However, once I was at the event, I was quite pleased that I got out of bed. Although there were no oversea speakers this year, the sessions were quite interesting. I gathered quite a bit of information and was inspired by a couple of the speakers.

Every hour, two sessions of presentations/ discussions happened concurrently in separate rooms. I had a hard time choosing which ones to sit in. A lot of the speakers are old friends and some are “online acquaintances”. Since I was there to learn, explore and hear from everyone, I chose the ones with speakers whom I have not really had much interactions with in the past. I ended up in the following sessions:-

1) Melvin and Walter’s combined session (phew, no need to choose). As usual, the two never fail to impress.

2) Charlie Pownall from Burson Marsteller on the topic of e-fluentials and shared a survey the agency did in US. Pretty insightful but would be great to have a look at the Asian scenes.

3) Preetam Rai - The guy whose brother works in the same company as me and have been an online acquaintance for a while now. Today’s the first time we met in person. I really enjoyed Preetam’s session. I have been looking for interesting bloggers in Asia and Preetam shared his recommended list.

4) Michael Netzley – Again. Another online friend who I have always wanted to meet. Michael’s session was very inspiring – about wikis and educating the Gen-Y. Earlier this year, I stumbled upon the wiki Michael set up with his students as part of SMU’s social media course. I find the wiki very informative. Definitely a great effort by the students.

5) Finally, Amelia Wong shared her experience as a food blogger. Apparently, the pretty lady can bake some really delicious cupcakes. I can neither bake nor take beautiful pictures, so I am just going to admire her work for now and perhaps try to persuade Jon to copy the recipes and bake me a birthday cake!

For more details on the different sessions:-

Claudia has done a very good job – live-blogged at the different sessions. Robin and his team who put together this year’s podcamp had also written about it if you want more references.

The session that I missed and really wanted to sit in was the one on podcasting in Singapore by the tech65 guys

Overall, I thought the 6 hours at podcamp 2008 today were well-spent! And I kicked myself for forgetting my camera battery – have to wait for Mark to upload his photos as I was using his!

Since I was 4 years old, I had always wanted to be a musician. I played the keyboard and piano for 14 years but the music dream didn’t really come true. Ended up doing arts and design and somewhere over the years, started doing something else, completely different. So, here’s where I am now. No complaints though. I love what I do now.

Last evening, I was at Zouk and for the first time, heard the local indie/po punk band – Plainsunset played. When Jonathan and my very cool colleague Ray (who also plays in another local band, Kate of Kale) first told me about Plainsunset some weeks ago, I had never heard of them. I was actually surprised that Jon has their albums. I heard their songs from his iTunes collection and thought they were quite good and last night, hearing them live was pretty awesome!

Ok. I didn’t really go to Zouk for the bands.

It was more for work. And that’s where the other group of local young talents are found. At the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Awards (YMDA) part.

I am trying not to pull anything from the press release into this post. You can find out more yourself, if you are one of those developers who are exploring to develop cool applications for mobile.

Briefly, the competition is about encouraging young developers from tertiary institutes to innovate and create mobile-optimised applications using Yahoo!’s latest mobile development platform - Yahoo! Blueprint based on real business briefs from 4 corporate sponsors, including DBS Bank, Kellogg Asia, Malaysia Airlines and travel portal UEEEU.com.

The party last night was to award 4 winning teams and one Best in Show.

DBS bank widget won the Best in Show

What impressed me most was the quality of submissions from the young developers who created what we called mobile widgets . Check out some of the screenshots of the winning mobile widgets.

IZ Reloded’s who joined us at the party had done some video interviews and shared some pictures of the event.

Looking at the local bands and the young developers, I have to say, we have some really talented people in this city.

Wikipedia: Flaming is the hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users.

I was “entertained” for a very short while and decided that, time will be better spent reading some good old intelligent posts. Going through my hundreds of RSS feeds had been something I did on a daily basis some months ago. Work has taken over those time and I can only scan briefly over some news blogs lately. Today, I managed to get home earlier than usual and spent some time in front of my netnewswire.

Something crossed my mind, I remembered how mummy used to say to me when I was young, “read good books. read the classics. leave out the junk and those with bad writing.” When I grew up, she said, “Some magazines are worth the time, others obviously not. Don’t waste your money.” I totally love trashy chick-lits and the gossip magazines. BUt I have been good, I have got piles of C.S Lewis and George Eliot on my shelves, together with many other great books (all thanks to Jon, spoiling me and filing the shelves with books). If only mummy is more tech savvy, she would be telling me now to “go to bed and not waste time reading silly blog posts.”

For some reasons, I find that this blog is read by mostly communications students, PR folks and lecturers (I know, because you guys are nice enough to comment and email me) – both locally and in other countries. So, I thought, perhaps it might be good to share a couple of great blogs that have great writing and unique views (that mummy would have approved) and that I have enjoyed reading:-

Here goes…

Jeremy Pepper’s POP! PR JOts. One of my favourite posts in his – What does the P in PR stand for?. It was a fairly old post but READ IT!

Brendan Cooper, the friendly social media planner. All time favourite is his monthly PR blog index. Imagine those great effort of analysing and pulling together 100 PR blogs every month and ranking them. (And yes, my blog has been slipping every month, heh.. can’t blame anyone except for my lack of posts and activities) but otherwise, this guy has got some real cool stuff (social, new media and PR) in the blog.

I enjoyed almost everything in Brian Solis’ PR 2.0. Enough said.

I found David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now after I read his great book and have been a big fan of his ever since. So, check out both the blog and the book, esp. if you are into communication, new media or marketing.

Next, a very good friend, Kevin Lim directed me to Paul Stamatiou’s blog last year. Paul’s blog is not exactly into PR or marketing but more on tech. If you are into web 2.0 and new technologies, this 22 year-old blogger is definitely worth checking out! My favourite post recently is his review on WALLLLLLL….EEEEEE. I love Wall.E

And not forgetting my dear friend, Kevin Lim. He covers almost – EVERYTHING. His blog covers mainly technology, but be surprised and find different interesting observations from kevin! BTW, my blog is set up with huge help from him! Theory.isthereason is probably one of those blogs that I spent most time reading and commenting on. A search in his blog for my name, finds previous posts and stuff we discussed and commented on. He is currently in Buffalo and many of us back in Singapore is looking forward to him coming home!

That’s all for now! Happy reading!

Several topics and thoughts went through my mind the last few days and I shall try to jot them down in this and next couple of posts.

One of my colleagues came to Singapore from Sunnyvale to work on a project with me and we had a chat about how different the bloggers are in Singapore VS those in the U.S . He was highly amused at the “type” of bloggers that show up at events and the things they blog about.

I was discussing the same topic with another friend who commented that, perhaps the blogosphere here is not as sophisticated and generally still revole around recreational writing rather than niche blog posting. For example, I have always been trying to find influential technology experts who blog and have a healthy traffic in Singapore. I can only think of, perhaps 2-3 right now. If i am a client, trying to reach out to tech bloggers here, i have extremely limited options and would probably end up raeching out to tier 2 (and slightly less tech-savvy) bloggers.

I guess, this post is also directed to the social media consultants who are constantly advising clients to include bloggers outreach in PR/ marketing campaigns. It is definitely more than relationship building with the bloggers, we need to also know what we want to tell and WHO we want to tell it to.

Why would I want a popular food blogger (who might have 20,000 readers) whose interest is in food, restaurant reviews and receipes to try force a new high-tech application launch to his face and get him/ her to write about it?

If i am announcing a business strategy, why would i get a 17-year-old blogger (regardless of how popular his blog is) who writes in broken English to review our announcement?

Reach is one thing, influence is another. Quality (as in targeted audience and type of blogs) is definitely key. As a client, if i were to hold a bloggers outreach event (ie: in the office), to launch a new product, I would probably love to read/ hear about what the bloggers think of the product, ask intelligent questions about it and even if the post is controversial/ negative, at least it helps the client /company understand what users are thinking. What a client probably doesn’t necessary need is the blogger’s thoughts about the furniture, the carpet, the toilet signboard or the noodles he/she ate during the event and no mention about the product. When this happen, I can’t help but wonder where the problem lies.

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Some interesting blog posts:-

Brendan Hodgson wrote about “There’s more to digital PR than social media“

Brian Solis on “Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations“

Kevin Lim’s (non-social media post) but a hot topic on iPhone in Singapore

I noticed that a lot of bloggers are spending less time blogging but continue to be “social” on other networks such as twitter, facebook and flickr. Sometimes, I find my flickr pictures receiving more comments and views than my blog posts. I guess, the good old saying of “a picture paints a thousand words” is the reason why many people (myself included) start spending a little more time putting up our favourite pictures that document our interests and life.

A quick look at my current flickr, you can almost tell Jon and my obsession with monkeys.

A couple of weeks back, I read in The New York Times:

As part of an effort to expand access to its photograph collections and tap the collective knowledge of user-generated content, the Library of Congress Wednesday launched a pilot project with photo-sharing site Flickr to publish some 3,000 photos.

The key goals of this pilot project named The Commons are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

My friend, Ivan Chew wrote a fantastic post about it at his Rambling Librarian blog. (read more here, especially the part about whether community blogging will work).

This is usually what happens when you are in a new job, a bigger role and everything’s new. You spend every possible waking hours trying to read alot of information, talking to many people, think and think about how to make various things work to make sense.

The good news is, I have learnt so much in the last 3 weeks about everything mobile and of course, the big purple house. I am attached to the mobile business division of the company called Connected Life, managing the communications for the Asia region. Before this job, I was spending my time exploring the whole web2.0 (thus the creation of this blog and signing up at a whole load of social networks) and not paid much attention to the mobile space. The last few weeks opened up new perspectives on social media on the go. (hopefully, I can start sharing more when I settle in).For now, I am happy with a brand new BlackBerry Curve and unlimited data access! For those who have followed news at CES and heard Jerry Yang’s keynote, (and I am not promoting the company’s product) but my brother and I are having alot of fun with the new beta Yahoo! Go 3.0.

Try it or read more about what others wrote. This is the case of not having to even provide links, do a quick search for Yahoo Go 3.0 and you get endless pages of news/ blog links. Wonderful thing to do communications/ PR for a brand like this. I am excited!

There will be a lot to see in just four days (Jan 7 to 10). Spreading across 1.8 million net square feet of exhibits, 2700 participating companies, key note addresses, the industry insider series and other conference sessions plus alot of walking (so, i was told by a well-meaning colleague).

A sneak peak of some of the new new technology that will be on display at the show here:-

What I can’t miss is obviously Jerry Yang, CEO and Chief Yahoo! of Yahoo! Inc., who will delivering an Industry Insider address, sharing his views on the evolution of the Internet technology. Michael Muchmore of PC mag wrote that he is expecting many of the software announcements at CES to revolve around social networking, mobile internet apps, online digital media, and image and video editing. I am definitely looking forward to that too!
I am not sure how much time I have to walk around and hopefully capture as many interesting things as I can, but I am getting ready my comfy shoes and camera!

Timothy and I are planning to catch Zumanity at Cirque du Soleil one of the evenings, also catching up with my ex-client at Cirque after that. I am also hoping to meet up with with some bloggers whom I’ve been keeping in touch with online. Before I get back to Singapore from San Francisco, I am also planning to have dinner with my dear friend, Kevin who is heading to the Mac World Expo right after the CES in SF.

Exciting days ahead! For now, I have to continue my last minute Christmas shopping and get ready for my trip (there’s actually alot to prepare and do before then)! Thank Goodness, my wonderful colleague, Jeremy has been helping me with all the flight booking and details.

I came across this interesting article in MarketingWeb, mentioning the following stats:-

With an estimated 240 million wireless subscribers in the US, mobile is already a US$350-billion sector. According to Nielsen Mobile:

• 32 million use their phones to go online
• 70% send or receive text messages
• 41% percent use their wireless devices to send photos

The article also wrote:-

…… The old media broadcast model is dying
The idea of a media-consuming public that sits passively in front of a TV set is fast being replaced by a vibrant, active community of shared upstream content providers.

With the mobile phones being very much integrated into our daily lifestyle, it is no wonder that Nokia, the mobile phone maker recently launched its first ever video podcast (titled 14Days to signify the frequency of each episode) for its Nseries phone devices to ensure they stay top of mind amongst the consumers.

Thanks to Brian (from Ogilvy, Singapore) who alerted me to the vodcast

Hosted by “Girl with the number 11 briefcase” in the TV game show, Deal or No Deal (Singapore), Claire Jedrek attempts to show viewers how to take your mobile device (to be more specific – your Nokia Nseries handset) to the next level in each episode of 14Days.

The 14Days vodcast was conceptualised by Ogilvy, created by The Creative Room and produced by Nokia. All viewers have to do is to watch it online, download it to your mobile device or subscribe to it with an RSS feed.

I’ve just downloaded the latest episode into my new video iPod and of course, you can put them into any Nseries devices which I am planning to get one – the N95!! (featured in the pilot episode of the vodcast series).

Bloggers such as DK and Su Yuen who had seen the first episode think that the tips and tricks for the N95 were too “far fetched” and not “particularly interesting” The latest episode titled “VPL” was a let-down for me. After watching the episode, I was wondering “uh, where are the promised nifty ideas to push technology to the next level?” Well, the key message for the N76 is clear though – it’s a chick phone!

I thought the second episode, titled “Heroes” was quite cool, with Claire and a local blogger, teaching viewers how to freeze time and teleport at will with the Nokia N93i.

Brian was sharing with me that one of the main draws about the Nseries phones is that they are multimedia convergent devices, hence having vodcasts such as 14Days pushed the envelope in terms of showcasing the mobile convergence, the connectivity of the phone as well as accessing high quality multimedia while on the go.

This move (the creation of the vodcast) attempts to show the power and potential of the Nseries range, and also hopes to increase adoption and promotion of podcast and vodcast technology.

I am keen to find out what is the pick-up/ download statistics of the vodcast at the end of its series. It will also be interesting (as Su Yuen mentioned in her post) to see some user generated content, spinning off from the vodcast series. As the article in MarketingWeb mentioned, the next big trend is to see how social networking works on mobile.

Two weeks ago, Jonathan and I had to find a hotel in Singapore for him to stay in for 2 weeks as he was moving house and there was a transition period. After searching via Google for a long time for the right place with the right price, The MediaSlut reminded me that Bezurk can search for multiple results at one go.

That was when I first tried out the site and I must say, it is such a great experience that I am sharing it in this post (for the benefit of my girlfriends who are searching for holidays’ flight, hotels, packages, activities available in the countries they are visiting).

So, what exactly is Bezurk? In their own words:-

Bezurk is a travel search engine. Think of Bezurk as a price comparison website that helps you find the perfect flight, hotel, or travel package for your specific needs. Instead of having to trawl through many different travel sites, Bezurk provides the information you need to find your perfect travel purchase, be it airline tickets to Phuket, a hotel room for 2 in Bangkok, or activities you can experience while in Tokyo, all on a single site: Bezurk.com.

I am going to Shanghai in December for a short break, maybe to Thailand as well. So, I’ve been spending the last one week searching for flights, hotels and deals on Bezurk. Being a search engine, it does not sell me anything but link me to travel agents, hotels and suppliers to book directly. The user experience is definitely close to 5-stars!

Other bloggers and journalists have also been raving about the service and here’s Su Yuen who mirrored my thoughts:

Apart from just flights, their search engine caters to hotels and tour packages as well. What I particularly like is how detailed their filtering system is. You can filter your results by pricing, airline, hotel star-rating & etc. My MOST favourite filtering of all is “Features the hotel MUST have” which of course for me was the broadband Internet access. Too bad they couldn’t take this filtering a step further to “FREE broadband access”.

I totally agree with Su Yuen’s review. Must-haves for me when I search for hotels, include swimming pool and Internet access. What is really cool about the “refine your search” column, it displays currency so that I don’t have to log on to another converter site to determine how much I have to pay in SGD and also the price range bar – way cool! The search results change and update as you refine your search. No wonder it was named one of the world’s hottest startups by Business 2.0. (Ross made a disclaimer during his presentation that they have nothing to do with the publication’s shut-down – funny!)

My good friend Walter has the following comment which I thought was valid to some extend:

…. the unfortunate thing is that it comes pretty late after a slew of many other similar travel/airline/hotel portals. Standing out from the competition will be a challenge unless it can offer something truly unique which the rest can’t. What I would like to see is a greater effort to simplify the entire experience and add a greater human touch to the entire encounter. This is what social media is all about anyway – humans conversing with each other and interacting in such a way that makes transactions enriching and fulfilling.

I didn’t think it was that complicated. And though the site is younger than the other portals, I see unique features and powerful engine that separate it from others. What I do agree is to have some form of human touch, get some conversation going and spread the good words about both the site and its advertisers/ partners.

I can’t say there was alot of “style” at PopOut! - (an event aimed at engaging the community, students, technopreneur, venture capitalist and startups interested in the web2.0 services) but there were definitely some good presenters and a bunch of “geeky” but fun and savvy audiences. The content was pretty good too – informative and some great insights into a few cool start-ups with inspiring stories and products to tell.

What wowed the crowd and ME was Herryanto Siatono, the creator of BookJetty. The simple fact that it was books related caught my attention. In fact, it was the reason why I decided to pop down to the event. I briefly mentioned BookJetty in one of my previous post when I was comparing social book sites and what is really cool about bookjetty is the SMS service that allows users to receive SMS about details of the book they are looking for in the libraries.

TheMediaSlut wrote a more detailed post about Herry’s points.

And I signed up at BookJetty this morning. I just have to keep updating my ever-growing booklists.

The other presentation that I enjoyed was by Gen Kanai, director of marketing and partner relations, Mozilla Japan who gave a preview on Firefox 3.0 – way cool!

Check out some of the cool features at Claudia’s blog

Ross from Bezurk did a rather interesting presentation, giving quite a bit of insights and tips to entrepreneurs. I thought that was great, instead of just shouting your own products.

The other few presentations -ZopIM , Quaffs and Recruit.net, I didn’t really get what they were talking about. Perhaps I was not the target audience or maybe my anti-biotic pills were kicking in by then, making me really drowsy (yes, I was not feeling very well that night and spent the next whole day in bed with a fever).

Lastly, I did make some new friends at the event and caught up with some “old” ones. Said bye bye to Bjorn Lee (who had been my lunch “date” for a while) and now he is in Beijing, on a new job – awesome! Managed to meet up with new friends whom I chatted and blogged with online – Darryl Kang, Brian Koh and Coleman Yee. Nice to be able to put faces to the names.