The Panda Thinks

Ninja Panda in Ninja Rocket

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:01:00 -0700

If you were wondering how Thinkpanda gets to work so quickly, now you know.

Angry Panda is the next big fashion trend?

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:59:00 -0700

Pandas are cute and cuddly, which is why presumably everyone loves them. When pandas are not cute and cuddly, everyone still loves them, for different reasons, namely the associated paradox. This is definitely not the first time there have been successful angry pandas (such as this one from Egypt), but there is a new line of fashion coming out of its native China - Hi Panda.

This story is not just another panda story from this blog. The creator is a great designer to start off with, but his entrepreneurial sense, in scaling up the brand and distribution, is what sets him apart from the millions of other panda products or Chinese fashion designers out there. This is a great example of work smarter, not just harder.

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Scared Panda (Earthquake Panda)

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 19:39:00 -0800

Following the March 11, 2011 earthquake in Japan, this terrified giant panda grabs the leg of a policeman.

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SlideShare presents the best presentations of 2010

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:14:00 -0800

Earlier this month, SlideShare unravelled the winners of the world's best presentations, voted by SlideShare netizens and judged by slideshow pandits. You become best when you learn from the best. So what have we learned from the winners?

Font size is HUGE. Probably because you design presentations for the most visually-challenged member of the audience, but also because it limits how much content you can have on the slide, which leads us to the next point...
Text amount is small - in other words, content is capped. That means less reading, and more attention on you and what you have to say!
Font choice is fits the style or mood of the presentation topic. But make sure it is easy to read.
Photos are chosen to fit the words, and one photo per slide - a picture is worth a thousand words, but two thousand words may be too many.

Here are the top presentations:

SMOKE - The Convenient Truth

YOU SUCK AT POWERPOINT!

Social Media for Business

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Merry Christmas from Skype

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 12:03:00 -0800

We confirmed our suspicions that Skype was down for some reason a few days ago. Various sources and our experiences reveal that it is still sort of down. We think that this is God's way of saying "stop working during Christmas!" The reason for the season is definitely not code surfing. Happy holidays from Thinkpanda!

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Panda Invasion @ とれとれ市場

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 13:10:00 -0800

Photo from a friend in Japan.

"... because there are two baby pandas in the nearby zoo."

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Lessons learned from Wikileaks

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:23:00 -0800

Unless you've been living on the moon, you would have known about the Wikileaks drama unfolding. It goes to show how important information policy is to any collaborative environment, and the dangers of ignoring humans in a system.

The fiasco that the USA government is enduring now is not so much a technology problem than it is a human problem. Applying the 80-20 rule, we can assume that 80% of all accidents (incidents, etc) are caused by human error. Wikileaks is a website, and even if the website is destroyed, it is a brand. Somebody needed to make the leaked information available in the first place, and that somebody should not have had all the keys to the main safe.

Security is obviously a key consideration, and it does add to the cost of systems design and implementation. As we wrote earlier, one of the reasons the digital wasteland is deadly because of security concerns such as the one demonstrated by Wikileaks.

Finally, if something is really confidential, then DO NOT WRITE IT DOWN. Case in point: even the founder of Wikileaks is dealing with his own leak of sorts, uncovered by Interpol.

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Me Want Bamboo - iPhone game

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 13:07:00 -0700

Thinkpanda stumbled upon a nice iPhone game today called Me Want Bamboo.

It's a platform jumping game: you make the panda single or double jump, and you can also get the panda to fart for extra boost, though you can store one fart at a time, replenish with eating bamboo.

OpenFeint and Facebook connected. Great music, great graphics, and simple gameplay means time well wasted. Plus it is free to download. Plus the icon looks nice on your iPhone. Anyway, back to work!

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CAP your elevator pitch

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 12:25:00 -0700

30 seconds fly by really fast, here is a three-point framework to CAP your pitch:

Concise English (or whatever language) - use words with less syllables
Absolutely needed info only - more info can be found in the next point of contact
Please the audience - what info do they want to hear?

Remember the purpose of pitching is to get them to the next point of contact (a rep, the website, the brochure, etc). Having less is more, and keep the focus sharp, like lasers with sharks.

C A P

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Make sure your resume is on PAR

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:29:00 -0700

It's that time of year again: Labour Day. And many people are celebrating by joining or shuffling around the labour force. Several people have approached me to help them edit their resumes, and I thought that I would share another one of my funky frameworks with everyone to help them pimp their resume.

The purpose of a resume is to get you the first interview, not the job. Depending on the mood of the reviewer, how large the stack of resumes is, and of course, how well your resume is written, a review typically takes as little as 3 seconds. To help the reviewer ascertain a great and accurate impression in this small timeframe, the descriptions for your resume entries need to be on PAR

Position - describe your job - does not have to be same as job title.
Activity - what tasks did you do? How did you do it?
Results - what was accomplished? What did you learn?

Example: Chief Transporter, Thinkpanda

Driving - transported team to locations across Canada and US, evaded police and always got meetings safely on time.
Logistics - planned out routes and mapped out shortcuts, reduced travel time by 40% compared to Google Map estimations.
Research - investigated new technologies to improve driving experience - traction control variation, HUD complementary display, roll-cage.
Development - performed modifications and maintenance to vehicle - ECU programming, turbocharger configuration, extra ethanol fuel tank.

You may apply the PAR to any description entry: skills summary, job descriptions, volunteer activities, etc. Remember that the review is also human - use concise language. While your writing is on PAR, make sure your content makes you look above par. Get it? Har har, ok enough for today. Good luck with your job hunts!

P.S. - interested in what Thinkpanda is doing? Email us at hr@thinkpanda.com and we promise to spend more than 3 seconds looking at it :3

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Panda Cupcakes

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:03:00 -0700

Thank you Su-Yin for your amazing recipe! And here are her instructions:

I swiftly made a simple batch of almond chocolate cupcakes from scratch and popped them in the oven. I made a small bowl of buttercream with 60gms of softened butter beaten with 250gms of sifted icing sugar. This was spread over the cooled cupcakes to form a flat-ish surface. I then piped the eyes of the panda with a piping bag filled with 100gms of melted dark chocolate mixed with 2 tbsp's of cream to form a thick paste.

The eyes and nose of the panda was done with inverted chocolate chips and the ears were merely chocolate coated peanuts stuck to the edges.Pipe the mouth on with a scoop of butter cream coloured with a few drops of red colouring.

Unlike after eating its friend, the panda bread, we will be hitting the gym tomorrow.

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Kung Fu Panda video game

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:17:00 -0700

We finally got to play the Kung Fu Panda demo on XBOX, based off of the movie. It is a third-person action-adventure game and is basically a kid-friendly version of Dante's Inferno. For an hour of entertainment, this is awesomeness, and since this *is* a free demo, there is no charge for awesomeness.

The animation and camera work is very dynamic, almost movie-like. The gameplay is a bit repetitive after a while, since there seems to be only two types of enemies, small animals and their big brothers. If you love Kung Fu Panda, or love cute mindless button-bashing games, this is a great title for your collection. Unfortunately, there is a charge of awesomeness in full version.

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Don't say no to Panda

Wed, 26 May 2010 18:36:00 -0700

Its not in english, but this is hilarious.

EDIT: the entire campaign is here, translated for non-Arabic speakers

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Panda Picks

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:38:00 -0700

Turn your food into a Panda playground with these panda picks by New Stylish Tokyo (東京新潮網)。

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How to burn money

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:43:00 -0800

The inability to find what you are searching for is frustrating and demoralizing. Now you can add "wasteful" to the list of descriptions. Research from IDC indicates the cost of not finding information is $3300 per person per year. For an average mid-sized company, that is an annual $1.65 million virtual bonfire, the equivalent of 194 panda chairs.

And there are no style points awarded for this kind of money burning.

How did they come up with this number? Apparently, the sum of all inefficiencies

ineffective searches
inconsistent access tools
re-created content
reformats and revisions

as factors in causing employees to not find the information they need. No business should be burning this much money, especially in these times of austerity. The challenge though is to pinpoint a solution, precisely because this cash bonfire involves non-cash items.

Are collaboration technologies the answer to the problem? The latest craze is around transferring social media from consumer space to enterprise. Would Enterprise Collaboration 2.0 stop the annual bonfire?

Collaboration is about managing resources: time, tasks, employees, etc. The underlying factor is the human factor, and with it is the culture, something that forms automatically when more than one person gathers together. In short, different cultures that define different companies and their different departments require different collaboration strategies, and thus different solutions. In the collaboration space, there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.

Now enough with the talk, show me the money: what is the ROI? When expenditures are directly correlated to cash items, such as staffing a research and development team, use of collaboration solutions indeed affects positive ROI. Opportunity cost to developing or hosting your own infrastructure also produces good ROI.

Finally, being mindful of the digital wasteland phenomenon helps with a better ROI too.

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Pandas on a napkin

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:20:00 -0800

It was the night before EpCon 2010, and we needed something to spice up our about page. Our team had grown to 8 people, and I don't even have their photos (yes, we were not even friends on Facebook yet). So I sketched these cartoons on a napkin. Thank you EPIC team for scanning it for us :)

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Papercraft Panda Z

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:42:00 -0800

Today we took a break to make some desktop decorations. We chose this papercraft of Panda Z, the distant cousin of the legendary Mazinger Z. Here is a clip of him in action:

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Sneezing Baby Panda

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:11:00 -0800

Let's hope that this family lives in Canada, the land of free healthcare. We have actually featured this little clip on our 404 page, i.e. whenever Thinkpanda virtually sneezes. Try it out: www.thinkpanda.com/314159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937.

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The Digital Wasteland

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:09:00 -0700

Sending your people to the digital wasteland to die is not a great way to manage your empire. I'm sure we can all relate to the hallowing tales of workers venturing out into a collection of data, information, and knowledge that is in the state of FUBAR, only to never return. But how did this disaster happen in the first place?

There are basically two reasons why digital wastelands threaten otherwise 'irrigable' information systems.

Lack of policy to collect data and control information.
No reason or use for data and information collected.

The first reason leads to rampant hoarding of stuff. This leads to increased costs to maintain the stuff: measures to sort it, measures to access it, measures to transform it, and measures to keep it secure. And none of these are linear or sub-linear correlations to the amount of data you have.

The second reason is the all important human factor. In business, all things exist for a reason: to serve humans. If there is no human in the use case scenario, please go back to the drawing board. Sure, it is justifiable to collect things in the event that they are needed someday - the pack-rat logic. Or maybe the computer needs it for some of its calculations - after all, computers are SMRT and they need everything. But consider the costs mentioned earlier, and consider what is actually needed, your friend Mr. ROI will thank you later.

We are not advocating "not collecting information". We are advocating smart collection, with the human factor in mind, and supporting policies to turn your wasteland into a treasure island.

The Panda Thinks

Ninja Panda in Ninja Rocket

Angry Panda is the next big fashion trend?

Scared Panda (Earthquake Panda)

SlideShare presents the best presentations of 2010

Merry Christmas from Skype

Panda Invasion @ とれとれ市場

Lessons learned from Wikileaks

Me Want Bamboo - iPhone game

CAP your elevator pitch

Make sure your resume is on PAR

Panda Cupcakes

Kung Fu Panda video game

Don't say no to Panda

Panda Picks

How to burn money

Pandas on a napkin

Papercraft Panda Z

Sneezing Baby Panda

The Digital Wasteland

Panda attacks server room