Milestone for a Programming Idiot

Yup, that idiot’s me. =D It took a long time in making the decision but you gotta do what you gotta do.

To all my regular readers, I finally managed to get my own domain up and running and will be blogging at www.bjornlee.com from today.

To ease the transition, I might pop by this site here and then but all comments and new posts will go up at the new blog. Its a big leap of faith, i know. But owning your own domain offers me more control over the look and feel of the blog. I am really new at maintaining my own site and will be gentle.

To my dear feed readers, I will need you kind souls to update your feeds. (New feed link to my left. Feed icon on the sidebar will also be updated from now on.) If there is any problems with that, feel free to drop me a line anytime. I understand many of my feed readers are new so please bear with me. I promise i won’t change my blog again for at least some years.

To my fellow bloggers, please update your links and help me boost my PageRank. I really appreciate it.

Thank y’all!

Wrote a Business Plan when you were 17?

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.

Gmail: The Video

For those still stuck on Yahoo Mail or lousy Hotmail, get a life. =D

Made by the Gmail team, this video is great for pple who dunno about its kickass features. Especially in Asia where so many pple are still stuck on oter crappy email apps. Having used Gmail for a long time, I like the video cos I was able to see why a new user will like Gmail cos it really solves problems in sorting out the mess in your inbox.

Credit to Tony Chung’s Geekwhat.

How to Design Web 2.0 Logos

Web 2.0 logos are clearly distinguishable from their look and feel. But how do you put a finger to it in terms of design style? Check out this blog for an overview of the most popular logos we see.. The font of some logos are also identified, which really helps since its a bitch for graphic designers in trying to find them… (or at least for amateurs like me)

Get your web marketing education, you Old Media guy..

Jeremiah Owyang, from Podtech, has this beautiful summary of the various web marketing forms and tactics. I think of this post as the beginnings of the definitive guide that will enter all major marketing textbooks over the next couple of years. Get a headstart on everyone else NOW. If your company’s marketing director is pondering whether web marketing is restricted to mailing lists, newsletters or think that buying banner ads is really advanced, get ready for a re-education.

My favourite part is Section 5 “Community and Social Media Marketing”. I believe widgets will rule this year and get really mainstream, after Vista launches.

Unlearn English with Zlango

Zlango has received $12M funding from Accel Partners (fyi, the facebook investors) and Benchmark Capital. The service they provide is a text-to-icon translation service. I see it having immense impact among the IM users of ages 10-16 , also regarded as the next generation of kids who already are struggling with their English writing. Zlango, if successful, will eradicate the use of english over the web. We will enter the Web Version of the Caveman Era.

Here’s a horrible peek into the future, with the Adam and Eve story from the Zlango site.

I think its a ridiculous idea. I already dislike people who use too much icons to talk in IM, why the hell do I want more? Did I tell you this site was created by the Israelis? Man, I should emigrate there, my fart could probably be the next bio-fuel to solve the world’s problems.

The Commoditizing of Social Networking Sites

GigaOm makes his point on something I fully agree – social networking will become a feature.

Why? Because social networking as an independent subject matter by itself gets boring after a while. Scale has already been achieved by those that focuses on social networking as the end goal – MySpace and Facebook. You have to provide a greater utility beyond just “linking to your friends online”. Nor will explicit dating as the end-goal be a compelling reason for people to join a social network. I rest my case for networks like Xuqa that plastered hot chicks on their homepage a while back in order to lure desperados.

But I do not think the social networking war has ended. The definition of social networking is pretty wide to encompass just about any site that allows you to browse other people’s pofiles and connect with them as “friends”. Friendster used to dominate a few years ago, and then usurped by a new generation of teeny-boppers who never heard of Friendster but used MySpace instead. Similarly, MySpace will also be susceptible to an upstart social network – one that began by being highly customized for a local niche group, like the high school students 5 years from now who think MySpace is lame and want something their own generation created. There is, after all, a limit to the number of friends you can maintain online, hence network size, which MySpace has now, might not ensure its longevity. Secondly, a premium-content-based approach taken by Fox to make MySpace an entertainment portal is still an experiment by Old Media to see if they can transplant their ways successfully to a new medium. First movers never always win.

What do you think? Want to make your own social network today? See a list of turnkey solutions here.