expertria.com

Last year when I was in Seoul in got the chance to chat with Jason Calacanis, whom I told him about The Actionscript Conference. When I told him that it is still small, he told me “give it a few years”. His words bring me far and I am determined to turn TAC into one of the biggest Flash and Flex conference in South East Asia.

This year, TAC will be held on the 14th and 15th September, in the 550 seater of NTUC auditorium at One Marina Boulevard. For many attendees, it simply means crossing the road of Shenton way from their office to the venue. 2 Full days means we are invite more speakers, more topics and give you the updates and knowledge of Flex, Flash and Flash Player, and AIR that you are craving for.

I am proud to announced that ticketing is now opened. So register now!

Image from APLINK
 

I am very honored to be part of the speakers’ panel for Digital Media Festival 2008, the augural conference in Singapore for Web 2.0 and Social Media. I spoke on Building your Community 2.0, using Seesmic as one of its examples, as well as sites like GetSatisfaction, Twitter and ways to gather feedbacks from your Community.

At the backstage, I go around interviewing the great speakers. I managed to get Hugh Hancock, the man to coin the term “Machinima”, answering some questions the seesmic community posted, as well as Timo Vuorensola, director of Star Wreck, on community collaboration of videos

See the videos below and input your comments!

Interview with Hugh Hancock:
Where should they put their videos to ? http://seesmic.com/videos/HSJ7EcUwRy
Which game should they start with ? http://seesmic.com/videos/TFqB5frY5t
How do we create complex animation? http://seesmic.com/videos/8QCJ8JDQp4
How do we have customized scenes? http://seesmic.com/videos/qzL7osRpnv

Interview with Timo Vourensola

The event boast a wide variety of booths and technology showcase. I managed to interview with a couple of companies like Paymo as well as Garena
 

Paymo is a mobile payment solution, similar to Paypal, but enables anyone who has a handphone to pay using SMS. Definitely a good micropayment solution that I can look into for future events or even donations!

Garena is a Community Portal for Gamers to find fellow gamers to join in games like DOTA, WoW, CS, etc. At the point of interview, over 100k of gamers are connected on the portal playing games, a very impressive numbers!

  

Stefano Virgilli on his talk and creative crew:

Congrats SITF, @itr8 and the organizing committee for the success! Its been a great experience and I am looking forward to DMFest 2009!

DMFest Preconfence Meetup

It is a great evening at Text100 today as I am invited to attend the DMFest Preconference Blogger Meetup, where I am able to meet up with some of the most talented entrepueroer and bloggers of the Singapore Web 2.0 circle. Among the attendents are Chris Jones from Magma Studios, Philip Morgan from Muvee, Coleman Yee, Tech65 bloggers Daniel and NTT, Walter Lim of yesterday.sg

The meetup kicked off by a series of introduction by Ivan Ho, who is running the Digital Media Festival, as well as Anthony Fu, who gives us more insight of the purpose and the schedule of the main event proper on the 30th and 31st of October. The purpose of the meetup is to allow the speakers and the blogger community of singapore to meet up and network, as well as to give us a quick showcase of some really nice user generated movie, one of which titled “Big Buck Bunny“, which is really very impressive!

The main part of the meetup evolves around the discussion of “User generated Content (UGC) , in particular in Singapore, as well as the viability of both the publisher and the platform provider to generate revenues via UGC. This spawn into very interesting discussion among the attendees. Some discussed points includes:

1. Very few publisher of UGC produce content of high quality (regarding of blogs, videos, etc). These talented publisher might then move into mainstream publisher. For the rest of the publisher, many of them might not get noticed or is of lesser value to advertisers. Thus, we get a lot content that advertisers are not interest of.
2. The floor is getting lower and the ceiling, higher. With blogs going mainstream and everyone having a camera phone and the advent of HD consumer cameras, more and more people can produce videos and content of their own. On the other hand, it is getting harder and harder to actually make oneselves notice in this “sea of content”
3. Hits != Quality Content. Some publisher of UGC will create videos / hate posting that is for the sole purpose of hits and traffic. The content however, is not of real value. Thus, having high hits is not a good measure of good UGC.
4. UGC means differently for different users. For some users, privacy is more important than getting as much exposure to it as possible. This will result in the needs for channels, groups and privacy control. In such an environment, how can platform providers monetize from the content?

Summary
In short, we have a very quality discussion of over 2 hours on these topics and I have to thanks text100 and DMFest for making this possible. I hope that we can have more discussion over the questions and issues we have risen and have a fruitful discussion during the main event itself. Oh yes, I managed to give Seesmic Stickers to all who attended too.

I am looking forward to DMFest at the end of this month!

I am exciting to announce that I will be speaking at Singapore Digital Media Fest, being part of the Panelist for topic “Web 2.0 and Building Online Communities”

I am looking forward to be speaking alongside with the great lineup of speakers, like Stanley Tan from Microsoft and S.P Raja from IBM to name a few. Like I said in my previous post, it is really very exciting to see Singapore embracing Web 2.0 and Social Networking. I believe it is not the end of Web 2.0 yet and we will still have many exciting times to come, especially for Asia!

I have been using Amiando to host events for the Singapore Flex Usergroup for the month of August and September and it works great. No registration for end users, reminder services, simple non-cluttered interface. However, what impressed me most is their service. And here is why:

At Amiando, you can upload banner for your events, change the CSS, to meet your event styles. I uploaded an image yesterday and coincidentally, it is covered by the tabs below:

I dismissed the issue, as I believe most users will actually saw my email newsletter first before heading to the page. However, when I woke up today, I revisited the website and see this:

What is the difference? Basically it is being FIXED! And I got a personal email from Amiando stating:

I have seen you set up a new fug meeting http://www.amiando.com/fugsg-sept.html which looks great. We can do some adjustments via CSS so that the text in the left corner can be seen as well as the Yahoo logo. I will talk to our frontend developer Patrick and will let you know.

Best,
Boris

What does that mean? That means that Boris Barreck from Amiando, actually takes the time to go through every single event hosted on Amiando, checked whether there is any problem. Even a small CSS issue as above, is identified and fixed within a few hours. Note that Amiando host major events like LeWeb and I deeply appreciate them to actually notice issues I am having on their website and help me within a day.

Web 2.0 Customer Service

Web 2.0 has cause significant changes to customer service and support. On top of Get Satisfaction, we see companies tracking Twitter for keywords to bash their competitors or to provide support, as well as in my own case, tracking blog post for relevant questions on your product (see the comments in the link)

With high competition and low barrier to entries to the Web 2.0 world, it is not difficult to understand how good customer service like Amiando will play a big part in the success of a company.

Today, Facebook announced that they will be shifting the Application Bar to the bottom left corner of the page, together with the chat bar.

So I was happily coding halfway today, when the Application Bar on the top disappeared and I was thinking it is due to me not drinking enough coffee. Then bang, it appear on the bottom on the second look

For those who do not know what Application Bar it, it consist of all your applications on Facebook, including Events, Photos, Videos and the other application you have installed. Previously, it can be access as a drop down list on the top. The new bar also means that bookmarked applications will now be visible always in the bottom.

Does the new Facebook profile really sucks ?

I started doing Facebook application development before the New Profile and things are pretty simple. 1 cached FBML for the profile page and the rest of the application is pretty much up to your own creativity. With the New Profile, you can have your application in the main Wall, OR it can be under Boxes, AND it COULD be under Application Tabs.

For end users, most of the first reaction from people I met is “It sucks”.  In fact, that is my first reaction too. Plus, designers will curse and swear too since now they have to design 2 more UI for Boxes and Application Tab. However, that also means that every Application gets the chances to have more exposure. Having a user putting your application to his / her application tab will be like winning a lottery, that means they love your application. You can now design a wide FBML  for Boxes Tab, and also a narrow FBML for Wall Tab, in which both can have radically different design, at the discreet of the developer.

Another tread we will see if that developers will now focus more on User’s stories to have their application noticed. Unless a user place their application under Wall Tab, it is unlikely that their friends will go the Boxes Tab to see “what application their friends have”. By focusing on User’s Stories, they will have information of their application to appear under the users’ Feeds, which is right on top on the user profile page. Applications not doing that yet will have to do that, to keep their applications competitive.

On the overall, while during the transition period, many might throw curses at Facebook New Profile design, I believe they will come to like it as they get used to it. Afterall, we get a less cluttered profile page now.