COMA

A Space for Ideas

In Odds & Ends

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.

We are in India

In Odds & Ends

We now have an official presence in India as we welcome on board Shaily Shah, head of our operations in Delhi, India. Shaily has been working with IDFC Private Equity, India’s largest private equity fund focused on infrastructure, which manages a corpus (I guess this means capital) of USD 1.3 billion for the past two years. Prior to that Shaily has two years of experience in investment banking with MAPE Advisory and Avendus Advisors. That is really impressive but I think the best part is that she was at one point in her life writing flight simulation software for commercial aircrafts at CAE Inc., Montreal.

Shaily graduated with an MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and have a engineering degree from McGill University, Canada. Shaily loves to travel, meet new people and paint, and recently held her own art exhibition in Bombay.

Shaily will be heading our operations in India and will be responsible for growing COMA business in that part of the world. She can be reached at shaily@coma.sg.

Say hello to Ben

In News

Two weeks ago we put up a quirky notice saying we are hiring a business development executive. After burying ourselves in a pile of resumes and cover letters, and going through two days of interviews, we finally picked our favorite.

Meet Benjamin Belieu, a charming hearththrob from Seattle, USA who has recently completed the S3 Asia MBA, a joint degree between some really prestigious colleges in Asia, and now the officially the hottest guy in COMA. He is our head of business intelligence, which we thought was a really cool title that spawned from one of our late night discussions. Ben will play both business development and strategic roles at COMA and we think he will be a really great member of our team.

Need COMA’s services? Or just say hello, Ben can be reached via email at benjamin@coma.sg.

The New York Times on Shashi Tharoor's Twitter Success

In Odds & Ends

Early this afternoon, I woke up and checked my email and some news sites as usual before I left for a meeting. I was on the New York Times website when I saw the smiling face of a familiar Indian man under a heading “Indian Official Gets Far on a Few Words“. Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times wrote an article on our client Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian Parliament, Junior Minister of Foreign Affairs, and former top United Nations diplomat. She credited his rise in political popularity to his extensive use of Twitter.

Mr. Tharoor has more than half a million followers on Twitter, and his ability to speak directly to these people is an invaluable asset to an increasingly networked Indian society, political experts said.

As Shashi Tharoor’s online and social media consultants, we are both honored and delighted to see the results of our work, from before the elections to the biggest victory in Thiruvananthapuram in over 30 years and to the most recent milestone of crossing half a million Twitter followers.

Source: The New York Times

Gmail Signature Bookmarklet Maker

In Odds & Ends

In the past, I have mainly used desktop email clients like Outlook and Apple Mail and they all have features that let me create rich, HTML signatures to go with my emails. Since being sold on cloud computing and the superiority of Gmail, I have been using Gmail from the browser ever since, along with Google Apps for documents and other cloud-based apps for invoicing and project management. Mozilla Firefox has been the browser of my choice until recently I switched to Google Chrome for its speed and lightweight. One of the things I missed the most about Firefox are its extensions. One of them is which works like a signature manager and let me use HTML signatures in Gmail. Since I am on a Mac and Google Chrome for the Mac still does not support extensions, there was not anything I could use except for copying and pasting my signature from somewhere each time I write an email. Thus I had the idea to create a bookmarklet which uses jQuery to insert signatures into the Gmail message composing box.

The Gmail Signature Bookmarklet Maker, as its name suggests is the result of the bookmarklet I wrote for myself and the COMA staff. All you have to do is to create a HTML signature in your favorite text editor, feed the HTML source to the Gmail Signature Bookmarklet Maker and it will generate a bookmarklet—a hyperlink which you can drag to your bookmarks bar or saved into your favorites which you can then use to insert your pretty HTML signatures when composing or replying to a message in Gmail. Because it is a bookmarklet, it will work on any browser with JavaScript support and you do not need to install anything. Need more signatures? Just make more bookmarklets!

The Gmail Signature Bookmarklet Maker lets you turn this

into a bookmarklet which you can use to insert HTML signatures into Gmail like this

Generate your own HTML signature bookmarklet for Gmail at the Gmail Signature Bookmarklet Maker.

We Want You

In Odds & Ends

This is a job posting. We are looking for a full-time business person. Read on if you think you or somebody fits the role.

About COMA

COMA, short for Communication Analysts, is essentially a group consisting of designers, thinkers, engineers and the likes. COMA has been established as a consultancy to solve today’s problems which businesses face today. Although we look like a regular design agency, we prefer to see ourselves as thinkers, heretics and change-makers who apply creative thinking, technology and design in solving the problems our clients face, never hesitant to rock the boat and break the status quo.

Our notable clients include Ate Media, who publishes the authoritative “The Miele Guide”, a prestigious regional food guide first published in 2007 set to overtake the Michelin Guide as Asia’s best source of knowledge for foodies. COMA has also assisted Shashi Tharoor, India’s most popular politician in his social media campaign in becoming a minister of state and parliamentary member. With more than five hundred thousand followers on Twitter, Shashi Tharoor is simply India’s Barack Obama.

Working for COMA

We strive to make the COMA work environment as friendly to creativity as possible. Therefore we have no hierarchy, ranks nor political complexities. COMA is build on a culture of innovative thinking, creative mindsets and free collaboration. People who work for COMA are valued by their contributions, efforts and attitude… not by how busy and serious they try to appear. We welcome anyone who wishes something exciting and fun. If you are only interested in reporting to work on time and collecting salary, a.k.a a corporate zombie, this job is not for you.

Responsbilities

As a “business guy or lady”, whom some call a Business Development or Sales Executive, you are responsible for marketing and selling the company’s services to other companies. That sometimes involves having to convince people of certain ideologies, like how a doctor has to convince a sick patient to undergo treatment when the patient thinks he is actually alright. You will also have to manage and coordinate projects and the geeks who work on them.

You should be sufficiently organized in the sense that you use a todo-list to keep track of tasks, a calendar to manage your schedule and check your mail at least a hundred times a day… figuratively or literally.

Apply for this position, tell your friends about it. Our contact email is hello@coma.sg

Shashi Tharoor Website in Official WordPress Showcase

In News

We are thrilled to have Shashi Tharoor’s website, which was designed and developed by us being featured in the official WordPress showcase. The website has been one of the bigger scale sites we had the pleasure in developing and the feature in a showcase of good WordPress-powered sites as prestigious as the official one comes as a pleasant surprise. Here’s what WordPress.org says about tharoor.in:

“Shashi Tharoor is a promient figure in Indian politics and has a well-designed website that serves as a hub for his online presence.”

Source: WordPress Showcase
Visit: Shashi Tharoor

Let It Snow!

In Odds & Ends

Introduction

It’s the time of the year. Why not dress up your WordPress blog with some fancy falling snow flakes? Let It Snow is a WordPress plugin I wrote back in 2007, just before Christmas and it is currently one of the more popular plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. Since Christmas is coming, I thought I should just give this plugin a little refresh and move it to the COMA blog from where it originally was, on the Widgeo.us blog. I am no longer working at Widgeo.us and since this was initially a little pet project of mine anyway, I should just house it somewhere close.

The plugin works best if you have a blog (a WordPress one of course) that has a dark background, else the snow would be invisible on a too light background. Anyway I hope you like it and that it will give your blog that little more festive sparkle.

History

In 2007, WordPress.com introduced a falling snow option for its users after Matt Mullenweg asked for a falling snow script. Because the feature was only available to WordPress.com users and not self-hosted WordPress blogs, I took the falling snow code and made a plugin that exactly the same thing. All users needed to do was to download and activate the plugin to have beautiful falling snow flakes on the blogs.

Download and instructions

Download the plugin at the WordPress Plugins Directory.

Shashi, India & imbibing linguistic diversity

In Odds & Ends

Shashi Tharoor has yet to become a household name like Barack Obama, but Google him and you’ll find yourself confronted by an intellectual powerhouse, not unlike Obama, and perhaps more so. His name blinked for a few moments when Kofi Annan was about to retire from his post as the United Nations secretary-general (I was a modest fan of Kofi Annan’s, and somewhere tucked in my idealism, I still believe in the indispensability of the United Nations). Tharoor was one of the top two candidates, but the position ultimately went to Ban Ki-moon of South Korea.

It, of course, came as a total surprise, a delightful one at that, that we were engaged as communication design consultants to his new office. And that speaks a lot to Aen’s UI design ability!

A word fiend, I’m very much enamored by Tharoor as a writer, and a prolific one too. There’s a good interview of him by Harry Kreisler, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies in Conversation with History, a UC Berkeley production. In the interview, he talks about his upbringing, India and how he finds time to do a super-duper job at being the Under-secretary of Communications while writing 11 books, fiction and non-fiction.

His thoughts roll off his tongue with such eloquence that you can’t help but be hopeful for the world that another adroit political leader in the rank of Obama has risen, especially in India. It certainly doesn’t hurt that he has a posh, boarding-school accent too.

My best friend in the US, Lehka Pillai, is a Malayali and Keralite, like Tharoor. My understanding of Indian culture grew exponentially thanks to Lekha. I had assumed all Indians spoke Hindi, since it was the “official language” in Bollywood movies. But, Lekha helped me discover that, beyond Amitabh Bachchan and Rai Aishwarya, that there’s a thing called Mollywood where half of all Indian movies are made in Malayalam. I was also confounded sometimes when Lekha spoke English to her fellow Indians in Portland, Oregon. Initially I had thought it was perhaps a posh thing to do, like in Singapore, but soon I realized that in spite of Hindi being the national language, English is really the actual common language that connects the Indians.

Growing up in Singapore, I had thought all Indians were Tamils and if not, they can speak Tamil. At least, that’s how it works in Singapore and its school system. It doesn’t matter if Bala or Rashmi was a Malayali, Punjabi or Tamilnad, Tamil is the second language in school and must be presumably spoken at home. But when I started reading about the Tamils, the Tamil Tigers and all their political drama, I’m left with a string of question marks about the decision of Tamil being one of the official second languages in Singapore’s school system.

Tharoor writes about the pluralism in Indian language, hence culture, in The Times of India. He articulates a culture that is as complex and expansive as the Mahabharata, and that the pluralism, though incomprehensible at times to the rest of the world, is uniquely Indian and absolutely worth celebrating.

Having lived in the US for about half my life, the idea of speaking fluently in another language is enough to make my head spin. I’m humbled by the thought of being in a country where one-sixth of the world’s population is housed, that the confluence of cultures and languages is a daily norm. Just feasting on bryani or roti prata is not going to cut it unless, of course, Shashi Tharoor sits across the dining table as we imbibe, in which case I’m sure my understanding of Indian culture will most certainly be substantially broadened.

Shashi Tharoor New Web Site Launched

In News

COMA, Singapore based design agency, is engaged as communication design consultant for Shashi Tharoor’s office.

Indian Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor has launched a new web site—http://tharoor.in to replace two previous sites.

The new site, created by COMA, offers simple access to information and connection to Tharoor, who was elected in May, and his office. A key function is to promote open and transparent governance and to help people seeking to address their concerns. The web site is, hence, kept simple to navigate to encourage participation and to create an open communication channel between Tharoor and his constituents.

Previously, Tharoor had two web sites: his personal site, which included interviews, his biography and information on his books; and a campaign site, which played a pivotal role  in his election to India’s Parliament for the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala in May 2009. With Tharoor’s new political responsibilities, it became evident that a new portal was needed to combine the two ponderous sites into one with good information architecture that will serve to fulfill his campaign promises. COMA, with its forte in user interface design and communication design, was approached to create a web site with clarity and easy accessibility to information and services.

Tharoor, a well-known humanitarian and writer—currently also serves as the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs. Previously, he served as the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information. In 2006, he was nominated by India to succeed Kofi Annan as U.N. Secretary-General, a position that ultimately went to Ban Ki-moon of South Korea. Tharoor’s United Nations career began in 1978 in Singapore. He was assigned as Head of the UNHCR office in Singapore (1981–1984) during the peak of the Vietnamese “boat people” crisis.

COMA is a design agency founded in 2009 in Singapore with a focus on using design strategically to achieve business success for clients. COMA’s expertise encompasses communication design, identity & brand design, interactive media, and information architecture and design.

Press Contacts

Lynne Toh
COMA
lynne@coma.sg
+65 96286279

COMA
coma.sg
Red Dot Building
28 Maxwell Road, #03-05
Singapore 069120