Here’s a small brief about companies bacground. Directly copied from companies about page in English.

• August, 2005. 51.com was founded by IT entrepreneur Mr. Pang Sheng Dong, in Shanghai.
• May, 2006. First round funding of USD 6 million led by Sequoia Capital and joined by SIG.
• July, 2006. Listed in the “2006 Red Herring Top 100 Asian Most Potential Science and Technology Innovation& Investment Companies”.
• Suptember, 2006. Listed as No.21 among IWebChoice’s Chinese language websites.
• November, 2006. Register user number reached 50 million.
• May, 2007. Acquired Pixoart Design, successfully integrated its avatar service into 51’s platform.
• June, 2007. Register user number reached 70 million.
• July, 2007. Second round funding of over USD 15 million led by Intel Capital and joined by Redpoint, Sequoia and SIG.
• January, 2008. Register user number reached 100 million.
• According to Baidu’s 2007 China Online Space and Blog Report, 51.com ranked overall No.2 among all online space and blog web sites, with No. 1 user activity ranking.
• May, 2008. Company moved its Headquarter to Zhang Jiang High Tech Industry Park.
• July, 2008. Third round funding of over USD 50 million led by Giant Interactive.

This kind of pure design not only makes everything easy to understand, it also lowers the hosting cost for company. Congratulations for the design.

With Xtranormal technology you make your “Nissan cube” movie and get the chance of earning special prizes including a Nissan cube too.

Hope to see this kind of creative ad-campaigns.

It’s interesting. How could this be commented?

Amplifeeder is an asp application that integrates with your Friendfeed account and gathers your online data to show in a place just like your own domain.

It’s stylish, but not social. That’s the biggest minus I think. Social actions, isnt it that forced us to use friendfeed?

I can only see twine as a tough rival of friendfeed these days.

I can see this bright idea is spreading quickly around. They’ve served 727 million buttons till now and counting.

Dont forget their premium tracking services inside.

You can share my posts with Tell-a-Friend and I can track what you do :p

As you know, I started an interview set with “one man show” online ninjas of internet market for Turkey’s #1 web2.0 blog Webrazzi. First was Shaun Inman of Mint. Now, here Jon Yongfook Cockle comes and our small chat on his new business approach, new company (Egg Co.) & new product; Peashoot.

Sinan: When you start working on internet and can you tell us some about your educational bg?

Jon: I actually studied finance - I have a degree in accounting. However, for 99% of the time I was at university, I was making websites instead of studying.  I found it much more satisfying than doing accounting - I enjoyed the process of creating and publishing to the web for everyone to see - and I loved that there was always something new to learn.

I’m lucky in that over the last decade I’ve had professional experience working in a few web production agencies in London and Tokyo, and have also had top-tier experience working in Japan’s largest advertising agency, Dentsu.  At the same time as all of that, I continued to self-learn and build project websites on the side.  I think like most of us working with the web, I am continually learning.

Jon: Before 8apps I was working in a web production company in Tokyo as a design engineer (which kind of meant I did everything - front end and back end).  It was a very typical small, Japanese production company - long hours, little sleep, low pay!  But we put out lots of great work and I learned a lot about the business.  I definitely think it’simportant for people to have some company experience like this and not confine themselves to a freelance bubble forever - you learn a lot about doing business, best practices, security etc when you’re working in a larger corporate entity like that as opposed to doing client work on your own.  There are definitely lessons I learned back then that I still use today.  Two or three of these tips
(http://zygote.egg-co.com/10-dirty-little-web-development-tricks/) are things I learned back then.

After that I joined Dentsu, a large advertising agency, as an analyst. That was very useful not only to see how the “mothership” operates (in the Japanese media world, Dentsu is pretty much the highest you can go) but also to learn more about the analytical side of the web. Testing, conversions, funnels etc.  It was around this time that I launched Open Source Food as a side project.  It is a recipe-sharing website with a photo for every recipe.

Peashoot (http://www.peashootapp.com) is my first upcoming project. It is a software-as-a-service application aimed at marketing teams or individuals.  It is a link tracking tool with a focus on analytics and goal-setting.  More previews will show up on the company blog soon - http://zygote.egg-co.com

Jon: I do 99% of the work by myself, mostly because I’m pretty bad at working with other people!  I’m very passionate about what I do and take the work very personally.  It’s difficult for me to work with other people when I’m like that…

I think this is the case for the early stages of the product, though. Once the products become more established and stable, it becomes easier for me to work with other people.  I’m not ruling it out for the future.  But it also depends on how I want to grow - do I want to gradually become a bigger and bigger organisation by hiring people (with all the responsibilities and complexities that this brings), or do I want to continue as a one-man-show, putting out one or two projects per year and having a lot of freedom (me and my friends call this “digital hobo”)? I haven’t really decided yet.  My goals this year are to put out a couple of apps by myself, we’ll see where that leads next year.

Sinan: I know that you’re good at design and develop online products. How do you seperate design and development.

Jon: I work in photoshop and usually do a rough page design (logo, navigation, content area) and then start putting it into code.  From that point onwards I just sort of design-as-I-go.  It’s just faster for me that way - I can try out different styles and layouts using code much faster than I can by dragging things around in photoshop. I use an MVC framework called CodeIgniter, for all my development. This allows me to nicely separate my front end view templates from all my business / database logic so even if I want to change the design at a later point, it’s pretty easy to do, so I don’t worry about it too much in the beginning.

Jon: A moleskine notebook with blank sketch paper.  That’s all I use.  I tried to use things like basecamp etc - and whilst I think they are lovely examples of software, I’m just too lazy to “train” myself into using them.  I prefer to just scribble in my notebook and it seems to get the job done

Jon: I have one “exit” under my belt - selling Open Source Food.  Building up traffic, a large community, and then selling it all takes time - a long time (it took 2 years with OSF).  It’s not really a cycle that I want to try to repeat for profit, at least not intentionally.  As I said, a far more interesting challenge to me now is working with a much smaller group of paying customers, who are using my software.
That’s also a model that I think a small enterprise like me can be more successful with.

Sinan: What are your “must” s after you release a product. For marketing?

Jon: Take good care of your initial user base as they will be your evangelists!

Sinan: Thanks for your great answers Jon. Cheers to Japan/Tokyo!

Jon: Cheers to everyone from Turkey! By the way, I love lokum!

Shaun Inman is the creator of Mint and sIFR image replacement technology. You can learn much more about him in this post.

Sinan: How long are you working for new media?

Shaun: I have been creating websites and following/participating in the online discussion since 1999 and professionally since 2001.

Sinan: Can you tell us about your story.

Shaun: (This answer got a little long.)

I attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in the Graphic Design program. At the time I aspired to become a CD packaging designer, a quaint idea in retrospect. I was especially influenced by early Nine Inch Nails packaging (the Sin single’s typography and Broken/Fixed cases in particular) and David Carson (who would go on to do the design on Nine Inch Nails The Fragile).

During my junior year at SCAD my History of Graphic Design professor emphatically stated that the web was the future. That was 1999 so SCAD didn’t offer much beyond “Slicing Images and Tables for Layout with Photoshop and Dreamweaver 101″ and “Skip Intro with Flash and Director 102″ so I did an independent study or two and with the help of some Computer Science major friends from back home I hit the O’Reilly books pretty hard.

I started with basic HTML, picking apart the code produced by the crappy WYSIWYG editors of the day and moved on to JavaScript. It took some bounding back and forth between JavaScript and early versions of ActionScript before I really grasped even basic programming concepts. By the time I graduated in 2001 I had a beginner’s grasp of server-side programming with PHP and MySQL.

Throughout the learning process I dissected and built things. Forum software. Pre-blog news systems. And eventually Designologue.com. And I continued to read about the new technologies I encountered.

About a year after school I stumbled into web standards, bleary eyed, and read Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. I submitted two designs to the CSS Zen Garden. When it came time to redesign my site I was unsatisfied with the state of web typography and image replacement. Inspired by the use of embedded Flash for headlines on ESPN.com I combined what I knew about Flash, ActionScript, JavaScript, HTML and progressive enhancement to create Inman Flash Replacement (the seemingly immodest name abbreviated IFR was derived from FIR or Fahrner Image Replacement). IFR eventually became better know in its scalable variety as sIFR (currently maintained by Mark Wubben)

Because of the reaction Designologue, my CSS Zen Garden entries and Flash Replacement were receiving I grew more interested in my referrers. This interest lead to ShortStat and eventually Mint.

Leading up to the release of Mint I worked full-time for TechTarget.com and then Silverpoint.net as a designer/producer as well as doing some freelance design and development on the side.

Mint was a surprise success. At best I imagined it would pay for groceries and maybe fill up the gas tank once a month. When I left Silverpoint I had plenty of potential freelance work lined up. With Mint’s immediate success I was able to forego that client work and focus on supporting and improving Mint. Mint has also afforded me the time to work on other projects like my personal site, Pixel Portraits, Shortwave, Horror Vacui and the soon to be released Fever.

Sinan: What do you see as “best step” for your professional career?

Shaun: The most important contribution to my career has been my continuing independent studies. It took 3 and a half years of college to find something that I was really passionate about. Upon graduation I kept reading and learning. A very close second would be participation in the community. I think I owe part of my success to being in the right place at the right time. But not just being, participating.

Sinan: How do you seperate both design and development?

Shaun: I’m not sure that I do. It’s a circle. Development limitations inform design decisions. Design ideas present new ways to solve problems programatically. Design and development aren’t as disparate as everyone believes. Both require you understand the problem before you solve it. Both involve communication, with people or computers. The difference is one of language, visual versus programming.

As far as workflow is concerned I usually have Photoshop, TextMate and Transmit open all the time. If I hit a roadblock with a design idea or a question about how feasible an idea is to implement I switch over to TextMate. When I need a break from brackets, semi-colons and dollar signs I switch back to Photoshop.

Sinan: Do you have a project that you can say “totally fail”?. Can you tell us about some?

Shaun: I’ve been fortunate in that, since I’m working primarily for myself, if I don’t like where a project is heading I can abandon it before it gets to “fail.” The one project that sticks out in my mind is ShortStat 2. ShortStat 2 went out of its way to normalize its database and eliminate any redundant data. While theoretically ideal this resulted in absolutely terrible performance in practice. But from that failure came a better understanding of how to optimize a database schema for recording web stats which ultimately lead to Mint.

Sinan: Can you tell me some about your technical background of your projects?

Shaun: I use a custom PHP framework for my sites called Bookend that provides a modified version of the MVC design pattern. It’s less restrictive than the typical pattern and suits my designer/developer hybrid mind. I can only take so much abstraction. I like my file hierarchy to mirror the url of the page I’m working on and I hate having the pieces all over the place so Bookend accommodates my way of thinking.

Sinan: Are you working alone or having freelance support on your job?

Shaun: It’s just me. My wife Leslie Jensen-Inman is also a designer and web educator and a number of talented friends in the field so I do have someone to bounce ideas off of. Leslie and I attended SCAD together so we probably have a better handle on criticizing and accepting criticism from our spouse than most.

Sinan: What do you think for Mint’s background and foreground?

Shaun: Since Mint’s release in the fall of 2005 it has been added to tens of thousands of sites. Mint clients run the gamut from ivy-league colleges to mainstream bands to design shops with hundreds of client licenses to the kid with a single blog who received a Mint license as a birthday present. (Is that what you mean?)

Sinan: Again I’d like to have some clues about Feedafever.

Shaun: (I’m going to pass on this question for now. ;D)

Sinan: Last, I’ve heard about your IPhone apps interest. How’s it goin?

Shaun: This past February I released my first game for the iPhone, an original abstract strategy board game called Horror Vacui. I’ve written quite a bit about that process on my site. As for iPhone development in general, it’s…interesting. As a server-side web developer I have trouble mapping my way of thinking onto the Cocoa framework’s way of doing things. That said, I’ve already begun planning my next iPhone game which will be a considerably larger undertaking than Horror Vacui. What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment.

Sinan: Thanks for your answers Shaun.

Shaun: My pleasure. Cheers TR and Webrazzi readers!

I’m going to continue this set with many other “online ninja” s. I hope you enjoy!

Here’s the interview.