COMA

foound at eChelon 2010

We were at eChelon 2010 (formerly known as unConference Singapore) yesterday with foound—Danny and Aung. The two-day event was organized by e27 and the first day featured startup pitches and talks by notable speakers such as Dave McClure—an investor involved in Mint.com and Slideshare, and Gen Kanai, Director of Mozilla. foound was one of the pitching companies in the Launchpad segment and it received overwhelming love from the crowd as we pulled off what people are calling a “World-class presentation“, as tweeted by Dr. Serkan Toto of Techcrunch. The response to our pitch was overwhelming. The Geeks on a Plane folks were all wearing t-shirts and we took some really cool photos together.

Danny (CEO of foound) and our team have been working really hard over the past three weeks to prepare for the event. We wanted to launch foound at the event but due to various difficulties, mostly technical, we decided to hold off the launch and went ahead with a slide-based demo instead. The presentation was planned and designed over the past one week. The slides were deliberately kept simple to reflect the values and messages of the foound brand, which was also developed at COMA. Danny and the rest of the team practically camped in our office for weeks working closely and intensely with us. My role as the head of UX (User Experience) and Branding is to ensure the app is a joy to use and own.

foound will be released some time late June as we iron out the remaining bugs and make more performance tweaks. The team has done a great job preparing for yesterday but there is a bumpy road ahead as we push hard for the launch of foound on the iPhone and subsequently on other mobile platforms. Meanwhile please visit foound.com to sign up for the newsletter and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Pics from yesterday courtesy of Kris Krüg

foound + Geeks on a Plane in foound T-shirts

Danny and I with Dave McClure in the background

The slide which got the loudest applause!

The Story of Yeh Chi Wei

Leader, teacher, mentor and experimenter, Yeh Chi Wei was a mover and shaker of Singapore’s early art scene. Members of the artistic community would know how this quiet artist worked laboriously and played significant roles in shaping visual art during the 1960s and 70s. Yeh created some of the most distinctive oil paintings, and defined a unique Southeast Asian style.

Drawing inspiration from many cultural sources, ranging from ancient Chinese rubbings, carvings to Javanese batik, Yeh’s works powerfully interweaves these cultural elements with both Asian and Western art techniques. As an art teacher and leader of the Ten Men Art Group, he guided and mentored many Singapore artists. He was also a tremendous source of inspiration and encouragement to many others.

The Story of Yeh Chi Wei celebrates the life of such an artist. The National Art Gallery, Singapore commissioned COMA, as part of a broader online and social marketing initiative which will take place throughout the year, to design an online microsite with the challenge of making the site accessible and useful to both adults and children. We developed three educational and interactive mini games which children can have fun with while on the website, to learn about the artist and his work. The microsite was developed using open-source software and is based on open-standards, thus making the site accessible to more people across a wide range of web-browsing devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

We also designed “Hopper”, an adorable frog character who can be seen on the kids sections in the website and the Creative Play Corner in the exhibition.

This is old but gold

If you walk into a consumer electronics store today, you will still see lots of boxes like this. This has been around for years thought it’s always good to remind ourselves the dangers of poor design.

Paula Scher Quotes

I came across some Paula Scher quotes today while doing some research on the web. Here are some which I think are really good.

On working with people

“There are smart people and dumb people. There are people who have energy and people who are lazy. They exist in combinations. If you work with a smart person with energy, that’s your best collaborator. If you work with a smart person who’s lazy, well, that’s a bit of a waste, but it does no harm. If you work with a dumb person who’s lazy, that’s sad but not problematic, because they will simply be ineffectual. But if you work with a dumb person with energy, therein lies the seed of disaster.”

On Helvetica

“I had rebelled against the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the visual language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and therefore somehow responsible for the Vietnam War.”

On 34 years in 1 second

“How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it is done in a second. it’s done in a second and in 34 years, and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that’s in my head.”

A place to call home

We have moved into our new office. Took us a whole day to wait for delivery of our furniture, assembly and setting up. The MUJI chairs are pretty fun to put together but the bulky Melltorp tables is a painful affair. We really like how it has turned out as a beautiful and refreshing studio. Enjoy the photos!

Shashi Tharoor cited in the New York Times for Personal Branding

Just a day after Shah Rukh Khan’s public challenge to overtake Shashi Tharoor in Twitter follower count, Shashi Tharoor was again cited in The New York Times, this time for personal branding. In the column Branding and the ‘Me’ Economy Anand Giridharadas talked about how the State Department in United States has allowed tech-savvy senior officials to maintain robust personal brands an how the personalizing officials can “strengthen the acceptability of the official message.” Shashi Tharoor among other diplomats were mentioned to have established a strong personal brand in the message-conscious world of diplomacy.

Who do you think has a stronger brand? Movie star or political messiah?

Shah Rukh Khan vs Shashi Tharoor?

A couple of days ago ‘King of Bollywood’, Shah Rukh Khan’s announced his wish to overtake politician Shashi Tharoor at a function. “I had predicted this the day Shah Rukh joined Twitter. I will be happy rather than regret it,” Shashi Tharoor said in response. As the social strategy consultants for Shashi Tharoor, we thought we should offer our opinion.

While being two of the most followed Indian celebrities and share some similar fundamental objectives, Shah Rukh Khan and Shashi Tharoor are really quite different. They appeal to different audiences, are motivated by dissimilar ideals and their approach is starkly unalike. Comparing Shah Rukh Khan to Shashi Tharoor is like comparing Steve Jobs to Paris Hilton, there are surely more Paris Hilton fans than Steve Jobs fans. Shah Rukh Khan will be able to reach a much higher number of Twitter followers simply because of the potential in the vast number of Bollywood movie-goers compared to political aficionados. And looking at his popularity and the amount of hype he generated with his latest film “My Name is Khan” which I really enjoyed watching, overtaking Shashi Tharoor is definitely possible, but in my opinion hardly anything to shout about. What will be meaningful is the magnitude of the influence they will have on their really big groups of technology-savvy, educated and well-informed followers. It’s always good for people who have positive stories to tell to have a bigger audience.

Looking at the chart above which plots the growth of Twitter followers for both Shashi Tharoor and Shah Rukh Khan over the past three months, we can say Shah Rukh Khan is not going to catch up to Shashi Tharoor any time soon. So while Shah Rukh Khan tries to catch up we will work harder with Shashi Tharoor to extend his reach to as many as we can. Catching up is not going to be easy :)

See You at Business Evangelism 2010

I will be attending Business Evangelism 2010 organized by RAPP and will be catching some really good speakers presenting their ideas. Here’s a list of speakers for tomorrow’s full-day event.

See you there.

Ben Live @ HackerspaceSG

We were doing a marketing/promotional video for foound at SMU this morning with Danny (foound founder), YY (animator) and Ben (voice narrator) and after that we headed over to HackerspaceSG to chill and avoid the blazing afternoon sun. Ben, our business head and inspiring musician found a guitar lying around and we got him to play some songs. He put up a really nice performance and I recorded all of it.

Video after the jump

Like it? Tell Ben you love him by writing in the comments below. We are so going to make him perform more.

A Space for Ideas

What kind of business will you do if you have a free 760 square feet commercial space? Martell started a contest “Ultimate Start-Up Space” and is inviting people to submit their ideas in the form of a minute-long video and the winner will get a really big office space, renovation money and some other goodies. We looked through the videos of ideas others have submitted and most of them are really boring. An idea struck me while I was falling asleep two nights ago and I thought we should submit an idea about ideas.

We made our own video and submitted it two days ago on Sunday and here it is.

The big idea is that we can use the space as a platform for ideas. People will come into the space and exchange ideas and work together to turn good ones into things i.e. technology, products, platforms, etc that will benefit people.

The place will be equipped with free WiFi, broadband internet, plentiful power points and other essential facilities and people can just bring their laptops and do stuff. The walls of the space will be lined with big bookshelves fill with books on innovation, design, technology, science and philosophy and they can come from donations, sponsors or purchased cheaply from used books stores. There will also be a nice cosy corner with a projector for presentations, talks, pecha kuchas and all kinds of show-and-tell. It will be like our own mini TED conferences.

The whole purpose of this idea is to provide a platform for the generation of ideas by encouraging people to think, make and do, and to encourage the exchange of these ideas though sharing, discussion and collaboration. The goal is to develop an open platform for thinking and collaboration to create business and societal value by collectively and intelligently solving problems and improving the world. If we win this and the idea becomes a reality, I intend to operate this as a non-profit, like Wikipedia and TED and probably rely on membership fees, sponsorship, corporate programs, etc to sustain operation.

It is just a big idea at the moment but we will surely pursue it if we win. Please spare some minutes and vote for our idea at http://www.ultimatestartupspace.com.sg/#/rate-entry/75. And do share your thoughts with us in the comments.