Okay so Nuffnang Philippines has launched just about a week plus ago and the response has been great. So much that the team there is now down and busy talking to advertisers on launching our first ads there.

Now anyway to mark the arrival the team in Nuffnang PH has been doing all sorts of things… and one of them is a giant Outcomm LED Board ad that they put up on one of the busiest streets of Manila.

One of the Nuffies there even took a recording of the ad and posted it up on YouTube.

Check it out.

Boy I have never seen such a big Nuffnang logo before.

On another note, I was just browsing 88DB.com.my and checking out their ads. They have this contest going on now where the most creative classifieds ad that you put up will win PSPs or a 4 Day 3 Night Trip to Bali.

Then I happened to see a funny ad there.

This joker was selling his FISH on 88db.com.my

And he even put up sort of a poem on the ad.

four huge Japanese kois
around 20 inches each
kohakus, showa, also tancho
swimming in the pond

but with size restriction
they’ve outgrown the pond
looking for new home
to grow into jumbos

pictures worth lotsa words
taken a year ago
now bigger and rounder
come see for yourself

striking colors, beautiful shapes
these fish are gems
to let go at
eleven thousand triple eight

email me to ask
ky at kyspeaks dot com
and you can get
all the four fishes

And then I looked and it closer and it occurred to me that it was KY‘s ad.

LOL KY you damn fahney.

Jom I help you pimp your add.

Everyone go and vote for KY’s ad on 88db.com.my or if you want go and do your own ad and compete with KY.

*Update

One of our Nuffies just sent me this. Here’s a day time version of Outcomm’s LED Board Ad

I was watching Sex and the City: The Movie last night.

Yeah I know I’m a little slow but I didn’t until recently manage to get around to actually watching it. I’m one of the few guys I know who actually follow the series. Well okay not really one of the few, but I think only about half of the guys I know follow it.

It all started during my second year of university where I shared an apartment with two girls.

Every Wednesday night they would steal the remote from me and overrule me in choosing what channel to watch so I was forced to watch Sex and the City with them.

I eventually grew to like it… I love Samantha Jones… she’s hilarious!!!

Anyway there was a scene in the movie where Carrie was left by her groom on her wedding day and was so heartbroken she went for a trip somewhere and slept for days.

It got me thinking. In so many movies we see people leaving their other halfs on the alter during their wedding day for getting cold feet or for whatever reason but does this really actually happen in real life?

Then I remembered… and I thought about one of my friends whom I will here refer to as Joseph.

Joseph was a young and successful professional. I mean heck the guy graduated from a great university and found himself a job with a ridiculous salary package. I think he was earning a basic of RM4,000-RM7,000 a month as a fresh grad excluding annual performance bonuses that can range from 12-24 months depending on the year.

Since his university days, Joseph was dating another girl whom I will refer to here as Debbie. Debbie was another high achiever like Joseph with a bright future. I mean she too graduated from a top university and found herself a job that also paid her a fortune.

The future was bright for the both of them and they were in a 5-year relationship before they finally decided to get married. Wedding preparations were made, the venue was booked and the invitation cards were sent out. It looked like it was going to be one helluva wedding.

Then just 2 weeks before the wedding was supposed to take place, the wedding suddenly got called off. All the hundreds of guests who were sent the invitation cards including myself were informed that the wedding was off. Everyone was in the dark but sooner or later word got out.

Apparently the rumour has it that Debbie had been sleeping with Joseph’s best friend and Joseph had just found out about it 2 weeks before the wedding. I think Joseph was prepared to forgive her and go ahead with the wedding but Debbie didn’t want to get married to him anymore. Maybe she was confused, or maybe she really did see something more in his best friend than him.

Joseph was heartbroken, so heartbroken he couldn’t even go to work for a week. When I later saw him, his face had changed. He had deep eye bags below his once cheerful deep eyes and you could see that he had just gone through many many sleepless nights.

His confidence and self-esteem too had been hurt so much that he had a bit of a knee jerk reaction. Before the wedding he was saving up money to put down the downpayment for a home.

But now that there wasn’t a wedding anymore and sure he could’ve still bought himself a home but he needed something to boost his confidence. so he took all the money and with a car loan bought himself a BMW.

Now in a normal sense of the world, that’s the last thing anyone with any form of money should do. If you made some good money, first you invest it in a home or in other assets to grow it, not buy yourself an expensive car. You buy yourself the car only when you’ve made many many millions!

But none of us could blame him. He needed to feel better about himself and while sitting in his brand new BMW the other day he told all of us

“You know I feel that people look at my differently when I drive this car. When I drive on the road, more girls turn to look at me. In my previous car nobody seemed to give a damn”.

That’s probably only half true… but at least he felt it helped.

With the story of Joseph in my mind I started thinking of my heartbreak. I’ve been through heartbreak once before in my life and it was the worst feeling to ever have. I remember how I didn’t have the appetite to eat, how I wanted to sleep away my days and how whenever I went out, I feared that I might bump into her.

But after all the heartbreak and struggles, I changed… possibly for the better or possibly for the worse. An emotional self-defence barrier emerged in myself where I was able to control the level of feelings I had for any of my subsequent girlfriends. Perhaps it was myself fearing heartbreak again to fall in love again but I never suffered or cried in all the break-ups of all my following relationships.

A friend of mine recently told me that one day some girl will sweep me off my feet again and break my heart no matter how prepared I am.

Well I guess we can all never be too sure.

PS: Joseph today has moved on with his life pretty well. New beautiful girlfriend… and still doing well in his career. Debbie too has moved on and last I heard she’s doing well too. They’re both still friends today.

If you were young and work with a bunch of other young people, what kind of work culture would you have?

I’m not sure how we ended up with the way we work now but here’s a bit of how Nuffnang seems to run .

In the Nuffnang office, there’s often music playing in the background… whether it’s Bob Marley or Justin Timberlake it don’t matter.

We all sit together in an open environment and we sometimes end up watching funny YouTube videos that we share with everyone in the office.

Facebooking during office hours is allowed and is something everyone seems to do.If you’re tired then you can go and sleep in Nuffie’s Corner with all the bean bags and big pillows, we even provide you blankets in case you’re cold.

Heck and some of us manage to work some flexible hours too. The only condition to all this is that everyone keeps up with their work.

Just over a week ago, a very nice journalist by the name of Eve gave me a call to ask me about the flexible hours that some of the people in the Nuffnang team take advantage of.

The call led to a visit to our office, then an interview of some of our Nuffies and a day later, an article in the New Straits Times.
Basically at Nuffnang we believe that if you have a role that does not require you to work strictly during office hours, say if you don’t have to service a client during typical working hours then you can have some flexibility in your working hours.

Unfortunately for many of us including myself, a lot of our roles require us to work the same working hours as our clients though for the rest of us, they get to work a little more flexible hours.
One of our guys Firdauz for example comes in at 2.30PM or 3.00PM on some days and works till night though I hear he’s trying to normalize his working hours now so he can spend more time working with the rest of the team and why not right? We’re all fun to be around with right Firdy?

In the past month, we’ve added a few more Nuffies to the team. There’s the new Nuffie in Singapore.And right before her came two more Nuffies we hired for Nuffnang Philippines office in the past month.

Meet Camille!
and Roanna!
Somehow, the rest of the Nuffnang offices apart from the one in KL that I’m based in seem to be pretty female skewed.

Don’t worry my dear sausage Nuffies!!!
I lup you all still!!!

We’re still looking to add on to the team and after sooo damn long of trying to come up with an excuse of why we don’t have a career page at Nuffnang, we finally managed to get our Nuffnang Career Page up.

I know I know it took us long enough!

In the past we’ve had some potential investors and business partners come in to see how we work and they all wonder how we all actually manage to get work done working like that.

That’s something even I can’t explain but we do get loads of things done.

I was surfing around YouTube and found this recording of a prank call gone wrong.

Listen to it.

If there is any lesson to be taken away from this prank call, it would have to be: Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman’s Wrath!

The biggest Manchester United fan I have ever met and known has got to be the other Co-Founder of Nuffnang, Ming.

Seriously.

Let me tell you 3 true stories to show you why.

Story 1: Watching the Champion’s League Semi-Finals

While Manchester United was playing the semi-finals of the Champion’s League Ming was down in KL for work and he was staying at my place.

The match was something like 3.00AM and in spite of having an early morning meeting the next day, he made sure he was up at 3.00AM to watch the match in my living room.

The night was a very very quiet lonely night and I was sleeping nicely through it when I was suddenly jolted out of bed by a yell from my living room.
“YES!!!!!!”

I remembered that Ming was in my living room watching the match so I assumed Man Utd must’ve scored a goal or something so I went back to sleep.

The next morning I saw Ming and he was bright awake. I asked him how was his sleep and his reply
“Dammit … I was so happy last night after the match.. I couldn’t sleep!!! I actually CRIED when they won the match!!! “

I just nodded when he went on to say
“Eh I think I’m going to Moscow to watch the finals”.He eventually went and lucky for him, Man Utd won the finals.

Story 2: Conference Call

We were having a regional conference call with some potential business partners when suddenly the topic of football came up between Ming and a guy that I’m going to refer to here as John.

The conversation went like this.

Ming: OH I didn’t know you’re a football fan too!!!

John: Yeah man! I am.. HUGE FAN!

Ming: Who do you support?

John: I support the Gunners. Arsenal.

Ming: WHAT?!?! YOU JUST WENT DOWN ONE BROWNIE POINT ON MY LIST MY FRIEND!!!
Story 3: LIVERPOOL VAN

This just happened last week.

I was down in Singapore and had just had dinner with Ming and some of our friends. We just got out of an elevator to go into the carpark when suddenly he saw a HUGE RED VAN.

On the red van was a HUGE Liverpool Football Club video with the line “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

The van looked like it was plastered with this all over.
The minute Ming saw that he started cursing away
“LOOK AT THIS COCKSTER!!! COME PARK RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF ME ALSO… C*BAI NABEH!!! MOTHERF*CKING LOSER!!! NO WONDER HE’S DRIVING A VAN!!!”

To Goldfinger and RockingDandy: It’s ok. I’ll smack Ming for you both!!!

Visiting the Taylor’s Sri Hartamas Campus
“I made 120 decisions today… all of them are wrong”

I was sitting in a talk last Sunday and looking at that line and I couldn’t help wonder where my life had taken me since I left high school.

Let me refresh my memory.

The first thing I was thinking about right after I walked out of my last SPM paper was how I was going to spend my next few months dating my girlfriend at the time.I was thinking of all the movies we would watch, all the walks on the beaches we would take and all the other… uhmm.. innocent fun we were going to have. Those few months flew by so quickly and by the time I realized it, it was time for me to think of where to go after school, what I was going to study and where I was going to end up.

I had no clue what to do to be honest. I didn’t…
It’s true… when I was young I wanted to be all sorts of things. I wanted to be a soldier once… then a pilot another time… and at one point I even wanted to be a postman.

I told my mum that I thought it was so much fun riding around everywhere in a motorbike. My mum panicked a little bit.. you know typical traditional Chinese family. If your child doesn’t grow up wanting to be a doctor/accountant/lawyer then your son needs help.

So there I was back in present time sitting at this lecture hall listening to this talk about careers.

I was at Taylor’s Sri Hartamas Campus.

that just newly opened and I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon there since they were all so nice to invite me to go pay a visit.In the audience were starry-eyed students fresh out of SPM and concerned parents trying to figure out what future would be best for their children.

I sat there alone unaccompanied by anyone with jeans and sports shoes so much that I looked like I had just finished my SPM myself… though I actually wish I had really sat through one of these talks right after I left school.

At least I might have known what I should do with my life.
After the talk ended, the nice people that man the new campus decided to take me a tour of the campus. It was quite an environment.

Allow me to illustrate.

They had nice hangout places for students to just sit and chill.Can you believe that? They actually had special spots just for you to CHILL!!!

That’s it!!!

During my days as a student (which wasn’t too long ago), we all sat on the staircases to chill which was fun for a while until your butt becomes so flat you could place a cup of coffee on it.

Not to mention, occassionally a passing lecturer would say
“OI!… So free can just lepak here ah?”

At this college now at least the students could say
“No Sir… I am just making use of college facilities Sir.”

Then there was the library.
I’m used to seeing library with old wooden chairs and wooden tables. Heck memories from my old university days but this library actually had something more than just the really cute “Alphabet” stools on the tables there.

Seriously, just a private thought to myself right… it’s not going to take long before the students start arranging the chairs to spell

“F…U….”

“N”….. AH HAH !!!

I was going to say “FUN”.. what were you all thinking! Notty notty!

Now apart from the cute alphabet chairs, what really grinded my gears was… that they had their own “Nuffie Corner” there.

And one that was SOOO MUCH bigger than the one we have at the Nuffnang office in KL.

And check out these really really cute ‘chair’ like bean bags they had.

Dammit if I were a student there.. that’s where I would be all my student life. Sitting on that chair.

I’ll be there so often they’ll call that place “TIMMY CORNER”.

See? Don’t I just fit in there?

That’s the thing I love about bean bags. They don’t judge you if you’re fat like me. No… not like other chairs where you might be too big to sit on. Bean bags, they fit around your butt no matter how you sit on them.

Ahhh…

Anyway, seeing how nice the library was I insisted they showed me how the classrooms looked like. And this is how they looked like (without the hot chicks sitting on them chairs).The classrooms were pretty Hi-Tech and it wasn’t only because of how each classroom had a fixed projector of its own …

But they had these things called “Dynamic Notes” where at the end of each class, you could Bluetooth to your mobile phone a recording of the entire session and take it home with you.

How stressful is that? I mean imagine if you were passing notes in class and your teacher catches you and gives you a public caning in front of everyone in the class.

Before, your shame would only be limited to the few people in the class who were there to witness it but now anyone there could take the recording to any of the computer labs they have thereand upload it on to the internet with titles like

“Timmy Tiah Gets Spanked During Biology”

After the classroom tour I had a “BEHIND THE SCENES TOUR” of the teachers’ lounge.

CHECK THIS OUTHeck … I can see why more and more people are becoming lecturers these days. I can even imagine myself there… you know… “Mr. Tiah”.

Sitting down sipping my morning coffee and reading a newspaper.

I would be one of those ‘cool’ lecturers that jokes and dances in class.

Okay soon my tour of the campus came to an end and I’m going to show you my favourite part of the campus.

While we were walking around I spotted this glass room with chairs and table in it and I asked “What is this?”
The room was apparently called… the “BRAINSTORM” room.

How cool is that!?

You actually have a glass room for you to do nothing but brainstorm in it.

Now I’ve seen this in a few corporations… really really hip ones but this is the first time I’ve seen it in a college!!!
I love these rooms.

And not too far away from these rooms.. A VENDING MACHINE!!!
For us to binge!!!

The total sum of money it took to put together a college like that with all the glass rooms, projectors, classrooms, chairs, tables and BEAN BAGS… came up to… RM6,000,000.

Ah how Taylor’s has come so far from its early days at Pantai Bahru (Yes… believe it or not Taylor’s College started there in 1969… not at Subang).The Taylor’s new Hartamas Campus is still pretty new so go check it out if you guys have the time but if you’re going to go into college soon… my advice… figure out what you wanna do first… you know go for a talk or talk to some people.

I ended up doing Economics at university because I didn’t know what else to do and ended up not liking the very very mathematical subject but I had to force myself to finish the course I started. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

I’m really excited today because today is the day we’re officially launching Nuffnang Philippines Inc.

We’ve been working on this for many months now to be honest and I’ve actually been flying to Manila to help set up Nuffnang Philippines with our local JV partner there Outcomm Inc.

Outcomm is one of the largest outdoor advertising firm in the Philippines and our partnership all started with a call to our office, leading to an overseas conference call and finally a meeting in Singapore before I eventually flew over to Manila to get some work done.

Gosh you have no idea for how long I wanted to blog about my trip to Manila especially about meeting one of the most popular bloggers in Asia… BryanBoy who is now part of Nuffnang too.

Look how star-struck I was. Giggling away like a little boy.

But alas, I had to keep it all secret because we didn’t want people to know that we were going into the Philippines yet.. although word started to leak out rather quickly.

A local blogger there happened to see one of our job ads to hire Nuffies for our new team in Manila office and word leaked out. Speaking of the Nuffnang office in Manila, it’s sooo wonderful!

It’s at this place called Bonifacio High Street where you have a beautiful garden with office units throughout the side.During the evenings you can actually see people walking their dogs around the area. It’s like a half office half shopping high street kind of area. Really nice!

Imagine looking out your office window and seeing a view like that with a fountain in the middle.
Manila was just really really quite nice. I mean what is there to NOT like. The people are all English speaking and they are extremely polite, humble and friendly.

Heck you guys should meet our local partners there.

Meet Eric and Jay, the founders and owners of Outcomm Inc.Both extremely successful entrepreneurs who graduated from Top US Colleges (Eric went to Stanford and Jay went to UPenn Wharton) and both extremely humble people.

Then there is Geraldine on the right of the photo below who is one of the key people responsible for setting up Nuffnang PH operations.

This photo was taken in our Nuffnang office in Manila a few months back when I was up in the Philippines helping set up the operations there.

I am so excited!

Will post up more pictures of all the rest of the Nuffies in our Manila office when I go there again ok?

1 and a half years after Nuffnang first started, we are now in 3 countries with offices in all of them.

Ahh exciting and challenging times ahead!

Ok I am really really extremely busy right now but I’m going to write a really really quick entry about a dinner we had with some Nuffnangers yesterday.

Well here goes.

Nuffnang has become increasingly famous for having huge fun themed parties among hundreds of bloggers to get the community together. The problem with these parties though is because of their size, they tend to take a lot of time and money to plan so we limit them to at most once every 3 months.

Yet as a Community we’ve always wanted to have something consistent, something where we could get together with Nuffnangers regularly in the most casual manner.. just to hang out, have dinner and get to know each other better.

Then one day we all had an idea. Why don’t we have just small dinners of say 25 Nuffnangers just to meet up and chat. The downside was that we wouldn’t be able to host as many Nuffnangers so we might have to rotate… but the upside… was the opportunity to get to know these few of them a lot better.

Last weekend we had our first of such dinners at Italiannies in 1-Utama at what we call a Nuffnang Sharing Session where we would all have dinner together and then get one or two bloggers to share their experiences in blogging or anything else.
The two bloggers we had that night were Cindy and Ringo, 2 of our Malaysian Dreamgirl contestants who were there to share their experiences being in a reality TV show.

The night turned out to be a lot of fun. Good food and great company.

I personally got to know a lot of Nuffnangers a lot better, many of which I met before in some of our earliest parties but couldn’t remember.

Here are some pictures I managed to take on the night… before I spoilt my camera which is now sent for a 3 week warranty. *sigh* That’s a whole other story.

Sorry guys in my rush to get this entry out… I didn’t have the time to link up everyone that I managed to take pictures with.

It was great meeting you guys! I actually had so much fun.

If you didn’t manage to get one of the limited seats for this session, we’ll be having another one next month ok?

See you guys then.

Alright I’m off!!!

A friend of mine just pointed out that my blog doesn’t have an “About Me” page like most other blogs do.

So I’m going to do an “About Me” entry now so anyone new to my blog could learn a bit more about me.

Okay so here goes.

My name is Timothy Tiah and I am 24 this year (2008).Although I now spend most of my time in KL, I grew up in Penang getting my secondary school education in a boy school there called St. Xavier’s Institution. I lived a very typical student life back then, spending most of my free time in cybercafes playing games like Half-Life, Counter-strike and Starcraft.

Whatever time I had left was spent playing table tennis, a sport that I used to be really good in representing my school, and eventually even representing my university when I studied in London.I used to be pretty fit…

but now I am fat.

I’m not sure why but it must’ve been all the excessive ice-cream.
After I finished college, I pursued a BSc in Economics at University College London, apparently the 25th Top University in the World according to a NewsWeek survey. Up till today I still wonder why they accepted me as a student.

The plan was that I was going to be an investment banker after I graduated with an Economics degree. Why? No reason in particular… I just didn’t have a better idea and everyone tells me that investment bankers make a lot of money.

So during my summer holidays I did internships at both JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, hoping that I would learn a thing or two about investment banking there.

In my final year of university however, I started a joke blog with a friend of mine which marked the beginning of my blogging career.

I got to know a lot of bloggers and began to feel a sense of passion for the blogging community.

It was then where I saw an opportunity for bloggers to get together in one big network and collectively sell their ad space to advertisers and so right after I graduated from university in June 2006, I turned down a job offer from an investment bank and took the biggest gamble of my life.

With with my partner Ming, we started Nuffnang.After spending months preparing the business plan, doing feasibility studies and building the website, Nuffnang officially launched on 27th of February 2007.About one and a half years later, the small team we had grew from a small office in Penang to having offices now in Penang, KL and Singapore. Our Community has also grown and as of August 2008, the Nuffnang Community had over 50,000 bloggers from Malaysia and Singapore alone.Our clients have also grown from the smaller companies that supported us when we were small today to big multinational brands like Nike, Nokia, MAS, HUGO and the likes.

Nuffnang today is pretty well-known as one of the fastest growing dotcoms in the region and we’ve had the fortunate blessings of being in an out of the media quite a bit. We’ve been covered in most major newspapers in Malaysia and Singapore, been on National TV 3 times and in 2007 both Ming and I were nominated by BusinessWeek Magazine as one of the Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs in Asia.

Young is what Nuffnang is… not just by the number of years we have been around but even by the age of the team at Nuffnang and I take pride that such young people are doing such remarkable things.

Of all of us at Nuffnang today, the oldest is 32 years of age and the average age is 24.

Today I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world and it’s not only because I love what I do and the poeple I work with.

It’s because I’ve had the good fortune of meeting the right people that believed in Nuffnang from day one who brought us to where we are today, be it the bloggers that always supported us to the clients that taught us all about the advertising industry and all we needed to know about how to run a company.

Where Nuffnang is today is something that I can’t and won’t take for granted.

I have learned that for any entrepreneur, life is full of its ups and downs even for some of the most successful billionaires in the world that I have read about like Richard Branson or Steve Jobs.

This blog will document my very own ups and downs.

Share with me my joys when I am up… and my tears when I am down.

Thank you for being with me on this journey.

I just got an e-mail from a fellow Nuffie sent to everyone at Nuffnang in all our offices.

The e-mail was sent by Nicholas and had one photo he candidly took of Yee Hou with his camera phone.

The title of the e-mail was
“How to Increase Productivity”.

Sometimes the funniest things happen at the Nuffnang office.

Happy Friday everyone!