Creative Idea Powerhouse

Just share some snap shot of the new Google Office in Taiwan HQ – Taipei 101 Tower 73th Floor :P Enjoy.

In my past, I did a lot of interviews, and 80% of the time, I have a chance to talk to the fresh minded graduates that just stepped out from their well structured, protected schooling year. I often like to know how well they are prepared to step into this choatic real world, and how they try to connect their schooling lives with the real world, and there’s where I always ask how many subjects they plan to do for their post-schooling years to come? Often I get people looking at me waiting for answers and it is normal especially for our Malaysian graduates.

The education system has well designed and structured, and it gives a simple idea to the student, study hard, scores Grade A or Distinction for all your subjects, and there is a great career out there waiting for you. The system also design carefully to valuate your effort and performance base on scoring. It does give a good way to benchmark the students performance, but it also make the student loss their direction when they step into the real world where benchmarking is not available in some organisation, or it is losely design and link with performance. Many time, you perform hardest as you can as you did so well in schooling time but the result is shocking unfair to you. You start to lose confident, and your big ambitions seems fading away.

Here is a simple guide to those who are school leaver that starting to embark their journey for the next 30 to 40 years. Make it right from the start and you can have a better balance life, or you going to have difficulties after you screw up three or four careers and still have no clue on whats went wrong mode.

You have only 6 primary subjects, and one elective subject to study in your years to come.

1. Career – What you want to achieve in your career live
2. Finance – What is your number for retire (familar with the ads? but it is real figure you need to find out)
3. Friend – How you treasure friends and friendship building strategy
4. Family – What is the ultimate goals for your family in your mind
5. Health – What is your ideal health standard? Smoking? Drinking? Consider these while defining it.
6. Community – What and how you want your community to remember you?
Elective – Spiritual – It is always good and important to have one in you, but it is elective as always.

So 7 subjects, you make your own rules and result benchmarking, but you need to make sure when you graduates one day, you have a good grade for it, be it Passed all, HD for all subjects, or you continue not graduating due to some subjects failed the minimum benchmarking point. You cant graduates with bad health while you want to have a loving, caring, family that will live with you long enough, or you spend most of time outside achiving high performance for your career but neglect your family, or even many businessmen does is hooking up with some relationships and neglect the family. You need to balance your scoring to be able to graduates with good grade (well, mostly people can’t complete their Post Graduates in these subjects due to many reason).

Interesting thinking? What is your passing grades for each of these subjects? And where are you now? Are you having balance scoring or some subjects need your additional attention? Use this opportunity before Year End to draft it and include into your Y2009 resolution! Cheers and good luck to all of you~!

When we talking about Branding, most of Young Generation-Y love Apple. The chrome cool apple logo has changed the way the world listen to music, using the mobile phone… and many more, including the way you use your mouse. Here is the slide to share with you how to build a brand like Apple does

I’ve been following on the local e-commerce growing and path-making landscape. Personally I found it is easy for any supplier, corporate or merchant to built a virtual store-front, and announced that they are in e-Commerce and selling to its potential 1.5billions consumers online. It is so amazing that these people have a mindset that once their portal, store front are listed on the search engine like Google or Yahoo, the next thing there will be millions of people clicking through their store and make orders. Yes, it is so simple as 1-2-3 to be listed in Google, and any SEO company can give you value added services to be on first 3 page ranking too, with little investment you willing to pay. However, that’s just the marketing talk and to be very honest, I get the response from many virtual store owners feedback, it doesn’t sell.

In Taiwan or Japan, if you would like to be successful as a B2C or C2C merchant, there is a set of detailed courses for you to go through. The course cover from front page design, product photo appearance design, product keywords design, SEO, how to gain consumer’s trust … and they have a stack of facts and statistic to guide you on what consumers look for when come to online, and this value on education is what I see lacking still in local market. Even there are people giving talks, sharing knowledge on their personal experience, there is still lacking of environment that value these knowledge. We are still in the learning path where suffcient sacrifies and wastage investment in e-Commerce is needed until the industry is mature. Should I say this. Again and again I asked myself, which is the successful e-commerce site you aware in Malaysia that is really making big bucks? Yes you can blame that the Malaysia consumer market is relevant small where economic of scale may not be sufficient to kick a big brand, or our internet penetration rate is low, or even because our retail outlet rental rate is lower compare to Japan or HK or Taiwan causing that there are still many stores out there for people to have choice and perfer physical experiencial touch. Yes all these reasons are valid, valid enough for people to stay away from this big piece of cake. ASEAN market having more than 500mil people, an open untap market, high young generation that are ready to enter the market and soon to be the largest spending machanism to continue growing the countries’ GDP.

The challenge for e-Commerce not ready in Malaysia due to IT or penetration issues? For credit card, the 3D authorisation method is good enough and strong to protect merchants and consumers, the broadband infra is ready (in fact I don’t see how fast you need your broadband connection to be to place an online oder), we have high penetration rate for internet access, and yes, 3G and Wimax does help, e-commerce technology and platform, webpage design service is available widely and cheaply (in fact you can hire a part time freshie to get you a page for very very Reasonable cost to invest, with full shopping cart function, payment gateway etc.). If the government will put some effort to enforce cyber law and take real action to follow through the online trading fraud, and create a trustable trading environment, will this help?

By far, this is just the first step e-Commerce challenge for B2C. There are still many more challenges await ahead for those who are study for potential investment into this 1.5bil consumer market. Logistic, payment gateway, security, IT infrastructure scalability, and many more issues still remain a challenge to explore. Take an example on logistic challenge, Amazon announced its 14th record holiday season, with 72.9 items ordered every second, up from 62.5 last year. How many resources are needed to be in placed to process this huge orders spike during holiday season? nearly 73 orders coming in every one second when the clock tick once. The entire supply chain, the IT capacity to process all these, and payment gateway to verify, QC to ensure right item is shipped to the right person with lowest error (imagine 1% return rate due to human error in a day will cause more than 63,000 items rejected and the cost of this error in logistic itself will result losses of $630k a day)

The day that orders peaked was on December 15th, when 6.3 million items were placed into Amazon’s checkout carts. That number was up 17 percent from the peak order day in 2007 (December 10). With five fewer shopping days this season, orders shipped peaked at 5.6 million on a single day, up 44 percent from last year. Some of the best-selling items this year included Eyeclops night vision stealth goggles, the Nintendo Wii, Razor scooters, Samsung 52-inch LCD HDTVs, The Dark Knight DVD, and the Twilight Saga books by Stephanie Meyer. Amazon says it was able to ship 99 percent of all holiday items in time for Christmas.

How does this year compare to seasons past? Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth provides the following comparisons:

Peak items ordered on a single day

2008: 6.3M
2007: 5.4M
2006: 4.0M
2005: 3.6M
2004: 3.6M

Items ordered per second

2008: 72.9
2007: 62.5
2006: 46.3
2005: 41
2004: 32

Peak items shipped on a single day

2008: 5.6M
2007: 3.9M
2006: 3.4M
2005: 2.7M
2004: 2M+

Early this month me and my mate went for Preseed Approval meeting and have some really challenging moment for that presentation. We went out and we have a spark inside our head. The catch we get during that presentation not only about how to tweak our idea works, but a very big light bulk inspiring us about what is truely needs for an entrepreneur personality, is about dare to fail, a quote which I think Billy used to sell well about, and follow up with the reading quote from Guy Kawasaki from Garage Technologies, dare to fail, fail hard, and learn from it.

A strike of 6 times in Evaluation pitchings (6 continue submission to preseed.. when I looked back, and this number is continue to add-on) and 2 times in Approval meeting pitching make me really think alot, and also learn alot. For those who continue to try as hard as me, I know you going to success one day, for those who don’t think that Preseed is the bowl of rice for you to raise your first startup fund, my advice is, don’t give up until you sign your first approval letter with MSC. My sincere advice, you will gain more, and more and more be a bullet proof personal, and for your company too.

My personal opinion and experience, the takeout from this exercise (sorry if I called it that way) not only about tha RM150k, but you will also learn how to sell your idea in future to the VCs (if you need to raise money from them), pitching to your potential clients and so on. If you can’t even sell to the Preseed, what confident level you have to sell to the public, or you only build your system to sell to your dad or mum’s relative companies (well I agreed even Bill Gates first go through his mum to get contacted IBM and sell his first copy of DOS….) but those day are over. The world now are more challenging than ever. Information flow faster than you brain pulse sparks, or speed of light.

Me and my mates are going in again for tomorrow evaluation pitch… and if we can get it through this time, I will be happy to share my slide here, open up my idea and the entire presentation deck to you, no hiding. And for those who are in Preseed Batch 13, good luck to all of you… hope everyone of us can catch the last ride for Y2008 approval meeting… and start to ‘Change the World’ in Y2009 to come. I love Guy Kawasaki quote.. Cheers! And for those who wondering what am I talking about, feel free to check out the Technopreneur website and catch the last batch application which going to due on 2nd Jan 2009.