So, i randomly came up with a somewhat apt title of this renewed (hopefully!) bout of blogging… and to fit the title, i thought i might as well list whats changed since then till now…

From a Garden to the Wasteland.

My blog used to be like a garden of bountiful harvests, from job offers, attendees for my E27 unconferences, networking invitations, advertisers etc.. It was like Doraemon’s magic pocket, where you can pull a treasure out every single time to make one’s life better. Now, its become such a drag as its overgrown with digital “weeds” aka spam comments which only makes me hate blogging much as a lazy garden owner hated weeding.. Not to mention that i no longer get interesting projects or job offers or spare passive income…

From firing neurons to deadwood…

… my brain, thats what. okay, i hope not.

But its true that not blogging for such a prolonged period of time, IMO, slows down the creative thinking function of those of us who work in the attention-deficient web industry, where information overload and our longish times in front of radiation-emitting screens can conspire to dull some parts of our brains. When I blogged, i at least synthesized all the gigabytes of data i consumed everyday for a good hour– finding patterns in articles across my RSS feeds, mapping them into specific memes and then crafting them coherently in words… That kind of information synthesis is priceless. After I stopped, i felt no ill effect for the short term, but today, after a year, i do feel something’s real amiss.. like a slow-acting poison…

its one thing to write powerpoint presentations for a business audience and another to write a blog article for an uncertain global audience. while the pressure to perform might be the same for both, the frequency and unscripted, freewheeling nature of the latter made for a healthier brain.

Viral vs Word-of-mouth

thought i should share this anyway since its the best differentiation among the two seemingly similar terms in the marketing world.

“Viral marketing is typically reserved for programs where the advertising is talked about as opposed to the product itself.”

” Word of mouth is the actual sharing of an opinion about a product or service between consumers”

More here from Dave Balter of BzzAgent, a service thats trying to create media for word-of-mouth mktg agents that i am playing with recently.

Thats it. My first post in almost a year. Hope the next one comes faster than that!

Enter the epicenter, pebble, swimmer, surfer, boater, with-the-fleet...

In short, a trend initiator (founder) is the epicenter and the subsequent characters simply reflect the difference in “content” consumption frequencies of the other early adopters.

If you know the founder personally who showed u his invention in secret, congrats ‘cos you are a pebble.

If you twitter, you are a swimmer.

Bloggers are surfers.

If you read it from Facebook, you are a poor boater..

If you read it from a mainstream outlet like New York Times, you are a fleeter.

If you are not listed here, I empathize with you. You are not the only victim of the information tsunami that swamps all of us.

What am I? I am thousand miles away from Silicon Valley in Singapore and definitely fall in the surfer-and-beyond outer ring of influence. I am only the pebble when epicenters happen in Singapore. But since many startups I have seen hardly moves any gears in Silicon Valley or beyond this island, I cause mere ripples.

End of meaningless rant after a rusty blogging hiatus.

Eric Picard from Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions (MDAS) and his views on the ad exchange of the future

AdECN’s 5-pager Dummy’s Guide to how an ad exchange works 

Let this blog post, no matter how insignificant it might seem, be my little way of remembrance for a dear friend who taught me to live a life without fear of social expectations but one of following your internal passion.

Ian ditched his studies at Uni. of Washington in his sophomore freshman year to return to Singapore and startup. He was the person who inducted me into entrepreneurship when I could barely fathom what it really means other than a massive ego-trip of being your own boss. With 3 other friends, we ran a bricks-and-mortar business distributing outdoor retail goods imported from US and Europe. Ian’s passion for the outdoors was unparalleled by none other I knew. He was such an avid rock-climber despite the frailties of his physical body.

And how cruel it is to die this way. Ian survived the worst road accident, for more than a decade, in a remote part of Melbourne when a massive lumber truck crashed at full speed into their car on the highway. An accident that robbed him of another of our friends, Yaoping, weeks after we celebrated his 21st birthday and landed another friend, Kiat Han, in a coma for 3 months. Ian escaped with a spinal injury due to his being thrown out of the back seat. A fortuitous escape considering he did not wear his seat belt.

He next cheated death again when he survived a 6 metre fall during an indoor rock-climbing mishap and then one more time at the Dairy Farm natural rock climbing range in Bukit Timah - a 15-metre plunge which broke his leg after his cable snapped due to the brittle rock.

A man who could not be killed by extreme sports nor horror road accidents died due to a mosquito bite!?! Can life get more ironic that that? Whence the fairness in robbing the vigor and vitality of such a young man, i ask?

I only hope Ian’s final blow was inflicted fittingly in the outdoors. It would be due respect to him, if anything else. Despite his short life, he had left indelible impressions of his life philosophy on many of our friends. Many of us will remember how he challenged “mis-authority” with covert campaigns and audacious public acts during secondary school. As a college dropout and entrepreneur, he demonstrated a rare ability of daring to dream, venturing into the unknown as he pursued a career in the outdoor sports retail business — such an offbeat path in the concrete jungle of Singapore, albeit one he truly believed in. MORE crucially than any of the above was how his appetite for living was never diminished by all the brushes with death he had, setbacks which could only injure his physical shell but not dent the strong armor of his mind.

You taught me the courage to dream through your actions in life and I shall seek to repay you for the rest of mine.

For that, my dear friend Ian, go forth in peace. You will be sorely missed.

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 I really like this comment by Mike King in the same post:

I would add 2 things: First, you may have no idea now what really fuels your fire. You should stay on the course you’re on long enough to show your talent and commitment, and to pick up some real world skills. If you discover another passion you’d rather pursue, go for it - just make sure you’ve put in at least a year at your first job. And don’t let someone else define you - people have a tendency to define you interms that are convenient for them. Know yourself and pursue your passions with vigor.
Second, build a network. Understand now that other people are as vital to your success as you are to theirs. Build relationships through authenticity, and always be ready to give first. Whether you believe in Karma or not, believe this; what goes around really does come around.

If you are interested in this space, sign up for the June 21st dinner here.

I don’t think the day’s far off when a smart ad server with the right tools can track mobile user behavior in a meaningful and useful way–serving a post-roll ad to a user based NOT on the content of the NBA highlights he just watched on his phone, but based on the fact that he’s looked done two mobile searches on pizza and visited a pizza parlor’s WAP site all in the last ten minutes, and (LBS comes in) on the fact that he’s just a bus stop away from another pizza franchise that happens to be our client. He finishes the clip, and he gets hit with the image of a thin-crust pepperoni slice leaving strands of?cheese as it’s pulled away from its mother pie. Then all he has to do is tap a button to be connected by voice, toll free. He orders, and gets a discount to boot. And his pizza is coming out of the oven just as he gets off the bus and saunters in. (via)

Let me do some doodling and connect some dots here.

Ogilvy (is a unit of its parent)–> WPP (who just bought)–> 24/7 Real Media (and has this press release dated April ‘07)–> Open AdStream® Mobile Edition

Maybe the future ain’t too far off…

From BusinessWeek:

JMP Securities’ Ingrid Ebeling used conservative price-earnings ratio projections for 2008 to calculate that the Mac business, with revenues of $11.7 billion and net margins of 11%, would be worth $42.70 on its own. The iPod, with $10.8 billion in revenues, 12% margins, and a slightly lower multiple given slowing growth, would be worth $38.87. Add in $6.36 for other music products, $6.76 for peripherals such as Apple TV, $5.91 for software, and $14.18 per share in cash. You’re already at $114.78—with no help from iPhone…

…It plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29, two sources say. (Apple won’t comment.)

Apple went down 3.5% today to $120 following the lack of news on iPhone at WWDC. Awww.. let it drop so I can get back into the game

And this is a funny picture Apple won’t laugh at:

(via TUAW)

TheStreet.com fills us in with sagely advice:

“aQuantive gets most of its revenue — 60%, by investment bank Goldman Sachs’ estimates — by selling services to advertisers who want to reach customers through digital forums. That sets aQuantive apart from other online ad companies like DoubleClick, which was recently acquired by Google, or ValueClick, which has seen its stock soar amid takeover speculation. Those companies are known for selling technologies to Web publishers who want to place ads on their own sites, not advertisers.

And while aQuantive is often mentioned in the same breath as DoubleClick or ValueClick, it’s unique in having the ear of so many top notch online advertisers. And that’s why aQuantive is so valuable to Microsoft. The traditional method of selling software in shrink-wrapped packages and through expensive annual licenses is being displaced by a more nimble way in which software is delivered over the Internet. Some of this so called Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, model will rely on having ads placed next to it, which Microsoft knows.

Its interesting how TheStreet points towards SaaS as a potential revenue goldmine for Microsoft, we know Salesforce is the king on the SaaS front. But it looks like the big ol’d dinosaur organization from Seattle is one step behind their fleet-footed Mountain View nemesis:

Google and Salesforce.com are reportedly discussing a broad partnership that might help them in their ongoing battles against Microsoft. Both companies are the largest in their chief markets - Web search and advertising for Google and online customer relationship management for Salesforce - and have recently expanded into areas of business software now dominated by Redmond, Wash., software giant Microsoft. (via Mercury News)

The drama doesn’t seem to end, does it? Stay tuned for the next episode…