Bjorno.licio.us

Do you have a new company that’s going to be the next big thing on the Internet? Would you like to demo your company to a passionate audience in Singapore and gain exposure in Silicon Valley?

If you’ve got at least one key member of your team under 27 years of age, Entrepreneur 27 in Singapore is the premium platform for you to get the word out about your business!

Entrepreneur 27 Singapore is looking for 3 startups (preferably with a technology angle) to present at our next power-packed event. You will be presenting to an audience that is well heeled, are early adopters of technology, web savvy and discerning. They are young, passionate and entrepreneurial. Judging from the success of our first event, your elevator pitch will be met with new ideas that would help you to fine-tune your startup and your pitching skills. Lastly, get to network in an energetic, fun-filled Silicon Valley style mixer that’s like no-other in Singapore!

If you would like your startup to be presenting at this exclusive event, or know of a friend who’s doing something that you’d like to recommend, please send us an email at: singapore@entrepreneur27.org

(We will be shortlisting only 3 companies to present at the next event, so hurry!)

Error message encountered by Wordpress server. T’is the way to do it!

”

Confessions Of A Server

OH MY! Life is so unfair! What did I do wrong to be born a server in this day and age? I could have been a nice simple bicycle that people happily rode around on all day. But no, I’m stuck inside this metal case serving web pages instead. I never even see the light of day and all I can hear is the rush of the air-conditioning!
Well, no more! I’m relaxing here with a cup of tea and a biscuit until someone shows me some love and attention.

It never takes them long to fix me when I kick up a fuss so check back in a few minutes and I’ll be chugging along merrily again.!

Signed,
The WordPress.com web server
(WordPress.com - where even the machines have life!)”

Not content with Earth-based dominance, Google Maps has expanded beyond Earth and Moon to Mars. This is part of the interstellar expansion and growth strategy of Google to collect information UNIVERSALLY across the Universe and make it accessible to sentient life of every conceivable bio-footprint.

Google Maps: Mars allows for viewing of almost all photographs taken by the orbiting satellites and also ground shots taken by the exploration rovers that had successfully been deployed over the years, including the 2 currently active ones: Spirit and Opportunity that have been functioning way beyond their intended lifespans and mission lengths.

Here are some screenshots in 3 image viewing modes: Elevation, Visible and Infrared.

And here’s a shot of the Spirit Rover currently active on Mars.

Simple. Eye-catching. Immense “WOW” factor.

This would really stop me dead in my tracks to find out what the hell it is. It makes for great viral marketing on the web too! Awesome marketing for the new Apple iPod Hi-fi!

Writely, the online document collaboration service, or what i consider the Web 2.0 version of Microsoft Word, has been acquired by Google. Woo Hoo!!

This is a great boost for all those startups out there counting on Google/ Yahoo as an exit strategy. Since so many startups are dependent on online advertising as their primary revenue model, why not attach themselves organically to the King of Web Advertising Google itself? And as long as the Google-Microsoft war for web dominance continues, Google should be in a buying mood to snap up well-designed web services with sizeable user communities, along with their innovative founding team. Triple Advantages there and frees up their army of engineers on other projects such as the Google Moon Base, that Space Elevator… ok, digressing here…

But wat i am trying to say is it seems Google’s new projects such as Google Base, Google Pages have lacked the punch and excitement to be expected from them. How Google is going to create a company culture that fosters independent innovation and organizational cohesiveness concurrently will be the important dilemma facing its founders and management. It will have to go beyond its 70-20-10 rule and over-reliance on the Page/ Brin/ Mayer gatekeeping practice. Hence I view the founders, of these startups Google are currently buying, operating as contract employees there because these founders’ creative energies will take divergent paths with Google’s corporatization strategy. But who knows, Google might defy convention and maintain its culture of innovation with a rapidly expanding organization just as it innovatively came to dominate and define search today.

A random thought here, but with the increasing popularity of web startups taking the acquisition option by Google, Yahoo, AOL, IAC, Microsoft, EBay, NewsCorp etc, are we witnessing an “arms race” of sorts by these Internet giant to snap up digital turf and as much mindshare of web users?It seems the stigma of the 2001 tech bubble bust has left an indelible mark on the tech industry’s appetite for IPOs. I am rooting for the next successful startup to spurn one of these giants’ advances and IPO successfully.

Here’s some insightful tips from Guy Kawasaki on tricking angels, VCs to cough up the moolah for our next dogfood-conquers-the-world enterprise.

8 Tips on Lasso-ing Angels and Clipping their Wings to give you money

10 Tips on How to Seduce Entrepreneurs

And here’s something I should pin up on my bathroom mirror every morning to remind myself what not to be. I recommend these Top Lies of Entrepreneurs to any fellow billionaire wannabe so we snap out of our wildest nightime dreams and ground ourselves to humility and reality.

For those of us in mind-numbing jobs and contemplating a job switch, try the GBAT test, by clicking on the Bozos above. Its also the Guy-Kawasaki Bozofication Aptitude Test. Have some humor in your factory-drone job and maybe you will think clearer after the test. (psssstt… change your job if you have a high score)

Vinod and gang are gearing up for what could be a smashing Web 2.0 event in the Bay Area. They are gathering a great team of speakers and startups which will not only tap on a hot sector in the Valley now but also raise the profile of Singapore on the Web 2.0 universe.

Found an interesting site on how the media industry is tackling internet marketing and digitalizing their existing old-media tactics. Easy read without going into specifics and some pretty good supplementary technical sites for measurement of metrics. CHeck it out here.

Thanks to this blog.

Watch this Video.

In typical theatrical fashion of a media giant, Ross Levinsohn, of Fox Interactive Media, announces a mysterious acquisition of one of 32 startups presenting at the Under the Radar conference. Its also starts what could be one of Web 2.0 industry’s biggest “Whoissit?” treasure hunts this year. This is huge, and marks the validation of one of Old Media’s giants stepping into the Internet industry again to make investments after the mammoth acquisition of MySpace last year under a $580 million buyout of MySpace’s parent company.

This announcement comes hot on the steps of this Newsweek article by Rupert Murdoch’s address of NewsCorp shareholders. Internet might seem like the new predator snapping away at Old Media channels, but fundamentally, like Rupert Murdoch mentioned at the end of the article, the demand for content of humans is insatiable. Business models will crash and evolve and the earlier media companies realize that nothing has changed fundamentally in consumer needs, we will witness more acquisitions of Web 2.0 startups, particularly those functioning as B2C media intermediaries.

I had been critical of Under The Radar previously. It was priced exorbitantly and outside of my reach, despite the impressive lineup of speakers and startups. However, i have to concede it was perhaps a showcase of Web 2.0 to investors and angels who were looking to get a crash course into a piece of this new mojo stirring in Silicon Valley. And its all true now. Ross Levinsohn may have triggered many investors into action today and he might just have started a tsunami of M&A action involving Web 2.0 startups.

More on NewsCorp’s New Media overtures are found here.

And how can Techcrunch miss out on the guessing game? In fact, Mike Arrington can be credited for starting it. Updates and guesses here.

I realized I am blogging lesser about Web 2.o these days, but I am still reading and keeping track of trends and ideas, its just that there's not much i can contribute or add value to curent literature out there. My friend, Vinod, is learning loads though in Silicon Valley and you should check out his blog about the event he's co-organizing. Just wish he could blog more and share about what he learnt.

Had a brainwave yesterday on some social and web trends, interesting concept tjhat might revolutionize the Web 2.0 world. Will keep working on that for now first.

I was replying to an email from a friend studying in NYC and thought I might as well put this out on the blogosphere for the sake of improving my local society. The government is on the right track in evolving lil' Singapore to become a global city but there's only so much the public sector can do. Alot of it has to come from grassroots, privately-initiated action. Plus, there's a certain level of scepticism and doubt plus credibility concerns over something emanating from a civil servants' office.

Rehashing an idea i always gripe about over beers with my friends — "The Conveyor-Belt Social System of Singapore"

You jump on board maybe in kindergarten at a PAP one (PAP is the local ruling party since the borth of this country), then the primary school, secondary school, JC/ Poly/ NUS. At the end of each education/ production stage, (there are major examinations such as the PSLE, O levels, A levels by the UK's Cambridge University GCE system), there is a Quality Inspection by the Singapore QA team, they filter the better students from the average ones and segregate them from the rest, filtering into the sub-belts such as neighborhood, gifted programme, SAP schools.. Top10… further nurturing them and pumping more money on developing their strengths.

Amidst this efficient filtering and quality selection is an inherent fear of those on the belt not to fall off the tracks and get derailed… For there is not much hope and encouragement offered to those that fall off, nor much attractive choices beyond a plain-vanilla academic syllabus of sciences and math and alil' bit of art… Hence, a mentality is seared into them to obey and conform over a period of 10 years. The main goal is to find talents to feed the Spore machinery at the government level - the elite to govern the next generation. Then they have the scholar class, who have their own conveyor belt all the way to the top of Spore society. Those who dun make it to the scholar class get disillusioned and join another track — the mainstream society, another conveyor belt, where u graduate from NUS/ NTU, find a husband/ wife, find a job, get married, start a family, buy a HDB flat or whatever, slog the rest of ur life struggling to pay bills for cars, houses, then wait for the day to draw CPF (the public pension system) and finally die.

i hate this life. Its a black and white world where there's not much happiness in being gray. And this is social engineering at its best and why Singapore is filled with so many people persistently unhappy and always yearning for a life beyond their current mundane existence. I see that in alot of pple of my age and generation. The yearning does not turn into reality because there is a huge mental block, a fear of treading into the unknown, a fear that has never been overcome due to a lifetime of teaching not to question and experiment/ innovate…. UNTIL u leave this country. Things are changing in Singapore, but it will take a long time to effect change.

How can we change? I think we need courage, and it is in every one of these disillusioned young people of my generation. Find out what we really want and dare to voice out to your superiors at work. Change is hard, but our own lives and society, the country will be all the better for it when everyone loves what they are doing and perform at their maximum capacities. Idealistic you might think of me, but hey, i am young and 24. The world beckons ahead of me.

For Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, click here.

Related article: What Drives you?