Photography Essays Bernd and Hilla Becher

Photography Essays Bernd and Hilla Becher Recognize what you consider to be the heritage of the craftsman Bernd and Hilla Becher for the significance of the photographic picture. ‘The present day picture taker is the architect’s most noteworthy publicist’; that is, in the event that one considers compositional photography an idiotic replicating gadget, and an unadulterated record that illuminates the spectator just of the structure and its functionality.â However dull a progression of photos delineating just water towers may appear, Bernd and Hilla Becher committed a lot of regard for shooting such symbols of post-war Germany thus made a verifiable document.â along these lines, the Bechers’ living inheritance is ‘a account of socio-notable reality dependent on photography’s potential to hold some indexical hint of its subject’, yet as referenced by Mack, the Bechers are among those photographic artists who are likewise ‘involved in some degree of development or manufacture, particular from the pragmatist and target position which is typically credited to [photography]’.â Their photography and l essons speak to when photography was winning genuine thought by the European craftsmanship scene as are obviously significant and persuasive, yet maybe the most directed inquiry toward pose of their work is the specific idea of its impact on different craftsmen, on the idea of the photographic picture, and on the scene of Germany of which the mines and storehouses they shot were a crucial part. Similarly as a notable content is the subject of the author’s translation of the truth of the occasions, a photo is the result of the photographer’s decision and control of an image.â It is plain that the Bechers were not endeavoring to compliment planners or favor of the structure and capacity of the structures they shot, as is regularly the situation in the great comprehension of building photography.â Although it can't be denied that their numerous pictures, similar to those of August Sander, make a social record for posterity’s purpose, the photos are not the slightest bit a wistful beholding back to the past or a consolation of German identity.â The innovation portrayed in the Bechers’ typological arrangements, frequently in a condition of weakening or relinquishment, could be said to speak to a period of profound destitution and the ‘erosion of acquired social and good values’.â considering this recommendation, Bernd and Hilla Be cher appeared to try to archive their subjects in a clinical, target way; staying captivated with yet shedding the past with the expectation that ‘the unburied mechanical wellsprings of Modernist symbolism be cleaned and removed from us, in case [they]†¦ attack the psyches of another generation’.â Therefore, in contrast to August Sander, the Bechers are progressively keen on giving us demise (instead of Sanders life investigation of the classes of Germany); the photos can be supposed to be looking forward to a superior future in particular if the watcher deciphers it so. Shouldnt these photographs at that point, captivated by death to the point of necrophilia, be recorded and forgotten?â Rather, it ought to be said that the photographs augment our comprehension of the photographic picture, accurately in light of the fact that they fill in as an unmistakable token of a past away from which the world has moved.â As much as it was careful for German craftsmen to deny history in the quick post-war period, Bernd and Hilla Becher decided to show it, with distinctively functionalist genuineness and truth.â Viewing the photos, we realize that the profoundly severe opportunity to which the structures have a place has passed thus see our position favourably.â Photography is the fine art that is most intently practically identical to our existence; regardless of whether they intended to or not, the Bechers have made craftsmanship through which we see history with a lucidity that can't be increased through memory or other works of art. Photography has consistently been related with some idea of removing and maintaining the past in control that it isn't overlooked, despite the fact that not really so as to praise or real the occasions therein.â A broad assortment of in an exposed fashion honest design pictures, for example, the Bechers’, could be supposed to be a method of saving the structures and what they speak to, as opposed to a method of banishing them to ‘the registers of the dead’ all together that society pushes ahead (or if nothing else away from the artificial movement of industrialisation).â Preservation, truly, and as essential to the reestablishment of German way of life similar to the protection of Auschwitz.â Indeed, the Bechers were intensely engaged with the German modern safeguarding development that began during the 1950s and brought about various symbols of the country’s financial and social history being recorded and their destruction prevented.â The intensity of the Bechers craftsmanship, and consequently part of their rendering of photography as a significant structure, is unmistakable in that the photos were convincing to the point that they turned into a piece of a development which changed (or kept up) Germany’s scene. It can likewise be said that, in safeguarding the winding apparatus, the structure workers’ houses and storehouses in their specialty, the Bechers’ ‘industrial archaeology’ was an examination concerning explicit communities.â Despite claims that their subjects are totally separated from their condition, the photos are frequently dated and their areas recorded, and along these lines offer a relevant token of a particular existence for each comparable yet altogether extraordinary picture.  From there, a watcher can set aside some effort to contemplate the stilled genuineness of the structures, their quiet watch, while staying mindful of their specific presence inside individual social orders. While this is a huge piece of the Bechers’ typological studies’ heritage, their method of demonstrating structures is assuredly not anthropocentric.â Never do they intentionally utilize the human structure to legitimize or improve their modern subjects.â Indeed, it is the very nonappearance of the human structure that makes these photos so intriguing in light of the fact that really ‘the craftsmanship of men is wherever visible’ and the assortment stands halfway as a declaration to humankind’s endless creativity and inventiveness.â The Bechers’ interest with metal and all that goes with its creation couldn't be an all the more remarkable articulation about that which is strange to human physical presence, yet similarly it is a remark on the degrees to which mechanical individuals are compelled to go as a result of their dependence on the laws of nature. Not straightforwardly keen on the human structure, yet in any case a result of the human brain and aptitude, the Bechers’ craftsmanship shows humankind’s hailing endeavor to ace nature, to reign it in and use it or, without a doubt, to ‘make nature in the picture of their own desires’.â Such a fight can just end in disappointment as, with water towers for example, the very capacity of the structures advise us that we are completely dependent on the earth’s assets; just when we join our comprehension of powers, for example, gravity with our longing to stay alive are we ready to make advancements that serve us while complying with nature’s laws.â In so saying, it is fascinating to take note of that the static picture of the photo helps one to remember the refusal of evolution.â The Bechers help the watcher see, through their practically thorough assortment of comparative pictures, the contrasts between the people self and the structures in the photographs.â The most pointed differentiation being the manner by which each capitulates to the procedures of evolution.â Whilst we proceed onward from war, from old thoughts regarding workmanship, from financial top to monetary trough, these structures remain especially the same.â This turns out to be a piece of the removing procedure that appears to make the Bechers’ work so significant; the photographic picture is unchangeable, irrefutable truth that will consistently stay in the past while we proceed onward ourselves.â The photos come to deny the ‘progress’ they initially represented, thus reaffirm our place in the present and, all the more critically, propose our continuation into a future that will be extraordinary. The Bechers’ work has gotten a lot of consideration; in any event, winning a renowned prize for sculpture.â The surrounding of the captured structures, the uniform lighting utilized and the subjects’ obvious opportunity from their noticeable condition permits a balance, which carries the structures nearer to sculptural treatment than the two-dimensional reportage that is regularly the part of the photographic image.â As Klaus Bussmann states in first experience with the Bechers’ Industrial Faã §ades; ‘in these photos the capacity of the engineering doesn't rise up out of its form’.â Unlike the specialty of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the Bechers’ photography doesn't commend the ‘dynamic and emotional usefulness of the mechanical machine’; in fact it doesn't contribute them with any importance at all.â We contribute them with significance and recollections †however the Bechers were apparently entranced by their deadness, t heir static spot in history and their correlation with the liveliness of human presence. The Bechers’ work had an amazing effect on the workmanship world, and the effect of their heritage is halfway because of the way wherein they decided to show their photos when their work was exhibited.â If there is a contention that portrays the photographic picture as a dull record of what we would all be able to see as it exists or existed in nature, at that point the Bechers’ typological develops deny this.â Seen in gatherings; one structure in contrast with twelve others of nearly (however distinctly not) indistinguishable appearance, the subjects of the photos are reproduced once more, and out of nowhere become some different option from their p

Literary Analysis of Tell-Tale Heart

A Doll's House was a disputable play in its time due to Ibsen's strong addressing of society's essential principles and standards. One of the most squeezing inquiries in the play is that of the inconsistent treatment of ladies. Ibsen questions Is it option to regard ladies as inferiors? ‘ Through the connection among Nora and Helmer, Ibsen presents inconsistent force partaking in a negative light, attempting to incite the crowd into addressing what was acknowledged as the standard in that period. One of the subtler procedures utilized is Helmer's language and diction.He utilizes creature terms to allude to her, for example, skylark' and squirrel'. This recommends Helmer doesn't adore Nora as an equivalent, and treats her like a pet'. More regrettable, he calls her his ownership', as though she were a thing, not a person with her own different character. This utilization of belittling, disparaging terms features the social standard of regarding ladies as sub-par, and incites the crowd to scrutinize the legitimacy of that standard. Besides, for the bigger piece of the play, Helmer is depicted as having the most influence in the relationship.He controls all the cash, and offers it to Nora as endowments. Nora's explanation that she has lived by playing out stunts' and by being pretty and enchanting, makes the crowd mindful of the disparaging, deceptive parts of imbalance, and again questions the legitimacy of this social standard, which, shockingly, has not been totally dissolved even in present day society. All things considered, the subject of disparity between the genders is just piece of the significant inquiry Ibsen presents: Is it option to compel individuals into social jobs without giving them the opportunity to investigate what their identity is and what they need to be? Ibsen presents this inquiry by first portraying Nora and Helmer as dependable conventionalists to social jobs and afterward sensationalizing the negative impacts of those jobs with a n end goal to incite crowds of that period to consider their profoundly instilled convictions. Nora appears to satisfy the job of a loyal spouse and mother. She doesn't work yet remains at home and deals with her youngsters. Ibsen at that point uncovers that, initially, she isn't generally satisfied, or self-realized, through this role.The job of spouse and mother doesn't draw out the entirety of her latent capacity. He shows this through Nora's affectionate memory about doing a touch of replicating' to take care of her obligations: It was practically similar to taking care of business'. She finds the experience fun' and satisfying, and does it for a decent aim. Be that as it may, she needs to work covertly as her job doesn't permither to work. The crowd is indicated the negative impacts of limiting people to cliché jobs. Ibsen in addressing, through Nora, regardless of whether it is all in all correct to compel people to specific jobs in society.Moreover, Ibsen uncovers that compe lling people into jobs on account of sexual orientation may be a pointless activity as not every person is appropriate for their jobs. Nora, for example, in not a generally excellent mother. The house cleaners invest more energy than her with the youngsters (however it is conceivable this is additionally a social show), and she plays with them like dolls'. Helmer, as well, is a casualty of society's desires. He discloses to Nora that he cherishes her so much he wishes that she were at serious risk with the goal that he could hazard everything' for her sake.He considers himself to be striking and solid, surely part of his personality he has gotten from social molding. Be that as it may, when Nora is truly in peril from Krogstad's extorting, Helmer's response shows the crowd that he is a quitter and thinks about himself when there is threat. He can't satisfy the job expected of him. This breaks the ideal model spouse generalization, yet additionally drives the crowd to address whether it is on the whole correct to power such crooked desires onto people without giving them opportunity to develop by themselves.Finally, this leads us to the most significant inquiry Ibsen presents: Should people not be allowed to make their own character, uninfluenced by society? ‘ We have seen the negative impacts of Nora being constrained into the job of spouse and mother. She feels smothered as can be seen through her remarks that she would essentially love to state Damn' before Helmer (in that period, the word damn' was viewed as incredibly discourteous and profane). She appreciates working, however can't on the grounds that her job doesn't permit her to.The question introduced here is that would it not be better if society didn't decide jobs dependent on sex and let people choose without anyone else what they need to be? Ibsen uncovers a typical falling flat of society through Nora's memories of youth: her dad shaped his suppositions, and Nora simply acknowledged them, ne ver voicing her own. Furthermore, when she wedded Helmer, she simply procured his preferences'. She has gotten no opportunity of picking up of more experience of the world and to get familiar with herself. Every one of those years, she has been what her dad and spouse, images of society, need her to be.The previously mentioned question is introduced delightfully in that last clash among Helmer and Nora. Helmer says that Nora's hallowed obligation' is to her significant other and youngsters. Nora answers that as a matter of first importance [she is] an individual', and goes out' to pick up understanding and information, and to discover increasingly about herself. The play doesn't reveal to us her possible destiny. For example, finishing simply presents the crowd with questions in regards to the legitimacy of profoundly instilled social standards, jobs and qualities, and whether it would be better if people, as Nora, utilized their opportunity to locate their own specific manner in li fe.These questions were exceptionally applicable in the period in which A Doll's House was composed, are as yet huge at this point. Indeed, even in present day society, people are as yet expected to take on specific jobs and characters and are mistreated for conflicting with social and social standards. Also, on the grounds that these inquiries are introduced through the lives of normal people like us, whom we can relate to and whose circumstances are not all that not at all like our own, those inquiries become considerably progressively noteworthy to us and the issues we face in our every day lives.

Kii

Kii INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in San Mateo, in the Kii Office, with Masanari. Konnichiwa.Masanari: Konnichiwa.Martin: Who are you and what do you do, Masanari?Masanari: I’m the CEO of Kii Corporation.Martin: And what is it? What is Kii Corporation?Masanari: Kii Corporation is focusing on solution for the mobile. We are providing backend technology to mobile application developers. And also these days, one of the famous segments is IoT, Internet of Things, we are also providing backend for the IoT devices.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Masanari: I was focusing in my entire career after the university on mobile. After I graduated in the university and got a master’s degree, I joined IBM. That was IBM-Japan. I was in ThinkPad group. When I joined IBM in 1984, and there was no notebook PC at that point. So IBM was working on a new notebook PC. ThinkPad was that PC, and I was the product manager for ThinkPad.Then, I spent 10 years in IBM. When I was doi ng product management for ThinkPad, I was travelling around Silicon Valley, meeting with a lot of innovative people and start-up companies. What I was looking for was the technology that would make ThinkPad more attractive. So we tried to partnership with many start-ups to acquire their technology into ThinkPad and to make ThinkPad more attractive for the people. Because I have spent so much time in Silicon Valley, I started to love Silicon Valley. So after 10 years in IBM, I decided, “Okay, maybe it’s time to quit at this big company.” I wanted to join a small, small start-up, so I joined the company called Intellisync. Intellisync was providing mobile software to synchronize mobile device to the backend system like Microsoft Outlook Exchange Notes, that kind of stuff. When I joined, the company had only five people. We really started from scratch at that point. From a 200,000 people company like IBM, I joined a five people company. I was one of the original members in Intell isync. Then, I spent more than 15 years in Intellisync. So whats happened, Intellisync was focusing on mobile solutions. I joined in 1995. Then, in Intellisync went to IPO in 1996. So that was a great experience because 1995 was the start of an internet bubble because that year Netscape went IPO. I had many experiences there. But in 2000 everything crashed. Then from that point, we started up again. In 2006, Nokia started talking to us because they wanted enterprise mobility solutions by using data synchronization technology. That was what Intellisync was focusing on and making Nokia devices for the enterprise grade device. Then Nokia started talking to us and finally decided to acquire us. So in 2006, Nokia acquired Intellisync. So that was what happened. At that time, I was the general manager Asia in Intellisync.At that point as Nokia was acquired, Nokia was not really doing well in two countriesâ€"Japan and Korea. They wanted to get a lot of knowledge about the Japanese market f rom me, and so I became country manager for Nokia Enterprise System. So I was working for Firewall, ECEs forms, and also in Intellisync Mobile Software Technology. So we were setting those things. Then in 2006-2007-2008 time frame, Nokia was fading out from Japanese Market. At that point, I proposed to MBO, originally Intellisync Japan business from Nokia. We got an agreement in 2008 and acquired a small portion or the original Intellisync software business back to us and that was the start of the company Kii. At that time, the company was named Synclore instead of Kii. So we got only 10 people and started all over again in 2008. What happened was, Intellisync originally started from Silicon Valley and became a worldwide company, but the portion we acquired back was just the Japanese portion. So I wanted to expand my business to the entire world again. Because I spent so much time in Silicon Valley, my nature became like a Silicon Valley guy. When I want to expand, usually Silicon V alley acquires companies. So we decided lets find a company to acquire. At that point, we looked for many companies but they were so expensive because that was another bubble in 2008. We spent one year in that phase, expanding in the Japanese business and tried to expand outside of Japan. However, in 2009, the Lehman show happened and everything was changed. EM became so high and all venture money in Silicon Valley stopped. As result, a lot of companies were in trouble and so we could acquire a company at that point. So we found a company who is providing mobile smart phone technology to Korea. We also provided the latest technology to Korea, so this was a very good synergy because that company has smart phone client technology and Intellisync spin-out had java side technology. So by combining cloud technology to moving the data around and smart phone client technology, that makes a new world. So we decided to merge the two companies together. The company name was called Servo. Actu ally, it was Christof, the German guy I think he came from Munich. So we merged together and then became Kii.Martin: Okay, great.Masanari: Sorry, long story.Martin: Okay. But how is it for a Japanese guy who is normally supposed to normally work in one company for 30, 40, 50 years to step out of a big company, join a small company, and justify that to his family?Masanari: What was happening inside of IBM was like it was having an internal battle and a lot of conflict inside. So ThinkPad was created like a PC company, but at that point, IBM was always pushing an IBM operating system for PCs. So they were fighting with Microsoft but from a PC viewpoint, we have to have to support both. However, they were always pushing too hard and so that makes the IBM PC business so hard and uncompetitive, because you have to support another operating system because of IBM. At that point, I was really, really frustrated about IBM strategy. As a part of a big company, I cannot make decisions quickly enough to move to the next step. At that point, Compaq, Gateway, so many PC companies were competing with each other. So three months is a really, really long time for the PC work. However, IBM wanted to spend one year to decide to do anything. At that point, I was so frustrated. Actually, I became sick. I had fever for two years because of the stress I got. So I just wanted to have freedom and make the decisions by myself quick and wanted to move ahead. So that came from the frustration of working in a large company.Martin: Masanari, how did you come up with the company name Kii?Masanari: We have two stories, which one do you want to hear?Martin: The true story.Masanari: Okay. So I mentioned the two companies merging together with almost the same size and kind of operation. If we would proceed with one name inside the company we would create a kind of perception that one company acquired the other company. I may start seeing peoples conflict. So, I didn’t want that to happen. So, this is a new company, we merge together, and we are creating a new company from now on so let’s work together. So that was the concept. I wanted to have a new company name to make that happen. Executive teams from both companies spent almost three months to decide the new company name. We had more than 200 candidates. Some people liked it, some people didn’t. We had a very long battle about the company name and we couldn’t decide. Then one guy went to godady.com, trading domain names, and we found that Kii.com is on sale and I thought this may be a great name for the company but I wanted to make sure that everybody was happy. At that point, we had employees in United States, Japan, China, Spain, and Germany. We asked everybody how Kii sounded. And everybody said “Wow, it sounds really good.” The US people said, “Kii is key”. We wanted to be key company. Japan said, “Wow, Kii is like a place, originally where the Japanese god came fromâ€"Kii Peninsula,” and the Ch inese people said, “Wow, that sounds really good, sending Kii, or Qi.” So everybody loved it, so we decided to have the company name Kii. So after a while, we talked about Kii came from the origin of the Japanese god, so this name was decided because we want to be the origin of that new business. But truth is that.Martin: First domain, then the story, and then the other way around.Masanari: Yes, yes. That’s right. Yes.BUSINESS MODEL OF KIIMartin: Masanari, how does the business model work right now?Masanari: So we are providing a platform to mobile application developers and also IoT device manufacturers. How this works. Basically, our company body proposition is when you want to develop a mobile application, you can develop everything by yourself. But typically, start-up people have frontend application, something they want to concentrate on, because they have idea around the application. But the backend side is really painful because you have to hire a server engineer, you h ave to operate the server, and you have to scale the server if you have a number of users. If you spend a lot of time on this, you cannot spend more time on this application side, that’s the most important thing. So our value is we take care of all the backend and you don’t have to do anything, so you just concentrate on the application side, so you come up with total scalable solutions. So we have a lot experience working with mobile carrier in the previous company, Intellisync, like Entity, Docomo, and SoftBank. We have about 50 million users in the Southeast and that kind of stuff. So we have a lot of experience and can provide a scalable backend. Basically, our business model is walking this application developer to kick-start their activity with providing free service at the beginning. Then, if those people start growing, we basically charge a fee based on the usage of the server for storage space, CPU power, and that kind of stuff.Also, we are working with device manufactu rers. When you come up with a webcam or a smart power, whatever, you usually want to have a companion mobile application and also want to understand how to manage the device. So we provide device management and device analytics so people can understand how to use the device and also mobile application development platform. So we provide those three key elements to make mobile IoT device successful and we basically charge them based on the number of device.Martin: So if I am a mobile developer, I can concentrate on my frontend, designing how the interaction with a customer will be, and then I will use your servers and get some analytics on how the user behaviour was without needing to develop all the kind of data sourcing and analytics stuff. And in addition, you will take care of all the hosting stuff?Masanari: Yes, yes.Martin: Okay.Masanari: The basic idea here is you don’t have to do any server side coding and you don’t have to do operate the server. Also, we provide a lot ele ments of functionality you need to develop mobile application. For example, I can user management, data management, push notification, analytics, and so on. So to prove our power, I asked our engineer to develop a copy of the Instagram and he finished it in one week. So that is the kind of power that we have.Martin: How do I connect the frontend with the backend provider by you then? Is this some kind of framework that you provide, or is it something else?Masanari: When you start developing applications then you can come to our developer portal, and that is developer.kii.com, then sign up, download the SDK, then just plug-in the SDK, then your application is just talking to the SDK, and then you can get all the functionality for the backend. For example, to do user management, such as issuing a user ID and the password, verify password, and manage the user ID and password, you can just add two or three lines of code into your mobile application, then that code will talk to SDK, and basically everything is done. If you do the coding for all those user management, you have to spend a lot of time, and you don’t have too.Martin: Okay, understood.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: So let’s talk about corporate strategy. What makes you unique in this market place? Are there any other players who are doing similar things?Masanari: Yes. Actually, we are not the first company doing this mobile backend, there are many companies that were established before. For example, a company called Parse was acquired by Facebook, StackMob was acquired by PayPal, and we have many competitors. But our uniqueness is maybe a couple of things. One is, we have started from Japan and have a big operation in China. So, we have a big strength in Asian market, not only focusing on U.S., but also on Japan, China, and all other Asian countries.Martin: Do you have some kind of cost-competitive advantage or not?Masanari: No, actually. The advantage is, for example, you are the developer, and you have to deal with English all the time, but because we have a big operations in Japan and China, we are providing Japanese and Chinese, including documentation support. Also, in Chinese market for example, if you want to publish your application into China market, there is no Google Play. In China, it’s really hard to access Google Play. As a result, you have to publish your application into China local app store, and most people don’t know how to do it. So we provide a program called Kii to China. By using Kii to China, you can publish applications very easily. Just give us the APK, and then we will publish the application on behalf of you to the Chinese local market. There are 200 different local markets. We select and partner with 20 China local app store and do the publishing. This is like a technology and language barrier because a lot of the people in China and Japan don’t want to deal with English documents, so we also support a Japanese and Chinese local community so that everybody understands the local situation in the technology program. Like I mentioned, we also help in distribution. Distributing mobile application to the Asian market is a mystery, right? You don’t know how to do it, so we are helping into appropriate distribution.Martin: On a success-base or is it included in your basic product?Masanari: Basically, we are always open. So if someone comes in and says, “Please help us to distribute,” we put them, for example, into the Kii to China program and everybody can use that service. And also, we start to see the growth and jump in to help those applications make better. For example, ASTRO File Manager, that’s one of the partner, that’s a famous file manager for Android. When we started working with them, they had only 15 million downloads, that’s pretty good, 15 million. After we helped, now they got around 75 million downloads and 25 million active users. That is huge, right? We helped them to make that happen. So sometimes we jump in and help the application developer.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: In terms of market development, can you give us some kind of overview how you perceive the current development in the mobile market sphere worldwide, maybe some kind of subsequent trend?Masanari: You mean, like the mobile market in general?Martin: Yes.Masanari: Yes. Basically, what happened was, before smart phone, feature phone, everything was closed. When you wanted to create some innovative application for the feature phone, feature phone is so closed and cannot do so many things. Even the Symbian Operating System, that was a pretty open operating system, but for the developer, it’s not easy to use and easy develop something. However, when Apple opened, like the API, for any kind of hardware features, for example, a gyroscope or a touchscreen, everybody started thinking, “Maybe I can use this hardware feature to do something.” So everybody has thrown so many ideas. What happened was that so many interestin g applications people never thought about started evolving. For example, by using the iPhone now, you can check the golf scene.Martin: Yes, yes. You said that you were a golf fan.Masanari: Yes. How many people can imagine that service before opening access to the hardware features? That basically changed the whole thing. Now there are a lot of applications.First of all, there are so many smartphones now that are available in the market and everything is so open, so you can come up with many interesting applications. Basically, after the hardware opened, a lot of people could think about innovative things by using those hardware features.The second thing that happened was that Apple created a market, the app store. Before the app store happened, you always have think about how to distribute my application to the world. But now, by just publishing the application to the app store, you can now access all over the world in store-based. So, that’s a big change.Thats the smartphone, and then this entire application ecosystem has started to happen. My view is that it’s going to expand to the IoT devices also, like you have the iPhone, iOS and Android, now you have the webcam, the smart light bulb, and smartkey which you can open them from a mobile application whenever you want. So my view is that iOS, Android, and all those kinds of IoT devices are going to be open API to a third-party, and then many people will start thinking about very innovative applications. For example, like combining webcam, smartkey, iOS, and smart light bulb, you can come up with an interesting application, right? So, I think that kind of world is happening for the mobile these days. Then everybody can have the opportunity to monetize it.Martin: I mean, one cool application might be having Google Glasses, being on the golf court, and then seeing which angle and what kind of strength should I use to hit the ball.Masanari: If you play golf like me.Martin: And you don’t need that.Masanari: No, no, no. I think technology is still pretty much early. Golf is so sensitive and you really cannot control by just seeing the information on the grass. Yes, but in navigation devices, the application is pretty good for those golf courses, and you can just see how far you would like to hit and that kind of stuff.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM MASANARI ARAI In San Mateo (CA), we meet co-founder and CEO of Kii, Masanari Arai. He shares his story how he co-founded this startup and how the current business model works, as well as what the current plans for near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is included below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in San Mateo, in the Kii Office, with Masanari. Konnichiwa.Masanari: Konnichiwa.Martin: Who are you and what do you do, Masanari?Masanari: I’m the CEO of Kii Corporation.Martin: And what is it? What is Kii Corporation?Masanari: Kii Corporation is focusing on solution for the mobile. We are providing backend technology to mobile application developers. And also these days, one of the famous segments is IoT, Internet of Things, we are also providing backend for the IoT devices.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Masanari: I was focusing in my entire career after the university on mobile. After I graduated in the university and got a master’s degree, I joined IBM. That was IBM-Japan. I was in ThinkPad group. When I joined IBM in 1984, and there was no notebook PC at that point. So IBM was working on a new notebook PC. ThinkPad was that PC, and I was the product manager for ThinkPad.Then, I spent 10 years in IBM. When I was doing product management for ThinkPad, I was travelling around Silicon Valley, meeting with a lot of innovative people and start-up companies. What I was looking for was the technology that would make ThinkPad more attractive. So we tried to partnership with many start-ups to acquire their technology into ThinkPad and to make ThinkPad more attractive for the people. Because I have spent so much time in Silicon Valley, I started to love Silicon Valley. So after 10 years in IBM, I decided, “Okay, maybe it’s time to quit at this big company.” I wanted to join a small, small start-up, so I joined the company called Intellisync. Intellisync was providing mobile software to synchronize mo bile device to the backend system like Microsoft Outlook Exchange Notes, that kind of stuff. When I joined, the company had only five people. We really started from scratch at that point. From a 200,000 people company like IBM, I joined a five people company. I was one of the original members in Intellisync. Then, I spent more than 15 years in Intellisync. So whats happened, Intellisync was focusing on mobile solutions. I joined in 1995. Then, in Intellisync went to IPO in 1996. So that was a great experience because 1995 was the start of an internet bubble because that year Netscape went IPO. I had many experiences there. But in 2000 everything crashed. Then from that point, we started up again. In 2006, Nokia started talking to us because they wanted enterprise mobility solutions by using data synchronization technology. That was what Intellisync was focusing on and making Nokia devices for the enterprise grade device. Then Nokia started talking to us and finally decided to acquir e us. So in 2006, Nokia acquired Intellisync. So that was what happened. At that time, I was the general manager Asia in Intellisync.At that point as Nokia was acquired, Nokia was not really doing well in two countriesâ€"Japan and Korea. They wanted to get a lot of knowledge about the Japanese market from me, and so I became country manager for Nokia Enterprise System. So I was working for Firewall, ECEs forms, and also in Intellisync Mobile Software Technology. So we were setting those things. Then in 2006-2007-2008 time frame, Nokia was fading out from Japanese Market. At that point, I proposed to MBO, originally Intellisync Japan business from Nokia. We got an agreement in 2008 and acquired a small portion or the original Intellisync software business back to us and that was the start of the company Kii. At that time, the company was named Synclore instead of Kii. So we got only 10 people and started all over again in 2008. What happened was, Intellisync originally started from S ilicon Valley and became a worldwide company, but the portion we acquired back was just the Japanese portion. So I wanted to expand my business to the entire world again. Because I spent so much time in Silicon Valley, my nature became like a Silicon Valley guy. When I want to expand, usually Silicon Valley acquires companies. So we decided lets find a company to acquire. At that point, we looked for many companies but they were so expensive because that was another bubble in 2008. We spent one year in that phase, expanding in the Japanese business and tried to expand outside of Japan. However, in 2009, the Lehman show happened and everything was changed. EM became so high and all venture money in Silicon Valley stopped. As result, a lot of companies were in trouble and so we could acquire a company at that point. So we found a company who is providing mobile smart phone technology to Korea. We also provided the latest technology to Korea, so this was a very good synergy because tha t company has smart phone client technology and Intellisync spin-out had java side technology. So by combining cloud technology to moving the data around and smart phone client technology, that makes a new world. So we decided to merge the two companies together. The company name was called Servo. Actually, it was Christof, the German guy I think he came from Munich. So we merged together and then became Kii.Martin: Okay, great.Masanari: Sorry, long story.Martin: Okay. But how is it for a Japanese guy who is normally supposed to normally work in one company for 30, 40, 50 years to step out of a big company, join a small company, and justify that to his family?Masanari: What was happening inside of IBM was like it was having an internal battle and a lot of conflict inside. So ThinkPad was created like a PC company, but at that point, IBM was always pushing an IBM operating system for PCs. So they were fighting with Microsoft but from a PC viewpoint, we have to have to support both. H owever, they were always pushing too hard and so that makes the IBM PC business so hard and uncompetitive, because you have to support another operating system because of IBM. At that point, I was really, really frustrated about IBM strategy. As a part of a big company, I cannot make decisions quickly enough to move to the next step. At that point, Compaq, Gateway, so many PC companies were competing with each other. So three months is a really, really long time for the PC work. However, IBM wanted to spend one year to decide to do anything. At that point, I was so frustrated. Actually, I became sick. I had fever for two years because of the stress I got. So I just wanted to have freedom and make the decisions by myself quick and wanted to move ahead. So that came from the frustration of working in a large company.Martin: Masanari, how did you come up with the company name Kii?Masanari: We have two stories, which one do you want to hear?Martin: The true story.Masanari: Okay. So I me ntioned the two companies merging together with almost the same size and kind of operation. If we would proceed with one name inside the company we would create a kind of perception that one company acquired the other company. I may start seeing peoples conflict. So, I didn’t want that to happen. So, this is a new company, we merge together, and we are creating a new company from now on so let’s work together. So that was the concept. I wanted to have a new company name to make that happen. Executive teams from both companies spent almost three months to decide the new company name. We had more than 200 candidates. Some people liked it, some people didn’t. We had a very long battle about the company name and we couldn’t decide. Then one guy went to godady.com, trading domain names, and we found that Kii.com is on sale and I thought this may be a great name for the company but I wanted to make sure that everybody was happy. At that point, we had employees in United States, Ja pan, China, Spain, and Germany. We asked everybody how Kii sounded. And everybody said “Wow, it sounds really good.” The US people said, “Kii is key”. We wanted to be key company. Japan said, “Wow, Kii is like a place, originally where the Japanese god came fromâ€"Kii Peninsula,” and the Chinese people said, “Wow, that sounds really good, sending Kii, or Qi.” So everybody loved it, so we decided to have the company name Kii. So after a while, we talked about Kii came from the origin of the Japanese god, so this name was decided because we want to be the origin of that new business. But truth is that.Martin: First domain, then the story, and then the other way around.Masanari: Yes, yes. That’s right. Yes.BUSINESS MODEL OF KIIMartin: Masanari, how does the business model work right now?Masanari: So we are providing a platform to mobile application developers and also IoT device manufacturers. How this works. Basically, our company body proposition is when you want to develop a mobile application, you can develop everything by yourself. But typically, start-up people have frontend application, something they want to concentrate on, because they have idea around the application. But the backend side is really painful because you have to hire a server engineer, you have to operate the server, and you have to scale the server if you have a number of users. If you spend a lot of time on this, you cannot spend more time on this application side, that’s the most important thing. So our value is we take care of all the backend and you don’t have to do anything, so you just concentrate on the application side, so you come up with total scalable solutions. So we have a lot experience working with mobile carrier in the previous company, Intellisync, like Entity, Docomo, and SoftBank. We have about 50 million users in the Southeast and that kind of stuff. So we have a lot of experience and can provide a scalable backend. Basically, our business model i s walking this application developer to kick-start their activity with providing free service at the beginning. Then, if those people start growing, we basically charge a fee based on the usage of the server for storage space, CPU power, and that kind of stuff.Also, we are working with device manufacturers. When you come up with a webcam or a smart power, whatever, you usually want to have a companion mobile application and also want to understand how to manage the device. So we provide device management and device analytics so people can understand how to use the device and also mobile application development platform. So we provide those three key elements to make mobile IoT device successful and we basically charge them based on the number of device.Martin: So if I am a mobile developer, I can concentrate on my frontend, designing how the interaction with a customer will be, and then I will use your servers and get some analytics on how the user behaviour was without needing to d evelop all the kind of data sourcing and analytics stuff. And in addition, you will take care of all the hosting stuff?Masanari: Yes, yes.Martin: Okay.Masanari: The basic idea here is you don’t have to do any server side coding and you don’t have to do operate the server. Also, we provide a lot elements of functionality you need to develop mobile application. For example, I can user management, data management, push notification, analytics, and so on. So to prove our power, I asked our engineer to develop a copy of the Instagram and he finished it in one week. So that is the kind of power that we have.Martin: How do I connect the frontend with the backend provider by you then? Is this some kind of framework that you provide, or is it something else?Masanari: When you start developing applications then you can come to our developer portal, and that is developer.kii.com, then sign up, download the SDK, then just plug-in the SDK, then your application is just talking to the SDK, an d then you can get all the functionality for the backend. For example, to do user management, such as issuing a user ID and the password, verify password, and manage the user ID and password, you can just add two or three lines of code into your mobile application, then that code will talk to SDK, and basically everything is done. If you do the coding for all those user management, you have to spend a lot of time, and you don’t have too.Martin: Okay, understood.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: So let’s talk about corporate strategy. What makes you unique in this market place? Are there any other players who are doing similar things?Masanari: Yes. Actually, we are not the first company doing this mobile backend, there are many companies that were established before. For example, a company called Parse was acquired by Facebook, StackMob was acquired by PayPal, and we have many competitors. But our uniqueness is maybe a couple of things. One is, we have started from Japan and have a big o peration in China. So, we have a big strength in Asian market, not only focusing on U.S., but also on Japan, China, and all other Asian countries.Martin: Do you have some kind of cost-competitive advantage or not?Masanari: No, actually. The advantage is, for example, you are the developer, and you have to deal with English all the time, but because we have a big operations in Japan and China, we are providing Japanese and Chinese, including documentation support. Also, in Chinese market for example, if you want to publish your application into China market, there is no Google Play. In China, it’s really hard to access Google Play. As a result, you have to publish your application into China local app store, and most people don’t know how to do it. So we provide a program called Kii to China. By using Kii to China, you can publish applications very easily. Just give us the APK, and then we will publish the application on behalf of you to the Chinese local market. There are 200 di fferent local markets. We select and partner with 20 China local app store and do the publishing. This is like a technology and language barrier because a lot of the people in China and Japan don’t want to deal with English documents, so we also support a Japanese and Chinese local community so that everybody understands the local situation in the technology program. Like I mentioned, we also help in distribution. Distributing mobile application to the Asian market is a mystery, right? You don’t know how to do it, so we are helping into appropriate distribution.Martin: On a success-base or is it included in your basic product?Masanari: Basically, we are always open. So if someone comes in and says, “Please help us to distribute,” we put them, for example, into the Kii to China program and everybody can use that service. And also, we start to see the growth and jump in to help those applications make better. For example, ASTRO File Manager, that’s one of the partner, that†™s a famous file manager for Android. When we started working with them, they had only 15 million downloads, that’s pretty good, 15 million. After we helped, now they got around 75 million downloads and 25 million active users. That is huge, right? We helped them to make that happen. So sometimes we jump in and help the application developer.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: In terms of market development, can you give us some kind of overview how you perceive the current development in the mobile market sphere worldwide, maybe some kind of subsequent trend?Masanari: You mean, like the mobile market in general?Martin: Yes.Masanari: Yes. Basically, what happened was, before smart phone, feature phone, everything was closed. When you wanted to create some innovative application for the feature phone, feature phone is so closed and cannot do so many things. Even the Symbian Operating System, that was a pretty open operating system, but for the developer, it’s not easy to use and easy devel op something. However, when Apple opened, like the API, for any kind of hardware features, for example, a gyroscope or a touchscreen, everybody started thinking, “Maybe I can use this hardware feature to do something.” So everybody has thrown so many ideas. What happened was that so many interesting applications people never thought about started evolving. For example, by using the iPhone now, you can check the golf scene.Martin: Yes, yes. You said that you were a golf fan.Masanari: Yes. How many people can imagine that service before opening access to the hardware features? That basically changed the whole thing. Now there are a lot of applications.First of all, there are so many smartphones now that are available in the market and everything is so open, so you can come up with many interesting applications. Basically, after the hardware opened, a lot of people could think about innovative things by using those hardware features.The second thing that happened was that Apple cre ated a market, the app store. Before the app store happened, you always have think about how to distribute my application to the world. But now, by just publishing the application to the app store, you can now access all over the world in store-based. So, that’s a big change.Thats the smartphone, and then this entire application ecosystem has started to happen. My view is that it’s going to expand to the IoT devices also, like you have the iPhone, iOS and Android, now you have the webcam, the smart light bulb, and smartkey which you can open them from a mobile application whenever you want. So my view is that iOS, Android, and all those kinds of IoT devices are going to be open API to a third-party, and then many people will start thinking about very innovative applications. For example, like combining webcam, smartkey, iOS, and smart light bulb, you can come up with an interesting application, right? So, I think that kind of world is happening for the mobile these days. Then ev erybody can have the opportunity to monetize it.Martin: I mean, one cool application might be having Google Glasses, being on the golf court, and then seeing which angle and what kind of strength should I use to hit the ball.Masanari: If you play golf like me.Martin: And you don’t need that.Masanari: No, no, no. I think technology is still pretty much early. Golf is so sensitive and you really cannot control by just seeing the information on the grass. Yes, but in navigation devices, the application is pretty good for those golf courses, and you can just see how far you would like to hit and that kind of stuff.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM MASANARI ARAIMartin: Masanari, imagine you daughter comes to you and says, “Daddy, what advice can you give me for starting my own company? What should I do and what shouldn’t I do?” And maybe you have some other mistakes that you can share with us.Masanari: First of all, I think, some people like start-up, some people don’t like start-up . Even if you do like start-up, some people are not start-up people and some people are. If you want to start-up, I’ll basically say “Yes, that is really a great thing.” However, I think you have to understand that when you are in a big company, you learn a lot of good things because a large company has nice processes and also a way to organize people. But in start-up, you don’t have any kind of that. So, you don’t have enough skill to start a company. To fix that, you have to, first of all, create a team. It doesn’t have to be big. You may get one person with an opposite characteristic to you who can help you. Hopefully they will have more experience. Then make a team and think about the business. I always say, for Silicon Valley people this is kind of common sense, but for people in Japan, China, and sometimes in Europe, they want to start a business by spending more money. But I say, “Don’t spend your money even if you have a lot of money, don’t spend your money ,” because if you don’t spend your money, you will have to get money from someone else. To get the money from someone, you have to convince that person. So this process is very important to kick-start a start-up. You start seriously talking to the people and try to convince them to give you the money to start a business. If in that process, you have talked to 20 people and have failed, it’s okay. Every time you talk to those people, you get new stuff that adds to your knowledge. Sometimes, your business plan is pretty much as if dreaming of something that has never happened. Those people always talking to you will tell say, “You’re wrong and you have to fix this,” and If competitor come in, how do you compete? So all those information people are giving to you for free is like a process. So, don’t spend your own money, start talking to the people, get the money, and then start your business. I think that is a very important thing. There are many tips, important concepts like for example lean start-up But I think, in the beginning, having a good team and talking to people who have experienced and gone through building a company type of process is very important.Martin: Great. Masanari, thank you very much for your time.Masanari: Yes. Thank you very much for coming.Martin: Sure! And if next time you start a company, maybe you should create a very great team, and then think about how you can get in touch with investors to check your hypothesis and validate your business model.Masanari: Right.Martin: Thank you very much. Good.Masanari: Domo arigato gozai mas. Thank you very much!Martin: Okay.Masanari: Arigato.Martin: Arigato.Masanari: Yes.Martin: Good. Thank you very much.Masanari: Okay. Thank you very much.

Kii

Kii INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in San Mateo, in the Kii Office, with Masanari. Konnichiwa.Masanari: Konnichiwa.Martin: Who are you and what do you do, Masanari?Masanari: I’m the CEO of Kii Corporation.Martin: And what is it? What is Kii Corporation?Masanari: Kii Corporation is focusing on solution for the mobile. We are providing backend technology to mobile application developers. And also these days, one of the famous segments is IoT, Internet of Things, we are also providing backend for the IoT devices.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Masanari: I was focusing in my entire career after the university on mobile. After I graduated in the university and got a master’s degree, I joined IBM. That was IBM-Japan. I was in ThinkPad group. When I joined IBM in 1984, and there was no notebook PC at that point. So IBM was working on a new notebook PC. ThinkPad was that PC, and I was the product manager for ThinkPad.Then, I spent 10 years in IBM. When I was doi ng product management for ThinkPad, I was travelling around Silicon Valley, meeting with a lot of innovative people and start-up companies. What I was looking for was the technology that would make ThinkPad more attractive. So we tried to partnership with many start-ups to acquire their technology into ThinkPad and to make ThinkPad more attractive for the people. Because I have spent so much time in Silicon Valley, I started to love Silicon Valley. So after 10 years in IBM, I decided, “Okay, maybe it’s time to quit at this big company.” I wanted to join a small, small start-up, so I joined the company called Intellisync. Intellisync was providing mobile software to synchronize mobile device to the backend system like Microsoft Outlook Exchange Notes, that kind of stuff. When I joined, the company had only five people. We really started from scratch at that point. From a 200,000 people company like IBM, I joined a five people company. I was one of the original members in Intell isync. Then, I spent more than 15 years in Intellisync. So whats happened, Intellisync was focusing on mobile solutions. I joined in 1995. Then, in Intellisync went to IPO in 1996. So that was a great experience because 1995 was the start of an internet bubble because that year Netscape went IPO. I had many experiences there. But in 2000 everything crashed. Then from that point, we started up again. In 2006, Nokia started talking to us because they wanted enterprise mobility solutions by using data synchronization technology. That was what Intellisync was focusing on and making Nokia devices for the enterprise grade device. Then Nokia started talking to us and finally decided to acquire us. So in 2006, Nokia acquired Intellisync. So that was what happened. At that time, I was the general manager Asia in Intellisync.At that point as Nokia was acquired, Nokia was not really doing well in two countriesâ€"Japan and Korea. They wanted to get a lot of knowledge about the Japanese market f rom me, and so I became country manager for Nokia Enterprise System. So I was working for Firewall, ECEs forms, and also in Intellisync Mobile Software Technology. So we were setting those things. Then in 2006-2007-2008 time frame, Nokia was fading out from Japanese Market. At that point, I proposed to MBO, originally Intellisync Japan business from Nokia. We got an agreement in 2008 and acquired a small portion or the original Intellisync software business back to us and that was the start of the company Kii. At that time, the company was named Synclore instead of Kii. So we got only 10 people and started all over again in 2008. What happened was, Intellisync originally started from Silicon Valley and became a worldwide company, but the portion we acquired back was just the Japanese portion. So I wanted to expand my business to the entire world again. Because I spent so much time in Silicon Valley, my nature became like a Silicon Valley guy. When I want to expand, usually Silicon V alley acquires companies. So we decided lets find a company to acquire. At that point, we looked for many companies but they were so expensive because that was another bubble in 2008. We spent one year in that phase, expanding in the Japanese business and tried to expand outside of Japan. However, in 2009, the Lehman show happened and everything was changed. EM became so high and all venture money in Silicon Valley stopped. As result, a lot of companies were in trouble and so we could acquire a company at that point. So we found a company who is providing mobile smart phone technology to Korea. We also provided the latest technology to Korea, so this was a very good synergy because that company has smart phone client technology and Intellisync spin-out had java side technology. So by combining cloud technology to moving the data around and smart phone client technology, that makes a new world. So we decided to merge the two companies together. The company name was called Servo. Actu ally, it was Christof, the German guy I think he came from Munich. So we merged together and then became Kii.Martin: Okay, great.Masanari: Sorry, long story.Martin: Okay. But how is it for a Japanese guy who is normally supposed to normally work in one company for 30, 40, 50 years to step out of a big company, join a small company, and justify that to his family?Masanari: What was happening inside of IBM was like it was having an internal battle and a lot of conflict inside. So ThinkPad was created like a PC company, but at that point, IBM was always pushing an IBM operating system for PCs. So they were fighting with Microsoft but from a PC viewpoint, we have to have to support both. However, they were always pushing too hard and so that makes the IBM PC business so hard and uncompetitive, because you have to support another operating system because of IBM. At that point, I was really, really frustrated about IBM strategy. As a part of a big company, I cannot make decisions quickly enough to move to the next step. At that point, Compaq, Gateway, so many PC companies were competing with each other. So three months is a really, really long time for the PC work. However, IBM wanted to spend one year to decide to do anything. At that point, I was so frustrated. Actually, I became sick. I had fever for two years because of the stress I got. So I just wanted to have freedom and make the decisions by myself quick and wanted to move ahead. So that came from the frustration of working in a large company.Martin: Masanari, how did you come up with the company name Kii?Masanari: We have two stories, which one do you want to hear?Martin: The true story.Masanari: Okay. So I mentioned the two companies merging together with almost the same size and kind of operation. If we would proceed with one name inside the company we would create a kind of perception that one company acquired the other company. I may start seeing peoples conflict. So, I didn’t want that to happen. So, this is a new company, we merge together, and we are creating a new company from now on so let’s work together. So that was the concept. I wanted to have a new company name to make that happen. Executive teams from both companies spent almost three months to decide the new company name. We had more than 200 candidates. Some people liked it, some people didn’t. We had a very long battle about the company name and we couldn’t decide. Then one guy went to godady.com, trading domain names, and we found that Kii.com is on sale and I thought this may be a great name for the company but I wanted to make sure that everybody was happy. At that point, we had employees in United States, Japan, China, Spain, and Germany. We asked everybody how Kii sounded. And everybody said “Wow, it sounds really good.” The US people said, “Kii is key”. We wanted to be key company. Japan said, “Wow, Kii is like a place, originally where the Japanese god came fromâ€"Kii Peninsula,” and the Ch inese people said, “Wow, that sounds really good, sending Kii, or Qi.” So everybody loved it, so we decided to have the company name Kii. So after a while, we talked about Kii came from the origin of the Japanese god, so this name was decided because we want to be the origin of that new business. But truth is that.Martin: First domain, then the story, and then the other way around.Masanari: Yes, yes. That’s right. Yes.BUSINESS MODEL OF KIIMartin: Masanari, how does the business model work right now?Masanari: So we are providing a platform to mobile application developers and also IoT device manufacturers. How this works. Basically, our company body proposition is when you want to develop a mobile application, you can develop everything by yourself. But typically, start-up people have frontend application, something they want to concentrate on, because they have idea around the application. But the backend side is really painful because you have to hire a server engineer, you h ave to operate the server, and you have to scale the server if you have a number of users. If you spend a lot of time on this, you cannot spend more time on this application side, that’s the most important thing. So our value is we take care of all the backend and you don’t have to do anything, so you just concentrate on the application side, so you come up with total scalable solutions. So we have a lot experience working with mobile carrier in the previous company, Intellisync, like Entity, Docomo, and SoftBank. We have about 50 million users in the Southeast and that kind of stuff. So we have a lot of experience and can provide a scalable backend. Basically, our business model is walking this application developer to kick-start their activity with providing free service at the beginning. Then, if those people start growing, we basically charge a fee based on the usage of the server for storage space, CPU power, and that kind of stuff.Also, we are working with device manufactu rers. When you come up with a webcam or a smart power, whatever, you usually want to have a companion mobile application and also want to understand how to manage the device. So we provide device management and device analytics so people can understand how to use the device and also mobile application development platform. So we provide those three key elements to make mobile IoT device successful and we basically charge them based on the number of device.Martin: So if I am a mobile developer, I can concentrate on my frontend, designing how the interaction with a customer will be, and then I will use your servers and get some analytics on how the user behaviour was without needing to develop all the kind of data sourcing and analytics stuff. And in addition, you will take care of all the hosting stuff?Masanari: Yes, yes.Martin: Okay.Masanari: The basic idea here is you don’t have to do any server side coding and you don’t have to do operate the server. Also, we provide a lot ele ments of functionality you need to develop mobile application. For example, I can user management, data management, push notification, analytics, and so on. So to prove our power, I asked our engineer to develop a copy of the Instagram and he finished it in one week. So that is the kind of power that we have.Martin: How do I connect the frontend with the backend provider by you then? Is this some kind of framework that you provide, or is it something else?Masanari: When you start developing applications then you can come to our developer portal, and that is developer.kii.com, then sign up, download the SDK, then just plug-in the SDK, then your application is just talking to the SDK, and then you can get all the functionality for the backend. For example, to do user management, such as issuing a user ID and the password, verify password, and manage the user ID and password, you can just add two or three lines of code into your mobile application, then that code will talk to SDK, and basically everything is done. If you do the coding for all those user management, you have to spend a lot of time, and you don’t have too.Martin: Okay, understood.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: So let’s talk about corporate strategy. What makes you unique in this market place? Are there any other players who are doing similar things?Masanari: Yes. Actually, we are not the first company doing this mobile backend, there are many companies that were established before. For example, a company called Parse was acquired by Facebook, StackMob was acquired by PayPal, and we have many competitors. But our uniqueness is maybe a couple of things. One is, we have started from Japan and have a big operation in China. So, we have a big strength in Asian market, not only focusing on U.S., but also on Japan, China, and all other Asian countries.Martin: Do you have some kind of cost-competitive advantage or not?Masanari: No, actually. The advantage is, for example, you are the developer, and you have to deal with English all the time, but because we have a big operations in Japan and China, we are providing Japanese and Chinese, including documentation support. Also, in Chinese market for example, if you want to publish your application into China market, there is no Google Play. In China, it’s really hard to access Google Play. As a result, you have to publish your application into China local app store, and most people don’t know how to do it. So we provide a program called Kii to China. By using Kii to China, you can publish applications very easily. Just give us the APK, and then we will publish the application on behalf of you to the Chinese local market. There are 200 different local markets. We select and partner with 20 China local app store and do the publishing. This is like a technology and language barrier because a lot of the people in China and Japan don’t want to deal with English documents, so we also support a Japanese and Chinese local community so that everybody understands the local situation in the technology program. Like I mentioned, we also help in distribution. Distributing mobile application to the Asian market is a mystery, right? You don’t know how to do it, so we are helping into appropriate distribution.Martin: On a success-base or is it included in your basic product?Masanari: Basically, we are always open. So if someone comes in and says, “Please help us to distribute,” we put them, for example, into the Kii to China program and everybody can use that service. And also, we start to see the growth and jump in to help those applications make better. For example, ASTRO File Manager, that’s one of the partner, that’s a famous file manager for Android. When we started working with them, they had only 15 million downloads, that’s pretty good, 15 million. After we helped, now they got around 75 million downloads and 25 million active users. That is huge, right? We helped them to make that happen. So sometimes we jump in and help the application developer.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: In terms of market development, can you give us some kind of overview how you perceive the current development in the mobile market sphere worldwide, maybe some kind of subsequent trend?Masanari: You mean, like the mobile market in general?Martin: Yes.Masanari: Yes. Basically, what happened was, before smart phone, feature phone, everything was closed. When you wanted to create some innovative application for the feature phone, feature phone is so closed and cannot do so many things. Even the Symbian Operating System, that was a pretty open operating system, but for the developer, it’s not easy to use and easy develop something. However, when Apple opened, like the API, for any kind of hardware features, for example, a gyroscope or a touchscreen, everybody started thinking, “Maybe I can use this hardware feature to do something.” So everybody has thrown so many ideas. What happened was that so many interestin g applications people never thought about started evolving. For example, by using the iPhone now, you can check the golf scene.Martin: Yes, yes. You said that you were a golf fan.Masanari: Yes. How many people can imagine that service before opening access to the hardware features? That basically changed the whole thing. Now there are a lot of applications.First of all, there are so many smartphones now that are available in the market and everything is so open, so you can come up with many interesting applications. Basically, after the hardware opened, a lot of people could think about innovative things by using those hardware features.The second thing that happened was that Apple created a market, the app store. Before the app store happened, you always have think about how to distribute my application to the world. But now, by just publishing the application to the app store, you can now access all over the world in store-based. So, that’s a big change.Thats the smartphone, and then this entire application ecosystem has started to happen. My view is that it’s going to expand to the IoT devices also, like you have the iPhone, iOS and Android, now you have the webcam, the smart light bulb, and smartkey which you can open them from a mobile application whenever you want. So my view is that iOS, Android, and all those kinds of IoT devices are going to be open API to a third-party, and then many people will start thinking about very innovative applications. For example, like combining webcam, smartkey, iOS, and smart light bulb, you can come up with an interesting application, right? So, I think that kind of world is happening for the mobile these days. Then everybody can have the opportunity to monetize it.Martin: I mean, one cool application might be having Google Glasses, being on the golf court, and then seeing which angle and what kind of strength should I use to hit the ball.Masanari: If you play golf like me.Martin: And you don’t need that.Masanari: No, no, no. I think technology is still pretty much early. Golf is so sensitive and you really cannot control by just seeing the information on the grass. Yes, but in navigation devices, the application is pretty good for those golf courses, and you can just see how far you would like to hit and that kind of stuff.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM MASANARI ARAI In San Mateo (CA), we meet co-founder and CEO of Kii, Masanari Arai. He shares his story how he co-founded this startup and how the current business model works, as well as what the current plans for near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is included below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in San Mateo, in the Kii Office, with Masanari. Konnichiwa.Masanari: Konnichiwa.Martin: Who are you and what do you do, Masanari?Masanari: I’m the CEO of Kii Corporation.Martin: And what is it? What is Kii Corporation?Masanari: Kii Corporation is focusing on solution for the mobile. We are providing backend technology to mobile application developers. And also these days, one of the famous segments is IoT, Internet of Things, we are also providing backend for the IoT devices.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Masanari: I was focusing in my entire career after the university on mobile. After I graduated in the university and got a master’s degree, I joined IBM. That was IBM-Japan. I was in ThinkPad group. When I joined IBM in 1984, and there was no notebook PC at that point. So IBM was working on a new notebook PC. ThinkPad was that PC, and I was the product manager for ThinkPad.Then, I spent 10 years in IBM. When I was doing product management for ThinkPad, I was travelling around Silicon Valley, meeting with a lot of innovative people and start-up companies. What I was looking for was the technology that would make ThinkPad more attractive. So we tried to partnership with many start-ups to acquire their technology into ThinkPad and to make ThinkPad more attractive for the people. Because I have spent so much time in Silicon Valley, I started to love Silicon Valley. So after 10 years in IBM, I decided, “Okay, maybe it’s time to quit at this big company.” I wanted to join a small, small start-up, so I joined the company called Intellisync. Intellisync was providing mobile software to synchronize mo bile device to the backend system like Microsoft Outlook Exchange Notes, that kind of stuff. When I joined, the company had only five people. We really started from scratch at that point. From a 200,000 people company like IBM, I joined a five people company. I was one of the original members in Intellisync. Then, I spent more than 15 years in Intellisync. So whats happened, Intellisync was focusing on mobile solutions. I joined in 1995. Then, in Intellisync went to IPO in 1996. So that was a great experience because 1995 was the start of an internet bubble because that year Netscape went IPO. I had many experiences there. But in 2000 everything crashed. Then from that point, we started up again. In 2006, Nokia started talking to us because they wanted enterprise mobility solutions by using data synchronization technology. That was what Intellisync was focusing on and making Nokia devices for the enterprise grade device. Then Nokia started talking to us and finally decided to acquir e us. So in 2006, Nokia acquired Intellisync. So that was what happened. At that time, I was the general manager Asia in Intellisync.At that point as Nokia was acquired, Nokia was not really doing well in two countriesâ€"Japan and Korea. They wanted to get a lot of knowledge about the Japanese market from me, and so I became country manager for Nokia Enterprise System. So I was working for Firewall, ECEs forms, and also in Intellisync Mobile Software Technology. So we were setting those things. Then in 2006-2007-2008 time frame, Nokia was fading out from Japanese Market. At that point, I proposed to MBO, originally Intellisync Japan business from Nokia. We got an agreement in 2008 and acquired a small portion or the original Intellisync software business back to us and that was the start of the company Kii. At that time, the company was named Synclore instead of Kii. So we got only 10 people and started all over again in 2008. What happened was, Intellisync originally started from S ilicon Valley and became a worldwide company, but the portion we acquired back was just the Japanese portion. So I wanted to expand my business to the entire world again. Because I spent so much time in Silicon Valley, my nature became like a Silicon Valley guy. When I want to expand, usually Silicon Valley acquires companies. So we decided lets find a company to acquire. At that point, we looked for many companies but they were so expensive because that was another bubble in 2008. We spent one year in that phase, expanding in the Japanese business and tried to expand outside of Japan. However, in 2009, the Lehman show happened and everything was changed. EM became so high and all venture money in Silicon Valley stopped. As result, a lot of companies were in trouble and so we could acquire a company at that point. So we found a company who is providing mobile smart phone technology to Korea. We also provided the latest technology to Korea, so this was a very good synergy because tha t company has smart phone client technology and Intellisync spin-out had java side technology. So by combining cloud technology to moving the data around and smart phone client technology, that makes a new world. So we decided to merge the two companies together. The company name was called Servo. Actually, it was Christof, the German guy I think he came from Munich. So we merged together and then became Kii.Martin: Okay, great.Masanari: Sorry, long story.Martin: Okay. But how is it for a Japanese guy who is normally supposed to normally work in one company for 30, 40, 50 years to step out of a big company, join a small company, and justify that to his family?Masanari: What was happening inside of IBM was like it was having an internal battle and a lot of conflict inside. So ThinkPad was created like a PC company, but at that point, IBM was always pushing an IBM operating system for PCs. So they were fighting with Microsoft but from a PC viewpoint, we have to have to support both. H owever, they were always pushing too hard and so that makes the IBM PC business so hard and uncompetitive, because you have to support another operating system because of IBM. At that point, I was really, really frustrated about IBM strategy. As a part of a big company, I cannot make decisions quickly enough to move to the next step. At that point, Compaq, Gateway, so many PC companies were competing with each other. So three months is a really, really long time for the PC work. However, IBM wanted to spend one year to decide to do anything. At that point, I was so frustrated. Actually, I became sick. I had fever for two years because of the stress I got. So I just wanted to have freedom and make the decisions by myself quick and wanted to move ahead. So that came from the frustration of working in a large company.Martin: Masanari, how did you come up with the company name Kii?Masanari: We have two stories, which one do you want to hear?Martin: The true story.Masanari: Okay. So I me ntioned the two companies merging together with almost the same size and kind of operation. If we would proceed with one name inside the company we would create a kind of perception that one company acquired the other company. I may start seeing peoples conflict. So, I didn’t want that to happen. So, this is a new company, we merge together, and we are creating a new company from now on so let’s work together. So that was the concept. I wanted to have a new company name to make that happen. Executive teams from both companies spent almost three months to decide the new company name. We had more than 200 candidates. Some people liked it, some people didn’t. We had a very long battle about the company name and we couldn’t decide. Then one guy went to godady.com, trading domain names, and we found that Kii.com is on sale and I thought this may be a great name for the company but I wanted to make sure that everybody was happy. At that point, we had employees in United States, Ja pan, China, Spain, and Germany. We asked everybody how Kii sounded. And everybody said “Wow, it sounds really good.” The US people said, “Kii is key”. We wanted to be key company. Japan said, “Wow, Kii is like a place, originally where the Japanese god came fromâ€"Kii Peninsula,” and the Chinese people said, “Wow, that sounds really good, sending Kii, or Qi.” So everybody loved it, so we decided to have the company name Kii. So after a while, we talked about Kii came from the origin of the Japanese god, so this name was decided because we want to be the origin of that new business. But truth is that.Martin: First domain, then the story, and then the other way around.Masanari: Yes, yes. That’s right. Yes.BUSINESS MODEL OF KIIMartin: Masanari, how does the business model work right now?Masanari: So we are providing a platform to mobile application developers and also IoT device manufacturers. How this works. Basically, our company body proposition is when you want to develop a mobile application, you can develop everything by yourself. But typically, start-up people have frontend application, something they want to concentrate on, because they have idea around the application. But the backend side is really painful because you have to hire a server engineer, you have to operate the server, and you have to scale the server if you have a number of users. If you spend a lot of time on this, you cannot spend more time on this application side, that’s the most important thing. So our value is we take care of all the backend and you don’t have to do anything, so you just concentrate on the application side, so you come up with total scalable solutions. So we have a lot experience working with mobile carrier in the previous company, Intellisync, like Entity, Docomo, and SoftBank. We have about 50 million users in the Southeast and that kind of stuff. So we have a lot of experience and can provide a scalable backend. Basically, our business model i s walking this application developer to kick-start their activity with providing free service at the beginning. Then, if those people start growing, we basically charge a fee based on the usage of the server for storage space, CPU power, and that kind of stuff.Also, we are working with device manufacturers. When you come up with a webcam or a smart power, whatever, you usually want to have a companion mobile application and also want to understand how to manage the device. So we provide device management and device analytics so people can understand how to use the device and also mobile application development platform. So we provide those three key elements to make mobile IoT device successful and we basically charge them based on the number of device.Martin: So if I am a mobile developer, I can concentrate on my frontend, designing how the interaction with a customer will be, and then I will use your servers and get some analytics on how the user behaviour was without needing to d evelop all the kind of data sourcing and analytics stuff. And in addition, you will take care of all the hosting stuff?Masanari: Yes, yes.Martin: Okay.Masanari: The basic idea here is you don’t have to do any server side coding and you don’t have to do operate the server. Also, we provide a lot elements of functionality you need to develop mobile application. For example, I can user management, data management, push notification, analytics, and so on. So to prove our power, I asked our engineer to develop a copy of the Instagram and he finished it in one week. So that is the kind of power that we have.Martin: How do I connect the frontend with the backend provider by you then? Is this some kind of framework that you provide, or is it something else?Masanari: When you start developing applications then you can come to our developer portal, and that is developer.kii.com, then sign up, download the SDK, then just plug-in the SDK, then your application is just talking to the SDK, an d then you can get all the functionality for the backend. For example, to do user management, such as issuing a user ID and the password, verify password, and manage the user ID and password, you can just add two or three lines of code into your mobile application, then that code will talk to SDK, and basically everything is done. If you do the coding for all those user management, you have to spend a lot of time, and you don’t have too.Martin: Okay, understood.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: So let’s talk about corporate strategy. What makes you unique in this market place? Are there any other players who are doing similar things?Masanari: Yes. Actually, we are not the first company doing this mobile backend, there are many companies that were established before. For example, a company called Parse was acquired by Facebook, StackMob was acquired by PayPal, and we have many competitors. But our uniqueness is maybe a couple of things. One is, we have started from Japan and have a big o peration in China. So, we have a big strength in Asian market, not only focusing on U.S., but also on Japan, China, and all other Asian countries.Martin: Do you have some kind of cost-competitive advantage or not?Masanari: No, actually. The advantage is, for example, you are the developer, and you have to deal with English all the time, but because we have a big operations in Japan and China, we are providing Japanese and Chinese, including documentation support. Also, in Chinese market for example, if you want to publish your application into China market, there is no Google Play. In China, it’s really hard to access Google Play. As a result, you have to publish your application into China local app store, and most people don’t know how to do it. So we provide a program called Kii to China. By using Kii to China, you can publish applications very easily. Just give us the APK, and then we will publish the application on behalf of you to the Chinese local market. There are 200 di fferent local markets. We select and partner with 20 China local app store and do the publishing. This is like a technology and language barrier because a lot of the people in China and Japan don’t want to deal with English documents, so we also support a Japanese and Chinese local community so that everybody understands the local situation in the technology program. Like I mentioned, we also help in distribution. Distributing mobile application to the Asian market is a mystery, right? You don’t know how to do it, so we are helping into appropriate distribution.Martin: On a success-base or is it included in your basic product?Masanari: Basically, we are always open. So if someone comes in and says, “Please help us to distribute,” we put them, for example, into the Kii to China program and everybody can use that service. And also, we start to see the growth and jump in to help those applications make better. For example, ASTRO File Manager, that’s one of the partner, that†™s a famous file manager for Android. When we started working with them, they had only 15 million downloads, that’s pretty good, 15 million. After we helped, now they got around 75 million downloads and 25 million active users. That is huge, right? We helped them to make that happen. So sometimes we jump in and help the application developer.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: In terms of market development, can you give us some kind of overview how you perceive the current development in the mobile market sphere worldwide, maybe some kind of subsequent trend?Masanari: You mean, like the mobile market in general?Martin: Yes.Masanari: Yes. Basically, what happened was, before smart phone, feature phone, everything was closed. When you wanted to create some innovative application for the feature phone, feature phone is so closed and cannot do so many things. Even the Symbian Operating System, that was a pretty open operating system, but for the developer, it’s not easy to use and easy devel op something. However, when Apple opened, like the API, for any kind of hardware features, for example, a gyroscope or a touchscreen, everybody started thinking, “Maybe I can use this hardware feature to do something.” So everybody has thrown so many ideas. What happened was that so many interesting applications people never thought about started evolving. For example, by using the iPhone now, you can check the golf scene.Martin: Yes, yes. You said that you were a golf fan.Masanari: Yes. How many people can imagine that service before opening access to the hardware features? That basically changed the whole thing. Now there are a lot of applications.First of all, there are so many smartphones now that are available in the market and everything is so open, so you can come up with many interesting applications. Basically, after the hardware opened, a lot of people could think about innovative things by using those hardware features.The second thing that happened was that Apple cre ated a market, the app store. Before the app store happened, you always have think about how to distribute my application to the world. But now, by just publishing the application to the app store, you can now access all over the world in store-based. So, that’s a big change.Thats the smartphone, and then this entire application ecosystem has started to happen. My view is that it’s going to expand to the IoT devices also, like you have the iPhone, iOS and Android, now you have the webcam, the smart light bulb, and smartkey which you can open them from a mobile application whenever you want. So my view is that iOS, Android, and all those kinds of IoT devices are going to be open API to a third-party, and then many people will start thinking about very innovative applications. For example, like combining webcam, smartkey, iOS, and smart light bulb, you can come up with an interesting application, right? So, I think that kind of world is happening for the mobile these days. Then ev erybody can have the opportunity to monetize it.Martin: I mean, one cool application might be having Google Glasses, being on the golf court, and then seeing which angle and what kind of strength should I use to hit the ball.Masanari: If you play golf like me.Martin: And you don’t need that.Masanari: No, no, no. I think technology is still pretty much early. Golf is so sensitive and you really cannot control by just seeing the information on the grass. Yes, but in navigation devices, the application is pretty good for those golf courses, and you can just see how far you would like to hit and that kind of stuff.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM MASANARI ARAIMartin: Masanari, imagine you daughter comes to you and says, “Daddy, what advice can you give me for starting my own company? What should I do and what shouldn’t I do?” And maybe you have some other mistakes that you can share with us.Masanari: First of all, I think, some people like start-up, some people don’t like start-up . Even if you do like start-up, some people are not start-up people and some people are. If you want to start-up, I’ll basically say “Yes, that is really a great thing.” However, I think you have to understand that when you are in a big company, you learn a lot of good things because a large company has nice processes and also a way to organize people. But in start-up, you don’t have any kind of that. So, you don’t have enough skill to start a company. To fix that, you have to, first of all, create a team. It doesn’t have to be big. You may get one person with an opposite characteristic to you who can help you. Hopefully they will have more experience. Then make a team and think about the business. I always say, for Silicon Valley people this is kind of common sense, but for people in Japan, China, and sometimes in Europe, they want to start a business by spending more money. But I say, “Don’t spend your money even if you have a lot of money, don’t spend your money ,” because if you don’t spend your money, you will have to get money from someone else. To get the money from someone, you have to convince that person. So this process is very important to kick-start a start-up. You start seriously talking to the people and try to convince them to give you the money to start a business. If in that process, you have talked to 20 people and have failed, it’s okay. Every time you talk to those people, you get new stuff that adds to your knowledge. Sometimes, your business plan is pretty much as if dreaming of something that has never happened. Those people always talking to you will tell say, “You’re wrong and you have to fix this,” and If competitor come in, how do you compete? So all those information people are giving to you for free is like a process. So, don’t spend your own money, start talking to the people, get the money, and then start your business. I think that is a very important thing. There are many tips, important concepts like for example lean start-up But I think, in the beginning, having a good team and talking to people who have experienced and gone through building a company type of process is very important.Martin: Great. Masanari, thank you very much for your time.Masanari: Yes. Thank you very much for coming.Martin: Sure! And if next time you start a company, maybe you should create a very great team, and then think about how you can get in touch with investors to check your hypothesis and validate your business model.Masanari: Right.Martin: Thank you very much. Good.Masanari: Domo arigato gozai mas. Thank you very much!Martin: Okay.Masanari: Arigato.Martin: Arigato.Masanari: Yes.Martin: Good. Thank you very much.Masanari: Okay. Thank you very much.

Essay On Compassion Amidst War - 1089 Words

Compassion Amidst War This is the product of war: thousands suffer death and loss. The more it tears family and friends apart, the more it turns intimate relationships to hatred. Yet, even amidst the chaos and horrors of war, there are those who rise above deaths malevolent sting and the irrepressible sorrow. This untitled photo tells that exact tale. Taken during a time of great distress, this photograph captures the compassion of a man as he cares for a small baby, who in turn has found peace and trust within this unlikely friend. Taken during a time when war ravaged the nation of Vietnam, this photograph provides a minute glimpse into this trying time. This war claimed the lives of over fifty-eight thousand American soldier and†¦show more content†¦The presence of soldiers reveals that their setting is hostile and dangerous. In addition, all the men surrounding this child are not the same race and are therefore clearly not the family of this child. Because the child’s parents are not photographed it implies that the child is in the care of the U.S forces. It is likely that the child has either been abandoned or orphaned. Swierk and the child have certainly suffered death and loss throughout this war. Yet, despite the war between them and their countrymen, Swierk finds compassion for this stranger. Swierk sits cradling within his arms a child in whom he has found compassion, care, and even happiness. His posture is slouched with both legs spread out in a relaxed fashion. His right leg, raised higher than the other, acts as a seat for the baby sunken in close to his chest. His face and brow are neither tense nor furrowed; his face and brow are soft and relaxed. With a slight smile, his face appears content and peaceful. Because his attention is focused on the child, Swierk’s head and back tilt toward the baby. There is nothing else capturing Swierk’s attention, as if the child is his priority, as if he truly cares for him. Swierk sits with both arms wrapped around the baby. Rather than having his hands loosely to the side, which might suggest carelessness, Swierk has positioned his arm to be securely bracing the baby. His right arm is lifted to a height that would take effortShow MoreRelatedEssay On Compassion Amidst War917 Words   |  4 PagesCompassion Amidst W ar Taken during a time of raging conflict of the most severe kind, this unnamed photo is a display of the compassion one can show towards another and the faith one can have in an unlikely friend. A young man sits on a concrete floor, slightly leaning on a pole, as he holds in his arms a baby appearing to be somewhere between one and two years of age. An African man sits close behind them looking away from the camera, only the lower half of his face captured. Both men are wearingRead MoreThe Tempest Critical Analysis1029 Words   |  5 Pagesdiscovery of a new world, fostering renewed intellectual and emotional understandings in relation to the construct of power in a microcosmic manner. This is further demonstrated through George Orwell’s essay â€Å"Marrakech† (1939), which recounts the poverty in corrupt Colonialist Morocco amidst the Second World War and presents the intellectual discovery of the political destruction upon humanity. The second related text Freida Kahlo’s self-portrait, â€Å"On the Border Between Mexico and the United States† (1932)Read MoreEssay about Causes and Consequences of Conflict1136 Words   |  5 Pagessituation, un aware of the consequences we deliver. The question is however – where does the importance of conflict lie – in its causes? Or in its consequences? It seems evident that there are many people will use their spite and fear and perhaps even compassion to exacerbate conflict. People all too easily become to involved in their own importance, that it can begin a domino effect of devastating and/or insightful consequences. At the height of illegal immigrants entering Australian seas, attemptingRead MoreSoul Surfer1821 Words   |  8 Pagesfamily, her sheer determination, and her unwavering faith in Jesus Christ. This essay will cover some questions and their answers through explanatory paragraphs. Compassion: Changing People’s Point of View Why does compassion change the way we view things? Let us first define it: It is the pity for suffering, with the desire to help or to spare. The definition itself explains the answer of the question. Compassion can be the natural instinct of a merciful individual who tends to help mostly thoseRead MoreReligious Diversity And Its Impact On Society1792 Words   |  8 Pagesan increase of religious diversity is Australia. This essay will argue that ethical and humanist spirituality do form a viable alternative to religion because statistics show that in response to capitalism, and in the context of contemporary society there has been a move away from traditional forms of religion. It will also argue that ethical and humanist spirituality appeals to the contemporary push towards individualism. This essay also that in the context of modern society and its emphasisRead MoreByj.b Priestley s An Inspector Calls2350 Words   |  10 PagesAn Inspector Calls is a definitive play written by J.B Priestley. Published in 1946, however set in the early years before The First World War, this play explores the many aspects of society that were diminishing during Priestley’s life. It stages, the Birling Family – high class and respected within their society, however frankly their false faà §ade, was slowly stripped away revealing, their inner, hidden, corrupt morals. Whilst having a riveting and uncanny twist, the play does indeed, explore manyRead Morewisdom,humor and faith19596 Words   |  79 Pagesmeans of survival in a threatening world. It demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.† Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France—1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (1968), 248. â€Å"Humor is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer. . . . The saintliest men frequently have a humorous glint in their eyes. They retain the capacity to laugh at both themselves and at others.Read MoreSurviving The Wars : Binary Disintegrations Of Homosociality And Homosexuality3237 Words   |  13 PagesMaciej Piorkowski 250651104 ENG 4740F Alicia Robinet December 4, 2014 Surviving The Wars: Binary Disintegrations of Homosociality and Homosexuality An overarching social paradox is inherent in the way Canadian citizens internalize the notion of civic duty; while violent participation in the Great War is lauded as personal and national achievement, post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from significant trauma, physical or social, is also recognized as an integral part of the military consciousnessRead MoreEuthanasi Pressing The Issue Of Its Legalization3341 Words   |  14 Pagesactually getting from the people. Euthanasia, also known as mercy death or mercy killing, has been practiced since ancient times in ancient Sparta. Though originally practiced to eliminate children who are born weak and cannot be of use to the Spartan war life, it has evolved into something more humane in the contemporary times. It is now defined and practiced as a deliberate measure done by the physician as to eliminate or end suffering caused by terminal illnesses and other health conditions that areRead MoreCosi Madness5345 Words   |  22 PagesVietnam War is what Lewis believes in at first. But he will agree with anyone at the start, so long as it keeps the peace. Mozart may seem an insignificant detail to the play, but that’s the point. To Lewis, how you can show love for someone becomes more important than politics etc, i.e. it’s the little things that count etc (Hence Mozart’s music, just a simple beauty). When Lewis enters the asylum it is like an island (thrust into another world). The patients don’t even know there is a war going