My first digital camera, was a point-and-shoot which was small, beautiful, took decent pictures. As enticing as they were, I’ve never really turned to the Digital SLR cameras. Why? My logic was that if it’s too clunky, there’s a high chance I won’t be taking it out.

In recent years, with the advent of mirrorless cameras (I prefer the moniker EVIL – Electronic Viewfinder with Interchangeable Lens), this gap between portability and functionality has pretty much narrowed. Throw in these camera’s unique feature to use almost any available camera lens out there as long as you have the right adapter, and you’ll pretty much have killer system to tinker with.

Being one of the first to enter the marketplace, my first EVIL camera was the Sony NEX-5. Since cameras are only as good as the lenses you’ve got, I slowly built up a collection for any occasion. Since then I’ve upgraded to the NEX-7, which has a ton of features I’ve yet to fully master.

A few weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to shoot the living daylights out of the Samsung NX300. Frankly speaking, I knew Samsung largely for their computer displays, smartphones and tablets, but to get a camera by Samsung took a bit of getting used to.

So how did it fair?
The first thing that struck me was how much was stuffed into a camera in this S$1,000 range. The Samsung NX300 has:

• 20.3-million-pixel, APS-C CMOS sensor (pretty high!)
• DRIMe IV image processing engine (processes images decently fast)
• Hybrid AF system
• Dual-band Wi-Fi (tons of connectivity options, especially to smartphones)
• 3-inch rear tiltable LCD touchscreen (borrowed from the Sony NEX)
• Supplied with full version of Adobe Lightroom (this I love!)

I consider myself an intermediate-level photographer & geek, where I know the basics (e.g. shooting at night without flash), but I won’t know every setting on a camera. As part of the Samsung Singapore NX300 campaign, I was told to showcase the NX300′s fast shutter capability through my cycling adventures.  I’ll run through the process by which I conduct my shoots, just to let you understand the ease of use and versatility of the Samsung NX300.

On a typical weekend, I’d plan with my cycling buddies on where we’d go. Sometimes it’d be off-road on a trail, sometimes urban exploration, but all the time there’d be some form of movement. This is where the impressive rate of 8.6fps in continuous shooting mode, and 1/6000th shutter speed really takes the cake. Below you see a low-res compilation of my buddy Jason Teo jumping a ramp at Tampines Bike Park, with each shot fairly bright and detailed.

Here’s a full shot of Jason killing it…

My Typical Workflow with the Samsung NX300
Now I’d be taking a ton of shots each time, and along the way, I might want to instagram a few shots instead of waiting till I get home for post-production in Adobe Lightroom. The magic of smartphones nowadays are the amazing array of photo-editing suites available for our touchscreen devices. In particular, selecting Wifi mode on the Samsung NX300 lets me connect to my smartphone in numerous ways, from remote controlling the camera, to transferring selected or backing up all shots for easier viewing.

Once transferred, the raw pictures from the NX300 were typically sharp enough, so what I do is to “tweak reality” by evening out the high and lows (bright and dark) areas of the shots through a free yet powerful photo editor called SnapSeed (iOS / Android). Once satisfied, I then pass the image over to Instagram where I can apply the typical set of filters for dramatic effect. Should my buddies be keen to have some photos, I could then Whatsapp them straightaway as well.

Once I get back home, I’d typically do a once-over on the raw images. The Samsung NX300 gives a good baseline of photos for me to work with, often allowing me to accentuate the key aspects of a particular photo with little loss of detail. If the shots are worth the trouble, I’d spend an afternoon selecting and tuning the photos in Adobe Lightroom. Otherwise it’s a simple case of sorting through iPhoto to save time. All my photos then get shared on Facebook and Flickr, which serves as my online backup as well.

Now as the camera has a dedicated wifi mode, I can actually save all these steps by sending photos directly onto my social networks from the camera itself. If speed of publishing is key (e.g. working for a newsroom), the ability to send images directly, even through email, is god-sent. An on-screen keyboard makes this practical. I must say that Samsung NX300′s touchscreen is the most responsive I’ve even used on any camera, perhaps a page learned from their smartphone and tablet industry. 

Versatility
Little things make the Samsung NX300 that much easier to use:

First, the kit lens that came with my camera was an 18-55mm OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) lens which is great, though the f/3.5-5.6 was probably a cost-saving measure. As you might know, the lower the f-stop the more light is able to go through a lens, though the price goes up exponentially as well. To be fair, the camera performed well under most challenging circumstances, which mean that if you invested in a better lens, this camera will truly deliver.

Second, the fact that I could charge the camera with a simple micro-usb cable, is just an incredible lifesaver in itself. If you ever travel and leave your charger at home (it happens!), this is worth its weight in gold.

Third, the sheer amount of wifi connectivity options. To be frank, I’ve not explore every connectivity option offered, but any geek will love the immense capability this camera offers. Besides remote controlling and backing up to my iPhone, I did manage to have to camera backup to my desktop computer as well, saving the need to plug in all the time. Furthermore, if you happen to have an NFC-capable smartphone (e.g. Samsung Galaxy Note II), tapping it against the camera apparently allows you to transfer photos with even greater ease.

Bottomline
Definitely value for money. There’s a lot of bang for your buck in the NX300 camera, and you can dabble to no end. The kit lens is sufficient for most users, still gives me wonderful bokeh under right conditions, but you’d do well to know that you can give this camera an upgrade with a better lens.  

• Sony’s Cybershot G1: Collaborative Shot, Picture Gift, and Tagging!?!
• Sony NEX-5: a proper camera for cyborgs like me
• Social Cyborg upgrades: GoPro Hero Cam + Xacti HD1010
• Pixeet 360: Create 360° spherical virtual tours on your iPhone!
• Sprint’s “Redefining Flip” Phone = Samsung M620?

Kevin: It’s been a while since I last blogged, but seeing how I can actually help out on a good cause, here’s something mysterious for you…

THE HUNT FOR OUR LOST POEMS
Stories, myths and legends await you at Singapore Arts Festival 2012, and right now, 23 Arts Fest Show Symbols are lost in the vastness of the Internet waiting for you to discover.
The symbols are hidden on various webpages, blogs and facebook pages, and where they are hidden just might give you more hints of what to expect of the programmes for Arts Fest this year.

HOW TO ENTER
Look out for symbols like the one on my page
Take down the website address on the symbol and enter all your finds in the submission page at the Singapore Arts Fest facebook page

The first five people to discover any 10 symbols will win.
But the best prize awaits the most hardworking person who manages to uncover all 23 symbols first, who will win a hamper with a whole lot of goodies!

There will be clues released on the Symbol Hunt page to help you find some of the more well-hidden symbols, so Like it to stay updated!

USEFUL LINKS
Symbol Hunt Facebook Page
Arts Fest Facebook Page
Arts Fest Web Page

• What Digg users Love and Hate according to Google
• Today’s Links: For those hip geeks on long trips…
• Visual Recipes: Like Flickr for Food
• LifeStory: When “home” isn’t a place anymore…
• Facebook Strategies Workshop 2.0 [Freshly Presented]

Thanks to digerati Preetam Rai, I was recently introduced to 938Live’s multi-talented radio presenter, Sarah Cheng-De Winne (aka @SarahCDW).

As part of her youth talkshow, Raw & Ready, she interviewed me as a blogger, social cyborg, cyberculturalist, and on my most recent role at The National Art Gallery, Singapore.

This interview was recorded in MediaCorp’s 938Live radio studio on 5th August 2011. You’re invited to take a listen!

FYI: This week on Raw & Ready, it’ll be Juicy & Delicious’ turn!

Download theorycast.66 :: On 938Live’s Raw & Ready with Sarah Cheng (.m4a / 7.8mb) from the Internet Archive, or listen to it on SoundCloud. Feel free to subscribe to theorycast on iTunes.

• theorycast.09 :: Radio Interview on Political Podcasts in Singapore
• theorycast.13 :: Facebook Privacy 101
• “The Princess, the Witch & the PowerPoint” by Coleman
• Watch ::theorycast:: on blip.tv (re-runs never looked so good!)
• theorycast tv :: Bringing the Macworld experience LIVE to you…

As promised at Singtel Accelerate, the game mechanics slides I presented today are now on Slideshare.net. It’s also downloadable as PDF :)

I met a lot of interesting folks there, from academics to developers, and the general sentiment I’m getting is: “At long last!”.

While game mechanics isn’t new or groundbreaking (think Jesse Schell or Seth Priebatsch), what I did offer was an easy way to understand this as a concept, as well as a simple framework for participants to start running their own addictive little systems.

As a sidenote, many were intrigued by the idea that museums could be about much more than they first realized!

• Speaking on ‘Productive Games’ at TertiaryTech, 18th Sept @ SMU
• TertiaryTech Conference 2010: Singapore student startups are pretty solid!
• What makes an idea viral?
• SOLsummit2009: Mindmelding with fellow edu-digeratis…
• It’s Official: I’ll be working at The National Art Gallery of Singapore

Last Saturday morning, I was invited by Wayne Soh of The Digital Movement to speak about game mechanics at their new conference series, TertiaryTech.

As you can tell, this conference was geared at students interested in breaking into the startup industry. I must say that from what I saw, I was very impressed. The ideas and design that went into the interactive applications pitched by student groups at this conference was pretty top notch. I’ve got a bunch of TertiaryTech photos and video interviews to share as seen below…

Here’s the game mechanics talk I presented meant to inspire and intrigue student developers into building “addictive” qualities into their apps (to sustain an active user base). From the feedback I’ve received, lots of folks were intrigued after hearing what I had to share, and I’m particularly glad how they have come to realize how Facebook derives free labor through the exploitation of such game mechanics (yes, pure psychological hooks!). Big thanks to Daniel Tsou of Tech65.org fame, for helping with the HD camera work shot using my NEX-5. I’m just going to re-use the wonderful abstracts from the TertiaryTech web site.

TertiaryTech 2010: How to add fun to traditional labor (Game Mechanics)

Traditional mass media has typically portrayed video games in a negative light for generating social undesirable or unproductive behavior. However, by harnessing the addictive elements of video games and embedding these game mechanics into traditional labor, can we make work fun?

These forces, or what we refer to as game dynamics or mechanics, are what influence us into subconsciously performing actions or completing certain tasks. As usage and engagement becomes the focus of many technology services today, there is a demand and need to infuse game mechanics in these products.

Kevin has been experimenting with the concept of productive games in the classroom environment, by using Amy Jo Kim’s game mechanics as a means of steering user motivations. He has also been invited to present his research papers and also to speak at numerous corporate and academic conferences. Be sure not to miss him by registering for the Tertiary Tech Conference today!

Additional video resources:
Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer on top of the World
Jesse Schell: When Games Invade Real Life

TertiaryTech 2010: Pigeonhole – Beautiful Conference Q&A system

Title of Project: Pigeonhole Live
Team Lead: Hew Joon Yeng, Lyon Lim Yu Tian
Academic Institution: National University of Singapore

Pigeonhole Live is a simple conference tool for speakers to engage their audience in a live setting using their smartphones, laptops and even iPad! Pigeonhole Live allows the audience to ask and vote for their burning questions on their web device in real-time. Good news for the audience: No more waiting for the McNanny at the microphone during the precious 10-minute QnA sessions! By looking at the highest voted questions, the speakers can now address the audience crowd more accurately.

Now everyone gets to take part in the post-keynote QnA at the conferences, without running to the microphones. Yes, even if you are a little shy.

TertiaryTech 2010: Su Yuen demos learning through AR for Kids

Team Lead: Chin Su Yuen
Team Members: Chen Lingwei, Tan Reiwen Alex, Ee Wai Lay, Liu Peng
Institution: NUS School of Computing
Category: Games, Augmented Reality

Virtual Sandbox is an educational game for 4-6 year olds that aim to create a creative and interactive environment to learn English vocabulary. The goal of the game is to build your city and populate it with people. Children use physical cards that are similar to flash cards to place and construct buildings in their city and populate these buildings with characters of the right job/occupation.

For example, to populate a school, children must place a “Teacher” character in the school before they can see an animation of the teacher teaching students in the building.

By using physical cards as a form of interaction, we merge the benefits of tangible objects which children are accustomed to with the interactivity of the virtual environment – morphing the flash cards into a less mundane and more fun method for learning English vocabulary.

TertiaryTech 2010: MARGE – Mobile Augmented Reality Game Engine

Team Lead: Jian Gu, Henry Been-Lirn Duh
Institution: MiMe Lab, Interactive Digital Media Institute, National University of Singapore
Category: Augmented Reality

MARGE is a game engine for mobile augmented reality (AR) environment based on iPhone, Android and Symbian OS. It includes integrated support for optimal graphics performance, networking, resource management, sound and music. Mobile developer can learn how to develop high quality 3D interactive mobile AR game using our proposed developmental tool. Several highlight features of MARGE: MARGE supports OpenGL ES 2.0, 3D graphics library which runs on the embedded chipset on different phones; Networking support is an essential feature for a Mobile AR game. MARGE supports multiplayer interacting each other in mobile AR environment using TCP/IP or blue-tooth.

In Summary
These student developer groups were impressive to say the least. It truly shows the potential Singapore has in this burgeoning interactive software industry and I’m all for supporting our local startups. I’ve only managed to interview a few groups here, so do check out the many more who presented at TertiaryTech 2010.

• Speaking on ‘Productive Games’ at TertiaryTech, 18th Sept @ SMU
• GE’s “augmented reality” campaign
• ICA 2010 Conference: Photos & Videos + Download Our “Leveling Up Students” Poster
• Speaking: Startup@Singapore, Wikis@SLAWNY, OnlineVideo@TLC
• The cyborg has disappeared into the everyday…

Game mechanics is quite the rage across disciplines and industries. Since 2009, I’ve delivered variations of my talk at SOLsummit 2009 (Syracuse, NY), Barcamp Buffalo, ICA 2010 conference, WebSG meetup, IGDA Pecha Kucha Night III, and soon, SingTel Accelerate conference.

This Saturday at TertiaryTech I’ll be helping interested students understand the basic psychological hooks that make games addictive, and consequently how we could apply these rules to make traditional labor fun.

TertiaryTech tickets are $15 for students, but I have three tickets to give away for the first three passionate students who drop me their contact details in the comments. The organizers tell me that another way to score free tickets is to contribute to their IdeaBoard. They just want a good reason to give tickets away!

If you’re interested, I speak from 11.00am-11.30am at Ngee Ann Kongsi Auditorium, SMU School of Accountancy. Here’s the abstract below…

How To Add Fun To Traditional Labour

In our daily lives, we do our shopping at the usual stores, buy a meal at our favourite fast food chain or visit our usual watering holes. We are rewarded by being loyal customers and we know when and how to get things at a cheaper price. Turning our attention online to social networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn, you’ll see the number of friends you have implicitly considered as a scoreboard, while the profile completion progress meter would look like feedback in the leveling process, all of which are game mechanics that tease our psychological urges. Casual games hosted on these platforms like Farmville and Mafia Wars are making us go back and play them every 30 minutes or so.

These forces, or what we refer to as game dynamics or mechanics, are what influence us into subconsciously performing actions or completing certain tasks. As usage and engagement becomes the focus of many technology services today, there is a demand and need to infuse game mechanics in these products.

Find out from Kevin Lim, our local friendly social cyborg and tech blogger at Theory is the Reason, on how to harness the addictive elements of video games and embed these game mechanics into a traditional system or product to make it fun and to encourage prolonged and frequent use.

Kevin has been experimenting with the concept of productive games in the classroom environment, by using Amy Jo Kim’s game mechanics as a means of steering user motivations. He has also been invited to present his research papers and also to speak at numerous corporate and academic conferences. Be sure not to miss him by registering for the Tertiary Tech Conference today!

Additional video resources

Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer on top of the World

Jesse Schell: When Games Invade Real Life

For details, head to http://tertiarytech.com

UPDATE: Tertiarytech Conference access for students now FREE! Professionals pay a token sum of $25. Do it for the kids ;)

• TertiaryTech Conference 2010: Singapore student startups are pretty solid!
• Productive Games: The Game Mechanics Presentation
• SOLsummit2009: Mindmelding with fellow edu-digeratis…
• Spore: The upcoming “Sim Everything” game by Will Wright
• “Video Games Live” is actually going on tour!

In case you don’t know, I recently got serious about cycling. Ever since Siva and the ZenDogs took me to Pengerang, Malaysia for my initiation ride, I’ve been hooked. Mind you they’re not some easy-peasy cyclists… they really put their feet to the metal, so I had trouble keeping up the first time round.

Thanks to Andy Dinesh who offered his bike recommendations. I finally settled on a 2nd-hand Birdy, specifically the Pearl White Monocoque Birdy Alivio 8-Speed, as listed in the StradaSingapore forums. It’s a German-engineered full suspension foldable bike, which is as exciting as it sounds! Here it is folded, and unfolded.

In the video above, you’ll see Kenneth Pinto and I taking on the length of East Coast Park Connector, from Fort Rd to Changi Village, and back. Total distance was 45km, and we did it at 2hrs 28min (mostly due to traffic and human congestion towards noon). I’ve fast forwarded it so you can see the entire ride in 10mins! It’s quite cute to watch!

• Lifecasting: Go Motorboarding to the campus
• Stowboard: The futuristic skateboard which transforms…
• ZenDogs vs. Pengerang, Malaysia – The 40km Cycling Trip
• theorycast.40 :: Interview with AtlasRider (video + mapping + biker)
• Geni: The fun (and slick) way to build an online family tree

Early Saturday morning, Siva and the Zendogs cyclists take on Pengerang, Malaysia, on a 40km cycling trip along the coastal kampong route. An hour boat ride from Changi Point to the Pengerang jetty, followed by two hours of cycling towards the seafood town of Sungai Rengit 20km away for lunch. After which we U-turned and headed back the same way.

Besides the rustic beach scenery, our trip ended up being quite hilarious, such as how one of our cyclists suffered three punctures on the same trip! He had to hail a taxi just to get back to the jetty. As for me, I used to cycle a lot when I was young, but it’s been years. The return leg took its toll on my thighs as the heat of the day built-up. Take goodness the rest of the cyclists were there to spray deep-heat (actually some Thai cooling muscle concoction) and pace me all the way back to make the boat.

This trip was an eye opener because I was in the company of experience cyclists. Among them were enthusiasts from the Land Transport Authority (LTA), the National Parks (NParks) and NUS biodiversity folks like Siva, all sharing the common passion to explore the prospect of cycling as a mode of commute in Singapore. Unlike the European countries, is Singapore too dense for cycling to be a norm? How much leeway has to be given to bicycles when taking public transport, including sharing elevators in HDB flats? Are foldable bikes the game-changer? While you deliberate, watch scenes from our 40km bicycle ride in Pengerang.

See the rest of the photos here…

• Watch our National Day 45km bike ride in 10mins
• theorycast.21 :: How Do You Blog? (for ubergeeks only)
• Busy busy busy weekend…
• Remember Chek Jawa with Siva @ Tanjong Katong Sec School
• What’s in my Bag: From 2005 to 2008

Rushing over from work, I made my way down to Blu Jazz where BlinkBL-NK was at it’s fifth installment. Having been to earlier speaker sessions in the past two months, I liked the diversity in speakers and the easy-going atmosphere.

This time it was my turn to hit the stage, so I thought I’d don the Social Cyborg outfit one final time. Putting on that wearable sensory rig was strangely nostalgic.

Beside my geek friends Coleman and Bernard, colleagues from National Art Gallery Singapore, Eve (plus her guy friend Ben), Jean and Shujuan, came by to support me, which was very sweet of them.

I don’t wish to ruin the fun of my talk, so just take a quick look through my visual slides and imagine my voice sharing stories around them. I’ll just say that we’re all in the business of trading experiences, and my approach was to explore how we could share our realities in the fullest way possible.

To help the audience along, I had played videos before my talk, including the documentary about the wearable camera system, as well as a trailer for Strange Days. Here’s the entire presentation as posted on Slideshare…

BTW, here are more photos my colleague Shujuan kindly took…

• Photoblogging competition on Singapore’s cultural heritage
• Speaking @ PRSA Buffalo: Social Media – Strategy Over Tools (Part 1)
• Chris Barr’s Under an Umbrella
• Video streaming through a Nokia cellphone, Qik.com and a FlexClip…
• HyperConnected Beings // From Social Web to Networked Consciousness

Friday evening after work, I grabbed a quick dinner then headed to the museum district to check out the Night Festival: New World 2010. Just me and my Sony NEX-5, absorbing the electrifying experiencing of the numerous unique performances downtown.

While there were several fringe art activities, I spent most of my time checking out the swinging taxi-girls (yes, they were yummy!), the World’s Slowest SMS Billboard at the Singapore Art Museum, as well as the epic Parabole 2.0 at the National Museum of Singapore.

See the entire taxi-girls photo set…

What struck me was how forwardly participatory some of these acts were, from dancing with the taxi-girls and taxi-boys as a way to learn about our past and have fun, the ability to SMS a personal love-note @ SAM, to how the epic Paths of Time theatrical production took two separate stages with actors/actresses having to cross through the audience. This turns the audience into a subtle backdrop or even into fellow performers.



There was simply too much to see in one night, and I’m glad I didn’t travel much because some of the shows, such as the Abusement Park @ SAM, had pretty long lines. I prefer not to get overwhelmed by picking favorites, but for some, the organizers could have perhaps provided a way for the public to create their own itinerary online (as my colleague Regina suggested).

See the Night Festival 2010 photo set…

Read on to watch the high-definition videos of some of these amazing performances…

Night Festival 2010: Taxi-Girls & Taxi-Boys @ SMU Green (HD video)

Night Festival 2010: World’s Slowest SMS Billboard @ SAM (HD video)

Night Festival 2010: Parabole 2.0 @ National Museum of Singapore (HD video)

If you missed it this weekend, you’d do well to come down for next year’s Night Festival!

• Seth Gordin’s The Dip… Singapore style
• Watch what Kevin did at the museums…
• Singapore’s plan for International Museum Day 2007
• Two Singaporean bloggers charged for anti-muslim sentiments
• Speaking: Startup@Singapore, Wikis@SLAWNY, OnlineVideo@TLC

While the job ended up being quite different from what I had originally signed up for, I’ve been trying to convince myself to learn beyond my talent and passion. What did take me by surprise after over a month into the job though, are the few colleagues who are clearly giving me the cold shoulder for some strange reason. I must have been lucky to have worked under cozier and less sterile circumstances.

Fortunately, most of the folks I’m working with are friendly and talented in their own right. Logically speaking, I should proportion my concerns accordingly. The funny thing about being human though, is that you could have a hundred friends cheering you on, but just a handful who dislike you in order to turn your mood down.

Whichever the case, I’ll try, and try harder. It’s an opportunity for me to earn their respect.

• Busy busy busy weekend…
• Diggdot.us: From Web 2.0 to Web 1.0?
• Tuesdays are toughest
• Photos: So how do I find Singapore so far?
• Magnus “Maestro” Martensson @ United Nations

Here’s the digital copy of our International Communication Association 2010 conference poster – Leveling Up Students with Class Blogs: Engineering Active Learning through Game Mechanics. This was color printed on an A0 size paper, so you have a choice of a JPEG or PDF versions.

Derek Lackaff and I wrote this up after conducting our experimental semester with students in Buffalo and Singapore back in 2007. On the whole, everyone had a good time… we even managed to throw an MTV-style awards party at the end of the semester!

I had more fun at #ICA2010 than I expected, mostly because the poster session was disorganized. A few of us received wrong instructions and printed our posters wide (72″ x 48″) when the conference boards were actually portrait format, and sticky tape became hot commodity. I also bumped into old friends while making new ones. Everyone was smart, friendly and most importantly, excited to share their discoveries.

Read on to see the ICA conference posters submissions I found interesting (presentation quality varied greatly), as well as a few video interviews with academics and curators while I roamed the Suntec City Convention floor.

ICA2010 conference: Evelyn Bottando on “What’s in a Domain Name? ICANN and Semantic Legitimacy”

ICA2010 conference: Lyudmila Popova on “Perceived Reality in Media Messages: An Explication of its Dimensional Structure”

ICA2010 Open Space Art Installations: Singapore Pangram

ICA2010 Open Space Art Installations: AmbiKraf

Enjoy!

• Photos: Meet the Freshies for Fall 2006
• Wall Poster: The Web is Agreement
• Video: Why are you crazy over them donuts @ Donut Factory?
• Video: AoIRing Your Thoughts
• DOAJ is so Fresh!

Yesterday, my poster session at the ICA 2010 conference turned out more fun than expected (will share that soon), while last evening’s first ever CC Salon Singapore at Hackerspace SG turned out to be quite a riot!

In case you weren’t aware, CC Salons are global, informal events focused on building a community of artists, developers, and creators of all kinds around Creative Commons licenses, standards, and technology. It’s nice to know CC awareness is growing within Singapore’s various creative communities.

Preetam Rai kicked off CC Salon with “Sharing my Images with a CC license”
Preetam is a natural storyteller, weaving a tale of how his CC-licensed night photography of a cathedral in Budapest was used in a Wikipedia entry, and how that landed him a position with Global Voices Online.

Kevin Lim (is I) spoke on “Marginalia: Giving books their social life”
Three things: FutureoftheBook, Commentpress, digress.it
If you’re interested, you can view my presentation on Google Docs.

Stefano Virgilli showed a demo of “Adobe After Effects: Creating animated words”

Pinned with numerous Adobe certifications, Stefano probably had good intentions for sharing his title animation technique with the crowd, but it felt more like an Adobe sales pitch riding on the CC bandwagon. Several participants felt the same way, and it could have been diffused if Stefano had shown alternative, affordable apps for doing similar things. e.g. Adobe Photoshop = GIMP. That would have made his session more approachable and compelling.

Inch Chua shared her story on “Creative Commons & The Opposing Innovation”
Incidentally, @InchChua was the first Singapore solo artist selected to perform at the SXSW music festival, reminding us how we as Singaporeans often lack the ability to appreciate local talent till they’ve made it abroad. At CC Salon, she explained why she gave away her music under Creative Commons, citing how musicians in the past would give fans their music as a way to get them to come to their performances, where they actually made their living. She also explained how 99 cents a track on iTunes would yield her less than 10 cents per song, spurring her to give her music away. Now I’m compelled to donate through her web site.

Me: “Is Inch Chua your real name?”
Inch: “Yeah!”
Me: “You’ve got cool parents”
Inch: “I guess I do!”

She followed up her talk with a live performance of two of her tracks…

Inch Chua performing live at the first CC Salon Singapore

Here are the rest of the photos I took from this open event. Thanks to Ivan Chew for organizing CC Salon SG, and to Lucian for sharing his great photographs! Do read Ivan Chew’s (aka Rambling Librarian) post-mortem of this Inaugural CC Salon SG if you’d like to know what happened and when the next CC Salon SG will be!

• theorycast 59 & 60 :: Michelle Thorne’s walkabout with Creative Commons Singapore
• Social Marginalia: How authors & readers give books immortality
• Two pieces of bad news…
• Video: “Youtube and beyond” @ National Library (director’s cut)
• DIY iPod stand hack

I’ve been waiting for a proper camera, one that gets as quality as a DSLR, without the bulk and bore. Sure there are micro four-thirds like the Olympus PEN series, but they just didn’t tickle my adamantium bone.

Having recently played with the Sony NEX-5, I fell in love with its features. It’s great for a DSLR newbie like me who wants to take diverse range of photos, as well as a videography hobbyist who likes experimenting with videos.

It’s a serious camera with an impressive APS-C sensor, which Sony says is 60% larger than a Four-Thirds sensor, and 13 times larger than a typical video camera sensor.

If you’ve seen the cameras I’ve used over the years, you’d know that I tend to go for the hybrid video/photo cameras, such as the Sony M2 and Sanyo HD1010 which tend to be pistol-grip by design. The NEX-5 lets me take everything up a notch, by having a proper image sensor, and the hardware customizability of a video camera (e.g. compact stereo mic add-on).

The physical and software interface is intended for amateur photographers. Though I’ve been taking photos and videos for years, I never really bothered with the mechanics behind camera, going instead with gut feel for lightning and composition. This camera keeps much of the controls on-screen instead of having a control dial most professionals are used to.

To guess at Sony’s design philosophy, it’d likely be the sheer lack of space for buttons and dials on such a tiny camera body. They turned this problem into an opportunity, by putting the controls in the software interface and adding contextual tips as well as a full-blown photography guide right in the menu system. While I prefer experimenting rather than reading the manual, it’s really handy having the guide right there to explain how I could execute specific creative shots.

I still getting used to the camera, but from my first run covering the BlinkBl_nk meetup last night, I’m glad that I finally have a camera that takes such sharp pictures in the dark. See what I mean by looking through the BlinkBl_nk photo gallery.

For those of you who love unboxing photos, I’ve got that too.

And finally if you wish to compare the Sony NEX-5 with current micro Four-Thirds as well as DSLRs, this is my favorite article detailing the NEX-5′s features, with side-by-side physical comparisons.

I bought this camera at the Sony Style store in Bugis Junction for exactly $1199 SGD, and it came with a $300 coupon for a second lens when it gets released. Comparing retail prices worldwide, this is a pretty good deal for Singaporeans.

This is only my second day with the camera, but I’ll do my best in answering any of your questions in the comments.

• Sony’s Cybershot G1: Collaborative Shot, Picture Gift, and Tagging!?!
• Lusting Sony’s HDR-TG1 // Loathing AVCHD
• Videobloggers Beware: iMovie’s MPEG-4 editing is terrible…
• A Cycling Photographer’s Review of the Samsung NX300 Camera
• Social Cyborg upgrades: GoPro Hero Cam + Xacti HD1010

Thanks to @PreetamRai, I got to visit Jakarta for the first time over the weekend. At their barcamp, I made it count by presenting an interest of mine, social marginalia. @RandomPlaydo was inspired enough to write his thoughts about shared digital annotations.

Barcamp Create focused on Intellectual Property Rights in Indonesia, and received an intimate turnout at the International Design School (IDS). Topics were spot-on with a few awesome surprises (see @glennmars’ Recycling Ideas below!).

We got to spend time with amazing people, including @glennmars @ChrisWaterGuy @aulia @monieksagita @barijoe @koesuma @savitri @kuriman and @murakumo_andy. You can see our red carpet photoshoot on Facebook. Alternatively, we used ScribbleLive to liveblog for #BarcampID, as reblogged below…

• 10:15 AM: brainopera I’m with @PreetamRai and @ChiehSuang (Singapore delegates) at BarCamp Create @ the International Design School
• 10:44 AM: brainopera
• 10:46 AM: brainopera
• 10:46 AM: brainopera
• 10:49 AM: brainopera
• 10:53 AM: brainopera
• 10:53 AM: brainopera
• 10:57 AM: brainopera
• 11:05 AM: brainopera
• 11:06 AM: brainopera
• 11:12 AM: brainopera Barcamp volunteers give participants a Red Carpet moment by taking their photos in front of a pretty backdrop, then posting photos at bit.ly
• 11:24 AM: brainopera
• 11:25 AM: brainopera Preetam up first, shares his experiences at Barcamps around Asia. Here you see Burma’s Barcamp, with 3000 attendees, 300 volunteers.
• 11:27 AM: brainopera
• 11:28 AM: brainopera In Thailand, Burma and many others, girls are the organizers, not guys. They are also resourceful, such as stealing Internet for the barcamp attendees
• 11:32 AM: brainopera Girls outnumbered boys at Mekong Barcamp
• 11:38 AM: brainopera
• 11:48 AM: brainopera 2nd presenter now discussing difference between trademarks and patents in Indonesian context.
• 11:49 AM: brainopera
• 12:03 PM: brainopera
• 12:04 PM: brainopera
• 12:05 PM: brainopera Setarbak Kopi and Hock Guan biscuits
• 12:06 PM: brainopera
• 12:10 PM: brainopera
• 12:13 PM: preetamrai Interesting discussion on trademarks. Can one use a logo for parody.
• 12:15 PM: preetamrai
• 12:25 PM: brainopera Aria is now talking about music as intellectual property
• 12:27 PM: preetamrai
• 12:27 PM: brainopera
• 12:28 PM: brainopera
• 12:43 PM: brainopera
• 12:47 PM: brainopera Aria says it strange that people in Indonesia still buy CD music and ringtones, more so than digital download music.
• 1:01 PM: brainopera About 120 million ringtones downloaded daily in Indonesia
• 1:05 PM: brainopera Aria discusses tactics for rewarding paying fans over pirates
• 1:05 PM: brainopera
• 1:10 PM: preetamrai
• 1:11 PM: preetamrai People might pay for exclusive content and services.
• 1:12 PM: preetamrai
• 1:12 PM: brainopera
• 1:13 PM: preetamrai
• 1:13 PM: brainopera
• 1:14 PM: preetamrai
• 1:14 PM: preetamrai Insteading of selling one product to everyone, have a tiered offering.
• 1:15 PM: brainopera Aria cites Trent Reznor’s NIN free mp3 downloads and exclusive boxed sets. Boxed sets sold out.
• 1:16 PM: brainopera
• 1:16 PM: preetamrai
• 1:18 PM: brainopera
• 1:20 PM: brainopera
• 1:44 PM: brainopera Discussing why Blackberry is so popular in Indonesia. It’s a social phenonenon, they use BB chat extensively.
• 1:45 PM: brainopera From network effect to peer pressure. You’re not in-group without a Blackberry here.
• 1:46 PM: brainopera Indonesia was first to bring Daily Prepaid blackberry service. It caught on. Actors carried blackberries.
• 1:47 PM: brainopera iPhone unpopular in Indonesia. No built in messenger, unlike Blackberry.
• 1:48 PM: brainopera Also prices for iPhone as astronomical here, so people rejected it.
• 1:50 PM: brainopera Foursquare is HUGE in Indonesia
• 3:33 PM: brainopera
• 3:35 PM: brainopera Now talking about “recycling ideas”. Whips out old tech given new spin, like retro phone for iPad, Chocolate bar case for blackberry (even has smell)
• 3:36 PM: brainopera Talking about adding emotional values to things.
• 3:38 PM: brainopera
• 3:39 PM: brainopera Makes people laugh, feel good, humor. Triggers good feeling.
• 3:46 PM: brainopera Indonesians love creating slangs on Twitter.
• 3:49 PM: brainopera You need all Twitter trending topic to be blessed by Alai!
• 3:52 PM: brainopera Showed how he recycled ideas from Twitter into tv commercials, depicting popular culture as shown online
• 3:55 PM: brainopera Cynicism destroys ideas
• 3:56 PM: brainopera Learn to like things you dislike, it opens your eyes.
• 3:57 PM: brainopera
• 4:03 PM: brainopera Recommends Twyla Thrap
• 4:06 PM: brainopera Allow yourself to have range, from hip hop to classical.
• 4:07 PM: brainopera Amazing speaker @GlennMars
• 4:08 PM: brainopera
• 4:09 PM: brainopera
• 4:48 PM: brainopera
• 4:50 PM: brainopera Playing illegal alien in New York…

• Idea: TwitterStory where everyone contributes…
• Gift Economy: From Eco-Gaming to Community Currency Research
• BarCamp Singapore 3: a truly socially constructed experience
• Where do you prefer your conversations: Twitter or FriendFeed?
• BarcampBuffalo: @jhsu’s LiveStreamMonitoring + @MikeCanz’s Codeswarm (Visualization)

Ever since I saw Alex Halavais rework Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) into a networked ebook at w1n5t0n.com, I’ve been intrigued by the whole idea of marginalia.

For Barcamp Create (12th June, Jakarta) and Creative Commons Salon (25th June, Singapore), I’ll be showing participants the evolution of marginalia, from early handcrafted books to the present day ebook readers.

I’ll eventually ask what happens when we start turning books into social platforms through marginalia, with tools such as CommentPress and Digress.it

Here’s my presentation slideshow on Google Docs, which will always be work-in-progress.

• Lecture: Seduction of the Swarm – Patterns of Online Participation
• Speaking @ PRSA Buffalo: Getting started with social media for PR practitioners (Pt.1)
• Readings of a participatory culture researcher
• Chart: Amazon’s Kindle vs. Sony Digital Reader vs. iRex iLiad
• Interview on CBC Business News: Examining eBooks

“What you do here? You see museums? Oh god, you see nothing. Go to the clubs, go dancing, drinking, so many beautiful pussies in Manhattan. You see nothing.”

That is my Albanian limo driver, Rafek, in his late fifties yet clearly without any dysfunction. Perched above the Manhattan traffic on his carriage, the Cadillac SUV, he peers out at the pedestrians, howling whenever we drive past an angelically proportioned lady of the night.

New York City, a renowned safe harbor for immigrants seeking a brighter future, gave Rafek his chance of starting a new life. A decade back, he arrived in New York and applied for political asylum. A court hearing and five years of no-travel commitment later, he brought his family over and lived the American dream.

I didn’t have it as hard as Rafek. Moving to the States was fun times for me, though going home was another story altogether. Though I struggled a little moving my nine years of baggage from Buffalo back to Singapore, I won’t deny that my heart had always belong in this tropical city. I just needed a really good reason to return… and the job was it.

I really wanted to do the East to West coast roadtrip as a personal farewell, but I chose on a tour of museums around New York City instead. Thanks to my professor mentor, Alex Halavais, I was able to stay comfortably yet frugally in a relatively expensive city.

What Rafek didn’t realize, which I didn’t want to dive headlong into, were the real-life pussies and boobs I got to see… at a live nude performance-art piece in the Museum of Modern Art. This was significant for two particular reasons: 1) Visitors were overheard commending how MoMA was willing to challenge conventions, 2) Being single for several years, it was a vice-free way for me to get visually reacquainted with the physical female form.

The exhibition which ended yesterday (May 31st), is none other than Artist Marina Abramovic’s retrospective performance-art piece entitled “The Artist is Present“. Since opening March this year, this show alone has drawn more than half a million visitors to MoMA.

Read about the exhibition at your pleasure, then take a mental flight across the other side of the planet to our fair (relatively oil-free) shores of Singapore. Would we ever see such gratuitous art exhibitions in Singapore? Possibly, but definitely not now.

From my month long exposure to what Singaporeans have to say about themselves, there’s a widespread belief that we lack the cultural maturity needed to create dialogue about the arts. Simply put, as a tiny economic powerhouse, Singapore’s initial focus on financial prowess may have cost the nation in cultural criticality. The government recognizes this, but it will take a generation or two before we see society’s appreciation of the art grow. The myth that art is only for the affluent remains invincible.

While local museums have been carefully making art relevant and accessible to the everyday man, they may also have to provide the challenge for those of us who seek a deeper connection with exhibited art pieces. In order to establish Singapore as a cultural capital, there’s a need to graduate museum visitors over time (even years!) in terms of the the thematic complexity of exhibitions. That said, some could argue that such complexity would naturally occur within any context, even simplistic one, not necessarily requiring predetermination. Either way, we have to keep asking what works best.

The National Art Gallery, Singapore, where I now work is staffed by some of the most talented museum curators, educators, and management talents around. They are in the phase of testbedding exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), in preparation of when the new galleries open at the former Supreme Court & City Hall.

Over the course of my new life in Singapore, my personal mission here would be to stay curious. As a fresh pair of eyes in musuem scene, I hope to reveal and question traditions to seek sustainable approaches to conversing about the arts. If you’re so inclined, I do keep a blog for interesting ideas at http://museumism.tumblr.com. Join me there.

Before I go, we have to ask… what is Art?
My favorite quote comes from Andy Warhol who once said “Art is what you can get away with” (Thx Liz!)

• Singapore’s plan for International Museum Day 2007
• It’s Official: I’ll be working at The National Art Gallery of Singapore
• 14″ PowerPizza: For the anti-style geek in you
• Meeting Minister Lee Boon Yang @ International Museum Day
• Watch what Kevin did at the museums…

For my friends on twitter, thank you for staying up to 1am EST (or 1pm in Singapore) to listen to my big news…

So after six months of fear and self-loathing, the big news is that I’ve finally found a dream job and will be moving back to Singapore for good. I’ve had a great nine year run in Buffalo, made incredible friends, and now it’s time to pack up and go.

As my housemate Jay puts it, I left Singapore for New York around age 24, and I return at 33. It’s been that long, but it’s been just as swell. If you’ve been following me online, you’ll know that I’ve been bidding farewells and visiting local museums. For the curious, here are the details of my new role…

What am I leaving the States for?
The National Art Gallery of Singapore.

The what…?
The National Art Gallery of Singapore, or TNAGS for short (pronounced “Tee-Nags” or “Snags” if you’re into silent letters). You might not have heard of it because it’s only expected to open around 2013. It’ll be taking over the former Supreme Court and City Hall (as seen above), which is undergoing a massive makeover to become Singapore’s new flagship Asian art gallery. Here’s a peek at the future architecture.

Why Singapore? Isn’t it better to work in the States?
It’s relative. Most of us recognize that the United States remains the epicenter of innovation (e.g. Apple iPad), but we’re starting to see other countries take the lead across different sectors. It’s important to go where the most relevant opportunities exists, and in my case, I found the greatest meaning returning home to Singapore.

Walter Lim, my friend, avid marketing blogger and director of corporate communication at the National Heritage Board, described this new entity to be fluid and experimental. They sought game-changers, and I wanted a job that gave me a hand in owning and growing a brand over time. It was a perfect fit.

What will I be doing there?
My official title will be Assistant Director, Strategy & Experience.

To get the big picture, Singapore has a diverse range of museums and art galleries, but the opportunity remains in turning the city island into a world-class cultural capital. The challenge makes this venture exciting. I see strategy and experience as the Ying and Yang of the role I’ll be playing.

The strategy component briefly involves developing TNAGS’ branding and purpose through broad, cross-sectional market research. Internally, I’ll be helping to develop policies and KPIs to shape corporate performance and forge synergy between the National Heritage Board’s (NHB) organizational elements. In geek speak, this gives me some access and editing privileges to the operating mechanics of the large organization.

The experience component is something that I highlighted at the job interview (which subsequently got added to my title). If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll understand my interest in the co-evolution of technology and society, where I’ve read, written and performed instances of virtual presence, memory prosthetics, networked consciousness, and game mechanics.

Our social reality is constantly being reshaped as we discover new means of engaging one another (e.g. read/write web, online social networks). Likewise, how a museum or gallery exists in our social reality needs to stay relevant to how we communicate with one another. Of the five conceptual slides I was invited to present at the job interview, ideologies from Nina Simon’s new book, The Participatory Museum, became a definite point of reference for the future of museums…

As you can see, much like how we understand brand engagement in social media, I see museums and art galleries as communal spaces that have to engage visitors in a participatory, even physical, fashion.

What you’re about to see is a preview of several concepts I presented to TNAGS. On this second slide, I proposed that artworks need to be turned into social objects, so conversations can easily continue to flow around them, extending their existence beyond the confines of the gallery…

In the concept above, the QR coded artwork aren’t just used to pull up references, but to have visitors indicate their ‘likes’, share their experience around it, and in turn help them discover other visitors and artwork most related to them.

Game mechanics though interactive design would help architect user behavior, motivating visitors to challenge one another (e.g. Saatchi art gallery’s artwork battles via “Hot or Not” visitor ratings).

You can think of it as similar to FourSquare, but instead of geography, we are centering attention around objects.

To curators, this method also provides a level of analytics beyond current means of analyzing user behavior around the gallery, which may traditionally include analytics around head-counts and surveillance footage.

There are downsides to this idea, most glaringly being the mobile digital divide, so how this idea is executed is where much of the work will be.

Finally, being a place of cultural history, the gallery would also allow me to craft inherent mythologies towards consistent, synergistic experiences through transmedia works and alternate reality games (ARGs). I will have to explain this in detail at another time, but just I will leave you with this simple yet powerful diagram above by Robert Pratten as a teaser.

So when will I be back?
I’m busy packing as we speak. On the last week of April, I’ll be heading down to New York City to chat with a few amazing museum folks there. On the first week of May, I’ll be on a flight back to Singapore, and start work by the second week of May. It would be my honor to catch up and possible work with everyone back home.

I have to thank my parents…
For betting big on me. To my dad for inspiration as a veteran artist, and my mum for supporting me financially when I was out of work.

Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments…

• Singapore’s plan for International Museum Day 2007
• The Artist is Present. So am I.
• Meeting Minister Lee Boon Yang @ International Museum Day
• Watch what Kevin did at the museums…
• Productive Games: The Game Mechanics Presentation

Being sentimental, I decided to photosynth my entire room before I start packing. If you don’t already know why I’m moving, I’ll announce it when I get the official green light. IMHO, things are going to get pretty darn exciting on my end.

As a self-proclaimed social cyborg, I’ve been exploring new ways of capturing experiences. While I could have digitized this personal space in a 360° panorama, I preferred photosynth for this because it lets me focus on particular objects around the room with amazing detail. Everything from the love letters, to the toys, to the books I own, you can try to locate for yourself. Leave no stone unturned.

If you explore my photosynth, I’ve even included highlights on the right sidebar as hints to the juicer bits. You can experience my personal life in Buffalo, by heading over here. If you spot anything strange, feel free to drop a comment!

• The Apple Way or The Dell Way
• Understand the tragic {present}, by peering into the sci-fi {past}…
• Today’s Links: Online vs. Physical Newspaper Readership
• Arrival: jfk + doubletree hotel
• How to build your own (cheaper) CNN Situation Room

While window-shopping on the iTunes app store for panoramic camera apps, I discovered a little-known 360° panoramic app from Japan called Pixeet 360. Quicktime VR experiences typically require expensive hardware, software and photographic know-how. Pixeet 360 leapfrogs all that by allowing anyone to capture and create these immersive experiences right on their iPhone.

While their app is a free download (iTunes link) for viewing panoramas, making your own immersive 360° panorama requires activating the app by purchasing their $79 fisheye lens. Add their shipping fee of around $15, and you’re almost at the $100 mark for generating instant immersive panoramic experiences. Depending on how driven you are, this might not be something you’d whip your wallet out for, so let me share what I’ve discovered…

Comparing iPhone lenses in the market, I learned that their tiny fisheye lens for iPhone is quite similar to one by another Japanese developer, Digital King, which also produced wide and macro lenses. Both companies sell iPhone fisheye lenses at a similar price point of $79. If you search more extensively, you’ll find yet another going for as low as $20.50, as shown below. What gives?

I emailed Pixeet’s customer service to ask about the huge price difference, and representative Gallant Frederic responded by explaining how “… it is neither a Digital King or Pixeet lens. In the case of the one above, we bought it to have a look and first, it’s not a fisheye but a wide angle (0.28), then the quality of the glass is very poor. We cannot fight against copy from china but unlike t-shirts or bags, glass polishing and lens manufacturing needs quality material.”

I guess that settles it then.

While considering whether to spurge on Pixeet’s Fisheye lens, I poked around the Pixeet web site and realized that I could still try their service despite not owning their lens. Pixeet lets users upload self-generated panoramas via their web site as a promotional gesture. In effect, they would process our stitched panoramic images, generate an embeddable Flash-based spherical viewer, and provide free hosting for up to 1gb.

If you’d like to try, get yourself a camera with fisheye lens, as well as a panoramic stitching software (Hugin is free and multi-platform!). Since my GoPro Hero camera has a 170 degree fisheye, I took four shots at 90 degree intervals, then used the trial version of STOIK PanoramaMaker for Mac to stitch them up. Finally, I uploaded the 360 panorama to Pixeet.com where the Flash pano viewer was generated for sharing and embedding as shown below. You can also see my results at pixeet.com

Using my own fisheye lens wasn’t as great…

• Panoramic shooting with PanoLab
• Panorama: Top Floor of NSC @ UB [processed using Hugin]
• Panorama: Flint Loop @ UB [entirely processed on the iPhone]
• Social Cyborg upgrades: GoPro Hero Cam + Xacti HD1010
• Mapjack.com wearable street-view rig found…

In this episode of theorycast, I interview anthropologist Grant McCracken (@grant27) on his recent book, Chief Culture Officer.

This interview took place at the Futures of Entertainment 4 conference at MIT, on November 21st, 2009. The video I captured from his book talk within the ROI of ROFL session panel is also included. From the video, you will see examples of cultural mistakes that major corporations have made, the penalties they face, and how they could have done better if someone within the company were responsible for providing cultural foresight.

Having studied American culture and business for 25 years, McCracken’s previous work included Transformations (2008), Flock and Flow (2006), Culture and Consumption II (2005), Big Hair (1996), and Culture and Consumption (1988).

In Chief Culture Officer (CCO), McCracken argues that culture now creates so much opportunity and danger for the corporation that we need senior managers who can devote time to focus on culture. In effect, these CCO become the early-warning system for companies to help navigate their relevant cultural landscape, as well as provide to more intimate cultural acuity into the way companies craft their brands.

In effect, McCracken is hoping to create a new occupational destination for people who can understand their organization’s cultural locatedness (e.g. social science grads), but are not presently channeled to draw upon their insight for the organization. It sounds to me that whoever fits the role of the CCO would also be similar to what Seth Gordin dubs as the Linchpin (2010), that is, someone indispensable to the organization.

The idea of of the Chief Cultural Officer is to…
Make commerce that inhales and exhales culture,
Make culture that inhales and exhales commerce,
Make a living, breathing corporation.

Download theorycast.65 :: Why Organizations need their Chief Culture Officer (.mp4 / 122mb), or watch this on Blip.tv. Feel free to subscribe to theorycast on iTunes.

• theorycast.63 :: What is Transmedia?
• Thirteen copies double-sided please…
• Why Online Elections is still a far cry away
• eBay to buy Skype for $2.6B
• theorycast.09 :: Radio Interview on Political Podcasts in Singapore

I called him a genius because he’s managed to turn a downfall into an upturn (i.e. Seth Gordin’s The Dip)… he’s just published his blog into a book! Storytelling is such a crucial art.

My PhD buddy @MrBigLive then pointed out Amanda Marshall’s “Everybody’s Got A Story” where back in 2002, the amazing singer had already called out academic inflation, with her lyrics which included “…and that taxi-driver’s got a Ph.D”. Don’t believe me? Take a listen…

• In High Definition: Singapore’s Night Festival – New World 2010
• Video: Impossible to get cabs just before midnight in Singapore?
• Two Singaporean bloggers charged for anti-muslim sentiments
• Singapore’s own 11yr old “John Mayer” in the making…
• How to make Universal Translator for travel…

1st month: Couldn’t get over the fact that I finally graduated.
2nd month: Glad that I was really a doctor (of philosophy).
3rd month: Slapped in the face: PhDs don’t mean as much nowadays.
4th month: Became an uncreative slob. Remained hidden from society.

I’m jobless. I’ve been at it for about four months now.

When I finally graduated, I thought that I had all the time in the world to do everything I ever wanted. On the contrary, being jobless and financially bleeding made it hard to get motivated. I realized that my most creative endeavors were when I was busy with some form of routine.

During the lulls of my previous job, I would sneak out a blog article, experiment with video, or do something out of line as a form of escapism. Usually this personal innovation time off (aka Google’s 20% time) later became extremely useful for me (e.g. watch social cyborg project trailer).

Being too free felt as if I had a limitless blank canvas… at some point I realize that I needed some constraints in order to kick off creatively (see Boring + Boring = Pleasant?!). Now I feel like I have nothing to escape from… a prison without walls (see Kerala’s open prison).

I recently watched Up in the Air (2009), where George Clooney’s jet-setting character was designed to expertly lay-off employees across the country. In our bleak economic climate, that translated to a lot of business (and air miles) for him. To every employee he laid off, he’d say the following, “Anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now. And it’s *because* they sat there that they were able to do it.”

It’s a chance for rebirth.
As they say, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Serendipitously, I discovered a short film entitled Lemonade (2009), which was about ad-folks whose lives had changed for the better since losing their ad jobs. When 37 year-old copywriter, Erik Proulx, was laid off from a large agency in Boston, it was the third time he’d been terminated in less than 10 years. He started a blog, Please Feed the Animals, to serve as a support group for other unemployed ad professionals. According to his movie’s synopsis, some 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs during this recession.

As enlightening and delightful as it was for some to discover their true passion, I believe that most of us have not located our pleasure centers, and might never will. Understandably, it’s not that easy for everyone… we’re scared.

Before I entered university, I was actively being the life of the party. In the early 90s, when the Internet was first publicly accessible in Singapore, I started a web publishing business to combine my trifecta interest in what my dad appropriately dubbed ATM (Art + Technology = Money).

My mantra was to make friendships productive, by calling upon classmates, training them in basic HTML coding while working with them on building client relationships. Related side projects were born from this, including online music communities Substitute.com and FrontalLabs.com.

I sometimes do wonder if all this education had ruined my drive… after all, the more I generally knew, the more I felt paralyzed. The realization of how little I was relative to my peers humbled me to the point of fear and self-loathing.

Almost sharing my dilemma, Lemonade’s producer Erik Proulx recently responded to a lady named Lisa, who had been laid off in 2008 after a 14-year career in broadcast journalism. She sought an answer to her plight, so he told her “[d]on’t be the person out there looking for the job. Be the person out there doing something interesting.” What followed from her were a series of “but, but, but” responses, a situation we’re all too familiar with. Paralysis.

Digging deeper, Erik quotes Seth Godin’s Linchpin (2010, currently #1 Amazon book on careers), where Steven Pressfield’s “the resistance” comes into play. According to Pressfield, the brain naturally wants to retreat to the comfort of normalcy and inaction. There are so many reasons to not do something. But the biggest is that the voice that asks “what if?” is usually drowned out by the voice that screams “it’s too scary.” Erik and Gordin both believe that the answer lies in a high tolerance for fear, where you have to see failure not just as a possibility, but a certainty.

As Erik puts it, “If you’ve failed at something, it also means you attempted something. You’re alive.”

Ironically, while I started by explaining how I had become routine-less while being jobless, I realized that there was a larger routine at work. I believe that I would get back into the game if I changed something in my life… such as moving somewhere else. Nine years in a place without family nor friends (most have left Buffalo) isn’t socially conducive to me in any way. After all, we’re more mobile than ever.

I remind myself what I’ve shared with friends before, that we have to keep experimenting until we find our groove. Then when we’ve worn that out, we have to find yet another beat to dance to.

But don’t just take my word for it.

Richard Nelson Bolles preached career self-reliance, or at least career self-direction, in “What Color Is Your Parachute?“.

“If you don’t take time to figure out what you want to do with your life, you will be at the mercy of all those forces out there today,” Bolles explained.

Job-hunting, or more ubiquitously, finding our passion, is a continuous, never-ending process. We have to keep being curious about ourselves. It’s not a luxury anymore; it’s a matter of survival.

Aside: As a segway, Tara Hunt investigates the conundrum of love vs. greatness. I think it’s great that there isn’t a best option. We chose our own beliefs, and the bottomline is to always work hard at it.

Update 1: Carolyn Lim suggested I watch Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. It’s aptly titled “How to live before you die“.

Update 2: From an email conversation, I’m reminded of a book title which fits what we’re experiencing. For folks like us whose lives seem to be in limbo, my favorite line has always been from the title of a book about earthquakes: The Myth of Solid Ground. While it’s an intriguing book which discusses “earthquakes, prediction, and the fault line between reason and faith”, the title also seems meaningful to how we are now living in an era where everything seems less constant than ever before.

Update 3: Friends are sharing their interesting personal stories on routine-breaking and joblessness via Google Buzz.

• 100 Bullshit Jobs… And How To Get Them
• Today’s Links: Making Money though Blogging
• PhD or Die Trying: The Personal Mission Statement
• Steve Jobs Commencement Speech
• Bloggers get physical: from blogs to books

Around the start of 2010, I began hearing about this idea dubbed the3six5 project. A bunch of transmedia and emerging media folks discussed it with great fervor.

So I took a look…
frowned…
then asked…
“What’s the big effing deal?”

Every day, a different person would step in and write a journal entry of what was going on around him or her. There are rules of course, like being assigned a day insignificant to the author (i.e. no birthdays, anniversaries), writing a reflection of life that very day from the author’s location (i.e. the stark reality), limits to the number of words, and finally, zero blatant self promotion.

Yes, it’s crowdsourc-ive, it’s storytelling, it’s experimental, but is it too simplistic and too random?

Prior to the3six5, we’ve seen very well curated examples that have even been put to print, such as user-generated magazines Everywhere and JPG. In other words, this isn’t new… so what’s really going on here?

Thinking back at the3six5, I even tried to suggest connectivity between stories…

So I wrote to the3six5 co-founder, Len Kendall…

“While some of the twitterati I follow seem to like this project a lot, I beg to differ. I value the experimental (back to personal writing) nature of it, like how it provides a “snapshot” of our world from different perspectives, but find the articles all too disconnected from one another. I feel that it lacks connectivity, a kind of holistic purpose behind it. Perhaps I need to be unhinged to the idea of a plot? That said, I admire the difficult simplicity, consistency and diligence behind this project.”

To which Len calmly replied…

“Your reaction makes sense. There is certainly a disconnect between people. But I think that people’s minds often try to get non-fiction to mirror fiction. But that’s not how life operates. It’s very random, and this chronology reflects that. What makes it flow is that once every few days some folks with mention a “checkpoint” in time. Haiti’s earthquake, Obama’s spead, Apple’s ipad, etc. So that 10 years from now, if you read this story, you’ll have some sense of what was taking place at that time and when that time was.”

At this point I’m widening my sights to treat the theme as a giant chronological expression. Len explained that enforcing a theme pressures fiction around our non-fictional world. Thanks to our increasingly politicalized news media, perhaps it’s our learned reaction to pigeon-hole social reality. I have the sensation that what some storytellers are seeing, that isn’t apparent at face value, are qualities which will emerge from both the process and product of this particular sousveillance literature. The fiction will eventually appear because we will implicitly, and punitively, place it there.

As Len blogged, within the first 30 days of this year-long work, we’re already seeing a string of patterns emerge:

The web can be a really messy place. On creating order from chaos, Len writes how “Crowdsourcing ain’t easy”. Maintaining 365 authors for 365 days is pretty intense work, which makes me wonder if this project could ever work as an entirely community-governed iteration.

The number of views, comments and retweets act like an invisible leaderboard. There’s growing competition, or as BBHLab’s Ben Malbon puts it, “God help those writing in November…”. Throw in a few celebrity writers (ZeFrank!), and it looks like I’m pretty much screwed.

And on forcing fiction upon non-fiction: Margo Gremmler said “[...] you brought us all together in an author mosaic”. While I can’t wait to see the big picture, I thought that Gennefer’s tweet was rather poignant for the3six5′s journey…

Almost everyone contributing to this project agreed that “the case study for this project is going to be just as interesting as the project itself.”

To appreciate the3six5 experience, I asked if I could contribute, and was kindly given the day of 24th November 2010. It’s weird… but I suddenly feel like I own that day. It becomes both my honor, and my burden.

For a better idea of the3six5 project, be sure to read Ben Malbon’s “Interview with the3six5 project founders: 365 days, 365 perspectives“

• Understand the tragic {present}, by peering into the sci-fi {past}…
• HALO 2 is COMPLETE!
• PhD or Die Trying: The Personal Mission Statement
• GE’s “augmented reality” campaign
• Today’s Links: For Your Blog + Mac + Social Life

• iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?
  Media studies graduate student / thinker @VenessaMiemis provides a very thorough examination of the diverse perspectives to what Apple's iPad means for the future of computing.
• Fraser Speirs on Future Shock
  “What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock. For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort. Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism.”
• A Whole New Mind | Daniel Pink
  All the iPad discussions seem to point me back to Daniel Pink’s book. He observes that the future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.
• Clive Thompson: "Garry Kasparov, cyborg"
  What if, instead of playing against one another, a computer and a human played together — as part of a team?
• Project SIKULI
  Sikuli automates almost anything with screenshot ease, thanks to it's visual recognition technology. Works with any computing platform, including Mac, Windows, Linux! (via Lifehacker)
• Panopticlick
  EFF asks: Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies.
• The Pinky Show: Structure, Power, & Agency
  Pinky's been thinking a lot about class treason lately: What does it mean that we do so many things in our lives 'automatically'? What can we really do to make this world better? And what will we have to give up or risk in order to achieve it?
• Pictures + Stories = Pictory! And It's Pretty. // Current
  Pictures have never been more share-worthy than they are within Pictory, a new, community-driven, ongoing series of photos and the stories behind them. Get out your Kleenex… some of this stuff will truly tug at your heartstrings! The Internet can be so great.
• List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010 « Jeremiah Owyang
  There are very specific requirements for this list, please read before submitting: 1) You must have a public LinkedIn profile page that 2) indicates that social media is part of your full time career and job –not just for personal use, 3) You must work at an enterprise class corporation with more than 1000 employees.
• Securing your iPhone's traffic | Macworld
  There are several firms that specialize in “rent-a-VPN” service for travelers who don’t have a corporate information technology department behind them handling VPN service. I'm thinking it's the easiest way to spoof your iPhone's IP as well.
• Reboot These Sci-Fi Shows Next, Wired.com Readers Plead
  Brings back lots of memories… though sadly I watched them alone with no one to share stories with.

• World’s first anti-theft app for iPhone (video)
• HelloTxt: For microbloggers who can’t get enough…
• So… would you hire a social media strategist? (Part 1)
• Waiting for the “social media strategist” interview report?
• Minds for Sale: Jonathan Zittrain explores the rise of Cloud Labor

I keep having these aspirations to have my own daily video show, but until it actually happens (yeah right!), I’ll just share recent links I’ve enjoyed. I’ve heard from some of you that this is what you like best from my blog… less talkie, more linkies!

• Sarien.net – Instant adventure gaming
  Welcome to Sarien.net, the portal for reliving classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamers' hearts and promote the adventure game genre. (via @tiffchow)
• “Socialgraphics” webinar slides « Altimeter Group
  Recorded webinar of Altimeter's “Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behaviors“. You can also download from Slideshare.net (for slides) and drop.io (for the recording).
• Get Glue: The Network That Sticks To You
  Glue is a service that helps you find your next favorite movie, book, music album or other every day thing (here's a list of supported categories). Glue shows you things that you'll like based on your personal tastes, what your friends like, and what's most popular on Glue.
• Government posting wealth of data to Internet – washingtonpost.com
  Under a Dec. 8 White House directive, each department must post online at least three collections of "high-value" government data that never have been previously disclosed. All the new data collections will be added to the government's Web site, data.gov.
• ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web – NYTimes.com
  Observational article on twitter users as content curators & human aggregators.
• IDEO Labs » Keynote Tweet: Participate in the backchannel of your own presentation
  Enter Keynote Tweet, a simple open-source script that provides the capacity to participate in the backchannel by combining Twitter with Apple Keynote. All you have to do is add text wrapped in [twitter] and [/twitter] tags in the presenter notes section of a slide. When that slide comes up in the presentation the script grabs that text and sends it to Twitter on your behalf.
• Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee – The Rumpus.net
  Samzenpus on Slashdot wrote: "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
• The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures « OkTrends
  To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things: 1) Facial Attitude. Is the person smiling? Staring straight ahead? Doing that flirty lip-pursing thing?,
  2) Photo Context. Is there alcohol? Is there a pet? Is the photo outdoors? Is it in a bedroom?, 3) Skin. How much skin is the person showing? How much face? How much breasts? How much ripped abs?
• TheSixtyOne: Beautiful music listening + discovery + game service
  TheSixtyOne is an amazing way to discover new music online. It's chock-full of musical goodness — including lots of Creative-Commons licensed music that can be freely downloaded. It turns music discovery into a social game and lets you "heart" songs (you only get so many hearts to give out each day, depending on your level). If others then "heart" those same songs, it means you've helped them discover good music, and you get more "reputation" points (which in turn allow you to level up and "heart" even more songs, and so on).
• iSites – Create your iPhone/Android app now
  iSites enables you to create and self-manage apps for multiple smart phones (iPhone, Android) from one place. Just $25!
• Thwapr – Mobile To Mobile Video Sharing
  The easiest way to share videos and pictures from your phone to your friends' phones. All you need is text messaging and a mobile browser. Thwapr is free and requires no downloads.
• An Illustrated History of Location-Based Technology – BlackBook
  As far back as 200 BC, humans have been busy inventing a variety of tools to help steer us in the right direction. This timeline is an informative look at just how far we've come when it comes to location based technology.
• UK Launches Open Data Site; Puts Data.gov to Shame
  Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today. When will we see Data.gov.sg?
• L+E Visual Thinking Archive – a set on Flickr
  This group of visuals has been designed and produced by me (David Armano). You are welcome to use the visuals for presentations, slideshows and blogs posts. Please provide proper attribution and a link is always appreciated. davidarmano.com
• Booki: CollaborativeFutures
  As we began the collaborative process of crafting this book on the future of collaboration, we realized we were all working from a set of assumptions, many of them shared, some of them divergent. We were talking about a specific form of collaboration, specific media of collaboration, and specific goals of collaboration. And we were talking about a specific history of collaboration, and a correspondingly specific set of futures.

• Dirty Hack: JoikuSpot + Nokia cellphone = 3G iPhone
• HelloTxt: For microbloggers who can’t get enough…
• Today’s Links: Mazda Sassou = Very nice
• Want the juice on Macworld? Try Twitter.
• Today’s Links (Variations)

Sipping on a nostalgic white milk tea Audrey Lim had kindly sent me, I ask this extraordinary expatriate mother of two what made her move to the States and how she got started with her online Asian grocery store, SingaporeMalaysiaStore.com

As a working mother of two school-age children, Audrey Lim was constantly on-the-move. Being in the States, she craved for food from Singapore and Malaysia, yet wanted a easy way to fix up an authentic-tasting local meal without the required hassle. Seeing a need, the SingaporeMalaysiaStore.com was created to help overseas Singaporeans and Malaysians re-connect with their heritage through simple-to-prepare delicious food.

1) As a Singaporean, what made you move to the States?

We moved from Singapore to Seattle back in early 2003 due to my husband’s job. His company, an engineering firm based in the US, decided to move the bulk of their APAC operations from Singapore to China and offered my husband to relocate to the States. My husband loved working at this company and so he said ‘yes’. At that time, I had just started to be very successful as a sales person with Starwood Hotels APAC and was being groomed by my manager to help grow the China market, as such, I wasn’t really willing to make the move. I also didn’t wish to leave my mother alone in Singapore, was concerned for my son who was only barely 2 years old, and finally, whether I would be able to adapt to the new country. My husband decided to go ahead with the move while we worked out a plan for us to meet up around twice or thrice a year.

My son and I visited my husband in Seattle after he had already settled into his new home for two months. My husband arranged everything perfectly for us, making sure that we do all the usual touristy stuff and that his apartment was super-comfortable for our visit. He brought us to Asian grocery stores and restaurants to show that it is really not that bad to live in the States after all. I have to admit that the visit was amazing as we had really missed each other while we were apart and Seattle is simply beautiful!! On June 2003, my son and I finally made that international move from Singapore to Seattle. I remember thinking to myself at that time I must have been absolutely crazy for giving up my career, close friends, yummy foods, but most importantly to leave my mom to come halfway across the globe!!

We lived in Seattle (specifically in Kirkland – which is on the east of Seattle) for close to almost three years before my husband’s company moved us to Atlanta, GA where we have been calling home for now. Frankly speaking, I’ve no idea where 2010 will bring us :0)

2) What do you like best about living in the States?

There are so many things about the U.S. that I like and so, it is quite difficult for me to choose the best. One of the things that I like most about this country is the unlimited amount of opportunities out there for everyone in the country regardless of your ethnic, educational, economic, and social background. Coming from a fairly stern, materialistic and somewhat superficial small country, it was a real eye-opening experience for me to see that you do not really need to have the right connections or have First Class Honours in your degree to be successful in the States. Even the definition of the word ‘successful‘ can mean so many things here in this country, unlike in Singapore where I feel that one’s success is measured only by the type of house or car you own, the schools you attend, your job title, your salary & even the brand of the clothes you wear!!

The States has taught me a very valuable lesson in that you have to dare to dream and dare to grab any opportunity that presents itself to you. I’ve also learned that there is nothing wrong to be a Stay-At-Home-Mom (SAHM) and just spend time with my children (though it may mean that we are not as financially well-off as our peers back in Singapore who enjoy dual-income). I recalled my friends back in Singapore being so shocked when I told them about my decision to be a SAHM. Reactions from them range from “Are you crazy?” to “What will you live on then?” to “How are you going to have your own money – independently from your husband’s?” to “What about your career?” and so on….

3) What do you miss most about Singapore?

Having said all the above, the one thing I miss most about Singapore is my mom. She is a single mom and despite my constant nagging and urging, she refuses to move to the States with me. I miss her terribly and with us being a single-income household, it is tough for us to visit her in Singapore. She does visit us once a year for about 2 weeks (she is still working and so, cannot stay long) but it is just not the same… sometimes, you don’t realize how important someone is to you until they are far apart from you. My mom and I definitely have our ups and downs but when all things are said and done, I miss her terribly and wish I were there in Singapore to look after her, to bring her for vacations around the world. [Kevin: Ya, I feel the same way for my parents too].

4) I understand that you wanted to help bring local food to Singaporeans and Malaysians in the States… what tipped you over to actually do it?

Time and Frustrations!! Hahahaha! Seriously, I was not a very good cook when I first arrived in the States (since I never had to cook in Singapore) [Kevin: I know, as Singaporeans, we're spoilt for choice with amazing food at every turn!]. So, I had to hunt for easy and instant cooking spices/ sauces/ mixes in order to prepare meals for my family. In a nutshell, I had to become a competent cook overnight or my family would have starve; we would have become broke from eating out. Although there are always Asian grocery stores around us (Seattle & Atlanta), it is very time-consuming and frustrating to have to go to different stores to hunt down some ingredients/ sauces. Furthermore, you may not even find the things that you need in the stores after driving all those miles. Based on my experience, Asian grocery stores do not keep a very generous supply of cooking spices/ sauces and mixes from Singapore and Malaysia. They do offer plenty of products from Thailand, Vietnam and China but as you know, Singapore/Malaysia cuisine can be very different from these Asian countries [Kevin: Totally agree, Thai and Vietnamese food are way more accessible in Buffalo too].

Another reason why I finally took the leap to launch this online store is to help not just Singaporeans/ Malaysians, but also as many people as possible out there to identify the best tasting and most authentic foods/ sauces out there in the market place. I have always found it daunting to try something new I see in the stores or online since I am not sure if they are truly good or is it that these food products have good marketing team in place to promote their products/ brands. I want to be able to share an impartial view of the food products out there not only based on my personal experience with the products but also based on feedback from my team of food testers (a great bunch of Singaporeans/Malaysians).

5) How much time and money did you take to do something like this? Did you have to learn how to manage an e-commerce site?

Honestly, I don’t know the exact amount of money that I invested into this online store :) Not very wise of me for sure… but I have to admit that I am still spending countless hours (day and night) trying new food products out there, and simply learning and doing. I am neither an entrepreneur nor an IT/Web wizard, and I don’t have the money to hire someone to do things for me. In the beginning, I did not even know what HTML meant, how the web worked, how to design a website, etc. The only thing that I knew was that I wanted to share my recommendations with everyone out there and hopefully, carve out a new opportunity for me in the entrepreneur world. So, I spent hours scouring the web and constantly reading on how to launch a business, what an e-commerce site was, how to design a website, and even how to take good photographs!! There were lots of trial and error along the way and I’m sure that I will continue make mistakes along the way (be it technically or in business) but the way I look at it is I am learning a new thing every second and learning something new is never a bad thing right?

6) What kinds of food do you tend to carry on your site?

There is no specific limit to the kinds of food that I intend to carry on my site. My vision is to have an online store featuring only the best of the best food products that help bring people together and in my small way, share a little of our Southeast Asia’s culture with everyone. Being a Singaporean mother who had moved to this country with zero cooking experience, I know that there are others out there just like me who are always at our wits end on what to cook for our family and how to cook those dishes that we are familiar with back in Singapore and how to prepare those delicious foods with the limited resources (time, money, skills & ingredients) we have.

7) Ever thought of selling via Facebook or twitter? Perhaps locate Singaporean student clubs across universities to take group orders?

Yes, I am trying to figure out how to sell via Facebook and Twitter (the latter I am NOT familiar at all) without anymore additional costs. As you know, I am doing all these on my own and so, I have very very limited resources. I did manage to locate Singaporean/ Malaysian student clubs across some universities in the hopes of taking group orders and have in fact emailed to a couple of them to let them know about my online store but sadly, no responses from them so far…not quite sure what I did wrong but I am definitely not giving up since I know that not only does mothers need help in the kitchen, Singaporeans/ Malaysians students in the States will also appreciate any good and easy to prepare food products that allow them to enjoy their fav. dishes ….I just need to figure out how to contact these groups of people. Any suggestions? [Kevin: Call to action can be tough at the start, so perhaps you could start by spreading awareness via social networks and online communities. Let friends to spread word of mouth; I'll try to help]

8) Have you met other Singaporean moms in the States? Is it true that bordom is their worse enemy?

I have met other Singaporean moms in the States. From my interactions with them, I have to say that there is absolutely NO TIME to be bored!! Since we do not have any support system in place over here (such as maids, parents, in-laws etc like what we have in Singapore), it is very very tough to be bored here in the States especially if you have children. Here, you really need to do everything yourself from teaching your children (tutors are so expensive and a luxury here just like having maids) to bringing them to their afterschool activities to volunteering in their schools to cleaning the house to cooking to doing laundry and the list goes on and on….

I always laugh with my husband saying that I never know marketing/ grocery shopping can be such a fun family activity that takes an entire day to complete – sometimes, we even spent our entire weekends in different grocery stores!! Our children now think that going to the grocery stores is their weekly field trip!!! Imagine what their classmates must be thinking when my children are always sharing with their classes that they have just spent yet another weekend going from one grocery store to the next : 0))

9) Have you met any inspirational expatriate moms living in the States?

One of the most inspirational expatriate moms whom I know is Veronica. We bump in to each other in a Malaysian restaurant here in Atlanta and we just ‘clicked’ :) Although she is married to an American, I feel that Veronica is very successful in bringing together some of the best parenting and values from both the America’s and Asian’s cultures in her family. Her family loves Asian dishes and although she is strict with them in terms of education, she is never overly-obsessive about her kids getting straight A’s unlike a lot of parents I know in Singapore. She makes sure that her children always know that she loves them very much no matter what and she is not shy about telling them that she loves them and giving them hugs/ kisses. Veronica will also take the time and efforts to talk to her children and also to hear their views of what is going on in their lives, no matter how busy she is. I do not know many parents in Singapore who will listen to their children without passing any sort of judgment or criticisms [Kevin: Aiyoh!].

10) What cultural survival tips would you share with Singaporeans & Malaysians families living in the States?

Survival Tips:-
1. Don’t bring your kiasu-isms to the States!! This includes not comparing your children’s achievements against each other kids’, seeing who drives bigger car or who has a bigger house. None of these matters! What truly matter is that we learn from each other in this country and be willing to help each other out.

2. Be active in your children’s schools so that they know you are interested in their lives in school and help them understand the values of contributing back to the community through actions and not just through monetary donations

3. Don’t be snobbish!! Not every Singaporean/ Malaysian mom here in the States are living on the high-life and they may not be as financially well-off as you or your peers back in Singapore. This tip also expands to making sure that you befriend not only fellow Singaporeans/ Malaysians but also the Americans!! Do not be afraid to approach them and just open yourself up. You will be amazed at how much you learn from each other and the lasting friendships!

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help! You will find that Americans and fellow Singaporeans/ Malaysians are generally willing to help you or share localized tips with you (where is the nearest grocery store, where is a safe place to go at night and where are the good schools) once you asks for help.

5. Stay connected to Singapore/ Malaysia through any local Singaporeans/ Malaysians associations and it is now so easy for us to read up on news from back home online : )

6. Be sure to register yourself and your family with the Singapore Embassy nearest to you via their websites. You can even sign up for regular news blasts from the embassy/ consular office.

7. The following websites may also be useful to Singaporeans here in the States:
http://www.babybonus.gov.sg
http://www.mfa.gov.sg/washington/
http://www.moe.edu.sg/education/admissions/returning-singaporeans/
http://www.moe.edu.sg/education/admissions/returning-singaporeans/#going-overseas
Application for Singapore Citizenship, click on http://www.mfa.gov.sg/sanfrancisco/ and on the link that says “Visa and Immigration Matters”

Thanks for sharing your story. I’m sure lots of folks will benefit from this, and I hope they’ll check out your online grocery store, SingaporeMalaysiaStore.com.

• Homemade Hainanese Chicken Rice for Singapore National Day
• Our New Year’s Food Expedition in Canada
• Li Ao’s “Singaporean stupidity” redefined?
• Photos: Singapore as seen by a time-traveller (Oct 2006)
• LifeStory: When “home” isn’t a place anymore…

As educators, teaching evaluations can sometimes make or break our careers as seen in this New York Times article. Artist Abi Huynh, from the Royal Academy of Art, the Netherland puts a new spin on the otherwise boring survey form.

Don’t bother. The image is too low-res to print, so we’re encouraged construct our own versions.

Source: New York Times “Judgement Day” // via worldfamousdesignjunkies

• Fiendster: the new way to hate people
• Today’s Links: Overheard Conversations in New York
• How do you beat stress?
• Wall Poster: The Web is Agreement
• More US students seek Asian experience (The Straits Times, 3rd July)

During my Singapore vacation in October ’09, I caught up with Kelly Choo, co-founder of Brandtology.com, to learn more about their online brand intelligence service.

While there are numerous online sentiment monitoring companies in the States, such as Radian6 and Omniture, this space is relatively new and growing in South-East Asia.

As mentioned before, my friend Ben Koe works at JamiQ, which differentiates from Brandtology’s intelligence suite with a straightforward, hands-on approach to social media monitoring. There’s also ThoughtBuzz, which I recently read about.

To better understand the strengths of each startup, check out SG Entrepreneurs’ interviews with Brandtology’s Kelly Choo, JamiQ’s Ben Koe, and the ThoughtBuzz team.

Businesses have traditionally (and still do) debated about the lack of proper social media metrics. As many in the online space would explain, there’s in fact a deluge of metrics which leads to a dilemma of choice. While concepts of viewership and circulation were somewhat sufficient for traditional media, social media affords a broader range of metrics. The real first step is really determining what we want to measure.

For instance, as seen in MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide (PDF), it’s been found that social media is very effective at building brand awareness and reputation, while it’s yet to prove itself at driving online sales. There’s no silver bullet; every media has varying levels of richness, with leaner media tending to be more distributive. Our choice of media involves a host of factors, which is why media intelligence (social or not) gets more valuable than ever.

Did You Know: The music in the end credits comes from Starfish Stories’ latest album, Crystal Tears and the Dream Nebula. It’s track 5, “Stroke of Midnight v2.3″, which I bought for a dollar.

Download theorycast.64 :: Visiting Brandtology (.mp4 / 35mb), or watch this on Youtube and Blip.tv. Feel free to subscribe to theorycast on iTunes.

• From Singapore to Buffalo, what I’m up to now…
• HyperConnected Beings // From Social Web to Networked Consciousness
• Haven’t got your free Digital Library Card?
• theorycast.13 :: Facebook Privacy 101
• theorycast.04 :: Interview with Megite’s Matthew Chen

Sivasothi (@sivasothi) and Ivan Chew (@ramblinglib) tipped me off on the Singapore National Library Board‘s new Facebook app, simply called ‘myLibrary‘. What’s interesting about the app is that it integrates much of our typical library transactions right into Facebook.

At first we might wonder, “What’s the big deal about a Facebook app? Can’t we already access the same services by going to the library’s web site?”

True that, but more than just a matter of accessibility, it’s about being “within reach” to users, and extending their library use into the third place. Allowing users to recommend books to friends or posting what they’re reading directly onto their Facebook profiles is very much for the library’s win (i.e. word of mouth).

Since the Facebook app does require an NLB account to play with, I’ve made a quick five minute screencast above for the benefit of our international librarian friends (also on Youtube for the kiasu ones). If you can’t or hate watching videos, you can also read all about ‘myLibrary’ at NLB’s Facebook FAQ page, which includes a user guide (PDF) complete with annotated screenshots.

So far, the tweets about the ‘myLibrary” has been largely positive (many of whom were surprised!), so I do hope NLB keeps up the great work. I love our innovative librarians, and this in turn makes me proud of Singapore.

UPDATE 1: Some folks have asked if NLB has plans for mobile apps, and while there’s no official word, my sources have quietly hinted in due time. Meantime, we can always point our iPhones to http://m.nlb.gov.sg

UPDATE 2: If you’re so inclined, Ivan Chew (@RamblingLib) has shared screenshots of NLB’s myLibrary Facebook app.

• High Browse Online: Singapore’s Book Blog
• Why Librarians should blog…
• “I Heart My Library” gone wild…
• Guess where I am now…
• LifeStory: Kevin and his lost library card…