Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good We all heard of the infamous disastrous interview between Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerburg (CEO, Facebook) in the SXSW conference 2008. Of course, the reason why she was selected for interviewing Mark Zuckerberg was based on her upcoming book, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" which has now gone on sale in the book stores. Unlike the other books like Jessica Livingston's "Founders' at Work" and Rebecca Fannin's "Silicon Dragon", her book does not provide a more structured account about the respective founders and the web 2.0 companies that become the poster child in the current web revolution. Instead, it picked a very narrative approach (since she is a journalist by training), which makes it easy for a reader to get through the book. Since the book is written like a story, you might find some success stories missing or being passed off with a few sentences. Yet, it offers a slightly different perspective by tracing how the seeds of web 2.0 come about from an ecosystem that emerged after the dot.com bust. Once you get through the book, the important theme of the book is how an ecosystem is important to sustain the  tech community in Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is not just the money but the people who are involved in creating the web 2.0 wave. The way she traced the formation of the ecosystem is to look at how some web entrepreneurs who made it, spent the time and money to foster and mentor other start-ups that eventually grow into a success stories. At the start of the book, the author showed an interesting diagram about how the some founders and their successful web 1.0 companies are linked to those from the web 2.0. In the centre of the web 2.0 story, there are a few key players: M. Andreesen (Founder of Netscape), J. Adelson (Equinix), D. Sze (Excite@Home), Peter Thiel and Max Levchin (Paypal), R. Hoffman (Linkedin) and some others. You will hear the stories about Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3 & Pownce), and what Max Levchin moved on from Paypal to do Slide. In this story written by the author, the venture capitalists become the secondary players and become more of the villains rather than the heroes, because some of them were responsible for the insane and unsustainable valuations for the dot.com bust. Hence for those who are thinking of seeking more funding, this book might provide a different perspective. For example, the author provides the different urban myths on Mark Zuckerberg and how he rose to fame with a controversial character in Silicon Valley by the name of Sean Parker, or what some venture capitalists called "everything that's wrong with Silicon Valley". Of course, one of the interesting tidbits in this book describes how Peter Thiel advised Mark Zuckerberg whether he should sell Facebook to Yahoo! based on his experience in selling Paypal to eBay. A few interesting lessons can be learned from the book: (i) the importance of having a network among the founders seeking advice and help on business issues,  (ii) the type of drive and determination that the founders to make their start-ups a success and (iii) the lessons that the entrepreneurs when Silicon Valley went through the bust which I think that is key to why they are good for the second Internet revolution.  If you look into Asia now, and gaze through the crystal ball, the closest Silicon Valley replica is in Zhongguancun, China and currently a lot of web start-ups emerged. The real question which I am curious to know is that can Zhongguancun do exactly what Silicon Valley do, revive should a crisis emerge. Still, I think that the book is a good read and I have attached a video of Sarah Lacy in Authors@Google here for you to get a better sense of the book. She also answers an interesting question about what is the weakness of Google in their current state.   Is Friendster engineering a comback? A Meeting with Jeff Roberto from Friendster While most of the hype and buzz have been going on with Facebook and MySpace for the past two years, Friendster has been left out of the spotlight. After all, it was the first social network that came about from the web 1.0. The transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 for this first social network has been tough. Like Twitter, Friendster lost a lot of audience to other networks from the scalability issue between 2003 to 2006. Yet, all is not lost. Recent trends seem to indicate that Friendster might be engineering a comback through other avenues. Sometime back, I wrote about Friendster's high growth against the other online social networks in Asia. That post has prompted some discussions in the background between Nicholas Aaron Khoo, Jeff Roberto (Marketing/PR Director, Friendster) and myself, since I am interested in the crossover audience between different social networks. Thanks to the Ad-Tech Conference held in Singapore and Howie and his team from The Digital Movement, I managed to meet Jeff Roberto along with several bloggers for lunch in Pan Pacific Hotel,Global Kitchen, Level 3. In that short lunch meeting, Jeff brought me the answer which I have asked in our past email discussions over the web.Given that the battle for the public social networks are heating up, with platforms open up in practically every one of them starting from Facebook, it is interesting to take a look again at Friendster. After all, the first online social network has returned with a web 2.0 interface and a developer's platform that is part of the Open Social Foundation (I have heard from several sources that it is coming soon in late July). Of course, some of us will be ready to say that Friendster has now become the follower rather than the leader. To be fair, Jeff Roberto has invited us for lunch with an upcoming announcement that was about to made two days later after our meeting in Singapore. That is the announcement of mobile text alerts. The users from Friendster in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines will soon be able to subscribe to Friendster Text Alerts, a full suite of alerts covering activity in the network that can be sent directly to their mobile devices via SMS text messages. As I was told, the Friendster Text Alerts is a mobile offering and complements their mobile site, m.friendster.com, launched in May 2008. It also demonstrates that Friendster understood the Asian market better than the other social networks which has some presence in the Southeast Asia market. Here is the more interesting part since there is a private discussion over email on this issue. For some time, I am curious what the cross over from Friendster to Facebook looks like. I did ask Jeff over email and he replied me that he would come back to me sometime later. True to his word, he did provide that statistic, short of the demographics, where a possible correlation on the age group of consumers can be determined. If you look at the table above (source: comScore Media Metrix, May 2008) provided, the overlap between Facebook with Friendster is minimal with the other exception being Orkut (the online social network popular in Brazil and India). It has some implications particularly for those who are in the development apps space. The first is that the developer can push their apps from Facebook into Friendster and create a new customer base. For my own investment into social network apps, I often impose what I called "platform agnostic", i.e. your app must be operable and portable to any platform that has opened up for development. In some sense, listening to Jeff explaining the features to us over the lunch table, one thing I do pick up is that Friendster is trying to localize the features of their social network to the countries which they are expanding in. The m.friendster.com, or the mobile site is to exploit the Asia market where most users uses their mobile phone to do surfing more than on their computers. In fact, they ensure that the mobile sites are launched with the native language of that country, for example, Indonesia and Malaysia. The other interesting feature that I liked was the fan profile, where the celebrity concerned can update their profile and enabled their fans to look at new photos, new blog posts and invitation features. While I don't think that it is an innovative feature since the other social networks have them, I notice that Friendster has managed to have many celebrities on their platform. The reason I think is that there is a degree of control element for the publicists of these celebrities, where they need to skilfully deal with the emerging complexities of dealing with fans. In such a scenario, Friendster innovate more on social practice rather than technology. The lunch ended less than an hour with a vibrant discussion about the new developments in Friendster. As Jeff has rushed for another appointment, we have managed to lock him down with us for a quick picture. Related Links:[1] Su Yuen, Friendster dying? More like growing   Creative Commons in Singapore finally I have talked about the need for Singapore to adopt Creative Commons sometime back. It has implications particularly on copyright and intellectual property. Finally, CC Singapore is pleased to announce that the draft of CC BY-NC-SA adapted to Singaporean law. The draft (PDF) is now ready for public discussion. The CC Singapore team, lead by Anil Samtani  and Giorgos Cheliotis and hosted at the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL), has been working with Creative Commons International to port the licenses to local copyright legislation. As part of the public discussion, we warmly invite you to join CC Singapore???s discussion list and share your comments with local and international legal experts. The event "Copyright And The Creative Commons" will be happening in Nanyang Technology University, School of Art, Design and Media on 27 July 2008, from 1.30 pm to 3 pm, part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2008.      HP TouchSmart PC Bloggers Event at Brotzeit, Singapore Yesterday, I was invited along with other bloggers to attend the preview event of the new HP TouchSmart PC at Brotzeit restaurant (which I highly recommend for the Munich Lager beer and the pork knuckles) in Vivocity. The product was unveiled more than a month ago in Germany and Van Tan did an interesting report about this event when she was in Germany for the event.  The official release date of this new gadget is on 18 July 2008.  Other than getting my hands to try a touch screen PC, one of my other tasks is to do a special Geek Goddess episode on the product itself together with Estee, Peter and Michael. It is interesting that more and more companies like HP are now also competing in making the desktop not just being a computer but how the design of the product can fit it with the home. Coming back to the event, the bloggers were first greeted by Hwee Koon (Director for Consumer PC & Handheld Business Units, HP, Asia Pacific and Japan). She gave us a short presentation on the product and the emphasis is on the design of the product and how it came about. After that, four TouchSmart PCs were unveiled within the restaurant and the HP team were around to demo the interesting features about the product. From first impressions, the sleek black piano design made it look like a big photo frame in the house. Of without fail like all reviews, I have to spill the technical specs about the product. The HP TouchSmart PC is an integrated 22" diagonal hi-def widescreen with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and Microsoft Vista as the operating system. The DVD drive is located at the  side of the PC and comes with the standard peripherals such as the USB ports and the wireless LAN. Most of the excitement about the product is the management of rich media in the system. Of course, the computer comes with a pretty good photo management system. Melvin Yuan asked me for the memory card from my camera, and immediately transferred the pictures from my camera quickly into the PC. The process is seamless without any hiccups to my surprise, given that I have sworn off Microsoft operating system for the longest time. You can make edits quickly on the photos without much problems. I did observe that Peter was spending time playing games with the HP TouchSmart using the touchscreen interface, after he has completed his interview with one of the members in the event. Of course, most of the time for this event, other than listening to the presentation on this new product, Michael  and I were busy preparing both the interviews for Peter and Estee. Estee did the starting introduction with Hwee Koon and also asked her about the design, the price and when it would be launched while Peter focussed on the technical side: features and interface of the TouchSmart PC. Of course, we usually round up with the two hosts to conclude the show for us and their thoughts about the HP TouchSmart PC. After we completed the filming for the show, we spent time mingle around with a lot of our friends who are also there to look at the product.  But, stay tuned for the coming episode of the Geek Goddess Show. Related Links:[1] Photos for the event on my Flickr Account which you can view.   The Economics about Banning Political Films I have been thinking about the political films discussion that took place during the Seminar on Internet Regulatory Reform. Two of my colleagues, Alex Au aka Yawning Bread and Gerald Giam have voiced their opinions about section 35 in the Films Act and their reaction to the comments made by Mr Cheong Yip Seng, the Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (AIMES). Alex Au is worried that AIMES may be trying hard to justify why section 35 should stay after hearing Mr Cheong's point about the high impact factor that a political film can sway how people think after his visit to a conference in Canada. To reinforce his point, Mr Cheong also cited that Japan and Korea were the other two countries that banned political films. On the other hand, Gerald took a different position by arguing that the political films act benefit PAP more than the other opposition parties. In this post, I adopt the relationship between the demand & supply with the impact of a political film to explain why banning section 35 is a worse option for the PAP to stay in power. Basically, I will address the issue starting from the fear of a political film being potent enough to change the outcome of an election. Indeed I do not dispute with what Mr Cheong said about political films. He is definitely right to say that the political films can have a powerful impact on the audience. In fact, coupled with modern filming techniques that kept on repeating the same subliminal political message over and over again, the film may be so powerful that it would convert a voter to sway to another political ideology. In fact, I can even push Mr Cheong's argument further by offering the example of  the religious fundamentalists under Osama Bin Laden who have adopted such approaches to radicalize people towards extremism. However, something is missing in the entire argument. That missing link is how demand and supply for such political films is correlated to its impact and how much emotions it can stir. If there is a huge demand, the political impact is greater and vice versa. So, the real question that one should ask is under what conditions, a political film can create a huge demand. The answer is when the film becomes a forbidden fruit, i.e. we set up legislation to ban political films that can incite potential damages to society. It's a situation of high demand and low supply in economics. Seriously, I found out that everyone I know when I was living in overseas, gets a thrill out of  watching some of the banned political films in Singapore, for e.g. the Singapore Rebel from YouTube and Google Video in the UK. The reason for the thrill is that they believe that they will not run into problems with the Singaporean law if they watch it in UK. Here's the part which made it so difficult for our establishment to deal with the YouTube problem. They can ban the film, but they cannot stop people from uploading the film into YouTube and continuously pervade the entire Internet with the film. The enforcement of a ban, bolstered by the printed press, created even bigger demand in people who will go all out to search for the film in Google. The same argument also works for the political films which are used to radicalize people to become extremists. In fact, every time the American media tries to make a big deal out of an video tape from the leaders in Al Queda, everyone will flock to YouTube to search for the video. It is human psychology to find out more about the forbidden fruit and sample it even if you use the law as a deterrence. In this case, given the evolving technologies of the Internet, it becomes even easier for people to get the forbidden fruit and at the same time, believe that the political film must have a high impact such that the establishment bans it. What about the other side when the demand is low and supply is high? To reinforce my argument, I will use Michael Moore's "Farenheit 911" as an example. For most people outside America, we are swayed by his film to believe that the US administration harbor bad intentions to invade Iraq. As a matter of fact, Michael Moore wanted to use the film to change the outcome of the 2004 US Presidential election. He was so determined that he offered to give free showings of the film to people all over US and marketed the film everywhere so that he can sway the people to vote for John Kerry instead of George W Bush. In the end, he failed even his film was made available everywhere. What happened? A few factors contributed to why the political film achieved so low impact in the US elections. The first reason is that the opposing side created similar films that distorts Michael Moore's facts in his film, and better still, using the same set of techniques Michael Moore adopted to attack his credibility. The second reason is that the American mass media is divided into different political ideologies, and hence the public develop a type of social immunity to be skeptical about the truths in political films. Imagine Fox News spending every day telling everyone that the movie "Farenheit 911" is a bad movie and they did exactly that. Does that sound familiar? Yes, for the longest time, as Gerald rightfully puts it, banning section 35 of the political films benefits the PAP more than the opposition. In a game theoretic sense, they suffer from being the bully for banning political films and the outcome is that it encourage the situation of high demand and low supply. The situation instigates more people to search for the banned political film.  The same goes for publications. Imagine you ban a book today, the next day someone goes to Amazon and buys the electronic copy and downloads it without you detecting it. In fact, the ruling party have so much more resources to create political films of better quality than what has been done by Martyn See. I find it ironic when Martyn said during the seminar that he was out to prove that political films do not make such a big impact as the establishment claims. In fact, by banning it, more Singaporeans are eager to watch it. Since a large population are socially conditioned not to think critically, they start to believe the information from the political films. Of course, at the end of the day, I will not dispute what some naysayers will tell me that it's a waste of time to try to convince the authorities about abolishing section 35. That is why they are still holding power. My answer to them is that technologies and social practices change and the same kind of deterrence can falter against the backdrop of innovation in the Internet. I will end with an anecdote told to me by a Singaporean friend who lived in New York. On the day when the Obama campaign executed their internet strategy to organize people using Facebook for caucuses and fundraising through online means as early as July 2007, a Singaporean friend of mine and an expert on social media called up his American friend from the Hillary Clinton campaign and asked whether they have  an internet strategy. He wanted to help but got a snub back from his American friends in the Hillary Clinton campaign, "We don't believe in a Internet strategy." Perhaps history might have turned out differently if they have listened.   Community Moderation: Thoughts from the Internet Regulatory Reform Seminar Organised by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, the seminar on internet regulatory reform happened today at the URA Centre. About 50 people attended the event, excluding the organizers and the bloggers who are involved in the drafting of "Proposals for Internet Freedom in Singapore". The aim of this seminar is to present the proposals and at the same solicit some thoughts and comments from the public. Together with Cherian George, Alex Au (Yawning Bread), Choo Zheng Xi, Ng Ejay, Arun Mahizhnan (Institute of Policy Studies) and Mohan Gopalan, we presented the various aspects and sat on a panel to discuss the proposals. In the process, we drew interesting comments and questions from the audience.  After a vibrant discussion, I will like to outline some ideas about the formation of Internet Content Consultative Committee (IC3) mentioned in the community moderation section of the proposal. For some time, I have been a strong advocate of the community moderation as an alternative to internet regulation. The intention is not to replace regulation but rather to provide a stop gap measure that deals with the emerging complexities of online communities in the Internet. A simple hypothetical example is that a young and immature blogger can make unintentional statements that might cross the OB markers accidentally. The instant reaction is to report to the police and let the law take action. Imagine in a more mature society like the UK, the more immediate reaction is to bring the matter to the attention to the civil society and only take action if the blogger is really inciting violence offline. The idea of community moderation in Singapore serves two purposes: (i) to educate the individual that  freedom of speech comes with responsibility and (ii) striving towards a mature society that  allow open debate and diversity. One of the questions which was posed to the panel is the question on how the structure of the IC3 committee can be created and how it can be enforced. We did not elaborate on the details on how a committee can be created and the roles and responsibilities of the IC3. Instead, each one of us offer a different perspective on how it can be formulated and created. After some thinking on my way home, I sketched out three possible models outlining their advantages and disadvantages respectively: A formal IC3 committee seeded by the government (top down approach): One proposal of the IC3 is to follow the model of films repeal board, where selected individuals from various walks of society are invited to listen to the makers of a film that is banned and made a decision whether it should be repealed. In this model, the committee can be seeded by the establishment and slowly the committee can co-opt members from the Internet community or the industry where the technology is evolving. There are two drawbacks with this model. The first issue is the legitimacy of this IC3 committee and some bloggers might see this committee as cronies to the establishment. The second issue is that  unlike the films  repeal board, the action taken by the films committee is of a pre-emptive nature, i.e. the film can only be released upon a fair hearing and decision with the film repeals committee. In the case of controversial incidents in the Internet, the action taken by the IC3 committee is of a reactive nature. Hence a formal IC3 committee may not be quick enough to act before the police is alerted if the blogger has totally crossed the line on race and religion issues. An formal IC3 committee totally formed by the blogosphere (ground up approach): In this model, the government does not play a part in forming the IC3 committee. Instead, it is built from the blogosphere. It starts off from an informal group of bloggers who are ready to flag or advise a blogger in the case of the blog entry crossing the OB markers. This model will take a longer time and some experience from the group of bloggers. Similarly, the legitimacy issue will be questioned. The critics will most likely ask, "What is the moral authority of these group of bloggers?" or "Why should we let them police the blogosphere?" If the IC3's job is to enforce, then the legitimacy argument is valid. Unfortunately, we never conceive the IC3 to be an agency of enforcement. Its role is to serve the purposes of promoting responsible and free speech and issue a condemnation such that the blogger is aware that what's being said is against the social norm. An informal code for all bloggers that naturally creates an IC3 structure in the blogosphere: This has been tried by several bloggers including myself and failed. The idea is to establish a code of ethics and let the bloggers decide whether they want to abide it. In this model, the group of bloggers select a set of guiding principles that both demonstrate free and responsible speech or best practices in blogging such that they can abide an informal code of behaviour. In this model, the entire blogger community which signed up for the code is the IC3 structure. The majority will be able to persuade the single blogger (who is part of the group) for irresponsible behaviour. Like all models, it has a potential drawback: not everyone will want to adhere to a code of ethics. I do have a personal opinion on this matter and I preferred the third model on the basis that everyone is responsible for encouraging free and responsible speech and not a selected group of individuals. While we cannot transition to the third model immediately as our society is struggling with political and social maturity, something must be in place for the transition. That transition will be the first and second model, and the question which we ask will be, "What is the roles and responsibilities of such a committee? How is action taken when a blogger trepasses?" One immediate answer which I brought up is the following: the IC3 committee can flag and issue a condemnation to the blogger who wrote the controversial comments, and it is up to the blogger to do it or not. If the blogger does not, the law enforcement can take place. The real function is to give a period of time to allow some open debate on sensitive issues in Singapore. If we are seriously striving towards a thinking society, then we better start doing something about open and free debate on issues and not name-calling. That comes to my last point. I don't have an answer to the questions posed but offered one viewpoint, "The devil always lies in the details." Acknowledgments: I am glad that several members from the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (AIMS) were present at the seminar. Mr Cheong Yip Seng, chairman of the AIMS committee had offered us his thoughts on the proposal. Tan Tarn How from Institute of Policy Studies and Siew Kum Hong, the nominated member of Parliament were present. I also acknowledged and thanked several members from the public who have contributed their comments and views on the proposal. Do check out Mohd Hisham's twitter and plurks on the timeline of how the event transpired. Related Links: Gerald Giam, Internet Content Consultative Committee Alex Au, Key concerns about internet deregulation emerge at forum Andrew Loh, The long road ahead          Cherian George, Why we need a bottom-up internet content consultative committee Arun Mahizhnan, Rationality vs Political Expediency in Internet Policy   From CommunicAsia 2008 to Crunch Network Meetup in Zouk This week, Singapore hosted the CommunicAsia 2008 in the exhibition halls of Expo. Two days back, I visited the exhibition since the admission is free for anyone. The exhibition encompassed the EnterpriseIT 2008, Broadcast Asia 2008 and Interactive Me as well. Of course, Samsung took the occasion to launch their new smart phone, Omnia in this exhibition. The same day which I visited the exhibition, I managed to arrange a last minute Crunch Network Singapore meet up in Zouk. The meeting is with Greg Kumparak, the MobileCrunch Editor from TechCrunch. So, here are some of the pictures following from the exhibition to the evening meeting. The entire exhibition took up all 7 exhibition halls. Once you reached there, you have to go all the way to Hall 2 for registration. Since the admission is free, the requirement is to fill up a form and get a visitor pass. They split up the passes for both local and global, and it is pretty quick to get into the exhibition. First, you will pass through all the local IT enteprises in Singapore, and once you crossed into the next hall, you will see the IDA exhibition booth with the layout of the Singapore 2015 plan for information technology. Given that the goal is to encourage business to business interactions, the different players (small medium enterprises to multi-national corporations) can communicate with each other to see if any form of cooperation would happen. In any case, some of the start-ups from Thymos Capital are here for the exhibition under the MDA booth, for example, Widgeous. A few interesting exhibits crossed my path. One of them is the sports car which SingTel used for marketing the first Singapore Grand Prix event in September 2008. Other than the sports car skinned with a SingTel logo along with the other few telecommunications companies in the region owned by them, there is also a wardrobe where you will see the gear of a Grand Prix driver. In the exhibition, they also set up two driving simulators for people to try out driving a race car. You can definitely people crowding around. I was told that the same car is also exhibited in the SingTel centre near Kiliney Road, Singapore. While I moved around, you can see the companies releasing their new mobile or smart phones. Definitely, the blackberries and Samsung's new smart phone, the Omnia were presented in the respective booths of the companies. I often thought of a blackberry is a glorified email device and telephone, otherwise, it is not really that much of a device. While I was trying to get my hands to look at the Omnia, the whole place was totally crowded. Since I am not planning to get any smart phone other than the iPhone 3G, I figured that I can give it a miss. I did get the chance to look at it later at Zouk, where I actually met the PR team for the Omnia from the United States. So, in the end, I still managed to get a look at the Omnia in the Crunch Network Gathering 2008. Definitely, I got a glimpse in the Yahoo! booth and the focus for them in this exhibition is on widgets and internet applications. Of course, there is a slight twist towards the mobile. Given the recent Microsoft fiasco to threaten a hostile takeover till Google striking up a partnership, Yahoo! is now relatively a weaker player in the Internet industry. I did recently hear about the Yahoo! is relaunching their email services that has the domain names of @ymail.com or @rocketmail.com. Still, they have gotten to do better if they are thinking of competing against Google's gmail. Still, Yahoo! has a significant market share in Asia. It would be interesting to see if Google's entry into Asia might change the dynamics between these two companies. At the end of the exhibition, for some of the companies which are selling mobile phones and other forms of digital devices, be it just me after going to the PC Show last week, I find that some of these companies are transported from one exhibition to the other. Definitely, I did manage to find the CNBC booth where they interviewed the industry leaders about their thoughts on the IT industry this week. In any case, the evening was the Crunch Network gathering at Zouk. Well, I have talked about what happened there. So, since a picture paints a thousand words, I will just leave the photo for the gathering of the local web community and the Greg here. Related Links:Le Byzantin3 Court, Samsung Omnia Launches at CommunicAsia 2008