Tablet Computing: Definitely Not A Fad

I was in Paris two weeks ago, speaking at Le Web. It was a blast - Paris was gorgeous, I had a great chance to meet some of the most influential folks in the industry. Le Web is actually one of the best opportunities to hang out with the big guys from the Valley. Back in the States, they are all too busy and hard to meet; Meanwhile, Le Web is like the geek's winter break in Europe, and everybody from the Valley kind of hangs out together at night.

More about Le Web later on, but one obvious thing that anyone couldn't miss at Le Web was that this tablet computing thing is definitely not a fad. Trust me - every single person at Le Web was browsing and tapping on an iPad.

This was probably the first business trip where I didn't bring a laptop with me. I just threw my iPad into my carry-on, and that was it. But then, it seemed like everyone else was thinking the same. Sure, Le Web participants may not be the most average bunch, but it's not like the mainstream users are alienated by tablets or think tablets are only a "geek thing." It's projected Apple and other manufacturers will sell some 40+ million tablets in 2011.

Lesson: whatever web service you're doing (Blogger included, I guess), you should not lightly dismiss supporting tablet computer users. The whole tablet computing phenomenon is very much here to stay.

Hello World, this time for real

This has been on my to-do list forever, but I'm finally doing it this time for real: I'm starting my own Blogger blog.

Guess what I do for a living. I'm a product manager at Google, and my product is no other than... Blogger. Yet I didn't eat my own dogfood enough and didn't keep my personal blog at Blogger.

Yes, I'm a longtime blogger, but I was blogging mostly on Tistory and Textcube -- the Korean blogging services developed by TNC, the company that I served as a co-CEO and later got acquired by Google. Also I've written dozens of posts for Blogger's official blog, obviously running on Blogger, but they don't really count because they're not my "personal" blogs.

So here I'm embarking on my much belated journey of blogging on Blogger - you're better late than sorry. On this blog, I'll write about these things:

• Blogger, blogging
• Life at Google and Silicon Valley
• Product management
• Interesting web services from Asia (continuing on Web 2.0 Asia, but the Asian web won't be the central theme of this blog) 
• Bunch of other stuff, possibly with photos

Printing "hello world" on screen is often one of the most important milestones in programming. Likewise, this first post will hopefully be a good start of many posts to come.