Bjorno.licio.us

This is an example of a user-generated ad posted within Facebook (stanford edition only). No big deal except I think its really cool the Stanford staff chose not to carry out a full blown investigation, which my college NUS would DEFINITELY have done without thinking, but chose to use Facebook instead to distribute this message. Note: a heavy-handed approach is so not appropriate for playful young college students..

The pervasiveness of Facebook would undoubtedly make this message more effective in reaching the right target group than a mass email to the entire student community. The reach would equally have been the same but I am sure fewer care about emails from some dumbass school admin bureaucrat. This is a good example of how using the right medium to communicate will increase the relevance of your message.

Now perhaps when Facebook properly takes off in NUS (at 5800++ members today and counting), the NUS admin offices will do well to not ignore Facebook’s influence for their carpark closures and multiple warnings on campus conmen.

.. and the award goes to.. *drum roll* Victoria Junior College! And their 3 blogs at Cosiety, SecondLifeVJC and an unverified GeneralPaper.

Ok, i expect an uproar of controversy and conspiracies out there if I am wrong. Truth to be told, I read so much these days I hardly have time to explore every nook and cranny of the blogosphere. Hence, whenever I can connect the dots, I try to hail it as a “trend” and hope my readers or friends either validate it or debunk me.

Victoria Junior College (VJC for short) has had its student-run blog for a year now! Hurrah for the students who made this happen, their site “Cosiety” has improved by leaps and bound and you can see improvements made to the site design, useability and reader-oriented articles and coverage. I like their Subjectif section:

Subjectif is Victoria JC’s weblog of student opinion, mindless ramblings, colourful ideas and chic talk. It’s your finger on the pulse of the life of the college, and is updated weekly by irregular wits, specialist columnists, flowery tongues and sizeable speakers.

In terms of student participation, vibrancy of content and the authenticity of its bloggers, Cosiety beats any varsity-run online bulletin/ magazine , especially my alma mater’s Hooked, which is a sorry study of old-media-thinking transplanted forcibly on the internet platform. Sorry to its original founder and my friend Justin but more blogger-scrutiny might do it some good. Perhaps Justin could blog and shed some light separately..

SecondLifeVJC is really new and started its virgin post this month of April 2007. It taps on the enthusiasm of the local community’s growing Sl interest and our Lion City project inside and also appears to be aggregating relevant moves by local enterprises such as PR firm Text 100 in this area.GeneralPaper is much more established and also celebrates one year of blogging last month, same time as VJC’s cosiety. Their blogroll also gives prominence to SecondLifeVJC and you can see where my deductive skills is implying here. Helmed by an true educationer, Gimster aka Hoe Kim Yau, its intention to be a blog-based learning resource for General Paper (a test on English writing skills for the GCE A levels high school examination) students is clear. I think its a really cool idea to expose high school/ JC students to new ideas and concepts on the web and do it through a blog. I really wished I learnt this way during my time in JC too because I would definitely have learnt much more from my GP teachers.And there you have it, VJC leads the way in blogging, moving aggressively in entertainment (Cosiety), innovation (SecondLife incarnation of an actual VJC college in Lion City?) and education (GeneralPaper).Anyone contesting this claim?

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Just an observation of the “leaderboard” of popular postings at Ping.sg now:

7 out of 10 are directly related to Nexus. Almost 42 hours after the end of Nexus, this might be reflecting the peak of Nexus-chatter on Ping.sg, perhaps the only startup to get the most out of the web2.0 -centric event. Lets see how big they go on from here. Much activity going on now at the forums on developing a Diggnation-style vlog to market Ping.sg. It will be fun.. So head on over if you haven’t kept up with the post-Nexus conversation. Nexus the event will never really be over…

Just a sidenote, even if Ping.sg gets big (now that they up in the Alexa top 100K rankings) it will suffer the same problems in scaling outside of our shores.. like tomorrow.sg.. how will regional online communities ever warm up to a url that blatantly promotes only local sporean news? Something for Uzyn the founder to ponder upon while he completes his final year project .. heh heh

Woah, its been a long time since I blogged. Anyway, I met my ex-vice-dean (”ex-” because I graduated) yesterday in school and she asked me the question I always get these days.

Have you found a job yet?

Sometimes, this kind of questions irk me but I know she has good intentions. She thinks a graduate with no job 2 months after graduation is a cancerous anomaly in the booming economic climate of Singapore today (not counting the Shanghai-instigated stock market meltdown recently).

I laughed off her probing questions with my usual answer. I work for passion, not money nor social recognition of my self-worth. I also proceed to tell her stories of me rebuffing job offers, which is only met with expressions of horror and disbelief. Someone who understand me less will think I am arrogant (to actually reject employers, WTF does Bjorn think he is?). But I see it as a case of being fair to the employer. If I do not have passion for what you are hiring me to do, I shouldn’t do it.

So how do I survive?

I do freelance (but not free!) consulting projects. Currently, I have 2 open projects. One is an online marketing project to build and publicise a microsite with viral videos, podcasts and blog articles to engage with a young audience in the educational field. Another is a project to write business plans for an entrepreneur seeking funding in the healthcare recruitment sector. I might also have a new gig to consult in corporate blogging. At the same time, I network a lot through my role in Entrepreneur27 Singapore, meeting with professionals, entrepreneurs and students as I build a local Web 2.0 community for like-minded individuals to meet and share ideas.

Where am I headed with all these?

I want to work in the web industry, where changes are happening rapidly in media consumptions habits, marketing tactics and corporate-customer communication strategies. This is a pretty big space and that is where my values come in. I strongly believe in community-building; in being open, direct and frank in interactions with the masses of consumers who now have a voice on the internet and have no qualms about complimenting or complaining about a product or user experience exercising that right (pity our neighbor Malaysia is taking a step closer to the Stone Age by censuring [political] bloggers)

Few companies in Singapore, my home country, truly understand the value of reaching out to consumers over the web. This is where its disheartening and maybe one good reason why I can’t find a suitable job. There is no visionary mentor I would enjoy working with, someone who dares to take chances and bet with big stakes for an even bigger payoff. Most companies look at the young spending huge amounts of time on the internet and jump to conclusions they are either bootlegging illegal content through P2P downloads/ youtube or penning down thoughts into their “public diaries” or blogs. This is a common stereotype even for experienced professionals and one which requires much industry education to overcome. While the mass media’s hyper-ventilation over breathtaking buyout numbers of Youtube or Google’s revenue figures make some of these companies do a double take on such “new media”, it is not enough. My interactions with some entrepreneurs and businessmen still make me believe they only see the obvious “whats” of this “new media” phenomenon but not the “whys” of how this phenomenon gained such success. I don’t think anyone not understanding the “whys” of how Web 2.0 or user-generated media came about, will be successful in making money from this market.

A good rant while I am sick and stuck at home, missing out on a good party in Sentosa Cove with the E27 folks. Don’t mind me while I sneeze my way out of my drug-induced stupor..

 

There is a new kid in the world of social networks. And its from the little red dot of Singapore.

Founded by two 26-year-olds R. Chandrasekar and Sam Hon, Velvet Puffin is an “always-on” service that seeks to bring together a seamless social networking and media (video, blogs, photos) sharing between the mobile ohone and your desktop computer.

The startup has received $10 million funding in cash-rich Singapore looking for our own Youtubes and Skypes. The Economic Development Board (EDB) is a public investor along with other private institutions. Such a large sum of money certainly raised eyebrows for a service which has no significant user base and is only launching its public beta today.

What is promising though might be in the intellectual property of Radixs, the parent company of Velvet Puffin. Radixs, in a press release in 2004, released information of their success in building the world’s first universal mobile operating system. This will greatly enhance the compatibility of mobile services across different handsets from the various mobile phone makers. The inter-operability of the mobile service with web-based standards might pave the way for what the Velvet Puffin team touts as “a truly always-on service” across the 2 important screens of the digital revolution.

A review of the startup is available on the Entrepreneur27 site, on Techcrunch and also on Business Times.

I didn’t. But the high school students at Raffles Junior College (RJC) sure did. I was at the school yesterday giving a presentation on business plan writing to about 40 (?) members of their Entrepreneurship club (along with Justin who’s an alumni). This was a weekend camp for the new members who had a 2-hour crash course on business plan writing as part of their camp programme. 2 hours?!?! Man, it took 10 weeks for John Nesheim to teach that same course. Maybe a couple of days for a proper workshop for business plan competition participants. But 2 hours? I didn’t really know what I was in for when i took this project up.

“Can you talk about “Business” or “Entrepreneurship” for more than 3 minutes when you were 17?”

I am good at BS, so I sure could =D But it won’t make sense to those who really knew. I wanted to develop a presentation that excited the young audience without killing their interest by boring them with details. Thats where the E27 philosophy came in. We invoked a lot of excitement by highlighting Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Blake Ross, Mark Zuckerberg, the Youtube guys — most of which were 1-5 year timeframes away from the young audience when they started up. But inspiring them was easy, the meat of the presentation was the tricky part.

I had ONE BIG Challenge: the Curse of Knowledge.

1. I had way too much knowledge from my years of starting up and working for a startup. A fine line had to be drawn between simplicity and quality.

2. These kids had their own Curse of Knowledge too - from Google. I have to help them navigate through that surplus of information that plagues modern society today.

We realized 3 things early in developing our presentation:

1. A business plan format is really boring and tedious to 17-year-olds.

2. Everything was available on Google.

3. We are all very good “buying” consumers but we just dunno what its like on the other “selling” side.

We ditched the entire business plan format as the focus. And did away with a lot of business jargon like sustainable competitive advantage, core competency, value proposition. At its very core, entrepreneurship=business=making money. To me, entrepreneurship is making money with soul as a real human being. (You have to curb some human instincts when you work in a big corporation.) Injecting what you know about human society, their psychology and their attitudes towards buying things. All of us are humans and we are in contact with many businesses every day. And thats the angle I took.

Since everybody could google “Business plan writing” anytime, we focused on 3 key concepts that will be good filters in knowing the core of what it takes to write a good business plan. These filters were intended to be the mental “Compasses” to navigating the “GoogleLand” and overcoming the Curse of Knowledge.

1. Unfair Advantage

2. Positioning

3. Strategy

These were smart kids and I tried to make the examples and analogies as close and personal to them as possible. I asked that what shoes they wear, the food they eat, the MP3 player they like and what other company dominates their consciousness. From there, I explained why Nike, Singapore Airlines, AirAsia, Apple iPod conquers the business world and their minds.

Hopefully, it was all engaging. The room was bloody cold and the kids were dressed in T-shirts and shorts. I feared there would be a mass exodus midway through the lecture due to hypothermia fears. =D Thankfully, there wasn’t. Lets see if any of them find this blog post so we all get some real feedback.

Yahoo ramps up it advertising deals with top brands today, according to Reuters. In a show of its clout among brand advertisers, Yahoo has signed a multi-country mobile-phone advertising deal with companies like Hilton’s Embassy Suites, Infiniti, Intel Corp., Nissan, Pepsi & Co, Procter & Gamble Asia-Pacific and Singapore Airlines. This is expected to be the first wave of customers.

The new service is available in Western Europe in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and in the Americas in United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

It also plans to offer the advertising service in Asia-Pacific markets including Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

How will it work?

Advertisements will run along the top of Yahoo’s home page on the Internet screens of mobile phones. Consumers can click on the interactive ads to learn more about an advertiser’s offer or call the advertiser directly for details.

Yahoo Japan Corp., the company’s joint venture with Softbank Corp. has been running ads in Japan for several years in what ranks as one of the world’s most advanced mobile technology markets.

Its interesting to note the aggressive push of Yahoo into the mobile markets of 6 major Southeast Asian markets. Yahoo’s expanding reach across Southeast Asia, in recent years, has focused on building up an advantage in working relationships with local content and service providers, giving it a heads-up advantage over competitors like Google which is still very new to the region. Granted that direct response advertising don’t really work well on mobile phones anyway (simple no screen space to serve them alongside search results), Yahoo is proving to be faster in understanding that their strengths lie in brand-based marketing and scaling those relationships to the Asia-Pac region.

The Yahoo Japan example in the news article is a curious misnomer. Everyone knows Japan’s 3G (or beyond now?) networks and user habits make them an anomaly in global digital culture. The Japanese read mini-novels, watch TV and play geo-dating games on their phones, all of which are ideas still largely being incubated in many media and research labs around the world. While Singapore might boast a decent 3G infrastructure, user habits are unlikely to shift dramatically overnight to make branded ads a painless component of mobile internet usage. I already find loading webpages on the Nokia 6280 and Motorola Razr V3X a time-wasting hassle, let alone wait for a static graphic ad to load at the top of my browser.

Credit to Marketing Pilgrim for breaking this news.

This is sort of a reply to James Seng’s post. James is considered one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore, based on Wikipedia. He is also an advisor to the non-profit organization my friend Ming Yeow founded - The Digital Movement. I should start by thanking him for approving the E27 submission on Tomorrow.sg, Singapore’s top social media news outlet (which James founded). Thanks, James. =)

James had 3 points on why Singapore is not ready. I generally agree. I am nowhere near James in terms of repute nor experience and all I am doing is to offer my humble viewpoints. Almost exactly a year ago, I blogged about finding zero Web2.0 startups in Singapore, only to amend that statement when I found some and profiled them at the first E27 event. Still, we are a far cry from the Web2.0 frenzy in Silicon Valley. I know its unfair to compare, although recent media exposure on the national (rather the government’s) desire to create the next “Youtubes and Skypes” from our shores have made this a hot topic again. Below are my personal views on his various points. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine, Wesley Oxenham, hails from Mauritius and has written an article in what I can only guess is a news journal of Mauritius. The main site is in the native tongue (?) of French. But Wesley’s article is mainly in English and its speaks of his dream for his home country. A dream many Singaporeans like myself sometimes forget and take for granted in our cushy environs.

“I have a dream for Mauritius; but the desire is not enough for a dream – a vision – to come true.” …

I believe we need to build up new and sturdy foundations for our country and people, and the best way to achieve this turning point is to learn from successful case studies from around the world, one of which is Singapore: a country with absolutely no resources, about 3 times smaller than Mauritius and with 4 times more people. Yet Singapore today is referred to as one of Asia’s economic “tigers”.

Wesley goes on to talk about how a culture of poverty and corruption handicaps the social psyche and perpetuates a subculture of hatred and criminal violence. He highlights the importance of meritocracy and how it might stem the brain drain of talented native Mauritians who choose not to return to their home countries.

Reading this article makes me think of the many Mauritians I have met in the past few years. I distinctly remember a guy called Joy from my undergrad years in NUS - a person who dreams of learning what he can from Singapore in order to join politics back in Mauritius and contribute to his society. His friends laugh at him but his spirit and mentality is admirable. His career pursuit is guided by a socially responsible compass and the outcome is one which will lead to benefits that goes beyond his personal domain.

Such thoughts always make me come back to the “Idealism vs Pragmatism” debate I think plagues young Singaporeans today. Read the rest of this entry »

Right, this post is for the Singaporeans only. Ding Cheng An commemorated Singapore’s victory at the recently concluded ASEAN Football Championships and made this machinima-esque video. Not sure how long he took it. But the attention to detail and sequencing was smooth if he really did it haphazardly. He even chereographed the match highligts, shots and goals to near-perfection. Its an enjoyable clip. Look at the faces of Khairul Amri, Mustafic, Shi Jiayi and Daniel Bennett and see if you recognize them.

[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuhLTpc2OkY]

Credit to Youth.sg for this.