Tomorrow is already Christmas eve and this year is quickly coming to a close. This year sure went by very fast...

Last week I attended the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago. The conference was very well attended (over 4,000 people is what I heard) and there were many interesting sessions on search engine spam and shopping search engines. SES is a great conference for someone who is interested in learning about search engine industry and business. The web site for SES is www.searchenginestrategies.com.

I will be flying down to LA tomorrow with my wife Sunny and son David (19 months old) to spend Christmas with our family. Our parents are especially excited to see David since they just can't seem to have enough of him. We are planning to visit Ronald Reagan library in Simi Valley and go to Legoland near San Diego since David loves playing with Legos. I will be back in the office on January 3rd, 2005. Next year is already gearing up to be a busy year with launch of Become at www.become.com.

Wish you all a merry Christmas and great new year in 2005!

We finally launched our beta site at www.become.com yesterday!!!!
The search engine is accessible only for friends and family of Become employees so that we can continue to test it out and improve it before opening it to broader group.

To celebrate the launch of our beta site, we had a small celebration party last night with champagne, wine and cheese. It is truly an amazing feat that with 20 people we launched a full blown search engine specialized for shopping in less than 7 months. Every one did a great job. We have great team, technology, service and culture. Things are really jelling now. Gave everyone a gift card of $100 as a token of appreciation for job well done. It is a great start and we have much work to do.

I made my first purchase using Become.com today. We were looking for Wildwood crystal lamp and Become found a great site that sold the particular model we were looking for for $180 less than what local furniture store sold it for. It was a great feeling to use our engine for actual shopping research and purchase.

Tried searching for "mexico cruise" and "honeymoon tahiti" and the results are really good too. It is definitely useful for both products or services. Or, for that matter, anything that you could buy.