Archive for January 2013

Conference business thoughts from @JeffPulver

Some nuggets from a Mixergy interview with Jeff Pulver (wikipedia). 

“The conference business when it works, is one of the most highly profitable businesses that is legal.”

“The more I charged, the more people came.” It’s a credibility thing. In telecom, its corporate money, take as much as you want (its not individual money). With competition, someone always wants to outspend another in sponsorships, etc.

However with a waning economy in 2010, the 140conf charged $140. EBITDA is poor, but you get folk. Inspiration for these lower prices came from Fred Wilson’s post about conferences.

He didn’t start out with a professional conference/event management firm. He built conferences based on the ones that he had attended before.

He never pays for speakers (with one exception: Scott Adams). He gets paid $40,000 per speech. He does occasionally cover travel costs. He has sponsors from hotels so accommodation is usually taken care of.

Very open about his numbers, earnings, business (he had many including a record label), failings, etc. in his interview. Well worth a listen if you have the time.

Parting thought: you have to occasionally reboot your buddy list. I can agree – different friends take you thru different parts of life.

smartphone rebates in malaysia

I wrote a lengthy email (on 7 January 2013) about smartphone rebates for a journalist, but I think it didn’t fit with their planned story, so I’m pasting it here instead. The story, of course, never ran. Today I see that Maxis is already recycling spectrum that they own for LTE. Maybe these rebates make sense (from a recycling spectrum perspective), but I still think overall it’s meant to be abused. I’m pasting the email here in its entirety.

1. Who do you think will use the smartphone rebates?

Well, it is stipulated that people between 21-30, whom earn less than RM3,000 per month. The cap is set at RM300 million. This benefits 1.5 million youths aged between 21-30. This also benefits mobile phone resellers at a crucial time

I am more concerned that our youths are earning so little to begin with, but that is cause for another story.

From what I gather, more than 22,000 people have already taken on the rebate, meaning the payout has already been RM4.4 million *gasp*

I do not like any form of subsidy to begin with (including petrol subsidies), so I do not think we should continue to feed the subsidy mentality.

I do not like the idea of flip flops either. You do not first say the RM200 rebate is for 3G phones costing less than RM500. Then make an ad with an iPhone in it. Then back track completely and say its for any phone because of political pressure from youth wings of political parties (read: http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/insights/smartphone-rebate-turnaround-mcmc-hung-out-to-dry for a good story)

There can be a benefit – more people with 3G enabled phones. Maybe this gives MCMC the benefit of getting rid of the 2G networks and recycling the spectrum. Puncak Niaga (read The edge from a few weeks back) wants to get access to some of this spectrum, because their 40MHz of LTE spectrum isn’t enough for proper roll outs. This has been done before in other countries, see:

This can also be a benefit for app developers. What apps can you develop to target 1.5 million people, aged 21-30, who are low income earners (below RM36,000)? Will we see more banks targeting this segment with apps? Mobile payments? Mobile loyalty? Etc.

All this aside, I keep on wondering. If you need a RM200 subsidy to buy your iPhone priced at RM2,199, you probably don’t deserve/need it. You’re just happy getting a free cheque from the government, so that you might remember them during voting time.

If you are truly using a 2G device and think you want to upgrade to some cheap 3G device, maybe it will benefit you.

But how does 3G benefit you without mobile data that you most likely cannot afford? Even U Mobile will set you back RM30/month for data from what I remember, and that hits you at RM360/yr. The RM200 rebate doesn’t benefit you that much right? :-) But maybe its about 6 months of free data, which you can always remember till election time :-)

I see the only benefit of this as recycling spectrum. But its sad that we don’t charge in bidding process for spectrum – we just give it away… sigh

2. Who will benefit BN or PR and why?

BN:
+ RM200 packet to people earning less than RM3,000. Who doesn’t like free money?
+ Who doesn’t like a new phone?

PR:
+ shoddy implementation by BN. Disguised bribe. Highlight it
+ people can now stop reading Utusan and start reading The Malaysian Insider/Malaysiakini. This is a great bonus

3. Was it a good step for BN and why?

I don’t think providing more subsidies is sensible. It goes against the principles of PEMANDU Chief idris jala as well. How do you wean people off subsidies if you keep on providing them more of it?

Here’s again how PR can benefit – its like the left foot doesn’t coordinate with the right foot, thus making a terrible tango (dance).

Selling enterprise software

Enterprise software largely sucks

I remember an expense app that would refresh the page everytime you hit the Tab key to move fields. It would also only work with a certain web browser, up to a certain version. Some 30,000 people used this application, everyone probably hated it, but no one could do anything about it.

However, flipping it around, building enterprise software is hard. The adage that build it and they will come cannot be further from the truth when you’re dealing with enterprise software.

Let’s say you build for an organization with the idea of selling it to other organizations. That takes you down the path of feature creep and much customization that may not work well for others.

Let’s say you build to solve a problem. How do you get it into the doors of the enterprise?

SME’s in Malaysia make up most of the organizations which could probably use software. These people are employing less than 50 people (small; medium is less than 150 people) and are the backbone of the economy. Many don’t want to have the Internet in their offices. Do you think they want to pay for your software?

MNC’s aren’t usually interested in local enterprise software. If they are, its going to cost a lot of money to get your foot in the door. Getting into government is also expensive (that is a little special in Malaysia with quotas & other nonsense – rest of Asia is probably fairer in this respect).

The enterprise mentality is also largely “no one got fired for buying IBM”. Breaking this mindset is tough. Some mitigate this by saying the software itself is opensource. I don’t think that argument provides bonus points to CIOs.

So there are many problems to solve in the enterprise space, but getting your foot in the door and in front of enterprises is crucial. You don’t want to go bust trying to sell.

Malaysians its time to support your local business

RechargeGabey Goh (editor at Digital News Asia) couldn’t have said it better in her column in The Star: A nation of beta-testers. It just got re-published on DNA.

I have consciously decided that when I’m in KL, I’ll only spend my money with businesses that support other local businesses. So with a place like Jaya One, its pretty easy for me to pick only a ChopChop merchant. Its also allowing me to find indie coffee merchants – so the app is aiding my discovery of other local businesses. Why this decision?

Malaysians: when was the last time you looked at something and said, I’m buying/doing/getting/trying this because its Made in Malaysia? We lack a sense of nationalism for many reasons, no thanks to our politicians. People prefer to buy Tupperware over Swordman. In Australia, buying Australian Made is highly encouraged. In the USA, people love it when production comes home. The Swiss are proud of their items. 

Now, Malaysian businesses/startups as a consequence suffer from this sort of mentality. By not trying Malaysian made software, it hurts Malaysian made software producers. I’m not saying you should aid (via crutches) these folk if they cannot compete with an international product. I’m all for trade over aid. Gabey agrees on this too.

But for me, I look at it this way. We all know & love Foursquare. You as a business can offer mayor bonuses or bonuses on every first checkin or every 5th checkin. Great. But as a business owner why not try loyalty products like ChopChop at the same time? Its proudly made in malaysia, and you’re helping a malaysian business succeed (just like they’re helping you, a fellow malaysian business succeed).

Gabey continues to state that if you try something and if it doesn’t work out, don’t hesitate to provide constructive criticism. I totally agree. I’m sure the local business will even give you a free service or something valuable in return.

To all the haters that claim that all malaysians do is copy stuff, I will humbly ask you this: you may copy amazon.com and call it lazada/zalora, and every inch of the design might look alike. Can you copy their back-end logistics? Can you copy the requirements of going into the local market (ads, events, etc.)?

Let’s consciously support local businesses & efforts. Its hard enough for the entrepreneurs to deal with the myriad difficulties that come with having to conduct business in Malaysia. Let’s make it a little easier.

(I don’t get any gains from talking about ChopChop. I’m truly a fan of this product. I’m truly a fan of the team.)

Vine goes 6-second adult

So Vine is all the rage now eh? What Twitter did to quick communication (140 characters), they’re now doing to video (6 seconds). Headlines today are: hardcore porn climbs to the top of vine’s editors picks.

When the porn industry embraces something, its likely to get big :)

I’m guessing this is currently more the amateur porn industry than anything else. There is a website curating based on hashtags (nsfwvine.com) and a twitter account (@nsfwvine – currently with 11 followers, 27 tweets).

Interesting development to watch. 

making journalists pay for editorial space?

Club-Mate: drink of hackersI’m with Tyler Brule here on the Eurostar – it is the Right Time to Change Track. What’s more interesting is a comment from Boswell:

Here’s another, shameless open ended business pitch Mr. Brûlé’s main business, Winkreative — it will be interesting to see which of the companies referenced here becomes his next client. Note to FT: I hope you are not actually paying this guy for his column given that he derives millions in new business from it all day long. Perhap’s he should be paying you — a wonderful new metric for the publishing industry whereby the “journalists” pay the newspaper for editorial space so that they may attract new business for their consulting firms, etc.

There are many journalists that become names themselves. This must be true since Google’s also launched an Author Rank. Its true for Tyler Brule. Its true for Paul Carr (nsfwcorp). Its true for Sarah Lacy (pandodaily). The list can go on.

I don’t know how many journalists also have consulting firms or do other things besides just writing/freelancing.

What about pundits? I know many pundits in the tech space that act as advisors, board members, etc. thanks to their published writing in tech press. They gain monetarily out of their writing, so why not make them pay to get published?

It is definitely a novel idea for the fledgling media industry to get paid by journalists who also get a regular soapbox.


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