My Projects
A comprehensive overview of my past projects.
Polliy (with 'i')
2019-2023
Why "Polliy", and not "Polly"? Because that was the domain name I got, "polliy.com". Polliy was an intelligent personal assistant, pre-LLM revolution. For some reason, I loved the sound of "Polly". It wasn't "Shiri" or "Cortana", or even "Google Assistant". (What a name! 😅) They are known as the "wake word" in the voice-related technologies. (They are not just "names"). Now, what was special about Polliy? TBD.
MusicPye
2019-2021
A full service virtual agent for indie musicians. It was like Shopify for independent musicians, including all social media management, and virtual concert management (concertjoy.com).
Concert Joy
2019-2021
A virtual/online music venue for indie musicians. Can you really compete with Ticket Master? Especially when you have no capital? I had been working on MusicPye/ConcertJoy at a full throttle, when Covid happened. This effectively killed by ideas. (Wow, you seemed to have been in the right place at the right time. What happened? Well, Covid happened. In theory, online services like mine can benefit immensely. But, in reality, a large amount of investment started to pour in, and there were a huge number of startups popping up in this area. Unfunded/self-funded startups stood no chance.)
Cubby Box
2019-2020
Micro-storage service for small luggage.
Virtual Mall
2018-2022
A virtual mall for online shopping, which is a reflection of a physical mall. It was a "metaverse" before the term was coined.
Motif Mail
2018-2020
Again, the app name was chosen because I owned the domain name motifmail.com at the time. It was a "new kind of email service". Web-based email services have been around from the beginning of the Web. TBD.
ToDo Canvas
2016-2018
Everybody who is a developer and wants to start a startup tries a to-do app or some other productivity apps. I don't know why. The top priority of developers is productivity? Or, are they a bunch of people who are never satisfied with existing solutions? In any case, I myself built many different kinds of "to do apps" over the years as well. ToDo Canvas was one of such apps. It was a "visual" to-do app. The client and server were all gone now, but I just found out that some of my POC Chrome extensions are still available in the Chrome Web Store. ...
Alexa Skills
2016-2018
"Alexa, play solo blackjack." Do people still use Alexa skills any more? Note that the companies like Amazon and Apple who (prematurely) pushed the voice agents like Alexa and Siri are now left well behind other LLM leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. The user experience was not ideal, and yet they pushed this through marketing, and money. I also developed a few Alexa skills for Alexa devices, and it was fun. One of them was a "match game". Through the voice communication, you played the classic memory game. I also had another "popular" game (at the time), a single player blackjack game. I even created blackjack flashcard apps (for BJ card counters :)). (Incidentally, Google was so adaptive in this transition. They immediately abandoned Google Assistant and released Gemini. We will see how Apple and Amazon adopt to this new LLM revolution in the near future. BTW, companies like Amazon and Microsoft are big investors in many of these AI startups. If you cannot compete, just buy.) I just tried my games on Alexa again, and the Solo Blackjack game still works. :) (Google search "alexa skills solo blackjack by sideway bot") The "match game" seems to be broken though for some reason.
Smart Maitre D'
2018-2022
What is "Smart Maitre D'"
SnipNews
2015-2020
What is "SnipNews"
TransPad
2016-2018
When Microsoft was half-heartedly trying Windows Phone, many developers like myself went all in. As we all know now, Microsoft ended up abandoning their mobile project, not even with a fanfare. TransPad was a novel keypad app on Windows phones. (As you can see below, you never lose interest in certain ideas. Mobile input was an ongoing pet project for me.) Obviously, this Windows app is dead as a log, and I am always reluctant to go all in with Microsoft technologies. (I find it amazing that big tech companies like Microsoft, and Google and Amazon, etc. treat their loyal developers with no regards, and yet they are still at the top list of developer choices.)
Shopping Memo
2005-2020
What is "Shopping Memo"? shoppingmemo.com was one of the domains that I owned for years and years. (Sadly, I no longer do. The best domain name I had was probably "ailab.com". I failed to pay the annual fee and I lost it. 🤣 It was 1999, and I was moving from Jerusalem to San Francisco at the time.) Online marketplace is dominated by a few big companies like Amazon. It fact, Amazon is a de-fact monopoly. There have many efforts, and Shopify is probably one of the rare success stories. My project, Shopping Memo, even predated Shopify. I finally gave up, and I am at peace now. 😁
Smart Alarm Clock
2008-2010
Now pretty much everybody carrie a mobile phone, many smartphones. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, the transition to the "mobile Web" was a big deal. Everybody was interested. Then came PDAs like Palm Pilot, and Sidekick (my absolute favorite at the time), and eventually Blackberry. iPhone first came out in 2007, and the rest is history, as we all know. Now we take smartphones, and "apps", for granted. When Android came out, I was also interested in building mobile apps. (I was never a big fan of Apple's closed ecosystem, and I still don't do Apple.) One of the first apps I worked on was a "smart" alarm clock. What do I mean by "smart"? TBD.
Smart Mobile Keypads
2008-2015
When smartphones came out first, their small form factors was a bit inconvenient, say, for typing. (I think it's still a problem, to a lesser extent). I tried a few different ideas for Android phone input method. Some ideas were patented. TBD.
Sports Time Buddy
2010-2012
A "real-time" social network for sports time fans. It was the biggest personal Android app project for me. I had to stop this project for some unfathomable reason. Bye bye, Android. (I ended up working on Android development one last time for my employer, in 2017-2018.) TBD.
Web App Builder
2008-2012
App/website builder SaaS apps, which cater to non-technical end users, are rather popular these days. Many are very successful. This tradition goes as far as (desktop) apps like Microsoft FrontPage. As a developer, this kind of practice is rather common. This is often known as "scaffolding", which builds a basic app structure for new apps. Many (backend) frameworks go well beyond this and they even build data models and what not, e.g., based on the model specification by the user. This started well before Ruby on Rails, and there were many such frameworks, for example, for PHP, etc. I extended this technique to build the entire Web apps. If you specified a set of data models, the app created "everything", e.g., the backend API service, the fronted UI, middleware, and everything between. Obviously, you still had to add some business logic, but all "boilerplate" code was taken care of. It was a mega-project using Apache Velocity template engine that spanned multiple years, over ten years ago. Now, AI/LLM does this for you.
Safe URL Shortener
2008-2010
There were many popular services popping up at the time which may be called the bookmark and URL shortener apps like delicio.us and tinyurl, etc. They were in a way precursors to social networks like Friendster and Facebook. I also worked on a few different versions of bookmark/short url apps. The Safe URL service checked the short URLs and "certified" their genuineness, e.g., to prevent users from phishing attacks, etc.
Grand Challenge
2003-2005
DARPA's Grand Challenge was a series of competitions for autonomous vehicles. The first one was held in 2004, and the second, and the last, competition was in 2005, in Primm, Nevada. I was a big fan of the idea, and I wanted to participate. I didn't build a self-driving car, but I worked on a training framework and simulation environment for autonomous vehicles, using OpenGL/DirectX. It was a fun project, but well ahead of its time, and beyond my capabilities. I didn't even start to build a real car. Now, we see self-driving cars on the streets. It has been a 20-year journey (without my contributions).
DVD Match
1999-2005
DVD Match was a social network for movie lovers, a combination of Netflix and IMDB.
City Surf
1999-2001
Anybody who has been interested in "doing a startup" for some years, like myself, should know that the category usually called "local" is the hardest nut to crack. There have been some limited successes. We have Yelp. We have TripAdviser. And, Google Maps is expanding. (Yes, Google's ambition is not just to provide a free map service, but ultimately to dominate the local category, say, by putting all local business on the map and upselling to them, and selling ads, etc.) "citysurf.com" was my effort to build a service for local businesses, at the time of the infamous "dot com boom".
IGC (Internet Go Client)
1995-2003
Who said the Internet never forgets? IGC was one of the most popular client apps for Internet Go Server. There were a few major releases, "IGC 97", "IGC 98", and "IGC 2000". If you did a Web search with these terms, they used to show up. Not any more. 😁 It was a Windows desktop app written in C++/MFC, and it had many "innovations", well ahead of its time. For example, the game play and the comments ("kibitz") were "synch'ed" (in the recorded games), which services like YouTube only recently adopted. I also built viral marketing features into the app, which other companies and startups adopted many years later (e.g., "sent by iphone"). Terms like "viral marketing" did not exist at the time.
Dummy Go
1995-2003
Do you play go? (Weiqi, Baduk, Igo.) Many people are probably familiar with AlphaGo, even if they don't play go, and how it beat the best of the best human go players. It was the true beginning of the deep learning revolution. It was 2016. And, I was already working on an AI go player in the late 1990s. (Just to be clear, I wasn't the only one. At the time, there were many computer go programs such as GnuGo, but they were just too weak to be even relevant.) The reason why I created an Internet go client (IGC) in the first place was to train my "Dummy Go", e.g., to let it play with human players on IGS. ("On Internet, nobody knows you are a dog." 😛)