Colin Charles Agenda

I’m a huge Kickstarter fan. I enjoy backing creative projects and seeing the outcome. I prefer outliers, not surefire success stories like the recent Kickstarter by Seth Godin (25 days more to go, $221,259 reached out of a $40,000 goal). The only problem with Kickstarter? It allows projects from the USA only. The world is bigger than the US and there are projects elsewhere that can benefit from this crowdfunding phenomena. 

How does Kickstarter work? You pledge a certain amount to a project. You hit the Amazon Payments gateway. It confirms you may make a transaction at a certain date. Then you can follow the project updates, etc. before the pledge date closes. If pledging is reached, when the closing date arrives, your credit card gets charged. Otherwise, you can forget that you even made a pledge! (read more). Read more about why Amazon Payments as well (this becomes important for pitchIN later).

I read about pitchIN on June 12. I believe that I was so excited I hopped on over to the project to take a look at it. I browsed every available pitch. Then I decided to plonk down some change on one project. pitchIN uses PayPal so the pre-authorization happens on your credit card, basically immediately. With Malaysia now telling you everytime there’s a transaction, you get an SMS telling you about this “charge”. You’ll only know its not a charge when you visit Paypal and notice this is just an authorization, nothing more. I’m glad the pitchIN team contacted me within 24 hours to tell me about this via a Facebook message as well, but it isn’t the best “first experience”. 

A few suggestions:

1. Forget this USD thing. I’m sure you want international pledges, but USD for Malaysians is just prohibitive. People think in MYR and the USD fluctuates on a daily basis. Questions like do I get the pre-auth USD$100 rate on June 12 versus July 11 which is closing date? Who makes the difference in currency exchange? Will I get the pre-auth amount returned to me if the pledge doesn’t make it based on a different currency exchange rate? I have no idea, and I’m willing to bet Team pitchIN doesn’t either.
2. The interface needs to work. It is currently very raw. Lots of “sorry matcha” error messages.
3. Pitch videos need improving.
4. A paypal email address like wtf@wtf.my (which really is WatchTower & Friends, the company name) doesn’t inspire great confidence.
5. Fix the SMS from the bank. PayPal might have a better way to do pre-auth. Or banks shouldn’t send SMS’s during pre-auth. It turns customers away (first pitch shouldn’t be an issue, what about the next?). I hate to imagine this being a regular customer service question.
6. Got to iterate faster. Its 10 days since I last visited the site. Nothing has changed.
7. If you’re starting a project, remember that pitchIN charges a 5% fee in addition to PayPal’s 3.5% processing fee. This is exactly like Kickstarter, but worth keeping in mind.
8. PayPal notice about seller and buyer being in Malaysia… well I’m using a Malaysian account and I’d presume wtf@wtf.my is Malaysian too… So odd message to contend with.

All in, I’m hoping pitchIN succeeds in getting Malaysian creative projects funded not only by Malaysians but by the vast Malaysian diaspora. Best wishes and I’m looking to further try this out when its iterated upon. So far nothing is “bringing me back” to the site, so that’s something that clearly needs to be worked on…

Nathan Tinkler (young Aussie, rags to riches story) has decided to call Singapore home. Why?

Aside from the country’s low taxes, clean government and pro-business environment, wealthy foreigners are also drawn by Singapore’s low crime rate, highly developed infrastructure, and its lack of local tabloid media excesses.

Following my themes a little, no? Malaysia needs rebooting and it has to come from the people.

The iPhone dock connector is awesome. There are plenty of devices for it. Its what I would consider ubiquitous today.

I visit many hotels and one of the things that I totally enjoy is the fact that I can dock my iPhone and it automatically charges it. Sometimes I play music. Sometimes I’ve seen it at the back of the telephone, and the whole idea is to provide charging only. It means I carry one charger less.

The charger itself has changed over time. When I first interfaced with it, it connected to my computer using Firewire (from the days of the first generation iPod). Then it moved to USB. To the device, they had little push-in buttons. Now its just push in or pull out. 

Throughout all this though, the form factor has remained the same. Which is why there are so many devices for charging, playing music, interfacing to blood pressure monitors, and lots more. The device ecosystem is huge.

Changing it now without compatibility is going to be a real bummer. Lets hope Apple is smart about this. Optimize it, maybe. But make sure it “just works”.

“And since I made it here,
I can make it anywhere
(Yeah they love me everywhere)”
– Empire State of Mind, Jay-Z & Alicia Keys

There are more than a million Malaysians working abroad. Malaysia’s population stands at about 29 million now.

Generally it is safe to assume that the million living overseas are all educated. Countries gaining from the loss toMalaysia: Australia, Brunei, United States, Britain, Canada and Singapore. I’m willing to believe that most are moving for a better future.

Better futures include but are not limited to: fair working hours, fair wages, fair maternity rules, great public school education for children, freedom to practice religion, social security, safety, better healthcare, a level playing field (meritocracy).

Out of these one million Malaysians (net loss of great minds), apparently 680 have applied to come home with TalentCorp (I think TalentCorp is missing out the fact that many left on their own accord and don’t exactly want to come back & people should focus on the talent that stayed back, but thats a point for another post). That’s 0.68% success rate. How many will leave to go back to their new adoptive countries?

Malaysians are resilient. The vast diaspora proves that. As I listen to Empire State of Mind, I see how all the countries above benefit from having Malaysians. Malaysians work hard, and if you can make it in Malaysia, you’ll work hard to make it in your new adoptive land. And you will succeed. The level playing field ensures this.

I speak as someone who spent years living abroad and coming home. I came back on the premise that I will use nothing that isn’t private (hospitals, international schools, etc.). There is however something that I can’t quite control and that is safety/security. (see totally cop-out response from home ministry about perception issues.)

The recent spate of attacks have gotten the Twitterverse at least talking about migrating. I think given the chance, many people just want to leave Malaysia. Anecdotally, many just say that Singapore is safer (and they have 46% of Malaysian migrants!). And this is truly sad because Malaysia is a beautiful country. There are so many pros of living in Malaysia. We also have one of the best passports in the world (in where we’re all Malaysian!).

I keep on thinking its time to change Malaysia. I’ve had this thought most of this year. We need better branding. We need better civic consciousness. We need to be Malaysian and united as one people. We need to be proud Malaysians. This change cannot come from the bickering politicians. It has to come from within. It has to be a people driven movement to reboot Malaysia.

I’ve never seen anything from Hulu before but the idea for streaming TV seems totally amazing. What’s even better is that there are Hulu Originals, which in my head, I think of a “HBO Original Series”.

I saw an original from a series titled “A Day In The Life”. This one featured Tim Ferriss, the author of several books in the four-hour series. It was about 30 minutes long and it was amazing. I saw ads:

• Before the video started, I saw an ad (30 seconds long, from the title sponsor). This is basically like what you see on YouTube these days. You have a choice to watch one long form commercial or just see them as it happens like a normal TV show.
• Around 6 minutes into it, there were 3 ads. These ad combos are about 1.5 minutes long. So each ad is about 30 seconds long.
• I see that you can swap ads – an “ad swapper” called “Hulu ad swap”. You have 3 ads to choose from. So you basically watch ads.
• You can also tell Hulu if the ad is relevant to you or not. I for example learned more about Bing and found that it was useful as an ad.
• Around 15 minutes into it, I got yet another 3 ads
• Around 25 minutes into it I got an ad about the Hulu original series itself that wasn’t skippable which then led me to another 1 minute 15 second ad break.
• I can pause Hulu TV and come back to it exactly where I left of.

So in 30 minutes, I saw 10 ads paid for by their advertisers. The first ad is by the title sponsor. The remaining 9 are various rolling ads that I can skip. Oh, and I saw another ad about the Hulu series itself, so in total, they were basically 11 ads. Thats about 330 seconds of ads. Some 5.5 minutes of ads in 30 minutes.

I just saw an amazing video from Wired editor Thomas Goetz (@tgoetz). If you have the time, do watch it (embedded below). He also has a longer article over at Wired on How to spot the future. I’ve just added his book to my reading list: The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine.

I took some quick notes from the video:

1. Look for cross-pollinators – e.g. Detroit meets Silicon Valley
2. Surf the exponentials – bank on today’s technology, bet on tomorrow’s technology. CPUs, battery storage, bandwidth
3. Favor the liberators – CDs are control, freeing up blockages is basically MP3 and BitTorrent technology. See AirBnB, Uber that brings liquidity to markets (via Reid Hoffmann)
4. Respect audacity – Set audacious goals, you’ll solve a lot more things along the way. Too many apps, look for Tesla’s and Square’s who want to change the way we drive and make payments respectively
5. Bank on openness – see Linux and the opensource movement in general. Microsoft compared it to a cancer (Steve Ballmer) and now they’re one of the biggest contributors to Linux. Twitter? Hashtags, retweets, etc. came from the users. Exploits your opportunity. Gives your good idea to reach a maximum number of people.
6. Demand deep design – see Apple with their simple user manuals. Good design strips away the barrage of information. Help us understand information. Facebook has a lot of redesigns over the years, and everything they do is cajoling a user to share more; better organised. Same reason why Pinterest is so hot right now. Turns messy lives we live into something that actually looks beautiful. Deep design: turns chaos into curation.
7. Spend time with time wasters – look at people who are spending time creating new tools, new language, new culture. Look at the DIY/maker movement, health 2.0, hackathons (organized time wasting – create even more than they start with).