Thoughts...

Was contemplating.... Just been thinking why my web traffic is so low and ruminating about the long tail of web economics... maybe some of my blog posts are pretty lameass, i dun have anything sensational, like sex, chicks, parties or anything ridiculously hedonistic... I am basically re-publishing links.. But hey, some other sites do make a lot of money re-publishing stuff, guess you call that luck..

I am not gonna change my blogging style, anyway, its good to keep it simple and not think too much abt the web traffic. It may bring some extra cash but also lotsa unwanted attention, and anyway i am 990,000 visitors away from any significant revenue contribution.

Back to luck, i found this quote from Okdork. It was an interview with Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook. (I met him before! lol)

“Success is very much the intersection of luck and hard work. First, you have to find an opportunity, and then you need to man up to the work necessary to make it something good. Having just one or the other won’t result in anything at all.”

Its been 3 weeks since i came back from the Bay Area aka Silicon Valley. I realized the main difference between these two localities is really the social environment -- the people, the conversation, the activities such as TechCrunch events, Stanford ETL talks...". I guess you could call this culture as well. Or if you crystallize it further, its the people. In Singapore, as I have always been critiquing about, young Singaporeans are not open-minded, we know too little of the world beyond our local spheres of knowledge. We lack understanding of different cultures and mindsets. How many of your friends know whats going on in Palestine, Samuel Alito or even who's the prime minister/ president of the neighboring Southeast Asian countries... How many times have we reached out to the foreigners such as the Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese scholars amongst us in NUS? I used to get blank stares from friends every time I start commenting on the politics in US, China, Malaysia, people would ask me wy I even care about whats going on in some place so far away and has no direct relevance to our daily lives. These are the same people who do not see value in interacting with foreign students sitting next to them in classes, tutorials seminars... I admit i did not do that too much either, in terms of talking to the foreign students in NUS. One important thing i learnt from the Valley is the value within every human being, how interesting every single one of them can be once you interact with them, the Russians, the Indians, the Taiwanese, Chinese, Palestinians, Jordanians, Brazilians...

I have this theory that Singaporeans have this "big-nation" mentality that we are big and do not need to care about everyone around us because we can survive on our won and do not need them. The cushy, relatively affluent lifestyles of Singaporeans may have fostered that. We trust too much on efficiency of our government systems. We complain alot, knowing that someone, somewhere will do something about it. We take alot of things for granted, the thousand-strong maid contingent that throng Orchard Road on Sundays can attest to that, so do the thousands of Indians that throng Little India and the Thais that throng Beach Road and.... We rely alot on foreign labor in order to sustain our chronic lack of human labor and at the same time, contributing to an "invisible" workforce that does all the dirty work that lubricates our chushy existence. Dirty dishes disappear, buses always come on time thanks to hardworking Malaysians, new buildings pop up in light speed housing more multinational corporations and contributing to the economy's growth. Singapore is great in tapping on the advantages of outsourcing, but are we remembering to focus on concentrating what little local Singaporean workforce we have on the high-value services so we do not get overwhelmed by hungrier, more driven and ambitious foreigners and immigrants?

Singapore is a great case study for Thomas Friedman's World is Flat philosophy. In that book, i remember him mentioning that nations today are competing for citizens. The capitalistic fundamentals and commitment towards free markets underpin the need for competition for greater resource efficiency. Singapore, a developed economy, has to stay at the forefront of economic innovation. Not only that, our small geogrpahical size and small populace merit "national innovation" as well. We need to innovate as a country. We need to master the science of harnessing external resources to contribute to internal benefits and build up our intrinsic value as a significant player on the global economic chess-game. Our educational policy in attracting bright young students from the region, complemented by an insidious social programme of integrating them into our society, hoping they will marry here and make Singapore home after they complete their studies and are obliged by a 6-year bond is a masterstroke. I see this as an evolution of our old stratey of attracting MNCs to invest in Singapore in the '60s and '70s through danling economic carrots such as tax breaks, pioneer status. Just that, we no longer can attract corporations today as effectively as yesteryear, but we surely can drill down and attract the components of corporations - the humans. From Corporations to Humans.

Where does this leave Singaporeans? We are faced with ever increasing competition in all aspects of society from all levels of education to all sectors of economic contribution. I think this is good. It keeps us on our toes. We have 3 basic types of responses:
- turn a blind eye to changing global realities,
- learn to compete and beat the new entrants,
- complain and give up.

In America, there is this phenomenon called "white flight". This is due to competitive asian immigrants besting the local american white kids in math,s cience and almost everything else ins chools. As a result, American parents pull their kids out of school, leave these newly competitive educational battlegorunds and migrate their families and kids to less competitive school where they think their kids will grow up normally in a "supportive" atmosphere of learnig.

One word. Bullshit.

I hope Singapore doesn't learn this American trend. We should not turn a blind eye and ignore our new foreign friends either, as in Scenario 1. We have to globalize our thinking and understand that competition is here to stay. We have to interact more with our foreign friends, learn what they think of Singapore, how we can improve, learn about their home nations and cultures and appreciate the intricacies of diversity of our global village. Singaporeans think that exchange programs broaden their scope and exposure and they willingly pay 7000 bucks for that experience. I say most of these affluent families can save their money, they can have that same perception-broadening experience right in our backyards within NUS, or for a peek into the other less-educated spectrum of foreign society, go to Orchard Road, Little India, Beach road on weekends to learn about foreign culture.

Shit, i wrote too much. What started as a rambling extended far too long. Maybe I can use this essay for other purposes by turning in as an assignment somewhere.. haha.. Hopefully it made sense, otherwise, go click on that "next blog" button on top of this page and thanks for your attention. Till next time..

Will Kosmix be the nemesis of Google?

Boasting of the same PhD heritage as Sergey and Larry of Google, these 2 Indian guys Anand Rajarama and Venky Harinarayan aim to best their former Stanford classmates at search.

Now, Kosmix has raised $7.4 million in venture capital as these folks embark on the next Holy Grial of search -- the "aboutness"/ meaning/ context of your keyword searches. Google's pagerank currently organizes search results by the gross popularity of links to a particular webpage, Kosmix attempts to do a deeper level of this by attempting to decipher the "meaning" of a page by analyzing those very links that leads to a webpage in order to understand the context of that page better.Anand and Venky, according to this article at SiliconBeat, used to own Junglee, the first Internet company founded out of their Stanford department and hence supposedly role models for other folks, including Sergey and Larry. It is noteworthy that Junglee also boasts Ram Shriram, the early investor and director of Google from Sherpalo Ventures.

Its admirable that more are challenging the status quo of Google's domination over the search industry. Competition is needed especially as Google is looking invincible, however, there doesn;t appear to be too much revenue model innovation at Kosmix yet. I would be interested to know if there is any disruption in this business model which Google is overly reliant on. With the first decade of the Internet industry looing to its conclusion, we have seen Google taking over the mantle of search leadership from Yahoo and drawing attention from the Microsoft empire along with a slew of bandwagon jumpers.. Kosmix and the rest of the Google-killer-wannabes has history on their side in the seemingly cyclical nature of the internet industry. I believe that with the increasing democratization of the internet witnessed through user-created content and the Web 2.0 hype, whoever manages to sift through all these cyber-junk to deliver valuable content will win.

Voyeur Paradise

Check out this website which has obtained access to thousand of live webcams all over the world. You can see slices of daily lives from all around the world.

I pity this poor guy working at the trustee's office in California who has a webcam spying on him 24/7 right at his desk. His whole life is up for scrutiny. You can see him taking calls, eating lunch, picking his nose etc... Those who you who have webcams better beware... Another demo of the omnipresent internet...

Reading Guy Kawasaki's blog and found this apt description of a blogger:

Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do.

So sarcasm and self-deprecation aside, Guy has a great guide to cutting the crap out of tedious business plans. Click here.

Who will own Disney's soul?

Great news for Silicon Valley. The revoultion of the traditional media industry continues as Apple CEO Steve Jobs' will be installed as the company's largest single shareholder in the $7 billion takeover by Disney.

Steve Jobs has successfully revoutionized how the music and TV industry embraces and adopts the internet medium into their business model REMOTELY through his other vehicle Apple's iTunes and proliferant iPods. Now, with a seat on the decision-making roundtable of Disney, one of tech's most celebrated personalities will have a crack at media domination from within "Old Media" industry itself.

With Pixar, Disney hopes to secure one of its most lucrative revenue drivers for the long term and stay at the forefront of the movie industry. With theatre attendances plunging for the whole of 2005, it is gratifying to see that at least one major movie studio is taking on the problems, related to changing consumer/ movie-watcher habits, head-on. Pixar's creative production team, with their proven tack record of success, will definitely invigorate the flagging fortunes of Disney in its multiple ventures. However, pardon me for my lack of knowledge, movie-making to me, is still a rather risky business and highly dependent on transient consumer tastes. Pixar is a relatively young movie studio and there is no guarantee that they will continue their track record of success over the long term. What Pixar is different is that tey take a rather technological approach to movie-making, relying on computer animation and voices rather than real, actual human characters in all of their hits. This wil definitely play into the digital media tsunami. I like to emphasise again that this to me, looks like Disney wants to consolidate its position within the internet media, especially in their relationship with Steve Job's Apple. With closer integration at the management level, we should see all of Disney's media archives being digitalized and available for sale on iTunes very soon. Such close collaboration with a traditional media titan wis definitely good for Apple, and for once, Steve Job's latest foray at digital entertainment surely looks like a win, at this point of time against the Evil Empire of Microsoft.

Taking a step back, it all depends on how much influence Steve Jobs wants to play within Disney. But he has already gotten through the door, and the world should once again wait for the Wizard of Cupertino to again weave his magic wand and hopefully sprinkle stardust over Disneyland again.

Office Employee Motivation -- NFL-style

Check out Terry Tate, your "friendly" manager with a kick-ass motivational style!

Google - Our Savior (for now)

Read this article and understand that MSN, Yahoo, AOL and all the other small search engines have sold you out to the Feds.

Thanks to Boing Boing, this is a follow up piece good for background information:

Feds demand user data from Google: Battelle's analysis
In light of today's SJ Merc report that the Department of Justice has demanded user search records from Google, this excerpt from John Battelle's The Search seems worth reading again:

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlaw- ful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person’s head hurt.

Top 10 trends to Watch in 2006

This is just too good not to share. Its from McKinsey.

Will probably flout some legal tape that still hasn't got its arms around the internet model of information propagantion yet, but those legal hacks should go catch the big fish, as of now, i still have no google ads anyway.

________________________________________________________________________

Ten trends to watch in 2006

Macroeconomic factors, environmental and social issues, and business and industry developments will all profoundly shape the corporate landscape in the coming years.

Ian Davis and Elizabeth Stephenson

Web exclusive, January 2006

Those who say that business success is all about execution are wrong. The right product markets, technology, and geography are critical components of long-term economic performance. Bad industries usually trump good management, however: in sectors such as banking, telecommunications, and technology, almost two-thirds of the organic growth of listed Western companies can be attributed to being in the right markets and geographies. Companies that ride the currents succeed; those that swim against them usually struggle. Identifying these currents and developing strategies to navigate them are vital to corporate success.

What are the currents that will make the world of 2015 a very different place to do business from the world of today? Predicting short-term changes or shocks is often a fool's errand. But forecasting long-term directional change is possible by identifying trends through an analysis of deep history rather than of the shallow past. Even the Internet took more than 30 years to become an overnight phenomenon.
Macroeconomic trends

We would highlight ten trends that will change the business landscape. First, we have identified three macroeconomic trends that will deeply transform the underlying global economy.

1. Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally. As a consequence of economic liberalization, technological advances, capital market developments, and demographic shifts, the world has embarked on a massive realignment of economic activity. Although there will undoubtedly be shocks and setbacks, this realignment will persist. Today, Asia (excluding Japan) accounts for 13 percent of world GDP, while Western Europe accounts for more than 30 percent. Within the next 20 years the two will nearly converge. Some industries and functions—manufacturing and IT services, for example—will shift even more dramatically. The story is not simply the march to Asia. Shifts within regions are as significant as those occurring across regions. The United States will still account for the largest share of absolute economic growth in the next two decades.

Further reading:
China and India: The race to growth (for access to links like these, click here and register)
Mapping the global capital markets

2. Public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential. The unprecedented aging of populations across the developed world will call for new levels of efficiency and creativity from the public sector. Without clear productivity gains, the pension and health care burden will drive taxes to stifling proportions.

Nor is the problem confined to the developed economies. Many emerging-market governments will have to decide what level of social services to provide to citizens who increasingly demand state-provided protections such as health care and retirement security. The adoption of proven private-sector approaches will likely become pervasive in the provision of social services in both the developed and the developing worlds.

Further reading:
The demographic deficit: How aging will reduce global wealth
Boosting government productivity

3. The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly. Almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade as economic growth in emerging markets pushes them beyond the threshold level of $5,000 in annual household income—a point when people generally begin to spend on discretionary goods. From now to 2015, the consumer's spending power in emerging economies will increase from $4 trillion to more than $9 trillion—nearly the current spending power of Western Europe.

Shifts within consumer segments in developed economies will also be profound. Populations are not only aging, of course, but changing in other ways too: for example, by 2015 the Hispanic population in the United States will have spending power equivalent to that of 60 percent of all Chinese consumers. And consumers, wherever they live, will increasingly have information about and access to the same products and brands.

Further reading:
Premium marketing to the masses: An interview with LG Electronics India's managing director
New strategies for consumer goods
Social and environmental trends

Next, we have identified four social and environmental trends. Although they are less predictable and their impact on the business world is less certain, they will fundamentally change how we live and work.

4. Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact. The technology revolution has been just that. Yet we are at the early, not mature, stage of this revolution. Individuals, public sectors, and businesses are learning how to make the best use of IT in designing processes and in developing and accessing knowledge. New developments in fields such as biotechnology, laser technology, and nanotechnology are moving well beyond the realm of products and services.

More transformational than technology itself is the shift in behavior that it enables. We work not just globally but also instantaneously. We are forming communities and relationships in new ways (indeed, 12 percent of US newlyweds last year met online). More than two billion people now use cell phones. We send nine trillion e-mails a year. We do a billion Google searches a day, more than half in languages other than English. For perhaps the first time in history, geography is not the primary constraint on the limits of social and economic organization.

Further reading:
The next revolution in interactions
The McKinsey Global Survey of Business Executives, July 2005

5. The battlefield for talent will shift. Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The increasing integration of global labor markets, however, is opening up vast new talent sources. The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones. For many companies and governments, global labor and talent strategies will become as important as global sourcing and manufacturing strategies.

Further reading:
China's looming talent shortage
Sizing the emerging global labor market

6. The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny. As businesses expand their global reach, and as the economic demands on the environment intensify, the level of societal suspicion about big business is likely to increase. The tenets of current global business ideology—for example, shareholder value, free trade, intellectual-property rights, and profit repatriation—are not understood, let alone accepted, in many parts of the world. Scandals and environmental mishaps seem as inevitable as the likelihood that these incidents will be subsequently blown out of proportion, thereby fueling resentment and creating a political and regulatory backlash. This trend is not just of the past 5 years but of the past 250 years. The increasing pace and extent of global business, and the emergence of truly giant global corporations, will exacerbate the pressures over the next 10 years.

Business, particularly big business, will never be loved. It can, however, be more appreciated. Business leaders need to argue and demonstrate more forcefully the intellectual, social, and economic case for business in society and the massive contributions business makes to social welfare.

Further reading:
What is the business of business?
The role of regulation in strategy

7. Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment. As economic growth accelerates—particularly in emerging markets—we are using natural resources at unprecedented rates. Oil demand is projected to grow by 50 percent in the next two decades, and without large new discoveries or radical innovations supply is unlikely to keep up. We are seeing similar surges in demand across a broad range of commodities. In China, for example, demand for copper, steel, and aluminum has nearly tripled in the past decade.

The world's resources are increasingly constrained. Water shortages will be the key constraint to growth in many countries. And one of our scarcest natural resources—the atmosphere—will require dramatic shifts in human behavior to keep it from being depleted further. Innovation in technology, regulation, and the use of resources will be central to creating a world that can both drive robust economic growth and sustain environmental demands.

Further reading:
Preparing for a low-carbon future
What's next for Big Oil?
Business and industry trends

Finally, we have identified a third set of trends: business and industry trends, which are driving change at the company level.

8. New global industry structures are emerging. In response to changing market regulation and the advent of new technologies, nontraditional business models are flourishing, often coexisting in the same market and sector space.

In many industries, a barbell-like structure is appearing, with a few giants on top, a narrow middle, and then a flourish of smaller, fast-moving players on the bottom. Similarly, corporate borders are becoming blurrier as interlinked "ecosystems" of suppliers, producers, and customers emerge. Even basic structural assumptions are being upended: for example, the emergence of robust private equity financing is changing corporate ownership, life cycles, and performance expectations. Winning companies, using efficiencies gained by new structural possibilities, will capitalize on these transformations.

Further reading:
Strategy in an era of global giants
Loosening up: How process networks unlock the power of specialization

9. Management will go from art to science. Bigger, more complex companies demand new tools to run and manage them. Indeed, improved technology and statistical-control tools have given rise to new management approaches that make even mega-institutions viable.

Long gone is the day of the "gut instinct" management style. Today's business leaders are adopting algorithmic decision-making techniques and using highly sophisticated software to run their organizations. Scientific management is moving from a skill that creates competitive advantage to an ante that gives companies the right to play the game.

Further reading:
Do you know who your experts are?
Matching people and jobs

10. Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly available and, at the same time, increasingly specialized. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the rise of search engines (such as Google), which make an almost infinite amount of information available instantaneously. Access to knowledge has become almost universal. Yet the transformation is much more profound than simply broad access.

New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations. Knowledge production itself is growing: worldwide patent applications, for example, rose from 1990 to 2004 at a rate of 20 percent annually. Companies will need to learn how to leverage this new knowledge universe—or risk drowning in a flood of too much information.

Further reading:
The 21st-century organization
Making a market in knowledge

Companies need to understand the implications of these trends alongside customer needs and competitive developments. Executives who align their company's strategy with these factors will be the best placed to succeed. Reflecting on these trends will be time well spent.

People who read my blog will know I blog sporadically and in spurts/ waves. Here I go again.

So here's something that I have been reading regularly besides all that usual news articles I read all the time (i found a better way to capture good news articles i visit -- the del.icio.us service, click here to access webpages i read and capture for posterity.

Back to the point, Noah Kagan is a friend who happens to work at Facebook, a social network I like very much amidst the Myspace-ish and Friendsterish clutter that are jamming the online social fabric of our digital, virtual generation. He happens to be churning out phenomenal ideas all the time and websites to accompany them, which all happen to fit right within my scope of interest. Check out his personal blog , his "consulting firm", E27 network, his latest collaborative blog for (what he calls) "YoPos" (sounds Japanese, but well, this guy has an Asian girlfriend)

The Real Man who was first in Space: Joe Kittinger

This is amazing. In 1955, before Yuri Gagarin, this man skydived from an altitude 3 times that of a jet airliner today, broke the sound barrier without any mechanical help, and lived to indirectly pass us this tale through video.

Attributes owed to this blog.

WARNING!: BUSH VS GOOGLE

911 was an immense tragedy for thousands of Americans and their families. It also marked a significant milestone in American policy, engaging in the war on terror. One direct post-911 defense mechanism implemented by the US government was the Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act is intended to safeguard the national security interests of Americans. It also has a component that grants the government immense sweeping powers to access private records held by any American organization, such as your cell phone records or your Google search history records. This is a massive blow to civil libertise and privacy concerns. The recently released news that Bush had approved wiretapping of Americans under the guise of national security has promopted certain sectors to call for his impeachment. No doubt if Bush had legitimate and justifiable reasons to back his decision, the rational people will grungingly agree with such an extreme move. However, this is also the same Bush who tried without success to fool the United Natins and the world to attack Iraq, based on false intelligence that Iraq had WMDs.

I say, great credibility Bush has.

Now, he is pitting his lawyers against Google, and intends to exercise the Child Protection Act, another anti-privacy law akin to the same philosophy the Patriot Act subscribes to, to access the search records of private individuals all of whom will run the risk of having their civil liberties taken away from them by a President that has exhausted his "political capital" and is desperately trying to fulfill whatever responsibilities he has left of his job. It may be child protection this time, but this creates a precedent once the government gains access to Google search records. I fear to imagine the day Feds abuse the Patriot Act and their noble duties under the name of national security.

Read the article. I will blog more about this when i get the chance.

Plunging Tech Stocks

Monitors and followers of the US tech industry will notice that Yahoo and Intel's earnings release have been met with unfavorable stock fluctuations by the general markets. It is amazing how short-term some investors are thinking to sell off their shares based on quarterly earning results that hold little, if any, long-term insight into the corporate strategies of these 2 companies. As of now, Yahoo stocks have plunged by approximately 20% since the results were announced. There is a spillover effect on other tech giants such as Apple and Google (the latter of which has retreated by close to $30) since their record high last week. Nothing has changed fundamentally in terms of strategy or operations over the past fortnight, but expectations level built into the share price of these tech companies, by humans beings, are creating volatility. Irrational exuberance. This caused the meteoric rise of GOOG shares, and should unfavorable news continue, will also be responsible for its fall. There has to come a day when the excitement of random press releases by GOOG announcing their entries into new advertising markets wear off and the financial analysts and seat-of-the-pants investors stop their adolescent fad-based tendencies of buying stocks and finally grow up.

I would buy Yahoo! stocks if I had the money now. I see immense potential in Yahoo's strategic moves to consoidate their position as the No. 1 trafficked destination site on the Internet. THeir moves to acquire the online communities of Flickr, Upcoming, WebJay, del.icio.us amidst a grander goal of leading the Social Media wave may seem like a haphazard way to consolidate the "Web2.0" industry. Particularly, the chronic hazy and bewildering concept of revenue models of these Web 2.0 startups may have also been looked upon unfavorably by financial analysts with no modicum of understanding of the disruptive wave of media and content creation sweeping across the Internet now. Yahoo's stock rise is also riding on the coattails of Google. If we assume that Google's share price is priced reasonably based on the expected boom and crossover from traditional offline advertising to the Internet, then Yahoo is unfairly being cut out from their share of the online advertising profit pie. TIme will tell if Yahoo is successful and I surely am keeping my fingers crossed that Yahoo is right.

Relevant article can be found here.

Everyday, someone finds something new to describe Google, which is changing our world so rapidly people are finding it a hard time documenting and explaining their meteoric rise to power.

So here's something new: Google is a religion masquerading as a company.

An excerpt from the article: "Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz."




An Article about the Cultural Phenom Craigslist and How It is killing the Newspapers of our world. Click here.

Norway's building a vault in the mountains to store seeds of main agricultural crops in the event of Armageddon. Take note, fellas, know where to go when you are the last surviving human on this planet. Click here.

This is cool. Know more about prejudices around the world. Click here.

Elevator Pitches. Shanghai-style.

Blackberry jumps on the bandwagon of GTalk. Click here.


And my favorite notion of the day. Lets IMPEACH BUSH.

The Great Firewall of China

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2006/tc20060112_749447.htm

Calling for those in Singapore!

Exclusively for existing and aspiring entrepreneurs in SIngapore,

Great venue. Amazing people. Mind-blowing ideas.

Come rock with us tomorrow evening!

RSVP HERE.

Cops using Facebook to fight crime gets Punk'd! hahaha.. great party labelled a "beer-blast" on Facebook with "cake-pong" and "cake-stand" disses college cops looking for evidence of underage drinking. Click on article Here.

Check out the face of this cop. He's gonna be infamous!















Here's the latest fad. Move over, keg-stands, meet "cake-stands"!












And it doesn;t stop there, fuck off with beer-pong, we have "cake-pong" now!

Zombies in Hollywood

In view of recent public announcements at the CES show by GOogle and Yahoo, the content distribution landscape is going to be shaken up over the next few years, with the Web juggernauts of Google-Yahoo-MSN-iTunes snapping away at the huge profit pie that Hollywood studios had dominated for decades. Sad thing for the studios is, there's not much they can do to prevent their demise, because they simple didn;t get IT fast enough.

Whats "IT"? Its the digital revoultion, spearheaded by the Internet medium as the most efficient distribution channel of the products of these Hollywood studios - their movies, documentaries, short films, cartoons and any other copyrighted content they have been naively protecting through MPAA these couple of years.

Online P2P file-sharing or the "Napster Effect", heralded a shift in consumer needs for media content. Consumers did not really want it free, their primary objective for downloading illegal music was not because of a conscious (or criminal) intent to steal copyrighted content. No, all they wanted was the media file, anytime, anywhere. They were still the same type of customers that the Hollywood studios have been targetting for decades. But the key difference was: they had new tools -- the Computer and the Internet. The Hollywood stiffs didn;t get that, they thought this new breed of downloaders was DA ENEMY, hence, they railed and fumed with fire and brimstone at every opportunity at them, bringing upon tsunamis of lawsuits in a futile attempt to stem the ever-growing tide of illegal media downloaders through the digital universe. Napster died, then Kazaa came, Grokster, Bittorrent, Aries, eDonkey.. the list never stops... Digital democracy is here to stay, like it or not, the tech-punks from Silicon Valley (SV) have crossed over from their hardware-software wizardry to create disruption in the Internet services realm. SV is the savior to the consumers, the same old customers that Hollywood thought they had wrapped up in their vaults for centuries to come and were worth gadzillions in future revenue.

It took a tech-punk in the form of Apple's Steve Jobs with iTunes to make Hollywood sit up from their delusional bubbles of reality that music and movie lovers were not evil at all. NO, they still wanted the same content and were willing to pay for it. This must have been a seismic moment for them. Rupert Murdoch, ever the opportunist, jumped right on the bandwagon with the re-organization of FOX, creating an interactive media unit that would explore and push the frontiers of distributing their content over the Internet. Of course, they also bought MySpace, a popular social network, that would bring them into control over a major piece of virtual Internet estate that has millions of users returning everyday for snippets of gossip, music, some video and whatsnot.

We know the story later, iTunes paired up with Disney and ABC. The tipping point was reached. Fools rushed in. CBS, NBC, WB all frantically signed their deals with the technoracy, signing away lucrative deals that also ceded away property they used to own exclusively. Its just a moment of time before the movie studios begin selling their content online. There's always Google Video Store or iTunes or whatever will arrive to shake up the industry in a few years time. Change will now pervade through the Jurassic-esque Hollywood circles. Welcome to the tech revolution and its tumultous cycles that gave us the 2001 tech bust! What dominates today, such as Google and Apple, may dramatically wither and fall in the next decade. Look at the fumbling juggernaut that is Microsoft scramble in the wake of tech heir-apparent Google's meteoric rise to power.

The digital revolution is not complete yet, we still have not conquered the mobile realm, where Internet is freely available on handheld devices that frees humans from wires, clunky desktops/ laptops.

Welcome to the Brave New World, powered by Silicon Valley and Goodbye to the Hollywood Zombies.

Was reading this article.

HomeComing

EVerything looks similar AND different at the same time.

Quite a paradoxical statement but thats what I felt in the 20 hours since i touched down. I touched down, unpacked and went to school 8 hours after I arrived. It was somewhat of an out-of-the-body experience, to some extent, as I walked around the campus full of unknown faces. I was constantly scouring the landscape for familiarity and they were few and far between. Nevertheless, I caught up with some old friends, and NOC alumni buds who were still brimming with fire and enthusiasm in their bellies. Its good to see thst some things dun change after 6 months in entrepreneurially staid Singapore.

I was chatting with Anubhav and came to a conclusion that the culture in Singapore, among NUS students, is pscyhologically draining in the entrepreneurial sense . People here are drifters, they do not have a keen sense of direction in their lives nor have real self-actualiztion needs. I qualify my statement by saying that there are passionate people out there bu these are the minority. For NOC alums returning from a Valley with entrepreneurs and wannabes in almost every strata of society espousing the virtues of entrepreneurship/ self-determination, we were surrounded by orbs of energy radiating, diffusing and positively influencing the NOC community. On the contrary, Singapore has too many "black holes", orbs of dark matter that suck up positive energy streams and endanger the flame of entrepreneurship in all of us. The latters' minds are not open, kinda like a Matrix blue pill-red pill moment. I saw what a real world should be, now I have difficulty readjusting back to fabricated reality in Singapore. hahaha....

I wanted to blog because of this picture I saw from this course I took on my first day back in my college. Before you stare at the pic (you might already have and I dun care, read on first), Now, this is not porn.This course I am taking is called Special Topics in Arts: Exploring Chinese Visual and Material Culture. The pic is taken from the 25 Peaces Project, a government-sponsored art project that cost taxpayers millions of dollars and was plastered on hundreds of billboards across Austria. Now, this art piece is causing multiple storms of controversy amongst the neo-cons and feminists across Europe. Look at it with an open eye and try and think what the artist was trying to convey. I assure you its worth your while and might deepen your understanding of contemporary art. At least, mine did. =)

Disclaimaer: This piece has nothing to do with Chinese art. The lecturer wanted to use something totally different to arouse our senses of pictorial perception.



For the impatient, know the meaning of this pic by clicking here

Its been a long while since i returned to dust the cobwebs off my blog. So much has been happening as I gear up to end my Californian adventure after 18 months. I was ending work, then headed to Tahoe for snowboarding, followed by a 5 day trip to New York CIty for New Year's celebration, in between trying to wrap up my life here such as selling my car, packing up my junk accumulated over the past 18 months...

I just finished packing my universe of stuff collected over the year. Its amazing that I managed to consolidate them into 110 pounds of mass jammed into my Samsonite and my backpack.

This frenetic pace of life over the past fortnight has also seen me fall beind in my "quasi-religious" schedule of keeping up with the news and blogs. And it was only when I read about the "virgin" podcast of Nicolas Sarkozy, a French presidential hopeful, did I muster the motivation to return here and blog again.

I remember reading smething from Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, about the politicians of the future reorienting their ideologies, or possibly reorganizing their political parties through splinters/ mergers, along the technology and globalization trends that impact our society today. Nicolas Sarkozy kind of embodies the type of politician who is beginning to "get it" and understand that the new electorate today requires a new form of medium to reach out to them effectively. In this article , Sarkozy's innovative approach of granting a podcast interview may or may not have endeared to a younger audience, but it definitely alerted the political spectrum,, left, right or centrist, to seek gretaer effectiveness of their communication by leveraging on Internet technology. This internet tech, could be blogs, or podcasts, or whatever other moniker or forms they will appear in future. This adoption of podcasting as a new political communication tool has granted the podcasting world legitimacy and endorsed it as a viable media outlet.

Will we see more money pumped into podcasting startups as a result??

Veering off-track, Blake Ross (of Firefox fame) speculate humorously on what to look out for in the 2006 tech world.