Last week I was in Phuket for my 2nd time attending WPP Stream Asia.

Remember my first time?

Well if you missed the first time round let me explain. Stream Asia is a big meet of all the top people in the digital and media industry in the region. It’s organized by WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency group. You can’t buy a ticket to Stream. On the contrary, everything from the conference to the food or even the accommodation is totally free for anyone who is invited to go but it’s an invite-only event.

Being in the advertising & media industry, I attend lots of conferences every year. Stream though is one of my favourites. It’s not just because it’s held at Club Med in Phuket at a resort right next to a beach like that.

It’s because of how this conference is run. In actual fact, they call Stream an unconference. Basically when you reach there, anyone can go sign up to either lead or participate in a discussion. The discussions can be about anything!

There are the serious discussions like “Doing business in Thailand” or “The China Story”, and there are rather casual ones (Jeff Marx last year led a discussion titled “The internet is for porn”).

The discussions are held in little tents like that all around Club Med

but the best part is who the participants are. There you had the top executives for internet heavyweights like Facebook or Google, or top entrepreneurs from around the region or even as far as Israel.  It’s not just about the opportunity to get to meet all these people but when you put the top brains in the region together for discussions, you learn loads from their stories or their experiences.

The stories you hear at this conference is amazing. I hear about entrepreneurs in China who sold their company for hundreds of millions of USD. I even met one entrepreneur at the conference who sold his company just recently for tens of millions. He immediately bought a Ferrari after that and is on to find the next big thing.

I met an Israeli entrepreneur that made money selling the simplest of all inventions. He designed this plastic thing which is shaped exactly like an ice-cream cone. The purpose of it… is so that you can plug it in the sand on the beach and use it as an ashtray. He made a few shipments of those and sold them all entirely and now he’s making more.

Got me thinking that innovation doesn’t have to come from technology. It can still come from the simplest of things.

So I recently joined Formspring after Shorty got addicted to it herself. It’s basically a platform that lets people on your FB or Twitter ask you questions that you can answer. I had some really interesting questions but one particular one was “Are you afraid of dying?”.

I never thought much about that question… but I just answered away and before I knew it I had composed one heck of a long reply and I thought I’d share it here.

So I guess for me what I feel is…. if you live your life to the fullest at any one point, you’re a little less afraid of dying. Because when you die, you don’t fear the regrets you have in life.. but just fear what comes after life.

What do you guys think?

If you’d like to ask me any questions on Formspring you can go here. I haven’t answered lots of the questions yet but will slowly digest them and answer one by one of them when I get the chance to.

Everybody… I am about to surprise you with something today. Now I’ve been going to Thailand quite a bit lately because of Nuffnang just opening up an office there. So I’ve had the chance to eat all sorts of great Thai food… and boy do our partners there really bring us for good Thai food.

After all these meals I have finally decided on what my favourite restaurant in Thailand is. It’s a Steamboat place called MK.

I know I know… you’re thinking “WTF?!?!?”. All the tom yam, all the fish cake, all the pandan chicken and all that and I choose to go to Thailand to eat steamboat?

I’m a big fan of steamboat, and MK is my second favourite steamboat restaurant in the world. My first is one in Penang that I’ve been going to since I was a kid called Golden Gate Steamboat. In KL… well I’ve tried many but I’m yet to find one that I like as much as MK or Golden Gate.

My Thai friend Pruet told me that the story behind MK is that it was started by a lady who used to work in a steamboat restaurant. After a while her boss decided to shut down the restaurant because he didn’t want to do the business anymore so she came out and started her own. Her son who’s an engineer by training runs the business now and MK has grown to an entire chain of restaurants in Thailand. You can see them EVERYWHERE!

MK has some specialties that no other steamboat restaurant I’ve seen have. Like these seaweed pork balls.

Who would think to do something so simple and yet so delicious.

MK is also the most efficiently run steamboat restaurant I’ve ever seen in my life. Everything there is so well thought-through for efficiency. For example.. you know how in steamboat restaurants the waiter has to bring everything over in one trolley. Then they would lay plate by plate of stuff on the table, taking up all the space right?

All the food in MK is brought in little stacked up trays like this.

So one waiter can carry everything over without a trolley and you can stack it all up on your table without taking much space. So the table can be a lot smaller and the restaurant can fit more tables than it normally could.

Cool right?

There’s more. When you walk into the restaurant the waiter doesn’t even have to give you a menu. Right behind each seat is a small shelf where everyone knows to reach for the menu. The waiter then takes the order with a PDA and all these orders are sent back to the kitchen. In less than 5 minutes they’ll bring out the pot and all the food you ordered.

Instead of using a gas stove, MK uses an electric one which saves them so much trouble if you take into account how many restaurants they have all over Thailand.

I’ve seen a lot of electric stoves before and they’re mostly not very good… but the one in MK though, will have the pot boiling by the time you finish tweeting about eating in MK. Among the other stuff I love at MK.
These green noodles.

And their roast duck.

I brought Shorty there for the first time last trip.

Shorty hates all kinds of steamboat. This one however… she sorta liked. And that’s good enough for me.

I love MK for the great food and service… but I admire it… for its efficiency and how they thought the steamboat restaurant business inside out to make it so efficient. It’s an inspiration to me on how the most traditional businesses can still be so innovative.

So Shorty borrowed my gym bag not long ago and filled it up with her stuff that she never took out. Today at the gym I opened up my gym bag and out came pouring all her stuff. Everything from pink Hello Kitty earphones, some biscuits and lots of some other pink stuff.

All the built topless men around me gave me a look as I sheepishly stuffed the pink explosion back into the bag. I cleared my throat and shook my head trying to make it look like it was my little daughter’s stuff or something. I don’t think they would even believe anyway if I told them it belonged to my girlfriend.

I’ve decided that the next time I go to the gym I’m going to load my gym bag up with dumbbells or something and accidentally let them fall out in the changing room. Then I’ll let out some grunt… and spit on the floor or something.

This morning I opened up my Instagram and noticed that Christina Perri (whom I follow… for obvious reasons) put up a couple of pictures on Hunger Games. I have never seen her do that for any other movie before. So I thought ok… this movie could be interesting. So happens we have a Nuffnang/ChurpChurp screening for that too.

So I Googled Hunger Games. The first thing I did of course was to watch the trailer.

I watched the trailer first with zero expectations. At first I was worried about whether it would be one of those movies with an extremely predictable plot and storyline but from the trailer it definitely doesn’t seem like that. So I did a bit more research and here are a few things I learned about it (thanks to IMDB).

1) Hunger Games is the first part of a trilogy series of a young adult books by Suzanne Collins. There are 3 books “The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay”. According to IMDB, the studio Lionsgate has said that they may or may not make the other 2 books into a movie. It all depends on how well Hunger Games does… so if it does well, we’re looking at another trilogy.. LOTR style.

2) The other thing I learned about Hunger Games is that Stanley Tucci is in it. This is a big plus for me.

Stanley Tucci is one of my favourite and in my opinion he doesn’t get nearly enough of the credit that he deserves. He has been in lots of great movies. Margin Call, Easy-A, Burlesque … but the one movie I watched that made me decide he is in a class of his own is when he played a murderer in Lovely Bones.
I love Stanley Tucci… and he alone makes this movie worth watching for me.

3) The last interesting fact about Hunger Games is this:

On February 22nd, four weeks before The Hunger Games’ release, Lionsgate began selling advanced tickets. Not only did the ticket sales break the one-day record originally held by The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, but also accounted for 83% of the ticket sales of the day.

Okok Twilight fans, don’t flame… but to date, Twilight remains the only film that I have ever walked out of the cinema of halfway.

Check out Hunger Games’s FB page here.

When Nuffnang and ChurpChurp subscribed for Cloud Hosting, the supplier gave us an iPad as part of their promotion. I decided to give that iPad to Pinky. You’d think that Pinky would happily go home and quickly install everything right?

Wrong… she left it in the office. So the other Nuffies in the office decided to take the iPad out of the box and hide it. In its place, they put in this little drawing.

The “slide to unlocks” is an inside joke on Pinky.

In the past week I myself got a gift too. This is what Ming gave me for the Nuffnang 5th Anniversary.

A pair of cuff links that I’ve decided that I’m gonna wear on my wedding night.

So the 27th of February this year was Nuffnang’s 5th Anniversary.

I can’t believe that it’s been 5 years since Ming and I stayed up one night to launch Nuffnang.com on the 27th of February between 2AM-4AM. Why did we go through all that effort to stay up? Because Ming went to see some Feng Shui master and the Feng Shui master said that for a successful business, we should launch it on that date and time.

Can’t say we really believed it then but I guess it’s a good thing that I can look back now and be thankful that I listened to that Feng Shui master. We never really celebrated too many of Nuffnang’s birthdays in a big way. There was the 1st Anniversary one, the Nuffnang Chipster Pajama Party where we had some of our bloggers then put together this video for us that we showed at the event.

But that was about it.

This year though we decided that we had to do something. Because it was our 5th year! Our team was just recovering from planning the biggest event we ever had, the Nuffnang Asia-Pacific Blog Awards 2011 in December but they managed to pull a celebration together. Nuffnangs of all the 7 countries we were in would together hold their own parties and celebrations to celebrate Nuffnang Turning 5 years old!

I went for the one in Neverland, KL that was attended by 250 Nuffnangers. We also had a short video done by some of our Nuffnangers too.

The Nuffies asked me to go up and give an opening speech but in all honest truth I had no idea what to say until I got on stage.

I didn’t know how to prepare or anything. All I knew was that…. if I went up there and spoke from the heart, I’ll be ok. So I did… I told them about how Nuffnang came about right after I graduated from university, how my father supported me, the dream were painting for bloggers then and what we have achieved now. I also talked about how exciting the future looks for us… and of course… big thanks to all our clients and Nuffnangers who had always supported us.
This is us… some of the KL Nuffies on stage doing our Nuffnang Stickman pose.

I don’t know how that pose came along but someone in our early years did it and since then it has always stuck internally with all the Nuffies.

Nuffnang has indeed grown. From a community of 300 bloggers in our first 3 weeks, we now have over 1,000,000 bloggers in 7 countries in the region with over 100 Nuffies (staff).

Thank you for the support everyone!

Hey Guys,

Check out this video of all the highlights of the Nuffnang-Asia Pacific Blog Awards 2011 we had in December last year.

You guys spot any bloggers you know?

Hey Everyone,

I just got back last night from Thailand working on Nuffnang Thailand. The week before I was in Philippines and next week I’m boarding another plane again. This week’s been a tough one for me with so many things going on so much that even when I’m supposed to relax now on this weekend I’m feeling stressed.

So I went to the gym this morning to try work out and release some of that stress. Well ok the truth is I do it more for the work out than for releasing stress. I don’t know why people say that exercise helps you release stress because jogging on a treadmill doesn’t do that for me. Playing computer games or watching movies does. Then something stupid happened to me. After I was done with my exercise I went to my car and realized that I hadn’t switched the Thai Baht I had in my wallet with my Ringgit. So I had no RM to pay parking with. I went hunting around for an ATM and eventually managed to find one but the minimum amount I could draw was RM50. Whereas parking was probably like RM5.

I was so sure that when I presented the RM50 note to pay the parking attendant he would flip me the finger but surprise surprise! He had change! Parking attendants today must be raking it in.

Lots of people ask me what else I’ve been doing and the truth is. Not much but work. I haven’t even been preparing for our wedding much. Shorty’s been doing the work and one lucky thing for us is that we’re getting lots of stuff sponsored even without asking for anything. A wedding dress designer named Gilbert Ng sponsored her wedding dress and designed a dress just for her. Her shoes, hair and now I hear even the wedding cake might be sponsored.

I never expected anything like that. When Shorty and I first talked about marriage plans our rule was that we would never ask anyone for sponsorship.. but if they came and we think they fit the theme without commercializing the wedding (like having buntings of corporate logos around the reception area or something) then sure. We’re lucky to have all these sponsors. Thanks to them we get to save a little bit of money.

Ok I’m going to take a break now guys. Need to release stress!

I was at the Prudential R U Ready workshop to give a talk last Saturday.

Shared with everyone a bit about my story with Nuffnang and ChurpChurp. No matter how many times I practice going up in front of a crowd to speak, I still get a little nervous and shy. What helps though is when people in the audience are responsive and the crowd that day was wonderful. That alone makes you feel a lot more at ease.

The past few days got me thinking about the life I have. I feel blessed and not a day goes by when I don’t thank God for how fortunate I am. I sometimes can’t help but wonder how different my life would have been if I had graduated and taken one of those investment banking jobs instead of starting Nuffnang. For starters I would probably be dressed like this every day.

Instead of like this.

Probably wouldn’t have met Shorty too.

Now don’t get me wrong.I enjoy being part of an internet company. I love the people I work with and I enjoy the work. While internet companies are cool and fun and all that, a part of me always wishes I was doing something more brick & mortar. One thing I always thought I’d love doing is property development. No no not necessarily in a huge way. Even in a small way, like buying a piece of land and building a house on it to sell. When I was a kid I loved building things with Lego and a part of my heart always feels like building a building is something I would love.

When I meet owners of the brick & mortar business though they tell me how lucky I am to be in an internet business. Where startup costs are low and where you don’t have to hold physical stock or invest in expensive fixed assets. Well there might be some truth in the latter but not in the former. One of my angel investor friends told me the other day how one of the biggest misconception is that “internet businesses are cheap”. He goes on to say, internet businesses tend to have a lower sunk cost or startup cost but they cost the same to run as a real business. Take for example if you were to start a physical shop at the Curve that sold shoes versus an online store. With a physical store you have to rent the store and put money into renovating it etc etc.  In an online store you don’t need to do that. But the costs after that are similar. In both cases you still need to hire staff, do marketing and etc etc.

I spent the past 5 years selling an “intangible” or virtual product. Banner ad impressions (Nuffnang), Tweet updates (ChurpChurp) or things that you can see on a screen but can’t feel or touch. I always wondered what it’s like to sell not a service, but a product. Like shoes, a keyboard or anything like that (which maybe is why we’ve worked so hard on Jipaban).The people I know who sell tangible stuff like that though always go on to tell me how they wish they were selling what I was selling, so they didn’t have to keep stock or things like that.

Maybe it’s like what they say in Hollywood: “Singers always want to be actors and actors always want to be singers”.