A different paradigm for assessing contextual information on mobile

It is funny but when a couple of your trusted filters talk about the same thing in different context and time, you tend to sit up and pay attention. This is what has happened.JP Rangaswami blogged about a Shazam for image in the context of a bird recognizing application. This was echoed by Fred Wilson a couple of months back when he suggested a similar application for tourists. Finally, Tomi Ahonen also talks about a interesting mobile service in Japan that 'uses the camera on the phone.... to read words (and) ..does a dictionary look-up and displays the word in Japanese on the screen.All these suggested a big opportunity: creating a different paradigm for assessing contextual information:-What happens when you can now assess the contextual information embedded in things around you?-Can we...

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Pull platforms need powerful coordination mechanisms

Pull platforms are a great way to build your businesses upon. It will be highly disruptive to whatever industries you are in. Building it however requires lots of experimentations on the right form and shape.One of the challenges is resolving the coordination problem. With so many partners and resources available in a pull platform, how do you make it easy for any party to find, retrieve and use the resources that he needs? It was hinted in the paper that I linked to that Li & Fung uses a low tech solution of calling and faxing to pull in the necessary resources:Li & Fung would be challenged without basic telephone and fax communication networks. How can we make it easier than this? Tagging might one solution. This new perspective makes it clearer to me that we are not done with tagging...

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Startups ideas from comments, tweets and more

Why is conversations important? One of the things they are giving me are plenty of ideas. Here is a couple I have collected the past week.Russell BeattieIf online shops were smart, they'd give a 5-10% discount for your Twitter ID/Password, and then tweet your purchase with a link.My comment: I am thinking of a service that combines the social graph with the affiliate model that is described above. Let the service tell the vendor how 'influential' the user is and set the discounts accordingly. Will this become a market for cashing in your social capital?Taylor Davidson Or perhaps it could help me find gifts for people by feeding in their public data; I know I could use the help picking out gifts :) My comment: Gifts are bounded by their context: to whom, for what, for when and how much. If...

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Business models for public goods (continued)

It has been 2 months since I last posted on this topic. One reason is my inability to find the relevant discussions on the Web (if there is any) that relates to the topic. Without external stimulus, it is hard to contribute anything further than what I have.The drought has ended with Doc Searls post on his PayChoice project, which is an innovation in demand-based pricing.PayChoice will create a “buy button”-simple payment system to allow readers, listeners and viewers to pay whatever they like, at their discretion, for whatever media products they use.One of the interesting concept he talks about is to:Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and to determine how much it is worth to them and..... to...

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Twitter as social VRM: a big idea

I love this idea of Twitter as a social VRM. For those uninitiated, VRM stands for vendor relationship management and is the converse of CRM. It is a powerful way of business engagement that levels the playing field for the customer. Check out the links if you want to find out more.To prove that this is viable, I did a simple experiment on Twitter Search using the phase: I am looking for. The results are pretty interesting. This simple search alone has revealed the intentions of many people that ranges from dating, to products, to jobs etc. The opportunity then is to build tools that allow vendors to respond and for the user to control these...

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Mobile Pearls Vol III

I have fallen behind in my mobile pearls series as very few innovative mobile services/products have come across my way. After weeks of collecting, here is the latest on mobile pearls:iPhone apps for connecting musicians and fansThe free apps include video content from the artists’ Kyte channels, as well as branding and advertising, click-through links to buy music and merchandise, a built-in RSS reader to pull in news updates, and community features like chat, comments and sharing.(Very similar to the previous mobile pearl on adva mobile)Pet Shop Boys introduce fans to QR code in their new music videoThe new video for their recent single, Integral, has QR codes interspersed within urban settings and pixelated images. The website also encourages fans to remix their own versions of the video,...

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A scorecard for building businesses on platforms

I came across an interesting article today that talks about how startups have to decide on which platforms to develop for, given the many open platforms available now and the scare resources that startups have.“A lot of startups are wrestling with prioritizing their relatively scarce resources,” said Jim Hornthal, a partner at CMEA Capital and chairman of TriporatiThis reminds me of an earlier post I wrote about the benefits of building your business on third party platforms. From that post came a good comment by Taylor on the different factors that one needs to consider when deciding on which platform to develop for. This leads to my pondering on whether a scorecard can be useful to provide a first level analysis on what is/are the right platform/platforms for your business.So, this my first...

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What did you learn from your startup failures?

It is common saying that failed entrepreneurs make better entrepreneurs because they have seen it once and know what doesn't work. However, a recent Harvard paper says that such thinking is a myth. An NYtimes article provided the reporting:In other words, trying and failing bought the entrepreneurs nothing — it was as if they never tried. Or, as Professor Gompers puts it, “for the average entrepreneur who failed, no learning happened.”At first, this seem quite shocking to me. Upon reflecting further, including on my own failures, I think the paper may be correct. When you fail as a startup, what did you actually learn? For me, it can be many things, from project management to a wrong business model or even wrong market. However, there are so many failure points that learning from some doesn't...

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A crisis in human resources

A crisis in human resources.That is a brilliant statement from the Sir Kent video that I posted earlier. It describes exactly the problems we have in education. For many years, our education system has prevented individuals exploring and exploiting their passion and talent to the fullest. At this time when we need diversity and talent to innovate ourselves out of institutional decay, we might find ourselves lacking the means to do so.One of the key ideas that stuck me from the video is the non-linear path that our education must evolves around. It is easier to be linear when you know what your passions are and how you can further evolve around...

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Another brilliant video by Sir Ken Robinson

I couldn't get enough of his TED video. It was both highly entertaining and brillantly direct in pointing out our problems in education. This is a follow up video which I have highly enjoyed.Here is the TED video in case you have not seen it...

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A summary of what our startups have achieved for 08

Through the i.JAM programme (a 50k pre-seed grant), we have already funded 120 projects in a 1.25 year period. I thought that this is a good time to share the progress programme and how the startups doing.The entire objective of our programme was to create an easy (minimal transaction costs) way for entrepreneurs to experiment with ideas. I think we have achieved quite successfully. Over the period, we have received more than 800 applications, which is quite remarkable given that Singapore only has a population of 4 million.One common complaint however from some startups is that 50k is not enough to build a business. To this, I reply that it...

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In this crisis, do you choose innovation over revenue?

One of our greatest fear for our startups is that many of them will turn to a service model in their attempts to keep the operations afloat. From a startup point of view, I fully appreciate their intentions of doing so. Personally however, I will not choose such a path.Don't get be wrong, a service model is not a bad revenue model. What troubles me is when a startup switches from a product focus company to become a service company. That indicates a couple of worrying signs to me:The different nature of product and service companiesA product company works very differently from a service company. The kind of business processes and the type of capabilities are vastly different. As John Hagel wrote, a service company 'builds building deep relationships with a target set of customers' while a...

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Thoughts on hacking business schools

Hacking education has been gathering momentum with people like Fred Wilson and Jeff Javier actively arguing for a reinvention of our education system. I have very little to add to their excellent description of the sector's problems and opportunities. However, I want to focus on an area that is not as widely discussed: the failure of our business schools and hence the need to hack it.There was a terrific article in the NYtimes that says the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades. I think there are some truth in that statement. Think about it: when we are in b-schools, all we are taught is that "the new logic of shareholder primacy absolved management of any responsibility for anything other than financial results.” Is it any surprise...

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Thoughts on hacking legal

I have been thinking a lot of the legal industry lately as one of my friends has the unfortunate experience of being retrenched. When we were talking about the industry in general, it occurs to me how deeply out of sync it is with the way our economy is going. I decided to post some of our conversations and my thinking here for further sharing and discussions.Legal practiceThe practice itself will become more consumer oriented, with greater emphasis on personalised and affordable services made possible by web technologies. We will see virtual lawyers and a pull platform that gathers the necessary expertise across the network to help the consumer. All these means taking down the walls that have make lawyers immune to the restructuring of the economy.Legal researchLegal research is now costly...

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Best reads for the weekend of 15th March 2009

Another week, another great set of articles and blogs posts to share. There is so much wisdom, insights, knowledge etc in the Web that we need to seriously rethink how to better harness them.Newspapers and thinking the unthinkableClay Shirky on how we need to experiment relentlessly to create new forms of organisations that better serve the new economy. The current crop of news organizations are built for the industrial era and it is time we let go of them to truly invent the future of news.Related: Old growth media and the future of newsSteven Johnson expanding on the Clay Shirky perspective and giving a detailed interpretation of how future of news would look like. Worth a read as well!Uncorporating the Large FirmA academic paper examining how different structures, beyond the standard corporate...

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Predictive analysis on new data (continued)

I have blogged about how the availability of cheap data is transforming job functions. Today, I just read a BusinessWeek article that talks, interestingly, about how HR is using data mining to determine the value of each employee.I think this is just an early use of abundant data to change how HR is done. It is a very crude way and I don't think that is the direction it will go. What I hope to see is companies facilitating the flow of such information both within the company and to the edge as well. We know now that leveraging on edge competencies is key to next generation businesses. The use of data should enhance the building of such competencies.Here...

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5 filters I used to detect people not suited for entrepreneurship

It is great feeling every time you come across a driven entrepreneur. He/she typically has such commitment, passion and drive in how they carry themselves that it is easy to spot them. The reverse also holds true. It is easy to tell if someone is not suited for entrepreneurship by noticing some characteristics. Below is my personal filters:They are swore to secrecy like their life depend on itI always believe in this: if your only competitive advantage is your idea, it is not something worth supporting. I have came across entrepreneurs who refuses to send me any information about their ideas and yet expect me to fund them. They are afraid of so many things that it becomes a pain just communicating to them. This is a clear signal that I am wasting my time.They have not change their business...

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Building businesses on platforms

I recently saw a comment by Fred Wilson saying 8 out of 25 of his portfolio are building on platforms. It is a rather high number and I wonder about the risk on riding on a single platform. On close inspection though, you will realise these 8 businesses tend to span across platforms. This implies that the value may lie, not only in leveraging on platforms, but in bridging the different platforms.This goes in line with what Tim O'Reilly was saying about building your software above a single device. In this case, it is building your businesses above a singel platform. The benefits of doing so are obvious.First, building across platforms achieves network effects faster.Second, servicing multiple platforms allows aggregation. Disqus is a great example. Now, I can see my comments whether they are...

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Thoughts on hacking finance

Finance has almost been part of my life. My education was in financial economics as in my first job. However, I have a great distaste for the industry and therefore left it to pursue my current interest in digital or new media. Now that Wall Street has self exploded, and we can see clearly how rotten the system is, it is time for startups and entrepreneurs to start reimagining how finance can be made better.A light weight and responsive investment banking modelTraditional investment banks thrive on information arbitrage and limited disclosure, not to mention exploiting customers to the fullest. Next generation investment banks will use technology to empower the customer; giving the customer as much information as possible as well as the tools for them to easily determine and manage his/her...

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Are we done with tagging?

My interest in tagging started way back when Umair Haque was talking about them and how transformative tagging would be. Instead, people tag things they prefer, and ignore things they think don't prefer. In this way, preferences get implicitly aggregated, and then coordinated. That is, if 400 people tag bubblegen with technology, you might also reasonably suspect a significant proportion of them think it was cool enough to tag, which goes on to coordinate your preferences about bubblegen.One immediate area when tagging can exert powerful influence is in the area of search. Tags represents an alternate way to find stuff.At some point, tagging becomes more efficient than search. This point is reached when the number of Google clicks is greater than the number of related tag clicks (or similar...

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What are the insitutional innovations needed for government?

People always talk about how difficult business strategies are to develop and implement. I think doing it on a national level, to an entire industry is even harder. In a company, there are already many moving parts but for a country, that number just shoots up exponentially.Recently, I was drafted into a working committee that is part of a bigger agenda of conducting an economic review of Singapore. The challenge to my committee was to review the entire creative industries, including digital media and to make policy recommendations on what need to be done to this sector. Where do we start?The initial thought was to suggest streamlining the operations...

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Exploring attention markets

I blogged about Digg clones before and how they failed to understand the true economics behind services like Digg: attention markets.Here is a new startup from the Ycombinator (Wintor 09) that begins to explore different market structures for attention markets.The voting on thesixtyone is combined with some concepts learned from video games. Listeners cannot just indiscriminately heart up any song they want. They are given a limited number of heart points on a daily basis. More points can be earned for identifying good music early or recruiting friends to the service. Songs can only be given positive heart points, however. They can’t be demoted...

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Best reads for the weekend of 8th March 2009

This past week has been interesting, with lots of discussions and ideas on next generation businesses. Here are some of my personal favorites:Hacking educationA great post with some powerful comments. With open course ware, and the myriad of social service models, it is much easier now to experiment on what education can be. The potential to create value in this broken education value chain is just too irresistible. To follow the discussions on this topic. this is a good place to start.Related: P2p marketplace for learningShifting search from static to real timeThis is post that is a couple of months ago but the opportunity it highlights is still relevant. Real time search however is a sub set of a bigger trend: real time interactions. Real time is not new in the area of distribution or delivery,...

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How do we create better conversations?

My last post on local startups not leveraging on R&D generate zero comments on this blog. However, over at my facebook profile, lots of people commented on that post, or more specifically, the title of that post. That incident alone generated a few pondering thoughts that I wanted to share here.The first thought I have was about the portability of conversations. Despite the fact that the comments on my Facebook might be relevant to this blog, there is no way (that I know of) to carry that conversation over here. This reminds me of the discussions on the portability of the social graph a few months back, which is resolved with Friends Connect....

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Why are local startups not interested in R&D

We have now supported a couple of international research centres that are doing interested things in digital and social media. Most of these R&D will be made available for startups to exploit and commercialise. Thing is, I have not seen any interest from the startup community at all. R&D is interesting to me because they are solving very hard problems. Problems that startups might not have the resources or capabilities to solve. The resulting solutions might unlock value that startups can capitalise on.Let's look at one concrete example. There has been talks about Twitter being a real time search engine. However, real time search is tough, especially if you think of non text data streams such as live video streams provided by 12seconds. One of the labs we are forming is a combination...

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The ebook market is picking up pace

Ebooks have been picking up pace in recent months and I want to take this post to summarise what has been happening so far.The most easy way to start is to see some numbers. O'reiliy's blog mentions that the fastest growing category in itune is book. The interesting thing, beyond the growth, is the fact that iphone is becoming the next ebook reader, something that a lot of people didn't expect to happen. With Google and Amazon now making their ebooks available in Apple's platform, it is emerging as one of the leading ebook device.Despite the growth, I feel that the potential of the ebook is far from realised ( have blogged about such potential before). This has been echoed by debates on whether are we having the wrong conversations about ebook pricing, instead of focusing them on new creative...

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Simple idea: creating financial app on iPhone for this part of the world

I came across this interesting post about Google engineers making a finance app for android.we added more features with the aim of allowing users to get stock quotes, market data, and news as fast as possible. If you are following the markets throughout the day, check out the real-time streaming quotes in your portfolio, fast stock look-ups with search auto-suggestion, and 'recent quotes' to make it even easier receive quotes on-the-go. For each stock, you can see detailed quotes, charts and news, and any change you make to your portfolio automatically syncs up with the Google Finance website.It was something I think will be useful and went about looking for a iPhone version. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one that covers this part of the world. I think this is something that people will find...

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Organising conversations

'Markets are conversations'In my view, that is the most powerful line in the Cluetrain manifesto. Markets have always been about conversations. People talk about stuff and exchange ideas. Traditionally however, these conversations are perishable i.e. once spoken, the conversation is gone. They are also restricted to face to face meeting.Now with the web and the proliferation of services such as Twitter, Disqus, Backtype, the Facebook Status API etc, we are now able to do much more with our conversations. Ideas can now be stored and referred. Interactions can be searched. Questions can be answered regardless of time. Useful exchanges can be forwarded and shared. This simple fact changes the whole dynamics of conversations and in the process, of markets.Conversations however creates attention...

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5 ways to make a better mobile ebook reader

Inspired by Seth Godin's post on reinventing the Kindle, here are my ramblings on how to make a better mobile ebook reader:Focus on sharing for non friction booksTravel guides, receipt books, open source textbooks, self-help references, business books etc can be more enjoyable when you can share notes and highlights. Think that a business idea is great? Highlight it for your friends to read. Have questions on a particular topic? Share your queries with those who bought the same book. Want to suggest improvements on a particular receipt? Annotate your improvements for your fellow readers to see.Imagine a feature where you can use a digital marker...

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Best reads for the weekend of 28th Feb 2009

Here are what I found to be the most interesting reads during the weekend:Example of how online communities works for traditional industry:Very good case studies to understand how the power of online communities can be applied in non-digital industries.Book publishers to commit the same mistake as music labelsHistory always repeat itself. A startup will ask what opportunities have been created by the iTune marketplace and what can he/she do to participate in the new opportunities created by the ebook market.Why do companies exist?A powerful piece on rethinking organisation models to unlock scalable connections and learning capabilities.Reinventing the KindleSeth Godin's take on how to make a bettwe Kindle with implications for the ebook mark...

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