NEXUS 2007 – by The Digital Movement

*applause* kudos to the team – this is certainly a very interesting event compared to what the big boys can organize themselves. Hope to see more regular ones of these. Saturdays are going to be very special from now on.

I promised that I’ll write something on NEXUS 2007, but after the event I suddenly felt that I must have over-read – nothing much is new to me – and to do the citizen reporting thing when one of the topics was citizen reporting is dumb ;). So I guess what I’ll do is to re-summarize my own lessons from my perspective. If you did not attend the event, I suggest that you go scour the web for other blogs that would do the reporting on “what happened” before reading this.

Citizen Journalism

For god sake, it’s not journalism if it’s just a piece of interesting article. To say that taking an MMS picture and posting it in some popular aggregator is like saying that banging your elbows and knees against the piano is call music (heck – call it music if you want – but remember that the laymen can tell).

Don’t forget, from a purist / nitpicker point of view, there are other non-citizens blogging to. I write a lot on Singapore but I’m not a Singaporean. Then are you going to call it Permanent-Resident-Journalism now? Huh?

Call it what it is – User Generated Content – and stick with it please.

Web 2.0

Wow, I mean, ok fine this is still an early stage thing. We barely understand our own definitions, and every other talk we’re out there doing the same evangelizing. But just seriously IMHO, don’t use some examples of some established companies and then say “tada”, web 2.0. We need to, as a group of people pitching this new idea, to be coherent ourselves. It is immensely confusing to the guys with deep pockets to invest in this paradigm shift, if we can’t sway the industry with a consistent set of vocabulary, a consistent set of benefits, and a clear path on how to make money out of it.

Sorry folks, yes let’s carry on doing the things we love, but there are some of us here where our jobs are to find these interesting things going on around town and try to hook them up with the right financial backing so that scaling can happen. You know scaling, you’ve attended NEXUS. See all the innovative things they brought it, campfirenow live chat la, Chern Jie’s photo streaming la, and so on – all die under the weight of? Insufficient Access Points. To most of us, bandwidth is free, but talk to the people who does this for a living and they will tell you scaling is hard and takes money.

Btw, I missed the panel discussion on this. I presume it was mostly about long tail?

Aggregators

This is perhaps the most “live” aggregator debate I’ve seen myself. 🙂 In summary we’re talking about the different models: ping.sg being free for all, tomorrow.sg being moderated by few (sounds like ReCom doesn’t it Syamsul), and Stomp by SPH being, you know, pseudo-gahmen (sorry.. it is wat..). Personally, I love them regardless of model, not because they can publicize my blog or anything, but it does make last generation netizens (especially those with no RSS) happy. Just like how Google News make me happy, or the typical reddit / digg.

But there’s one point I think wasn’t articulated enough – both ping and tomorrow are someone’s HOBBY! Please, be considerate. If you want to see someone better happening quickly, persuade the founders to sell it to you to set it up as a corporation or something. Then hire your bunch of geeks to change it the way you want. Otherwise, don’t tell other people how to fly kite.

Second Life

Wow. Marina, thanks for your talk. It’s an amazing experience for me coz just last week I was with Jaron Lanier, the chief scientist of Second Life in NUS and we’re talking about mimic octopus butler robots that create haptic experiences in virtual reality.

It’s likely that we need to pursue the path into VR taking into account both stories. On the one hand there’s the emotional factor – when you hug someone in virtual space, you actually feel that you’re hugging – as there’s scientific proof that when people know that the various avatars have a human behind them, they bring their first world experience into this new medium.

Then on the other hand there’s the continuous improvement of the physical environment where the VR experts will try their best in making it possible for you to interact naturally with all 5 human sensors. Second Life is one of our next step in the evolution towards better virtual communication, given our current global Internet infrastructure.

These two demand – the emotional want and the physical want – must converge somewhere along the road. That’s why I don’t agree when Cory say, “we’ll try to create the platform and get out of the way, because no one wants white male Americans running the show”. The physical platform must go beyond physical control of the avatars and elude to emotional parts of the communication. Much like games have been trying to capture “energy level”, “mana”, “magic dusts” and other intangibles.
As an aside, white male Americans are human beings too.

When can I start hosting Second Life servers as a business!?

Cyberlaws

Linden dollars turned out to be not a currency (surprise surprise) but some limited license thing that’s exchangeable. Suddenly I thought it would be great to just hijack this platform and do all the illegal trade that you have ever wanted to do. It would be a killer! Man, too bad I don’t know these people, otherwise I’ll just be their banker for exchanging real money for virtual money.

There is still no cyberlaw across all nation states. And this is a biggie: Nation states don’t like other nation states – so if one starts creating a space that have the characteristics of a nation state such as currency, then there’s an issue.

Litescape

Simply, I think litescape’s positioning as a software based cross platform unified communication is very appealing, especially for the disgruntled Cisco customers in Singapore who are crying foul on the high cost of their hardware pieces.

Hiring in Singapore

Cory harped on one point (and the audience picked it up) on hiring. He said that in the course of hiring people here in Singapore, he managed to get 3 out of 37 people he interviewed (correct me if I’m wrong) and that’s already higher than the average in US.

First – I think that’s a gross generalization of the hiring experience here. Yes there are plenty of IT workers in the market desperate for a job. And yes there are schools like NYP who “produce” knowledge workers who can already build stuff in Second Life. Furthermore, the education system here is indeed rather demanding and those who survived it probably also picked up quite a bit of skills.

But, Cory also mentioned the need for “brilliant generalist”. There’s no clear cut way of identifying these people. Just because he or she nailed the questions in your interview doesn’t mean that he knows how to solve other problems or possess other knowledge. (I recall an incident in Amazon years back where someone manage to pass the interview as a software developer, only to be found out by his colleagues that he don’t know what is an object or how to operate an IDE – the guy was fired after 5 days of employment)

More contentious is his statistical point of 3/37. My own hit rate is around 1/100. Are my standards higher? Hell no. I was just looking for a .NET developer for a local body shop, while Cory was looking for a “brilliant generalist” for a 100+ man strong startup company in an entirely new realm. He forgot about the goodwill generated by the strong media presence of his company. Not any startup gets featured by the Economist, and none have generated so much interest as Second Life in Singapore with only 2500 Singaporean users today.

This process of self selection gives a huge advantage certain companies. Perhaps it was part of a successful media campaign from the company itself, or maybe the company is the new poster boy for the industry to attract the best of the breed. So I think an interviewing experience for Second Life hardly speak for the knowledge worker’s capabilities here. There is still a lot of room to grow.

The Digital Movement (They Da Man!)

Again, I want to congratulate the team for making this a memorable event. I also did my own survey around on some feedback, maybe they can be relevant?

  • This event is run by kids!? (Well, mostly 20 year olds…)
  • This event doesn’t teach me how to make money… (well, you can pay a lot of money to go to those “make money with your website” talks)
  • This event is only attended by kids!!! (Yeah, $15 gave this away.. An IDC event will cost $500, will have a set of different speakers and talking about the same thing)
  • This event really allow me to network with some of the oddest people I’ve never thought I would meet. (You’ve been to Zouk recently?)
  • I left after the first talk. (Aiya, well, the first talk is indeed a bit boring if you already know the topic)
  • I left after the lunch. (Hey, you come here to eat or to attend conference?)
  • I didn’t stay for the networking session in the evening. (Yeah, me too, the room was so stinky and smell of drunk people, so hot, and so noisy)
  • The Internet was slow. (Hooray! NTUC management needs to beef up their access points capability)
  • The chatroom keeps crashing. (Why didn’t we just use IRC?? Sometimes I think we over innovate)
  • The food not bad sia, for $15. (Yes, without sponsors, this is impossible – please go support the sponsors)
  • Cory very cocky. (American lor, I guess, what to do)
  • There’s this man who keeps passionately shouting at the mic about philosophical issues, so irritating. (Well, that’s what moderators are for…)

Awaiting NEXUS 2008.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

5 Responses

  1. cory did not specify if the 100 in his US recruiting was 100 resumes or interviews.. if resumes, the spore hit rate will be the same 3/100 too.. minor point.. haha..

    is jaron lanier the same guy who was in the risk assessment seminar last week with james surowiecki? i didn’t know james came down to singapore, that wld be some awesome talk..

  2. Jaron had a talk in NUS: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/425953926/

    This is no resumes man. I guess I am lucky that I have a HR dept to screen resumes. But these kind of system also means that there’ll be false positive (they will only remove those confirm cannot fit ones). I actually have to speak to so many of them (mostly Indians coming here to find job) to realize that everything they have on the resume is fake. I mean, if your previous job was a civil engineer, and have 4 kids already, and you want a career switch to IT, and cannot assign a number to a variable, don’t claim that you have done CORBA, can design MVC web applications and a guru in J2EE application.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to Top