• What you do – is not wasted. (It’s how the dots will link together)
• Who you meet is all important. (They could be your future brothers)
• What you see – isn’t reality. (It’s years of hard work)
• What you count – isn’t money. (It’s sweat, blood, tears of a team through the last few months)
• What you want to do – can be done. (It’s how we manage our expectations & find the right talent.)
• What you hear – isn’t successful marketing campaigns. (It’s real people doing things right.)
• What you have to do – Be honest. (Lies can be seen in hours.)
• What you do next – Might sound risky. (No pain, no gain, it’s about calculated risk and managing them.)
• Belief is very important – Morales. (In a startup, you hear your inner voice, no financial advisors or mentors. Your sole decisions affects everyone around you. I’ve learnt it the hard way)
• Your true happiness – Is about helping people making life a lil better for everyone.
• Credit and power – Is all about your great team that runs with you.
• Your competitors – There to motivate and support you.
• Don’t torture yourself – If you are not happy about what you are working on, quit or review it immediately. Never leave life to chance.
• The difference between yesterday and today? – Action

You never know tomorrow exist.

Here’s an example:

Simply because it looks overly cliché, and it doesn’t prove your thought in sending them. Instead you would want to focus on building lost relationships, or reconnect with friends that you really miss in your life for the past year that you would really want them back to you!

Everytime an email comes to my inbox, I would be like – OMG not again, another automated email from a robot trying to look personal. It will come in some fancy bright email template colours, and it simply look like the guy behind the server wearing broken jeans with a baggy shirt is being paid 3 cents to send this email to every client. Super sad

Your message out to your family, friends, clients, associates and anyone in between should be fully personalised for every single contact. If you don’t do that, I rather you not send at all. Also, forget about all of the contacting systems that Company ABC decide to offer you, they will simply just include Dear (Your Name Here), and everyone will know that it is an automated robot doing its chores.

Imagine a boring email that says Hey Jeremy, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (insert sad face here) and a banner that says: this is an automated email, do not reply. Or worst, this is an email sponsored by ACME Mail Company, click here for a 30 day free trial. If you are one of them, Go kick yourself in the face.

My definition of personalised, is seriously personalised, like literally type or talk as though you are meeting the person in real life. I mean not be overly creepy like a guy pulling over your door to give you candy at 12 midnight. At least something, someone or an event you can relate to, and reminisce the good moments that was shared. You would want to catch up and find out how they doing, don’t you. The world with good friends is a much better place to be in.

So below is a list of things I couldn’t stand, but I still see that it comes to my inbox every single day.

Avoid flash, videos or content that requires you to click.

I can’t emphasise this enough, NO I DON’T WANT TO SEE SOMETHING THAT TAKE 30 MINUTES TO LOAD. Especially I am viewing your message on my crappy phone, where the speeds are horrible. (Plug: I recently wrote about why I didn’t want to switch to 4G/LTE)

Yes, during this Christmas or New Year season, it is actually faster to send a pigeon mail than to send an SMS or an email due to the horrible network traffic.

So please, senders, keep it in simple text, or an image that is really small (<100kb) so it loads on my phone, computer, tablet, pager, walkie talkie, papaya or anywhere so it is FAST.

Don’t write text, write text that sells.

So, if you happen to write, please don’t write something that we ALREADY KNOW. Like Merry Christmas or Happy New Year or a combination or both. It’s as good as telling me: “I am a male, and typing in front of this computer with nothing to do on my hands, so I decided to be social and send you this email for fun anyway, heh!”.

Write informative texts and make sure that they include some action, or some knowledge they could take away with – which is pretty much concise and to the point.

Use images if you must, but please, customise them. AND DONT USE CLIPART OR ANY OF THOSE NONSENSE.

If you have to include an image to your email, make sure it is personalised  or it will go with personalised text. Do not use clipart – why? It is overly used, too abundant, looks like crap, from the 80s (which might be a good thing anyway), and people will create a perception that you are still using Microsoft Office 1997.

By the way, for the younger generation, MS Office 1997 looks like this:

Yes, that is how crappy it looks like – no kidding. So don’t follow the footsteps from the past and create something original.

With abundance of images editing tools, such as Picasa, Paint.net, MS Paint, Photoshop, Gimp and blah blah. It is always easy to create meaningful content, if you don’t know how to edit an image, there is a million YouTube tutorials created over past second to teach you – step by step on how to do it.

My message for you:

So anyway, as my blog readers are basically everywhere, and I pretty much, have no idea whether you are coming back tomorrow to read again (I hope you do). I created a simple personalised message for you. My warm blessing is out to you, my dear internet friend!

(Images Sources: Toastytech, Ciker)

Still reading? … I have a nugget for you, since you make it this far.

TOO MUCH WORK?

I know a faster way: Call your friends and tell them how much you missed them in the year of 2012, and arrange a meetup on that call. Many would appreciate it, I know I certainly do. Guess what? This method always works.

Being able to evolve and progress in business and life means pacing ourselves to engage our thinking in activities that will help us to…

- achieve something we haven’t done before;

- do something better than we did it last time;

- find a more effective way of doing something that we’re used to doing routinely.

This is proactive thinking. It’s about taking time to strategize where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. I firmly believe that business is a marathon, not a sprint. If you try to take speedy shortcuts and react quickly to events, you won’t necessarily reach your destination any quicker. You might even end up heading the wrong way and have to promptly change course. And none of us like to be in that situation!

So, why do so many of us get caught up in this kind of reactive thinking?

…Because it’s easy to think that being busy means being productive – that if we deal with tasks as soon as they arise, we’re making progress. But in rushing to get through these tasks, we’re not giving them the attention and depth of thought they might need. This can be lethal to our creativity. By thinking proactively, we come to understand that innovative success is a force to be purposefully cultivated and deployed. We learn to push the boundaries with careful planning and strategizing, rather than using the same old tried-and-tested formulas.

(Source: Wearelikeminds)

Typically to our work environments in South East Asia and especially to younger executives, it is often that we get too caught up with the existing pool of work without taking account into the future roadmap.

When tight and near impossible deadlines are imminent, it is hard to be creative nor flexible. New ideas will look like a chore – desiring little motivation and purpose. Brickwalls are now hard to climb over. You are easily stressed.

J

Let’s buy, free – the invisible price-tag.

There are promotions everywhere, and businesses affix “FREE” labels in every product they can find in an attempt to lure more consumers. I think that there’s nothing wrong with that, as the main idea for the business is to generate profit & achieve their targets.
The problem lies with the consumers.

Businesses are run by people. Since we are all consumers (Yes, don’t you buy groceries or anything?) – Businesses are simply consumers too.

As humans, we tend to be more attracted to freebies and giveaways. Some of us are impulse buyers, but I guess we have to look through the thin line of feasibility. Like what marketers always say, we don’t create the product. Rather, we create the demand – the need of the item through multiple promotional & sales channels.

Logically, the item (free or not) is factored into the pricing of the product.

There’s 3 types of free
1) FREE for life, – Probably, something physical. (You’ve already paid for it)
2) FREE TRIAL – you’re physically given credits, emotionally, you’re locked in to the service / product. (You’re going to pay for it soon, unless your heart tells you otherwise. But due to the nature of how we are being brought up – It’s not that hard getting the consumer to pay after the trial.)
3) Freemium – The current trend of monetization, the company will offer you it’s barely sufficient plan – hoping that you will upgrade to the paid tier. I would say, this is really a large step for the consumer, as you could test it’s usefulness through time.

So here are some questions to ask, before buying items with FREE labeled on it.

BEFORE YOU ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS – YOU NEED TO HAVE SELF REASONING SKILLS.
Which I believe it’s in all of our blood, so let’s begin!

Scenario: You go to a supermarket / store, and see an item you really want.. You really want to buy it, but you are on a tight budget. So here are some questions..

1) Do I need this product?

1a) No, drop it.
1b) Yes, why?
(Do the answer come straight to your head? Or are you trying to come out with a use for that? If your answer is the latter, refer to 1a)

2) Frequency – How many times would I use it anyway?

2a) Really often. (Move to Question 3)
2b) I’m not too sure, rarely, almost never? Or still thinking how to answer this question? Refer to 1a. Or you could simply rent or borrow it from someone.

3) Alternatives

3a) Have I tried looking for the product on another platform? Internet? or other stores down the road?
There’s so many group-buying (Groupon), Auction Sites (eBay / Qoo10), Forums & e-Retailers.
On top of that, there are many eCoupons & voucher codes available on the internet. (You can input those before you checkout)
3b) Is there another product that’s equally competitive by another manufacturer? The bang for the buck – Remember, it’s not always the cheaper the better, neither, the other way round.
Also, check the specifications (Such as the volume, quality, etc), not just the pricing.
3c) Are there any problems with the particular model or product you crave? Look it up on Amazon.com, popular forums, hit the Google search for reviews. *Bonus if you have a data plan on the go*
3d) Timing & Seasons – A PC show next month? Summer sales a few weeks down the road? New model in the upcoming weeks? Can I wait?
If you did not bother to try out any of the options above, refer to 1a.

4) The Free Factor

After the long decision process, that’s where you figure out whether the ‘Free’ price tag is worth abiding by.
Think ‘free’, the new ‘paid’.
4a) Is it worth buying the item with the ‘free’ item?
4b) If you do not need the ‘free’ item, what are you going to do with it? Where is it’s new home?

5) Shelf Life & Future Provisions

I guess it’s entirely logical if I’ve to write about the practically of the future and the afterlife of the item. (Before you even buy it, yes, similar to Birth Planning)
5a) Do you have space to house the item? (Logistics)
5b) Is there any consequences after buying the item (No $ for dinner or rent, etc)
5c) How long do you expect the product to last anyway?
That’s where you decide on the quantity to purchase.

This is a long guide, but for all the impulse buyers. Here’s a toast to you.

Thoughts?

A Blog is regularly recognized as a personal journal, a recollection of events that happens in the mind. In the late twenties, blogging was probably one of the most happening things then. The impression when you tell people you were blogging then: One of the cool kids that hanged out with a bajillion friends.

Development of Blogging

However in the past few years, it’s easy to admit that the idea of blogging had developed into more of a knowledge Wikipedia or repositories. With all of the inspirations that the author would like to share on the top & all of the comments, edits and criticisms (Contributed by readers) at the comments section below. Blogs with commenting disabled do not play well with many readers. (And yes, it’s extremely frustrating to email the author for a factual mistake)

Private Blogs & the Internet

Since the concept of the blog began with a journal, its easy to predict that access control was important. Across the years, I’ve seen many blogs which have turned private. It serves those lucky readers on the invite list well.  However, Internet is a distributed platform where people communicate and share their works. If you pardon me a comparison:

Creating a private blog on the Internet is similar to writing messages on the notice board with a lock attached to it.

So what about Procrastination

A private blog is commonly used to rant about all the bad experiences in your life, relationships troubles & a ton of heartbreaking issues that one might face everyday, including commute.

Why not open private blogs? Possibly some information that they do not want to share with others? Or possibly something they want to hide. Whatever the reason is, private blogs limit the freedom of opinions and interactivity. The punch line? You won’t get solutions to all of the problems that you’re trying to tell others.

Probably, the de facto reason on why people contribute their content on the internet is to allow them to express their opinions & views + gather feedback, thoughts and ideas from their readers.

Private blogs just kills that.

Private Blogs is like talking to yourself.

+ you can do that in the shower.

+ nothing your write on the internet is safe

What if I still want a private blog?

• Grab some pens and paper, get writing and keep a journal.
  • Remember: The Journal doesn’t write back to you & tell you what it thinks.
• Talk to the wall or some puppets.
• Just keep everything to yourself and explode someday.

Stop hiding yourself in the closet and

Start telling people what you think & make this world a better place.

Thoughts? Love to hear them!

“Hey, are we doing the things that I really want to do?”

Moments later …

“Are we just doing it just for the sake of a short-term goal? Or are we just pleasing someone behind our backs?”

I believe everyone had somehow asked themselves this question before, somewhat directly or not, or during the times where you are in the middle of the crossroad.

No matter what the situation might be, this same story (from Steve Jobs) came back to me:

When Steve dropped out of college, he went for a lesson tour; sitting in and switching lessons that he had a keen interest in & one of the important lessons he sat determined the great typography in Apple Computers. Did he not drop out of school and sat for that particular lesson, Apple Computers will never look the same again.

As all of us, forward-looking people who move on the ranks of the society, I think we should some-how understand the concept of connecting the dots. Similar to the drawing game that you might have played when you are young, it is all about connecting the dots in your path:

Unlike the image on my left, if all the dots were so detailed, there’s basically an outcome that you can already foresee. I strongly believe that in many scenarios, all of us (including myself), pick up & learn new things that some of the times, we have no interest in or something that’s in no relation to our career paths.

However, sometimes, through this minor pockets of learning in everyone’s life, the invisible dots in our destiny will appear & if the lines were drawn perfectly and to scale, it will definitely give you the perfect image.

Notice that all of the dots are entirely dependent on no-one else other than you. Furthermore, all of this dots would never exist unless you went sourcing for opportunities or it literally came knocking to you (Rarely),

Here’s the punchline: Even though opportunities do exist, just like dots with labels in the picture (above), the lines are oftenly not drawn & soon enough, the labels and the dots will fade away. With another opportunity lost. It’s about how we connect the lines and find the right dots.

While I could only speak about myself, I’m still try to get my lines drawn (At best) & of course, if you got it connected, let me know!

Best of luck connecting those dots!

Source (Image: Colouring Page Sheets)

The 4th installment of EduCamp is held at ITE College East (LT3), where there are about 40 odd people. They come from various education institutions & diverse backgrounds. Well, some educators, some doing some awesome startups and curators.

One of the hot topics that was on the board was the debate of virtual online classrooms, the likes of Khan Academy and OpenLectures. What is the future of online learning? – The face to face element is still really important, so there needs to be some kind of balance.

The next is about Flipped Learning, where the teachers move lectures out of the classroom and moves the ‘”homework” to the classroom. Students get to spend more time about problems in class with their peers and get their lectures at home (Through teacher-aided online materials, online videos and so on). Mind-opening, great potential.

There was some chatter about Flipped Presentations, where students come to school prepared for every lesson at home to talk about what they’ve learnt & they shared it with everyone else. Pretty insightful.

Some insights of the usage of education through online media; if you change the medium but not the teaching method, it won’t work. No matter its podcasting, to vodcasting or what Social Media platforms.

(Next the event got split into both rooms, for those who can fill me in for the other room, drop me a tweet (@thejeremygoh) or email me (contact on the right), you’ll really help everyone in the community, loads of karma points!)

The next presentation is a brief showcase of an iPhone app to help educators, it got developed in a few hours during a development bootcamp. It mainly is a to-do list integrated with a class register, so that would really help collecting Edusave forms easier/report book/class tests/etc. It also aims to include a private social network in it, where teachers could basically gossip about students (in a good way) & help students to improve through collaboration. Monetization through subscription & customized development. Base code will be open sourced. (Still in discussion) Thoughts?

The next presentation is where an NUS lecturer share that he took the learning out of the classroom, bringing students to the nature like Palau Ubin or Botanical Gardens, where they use their laptops to look through pinpoints done by lecturers, students would have to observe the plant, take photos of them & they would have to basically work together. A junior is attached to the senior (Junior gets to learn technical skills from Senior, Senior gets to learn project management skills) & during the process, the assignment must create some sort of fear (A police and thief concept), so that the student will be on their toes. Everyone had fun.

Startup Weekend, all about the history and the future in Startups!

The next presentation is about #edsg (Educate Singapore), where a group of people requests everyone to use that hashtag on any tweet on Twitter that has a form of educational value. A platform of people where they collaborate and learn different things from people. So if you’re on Twitter, use it, why not?

(I will fork the section out below and create a blog post dedicated about my talk soon)

Plug: I also spoke about Social Media in Education, here’s a sweet summary of points:

• Use Facebook Groups for Communications
  • All your students are on it, you should too!
  • That platform could allow a collaborative discussion in seconds, its human instinct to hit the comment and like button
  • You get a ton of likes!
• Use Tumblr as a Blogging Platform
  • Not that everyone in the world is using it, but it’s easy to use and manage
  • The design and setting it up makes sure your content comes from, among anything else.
  • Maths, Science, Geography? Condense all of those long texts and put it on Tumblr
• Use Wikia for Community Building – This case, Wikipedia for Classrooms
  • Recognize: Not every student have identical learning abilities
  • Students to make notes for every lesson and make sure they use Wikia to contribute it online – Threaten if they don’t when possible.
  • Any student could edit those notes and add in theirs, making it more useful over time.
  • Outcome: Solving class learning inequalities + Students sharing knowledge
  • BONUS: Education is now open source, everyone could view and learn from there. Going out of schools, to help others in the world.
• Integration
  • Your role is to find a way to integrate all of this tactics to help your learning.
  • Good luck & remember to report back here!
• Questions?
  • How About Twitter
  • Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that limits the message to 140 characters, but the platform have a higher learning curve (learning about RT, @mentions and so on) and it is to saturated with many teenagers twitters posting about them wanting to cut themselves, relationship turmoil & I love you texts. So it’s basically too ‘noisy’.
  • Okay: Here’s a great tip, you can hashtag your Twitter classroom topics, like get your students to hashtag your lectures and make sure that you can follow their conversation & vice versa via Twitter.
• You can contribute your questions by commenting below, I will write what I think here. On top of that, I will publish a blog post about Social Media in a conducive classroom / learning environment soon.

Visited HackerSpace after that, nothing too exciting about programming, development and coding. Well, if you’re interested, there’s W3Schools, get started there.

If you visited the event & have loads of additional materials and content to provide to my blog, please kindly share them, for the love of the community. Drop a tweet or email me (details on the sidebar)

Cheers!

Well, I was technically the 2nd person to arrive; so we kinda just hanged out around the Multi-Purpose Hall and the entrance of the location.

If you are not technically familiar with Barcamp, this is how works – It’s an unconference, where guests are contributors and speakers to the conference. Anyone could just pop by and write their topic on the topic board and the highest voted topic will be assigned a speaking slot. (I myself presented about Android vs iOS & Windows Phone Apps)

Let me go with the flow, here are just some things we’ve spoke about, collectively. I couldn’t really remember the speaker names & I’m unable to cover the entire barcamp as there’re events running at all 3 rooms at 1 go.

The speaker spoke about how music would affect consumers buying habits in a particular location, in this case, the restaurant.

This speaker spoke about how hard it is to manage & deploy software through a set of servers & how this will impact the end user & server performance.

This speaker spoke about how a simple text editor; Aquamacs would be able to solve all problems, complex or simple, such as a task/to-do list, meeting schedules & so on.

This speaker spoke about the importance of Typography for any project/company or organization, be it small or big, it could play a difference in everything, from branding to emotions. It conveys it all.

This speaker spoke about the importance of metrics (Metrics for Startup Ninjas) (See, things look great, or do they). Pictures above describes it all. The full slides can be found here.

My mate (Kiran) spoke about the startup scene in Banagalore. Visit their beautiful city when you’re there! Heard it’s the place for all things technology.

Our very own NUS buddy spoke about his project; Using Social Media to identify words that was commonly used by Singaporeans & Malaysians. The Unigram Results show the commonly used words of Singapore & Malaysia Citizens.

There’s also a foldable bike showcase, which is extremely cool. Couldn’t remember the name of the bike, if someone in the barcamp remembers, fill me in (@thejeremygoh)

& probably the thing that we love the most, the afterparty! Held at University Town @ NUS. In an Italian restaurant, the tower of beer is just $55/=

Alright, see you in the next Barcamp SG 9, should be happening in Sept 2012 in a local institution. If you have any media you wish to contribute to this article, or any clarifications, please let me know – I would really appreciate it.

J.

Consumers are at plight as there is a wide variety of Android devices in the market & if you look at them closely, all of them hits a trend of generalization (Particularly in the mid to low end models) – Sluggish Performance, Poor User Interface, Attractive Pricing. {Yes I know fanboys, there’s high end models out there, but this article wouldn’t be relevant for you} You could either say that its set to change with Android 4.0, but the conversion rate is so low (Less than 10%). Rather, I feel that the Android manufacturers should do more during in the Research & Development stage of the product and reduce launching many prototype devices in the market.

Real Life Testing

I think the main selling point of the phone shouldnt be the specifications, customers doesnt really care about the dual, quad or even quadriple cores in the device. What really matters is simply – User Experience. As long as its logical and it make sense for everyone to use, push it out to the consumers market. To break it down technically, it is not about the benchmarks, like Linpack, Neocore or Quadrant. Its about the applications that the consumers could have access to – like the experience of customers playing Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Temple Run & productivity apps (Documents To Go, QuickOffice, etc). I think releasing a device logical to your target audience is probably the most crucial part of any product development. However, after some time, many companies lost focus of their consumers & they went to pursue other areas of interest (Example: Emergent technologies, New ways of interactivity & poor custom UI skins)

Takeaway: Testing should be done with real world apps, not benchmarks.

Devices that make sense

I believe many manufacturers spent time pushing out devices that could either (1. Differentiate from their competitors 2. Differentiate the market, particularly a phone that caters to a particular group of users). Particularly, I think coming out with a few flagship devices a year make a whole lotta sense as compared to pushing out prototypes and incremental upgrades of a product every month. Consumers like myself would feel used, just like a toy when every month I see another device thats being upgraded, with small incremental bumps to the specifications like the Camera, RAM or disk space. Show us some large software & hardware upgrades.

Into the future

Probably many device manufacturers still don’t realize what the user really need, so here’s probably a small generalization of points:

1) We don’t care about phones with quad or a bajillion cores

2) We see value in design & the user experience

3) We are not geeks & particularly, hate to see code and error messages. (At least give us helpful errors)

4) Give users some ‘help’ – There is basically too little documentation for new Android users

5) Probably one of the most important point – Android still lack an official media management software. (At least a cloud media management software is agreeable) – Not everyone would want to manage its files through File Explorers.

6) A tighter upgrade schedule. (If Android updates could be as good as Call Of Duty DLCs..) & that would pretty much reduce fragmentation.

7) Your ideas to the future here! (Drop us a comment!)

Android is in a right step

With Google hiring many engineers, making its platform open; source code public for all users, a strong developer community (Don’t get be started about Android Fragmentation) & extensive marketing efforts – the platform is set to increase its market share over time.

What are your thoughts? Comment below.