Last week the Nuffies from Malaysia and Singapore went for our first company trip ever (Nuffnang Philippines and Australia had their own because of the distance). We’ve always talked about a company trip over the years but we never got around to do it. This year though we decided we had to.

Two options were put the vote. The first was a trip to Hong Kong Disneyland and the second was a cruise on Royal Caribbean’s cruise lines. The Nuffies chose the cruise. So last week for the first time ever, the KL and Singapore offices closed and operations from Nuffnang, ChurpChurp, Nom Nom Media and Netccentric were put on auto-pilot.

The cruise was a 5 day trip. Most of it was some team-bonding activities but we also had a day for discussing the future of the company together and how we can do better. In this entry I’ll just cover the first day.

The Malaysians were up early on Monday morning to catch a bus to Singapore where the cruise was leaving from.

On the bus there, everyone was still half asleep. Rachel was wide awake and she tried to get us to play some games but the attempt failed. We were all just too tired. Some 5 or more hours later we found ourselves in Singapore and had our first little crisis on the trip. The bus driver had no clue where the Singapore Cruise Terminal was and we were already late for the boarding. At one point the bus driver stopped the bus at the side of the road and waved down a cab to ask for directions.

When we finally got to the cruise terminal and met up with the Singapore Nuffies we were really really late. Still Ming suggested we take a group picture before we go in (living life of the edge) so we did. Then we ran over to the check-in counter only to find out that the check-in counter closed some 15 minutes ago. A Caucasian man dressed in uniform who looked like part of the crew looked really pissed off. We begged…. and he let us through. We filled in whatever forms we could and hopped on to the ship.

Once we got on we all split up to get settled in our rooms. Ming and I chose to share a slightly bigger room so that there was a place we could all hang out together in private on the ship.

Once we chucked our bags in our rooms, we all met up at the swimming pool of the ship which was at one of the top decks. There we all sat around some deck chairs, had a briefing and played a game called “2 truths 1 lie”.

It’s where each of us will go up one by one and then tell 3 things about yourself. Everyone then had to guess which one was the lie. Eventhough I shared an office with many of the Nuffies and some I had known for years…. I found myself learning some new things about them. Later on we all decided to split up and take a tour of the ship.

This is Robb, Yuen, Elise, Clara and me at the ship’s indoor pool area they called the Solarium. It was made to look a bit like some sort of Roman bath. The main atrium area of the ship too was beautiful. This is how it looks like inside the ship.

Really looks like a hotel huh.

During the tour, Angeline really wanted to go to what she referred to as the “Titanic” part of the ship. After some querying, we figured out that it meant the front of the ship where Jack and Rose did their romantic Titanic scene.

So we brought her there.

And we took some pictures there. Here’s me with Angeline.

Angeline is an accountant who used to work in KPMG but now leads the Finance part of our company. So anything from sending blogger cheques, approving payments etc etc… all goes through her.

Angeline, Linda and I got there in time to catch the sunset. So we decided to take some pictures there.

After sunset we all went back to our rooms and got ready for dinner. We met for dinner at the dinner hall on the ship they called the “Romeo & Juliet” dining hall. It was beautiful!

Our group took up a few tables. Here’s one of them.

The food on the ship was free and it was great fine dining food. The menu had everything from Steak, Fish, Chicken or even Lamb. Whatever you chose.

You can choose to order however many Appetizers, Desserts or even Main Courses that you want. Our in-house “Eating Monster” Yuen Yee on average there ate 2 Appetizers, Desserts and Main Courses per meal on the ship. The dessert was always something I looked forward to though. Always some really good stuff.

I went around the rest of the night taking some pictures with the rest of the Nuffies around and here are the pictures I ended up with. Here’s me with Melissa and Hui Wen from Singapore.

Me with Michelle, Jestina, Rachel and Clara.

From the left, Michelle, Jestina, Rachel, Clara, Melissa, Hui Wen, Me, Nicholas , Tim2 and Linda.

Also took this random candid picture of Jestina, Rachel and Clara. Don’t know what they were looking at.

And finally me here with Nicholas, Tim2 and Linda.

After dinner we all adjourned to the highest point that we could go to in the ship. You see this round glass thing that overlooks the pool on top of the ship?

That whole area… is actually a club. So we spent the first night in that club dancing and drinking away. We had a lot of drinks and over 50 shots there the whole night playing lots of drinking games.

By the end of the night, some of us were really really drunk. I survived this night though… (not one of the later nights though but I will get to that later).

It was a great first night and a great beginning to our first company trip with the Nuffies.

Last weekend Eyeris invited me to his wedding. It was up at his parent’s house in Genting. That’s right… his parents actually really stay in Genting full-time. They have this beautiful swiss-cottage kind of house there.

At first Kitteh and I got lost looking for it. We were told the address and we punched it into our GPS only to find ourselves in some kampung around Genting. Then we were told that it was nearer to the top of Genting so we went all the way to the top only to find that it was somewhere in the middle of the hill. So we went down again. Time it took to get to the wedding: 2 full hours.

Going back though it was much quicker. It was only some 30-40 minutes drive. Suddenly living in Genting does seem like a plausible idea and I can understand why Eyeris’ parents do it. It’s quiet and there air is cool. It’s like living in a foreign country somewhere in Malaysia.

His wedding was packed with people from everywhere. Kim, Shaolin, KY, Suanie and gang were all there. Couple of things I loved at the wedding though.

These brownies.

This Wall-E cake.

(Eyeris is really into this kind of stuff. I hear he has this huge Transformers collection too.)

And of course …. this picture with the Groom and Bride.

Man do I look fat.

As you can see, my few days in San Francisco was fully booked. When I wasn’t at the Web 2.0 Summit learning and listening to the things going on there, I was visiting the offices of Zynga and Google and have some other meetings there. I did however manage to squeeze in two things. On one of the nights I managed to meet up with Kitteh’s best friend Angela.

Angela studies in Stanford which is not far from the Google office so she basically lives in San Francisco (almost). She came by to see me for a short while but the real reason why she came over was because Kitteh and her wanted to exchange stuff. When they knew I was going to San Francisco, they quickly bought each other stuff and got me to do the exchange for them.

On the last afternoon I was at San Francisco, I did manage to go to Fisherman’s Wharf.

I remember my parents taking me there when I was a little kid and I remember we bought this huge tin of hot chocolate powder that literally took us years to finish. Being there again many years later I can’t say that anything looked familiar to me though. I can’t tell if there was much of a change or that I just have really short memory.

Here’s Ming and I at Fisherman’s Wharf.

The cool thing about Fisherman’s Wharf is that standing there, you can see the most famous prison in the world: Alcatraz. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s this old prison they had on an island right off San Francisco and was once known as impossible to break out of. To date, nobody has ever officially succeeded in breaking out of Alcatraz Prison. (And I say officially because unofficially… JOHN MASON DID!!!)

The funny thing is that standing at Fisherman’s Wharf you’d think that it’s pretty near and that you’d make the swim over from the island to the mainland. The currents in the water though looked fierce and I would imagine even good swimmers would be swept out into the Pacific Ocean from the undercurrents.

Alcatraz is also known as The Rock and many of you might have known it for the movie The Rock that starred Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage. Kingston, Ming and I ended up having lunch together at a restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf talking all about action movies.

We all agreed that The Rock was one of the best action movies ever made and they just don’t make action movies like that anymore.

My favourite quote from The Rock:

John Mason (Sean Connery): Are you sure you’re ready for this?

Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage): I’ll do my best

John Mason: Your “best”? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

Stanley Goodspeed: Carla was the prom queen.

John Mason: Really?

Stanley Goodspeed: [cocks his gun] Yeah.

Or well here’s the scene. It’s a spoiler if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

If you haven’t already seen The Rock. Go watch it! The movie came out some 14 years ago in 1996 but it’s still just as good. Here’s the trailer.

The trailer’s really 90s (because it was released in the 90s) but the movie was great.

Anyway, Fisherman’s Wharf is a really nice touristy place. Lots of nice touristy stuff that you can buy there. We even saw this store that sold autographs of famous artists, politicians or people from history. Imagine having Heath Ledger’s autograph from Batman’s The Dark Knight. We saw it framed up there.

Before we left Fisherman’s Wharf I got my hands on these little donuts.

They’re like little drops of Heaven. SOooo yummy!

The next day I flew to Vegas to spend the weekend there before coming home. Will blog about that soon 🙂

Ming had just visited Twitter’s office that morning. I didn’t go with him so I could spend more time in the Web 2.0 Summit so I asked him how it was. He said it was nice but the environment there wasn’t much different from the Nuffnang/ChurpChurp offices we have back in Asia. Like it’s open concept, people sit together, we had lots of entertainment etc etc. One big difference though was Twitter’s office was of course bigger since they have some 300 employees to house.

So after Ming’s visit to Twitter we headed down to the Google HQ in Mountain View called The Googleplex. Now when Ming got there, he was blown away. I mean Google’s HQ was by far better than our offices back home or Twitter’s office or ANY office in the world!

It took us a 45-60 minute drive from San Francisco but heck when you’re in America you drive everywhere all the time, 45-60 minute doesn’t feel very long at all. When the GPS took us to the last traffic light junction before we entered the Googleplex, we knew we had reached just by the name of the street. The signboard on top of the traffic light read “Google”.

Not “Google Road” or “Google Street” or anything like that. Just “GOOGLE”.

The entire area was huge! There were so many buildings that we got lost for a while but finally made it to the right building where a Google staff was waiting to take us for a tour. We walked through the side of a building there

and when we got through we came across a sandbox that acted as a beach volleyball court.

On it were Google employees playing beach volleyball in the middle of the workday.

Then we passed some small little things. Like this little table thing that was made to look like a bicycle.

Or this Google Map marker for a really well-known Fish n Chips restaurant on the campus.

There was a lot of security too. Security guards were dressed in smart polo-Ts walking around and a lot of them got around on these bikes.

When we finally got to the front of the building we were supposed to go into, there was a big outdoor area with tables armed with umbrellas of different colours for Google staff to sit outside and have their meals. The weather there was cooling though so it was perfect to sit outside. Kinda felt like being in an air-conditioned room all the time.

Next to the sitting area there was this little organic vegetable garden where they planted all sorts of vegetables.

A sign there said that you could go ahead and take whatever you want to eat.

Food is free there at Google. You could have anything you want. Burgers, sandwiches and you could even have Japanese food or stuff like that. There was even a juicebar where you could get a smoothie or fresh juice.

The tour then took us to enter one of the buildings. Once you walk into the lobby of the building you would see projected high on the wall was real-time updates on what people all around the world were searching for at that very moment.

I stood there for a long time curiously looking at what people were looking for every second. Everything from “College Oprah went to” to even someone searching “MEET ME IN THE PARKING LOT” (for some reason).

Ming managed to pull me away from the projector screen to get a picture taken so one day many years from now we would remember we were there in that lobby.

When we went deeper into the building I came across a wall with a Google logo on it.

As I went closer though noticed that it wasn’t just a logo of Google but actually pictures of all the staff at Google.

Then we came across this.

I don’t even know what to call it but it’s like a “Google Earth” station. There were many many screens around it and you could search anywhere on Google Earth and it would come up on all those screens. Because the images were so big and clear, it kinda made you feel as if you were really there.

We saw lots of other things in the building but before we could take more pictures, a security guard came and told us that we weren’t allowed to take pictures in the building. Further inside we saw:

1) A huge cafeteria with lots of food

2) A pantry that had all sorts of chocolate bars and candy (all free by the way)

3) A laundry room where Google staff could come and do their laundry for free.

and we saw a gym that was so big and so well equipped it put Fitness First to shame. Everything… free!

They also took us to the Google Store in there where they had all sorts of cool Google merchandise like t-shirts, mugs etc etc. I ended up buying a Google Maps shirt but I’ll show that in my next entry. The stuff there were so cool it made me wonder for a while why they didn’t open stores like this everywhere else in the world.

We walked through only two of their buildings but the whole thing took us a couple of hours. If I were to just describe the Googleplex to someone I would just say “Think of a really nice university campus”.

“Then, think of a campus 100 times nicer than that and everything there was free!”.

The whole campus was Wi-Fi’ed up too. Everywhere you went you could hook up to the fastest internet connection ever. I guess that’s for people who might’ve wanted to work while sitting out on the grass one nice summer day. People at Google didn’t wear work clothes. They wore casual clothes or whatever they wanted to wear to work.

I also noticed that the people who work at Google were from all over the world. There were people from China, Germany, France even… and everywhere you could think of. The thing about Google though is that most of the people there are Software Engineers. So unless you’re a good programmer or something, it might be a little hard getting a job there.

We walked out of the Googleplex after some 2 hours and went back to the car park where our car was parked. They had all sorts of cars there, even saw an Aston Martin and some really nice cars which I’m guessing belonged to some early employees of Google who made it rich from their stock options. One popular car I noticed there though was the Prius. Seems like everyone there loves hybrid cars and is all about being “environmentally friendly”.

The Googleplex is definitely the nicest office in the world and definitely the nicest office I had ever been to. Really made me want to work there myself.

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.

—————————————

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.