27Jul
Some of you might have read about a new investment which I just made which I couldn’t announce earlier.
I’ve finally completed the investment this month and it’s now official: I’m privileged to be able to advise and invest in the company which owns and operates Singapore’s most well-read entrepreneurship and startup site: SGEntrepreneurs.com (SGE).
SGE seeks to provide the most comprehensive coverage on Singapore’s startup and entrepreneurship scene and some of the startups featured in SGE have gone on to feature in renowned international sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, KillerStartups, folksonomy, Malaysia Entrepreneurs, etc.
You can read SGE’s announcement about this investment in their latest ’state of the site’ report as well as check out the updated team bio.
This geek is definitely looking forward to an exciting journey ahead working with the good folks at SGE and if you are a startup, an entrepreneur, or toying with the idea of starting out, do feel free to ping us and pop by often!
Tags: investment, SGE, SGEntrepreneurs
01Feb
Going to suffer from Obama’s signing of the Ledbetter Law big time. No wonder the stock markets crashed when he got elected and again when he was inaugurated. I’d (or anyone for that matter) now seriously think twice before starting a business in the United States.
Tags: fair pay act, ledbetter law, lilly ledbetter
01Feb
In a meeting of doom and gloom at the World Economic Forum in Davos, surprisingly LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman was one of the very few optimistic ones..
Tags: Davos, linkedin, optimistic, pessimistic, Reid Hoffman, World Economic Forum
12Dec
Just put up an exclusive interview with the founder of Match.com and Interwoven. Read it at my CNET Asia blog here.
Tags: Interwoven, Match.com, Ong Peng Tsin, Silicon Valley
08Dec
I was just reviewing my blogs recently and I think this is the most worthless of the blogs that I maintain.
You see, according to ://URLfan recommended by Pat Law, this blog is not even listed.
At least my highway blog is listed on ://URLfan though I don’t write on it much. And even though I don’t write on my highway blog much, it still has pretty decent traffic.
Geekonomics @ CNET Asia of course is the most high traffic of the 3 blogs I painfully maintain amidst my busy schedule. And I do make time to blog there regularly 2-3 times a week - for contractual reasons. And it’s has to be all original content, I can’t just sticky something up there - a big Juniper (tree) will probably crush and kill me.
But look at this blog. Although it has a pagerank of 4 and just crossed the 100k pageviews mark (since it’s inception around June according to stats counter ‘wassup’), it is not even listed on urlfan and I don’t spend half as much effort on it as I do on my CNET Asia blog. And at least the highway of life has been recognised with a blog of the day award before.
Briefly scrolling through my posts on this blog, most of them are either press releases or just stickies of what I’ve read. I haven’t made enough effort to create better content. (And I have to login regularly to delete the spam that chalks up to 3 figures on akismet weekly)
It’s junk, even to me. I don’t even know why you even bother to read it.
I think I should either close it down or revamp it.
Thinking.
Tags: close, lousy blog, shut down, sucks, terrible
20Nov
Big news I guess, hard to ignore - Jerry Yang, Co-founder of Yahoo! leaves as CEO!
Well, the way I see it (and I could be wrong), he’s just taking the fall for a failed M&A which shouldn’t be entirely his fault. But too bad they need a fall guy and he’s the one.
Isn’t it so typical of companies? A co-founder/director does a great job all the way from the start and is made to look like a complete villian because of some silly corporate decisions which he/she has to take the blame and leaves in shame? Seen it before, a bit too often.
So they wanna try merge with Microsoft again? Well, they now have an excuse. But If I’m Microsoft, I wouldn’t take the risk at this economic downturn and even if I wanted to, probably can’t find a bank that’ll lend me that much money. So if a deal is reached, my guess is that it’d be at a much lower valuation which might cause Yahoo!’s shares to drop further. Lose lose.
Shares can soar now, but my take is that it’d come tumbling down like a roller coaster in due time. What a waste for such a great company. Personally I think that the slimmest hope for the company now is to keep Jerry on the board of directors and hope that he’ll still contribute to the company’s growth and direction. Then again, that’s about as likely as asking Bill Gates to join back Microsoft, so… good luck Yahoo!
(Signing off from Seoul)
Tags: CEO, Jerry Yang, microsoft, quit, resign, yahoo!
16Nov
I’m in Seoul now and tomorrow I’ll be presenting at this conference
WPBA
Amongst the familiar faces will be Hillary (Malaysia) and Victor (Hong Kong) from CNET Asia as well.
Initially I thought I’d just be coming here as an attendee and not a speaker. However when they invited me to present, I took sometime to think about the theme of the conference and decided to present on the topic ‘Citizen Journalism in Singapore’ giving a snapshot of what’s been happening here in this area as well as some key learnings. In Singapore, citizen journalism has impacted brands, government, sports, traditional media (STOMP,OMY and RazorTV), legislation, local blogging communities, and much more (depending on how much I can squeeze in hurhur).
Although I don’t really like to talk about social media and citizen journalism (as mentioned in an earlier blog post), when I started preparing the materials, I surprised myself how I managed to put a presentation together in less than 2 hours. In fact, I had much more materials than I had time to present. This alone convinces me that citizen journalism is truly well and alive in Singapore. Since I’m the only one from Singapore here, I hope to give the rest of the world a better understanding of what’s happening here in our part of the world, especially when folks from some really popular sites like Digg and Gawker Media (Gizmodo) will be here as well.
Hope to share more about the conference again soon. Till then!
p.s. Some of the gadgets I’m reviewing on this trip : Canon EOS 1000D and Gigabyte Netbook.
(Signing off from Seoul)
Tags: Aving, Citizen Journalism, Digg, Gizmodo, S.Korea, Seoul, World Professional Blogger Journalist Association, WPBA
03Oct
I was highlighted to this rather crazy news..the thing that interests me about this particularly is that just recently I actually joined the directorship of a local startup Qotion.com. Qotion currently has a business model rather similar to Bankrate’s as a internet finance startup comparing different bank products and rates, just like Bankrate’s 
Tags: 15million, bankrate, blog, internet finance, qotion, sales, web 2.0 finance
22Sep
Dean Kamen endorses Forum Nokia’s challenge
September 22, 2008
Singapore – Forum Nokia is proud to announce Calling All Innovators, a global contest for developers to create mobile applications that will help to better society.
Calling All Innovators challenges developers to think big about the opportunity to impact the quality of human life with mobile applications. Nokia will award up to USD 150,000 in cash and prizes, in addition to helping the winning developers distribute their mobile applications. Read more…
Tags: dean Kamen, FIRST, forum nokia, global developer contest, innovators, nokia
19Sep
Saw this on Blackberry geeks, thought it was pretty interesting since I’m now quite a fan of the Blackberry and the Blackberry Bold will likely be a BIG hit. As you are reading this, this geek is on a flight to a couple of states in the US and then to Osaka Japan. I believe I can’t use my Blackberry Curve in Japan though! And yes, I’ll be totally missing the F1 in Singapore 
Does your company use BlackBerry devices for its workforce? If not, then you might be wondering why. Further, you might be looking for ways to convince your boss that going BlackBerry is a good business decision. That’s where we come in.
We’ve heard from a number of workers who think that a BlackBerry could make for better business. The problem is finding a way to show the boss that it would be a quality investment. So we’ve cooked up eight reasons your boss should get your company BlackBerry devices. If you have any more to add, leave a comment.
1. It makes them more productive
You want a productive workforce, right? Sure. We all do. When you get more done, typically that means better performance, which translates into more money. So what would you think if I told you that BlackBerry users can turn an hour of downtime every day into production? That’s the deal, according to Read more…
Tags: blackberry, bold, curve, productivity
