reliable the network/phone is in their area, and so forth. Oh wait. That’s what Apple promotes on their advertisements.

    Time is ticking. Elevation Partners already put in $325M for 25% stake in Palm (current market cap: 1.56B @ price: $10.96) in the beginning of 2007 plus another $100M in late 2008. And what do they have to show for that? Another straight quarterly loss (10th) and a decline of 5% in # of units in its fiscal second quarter. This past quarter, S&M expenses rose 64% and operating cost rose 21%. The stock price has increased 3x since the beginning of this year because of the hype and anticipation that Palm will become relevant again. But, that’s all it is. Hype and anticiptation. Time is running out — In the AM many shares will be sold because of poor execution and results. Will they ever get the equation of success, right? Before they burn through all their money? Before reality kicks in and investors realize Palm is nothing more than a technology company that can’t figure out how to turn a profitable business?

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