Last week I was at the Merry Guinness Launch at Malones at Sooka Sentral. I was looking for Sooka Sentral that day and asking Yuen Yee for directions. She described it as a “shorty building” with “a cap”. At first I was confused. What the hell was she talking about? How are the words “shorty” and “a cap” be used to describe a building. Then I saw it and I began to see what she meant.

Are you ready to see how a “shorty” building with “a cap” looks like. Taadaaaaaa

Source: Skyscrapercity.com

I got there in time to catch some Nuffnangers there for some drinks and the launch started shortly after. The stage area just had a black drape over it at first while the emcee welcomed the media guests there that night. Then the black drape dropped only to reveal a very very Christmas dinner with lamb, potatoes and all that.

I grabbed myself a plate, sat down on a long table and made friends with the people around me. Throughout they were playing Christmas music so for a while it really felt like Christmas came early to me.

Of course we did have pictures that night. Lots of them. Here’s a picture of me and Kitteh

Kitteh said she looked ugly without her make-up and all since she came right after work. So she put on these big black glasses that she hides in her bag for use in situations like this.

Glasses still don’t work in hiding all bad pictures though. I was going to take this picture of Kitteh, Jess, Kim and Yuen Yee

But right before I snapped that picture Kitteh moved into place so she ended up looking like this on that picture.

Looked like she was holding an imaginary pint of Guinness. I made it up to her later on by taking a nicer picture with her and Cheesie later on in the night.

The rest of the night turned out to be a lot of fun thanks to these people here

but I shan’t go into the details. Lets just say… booze  makes you really happy.

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Another thing that’s new in my life is the recent launch of the new ChurpChurp.com. ChurpChurp as a company has been doing really well but we always thought it could’ve been better and wanted to improve it. So about a month ago we all sat down and really got working on the new site. The result was this.

The response so far has been great with lots of new sign-ups. Check it out here.

While I was in San Francisco, I had a chance to visit Zynga’s office. Zynga was started in 2007 and grew quickly to be one of the largest gaming companies in the world today. In fact in terms of the number of users that play its games, it is the largest. You’ll definitely have heard of at least one of the games that Zynga’s responsible for. They’re the creators of Farmville, Cafe World, Texas Hold’em on Facebook and even some iPhone games like Scramble. I know Kitteh was at one point addicted to Scramble.

Zynga was founded by Mark Pincus and today has over 1,200 employees with over $600 million in revenue a year. From some sources there I hear that Zynga today is worth some $6 billion. That’s insane!

The name Zynga came from Mark Pincus’ bulldog and I guess that’s why the logo of the company is also the dog. Their offices are housed in this building with many many individual office units. You need someone there to bring you in for a tour before you can go in and you also need one of these name tags.

There are some other offices in there too from other kinds of companies but the Zynga employee that took us for the tour told us that they take up 90% of the office units there. You’ll find the Zynga bulldog posters everywhere marking which units were theirs.

Zynga has a policy that allows everyone to bring their pets to work. So in their offices you’ll often see people working on their computers and next to them you’ll see their dogs just waiting patiently for them. When they go for lunch, they bring their dogs along.

Moving along the corridors though we found this door. Through this office unit is apparently where all the top minds of Zynga are at. The CEO, CFO etc etc.

We got to go inside their offices and their offices had an open concept kind of style not really different from the Netccentric and Nuffnang offices we have. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the inside of the office but inside we found Nerf guns and the likes.

I managed to snap a picture of this Zynga beanbag though.

Their office windows were all decorated with all sorts of stuff. Like these newspaper articles about their games.

And also make-pretend newspaper articles like this one here that was about Mafia Wars.

While we were there a Zynga employee named Jon gave us a presentation about they’re about and a bit of history on how they grew so big. Their strategy was always to make gaming social. It doesn’t matter so much what kind of graphics the game has and all that, as long as you can play it with your friends and interact with them while doing it makes it fun.

He also let out some secrets on how they managed to beat their competitors. They were better at coming out with ideas to distribute their games. Like on Facebook they would just allow you to give your friends a virtual gift. Like it’ll say “You found a cow” and in order to take care of it you have to go in and play their games.

At its peak, Jon mentioned that Farmville had over 30 million active users playing it at any one point. Now it has dropped to some 15 million or so but believe it or not that’s even better for Zynga. Why? You see Zynga makes its money from selling virtual items that people use in its games. The more serious gamers buy more virtual items whereas the more casual gamers buy less. They both however use the same amount of bandwidth which requires them to have the same number of servers.

So once the hype of Farmville drops out, only the more serious players stay and they’re after all the more profitable ones. Interesting huh.

One thing that Jon did concede is that the Americans are learning from the Chinese in China on how to perfect micro-payments or the business model of selling virtual items. After all, QQ the most popular instant messenger in China makes money from selling its virtual items. Each for a small amount of money but they sell a LOT of them.

We learned so much from Zynga that day though. Even caught a picture of their “core values”.

I now know so much more about social gaming than I ever did. Ending off with a picture here with Kingston and Ming who were there with me.

The next office I’ll blog about will be Google’s office in Mountain View. That is an amazing office!

Guess what Kitteh bought me for my early Christmas gift this year.

*DROOLS

The Web 2.0 Summit I attended in San Francisco last week was great not only because it gives anyone in the audience a good insight on what’s happening in the tech industry and what the coming trends are going to be like. One other thing it does is that it brings together more Tech celebrities (many of whom are billionaires) together in one place.

You get to see them in person, see how they respond to questions and from then really get a feeling of how smart these people really are and why they are where they are. So I’m going to run through some of the people I listened to at the conference and what my impression of them is like.

Eric Schmidt – Google (Net worth: $5.45 billion)

A year or two ago I read the book “The Google Story”. It told the whole story on how Google started, the struggles is faced and how it grew to where it is today. At some point in the book, it talked about how Eric Schmidt came to become the CEO of Google. Eric used to be from Novell and he was urged by a VC of Google to join Google. He was reluctant at first but he did it after some convincing from the VC. This didn’t leave me a particularly great impression of him because unlike some of the other staff at Google I read about, he didn’t seem like a believer.

Over the years of course, his stock in Google which he got as a result of joining it is worth almost $6 billion today. He is the richest professional (employee) in the world.

When I saw him speak at the Web 2.0 Summit though I was blown away by how intelligent he really is. He talked about Android, a subject that was constantly brought up throughout the conference (It seems more and more people now are talking about Android being the next big thing instead of the iPhone) and he answered had to answer some really really tough questions really well.

Eric Schmidt is also really careful with his words. Knowing that whatever he said at that conference will be quoted in the news in no time, he was careful about making statements about things he’s not announce yet but still gave just a bit of news about what Google’s doing next as a bit of a teaser.

True enough, just few hours after the conference news about this new Android software in a phone he was holding in his hand was all over the internet. I can see how Eric Schmidt’s skills and talent has brought Google to where it is today.

Robin Li – Baidu (Net Worth: $3.5 billion)

The moderator said that this was the first time that Robin actually came out to give a talk to the international community. Unlike many of the other speakers, Robin was more reserved in his actions and words. He spoke slowly, carefully picking the words he said as if trying to bring across a point in the shortest most efficient way possible.

Robin is noticeably proud though. Proud that he is Chinese and that Baidu, a Chinese company can grow to a market capitalization of over $36 billion. He said that’s the size of eBay. Somehow I felt that about him and many other entrepreneurs from China. While they were all really successful and had huge businesses, they were all proud that the Chinese internet market was the biggest in the world and they wanted the Americans to know their achievements.

Mark Pincus – Zynga (Net worth: $850 million)

Mark Pincus is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is responsible for a number of Silicon Valley startups but the company that made it biggest though is Zynga.

Zynga is only about 3 years old and is already one of the biggest games companies in the world from making Facebook games like Farmville. It does about $600 million in revenue each year and has 1,200 employees. Some people at the conference were estimating that the company is worth some $6 billion USD today, a lot for a 3 year old company!

Mark came on stage at the conference just to give a quick presentation about the app economy. I couldn’t tell that much about him or how he’s like because his was more of a presentation than a Q&A session but he is no doubt one of the most respected Silicon Valley entrepreneurs today.

Tony Hsieh – Zappos (Net worth $840 million)

Tony Hsieh is a the founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos. A company that has over a billion dollars in revenue and all they do is sell shoes.

What he stresses they focus on is customer service and he talked a lot about how he put in a really happy working culture in Zappos. Someone told me that he had a policy where after 2 weeks, he would offer a new hire $3,000 to leave the company. If that person didn’t take that offer he would know that the person was serious about working in Zappos and really wanted to work there. There is after all apparently a long waiting list of people trying to get a job at Zappos.

Last year he eventually sold Zappos to Amazon though for some $1.2 billion after some pressure from his VCs that wanted to cash out.

Jim Basillie – Research in Motion (Net Worth $2.6 billion)

Jim is the Co-CEO of Research in Motion, the company behind the Blackberry. I love Blackberry as a device so I was quite keen to listen to him talk. Unlike the rest of the guys there he sounded a lot more corporate and he was talking quite a lot about the performance of their upcoming Blackberry Playbook.

He said there were a lot of new upcoming exciting developments that he couldn’t talk about so I guess we just have to be patient.

John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield) & Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)

If you were an entrepreneur starting up in Silicon Valley, you wanted to know these two people. John Doerr is from the VC Kleiner Perkins Caufield which was responsible for Netscape, Amazon, Google and a lot of other internet companies. From his success he’s garnered a wealth of some $1.7 billion.

They put him on stage with a guy named Fred Wilson who was described as a bit of a “Simon Cowell” for the VC world.

Fred is from another VC based out of New York called Union Square Ventures which invested in companies like Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Feedburner and a lot of other startups. He was really really funny and awesome to listen to because he was very honest and blunt. Like he said that Apple’s iPhone was going to fail because it was a closed system unlike Android which was open (This is something Ming totally agrees with by the way).

I really agreed with one of his opinions though when he talked about our obsession with apps these days. Why do we need to have apps to access everything on the internet these days when we have browsers that can do just that? Sure some apps are necessary but some really make you wonder why they’re even there.

Fred also had some outrageously funny opinions like he called Facebook a “photo-sharing site with chat functions” which is a rather simplistic view of Facebook but when I think about it, it may have a little bit of  truth to it. I use Facebook some one a week or so and the only time I go in there is just to look at pictures people tag me in or reply messages. Still, Mark Zuckerberg would’ve been offended since Facebook is more than just that.

Speaking of which, the last one I’m going to talk about is…

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook (Net Worth: $6.9 billion)

This guy needs no introduction. He’s the Founder of Facebook and the youngest billionaire in the world. Funny enough I had just seen The Social Network at the Nuffnang Screening on Monday and it really depicted Mark Zuckerberg as an asshole for cheating his partner Eduardo out of his shares in Facebook. Wasn’t sure if that description was accurate so I ended up reading a book called The Facebook Effect and it seems to confirm that story. So I guess some people think that Mark Zuckerberg is a bit of an asshole (and arrogant too).

He did appear as a nice guy on stage though but I guess there were times when you could notice in his body language that he certainly was proud… it could come off as “arrogant” I guess but I’d say “proud” is a better word for it. I mean who wouldn’t be proud if you started a site that now has over 600 million users in the world.

Before the conference though I always wondered about Facebook. How a company can be valued at USD42 billion or so today when it hardly makes the profits to justify it even out of its $2 billion ad revenue. Then I went for the talk and I listened to Mark as he shared his vision. He wants to make Facebook where people do EVERYTHING social be it games, location based apps, photo sharing, messaging etc etc. He wanted it to be a PLATFORM. Not just a social networking site but a platform where it can create an ecosystem where people build businesses on it just like how Zynga has built a multi-billion dollar business from it.

Then it makes sense. Imagine Facebook as this economy where people make money from its user base either via apps or other stuff. With all this money going around in the Facebook economy, Facebook then has the ability to “tax” this money and the money it can make from this can easily be in the billions. It will then be able to one day generate the kind of profits that even Google makes today. That’s brilliant and I now understand what he’s trying to do. If he’s successful, Facebook will even be worth much more than what it really is today.

That’s the thing I admire about Mark Zuckerberg. His vision. Reading his book, he didn’t really see Facebook as just another social-networking site. He always wanted to take it further and in doing so even made some unconventional moves. For example, he opened Facebook up for people to create apps and then sells ads to advertisers from these apps.

The ad sales team at Facebook weren’t happy because that meant they had competition even within its own platform but Mark believed that all this advertising money was small compared to the big picture he was trying to achieve. He also believed it would help them against his competition which was MySpace at the time. Turns out he was right.

Facebook wants to create that ecosystem. Not to compete with it. Which is why it didn’t start its own version of Zynga. Some people asked him in the conference if the new feature Facebook Deals was meant to compete with Groupon and he answered “NO”. He said that Groupon already has its sales network in cities all over the USA and Facebook has no plans to start its own sales teams just to sell bulk buying coupons.

He also talked about the new Facebook mail and how he got the idea for it. He was at his girlfriend’s parents place one day and was talking to their teenage cousin. He asked her if she used e-mail a lot to communicate with her friends. She said “Yes” but she also said they don’t use email that much because it’s too slow and formal. Then he realized something.

People don’t use email for quick messages sometimes because it’s too hard to remember the e-mail addresses and it has a really formal feel to it unlike instant messaging on social networks when you can just send off a message based on a person’s name. Hence the creation of Facebook Mail.

Mark Zuckerberg is truly a genius.

The Rest of the Speakers

There were soo many other speakers there that day and I decided that it would be too long a blog entry if I were to cover every one of them. The other people who were there was Evan Williams who founded Twitter and  Blogger, the Founder of Linked-In, the Founder of ICanHazCheezeburger and lots of other people.

The conference was eye-opening to me and it was an experience to be able to see how these superstars of the internet world are in real life. Ming and I decided that if possible, we’d make it an annual thing there to attend it.

Next I will blog about my visit to Zynga and Google’s office 🙂

I’ve never really talked about Jipaban on my blog and that’s something that’s gonna change today because just last week Jipaban opened up in Malaysia. I have once or twice mentioned it here, referring to it as JPB though but today I’m going to tell you the whole story. 4 years ago when I first met Ming, we exchanged business ideas. I brought up the idea of a blog ad network that we now today know as Nuffnang and he came up with this ambitious idea for a shopping mall an online shopping mall. That mall was supposed to be called Jipaban.com so he actually bought the domain for it back then when we were still students.

We mutually decided though that we should work on Nuffnang first since Jipaban looked like a monumental project to undertake… maybe too big for us to chew on back then when we were just coming out of university. So 3-4 years later, Nuffnang (under the Netccentric Group) has grown to represent over 170,000 bloggers and social media users in 4 different countries with the whole Netccentric Group having over 60 full-time staff.

The company has grown a lot in terms of stability and Netccentric has also grown to have a few other startups, namely ChurpChurp and Ripplewerkz.Ming decided then that it was time to work on Jipaban so about a year ago we brought in Pierre as a partner and started Jipaban together.

Jipaban is an online shopping mall with social networking aspects that is meant to allow online shoppers to emulate the offline shopping experience. So there are features where someone who’s thinking of buying a product can share it with all her friends to see whether they think she should buy it or not. Or you’ll be able to see what your friends buy and decide if you want to have one too.

We launched it in Singapore some 6 months ago and on the week it launched it was the top search in Google Singapore.

It’s also the reason why I was with Japan with the Jipaban team for a trade show just a few months ago.

Some of our friends here have been bugging us for a long time, asking us when we’re going to bring it to Malaysia and so now we finally have!

We’ve been working really hard on it. Unlike any of the other companies we’ve started, Jipaban is one of those startups that we know is going to be really hard to make a success. We’ve prepared ourselves that the venture probably isn’t going to make any money for the next 2-3 years. Then why do it? Because we believe that SouthEast Asia more than ever before is ready for e-commerce and our mission has always been to set up the infrastructure for our growing internet market. Besides, we think social e-commerce is going to be a big thing.

There are a lot of other things to Jipaban but I’m going to leave it to you guys to explore it rather than spoil everything for you. If you want to know more about what it can do, check out this video here.

And if you’ve always wanted to start an online store, this video gives you an idea on what Jipaban does.

Check out Jipaban here.

www.jipaban.com

Hello Everyone! Guess where I am now… here’s a hint.

If you guessed Paris… YOU ARE RIGHT. Just not Paris, France but Paris Hotel & Casino Las Vegas!

Yes yes. After the long busy week at the conference and meetings at San Francisco, I decided to take a short 2 day trip to Las Vegas before I go back. I didn’t get a chance to sight-see or do anything touristy in San Francisco so this makes up for it I guess.

I’m here with Kingston.

This is us outside New York.

And when I say New York I mean New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

We arrived in Vegas yesterday and rented a car. A Chevy Camaro (the Bumble Bee car in Transformers) just because the USA is probably the only place in the world where you get to rent one and it’s relatively cheap.

Can you imagine, it costs only about RM200 a day to rent the car. In Malaysia I think it costs the same amount to rent a Toyota or something I think. I took some time to get used to driving on the right side of the road though. It was my first time driving a left-hand drive and it felt sooo unnatural for me at first. Got used to it after a while but had the tendency to drive too much towards the side of the road. This is me being all nervous with the driving.

It didn’t help that the Camaro was a really low car and the seat was really low. So I had to constantly sit up straight to look in front. While it looked all sporty and all though, it wasn’t a really fast car though. American cars still aren’t made as well as Japanese or European cars if you ask me.

Today we woke up early to return the car after a day, then we headed to the Las Vegas strip. This is me outside the Bellagio, one of the nicest and most expensive hotels there. I think a room there costs at least RM2,000 a night.

The rest of the rooms in Vegas are quite reasonably priced though. I’m staying at The Palms and it costs only like RM300 a night. Of course it’s a really basic room and hardly luxurious but hey USD100 is not going to get you very much in a hotel in New York for example.

Decided to stay at the Palms because it’s one of those hotels I recognized from watching Las Vegas (the TV show).

We had lunch today at this Mexican cafe that across the Las Vegas Strip and overlooks the Bellagio.

Also across from it is City Center, this new huge development here cost $11 billion to build! That’s the largest privately financed development in the USA.

I came back in the afternoon, took a nap and now I’m off to go watch David Copperfield. There are many many shows to watch in Vegas but Kingston insisted to watch David Copperfield because in his words “he old already leh.. dont’ know how much longer he is going to be able to perform”.

So okay, fair argument.

Will blog more soon. I shall leave you with a picture of a really cool number plate I saw on a car here in Vegas.

Look closely. It says “I’m All In”.

I bet he plays Poker and judging by the car, I bet he’s good at it too.

Hey Everyone,

I’m in San Francisco this week for the Web 2.0 Summit. The Web 2.0 Summit is this big conference in San Francisco held each year. When I say big I don’t really mean big in the number of people that attend it because to be honest I’ve seen bigger audiences but that’s also probably because it’s an invite-only event (I was lucky to get an invite).

But when I say big, I mean big in the sense that they bring in the most powerful people in the tech scene to speak. In these two days alone, I have seen 4 technology billionaires speak and a lot of other very successful hundred millionaires. People that range from the Founders/CEOs of Google, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Linked-In, Adobe and every other huge significant player in the tech world was speaking at this conference. I will go into the details of each person maybe in the next entry.

I’ve always wanted to go to Silicon Valley to see what it’s like. It is after all the technological innovation hub of the world! All the huge tech companies have a base here. Everyone from Apple, Google, Facebook and etc etc. I never got a chance to go though or more like never really had an excuse to go. San Francisco is a little far to go for a holiday and besides apart from my New York trip this year, I haven’t really had much of a chance to go on a full-fledged holiday-only trip.

So when the invite for this conference came up, I decided to take a leap at it. So far I can tell you this whole trip was amazing. Not only from the conference but from the offices of the Silicon Valley companies I’ve visited and the people I’ve met.

It was a real eye-opener for me.

Let me  give you a bit of an insight. As part of the conference today, they got young aspiring internet entrepreneurs to go up on stage and each were given some 2 minutes each to pitch their ideas to the crowd.

These people were all smart. They spoke well, carried themselves well and sold their ideas very well. You heard all sorts of ideas for all sorts of different web innovations that you have never even heard of. One of the guys went up on stage to pitch the idea of his new dotcom called Path.

It was an iPhone app that helped you share photos with up to 50 of your really close friends. Why 50 friends? Because he had some research done to find that we only really have a maximum of 50 really really close friends that we want to keep in touch with online.

Or there was a guy who had lost a close friend of his in a car accident and got inspired then to start a site to store our memories of someone’s life. He called it 1000 memories.

Or even this site called Tokbox that allowed you to communicate with each other via video much easier. There were a lot of other stuff. Other iPhone and Android apps (Android seems to be one of the most talked about subjects now with its growth) created by people to try to make our lives easier. I even saw one of the Founders of Meebo share a new feature of theirs that allowed you to share bookmarks or links by checking into websites FourSquare style. Point of that was to help you find people with similar interest of you.

And here’s the thing. This is going on EVERYWHERE in Silicon Valley. I was having dinner tonight with some people and overheard was some guy pitching his mobile app idea to someone else. . Walk around the conference area during break time and you see young entrepreneurs with laptops pitching their ideas to potential VCs, hoping to raise money to pursue their dream.

It’s everywhere! Everyone has a different idea and there are so many Venture Capitalists looking to invest in the next Facebook or Zynga. Silicon Valley has that energy of innovation. Everywhere you go there are people with ideas, people executing ideas and people looking to facilitate the execution of these ideas. Many of these ideas fail but some of them become multi-million or even billion dollar businesses in just a span of a few years. It’s crazy!

Here’s the funny thing though. Contrast to the internet companies in many other countries (even China), the companies that start here focus on PRODUCT first before making money. That in theory sounds really good because yes you want to perfect a product before you sell it or just like what Google did, perfected search before it found the way to monetize it.

That works fine in Silicon Valley because there are many VCs who are able to give you a lot of money to put all the resources you need together and give you the time to build a good product. All that without feeling too much of a pressure to make money first. So the result of that is that yes… in some cases they make some really good products. I’m not sure if this kind of thing works back in SouthEast Asia since the VCs back home aren’t able to give you that much money to be able to buy you this time.

Being here also really makes me realize how small we are in the grand scale of things. Take for example Baidu.

Robin Li the Founder of Baidu was at this conference too. Baidu has a market capitalization of $36.5 BILLION (RM114.39bn). None of the companies in Malaysia OR Singapore are even close to having that kind of stock market value. MayBank which is one of the biggest companies on the KL Stock Exchange only has a market cap of RM64.41.bn in comparison.

From this trip alone I feel like I have learned and experienced so much. What’s more important perhaps was the macro perspective that this trip to Silicon Valley has given me. I now look at life and business very differently.

In the next few days I will find the time to blog about the speakers who spoke at the conference and my visits to some of the offices of Silicon Valley companies that I was lucky to be able to visit while I was here. This afternoon I visited the Googleplex in Mountain View and took lots of pictures to share with you guys.

This trip has been a really busy but productive business trip. We’ve been so busy I just realized that I’ve never even had a chance to properly do touristy stuff or sight-see in San Francisco.  Haven’t even seen the Golden Gate bridge. Oh well okay I gotta go to bed now guys. Tomorrow morning I’m going to visit Zynga, the creators of Farmville and one of the fastest growing games companies in the world.

It’s 7.12AM here in San Francisco. Everyone is still asleep but I woke up at 5.30AM and struggled to sleep more. Jetlag does things to you and it gets so much harder with age. I remember how when I was stil in university, I would hardly feel jetlag at all. Ming has a place here in San Francisco with a view of the city.

So I woke up this morning and watched the sun rise for a little. It was beautiful.

In a few hours I’m going to get dressed and go for the conference I came for. Got a really busy week ahead.

On another note, thought I’d share something I haven’t actually blogged or tweeted about. Every year Prestige magazine comes up with a list of Top 20 people under the age of 40. My cousin was in it last year and I think he won.

I’m in the Top 10 for this year and I think there’s a voting process for the Most Promising Male and Female but I think voting has ended already. Don’t think I actually was the Most Promising Male for this year but well one thing they did do was come up with this article.

Thought it was a really flattering article but well here’s to share it with you guys.

Going to try to get some sleep now before I go for my conference. So see you guys.

Updated: Sorry just realized the pics didn’t come out before. Have updated it now 🙂

Hey Guys,

Forgive me for the short updates but I’ve been really busy traveling around lately. Spent a few days ago in Hong Kong waking up to this view in my hotel room.

This is Hong Kong. The real definition of a “concrete jungle”. Everywhere you go there are buildings taller and as close to each other as you can ever imagine. I ended up staying in this hotel with a really really small room.

The room doesn’t look that small in this picture but really, outside this picture there really isn’t anything else except a really small study table on the side. The room seemed to have a lack of lighting too, was really dark at night in spite of me turning on whatever lights I could find.

Tonight though I’m leaving Hong Kong to head on a really long flight across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. Going to be really busy at a conference during the week and will be visiting the offices of some Silicon Valley companies there. Over the weekend though I told my Dad that I’m considering going to Vegas for a night or two if I have the time, just to check it out.
Today he forwarded this e-mail to me saying
“I know you are going to Vegas, don’t you ever try this! Whatever you say I still think it’s dangerous!”

The email had these pictures.

Heh Heh. My Dad knows me sooo well.

I’ll blog more from there ok guys? See you then!

Last last weekend I met up with some friends for drinks and my friend Wilson here got us to play some drinking games. There were a number of drinking games but one of the funnier ones was this one we called “Bunny ears”. So it starts with someone having “Bunny ears” and the people right next to him will have to do this “Surfer” pose. Then he can look around the table and then point at someone else. That someone else will then have to put up the “bunny ears” and the people next to him have to do the surfer pose. If any of them are slow, they will have to drink. You can also “bluff” the passing of the bunny ears by just pointing the fingers but not letting it leave the top of your head.

Anyway here’s a video we got from that night.

What are the drinking games you guys have played?