Colin Charles Agenda

I haven’t written much about foss.my because I’ve been busy helping organise it.

The sponsors
Well, the crunch time is here. In a month we’ve managed to pull some amazing things off. For starters, we’ve confirmed four great Gold Sponsors: mixi.jp, Novell, Mozilla, and Microsoft. We’ve also managed to get some local companies to be affiliate sponsors: bytecraft and inigo. And we must be gracious to get APIIT to sponsor the location, of course!

So, what do the sponsors do? They help pay for things. Like the speaker party, happening on Saturday evening at IZZI. Suanie, Aizat and I have already scooped out the location, and its a great place, with WiFi. Much thanks to Suanie for sorting this out, naturally. They help subsidise the cost of the event. They might even be helping pay for prizes for early registrants :)

If you’re unsure ~RM50 will get you far
What inspired this blog post was @nazroll’s post. Running a conference isn’t cheap. RM30 for students, is actually a loss leader: you are getting 2 lunches, and 3 teas. Food in KL is surprisingly not so cheap, even if you go the Subway sandwich route. Early registration for non-students, with a t-shirt, is RM50. The t-shirt is actually pretty high quality, and sadly costs more than RM20 – surprisingly, making t-shirts isn’t cheap these days either. We could have gone the RM8-15 route, but its a t-shirt you wouldn’t be proud of owning, as after a few washes, the print comes off, and you’ll soon forget what a great time you had at foss.my 2008.

We’ll also sell the t-shirt, because if you’re not convinced pre-purchase, i.e. before registration, we want you to see it, touch it, feel it, and realise you probably want to be cool wearing it. So there.

The only way the event was going to be 100% free, was if we were going to not offer lunches, teas, a speaker party, t-shirts, etc… then you come to learn. But I hear this kind of event doesn’t work in Malaysia (or most parts of Asia, for the matter).

Don’t forget, the swag you’ll get. Bags, stickers, etc. The new friends you’ll make. So, the theme of “free & sharing of knowledge” is very much there. The culture is very much there.

The speakers
Have you seen the awesome speaker list? Open source conferences overseas typically costs hundreds of dollars, even for students. Less than RM50, is peanuts!

Speakers, I don’t know how to thank you enough. You are what’s going to help make the conference a great success. People are coming to see you. The speaker party reward on Saturday evening is so tiny in comparison to what you’ll be doing for the attendees.

The attendees
That’s you. You make the event a success. Register, pay up, come, have a good time, share, make new friends, hook up with people you’ve only chatted to via IRC. Thank you for taking time off from your busy weekend, to come enjoy the event.

Everything else
There are also Side Sessions. Birds of a Feather sessions, an Ubuntu Malaysia launch party, and much more.

All in all, pointing to a truly awesome event.

On thinking back, with regards to Rusty, CALU, and what is now LCA
The famous story goes that Rusty bootstrapped CALU on his credit card. I now realise that foss.my is no different. We’re bootstrapping everything on credit (or really, whatever cash there is in the bank – Malaysia and credit cards are still not there yet). CALU happened in 1999… foss.my is coming nearly a decade later.

Lets hope this event is as successful as LCA, and we have something to look forward to, on a yearly basis, in South East Asia. We’re not as far on yet as to have a howto, but we have ambitions to be the awesomest conference in S.E.A. ;)

What are you waiting for? Register and pay up, already! And see you November 8-9, 2008.

Check out VoteMatch USA. This idea was developed in the Netherlands by the Institute for Political Participation, I saw it on CNN today, and now they’ve got it applied to the US Elections.

I always felt I liked Barack Obama, but now I know that I am skewed to his policies, by about 83%. I really like the idea of VoteMatch.

In 2008, Malaysians showed Barisan Nasional that they’ve had enough. March 8 2008 is a day that will go down in history books. The next general elections, Malaysians will be ready for something like VoteMatch Malaysia. By 2012/2013, there will be so much Internet penetration, even more young guns who’ve been exposed to more freedoms, and even more that will want change.

VoteMatch is a propaganda fighting machine. No matter how many adverts there are in the media, how much parties embrace social media, there’s just been no way to show clearly, whom one would want to vote for. VoteMatch seems to be the answer

“The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.”

Richard Moss

i just slept for what must’ve been a good ten hours or more. boy does waking up from that make you feel refreshed. i miss my days of long sleep :-)

wednesday, got home, and immediately left to sunway for the dinner/event thing for international peace. good fun, spent time with john, carmen, ruben, sk2, her sister. yet another night at a hotel, tsk tsk. been ages since i had a room share, but we seemed to survive without throwing shoes at each other

work, caught some judo, dinner. walked out of dinner a lot. my tolerance level for silly people is generally pretty high, but i felt my top wanting to blow many a time that night. apparently, i was not the only one who was about to blow their top

then supper. visited mcdonalds, after what must’ve been a very long time. i ate, finally. good company helps that, clearly

short sleep, and then work… met up with aizat, suanie, and headed to izzy. we’ve now booked the speaker’s dinner place. went home, and headed out for dinner with parents. yum. didn’t know halloween was such a big deal here. they downed some margaritas (tgif has some amazing ones). i didn’t. we however had a mostly serious talk, which i was surprised went pretty well :P 42!

caught some crap on cable tv, which explains why i fell asleep on the couch. today, was lunch at some open house… dinner later will also be at some open house. i think i’ll head back to pj tomorrow. busy week ahead.

answer or no answer, i’m glad things are back to normal. anticipation doesn’t kill, really. silence does.

oh, movie updates. haven’t seen that many recently. miss the cinema. caught mamma mia! (great stuff, and the GSC Signature gold class is well worth the rm60 they charge – go there, the privacy, the seats, its all just amazing), and max payne (not so good). 2 in october is not so bad, i guess…

its november now. the year is almost over. boy has it passed by so fast.

I once wrote a plea to Apple about giving Malaysians access to the iTunes music store as well as selling the iPhone’s in Malaysia.

I stepped into one of the Apple Premium Authorised Resellers the other day, and spoke to someone who seemed knowledgeable about these things. I mean, I purchased my MacBook Air in Machines. I purchased an external DVD drive for it from the EpiCentre store, more recently.

The shocker? RM5 million in sales, sustained, for at least three months, before Apple would consider even opening an official Apple store in Malaysia.

Is this hard to reach? I find it hard to believe that this isn’t already reached. I take buying Mac hardware for granted. My latest iPod purchase however wasn’t in the market – I ordered it from the Singapore online store (I wanted it engraved).

If I want it engraved, I can only imagine that a lot more Malaysians want it too. Of course, I also imagined Malaysians spending more than RM5 million on Apple hardware per month.

Anyone know if this is an Apple requirement?

A recently jilted man, aged 27, decided to post information about his ex-girlfriend on Friendster. The Star reports:

In March he started his antics again, which she tolerated, until she started getting disturbing calls from men who had read the “invitation” for a life partner over the Friendster account, which had been created unbeknownst to her.

Get this. In recent times, there were 19 such cases, with 90% of the victims being women!

There’s just some irony in this (besides it being creepy – men, don’t be creepy!). Today it is your number posted on Friendster. Yesterday, it was plastering your number in some random toilet, with a sexy message. What will it be, tomorrow?

I give a lot of talks, but not a lot of pitches to VCs. But if I were planning to, I’d definitely recommend you to watch David S. Rose on pitching to VCs from TED. It’ll eat up fifteen minutes of your life, but the pitch coach, is simply fabulous. Heck, you can learn a thing or two for normal presentations too…

I took some notes:

* People – convince them that you are the people and convince them you are the one they are going to invest it
** 15-30 minutes at most
* Convey integrity, passion, experience, knowledge, skill, leadership, commitment, vision, realism, coach-ability (ability to listen)
* Business models, financial requirements – this is normal
* Timeline: 10-30s to get attention (grab the emotional attention), and keep on getting better, better, better, and then knock them out. A logical progression (think like a staircase)
** validation, believable upside (don’t lie!), things I know or understand, things that make one think, no typos/errors/etc.
* when speaking? use images, or something like what steve jobs does
* slide deck: company logo, business overview, management team, market, product, business model, strategic relationships, competition, barriers to entry, financial overview, use of proceeds, capital & valuation
* always use presentation mode, always use a remote control, hand outs are NOT your presentation (lots more information as it has to stand without you), don’t read your speech, never, ever look at the screen

Thanks to @ditesh for pointing this out.