Hacking is everywhere

Hacking is our new manifesto. With the marcopocalypse staring in our face, the pressure to hack our current economy is greater than ever. Fortunately, it is also now easier to get our hands on resources and begin hacking the stale industries that need reinvention. Everyday, I see more and more of such examples. I want to share it here and hopefully inspired more smart entrepreneurs to start hacking our industries.Hacking Uninsured WorkersDr. Ores is also a physician who runs a nonprofit health care cooperative for city restaurant workers that he sees as a model for how national health care could work. Under the plan, he charges each restaurant a dollar each month for every seat in the establishment and pools the money. In return, any employee from those restaurants can visit him free of...

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What I have learned from StockTwits

My previous post has briefly mention how StockTwits is pioneering a powerful new community model. There are actually more learning points to that. I want to share what I have observed from using the service and looking at its growth and strategies. StockTwits is pioneering something important and we can all learn from it.Leveraging on abundance of content but scarcity in wisdomStocktwits has very smartly avoided being another platform for content production. We have already too much of that. What we need and what StockTwits has provided is wisdom. They have used a very elegant tagging system to intelligently filter content from Twitter.Letting business model 'happen'The blogging platform it has created lets the talent have a stage to do their thing. (Note: this platform is different from...

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Admin note: carnival of mobilists #171

Carnival of the Mobilists #171 is up at CatalystCodehttp://www.catalystcode.com/theconversation/blog/My post on 15 Twitter Ideas was fortunately selected to be on this edition of the carnival.I took a glance at the rest of carnival and some of it looks interesting. If you are interested in mobile learning, advertisements etc, do pop up and take a look. Related articles by Zemanta Admin note: carnival of mobilists #161 (ac-idealog.blogspot.com) Carnival of the Mobilists #159 (ac-idealog.blogspot.com) ...

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Adding value to aggregation

Continuing from my previous post on democratizing aggregation, I want to elaborate about the value beyond bringing all the information together. That is only the first step. In fact, it is one of the least value adding aspect of aggregation. The important thing is what you do with the information you have aggregated. Here are three ways that you can add value to any aggregation service:Search and coordinationAggregation is mainly about data but search transforms data into information. If you add in the ability to coordinate actions, such that deals or actions can be closed much more effectively (food aggregator allows you to book restaurants...

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4 big opportunities for radical innovation in media

Umair Haque has a talk that finally brings everything together to help us understand the new economics of music (and media). Go and listen to it. It will help you better understand where are the value drivers and how radical innovation will happen.The sound in the video is a bit soft and most people might not have the time to sit through. Here, I have summarised the 4 big opportunities below. If you are a startup in media, these are the value proposition that you should think about:Information about preferences (or demand)The simple thing about demand is this: know what your customers want. Yet, many of the media companies simply don't have...

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Democratising agggregation

Fred Wilson has a post today that celebrates aggregation. I agree that aggreagators have changed the media landscape. Similar to Fred, I no longer consume my news via direct visits to the sources of the news. Instead, I rely on my aggregators such as Hacker news, Techmeme, Twitter etc to highlight interesting news before visiting the source directly.However, the current technical barrier to creating aggregators is still quite high. This has limit aggregation to the realm of startups. Why is this so? We are all curators in our own areas. We just need a simple service to help us organise our curations and share with it with whoever that wants it.It...

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10 random mobile startup ideas

Having strong interest in mobile, it is little wonder that I have a sudden surge of mobile startup ideas after reading Tomi Ahonen's mobile pearls volume 2 and rereading volume 1 as well. By the way, if you are interested in turning these ideas into real companies but lack funds, why not consider start up loans? 1. Alternative payment platform for mobile applications With the coming of in game currencies on iPhone applications, players are going to want alternate ways to get those currencies beyond paying their money for it. That is where alternate payment platforms likeOfferpay Media comes in. They offer a service for people to conduct actions...

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Pictures of Tim Draper karaoking in Singapore

Something about these pictures is disturbing to ...

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Why I used Twitter for market research on startups

As part of my job, I typically conduct market research on the Web to find out more about the markets that applicants of our startup fund are developing in. My routine would be something like this:-Start with some random Google searches to have an overview of the market as well as to find out the key players-Look at research reports (if available) that highlights the potential of the addressable markets-Go to Compete or Alexa to see how the key players are doing in terms of traffic-Search in crunchbase or other startup sites to see if similar services are availableAll these are well and good but I feel that these information are not direct. There is a disconnect between what I have searched and the real pain points in the market. Where are the voices of users? Where are the people who are suffering...

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Who wants to create a MyTopLinks with me?

Dave Winer has quietly created a very powerful service called TopLinks. It is a service that enables individual author to submit links, which are then voted by the community to determine how they rank. The author is the only one who can do the submissions, hence controlling the quality of the news.I think this is a very elegant model. In effect, it has the curation ability of an editor while being able to tap on the wisdom of crowds. The resulting page is a personalised Techmeme, one which can be shaped by any author.Toplinks is a solution for the Twitter attention problems that we are experiencing. It has effectively transform information flows into attention markets. That is a really powerful value proposition.I really love this concept and has some ideas on taking it to the next level....

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5 ideas for the new ebook landscape

Steven Johnson wrote one of the most relevant article about the future of ebooks. If you have not read it, I would advice you to do so if you are interested this market.(Side note: I am advising a startup in the ebook market and they are working on one of the key value propositions highlighted in the article: the ability to make passages and sentences the key unit of consumption rather than the whole book. Such a change is non-trival. Just ask Twitter.)If you read the trends correctly, there are actually a number of opportunities a startup can pursue. Here is my list of 5 ideas:1) Helping content to move across different readers and applicationsI believe that ebook readers will proliferate. There will be many devices and applications that enable ebooks to be read. While this creates complications,...

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Interactions that can enrich our social networks

Continuing from my previous post, I want to be sharper in drawing out the opportunities in social networks. More specifically, I want to suggest some possible interactions that have missing in many of the current social networks that we see.The current way we conduct commerce is very inefficient. One of the contributors is the amount of resources we spent on blind advertising. Social networks can replace the inefficiencies by becoming a powerful referral network that recommends the right products and services for their communities, taking into account the members' context. It can potentially transform commerce and become the default way we buy and consumer stuff. That is the true potential of social networks.To accomplish that, we need richer interactions that goes beyond what our current...

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Is there money in social networks?

Social networks have a very bad name. Whenever some startups open their pitch saying: we are a social network for XXX, many people would roll their eyes. I was one of those people. I thought that the social networking game has already been won. However, after reading the book "the social network business plan", I realise we may be on the blink on seeing what social network can unleash.One of the reasons we write off social networks is the narrow perception we have of them. We have a fixed view of the kinds of interactions that social networks enabled . Typically, we are restricted to think of interactions such as friending, poking, updating profiles etc. That is too limiting.If we expand our view to include 'social networks' such as Threadless, PatientsLikeMe etc, the scope for powerful interactions...

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The browser for your conversation graph

There is a discussion on Techmeme about Seesmic Desktop vs TweetDeck. While the comparison is interesting, the bigger point is the strategic importance of these conversation aggregators. I think they are are a powerful area to think about because they are the consumer interface to our conversation graph.These conversation aggregators control the browsing of our conversations. They have the potential to create powerful value propositions if they play their cards right. For example:- they can recommend relevant discussions and people to you based on your preference and what you have consumed and talked about (essentially overtaking Mr Tweet)- they can add value to the links such as extracting the articles from the links and presenting them in another column- they can allow users to add layers...

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15 Twitter startups ideas from the Web

Micro blogging is becoming a land of opportunities. If you like to read what I have already blogged about it, here are the relevant posts.i) Startup Idea #109: 6 Twitter ideas ii) How do we create better conversations?iii)Twitter is cooler when it becomes mainstreamiv)Twitter as social VRM: a big idea Beyond this, there are tons of interesting ideas from the Web. Here is a list of what I have found to be the most relevant. Most of them are related to Twitter but can be applied to micro blogging in general. Note that those with * denotes my favorites. 1a. TweetSenseJohn Battelle's idea on force fitting Google's adsense model into Twitter. Will it work? Probably in the short term but as its costs overwhelms the benefits, we will more likely see marketing as described in (1b) below:Marketers...

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Why social tags are more powerful than tags

I think tags started at the wrong foot. When early services like Flickr and Del.icio.us began the tagging movement, it was primary used as a organising tool. Unfortunately, it never took away. The tags were too inconsistent to be useful and you need critical mass before aggregation provides any sort of value.Right now, I am seeing tags evolving into social tags. On Facebook, people love to tag photos which their friends have appeared in. Similarly on Twitter, people like to use the @ tag to send message, links, comments etc to their social network.The evolution of tagging as an organisation tool to a social gesture mechanism is an important one.As a social gesture, tagging has become more viral and people centric. Its communicative nature has open up new ways which coordination can be done....

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While Youtube is making losses, mobile Youtube clone is making money

Technovia has an interesting article talking about whether Youtube is the largest loss-making venture in history:it’s still losing money hand over fist. As I mentioned earlier, a recent Credit Suisse report estimates it will lose a whopping $470 million this year. The reason for that is simple: while its revenues should grow at a more-than-respectable 20% in 2009, the number of streams it serves will grow at a rate almost double that (38%).Contrast this with SeeMeTv, a youtube clone on mobile that is making money. It has one big difference relative to Youtube: user has to pay for each view and the revenue was co-shared with the person who uploaded the video. On SeeMeTv, each user on average earns 12 pounds per video! Why is this so? Why can SeeMeTv charge for its service and be profitable...

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Why our school system needs hacking

(Note: I wrote this post not in a vacuum. My wife is a teacher. 5 of my school mates are as well. My current colleague is an ex teacher. I also dealt with schools as part of our Future School programmes.)Many many teachers I have talked to have spoken to me about this: our school system sucks. It has evolved into a model where branding and public relations with parents has become more important than teaching. This has sucked money, school resources and attention away from students and towards activities that made the schools look good (winning awards, getting press releases etc). All these has resulted in teachers spending more time on administrative efforts, rather than innovating on how to teach more effectively.In a teaching focus school, the structure is such that teaching load is heavier...

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Search, tags and follow

Organising or structuring information is a key value enabler in this age of abundance. Be it conversations, tweets, data etc, organization provides the key to efficient attention allocation. Currently, I have seen 3 scalable forms of organisations.SearchThe most commonly used form of organisation, search instantly organises information around your stated interest. However, as information increases, the cost of search is going up. Not only that, search itself is limiting in discovery and doesn't fit into our way of uncovering stuff.TagsTags is different from search as it is more discovery based. Interfaces like tag clouds encourages explorations. Now, with the use of tags on Twitter becoming more and more common, we might see innovations in tags related forms of organisation. We are not done...

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The value of links in next generation media (continued)

Scott Karr touched a very important point about links that I failed to convey adequately: they are currencies which relevance can be determined. Without relevance, you cannot build effective distribution for next generation media because you don't know what to send who.In my post on creating a link infrastructure to empower fans, I touch on dentralising the relevance derivation mechanism as a critical third step. Without that, it is almost impossible to build a scalable distribution channel. In fact, decentralising the link creation, link distribution and relevance generation mechanisms are ways to send money back from Google to the people who...

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Singapore's online classified sector

I had a chat with the CEO of JobFactory a couple of months back. One comment that stuck in my head was that the local classified market for jobs alone is worth 100M easily. This number was computed based on current revenue models of major job sites like JobsDB and the revenue for SPH's recruitment classified.The number assumes that the market wouldn't shrink. I don't believe that is realistic. Disruptive companies typically shrinks a current market. Craglist is taking billions out of the US classified market because most of the listings are free. Similarly, Wikipedia is taking billions out of the reference market and driving companies to cease operations.I think that will happen to Singapore's classified market as well. So far, we have not seen this happening because very few have realise...

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4 ideas for empowering fans

The most effective web API is still the link. Simple and powerfulThis summarises very nicely what I have written about the importance of links to next generation web. It is the most simple and most wide spread API that majority of Web users knows how to use. With such wide penetration, isn't it time for us to fully extend its capabilities?One of the most fruitful areas is to enable links as the foundation of which to rethink fans from consumers to distributors, empower fans to spread AND sell content, viral marketing AND viral distribution.How shall we begin? These are my 4 principles that I am thinking about:We need a tumblr for media linksTumblr made posting different media a breeze. Be it image, videos, text etc, they made it dead simple to post and more importantly, to turn up beautiful....

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5 startups experiments I like to try

I have been blogging for quite a while now. While many of the posts are ramblings off my head (thank you readers for willing to listen to these rants), I want to collapse some of them in this post into 5 startups ideas. Things that 1-2 developers can quickly code and experiment. These are stuff I wish I can do now. Unfortunately, I don't have the necessary time and resources. If you are somehow inspired by this post to do something, feel free to include me as a free advisor :)1. Social payment for ecommerceThis idea came from a golden statement from betaworks:there is a fundamental difference between “micropayments” (iTunes, I suppose) and social payments that are centered around a gesture, a social gesture, as a means of both giving money and openly stating a preference, and in that difference...

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5 local startups I will like to invest personally

I have been mostly critical of some of our local startups. However, there are others that I find that have tremendous potential because of the ideas they are experimenting with. Here are my top 5, which I will like to invest in personally when I am no longer with the office.Interactive Vision LabThey are doing to 3D scanners what digital camera has done to traditional cameras. By developing a technology that allows one click 3D scanning, they can potentially democratize many industries, from healthcare, to game development, to architecture etc. My hope is that they can become the Flip camera of 3D scanner to enable more creativity to be born.StoryBoyStoryBoy is creating interactive animated storybooks authoring and reading applications with multi-language narration for mobile devices. ...

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Empowering creative talent in next generation media

I have been talking about next generation media for the past 2 posts. I want to conclude by saying how we can leverage on these important changes to empower creative talent (i.e. the musicians, the photographers, the artists, the authors etc). In this, I want to draw reference to a powerful article on Nine Inch Nails (hat tip to Ethan Bauley) that has illuminated how media will evolve but also raised some important issues.Value capture for creative talent is still a challenge: he sold 250,000 numbered copies of the CD. The album is also available on iTunes for $9.90.Most of the innovations we have seen and discussed on the Web are on the value creation side. This is important because without value creation, there is no basis for growth. However, at some point, we need to talk about value...

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Principles for building interactions for next generation media

In my previous post, I have talked about how the link is an important enabler for next generation media. While we want our content to flow around freely, there is a need on the other hand for users to aggregate what they want to consume in an interface of their choice. This is why personalised 'destinations' or interfaces still matter.In these personalised interfaces, the key value driver is interaction. More specifically, interactions that are social in nature and are fun. This NYtimes article says it in such a simple and yet frightening accurate way that I have to quote it to build up my principles for building interactions for next generation media:Principle One: people increasingly crave interaction in their entertainment, not only with products but with other peopleThis is the indisputable...

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