The TWIA crew gathers before the Chinese New Year on Valentine’s day with our typical ramblings with Google Nexus One and Google Buzz. Following on, we continue an interesting joint venture between Baidu (China’s top search engine) and Rakuten (Japan’s top e-commerce company), and examine their implications. Then we switched gears to examine why Yahoo! is doing well in East Asia and then do a quick discussion on Wireless SG, the continuing saga between Google China and the Chinese government and Paypal’s run-in with India regulators. Continue Reading

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With Pamela Fox (@pamelafox) from Google Australia as our special guest this week, the TWIA crew tried to make sense out of the JooJoo’s new partnership with CSL Malaysia. We also reviewed the future of Naver, the top search engine in South Korea, the Malaysia government’s declaration of 95% adoption in OSS and most exciting of all, the impact of the court ruling on iiNet’s victory over the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). Not to mention, we weaved Google Wave, FilmCamp SG, the #dIE6 movement and adoption of open source in governments into an exciting week of This Week in Asia. Continue Reading

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The great bald marketeer of our time Seth Godin has been many things including, best selling author, founder of a wiki type knowledge based site and also TED speaker twice.

Recently he came up with a post on Random rules of Ideas Worth Spreading. If you do not know, Ideas Worth Spreading is the tagline for the TED conference which invite thinkers and doers around the world to share their ideas.

Anyway, these are seth rules from his site.

If you’ve got an idea worth spreading, I hope you’ll consider this random assortment of rules. Like all rules, some are made to be broken, but still…

You can name your idea anything you like, but a google-friendly name is always better than one that isn’t.
Don’t plan on appearing on a reality show as the best way to launch your idea.
Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.

• Don’t poll your friends. It’s your art, not an election.
• Never pay a non-lawyer who promises to get you a patent.
• Avoid powerful people. Great ideas aren’t anointed, they spread through a groundswell of support.
• Spamming strangers doesn’t work. Spamming friends doesn’t work so well either, but it’s certainly better than spamming strangers.
• The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.
• Powerful organizations adore the status quo, so expect no help from them if your idea challenges the very thing they adore.
• Figure out how long your idea will take to spread, and multiply by 4.
• Be prepared for the Dip.
• Seek out apostles, not partners. People who benefit from spreading your idea, not people who need to own it.
• Keep your overhead low and don’t quit your day job until your idea can absorb your time.
• Think big. Bigger than that.
• Are you a serial idea-starting person? If so, what can you change to end that cycle? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.
• Try not to confuse confidence with delusion.
• Prefer dry, useful but dull ideas to consumer-friendly ‘I would buy that’ sort of things. A lot less competition and a lot more upside in the long run.
• Pick a budget. Pick a ship date. Honor both. Don’t ignore either. No slippage, no overruns.
• Surround yourself with encouraging voices and incisive critics. It’s okay if they’re not the same people. Ignore both camps on occasion.
• Be grateful.
• Rise up to the opportunity, and do the idea justice.

The highlighted part is what I think are the most important. Have fun and spread your worthwhile ideas.

Michael Smith Jr, Director YDN SE Asia from Yahoo! joins the TWIA crew as our guest for the week. The discussion centered on the aftermath of the Apple iPad after months of speculation. With the Founders’ Institute coming to Singapore following after many incubators setting up shop here, the TWIA discussion group discussed the impact on tech entrepreneurship in Singapore and overall to the other countries Indonesia and Malaysia in Southeast Asia. With Maxis opening apps store in Malaysia and China’s declaration that they have nothing to do with the attacks on Google, the crew steered ahead with an exciting week in Asia. Continue Reading

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Gen Kanai, Director of Asia Business Development from Mozilla Corporation joins the TWIA crew as our guest to discuss the Google Showdown with the China government on unfiltered search & censorship and examine the implications of foreign companies entering into the Chinese market. We continue to discuss the recent Yahoo! Friendster partnership in Southeast Asia and an exciting discussion about the security of mobile banking in Korea and how that ties up with browsers, search engines and security protocols in East Asia. Continue Reading

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Last week in This Week in Asia, we talked about our perdiction how 2010 will be like in the technology space.

The whole crew takes the last podcast of 2009 to review the major events that rocked the web and tech landscape and also makes predictions for the new decade of 2010. This is probably our longest episode over an hour long and also a rare one which was done in the afternoon today. Continue Reading

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Our very own CerVentus was on The Digital Edge 15 recently with John Lim, Ben Isreal and David Lian and we talked about the fall of MySpace, MOL Access Portal Berhad and Friendster, the Digg’s vote-for-ads experiment, dead Danger Sidekick, behavioral advertising,and social networking bans in work.

For more info download it at The Edge or sign up it at Itunes.