F1 Fever in Singapore

F1 Fever is here in Singapore. It’s 2 weekends away!

Just do a search on Flickr to see the setup of the grandstands and the street race tracks.

There will be road closures that will inconvenience everyone but I’m sure it will be worth the while.

It’s like seeing our little city “grow up”.

Anyway every brand is running some kind of F1 event in town. I wonder why are marketers so uncreative.

Everyone is capitalising on the glamour and their marketing are all beginning to look the same. When you have even the sub-brands or less glam brands also doing F1 marketing, it sort of dilutes even the marketing of the top brands.

Imagine, “Ah Seng Contractors” putting their brand on an F1 car! Oh no! Not another one again.

Some one should do something really contrarian just to steal the show!

Sekai Camera: Finally Geo Tagging That Makes Sense

People have been talking about Geo-Tagging for a long time, but this product from Sekai Camera, a finalist at TC50 finally makes sense.

Why? Because it uses the world’s most popular phone of the future: the iPhone. It makes good use of its features like GPS, GSM Triangulation, Accelerometer and the Camera!.

Do check out the video from the TC post. It’s pretty good. You can just walk around with that thing and see a meta-tagged world. That’s very intuitive and I’m pretty sure even aunties and uncles can understand it.

I think these guys might just receive a big round of funding from the KPCB iPhone fund. And we wouldn’t be surprised if Google wants to buy them so that it will integrate with gMaps and gAndroid.

Really nice stuff. I would use it. Just that it will probably receive mass adoption only in later stages when iPhone solves its power consumption problem as this app seems to be fairly power hungry.

Old People Loose to Young People in ACE ‘Why Not’ Contest

I was eagerly anticipating the release of the results of the ACE ‘Why Not?’ Contest.

Firstly because I thought It’s quite an interesting name for a contest.

“Why Not?” Is a favorite phrase of Borat Sagadiev

So it was cool to see the posters everywhere in Singapore. Asking “Why Not?”

The voice of Borat Sagadiev kept ringing in my head

.

Nevertheless, here are the results:

16 Year Old Wins Nationwide Why Not? Contest

But unfortunately. The entry seems to be a closely guarded secret — it was not published.

And the other entries were like erm, a bit fail. Damn sad.

I could tear the ideas apart:

a)     Renting out office space in government buildings for start-ups in related fields to create close interaction between the private and public sector – by Mr Tan Peck Cheong, a landscape architect who started a design consultancy company last year.

Isn’t this done? Go to Raeburn park, Old Police HQ in Chinatown, old CPIB HQ…. all done up, ready to rock. What supply crunch? All still empty.

b)     Set up an incubator park with low rent offices and shared facilities. Government agencies, venture capitalists and banks could also set up branch offices at the park and have regular sessions with entrepreneurs at the park – by Ms Tan Pei Shan, Assistant Director, Public Service Division.

Nearly same as above. But not bad la…But I really wonder where is there a “low rent” place in Singapore? Choa Chu Kang cemetery. Maybe we should compete with the gang that want to put up bangla housing in Serangoon that caused so much furoe. I’m sure the expats and xenophobic Serangoonites would be happy to have entrepreneurs instead. But then again.. it’s the issue of “foreign talent”.. just another kind I guess.

c)     Set up a website where consumers can post their “wish list”. Budding entrepreneurs wishing to start a business can develop business ideas from gauging consumers’ wants from this website – by Ms Sharon Eng, a Derivatives Documentation Manager at BNP Paribas.

Done: http://www.ijam.sg/

But of course this is coming not from a real entrepreneur. Real entrepreneurs gauge demand not from a website but by looking at trends and being on the ground.

d)     Organise competitions in schools where each student group is given “seed” money which they have to grow. No need for lengthy business proposals, just sharing of lessons learnt –by Mr Joseph Wan, a JC2 student at Nanyang Junior College.

Can lor. Real seed money or monopoly money? If just want to make money play masak masak with monopoly money in school can also teach entrepreneurship.

e)     Set up a “fab lab” in Singapore equipped with high-tech prototyping equipment such as 3D printers, laser cutters and digitizers and make it free, so that designers and engineers can quickly prototype new ideas – Ms Michelle Fullwood, an R&D engineer at the Ministry of Defence.

Not bad. I’d actually make my way there to this lab and start making things. I need a better chair. I want to build like a massage chair in the back of my van. Make 3D models of myself. Make some IronMan exo-skeleton. Turn my van from pussy-mobile into BatMobile.

Shiok ah!

What Does Google Chrome Threaten Most?

What do you think?

Some people think it’s Firefox that will have a run for its money.

I think it’s Microsoft Internet Explorer.

IE is so slow and prone to Malware. gChrome has slight tweaks and should satisfy the uncles and aunties out there looking for sensible browser.

FF is still for the geeks. But FF has to get its memory leak act together. Otherwise it’s really going to be hard to get even geeks to continue using it for long!

Eliminating Email

I’ve been trying to eliminate email.

For one of the company email account. I keep the inbox at: ZERO mails.

I feel less stressed w/o anything in the inbox.

Everything that needs to be done immediately has been done.

Everything else that needs longer time has been transferred to my todo list.

Keeping mails archived and the inbox count to ZERO is a fantastic stress reliver.

You should try it too!

Dim Dim

DimDim.com: free, open-source web conferencing.

Says it all. Pretty disruptive business tool.

You need it!

And it has Mac desktop sharing even.

You can also deploy within your own corporate environment.

A little buggy on the interface but otherwise it’s good stuff.