Creative Idea Powerhouse

The last working day off CNY long holiday, I recieved the email notice from Preseed, and once again, as I already know the answer, your application has been rejected by the evaluation team.

Not to my suprise at some point, inside the meeting there’s only one of the evaluator really listening when I’m giving my pitch out of 5 person inside (another person is listening but is Preseed staff so I don’t think he is able to give out any of his voice). What is other doing? Well, one of the guy is enjoying his food (Char bee hun) that served, and another lady is 3D-ing herself, and one of them is face-booking and MSN-ing. I know the outcome at the first 30sec when I steped inside the room, but I’m still doing my best to give out my whole presentation. Thanks to the support of one of the Dr. inside, I have the courage of continue my presentation and not to immediately walk out from the room due to the action of non-respectful act of the evaluator inside.

When I shared my experience with friends and he shared that it is pretty common to see the evaluator behave like that, and at some point, they purposely to act like that to give some pressure and see how the presentor react. Haha, at some point, some told me e-Commerce and content is not the core focus for the preseed to fund, they are more interest in tech rather than model.

However, I still have deep faith on e-Commerce, regardless what the other out there is thinking. No matter what is the tech is evolving, there is one thing I believe on. You can have great tech like IP Phone on Skype, great video sharing technology like YouTube, or Technology gadget like iPhone, Malaysia is still Malaysia, and Asia is still Asia. I remember when Jack Ma started his Alibaba and tried to positioin its company, he studied Western and Europe market, and then he finally position its B2B portal towards SME rather than MNCs or GLSs, for one reason, Asia is still Asia, and we need to find a niche where we are different from Western or Europe at one point.

SEA itself contained a large group of economic power, with nearly half a billion population (from below population demographic table of data I compiled from different sources, mainly from UN data) that is potentially explore to Tech and e-Commerce, and this is the untargeted group for technology at one point. Believe it or not, they are the next spending power after India, China and Japan. If you can build a great economic chain and value chain to supply needs to them, you know what that mean. Malaysia, at one point has position itself very well at the central of all these countries, and it is a great logistic hub for making this happen. What you think of the tools that can make this happen in next 3 – 5 years? It is e-Commerce. I love what my great boss said, you don’t see the economic wave only build your strength, you must see beyond 3 – 5 years, and build to drive the change. Asia going to be the next strongest economic entity (believe or not, it going to be truth some how, some one told me . Just ask yourself, in pre-1900, which country is the strongest in Financial, Industrial, and military? It is not United State, it is UK. And before that, in pre-1800, it is not UK either… every 100 years, it change, and it bring mega shift to everything. Are we fortunate to be in Asia?

Nothing to be proud of, this is an experience sharing from my past 9 times ‘Unsuccessful’ presentations to pitch the MSC Preseed Grant. Due to my friend keep telling me there’re many people interest in applying this fund but don’t know where and how to start. It is easy to write the proposal for Preseed and you can always refer to the friendly Preseed Account Manager for helps and clarifications. However when come to preparing the presentation slide and pitching, the challenge comes. I’ve been axed out for countless times from evaluation, and also approval pitching.

I have gathered all these real experience and put into the slide below sharing of how to prepare a storyboard to present your idea. I will continue to improve the guide from time to time. For those Batch 14 applicants, best of luck once again, and I shall see any of you in the evaluation pitch soon… Cheers!

For those just get ready with your idea, Batch 15 just open and it is your time to ‘try’ your luck although I dont really believe in luck but hardworks… Cheers. Drop me email or comments to help improve this slide if you can, for those senior or approved applicants.

For past few years, enterprise has taken the ‘wait and see’ approach when come to adoption of Web 2.0 technology, or business model. A few companies that tried to 2.0 its web, such as Starbucks, has face the difficulties to orchestra its large pool of consumers feedbacks when it open up its feedback channel. In some sense, unless the corporation see large value can be generated from the effort of 2.0-ing its web (s.a. marketing gain, sales generation etc), in large amount of time, to make this effect works still require a lot of testing and ice-breaking efforts. How’s Air Asia’s effort to promote its site at Facebook? Personally, I don’t see any value of this effort beside having millions of fans (that does not convert into real numbers and value dollars and sents) in Air Asia Facebook. Here some slides from the famous guru of Web 2.0 sharing how corporate can make sense with social network and start to gain value from it

This is a series of Collection from recent CES 09 presentation. No more Gate’s cool tech toys preview but a review backward on the trending of Technologies with Teens. Remember ICQ? Napster? or even the first Palm Pilot toy?

Accoding to a report recently by Spamhaus, the global top 10 Email Spaming countries are as below:

1. USA
2. China
3. Russia
4. UK
5. South Africa
6. Germany
7. Brazil
8. Japan
9. France
10. India

Out of all the emails sending day by day, there are more than 95% of the emails are spams, and these are causing the corporate world the losses of $308billion a year. This amount is more than enough to save the bad situation of the top 3 car makers from financial bailout, restore back the entire financial crisis and global economic recession worries, or even to throw in a daily meal for all African poor kids from suffering of hunger.