The Next Big Bang #tnbb

Daniel Goh
Daniel Goh

If you’ve not heard about #TNBB or The Next Big Bang!, you missed a wonderful sharing session. It was held last Saturday 13 Nov 2010 at Standing Sushi Bar at 8 Queen Street organised by non other then Claudia Lim.

Daniel Goh started the sharing session and shared about the last 10 years and predicts some possible futures from his perspective. The 6 main things were:

  1. More Mash-ups
  2. Collaborative Creation
  3. Power to the People
  4. Connection Curation
  5. Increased Activism
  6. Gamification

See his slides on Slideshare. His slides made top presentation of the day on Slideshare, so its really good stuff. Most of the 6 points are already happening now and I really think he have had a glimpse of the future.

Howie Chang
Howie Chang

Howie Chang was up next and he talked about UX101. He shared about how User Experience is becoming more recognised as an important part of design and based it on Stephen Anderson’s User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model from his Creating Pleasurable Interfaces presentation. I’m looking forward to see his slides up on the net as he did not manage to finish building his slides in time for the event.

Next up was Brian Ling from Design Sojourn who shared about how his career path was like. And now how he finally deciding to start out on his own with his blog as the main primary marketing vehicle to his design consultancy business. He is clearly rich in experience and made the right preparations before this transition. I wish Design Sojourn all the best in its business. :)

Jon Yongfook at TNBB sharing on Littlecosm.com
Jon Yongfook

Jon Yongfook gave us a sneek preview of his latest project Littlecosm and it really looks like a fun website. It allows your positive and negative twitter updates to evolve your Littlecosm character and with its light / dark points, individuals will have different capabilities. Check out his slides on Slideshare.

Todd Kurie at TNBB talking about MyCube
Todd Kurie

Last up was Todd Kurie from MyCube. Being personally involved in MyCube late last year and earlier this year, I’m glad to see its progress and am excited for its launch early 2011.

You can also see Claudia’s post about the event which have lots more details, photos and links.

The Future

The future is indeed exciting and its very possible that The Next Big Bang can come from Singapore. All you need is an idea to solve a real world problem, a few individuals who want to make it happen and enough resources to make it happen. I always tell myself that any idea I come up with might already be thought by someone else and sometimes loose that drive to want to do anything about the idea. However, looking at those days when we thought Yahoo was it, then came along Google, then when we thought Google was it, then came along Facebook, Now Twitter and Foursquare is on the rise and a recent study showed 75% of 16,000 mobile Youtube users said mobile is their primary way of consuming Youtube content.

The world changes everyday and people’s needs change as well, this means there will constantly be a need for new answer to new problems.

A few videos to make all of us excited.

Ideas for next #TNBB

Overall, I think the event was clearly a success with a healthy number of people attending (some had to stand at the back) and with interesting speakers with lots of depth in what they were sharing. I’m already looking forward to the next TNBB already.

A few ideas of how I think TNBB could take shape in the future which I shared briefly with Claudia.

  1. By Demographic – Invite 6 speakers, two from below 20 years old, two from 20 to 30 years old and two from above 30 years old. I believe the ways this 3 group create, consume and interact with online content are drastically different. I cannot understand how some kids can have 200 Facebook comments in a few minutes, while I clearly understand the challenges a > 30 years old face when they want to blog *cough* work *cough* family *cough*.
  2. By Industry – Every quarter and organised into verticals.
    • Q1 2011 – Technology
    • Q2 2011 – Cars
    • Q3 2011 – Photography
    • Q4 2011 – Fashion
    • Q1 2012 – Food
    • Q2 2012 – Kids & Parenting
    • Q3 2012 – Business & Marketing
    • Q4 2012 – Sports
    • Q1 2013 – Music
    • Q2 2013 – Design & Creative
    • Q3 2013 – Gaming
    • Q4 2013 – Travel
    • etc…
  3. Across Online Disciplines – Lots of different disciplines are online so we can touch on:
    • Online Creative Design
    • Online Marketing
    • Online Social Marketing
    • Online Technical Development
    • Online Product Development
    • Online Game Development
    • Online Applications
    • etc…

The key I think is so long the target audience is clearly defined and kept consistent, it will not be difficult to know what interests this core target audience.

If you have any ideas, feel free to comment here or DM Claudia at @claudia10 or post on the Facebook Page.

The Social Network will be a classic

The Social Network Poster
The Social Network Official Poster

Caught The Social Network preview earlier this week thanks to @SonyPicturesSG and Qais Consulting. Its already a huge hit and looking at all the local reviews at www.thesocialnetwork.com.sg, its pretty clear its gonna be a huge hit when its in cinemas on this coming Thursday 28 Oct in Singapore. You can see the trailers in my previous post.

What the Movie was like

The movie is super fast paced. It starts with brilliant scriptwriting and darts around several parallel story lines.

The movie gives a good feel of how it was like back in the dorm days when Zuckerberg was coding the very first Facebook website. He coded like mad and school was like an obligation. When a cool idea would spark off in his mind or when he hears someone saying something that would be brilliant to add to the mix of the Facebook soup of features, he would dart off only to code more to make Facebook more like Facebook. I will not go into the whole law suit who was right and wrong thing, there are enough debate of it online already.

I think what the movie did really well was that there were so many parts that tech people can relate to. The whole I-need-to-fix-this-bug-and-lost-track-of-time thing, the whole I-only-feel-physically-tired-when-my-mind-have-achieved-its-focused-goal. The whole time, the movie was groggy.

Gage: Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?
Mark Zuckerberg: [stares out the window] No.
Gage: Do you think I deserve it?
Mark Zuckerberg: [looks at the lawyer] What?
Gage: Do you think I deserve your full attention?
Mark Zuckerberg: I had to swear an oath before we began this deposition, and I don’t want to perjure myself, so I have a legal obligation to say no.
Gage: Okay – no. You don’t think I deserve your attention.
Mark Zuckerberg: I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try – but there’s no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention – you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.
[pauses]
Mark Zuckerberg: Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

from IMDB

Check out the Websites

The Social Network | A Graphic Look
The Social Network | A Graphic Look

The official site have loads of nice stuff, so do check out the global site and also the local Singapore site for official trailers and goodies.

After watching the show, I naturally went to do some research and reading up. The few links below were the main ones I read up on. So if you’ve not seen the movie, bookmark this post, go watch the movie, then come back and check out the links below.

So where do we go from here?

Back in 2006, I told a friend that Facebook should be the final Social Networking site and so far I’m still correct. However, plagued with many privacy issues and like the movies tag line “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”, there are people who hate Facebook. But is there enough hate to bring facebook down or support something else that might take over facebook?

The 2 projects that I know of that are contending with Facebook are:

  • Diaspora which is an open-source distributed social networking service and the cool thing is Zuckerberg actually donated money to it.
  • MyCube founded by Johan Staël von Holstein aims to give you privacy, ownership and control of your digital life. read about it here. They also presented at the Social Media World Forum Asia this year. I was personally involved in this project from Dec 2009 till sometime around Mar/April 2010 so do hope that It will work as planned and cause a ripple online, but its really technically challenging to pull it off from what I can see. Sign up on their site to check out their progress.

Go watch The Social Network

You don't get to go to the movies without leaving your kids at home
The kids stayed at home

If Mark Zuckerberg is worth US$6.9 billion and if you are just 1% as brilliant as him, you would still be worth US$6.9 million. Wah… the movie really make you want to go something…

A month of Clara

Clara's Jane Cake shop Chocolate Cake
Clara's Jane Cake shop Chocolate Cake

It seems like just yesterday that we found out Pearl was pregnant with #3, how time flies, Clara is now one month old.

To celebrate, we held a big BBQ for the family on 10 Oct 2010. I think there were about 80 of us at the BBQ.

BBQ for Clara
BBQ for Clara

That sunday was also the first day Cleo got off her training wheels.

Yo!
Yo!

Clara have been sleeping alot (like all babies do), been getting breast fed alot, pooping ALOT and interestingly GRUNTING alot especially at night when she is asleep. She keeps on stretching herself as if like she is suppose to transform or something. Really don’t understand as Clié and Cleo both did not make such strange noises.

Clara is in Da House!
Clara is in Da House!

When she is awake, she is quite passive and stares at things alot. You can really tell that she can’t focus yet and don’t know what is in front of her. She is constantly in a daze.

Sleepy Girl
Sleepy Girl

When she sleeps, sometimes she pouts her lips and its super cute. She does it very often, so not too difficult to catch it on camera. Maybe she is dreaming of being breast fed.

Tiny Hands
Tiny Hands

Her hands are oh so tiny.

Tiny Feet
Tiny Feet

So are her feet.

Sleepy Head
Sleepy Head

Sometimes she sleeps in this position and she can be gone for several hours. It really looks super comfortable. It reminds me of the time when Clié was found sleeping in our walk-in cupboard.

Watcha lookin at!
Watcha lookin at!

But most of the time, Clara is in a daze. She is high on mommy’s goodness every 2 hours or so.

Waiting for the barf
Waiting for the barf

I wonder what will Clara be like when she grows up. As parents we really don’t know what to expect, only time will tell. All we can do is to provide her the best environment we can.

Pancake OCD

Pancake OCD
Pancake OCD

Do you have any of OCD? I have lots.

My kids always need me to cut up their Pancakes for them and this happens alot. Sometimes there are semicircles. DOes this happen to you too?

Maybe Strictly Pancakes should run a contest or something, or maybe even a gallery of pancakes being cut up by parents for kids.