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Following in the illustrious footsteps of Dawn Yang & Daphne Teo, Wee Shu Min enters this exclusive Singapore club of “Technorati Chart-Toppers”.

For my uninitiated readers, Wee Shu Min is an 18-year old high school student and is also a blogger. She happens to be the daughter of a local politician and is perceived to have an elite and cloistered upbringing, Her recent blog post, that was written last week in response to a middle-class 35-year old blogger’s rants against the competitive culture of Singapore, was deemed to be overly acerbic and sparked an online, and offline, controversy over the elite-middle class divide in Singapore.

For an overview to clue yourself in on this, click here.

But I also like to recommend you to watch this machinima summary of the whole saga, friggin’ good effort
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtavgfcZrvs&eurl=]

More on this brewing saga can be found on these blogs; BenDecidesToBlog, XenoBoySg, Kitana.

Some people ask why Singaporeans have such an outcry over such a trivial issue of a high school kid exercising her freedom of speech, well to that, I say that Singaporeans are not used to having freedom of expression, save for the internet and the blogosphere. There’s always a ying-yang balance in the universe, in Singapore, the counter-acting force happens to be the blogosphere since our mainstream media sector is underdeveloped (see Rank #147).

And the latest quote of the Year?

From: Singabloodypore

For more comics and related content, click here for IntelligentSingaporean.

Because Yahoo has officially become Pepsi.

And we might be looking at an internet industry with only 2 giants, if you believe MSN and Yahoo might merge under a Microsoft takeover.

Whats the deal with so many acquisitions, one might ask? There has been more than an avalanche of deals made in the past 12 months in the internet industry as Google, Yahoo, MSN, along with lumbering media dinosaurs behind eating their dust, jostled to make their way into college dorms (ok, not quite) for pizza-fueled, beer-guzzling young entrepreneurs with the Next Big Thing. The doomsday believers and closet Nostradamus groupies among us are even mentioning the feared “B” word - Bubble.

But Yahoo has really been the loser in this round, as their one-time protege in web search, Google has swiftly taken over Yahoo’s dominance as the first major search giant and gone on to corner the search and online advertising markets. The number of victories keep piling up for Google since their IPO in July 2004; Quarterly Revenue, Market cap on Wall Street, Market Share for Search, AOL, MySpace, Youtube… Its making Terry Semel and his merrymen in Sunnyvale wonder if they are losing their mojo in deal-making.

The latest rumor has it that Yahoo is now thinking of revisiting an old battle won by Google over AOL and mulling a buyout of that unit. Click here for CNN Money article.

In other news, Google may have truly grown too big for its size and exhausted Earth’s resource for intelligent people. Not too long ago in Feb 2006, they were still pretty anal about their GPA qualifications. Click here for Valleywag article. They have relaxed their GPA requirements for new hires, albeit only for sales positions. Click here for article from John Battelle.

After the campaign plug for Missouri politician Claire McCaskill, Michael J Fox came in for some scepticism and insenstive comments from a right wing radio host Rush Limbaugh who casted doubt on Fox and suggested the latter was “faking it” and “overacting” for the cameras and that Fox purposely did not take his medication to exaggerate the symptoms.

Rush Limbaugh: “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking, and it’s purely an act.

It goes to show how little Limbaugh and probably a majority of the public, like myself, knows about the disease. All the more I think what Fox is doing is great.

More on the Limbaugh rant here, but watch Michael J Fox’s interview on CBS below. I suggest not to just watch his motions but listen to his message.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8lsjfjgAA8]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9WB_PXjTBo]

Parkinson’s Disease is a truly terrible affliction. I grew up with Michael J Fox’s character Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy and maybe a couple of Spin City episodes.. This is not how he should live the next half of his life…

May the voters of America make some smarter decisions and kick the buffoons out of office. If there’s one thing that’s done right in Singapore, its our policy to allow stem cell research to be conducted here, enriching the lives of potentially millions of lives in the future. Yes, the policymakers might not have done it for purely altruistic measures, but the researchers are doing great work and thats what’s important. Lets support the scientists.

Related article here from Vin’s blog.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday that he may run for president in 2008… Click on link to read more from CNN on this update posted today.

Born of Kenyan-American descent, a first-term Democratic Senator from the traditional Republican bastion of red-state Illinois, Barack Obama symbolises the bridge across many of the divides we see in our world today… Race, nationalities, religion, education, socio-economic..

He might not represent all, but these are examples of bases of segregation which have been seeded and are sprouting in many parts of the world today. More importantly, such partitioning are making many lose the core driving force of the human spirit — HOPE.

We are told to remember the idea, not the man. Because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten. But four hundred years later an idea can still change the world. — V from Vendetta, movie

Come 2008, whoever sits in the White House, let not the message of Hope be lost.

An excerpt from his 2004 keynote speech at the DNC:

Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father — my grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

They would give me an African name, Barack, or ”blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined — They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.

That is the true genius of America, a faith — a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — at least most of the time.

The people I meet — in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks — they don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead, and they want to… People don’t expect — People don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.

Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?

Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

Videos of Obama’s DNC speech available here and here, courtesy of Youtube.

In my post yesterday with the “cheerleader” analogy of Friendster, I hit jackpot with my traffic after uploading the link on Digg. Looks like there’s still mojo in the Friendster brand for enough people to check in on its downfall.

I am No.4 (currently) under Fastest Growing WP blogs for the very first time and my post also appears in the “Top Posts” section next to Scobleizer’s “I hate Linkedin” rant.

But surprise, surprise, surprise, though the Digg effect was totally cool but not wholly unexpected, what I did not expect to see was a huge spike in referrals from the Stumbleupon service too.

It looks like StumbleUpon is fast catching up with Digg in terms of appeal to web publishers. If comScore ratings from June (best I could find in a quick check off Google) are accurate, StumbleUpon’s 1.37M toolbar users, as of today, are equally as voracious in terms of page views as Digg’s.

This is a classic story of a hot young thing that skyrocketed to fame, got blinded by the dazzling lights of scrutiny and thudded back to Earth to peter out of sight with a whimper.

There’s many success stories lately of Web2.0 companies making successful exits. MySpace and Youtube come immediately to mind at the forefront of these cool, sexy startups that rode on the wave of “youth-phoria” and their new-found social lives on the web. The founders of Youtube and MySpace may have become the new “rock stars” of the Internet Age, but for every rock star, there’s hundreds of has-beens..

Flashback 2002.

Friendster was touted as the coolest shit we had ever seen. A website that allowed internet users to create web profiles, connect with their old and new friends. The social networking industry was born and heralded as the Next Big Thing in the hype-fueled days of 2002. The mags were going gaga over it, from the notable Time, Forbes to chick reads like Cosmopolitan and Entertainment Weekly. Even Playboy was into them. Its founder, Jonathan Abrams, was THE STAR, showing up at events, with “strikingly beautiful women on each arm”, as NYT reports here.

And Friendster had powerful investors that read like the Hall of Fame of Silicon Valley. John Doerr, Ram Shriram, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) , Tom Koogle (chief executive of Yahoo through the second half of the 1990’s). It was an All-Star Team. No one could touch them. Google tried buying them in 2003 for $30M but was rebuffed. Friendster thought it could be much bigger, maybe something bigger than what Google is today. They wanted to do everything:

We had a new clothing line come out last week. We’re talking about a reality TV show. I thought it’d be a cool Web site, but the whole cultural thing has been amazing. — Jonathan Abrams speaking on MArch 16, 2004 at the SXSW conference.

Besides, those behind Friendster were so convinced that they were destined to be the next big thing that they instead fixated on the actions of their presumed peers — at least that is Mr. Siegelman’s recollection. “I remember going to these board meetings and feeling disgusted,” he said. “Half of every board meeting was taken up by a discussion of what Google’s going to do, or Yahoo.”…

…The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site. Source: New York Times

But today, we know what happened, Friendster is literally the jaded cheerleader who never got laid after attending all the frat parties and courted by all the football jocks. It lies listlessly in 14th position in a ranking of all social networking websites, hundreds of time smaller in membership size behind MySpace. Its website still sucks, where MySpace has bands, TV celebrities and cool people hanging out, a $900M advertising deal with Google, Friendster has to make do with lame shit like this on its front page:

Do you want to be a fan of Cornetto ice cream?

So why did Friendster fail? I strongly think it is due to the absolute loss of control of the founders over the company’s direction and strategy. The “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy came straight to mind. Secondly, the “experienced” investors dun get social networking. They focused too much on the money and not enough on the idea. Social netowrking is a real fuzzy concept that requires a lot of chemistry between the founders and its users. THink Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was not even 21 when he started it, MySpace’s young music-loving founders, Youtube’s Chad, Jawed and Steve who digged videos. Can you imagine the 50-something board members understanding this?

The number of mistakes made at Friendster are many:

1. Founder Jonathan Abrams was replaced as CEO in April 2o04.
2. Board members who had great resumes but did not understand the product. The legendary John Doerr was deemed to have “little feel for the product”, and taken off the board by his fellow KPCB partner Siegelman.
3. A rotating-door CEO policy

The board replaced Mr. Abrams with one of its own, Mr. Koogle, the former chief executive of Yahoo. But Mr. Koogle served only three months, a temporary caretaker who showed up at the office only sporadically, former Friendster employees said. The board next chose a television industry executive, Scott M. Sassa, to replace Mr. Koogle. That selection might have made sense if the company had been in position to start cutting big advertising deals. But it was not, given that its Web site was not up to speed. Mr. Sassa left after less than a year, which was nearly twice the tenure of his successor, Taek Kwan, who left at the end of 2005, six months after he started.

I truly believe Friendster is a good lesson for social networking entrepreneurs trying to create the next MySpace. Its way too easy to think any kid can code a website in his room and ask 100 friends to spread the word and them to spread to another 2 virally by themselves and hope for it to scale the Hitwise/ Alexa ranking s subsequently. Yes, myYearbook.com, founded by a 16-year old student, is ranked higher than Friendster currently.

But if you think you can be MySpace, what makes you think you won’t become Friendster instead?

If you like this, this article here.

Meet Jawed Karim, all of 27 years old, who ditched Youtube to study his masters at Stanford. A decision that stumped his Stanford professors too.

New York Times has a good article on this. What amazed me was his love for academia and teaching as opposed to the more common opposite route. Sergey and Larry of Google are notable examples.

Mr. Karim said he might keep a hand in entrepreneurship, and he dreams of having an impact on the way people use the Internet — something he has already done. Philanthropy may have some appeal, down the road. But mostly he just wants to be a professor. He said he simply hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who struck it rich in Silicon Valley and went back to teaching.

“There’s a few billionaires in that building,” he said, standing in front of the William Gates Computer Science Building. But his chosen path will not preclude another stint at a start-up. “If I see another opportunity like YouTube, I can always do that,” he said.

Its useful to note Jawed was already a millionaire prior to Youtube’s founding. Thanks to his time at Paypal, along with Chad and Steve, before it was bought by eBay.

An excerpt on the early path of Youtube’s founding:

Mr. Karim met Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen when all three of them worked at PayPal. After the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, netting Mr. Karim a few million dollars, they often talked about starting another company.

By early 2005, all three had left PayPal. They would often meet late at night for brainstorming sessions at Max’s Opera Café, near Stanford, Mr. Karim said. Sometimes they met at Mr. Hurley’s place in Menlo Park or Mr. Karim’s apartment on Sand Hill Road, down the street from Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that would become YouTube’s financial backer.

Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group. But he made it clear that contributions from Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley were essential in turning his raw idea into what eventually became YouTube.

More on Artis Capital Management here, the San Francisco hedge fund that also invested in Youtube.

Following the mega deal of the week, TimeWarner CEO Dick Parsons had this to say:

“The YouTube deal demonstrates the power of user-generated content today. “The question is,” Parsons said, “where is it going and how do you make a business out of it? Is it going to take over edited or professional content? No. I don’t think its going to overrun TV or movies.”

Parsons went on to note that for a “traditional” media company, like Time Warner, “This would be a tough acquisition to justify at this price, But for Google, it’s in their sweet spot. They are our partner on AOL Video, we know their vision. They’re trying to acquire anything that generates traffic—they monetize Internet traffic. None of the other media companies could have been in that ballpark.””

From the advertising industry, Organic Inc’s CEO Mark Kingdon:

“…thought the online video-sharing startup would have made more sense as a Yahoo Inc. property.

Google is strong as a “link and list business,” Kingdon said Wednesday during a conference call organized by UBS. Yahoo, on the other hand, is expert at organizing content into channels — and that is exactly what the fledgling YouTube site needs right now…

…Web companies haven’t figured out how to make video advertising appealing to them, he said. Yahoo’s structured display advertising allows companies to create big brand splashes on its content pages. In the same way, Google, YouTube and others hoping to make money in the video space need to come up with a new way for advertisers to reach video viewers, Kingdon said.

And 30-second commercials tacked on to a video aren’t going to cut it. “People today are walking TiVos,” Kingdon said, referring to the digital video recorders that makes it easy for viewers to skip advertising spots. “If they see something that looks like an ad, they mentally look beyond it.”

And a post-takeover Eric Schmidt had to play shrink to hyperventilating media bigwigs from NewsCorp, Viacom, CBS among others, fearful of a “Youtube-on-steroids” competing with their expensive media content (article here):

“Eric Schmidt is barnstorming New York this week to assure traditional media companies that the internet search company’s $1.65bn (£889m) acquisition of YouTube, the video start-up, will not turn it into a content competitor.

The Google chief stressed… that the YouTube purchase was intended to increase Google’s ability to distribute advertising and video on the internet. “We are not in the content business and partnerships really show the application of our advertising network to the content and media abilities of our partners. We want those partners to put their media content into this emergent [system].”

The driving force behind the decision to buy YouTube was Google’s belief that video is “one of the most important new media types on the internet”, he said.”

So there you have it, a round-up of the CEO view of the Google Youtube deal.

Related Article here.

Life’s getting too routine and I am unfit.

I need a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG). Something exciting, a little crazy and impossible.

7 Days. 240km/ 150 miles. In the Sahara Desert (Southern Morocco). Click here to know more.

The longest I have ever run is a half marathon of 21km 4 years ago. This race is 5.5 marathons and ran across the desert, with the longest single stage being 82 km. I have never been to Africa. The participation fee is $3000 and I have less than $1000 in my bank now. According to Wikipedia,

“During the 1994 race, Italian police officer Mauro Prosperi lost his way during a sand storm and wandered lost for more than 9 days, losing over 18 kg (40 lb) of body weight.”

This sounds ridiculous enough it might actually work.

Why am I running?

Because I believe I can and I am willing to try, so who’s to say I can’t? =)

And I really want to challenge my own physical and mental endurance. Or maybe you can call it my quarter-life challenge.

Living A Life Less Ordinary,

Bjorn