Creative Idea Powerhouse

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

Would like to share with you a very interesting slide presenting the Future of Social network. Personally I think Social Network will face a big challenge in 2009 to get a mature business model that able to prove its profitability and for the new players just entered the competitio, best wishes to them.

Mike from Giga OM has recently wrote an article saying Social Network will recieve more welcomes in 2009 due to economic depression (where many people will start to hang back at home – and go online and doing socialling business instead of going out and hang at Starbucks for F2F socialling business), yeap it is true but how can these site turn it to a promising profit model and start to cheers its investors and gain more confident and ensure their next payment are on-time? I believe some social network site have started to focus on revenue generation, and facebook, myspace and Apple Apps will focus more on Micropayment this year (where I believe it is a very strong and bold move for them to materialise from their large user base).

Anyway, enjoy the slide, and it is a challenging Y2009! Happy New Year and best wishes for long live Web 2.0.

Enough for email as new social environment. Inbox 2.0 should not focus on getting more stuffs into your inbox, but rather to focus how to make you do less in your email and start to get productivity up. Last month, GigaOm posted an article about Email as the new social environment, which OM talks that Yahoo and Google finally realize that their biggest assets, 260million email users from Yahoo! and 100million from Gmail, can be converted into social environment. Yeah I agreed from business standpoint there is huge amount of benefits and profit dollars in making email as a social platform for you to get your friend’s RSS update, twitter message, facebook updates, which make your email client become more sticky to you. By then, not only ads, spam are all squezing into your inbox, your facebook feeds, RSS, social sites updates all are going to bomboarding your inbox too. Currently average users get around 160 emails a day from all your multiple mailboxes. Imagine if your facebook, myspace, flickr, and other many more updates are going to come in to your inbox, what is this going to happen to you in person?
We are currently under email overwork, email overload, email overspam and email overstress stage. Imagine you are half-way rushing your weekly report and inside your mailbox there’s someone just drop in and say hi on your facebook, it pop up small notifier, which lead you to get distract. Go and look back at your facebook once again, I have 400 friends on my list, and if I were to continue getting updates from my social network, what will happen next?
It is time to call for a ‘stop’ and ‘think’ stage before we further innovate the email system already. Yes I agreed young generation wants to stay connected as much as they can, and I like Gabor’s argument on this ‘the fact is that when they go in to corporate world, does the company want their employees to stay connected always?’. Email will not die, and will continue to stay as a form of communication for corporate world in next decades. So how to better help the user to ‘Manage’ their works by helping them to manage their ‘email workload’ will be a big interest for corporate market in next few years to come. After all, $300billion losses per year on email overmanage is a big figure for corporate world according to research from Radicati.
While waiting for some cutting edge tools to better manage your inbox, here is some self-help tips that you can work by yourself before the email flooding your inbox.

I remember I start to pick up interest in email reengineering party last year when I read the post from Techcrunch introducing Xobni . The company picked up a 16 years old products where most of the internet users would have at least one, and some may have more than 10 inboxes (personally I tried to reduce from 12 last year to 5 right now), and try to reengineer it; and thats the reason Xobni is the ‘Reengineering’ of Inbox when you read backwards.

Since then, the industry start to refocus back on email again, and many starts to look back on how to enhance, connect, multiplex, increase efficiency of human interacting with email, and out of sudden, there are more than 10 already known startups that doing the emails development now. Ex VP of Engineering for Xobni had also leave the company and start his own new email company too (You can check out his blog at here)

In my list, there are currently so many new faces in email startup:
1. Xobni.com
2. WrapMail
3. unison.com
4. Zenbe.com
5. Inbox 2
6. Zimbra.com (acquired by Yahoo)
7. Xoopit

Lately, even Yahoo has unofficially announced that they are launching Inbox 2.0 but I’m not sure if it is same as Inbox2.com. You can check out the full post from GigaOM here.

In term of business model, Zimbra used subscription base, which pretty close to Gmail Pro version, while many others embebed the advertising engine (same old way as Hotmail started back in 90s, can’t we have some new business model for email please?!?!). Bottom line, I think email has reached a pretty simple milestone as Gabor has mentioned long ago, to improve users’ efficiency to handle ‘Urgent’ and ‘Important’ email, less attention to less important email rather than continue to ‘PUMP’ ads, information to users which at the end of the day, who border to read the ads in an email? Moreover, we all hate spam, same as we hate ads. Time to change, I love Inbox ZERO idea presented previously in Google Tech Talk, do less email, have more fun, life is simple. Don’t complicate users inbox with more ‘storage’ for email, instead, leave inbox to Zero email everyday as a best practices for all email users as the Mantra for email business that any new startups want to jump in. I will talk more on Inbox Zero practice later.

Below is the Elevator picth would like to share with you from Inbox 2.0.