I guess society has gotten used to the term “urgent“. It’s pretty annoying that people send you e-mails that make requests to be completed in a day or two, citing them as urgent. I guess these people don’t realize urgent doesn’t involve the entire world and applies to their context and not mine. Don’t blame others for your own lack of planning and foresight. I have a lot of other urgent things to do too.
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Second last CS3216 blog, lah!
OK, Prof. Ben is chasing me for a blog and since I’m sitting here (at work, at this hour) waiting on a colleague, I shall write a short entry. I realized I haven’t been blogging for a while and my 105% honest excuse is that my manager went to Sungei Gedong Chalet (a.k.a. Reservist) so I was busy as hell covering some of his work.
So here comes the second last blog entry. Aheem… (clears throat)
I’d love to thank my wife, mother, father, etc. and of course Prof. Ben for inviting me to attend this class out of nowhere. I truly enjoyed my time and learnt a lot of things. Actually, I joined the class with the aim to learn anything, or what Prof would call “random stuff“, not to develop Facebook apps. I’ve actually had enough of Facebook apps back in 2007 where I worked in a small company dealing with some very first Facebook applications being made out of Singapore, although building an app for others and building an app for yourself is a different thing altogether.
So what have I really learnt? I’ve learnt that my English sucks after four years of being bombarded by Singlish in the local workforce. I’m actually struggling to write a proper blog entry every time.
I’ve also learnt that I’ve lost touch with the geek world. I didn’t even know what Google Wave was. I’ve never heard of Prezi, and I’ve never heard of DropBox. There’s probably about 100 other things I’ve never heard of that I found out during these 13 weeks.
I’ve also found out that damn NUS students can talk and present! Sorry lah, but to the outside world NUS students are either like nerds or CMI. 😛
I’ve also found out that a year 1 freshie can actually learn ActionScript 3 build a Flash game within 1 week.
So there are super things that people can do that you’ve never thought was possible. But, now I know the power to create lies within, and I finally kicked myself in the ass and learnt how to build stuff in Flash. So, yes, I picked up a new language. Programming language, not French.
I also face new challenges trying to get things done. I think it’s a little different everywhere. Back in Polytechnic, it was either nobody cares, or maybe I cared too much. Yufen once said doing project a with me gave her “满足感多多，成就感少少” (great sense of satisfaction, no sense of achievement. Did I translate right?) because I practically wrote most of the code and we’ll all get an ‘A’. 😛
Then at work you could K people ‘cos they either deliver the goods or get fired. It was the root of all evil at work. $$$
Then in NUS it was also different – everybody cared too much, but was too busy. Like Prof. Ben said, this is not the typical NUS class. OK, I buy his explanation.
So anyway, CS3216 is a weird class, but I guess it’s weird in the right way.
Back to work…
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Singapore to Tokyo in 13 hours
No, I’m not talking about the flight time. I’m talking about the time at which I bought my plane tickets to the time I actually landed in Tokyo. Yes, this is my first trip out of Singapore without much prior planning – the tickets were bought at about 6pm, and the flight was at 11:50pm the very same night. The wife made a very haphazard booking with a hotel and we’re off on an 8 hour flight to Tokyo.
It wasn’t a good idea really, but the wife had an important certification training that got confirmed quite last minute and due to the school holidays, there weren’t any tickets on the weekend. She refuses to travel alone and so the husband must tag along.
I arrived at Tokyo and it was really cold (slighly below 10 degrees C). I had a fugly green winter jacket that I bought seven years ago when I went to China, but it was way too puffy for this weather, so my first stop at Narita International was to grab a decent winter jacket.
Anyway, fastrack a little bit. Most Japanese can’t speak English(some tokyo escorts can), and that’s my biggest problem here. Things are horribly, horribly expensive as well, e.g. no decent meal below S$10 per person. Nothing you can really buy for less than S$5 except canned drinks and MacDonalds’. My Hotel is miserably small for S$170/night. The entire room including the bathroom is actually about the size of my bedroom w/o the bathroom. Oh, and also, almost every non-living thing here talks by itself – lifts, trains, doors, pedestrian crossings, restruants, escalators, stairs… I’m serious! It warns you to mind your step!
This is the most automated and robotic place I’ve seen. Even people keep talking non stop – I mean the retail staff. You go to a counter and pay for something, the moment they greet you, they go on saying things (I cannot understand) until you get your change and they bid you goodbye. But the people are really polite and I do enjoy being around this place as a visitor. Working here is probably another different thing altogether. I’m about to head out of my hotel to take a photo of the peak hour rush on a Monday morning.
Tokyo Subway Map If you think Singapore’s MRT/LRT is messy, wait till you see Japan’s JR/Bullet Train/Tokyo Subway maps. The map above is just the Tokyo Subway alone. There’s the JR and Bullet Train not shown here. Bullet Train is quite straightforward though, it has only a few stops as it was designed to go long distance really fast.
On the side note, while I was walking down Roppongi with my wife this evening, two crazy angmohs (Caucasians) came up to me and tried to poke fun of me – maybe they were cracking some racist jokes or something. I told them off (in English, of course) that “I’m not a fucking local.” I guess they were a little surprised when I responded that way. These angmohs had better behave in other peoples’ country, seriously. I don’t know what they were thinking poking fun of Japanese in Japan. Somebody should kick their ass.
P.S. How is it possible for a map not to be north bound?!? The Tokyo tourist map is not north bound! I’m having a hard time reading it with my compass!
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Advertising as a Monetization Idea
I was chatting with a few folks who made the pitch last Friday and it seems a lot of people think selling ads is the only way to make money.
While Google probably made close to $100m in Singapore selling advertising alone, I still think citing pure advertising as a form of monetization is an extremely bad idea.
Advertising is an extremely crowded space. Search engines are doing it, news portals are doing it, forums are doing it, social networks are doing it, so where do you stand in this crowd, especially if you’re a new startup?
Instead of looking to sell advertisements for money, think of how you can monetize your strengths such as selling a service or selling data and statistics for market intelligence, or even being acquired by another company.
Think about it…
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Damn Busy
Sorry folks if I haven’t been responding to your e-mails/wave/chat promptly and haven’t been doing my homework. I’m super tied down this week with work, plus my mum’s sick and I have to be at the Istana tomorrow. The weather isn’t really very helpful since I’ll be under the damn hot sun.
If any of you need to buzz me, the surest and fastest way is via SMS.
And for those who’ve mailed me on project groupings and/or discussions please hang on a bit and I will get back to you ASAP.
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The Business of Search and Advertising
Phew. I’m finally back from graveyard work, showered and waiting for my hair to dry. I’ll blog while my memory’s fresh. If I go to sleep now, I’ll wake up with only half of what I was thinking the night before.
Chewy gave a very interesting talk at NUS today. It gave me new perspectives of the CPC/CPA advertising scene but I have my thoughts decided to blog them so everybody can discuss. I’ll be sending Chewy an e-mail so he can comment as well.
I totally agree that search is a place where money can be made. When Google went offline for two hours in the middle of last year, the Internet literally died together with them. Imagine the world without search today. (Food for thought.)
The local consumer industry’s probably not as competitive as in the US, but they certainly have found ways to suck your money without the need to spend more money on advertising. I mean, as a business, isn’t that fantastic? 😛
I think Singapore’s a weird economy. Here’s why I think so:
We don’t really have much choices. When Chewy said that Singapore’s the richest country in Southeast Asia, well, maybe we are in terms of raw GDP per capita, but I’m not entirely sure if we’re equally rich when taking real costs of living into account. The way PPP is calculated just isn’t fair. I mean WTF is a Big Mac Index? It’s almost like a currency conversion against US$! PPP needs to take into account other living standards and not just a “basket of goods” plus a Big Mac — stuff like a house or a car for example. It’s not like in the US where I could choose to live far out and buy a house cheap, I don’t really have a choice! Punggol is as far as you can get! Half a million for a HDB flat? Forget it!
We’re materialistic. So when Chewy brought up the point about Taxi queues, I’m not surprised. It’s a matter of how people perceive the value of money. I’m sure there are times you think to yourself, “OK, I can afford to wait. I don’t need to spend $3. I’ll stand in line.” Singaporeans are a materialistic bunch of people who’d rather spend money on goods for showing off than for services that convenience them.
We’re suaku. I tune in to News Radio 93.8 when I drive and there’s this programme called Talk Back or something like that where people call in and debate some topic, like “do you think Taxis are expensive in Singapore?”. Sometimes it just drives me nuts listening to what people complain about here. I can only conclude that we’re very suaku.
That much about what I think is the state of Singapore’s consumers, I’ll move on to the part on advertising.
The current CPC/CPA advertising does indeed encourage competition, but this type of advertising (price war) is unhealthy for businesses. It turns consumers away from the real value of a product (or brand) and focuses on price instead. If the industry worked this way, there wouldn’t be Bread Talk or Apple and business would fight themselves to death and create more disparities of wealth.
If you looked at PC hardware in Sim Lim, the stores there basically compete on nothing but price. Same probably goes for shoes at Queenway. If they wanted to win the sales, they simply cut the price. Plain and simple? Not so. At the end of the day they basically do more work for less and customers don’t even remember the stores’ name. So now goes back to the question on my TV purchase. If Chewy asked me why I didn’t go to Sim Lim to buy my TV, my answer would be that I trusted Harvey Norman (or Best Denki/Challenger) more than the dodgy stores at Sim Lim. That’ was why I decided to take a walk at Harvey Norman (instead of Best Denki/Challenger) which was nearer to my home.
Any business who’s looking for long term growth needs to build its’ brand. And by branding it doesn’t mean a colorful logo or a fancy yodel. A brand is something people have an affiliation to and builds royalty over time. Unfortunately though, brand building has to start when a consumer is unaware, and that’s where the CPM advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guys come in to screw around with generic algorithmic search results.
Although I’d believe that that there’s potential for CPC/CPA to aid in building brands, this is still an area that’s untapped. CPC/CPA isn’t necessarily positive for brand building. Some people may perceive advertisers as scammy or desperate, for example. I’m also sure that most people don’t plan and search online to buy everything. Some purchases are made on impulse, especially small value items like little earrings. Females 14 to 25 years of age should be familiar with such a buying pattern. 😛
