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John Nesheim, my “Jedi Master” from Silicon Valley, was so insightful today in parting some of my own thought clouds that I decided to share it:

“Waiting has a different meaning to an entrepreneur than a fisherman. Sometimes the angler must simply wait for the fish to arrive and start biting. But the entrepreneur acts, seeks the fish and when he finds them, stimulates them to bite.”

Its so much more important to be proactive rather than reactive.  I think I might be having a relapse of reactivism again, so its great always to have the Master give a sharp jab to the apprentice and wake the latter up.
More on the article here.

Lets play musical chairs today: You sit atop $60 billion worth of businesses selling media content ranging from movies, tv shows, music distributed across an arsenal of channels such as satellite tv, cable, network, radio, cinemas.

But something’s bothering you. Low growth in your existing business model. And ONE, singular new channel called broadband internet that you do not own but show extremely high growth and potential to be the next Holy Grail.

Did i mention your are 75? Yes, you are Rupert Murdoch. Would you chase this elusive Holy Grail and bet billions of dollars (and incumbent business partnerships spanning the globe) to understand the shiny new toy of Internet “chaos” ruled by a bunch of kids scarcely half your age who, when combined, dun really even make half the money you are making now?

Apparently yes, almost $600 million and 3 startups in InterMix (MySpace), IGN.com and Newroo later, the revolution has officially started. What began as garage ventures and stereotyped seat-of-the-pants decision making fuelled by beer-guzzling, pot-smoking, caffeinated college kids has moved mainstream. The battle field is no longer in the suburban garages of San Francisco Bay Area but the mahogany tables, marble-d corridors, posh skyscrapers and suited inhabitants of Manhattan’s Media Capital.

So, ALL HAIL the new Media revolutionaries: Podcasters, Bloggers, Burners, P2P Buccaneers, Mashup Artists, Phonecam Paparazzi and those One-Internet-Minute Fame-Seekers..

The Organizational Disconnect - Corporate Control VS Community Chaos

Coroporate seek control to dominate the monetization process. The MySpace Community has no overaching control structure and yet that is the core of their success. Which existing successful business has a biz model that doesn’t control its customers? How do you build a platform for all these independent participants/ players and still make truckloads of money from it?

A Global Idol and Hosting an Omnipresent audience of Judges

The platform is : (Help) audiences create hits. “Make that happen more quickly, cheaply, and reliably, and you have a philosopher’s stone for media: a Net-fueled word-of-mouth machine.”

In other words, refine the internet model of on-hit-wonders, be more efficient in scouting them plus bundle that with incumbent NewsCorp expertise to transform online one-hit-wonders to offline global celebrities through its media warchest… IN other words, a Global Idol with talent search beginning within MySpace profiles, letting the community of friends filter and decide on the good ones through monitoring page views, downloads, adding them as friends…

Think of all this as an ever-present audience of SimonCowells, Randy Jacksons and Paula Abduls.. Conventional logic: millions deciding beat 3 deciding, especially when the millions are also customers…. (and oh yeah, the MySpace judges can do much more than the mere 35 million text messagers on American Idol)
Imagine the amount of merchandise, the number of reality TV shows showcasing all these web celebrities and all those faces plastered across magazine covers and newspaper articles will result in an endless stream of web celebrities coming through MySpace. Now, thats control.

As a parting note, here’s a paragraph I like:

“As lucrative as those ideas may be, they’re based on an old media conception of audiences as consumers. But MySpace members are something different: They’re participants. The site’s greatest value isn’t connecting people to products, people to information, or eyeballs to advertisers. It’s connecting people to people. The MySpace team is light on information theorists, but DeWolfe happily quotes Metcalfe’s law: “The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.” In other words, MySpace multiplies the value of each member by connecting one to another. It’s a virtual nation of people instant-messaging their friends a link to Gnarls Barkley’s new track and decorating their pages with Family Guy clips. And that’s where MySpace could strike gold: It lets News Corp. host the cultural conversation.”

Full article here

There’s some pretty lame games, but i thought this game for McDonald’s was clean, well-designed, well-aligned to actual Mac’s business operations and immensely fun at the same time. You rear cows, manage the slaughtering, the restaurant operations and deal with the board as well, controlling PR, advertising and board management functions, cool things is it seems there’s a tight algorithm behind so everything’s linked in a realistic fashion to affect your revenues. Your aim is to stay in the game long enough or risk getting bankrupting the company and get sacked, Apprentice-style.

It appears to be produced by a bunch of Italians who create a whole bunch of other games some of which are not exactly family-friendly but fun nonetheless. I don’t think Mcdonald’s actually hired them to create this game so it might seem this guy had helluva lot of spare time on their hands. They would be a good team to hire if i wanted anyone to create some viral buzz for me through this game channel.

For the designers’ website, click here.

Click on the pic to play! My best so far is till the year 2016, drop me a line if you beat me.

Doing research on online social networks has its benefits especially when you read academics and scholars theorizing on contextually difficult topics of new web phenomena such as blogs or social networks. The context of new web media, IMO, is best suited to younger academics who are more adept in understanding it due to the simple fact they are likely to be active practitioners and users of their own research subjects.

One benefit I get so far is understanding better how social networking theory is applied in SNS like Friendster, Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace and how various management teams are tweaking the rules in order to milk out revenue models. An example is Linkedin’s InMail that charges you a fee for contacting a second-degree contact directly. No such problems on Friendster, you can send a message any time as its founding goal was really to help pple date better.

Danah Boyd theorizes three types of daters on Friendster in her paper:

Hookups. In all online dating sites, people surf for hookups
as well as potential partners. While the implied theory is
that friends-of-friends are the most compatible partners,
hookups use the network in a different manner. Many user
looking for hookups prefer to be three or four degrees away
so as to not complicate personal matters. In addition to intown
hookups, Friendster users tell me that they also use
the site to find hookups when traveling.

Direct Pestering. People often fail to introduce their single
friends to one another. By having a public articulation of
one’s network, it is really easy to look at Friends’ Friends
and bug the intermediary about potential compatibility.
While three and four degrees are often meaningless to
people, there is a decent amount of trust in second-degree
connections, simply because they can be easily confirmed
via a shared connection.
Familiar Strangers. When Milgram coined the term “Familiar Strangers,” he was referring to the strangers that
one sees regularly, but never connects with [6]. Given
additional contexts, an individual is quite likely to approach
a familiar stranger. For many, Friendster provides that
additional context. In browsing the site, users find people
that they often see out. From the Profile, one can guess
another’s dating status and sexuality as well as interests and
connections. Often, this is enough additional information to
prompt a user into messaging someone on Friendster or
approaching that person offline.

There is also a case study of these two guys who tried cashing in on the value of their Friendster networks by advertising their connections on eBay. Here’s the sales pitch of one of them:

“The ’self’ you’re packaging on Friendster is a strictly delimited individual - but when I’m selling my network on ebay, the value is determined by my extended self, defined by its relationships and surfaces rather than content - in other words, the true me, in its full, fragmented, postmodern glory, all the more true the instant a dollar value is placed on it!”

Awesome, maybe this short paragraph will spark some of us to expand our networks today and enhance our “full, fragmented, postmodern glory”… =)

Getting confused by what blogging is all about? There are blogs AND there are other blogs. How does credibility go hand in hand with blogs, considering the high number of blogs in Singapore with an overwhelming focus on merely being a web diary that needlessly undermines the individual’s privacy and exposes it to global scutiny. Well, if you want to learn more about blogging, sit tight and be prepared to learn.

Bernard Leong of SGEntrepreneurs has a great article here on citizen journalism, specifically blogs. Check it out on the Singapore Angle blog.

I just spent the past 50 mins of my life listening to this ETL video-cast of Google’s Marissa Mayer where she was sharing her lessons on innovation from her past 7 years of working experiences there.

During these 50 minutes, i wrote down stuff, thinking of recapping the lessons by blogging and thinking as i write.

And I spent the next 10 thinking what to actually blog about.

I wasn’t going to just do a point-by-point summary of what she said. Thats not blogging, thats called reporting, (like how secretaries take down notes mindlessly during meetings)

So my key takeaway wasn’t thinking about her lessons in the context of innovation, but of culture. Specifically, building a conducive culture in any organization.

Its a no-brainer that we spend about 50 years of our life working. For educated people with access to key information troves such as the internet like yourself, we are the educated strata of society who have the choice to decide what life, or rather working life, we want to have for a significant portion of our lives. Our companies become our “families” for a good part of the day and as we are emotional creatures since we are humans, we tend to bring the same emotions we have from our work back to our homes and the rest of our non-working lives. Which also means its very important to work in a positive work environment because it extends naturally to your ENTIRE life. Its not just the job function you are performing, not just the money you are in for, but its a lifestyle you choose when you choose to work in one particular company.

Which is why I think Google is great. The same theories that they learnt and applied to innovation or from their own product development extends beyond their applications in the workplace and can be used for personal enrichment too. I will highlight some useful ones.

SHARING –The Good Type

Marissa talks about the case, based on an analogy from Tom Kelley’s book Art of Innovation, of a hypothetical employee telling all his colleagues this great idea he/ she has for the main purpose of taking personal credit. This sounds great, pple are sharing ideas in the organization but the lesson is there is good and bad sharing. While sharing ideas are very important in any organization, a company should emphasise the message that:

• no one shld get territorial over ideas because it doesn’t matter who thought of them in the first place
• cultivate the culture that no one and nobody has any control over ideas and are free to conceptualize, daydream and contribute
• focus on what the idea and how it can add value to their daily way of doing things

EXPERIMENTING — Because Innovation is not instant perfection

• When you build something, can you really learn quickly about yourself, learn quickly from your users such that you can iterate more efficiently the next time?
• Every time you make a mistake, you iterate out of it. Make more mistakes but make sure you learn and get smarter every time.

Google encourages failure. Because hope springs eternal when an organization has dreamers that act on their dreams and constantly try to make them realities. Nobody succeeds by doing the same thing all the time. You got to be different, which means you have to innovate, and when the correct approach towards innovation is adopted and this becomes something synoymous with the Google culture, pple join the company believing they can do the same experimenting and thats when the founder’s habits and beliefs become immortalized as the culture of the company.

Data is A-Political

TO eradicate office politics, take a very quantitative process towards decision-making and even suggestions. Numbers dun lie, and using them to back up statements creates a meritocracy that is not based on relationships but your ability to use number-crunching abilities to support your thought process.

The QnA session took up half the 50 mins. I love Socratic dialogue style of learning by discussing, not preaching. Thats why E27 events are great!

This guy asked what was one of the toughest questions for Marissa:

Q: What are some personal characteristics that made you successful?

A:

• Passion to work
• Her Decision Process: Compile a list of the best decisions you have made and try to find out what is common between them. Especially when some decisions are really different from each other.
• Work with people smarter than you are so you learn.
• Challenge yourself by doing things that you are really not ready to do. Because you acquire new skill sets.You know your boundaries and you expand them.

Just a parting note, she had a really amusing gigglish laughter that is almost self-deprecating at times, endearing her to the crowd. 6 months away from Silicon Valley have almost made me forgot how much personality and charisma top executives like Marissa Mayer have compared to the many dour figures we have in Singapore where speakers seldom break out of their self-imposed shells once they step onto that stage to make a public presentation. Personalities like Marissa Mayer are icons and rallying points of a company culture.

They inspire. And thats another important hallmark of a good company culture.

Thanks to SGEntrepreneurs for cross-listing this too!

I blogged before about the obscure keywords that the Google engine uses to refer visitors to my blog. So today, "Coffee CLub Raffles Place SIngapore" happens to be my current No.1 . Why the hell do pple search for that? Anyway, if you came to search for coffee, sorry, this blog is not about coffee, but I don't want to disappoint you with your love for this cafe, and since I have such good karma (thanks to the Google bots) with Coffee Club Raffles Place Singapore, I want to hold a meetup there now.

BlogOut 2006 - A Blog-PodCast Festival (Click the link for fun)

Date: Undetermined yet

Time: Also Undetermined

Venue: Coffee Club Raffles Place Singapore

No 7, Raffles Place, Singapore 048625
Tel : 6532 6273

HOW TO GET THERE:
TALE MRT TO RAFFLES PLACE MRT.
TAKE THE EXIT LEADING TO ARCADE/OCEAN TOWER.
COFFEE CLUB RAFFLES PLACE OUTLET IS LOCATED AT THE LAWN IN FRONT OF OCEAN TOWERS

Here's the map

What is this meetup about? Its for bloggers, but more importantly, for my non-blogging readers. See, a couple of my friends and I think there's a lot of potential for blogs in Singapore to dominate searches for Singapore-related places, shops, news on the search engines like Google. If i can be No. 4 now for "Coffee Club Raffles Place Singapore" by only blogging about it once here, I can be No. 1 after this post since i use the keyword so many times and who knows, I could generate significant revenue for Coffee Club and be more effective than their usual marketing media. haha… And if Google got rich by capturing the Long Tail of the economy through AdWords, I like to test my "secret formula" for capturing this LOng Tail too. So this meetup is for me to talk to my non-blogging readers to see if they want to help me blog about stuff (I already know what stuff) and help build a Weblogs Inc of Singapore. =)

Drop me a comment and I will email you back for those of you brave souls who are keen.

" If Web 2.0 is the new rock 'n' roll, who are the one-hit wonders and who will still be playing to packed stadiums in 40 years' time? The comparison isn't quite as ridiculous as it may appear. Forty years ago, music was leading a social revolution, disrupting the establishment and empowering a new generation.

Today's web technology and social media, known as Web 2.0, or the second wave of the internet, are leading a similar challenge and the long-term effects are likely to be greater."

Click here for the full article.

Former BBC senior executive Euan Semple had a speaker slot at the SMU iX conference today. A visionary promoting the conversion from "old-media" methods to Web 2.0 thinking in BBC, he was also the first speaker at the conference today who blogs (cheers to that, Euan! here's some link karma), you can check out his blog here.

An article by Wired magazine quips Steve Jobs pitching his iTunes music service versus its strongest competitor: Free P2P downloading services like Kazaa, eDonkey, Bittorrent, what-have-you… I found this great response which makes a lot of economic sense… but maybe only to those who value their time, that rules out college students…

How low should the labels go? The answer comes by examining the psychology of the music consumer. The choice facing fans is not how many songs to buy from iTunes and Rhapsody, but how many songs to buy rather than download for free from Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks. Intuitively, consumers know that free music is not really free: Aside from any legal risks, it's a time-consuming hassle to build a collection that way. Labeling is inconsistent, quality varies, and an estimated 30 percent of tracks are defective in one way or another. As Steve Jobs put it at the iTunes Music Store launch, you may save a little money downloading from Kazaa, but "you're working for under minimum wage." And what's true for music is doubly true for movies and games, where the quality of pirated products can be even more dismal, viruses are a risk, and downloads take so much longer.

So free has a cost: the psychological value of convenience. This is the "not worth it" moment where the wallet opens. The exact amount is an impossible calculus involving the bank balance of the average college student multiplied by their available free time. But imagine that for music, at least, it's around 20 cents a track. That, in effect, is the dividing line between the commercial world of the Long Tail and the underground. Both worlds will continue to exist in parallel, but it's crucial for Long Tail thinkers to exploit the opportunities between 20 and 99 cents to maximize their share. By offering fair pricing, ease of use, and consistent quality, you can compete with free.

The Long Tail
I will be thinking a lot about the Long Tail economy this summer holiday, or rather, a market of obscure tracks and searches that reflects the true diversity of options and choices, in products and services, to the consumer. As the Internet enters perhaps its 2nd decade of mass adoption, the commercialization stage is just barely emerging out of the chasm as business models have so far failed to materialize. This is particularly evident in the first "Old Economy" industries to be hit — music, TV, radio and movies. Where NewsCorp bravely embraced what could be the singular most powerful force to revolutionize their business by promoting digitalization across all their business units, many other media juggernauts are still grappling with the harsh new economic realities by reining in innovation and relying on legislation to halt this innovative.

Point to note: the overt support of the courts of MPAA and RIAA against P2P illegal music downloading companies are not sending the right message to the prosecuting companies that their legal opponents/ defendants are the ones utlizing technology the right way (i mean channel, not the business model of free) to serve customer needs. Or the network neutrality vote in COngress that was overwhelming defeated in favor of the telecom and cable companies seeking to exert their economic power to restrict open access by users to the internet. The issue may be more complicated than it seems and I must admit I haven;t studied it at length but it appears to me that this was a political decision not based on the merits of long term policy benefits to the future of our society. It appears to be a vote by the Republicans for Big Business and their special interest groups that dominate the political arena on Capitol Hill. And that simply pisses me off if the stupid decisions of some cronies impact our future generations' rights to information.

… the 5th of November. Powerful words can shape an immortal idea. V for Vendetta, despite not making much of a splash at the box office, thrashes many of the other blokbusters hands down and is one of the movies I truly enjoyed in recent years.

How blur is the line between good and evil?

As we all learnt from history, sometimes, it just takes one event, with the right support from the masses, or the right media, to broadcast, propagate and transform that idea to become a culture-shifting milestone. Our world today could have been very different but for certain ideas and sometimes, that one single event, that tipped us from one extreme to the other.

Sep 11, 2001 — Collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, USA

Nov 9, 1989 — The Collapse of the Berlin Wall

April 12 1971– Beginning of ping-pong games (or diplomacy) between P.R. China and USA

June 28, 1914 — Assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia

From PortalofLife,

Evey: Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.We are told to remember the idea, not the man. Because a man can fail. He can becaught, he can be killed and forgotten. But four hundred years later an idea can still change the world. I've witnessed firsthand the power of ideas. I've seen people kill in the name of them; and die defending them. But you cannot touch an idea, cannot hold it or kiss it. An idea does not bleed, it cannot feel pain, and it does not love. And it is not an idea that I miss, it is a man.

V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V

Evey: Who are you?
V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.
Evey: Well I can see that.
V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation, I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

V: I, like God, do not play with dice and do not believe in coincidence.

V: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

V: But again, if truth be told… if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look in the mirror.

V: A building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by people. A symbol, in and of itself is powerless, but with enough people behind it, blowing up a building can change the world.

V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea.. and ideas are bulletproof.

Evey: I don't want you to die.
V: That's the most beautiful thing you could have ever given me.

Finch: Who was he?
Evey: He was Edmond Dantés… and he was my father. And my mother… my brother… my friend. He was you… and me. He was all of us.