Beyonce 100 Single Ladies Flash-Dance Piccadilly Circus, London for Trident Unwrapped

100 Single Ladies stop traffic with Beyonce's famous leggy dance in Piccadilly Circus, to celebrate the announcement by Trident of its free Beyonce gig in November. http://www.tridentunwrapped.co.uk

The Wireless Substitution Trend

I was reading a research paper done up by Nielsen on the trend of Wireless Substitution in the U.S. and I thought it would great to share it. We might be able to see that trend with an Asian context. 

Taking a step back to look at the people around me, I do realise that there are more friends who have snipped off their residential land lines over the years and are happy with relying on their mobile phones (or instant messaging/ email/ other communication technologies ) to communicate with their family and friends. 

The wireless substitution trend identified in the paper could very likely be seen here in Asia as well since mobile subscription costs get more competitive and users see the convenience of mobility without wires. And yes, mobile phones penetration rates has been rocketing in this region (esp. in Indonesia where even mobile usage is seen to be growing exponentially according to my ex colleagues at Yahoo! SEA). 

Now here's more hope for mobile marketing strategies! :)

Scrapblog - Digital Scrap Booking at its Best

Scrapbooking has always been a great way to collect and express beautiful memories that you gained through experiencing the beauty of life. I had a one on one sharing session with the folks at Ogilvy today and I thought it would be nice to show the people who work with me in the same vincity some little pranks I know of that happened in my ex-workplace - the Yahoo! SG office.

I used Scrapblog to create my presentation "slides" and populated with memories. :) Some of my colleagues thought that I've used Photoshop Elements to come out with the presentation but nope, I doubt I had the time to do so. Scrapblog was a much easier solution for me. It brings scrapbooking to another realm - the digital realm. No, digital scrapbooking can never replace the physical, texturised scrapbooking experience. But it brings the mental visuals, the designs, that has been residing in your head into images on screen before you go, "yea that looks good, I can translate that on physical paper." Well, you can always stop at the part where you print out the digital masterpiece if you are contented with that.

Being a SaaS, the Scrapblog is a mash up with practical API relations with many photo content sources like Flickr, Picasa, and even those pictures you've uploaded on Facebook can be imported over. Putting its feet in a user's shoe, the tool has a well thought out architecture that enhances a user's experience by providing so much ease and accessibility to the needed content. Kudos to the team behind it. They should be in the Techcrunch 50 list! I wonder how the site analytics is like. Would suppose that visitors have high pageviews/visit and long visit durations. It is a highly engaging site.

Well I shall cut the talking/ writing. Have fun if you're playing around with it.

Yahoo! Singapore Auctions to Retire

No way is this happening. Why? The service is great, there is a pool of audience, the activity within the network is visible. Now why stop the service?

I love Yahoo! Auctions

• for its easy to use functionalities.
  
• The interface is simple that anyone can use without going through a tutorial
  
• Posting an item is hussle free and easy.
  
• I'm fine without the paypal function since the seller could be staying 2 blocks away from me, or a train ride away. (Singapore is so tiny.)

You should stay!

Hiatus: Waking Up with A Song

I've gone for an unannounced break from my blog.

There are higher priorities in my to do lists. I just had to take care of them.

I still enjoy what I do despite the busy-ness.

Occasionally, I take a break, pick up that guitar and sing a song. :)

As such, I did a little recording. Just my mp3 player, my guitar and me.

http://www.purevolume.com/jpg/albums/99499428

Survey: Do you have a Social Life?

I'm calling for responders for this survey that my team put up. We are currently working on a Social Media Usage study and collecting some primary data.

We estimate that a 3rd of the world's online population or a staggering 417
million users in Asia Pacific are actively consuming social media in some shape
or form. (Social media includes things like Friendster, MySpace, YouTube,
Twitter, Flickr, Digg or Yahoo! Answers)

Are you one of them?
Do you consume social media?
What does it mean to you?
What would you do without it?

Please take less than 10 minutes of your time to share your experiences and become part of this dynamic and exciting study.

We thank you in advance.

I've got a eeky feeling why the link doesn't work for some, but nevertheless, you can cut and paste this into your browser if it doesn't lead you directly to the survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=lAloNlxmcS3TrwvKPMnmJw_3d_3d

Samsung Omnia Launches at CommunicAsia 2008

The "iPhone killer" - SGH-i900 also known as the Samsung Omnia had a world launch at CommunicAsia on 17 June in Singapore. I follow its one-liner introduction :

The all-in-one maxi-phone fully loaded with top-of-the line multimedia enhanced smartphone features

Here's a video by Samsung regarding the functionality and features of the phone:

The Samsung OMNIA i900 Specifications

I met one of the folks from Samsung PR (USA) during an impromptu CrunchNetwork Singapore Meet up and got the opportunity to have a try of the phone. Personally, I'm happy with the size and weight of the phone. It feels lighter than the iPhone. The Omnia runs on the Microsoft Windows mobile version 6.1 Pro. It totally feels like you are having your PC on the phone. The camera function is remarkably customisable. Memory space of 8 or 16Gb is just right. The processor was not slow even though there were 10 programs running concurrently on it. I just hope that it doesn't hang as often as the Dopod TyTn II and 818pro that I used to have.


The stunning interface did melt my heart. The screen does a 360 degree auto rotation to orientate according the the angle I held the phone. I particularly adore the widget-like side bar it has on it's standby page, it allows you to add all kinds of widgets unto your phone and access them on the "canvas" with us a touch and drag. And touch, even though the Omnia does not have the multi touch technology that the iPhone has within it, the sliding and pointing sensitivity is good enough for me. I'm not sure if the multi-touch technology is patented by Apple.

Before I forget, the meet up was actually initiated by Greg Kumparak, Techcrunch's Mobilecrunch editor and Bernard coordinated the meet up in such a short time via the SG Entreprenuer site (and the other sites to propogated the news and get the word out in a louder way). Greg and several of us were discussing views regarding the .mobi domain and its future. Well, keeping the session as one that is lighthearted, the exchange of ideas and opinions was just top line. But we had fun. :)

Asian Numbers Could Have Made Facebook the Largest Social Network.

Techcrunch recently published an article Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network. The title speaks for itself.


In April 2008, a Comscore report shows a worldwide tally of the total number of unique visitors for 2 top social networks, Facebook and MySpace, at 115 million each. MySpace has been hovering at this range for the past 1 year but for Facebook, it is a steadily growing volume. There is also a graph showing the numbers that were contributed by the US. The volume has been maintaining at a constant level of 70 million and 30 million for mySpace and Facebook respectively.

I’ve modified the graph to point out the visitor volume contributed by the rest of the world outside of the US as shaded areas. The dotted lines depict the numbers from the US thus anything above it will come from the rest of the world.

For the past year, there has been an immense growth in the number of APAC Facebook users. MySpace entered the APAC market earlier and membership has since stabilized. It is not as well received as Facebook in China, a significantly big contributor looking at the sheer size of the market. But of course, China has its homegrown xiaonei.com creating even larger waves.

Alexa presented traffic ranks of Facebook and MySpace by geographic regions:

Draw your attention to the highlighted countries (Asia Pacific countries) and you will notice that Facebook has been climbing to top site ranks in a short span of 1 year. Facebook was only released to the college and university networks into APAC beginning of 2007. A short span of slightly more than a year, growth of its audience in APAC is inevitably going to continue. The older player, MySpace is already seen to achieve stagnated or low growth, or at least not as exponential as what Facebook has gained.

I have my reservations making the assumption that the European, Middle Eastern countries are the key growth contributors. The European market is largely swarmed by Bebo users. Bebo was launched in January 2005 and its users are mainly from UK (almost 50%), Ireland and the US. In the Middle East, some countries are dominated by Facebook (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, UAE, Israel). The rest of the countries prefer Hi5, Orkut, PerfSpot and other Arabic Social networks like Maktoob.com.

So if APAC is indeed the biggest contributor of the growth, what does it really mean for online marketers and advertisers? @weekee asked me on Twitter if this means good news for them.

The most obvious benefit would be the availability of another avenue to reach your target audience (that is, if they match the demographics of Facebook users). Most probably, youths below 18 are very unlikely to be there because of the age limit that Facebook has, as well as folks above 50 since the content does not attract them as much as they would to the 18-50 audience (the range could be smaller for some countries).

Because it is a platform, there are plenty of ways advertisers or online marketers can grab the attention of their TA. They comprise different degrees of interactivity ranging from just a click on banner ads to signing up for an application and access it regularly for new related content. InsideFacebook.com provided some very good opportunities that marketers could exploit from Facebook. But before embarking on any, so make sure that the people whom you want to speak to are there!

In a nutshell, these were some of the listed alternatives

In the order of ascending user interactivity:

• Buying Social Ads, you specify how targeted you want it to be
• Engaging in Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• Use of Beacons and mini feeds to send information about your brand updates
• Having a brand profile page if your brand has a “personality”
• Running a News feed that people can subscribe to
• Running Polls for research
• Inviting guests through Facebook Events, and get invitees to RSVP
• Adding Facebook Notes, Photos, Videos, Share or Posted Items
• Selling on a Facebook Marketplace
• Creating a Facebook Network
• Creating Facebook Groups
• Creating Facebook PagesSponsoring Facebook Groups
• Sponsoring Facebook Platform ApplicationsCreating Facebook Platform Applications