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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.

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 »

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Have we not heard this from many of those old fogeys who dun really GET IT? Those who thinks blogs, social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster are just disasters waiting to happen because they read about online paedophiles, spammers, stalkers, phishers who steal your account info, from the newspapers? How many of your friends are real camwhores?? =) FYI, i am not one but just to prove a point to you on the pic to my left: a complete stranger at SF Halloween Parade 2005.. (yea, its an old pic, check me out on facebook for newer ones) Well, its true they dun get it, they think the web is a fad and that the young today simply have no sense of decency nor understand what privacy is…

They could be dead wrong, but the young generation’s new web habits of exposing our public lives is certainly no different from the “Rock and Roll” culture that swept mainstream society decades ago. Titled “The Biggest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll”, New York Magazine has this fantastically well-written article on what we know and identify with while the rest simply are clueless…

Thanks to Lightspeed Ventures for this..

This coincides with the launch of Shycast, whose invite email I received yesterday. It seems I had forgotten when I first signed up for their service. A quick read through the email shows it came from Techcrunch who featured it a while back as a social network connecting people and brands. From the Shycast beta invite email:

Hi everyone, you’re receiving this because you’re on the beta notification request list for Shycast…and it’s showtime! Thank you so much for your help.

As you read on TechCrunch, Shycast is a community of people and brands; the brands we work with actively seek to connect with people from the Shycast community. We encourage them to listen to people’s ideas, and think of creative and exciting ways to engage the community over time. We imagine that when brands can see and engage the people who really love their stuff, in a safe place on common terms, great things might happen. It’s a big experiment in the way companies and people talk to each other…we’re not sure what’s going to happen but we’re glad you’re joining us in finding out.

Shycast’s unique positioning in the lucrative marketing industry is worth a study:

But Shycast does differ slightly from other forays in one significant way. Instead of going after traditional advertising, PR, direct response, or online marketing budgets, it is targeting promotional budgets, an area of marketing that typically has been relegated to the coupon and sweepstakes industry…

…It’s an interesting strategy, because most big media companies ignore promotional spending. During the 1980s when markers began upping their promotion budgets due mainly to the rise in so-called “trade” promotions, and it looked like promotional budgets were beginning to cannibalize on traditional advertising, most big media companies developed promotional marketing units to tap into the craze. But in recent years, traditional media outlets have backed away from the strategy. While plenty of integrated media deals have a promotional component, they generally are not earmarked against promotional budgets.

The full article from MediaPost is here. IKEA has essentially endorsed Shycast’s approach and is actively getting their customer to produce videos based on bed-making.

Looks like 2006 might really mark a turn in the tide of marketing with the power balance tilting back to the consumers with social media backed by the youtube phenom. I am working on a similar project and experimenting with a live marketing campaign. Lets see how that turns out.

Update 2: The post-event analysis is up and readable here.

Update: I found Professor Ramesh Jain from UC Irvine, CA, who might be attending this event too as a presenter of his startup, Event Web. Check out Ramesh Jain’s blog. More on his startup idea here (no website available, it seems). More on the man here.

This event, held Jan 10, will launch an initiative to launch Web 3.0 in Singapore. Frankly, I don;t know how we skipped the evolution cycle because Web 2.0 did not even start in Singapore’s IT and media industries. More on this event at SGEntrepreneurs. I cannot find the actual event site. Looks like this Web3.0 event launch is neither search optimized nor browsable on the website of MDA, the lead agency spearheading this effort. tsk tsk..

And I left a comment on the SGE site which i will reproduce here, in an edited version. As a disclaimer, I am not yet an active practitioner nor entrepreneur in the web industry. But I think I have the right to at least air my opinion on this issue. I am passionate about the Web industry and bullish about the internet medium on business and society and am willing to support any initiative that will propagate its growth. I take issue with the manner of the latest launch by MDA and its affiliated agencies and just prefer to make my thoughts heard in the hope that it lands in the right hands/ ears and we do this initiative right.

“there’s no such thing called “web 3.0″ yet. i am attending this event to see just how the govt defines web 2.0 before we attempt to jump the whole world and create this fictitious web 3.0. Even the website of the event is a joke. its so web 1.0 and they still use antiquated terms of no relevance to the subject matter.

This event almost looks like another initiative by some harried civil servant who pulled together a bunch of kakis from the other ministries to show the whole world they are all collectively putting effort in doing something that meets their KPI/ ROI/ whatever. Yes, a bureaucratic kneejerk reaction is what this looks like.

I rant alot here, i know, but the way the government is trying to launch this fund shows they are simply out of touch in trying to understand what really matters in trying to spur innovation here. those who will create any web3.0 already exist. And i think none of these people are inspired enough by the promise of what this web 3.0 can do to them. I might be jumping the gun before i even attend this event but i will seek to offer some suggestions to improve as as an event precursor.

For starters, dun get government to push it. Get industry leaders, academics, foreign thought leaders from technological hubs in israel, silicon valley to speak at fund launches like this. If the govt has 500 million to spend eventually, they can spend a few million trying to do this right for once by flying the right people down to Singapore to launch this. Get any warm body the innovators, the engineers, the entrepreneurs, will respect, NOT govt officials. Unless this is an internal fund for only civil servants to create startups, no one in the audience is going to listen to some civil servants step up that podium and subsequently gladly oblige to follow the commands. Singapore’s culture may be paternalistic but all kids grow up eventually.

I don;t know whether this fund’s creators actually pondered the root to the lack of innovation here which is why we have no notable web 2.0 enterprises of note. The real problem is the engineers and comp science students in singapore flocking to the more financially stable industries of Finance and Banking. Without real efforts put into university admin and policies that effectively overcome the sociological and psychological bias of our nation’s brightest engineers against non-financial careers, this initiative is dead in the water before it starts. This is the real brain drain a fictional Web 3.0 industry in Singapore will face. And this is a chronic cancer no cure seems imminent at present. We need to make this industry more glamorous and credible. Which does not mean more lame advertising campaigns depicting the computing industry as sexy or anything. It means putting more money into the promising startups we already have, helping them hire good talent from local and especially overseas etc…

More importantly, we need to inspire and fertilize the ground which grows those entrepreneurs, ie. the schools. We need to find what ever minor successes we have in the current generation of web entrepreneurs we have in Singapore and cultivate them as role models through the media. Talk about their struggles, their successes and the route they took to success so others can take note and support can be rallied from society and the industry. Influencing the public is key here anda successful push in the Web industry will help greatly in expanding career options to students in the educational institutions in polys ITEs, and the unis.

THe only web “successes” we have so far is? I might be ignorant but only HArdwarezone.com came to mind and they were bought for a paltry SG$7 million. how is that going to inspire any potential local web3.0 entrepreneur to start up? I think this is a question begging to be asked. 500 million from the govt coffers might be huge, but it will not displace the importance nor influence of the VC industry which will be begging to ask whether any future valuations of startups in this region deserve funding after the HWZ precedent.”

Follow-up: For those frustrated with the development of Singapore’s web industry, help it grow at the BarCamp SG event on Jan 20.

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.

I wrote the following in response to a friend’s email, since I don’t have much time to really sit down and blog these days but felt the need to share my views on this deal. This post will be some off-the cuff thoughts as i wanted to bounce some ideas off here. Pardon the factual errors but I really want to get a feel of what some of you guys might be thinking out there..

The Question:

“Some seem to think it’s brilliant for google to buy them out in order to escalate themselves as a media gateway. While other’s think that google’s bringing the bubble back by throwing money on eyeballs and nothing else.

Is it a smart move? Or have they really lost it this time?”

My response:

i think its a wise move at this time. Strategy-wise, its both a defensive and an offensive move at the same time. It fends off the vultures from Yahoo, Microsoft, NewsCorp, AOL Time Warner, who will have otherwise unassailable community bases from their Yahoo groups, IM, MySpace and AOl communities, if they bought Youtube instead.

Community
Hence, buying community is one strategic move Google made, raising its user base to parity level with the other players. Remember, so far they only have “searchers”, not community members, and I dun count Orkut or Gmail users which are insignificant.

I consider this a defensive move, its the last chance to buy a community, other than an expensive buyout of AOL. And Facebook is just a social network, no real technology capabilities like Youtube.

Now for offensive,

Revenue driver diversification

Google is getting shit from Wall Street on its one-trick pony act of relying only on text-based ads. In the realm of advertising, it is king in text while the whole world knows “Video” and “rich media” ads are the next big thing due to the importance of the interactivity factor when reaching out to consumers. Google needs to develop that capability and it is, by signing deals with MySpace and Viacom’s MTV division to distribute their video-based ads on its search engine and affiliated sites. However, all these are only biting away at the huge video pie as the current Google “real estate” is limited to its search pages and its affiliated sites. Hardly a lot of prime video inventory for advertisers to choose from. Crucially, the bulk of their current users are on their search results pages which is video-free and I think its wise to stay that way to avoid looking like Yahoo.

So yes, I think buying the largest video distribution website in Youtube acquires them massive advertising inventory with accompanying users who are used to perusing video content (and wun find them obtrusive to the user experience). This move is both offensive and defensive at the same time. Offensive as they enhance their stranglehold on video ad distribution by having Youtube to complement their Viacom and Myspace deals,. Defensive cos they prevent some other company from buying Youtube and threatening their domineering status. In a way, it has become a two-horse race now between Myspace and Youtube for serving video content. Hence a 2 horse race between News Corp and Google. Google wins by preventing a third player from storming the party and limits competition with a “former old media warhorse” in NewsCorp, forcing the latter to compete on technology which is Google’s strong suit.

But the price? Thats a separate issue. I see numbers floated around of $32 worth of per-user acquisition costs which is decent compared with the $580 million buyout of Internmix Media (includes Myspace) which had close to 30 25M users that time and works out to approx $100 $23 per user. Again, my numbers might be wrong bbut shld be in the ballpark, a fact check is needed but read these numbers somewhere from techcrunch probably and am using them here for illustrative purposes. Based on this, Youtube has 72M unique visitors per month working out to $1650M/$72M= $23/user. For the NewsCorp-Intermix deal, based on this article, the user-acquisition cost is about $580M/ 23M= $25. That is if, you believe into using user-acq costs as a rough valuation model..

To add on, I think a lot of the media attention has been on legal liabilities centering around the copyright infringement issues. That might be why pple are not buying much google stock as they are fearful the courts will wipe out any revenue advantages such a deal will bring.

And that is true, alot of home-made content is amateurish save for a few really good ones made by the next Spielberg… I use Youtube to watch Jon stewart, family guy and some really cool viral ads. But i also use it, for eg today, to watch some amateur clips on North Korea taken by tourists and journalists when they visited in an earlier time Kim Jong Il was less crazy.

Alot of this has to come down to deal-making by the Google folks, which is why I believe the deals signed with the TV networks on the day before they announced the deal was orchestrated to prevent any free-falling of the stock. Its too bloody coincidental to not be. In the long run, they really have to fight with NewsCorp and its Fox network while gaining allies with with cable channels,. CBS, NBC. We forgot someone important here too which has been really pushing the frontiers in opening up Old Media and that is Apple and its new affiliate Disney Networks with ABC.

I am guessing, really a wild guess here, that Google is relying on the advertising model to roll out media and videop content over the web while Apple is advocating you download the clip and pay. Google will prefer to stream it over their vast fiber optic capabilities and give content away for free over Youtube, by allowing ad placement where as Apple is a direct download, pay-per-clip model that allows ownership of the content. The competitive dynamic in terms of content delivery and revenue model is interesting and I like to see more discussion on this.

Apple-Disney, NewsCorp-MySpace and now Google-Youtube. Who’s gonna try to crash this party next?

Related post: Business 2.0, Techcrunch, SGEntrepreneurs

Click on this pic to instantly watch some hit viral videos. I strongly recommend the mock news clip of some Alaskan town who resorted to desperate uses of Axe deodorant to boost their mojo, Video 3 of 8.

“Advertisers are creating and distributing videos on sites like YouTube and Google Video, hoping they’ll be distributed by thousands of Web users, reports Business Week. For that powerful chain of events to take place, marketers have to create something compelling enough for a legion of anonymous users to want to share it with friends. “If you entertain your audience, they will get it, and the viral mechanism will make the audience come to watch you,” says Ed Robinson, an ad executive and Web site owner who attracted more than 60,000 people in one week to his Web site with a 12-second spot. Within three months, he had 500,000 visitors. Video could be advertising’s holy grail. It reaches millions of consumers without spending millions of dollars. The big lure, according to research estimates–it’s a $100 million to $150 million industry. Just think of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s “Subservient Chicken” video for Burger King; it’s still one of the most popular viral video ads in history, with 400 million hits. And it didn’t cost millions to make. CPB says after that success, it found competition on the Web to be fresh, different, and fierce. After all, advertisers are competing with content created by millions of amateurs, too. Plus, Web users are an ad-saturated audience, so anything that lacks irony or a little sophistication and smacks of cheap marketing ploys won’t get very far. To be successful, viral video needs high entertainment value. That’s right, advertisers–you’re creating content, too.”

Read the full Businessweek article here.

I have a very good friend who always asks me: “How do you make a million bucks?”

There’s a lot of vaporish theories lotsa smart alecs try in wrestling over this question.

But, here’s a smart-ass answer I like: Make a $1000 a 1000 times.

There’s another way to interpret the question though. A two-sided answer to this classical question:

1. Sell a lot of a few items (be it goods or services)
2. Sell a few of many items.

The Autocratic World of the Creator Age

The thing is, in a time not too long ago (before the Internet Age), there’s an amazing homogeneity in the products we buy, the clothes we wear, the books we read, the movies we watch, the songs we listen to. You go into a shopping centre and you end up buying the same birthday gift for every friend, disappointing the poor fella who wonders what he did wrong to receive three CDs of the latest hit album which he hated but was considered a safe choice.
Many successful enterprises today subscribe to Point 1. They hold a carefully-groomed, meticulously-managed product portfolio and hire legions of pesky salesmen, clairvoyant crystal-ball-gazing marketing gurus, self-righteous management consultants in an attempt to uncover the Next Big Thing before their “Auld Enemy” or competitor beats them. In order to manage the scarcity of their resources enforced upon by the classical laws of “brick and mortar” economics, they focus their efforts on a select small group of products and attempt to homogenize product selection choices of customers. They treat customers as target boards and call effective marketing “targetting” as if finding customers was an activity akin to shooting at the rifle range. During selling, some seek to convince you honestly, some to brainwash you and totally rewire your brain (check multi-level marketing), and some just plain tricking/ scamming. It was a Command and Control Economy.
Jailed by the Space-Time Continuum: The Autocracy of Shelf Space and Distribution Cost

In pre-Internet Days, consumers were dung, subjected to the whims of Creators also known as manufacturers and their partner-in-crime, the Retailers. Retailers had finite shelf space, finite stores, limited human and financial resources to make and subsequently sell products. This is the Spatial Limit.

During the Cold War, the communist regimes best exemplified this as they gave out ration coupons for goods no one had a choice to say no to. With Democracy, we had Sears, evolving to Walmart today with thousands of selections. Yes, the regimes are getting ircreasingly democratic, but the democratization process is by no means complete for us the consumers.

Add the Time Limit too. Our world is segregated by our natural universe of Light and Night. Barring nocturnal humans, our modern society adjusts to nature and structure our social and economic activities in line such conventions. Save for 7-Eleven, most stores earn diminishing returns once we go past peak hours of human activity and encounter rising labor costs.

The Democratic World of the Consumer Age

Enter Ebay, iTunes, MySpace, Amazon. No longer are consumers subjected to the tyranny of the physical world. The Digital Age brought us the Internet, a virtual marketplace of unlimited ideas, products and opportunities. It injected transparency into the consumer world, bringing us hope and optimism while conversely bringing gloom to the Creator class that now has to grapple with a “sentient” Consumer Class no longer shackled by lack of choice.

• Why buy a whole CD when u only like one song? It took almost a decade of online piracy and still the music industry, which is supposed to be in the business of providing listening pleasure, is not listening.
• If you thought you liked Artist A, well there’s tons of Artist-A clones, or remixes. And this is just the variance in terms of product - the “What”. The “how” of listening to music by Artist A is no longer only your local record store, you could still choose classicial CD format, or DVD of the music video versions, MP3 format, AAC for your iPod. Same goes for say a book u liked.
• If you thought Dan Brown was good, check out the clones he spawned, the reviews on Amazon, the thousands of retailers you could possibly get it at, at a price cheaper than your local brick and mortar store. Or perhaps you can buy an “ebook”. Maybe you prefer listening as it fits your commuting lifestyle in the mornings while fighting with the peak-hour traffic in the trains or the highways. Buy an “audio-book” then.
• No time to shop because you are at work all the time?

Disrupting the Space-Time Continuum

Well, the Internet Store’s open 24/7/365. Globally. Anytime. Anywhere. Any customized format.

I just had to plug this book. I am halfway through and I can’t stop nodding my head all the time as I read it. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. He inspired me to write this dead in the middle of the night at 3am.  There’s a Long Tail blog too. Click here to check out Guy Kawasaki’s new-found affection for Long Tail theories too.

After the Americans, yes, they do, and a lot too, it seems.

“Outside the USA, France is one of the leading ‘blogging’ countries and its “blogosphere” (bloggers and/or blogs’ creators) is growing fast.”

Mediapost brings us an update on the census study of the French blogosphere.

1. 26.7% of the French online population visit a blog at least once a month.
2. 18.8% have posted a comment on a blog
3. 8.1% have created there own blog
4. 92.2% of onliners agree that blogs enable the greatest freedom of expression
5. 81.3% are both reactive and interactive
6. 75.7% say blogsd create a closest possible relationship between people
7. 62.9% of blogs are considered more critical than any other source of information

Laurent Florès, CEO of crmmetrix, says “Thanks to blogs, the Internet has become a primary source of information for French Internet users… This marks a significant move from ‘interruption marketing’ to ‘conversation marketing’, where listening and conversing become critical for brands and organizations as a source of… learning from what people are saying about them.”

Personal blogs are by far the most consulted (90%), followed by group and association blogs (46.3%) and media blogs (38.2%), while nearly one-third (29.9%) of French blog readers have visited a brand’s blog. They see blogs as a great opportunity to open dialogue with the brand and engage with the brand on a new level.

More of the report can be found from the blog of crmmetrix who commissioned this report.

I wonder what the census of the Singaporean blogosphere will look like, perhaps this should be a topic for online media research in the local colleges.