Pek Pongpaet

I just occurred to me as I was looking at my Google Reader friends’ blogs subscriptions that I have quite a few friends who blog. I was thinking it would be cool to share all these blogs as some of you might be interested in some of these blogs.

• http://bradmaier.com/ Brad Maier is an Entrepreneur in Chicago by way of Philadelphia and he currently runs a design, development, and strategy consulting shop known as Uncharted Ventures.
• http://dangreenblatt.com/blog/ Dan Greenblatt is an Interaction Designer who works at Motorola. He blogs about user interfaces, user experience with various product designs (mostly bad), and his blog is just plain hilarious.
• http://blog.dawdle.com/ Sachin Agarwal, CEO of Dawdle.com, an online clearinghouse for used videogames, blogs on his company stuff here.
• http://www.flaggedforfollowup.com/ Ian Sohn, who works at Ogilvy Public Relations, blogs about technology, marketing, and other cool stuff.
• http://flyingcart.com/blog/ Rishi Shah, CEO of Flying Cart.com, an ecommerce solution for SMBs, educates small business owners on selling online.
• http://iamjosh.wordpress.com/ Josh Kahn is a Flex developer at Accenture Technology Labs. He blogs about some hard core Flex / RIA stuff.
• http://jorikadullips.blogspot.com/ Erika Dufour. She’s the wonderful photographer who’s responsible for many of the photos you see at the bottom of this blog as well as the Chicago Wushu website She and her husband Joe are some really cool folks who do some amazing work.
• http://www.kadavy.net/ David Kadavy is a designer and entrepreneur. His blog is just hilarious.
• http://shop.lucidnewyork.com/blog/ Anna Sabino is a NY jewelry designer. I think she totally gets it when it comes to promoting her business on the web. She’s even been featured in Entrepreneur magazine.
• http://musingsaboutinnovation.wordpress.com/ Sriram Thodla is currently a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Design. He’s one bright kid and I value his thoughts on innovation and business.
• http://craigekerstiens.com/ Craig Kerstiens is a young entrepreneur living and working in the valley. He lives and breathes dotcom. I rely on him when it comes to keeping me in touch with startup pulse and various new startups and technologies.
• http://thelittleplum.blogspot.com/This is a diary of my friend Brandon Harvey’s son Elliot.
• http://blog.rhazes2119.com/Rhazes Spell is an RIA / Flex developer at Roundarch. We’re both Accenture Tech Labs alums and we’re on the same wavelength He blogs about tech and art. I often get good stuff from him.
• http://shanesbrain.net/Shane Vitarana has made quite an impressive living with iphone development. I’ve covered him before in this blog post.
• http://www.xanga.com/streetphotosAlan Kong is an avid amateur photographer. He’s one of my wushu buddies.
• http://tantannoodles.com/Joe Tan is a prolific WordPress Plugin developer. I don’t even know how many he’s actually written, but he’s definitely the cats pajamas.
• http://www.thehotiron.com/index.php/site/index/Mike Maddaloni is founder of Dunkirk Systems and also runs the Chicago Likemind gatherings.
• http://www.usereffect.com/Dr Peter J Meyers’ consulting firm’s blog. He’s definitely got a pulse on technology and usability. The funny story with him is that I used to teach him and his wife wushu.
• http://www.vensonkuchipudi.com/Venson Kuchipudi – I can’t seem to get enough technology and social media
• http://pixelwelders.com/blog/Zack Jordan – is a superstar Flash developer. I am constantly in awe of his work.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Zappos.com is an online store that sells shoes and is slowly adding more and more products. That may not sound very impressive but they are on target for doing $1B in sales for 2008. For an 8 year old company, that’s not too shabby. I only first heard about Zappos.com at SXSW. Tony Hsieh the CEO gave a presentation on Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce. Below is the slide.

I was very impressed by his talk. It had nothing to do with technology or fads or tricks. Rather his talk was about good old customer service and treating the customer right. Very few companies go above and beyond the way Zappos does. Nowadays, companies want automated machines to be the first line of defense, with an actual human being the last thing they want their customer to interact with. He had many stories about Zappos customer service reps, who on their own, went out of their way to help customers. He’s instilled a culture of excellent service that has generated great word-of-mouth for Zappos.

Just to set the record, I have yet to actually BUY anything from Zappos. As much as I like shoes, I also enjoy the process of trying them on, touching and feeling my merchandise before I make a purchase. I know I can do that by ordering a whole bunch of shoes from Zappos and sending back the ones I don’t want for free. That just seems kinda wrong somehow.

Anyways, all I know from Zappos comes from my episode at SXSW and from various blogs and sites about startups and entrepreneurs. Which takes me to my story. I read somewhere that Zappos publishes an annual culture book for their employees. That book is available for purchase on their website. And since they had such happy customers as well as employees, I wanted to learn more about that by reading their book. Well, I spent a few minutes on the site and could not find it. Since I follow Tony on Twitter (cuz that’s how I roll), I decided to message him to ask where I could find his culture book. A couple hours later he messages me back asking my mailing address so he can mail me the book for free. We email each other back and forth for a bit and he invites me to take a tour of Zappos if I’m ever in Vegas. I was just in awe. This guy probably gets flooded with tweets and email all day, but he’s taking the time to personally respond to me. I’m not even a customer. I also get an email from Zappos saying that the book has been shipped with a tracking number. Having heard stories of their overnight deliveries, I was not suprised to see the book arrive at the office in the morning the next day.

I’ve briefly read bits of the Zappos 2008 Culture book which is basically a collection of every employee’s thoughts on the Zappos culture. It’s my impression that everyone sincerely loves being there. It’s both awe inspiring and contagious. With so many people working at jobs they either hate or have no feelings for, it’s refreshing to see a company that makes people excited to work there.

I want to end with a video that is currently featured on the bottom of the Zappos homepage. I’ll probably have to try buying something from Zappos.com now, but it probably won’t be shoes.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Rishi, but you can call me Gerald for short. I was sent to planet Earth to start FlyingCart.com. It revolutionized life on my home planet because its A) awesome B) easy to use.

All kidding aside, I never had any friends, so I am obsessed with social networking on the internet. I am hoping to have 5,000 friends one day on facebook. Flying Cart incorporates networking to ecommerce.

Tell us a bit about your background.
I pretty much rock it 24/7 on the internet. Seriously, I spend so much time on the internet, sometimes I can’t remember what I do in real life, and what my avatar, Risk does. Its all a blur man.

Everything I learn comes from Jason Fried, my business partners Margo and Brian, JAW, and the Brainreactions community.

Tell us about Flying Cart and how you came about it.
All I want is more stores online that are awesome.  I hate it when cool super niche stores have a hard time competing with the super lame walmart/dropshippers of the eccommerce world. LET’S START THE REVOLUTION!

We want to allow small business owners to connect to each others store to sell online.  Think mini malls for the internet.

Tell us something interesting about yourself.
I’m a hardcore vegetarian. My roommate thinks its weird, but I think its weird that he locks himself in his room to watch Ryan Seacrest live.

What advice would you give entrepreneurs?
This is what my uncle told me when Flying Cart wasn’t doing so hot.  “You have to give any new business at least 1000 days.  Work hard and keep focused until then.”
Feel free to connect with Rishi in anyway.

Website: www.FlyingCart.com
Twitter: www.Twitter.com/risk
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=8613159
Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/rishivshah

Popularity: 12% [?]

The new Mortal Kombat vs DC video game which will come out later this year in November will have a Kollector’s Edition (get it?) whose cover is drawn by none other than the famous Alex Ross. Here’s a REALLY cool video of the process.

The game is available for preorder. Please support your local starving martial artist by buying through this link.

My friend Sachin has a good write up on one of my motion capture sessions for making this game over at the Dawdle blog.

Popularity: unranked [?]

These fight scenes aren’t from any major movies so I doubt most people have seen them.

1. A Star Wars fan film with great fight scenes. Stick with it, it’s pretty cool.
2. This is a 2 on 1 empty hand wushu set.
3. Amazing spear vs empty hand wushu set.
4. Well, technically this isn’t one fight scene but a sneak preview of several for the upcoming Tony Jaa movie Ong Bak 2.
5. The end fight scene of the short film, ‘The Duel’ – a must see for any martial arts buff.

Popularity: 2% [?]