Leave it to the Lex column in the FT to put a fresh spin on everything.

This one popped out at me due to the implications on investments/money:

The notion that government is not really keeping up with the people – just look at occupy wall street and some of the middle east uprisings as a clear sign of that. Throw in more social media, more communication and this trend in my mind can only accelerate. I wonder when China will feel it?

Second one was such a good point in that as big as Apple might be – 95% of the planet has not touched an Apple product. You think the shares are high now?

Being a fan of trying to do biz in emerging markets the third point was telling in that markets are getting bigger, easier to access and the talent pool is growing not shrinking.

The world is changing in a big way.

Sure there is the environment calamities – look at Thailand for a stark example of this but knowing how Thailand is operated I think most of it will be shown to be self inflicted. What I mean by this they mismanaged the damns, paved over all the canals to build malls/apartments and responded slowly to the threat. Water must be managed.

Energy policies need to change but I think some common sense – use more natural gas and the rise of technology will find a way to end the oil mess.

Technology will keep getting more sophisticated but yet more accessible all the time – look at these trends: codify and code academy for examples.

As for the financial mess – not sure I know what to say but clearly we have a problem. The rich are accelerating their wealth at a time when the poor are worse off and the middle class is shrinking. Something is wrong but I don’t know the answer. However something will break.

Good luck to the newest members of planet earth – it’s an interesting era indeed.

I covered some of my activity here.

Hats off to viki for their huge round of funding: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/20/andreessen-horowitz-bbc-greylock-put-20m-in-international-video-site-viki/

Heard about this site today – looks cool: http://chope.com.sg/

I attended this last night and met some folks from Ubisoft – I didn’t realize they were so big in Singapore.

Did you know that this is engineered in Singapore? Was cool to meet Steve from Chumby last night as well.

All in all – a lot of activity in Singapore but you have to dig past the headlines and the events to find the real doers – the folks building companies, heading up multi-national operations and the other peeps running around to ensure the ecosystem takes off. I have every faith that it will – just a matter of time.

Back to work..

First up was accelerate day at TechVenture2011. I attended the full conference at TV2010 and was even at some of the VIP events but this year I was too late getting back from the states so was only able to make the accelerate part of the event.

The main thrust of accelerate besides the speakers is the pitches from various startups in the region looking for cash.

You can check twitter #techventure and #accel2011 for the stream. Some good info in there…

I can’t say I saw something drop dead cool or must have but there was a number of solid offerings. In general though you can see how Singapore keeps evolving and is becoming quite the hotbed of startup and venture activity for Asia. I still feel that apart from China and India – Singapore and SEA is the other main place in the APAC to get it going  on.

Probably my highlight for the day was getting to hear Tim Draper of dfj.com speak twice. Once during the day at accelerate and once at night during FoundersDrinks. I was very impressed with his down to earth style, his poignant examples of business, and his gracious openness with the crowds. He answered a lot of questions and stuck around to talk to pretty much anyone who wanted to chat with him. It was not what I was expecting and I was pleasantly surprised. He shared a few Steve Jobs stories which was very cool. He made some interesting points about how powerful Steve was about changing the world and how is passing will leave a big hole to be filled within the industry.

I must say I was totally shocked during the evening event when Tim performed a song he had written about the venture industry.

I happened to record it with my iPhone – you can catch it here on Vimeo. I have not seen someone this famous from the tech industry belt out in song like that. Props.

Tim had some great points about how this is the best time ever to get started building something – he adamantly encouraged folks to ignore the downturn, the pessimism and to launch full in into building things and changing the world. It was welcome advice given the state of the world these days.

Thanks Tim for coming to Singapore and imparting your wisdom, positive attitude and your song on us!

Tim shared some book suggestions – one was “the startup game” – I would link to it from amazon but I can’t get logged in.

Tomorrow I hope to check Startup Weekend Singapore and JFDI.

laterz

Download was about 90 mins from Singapore – kind of long. Apple needs to host some bits around here.

Sync. Backup. New OS and then restore. Wait – it says my restore needs a password for the encryption. I never encrypted it. Damn.

Did a freshie – no restore. Pain in the ass but I have had no issues. Just took some time to get everything set up again. Kind of a nice way to start over though.

Love the notifications. So much cleaner and easier to deal with.

iMessage is awesome.

Things feel snappier.

Not sure on iCloud yet. Need more testing.

Love the camera from lock screen access.

Battery life looks good.

Need to play more.

Maybe upgrade the iPad tonight.

Macbook Air upgraded but have yet to play with it.

more soon…

I want an iPhone 4S I think…

I was standing outside of Fry’s in Palo Alto waiting for a co-worker to pick me up when I read the tweet. Steve Jobs had just passed away. We all knew this day would come but none of us were ready for it. I was stunned. Sad. Suddenly lonely.

When my friend picked me up I told him and said let’s go to the Apple Store in Palo Alto. I have been needing a new laptop for personal use and figured what better time to buy. So I grabbed a MacBook Air.

For me I will always remember where I was when I heard about SJ and I will always think about him when I use my Air.

RIP

Then the news hit – one building would house another, yes we need more, LV shop and the other would house two world famous clubs. I could care less about the LV shop but was mildly interested in a real international club hitting the Singapore scene. God knows the city needs it.

So when @groovemonkey mentioned that the Chemical Brothers were coming to town to play the new venue – we decided it was time to properly check out http://avalon.sg/

Could it be too much?

Far more than giving people what they want we want to be delivering what they will want, I hope to hear people say “I first heard that at Avalon”.

Reading a snippet like that from an interview with Steve Adelman one can assume that experiencing Avalon could be well – nothing short of amazing. So let me answer the interview question for Steve – yes it is too much. Too much pomp, circumstance, attitude, lousy service, smoke, and arrogance to probably last me a life time. Hell – if I get re-incarted I might just find that it is even too much for my second life as well.

So before I dig in, let me start with the good stuff.

• The venue is amazing. I think the external part of the venue was designed without Avalon in mind but I will give this one to the Avalon crew cause they need every bit of positive news they can get at this point.
• The internal design is super cool too but given the over abundance of cheap Thai smoke machines – it is hard to totally grok how amazing the place looks.  I suggest they run daytime tours with the lights on in hopes of maximizing the chances of making money.
• The sound system sounds stunningly good but since all I heard was an iPod running some genius techo playlist it was tough for me to fully appreciate the capabilities of it.
• The hiring of many international servers, female, wearing hot outfits is definitely different that most places in Singapore but it might be helpful if they were taught to smile, fake a slight bit of politeness and pull the stick out of their ass prior to coming to work.
• The view looking out from the club is also amazing and the internal design clearly shows this off but once again the internal haze made it mostly mute after about an hour of the club being open.

Enough of the good. Let’s get to the not so good.

• When one buys VIP tickets once expects some sort of treatment that the minions buying general tickets would not get. Maybe a special line, a free drink or at the very least a sticker that says VIP with a powerful enough glow to be seen through the internal micro-climate that produces pollution thicker than the haze on a bad day in Beijing. The door people/glorious ticket checkers also could not explain what the VIP tickets were for either. Nice.
• Upon entering the club, pre-haze, we found out that the VIP tickets offered us access to a top floor balcony with good views and seating. Wait – the seating could only be used if one bought about 2000 SGD worth of booze. Okay. Can we stand here then, seats with a small drink rail, and order some booze? Sure. But once people come who buy bottles we have to move you cause you have not bought a bottle. Great. So the VIP tickets don’t really offer us anything more than standing in the hallowed area while those buying bottles get better service. Awesome.
• We head to the bar to go singles on the booze and the bartender, nicest guy working in the place, offers us some F1 bottle specials. Perfect. Of course then he is interrupted by the manager wench, the one with the biggest stick, who informs him that one can only order a bottle if one is sitting in the areas that accommodate a bottle and to sit in those area one has to order a big huge bottle that cost an enormous amount of money. So in other words the specials don’t mean anything at all. Precisely.
• Enough of the deplorable drinking issues – by the way when we ordered our three singles drinks, 65 SGD, I had to go through yet another hazing because I had the gall to pay with my credit card. Yes – we locals like to use credits cards and most places take every credit ever invented, but the upper bar in Avalon was setup for cash – my bad again. So I hard to endure dirty looks and the service guy having to go somewhere else to run the card. I felt bad for putting them out having to pay for my overpriced drinks with my AMEX.
• Let’s get to the show stuff. The event used to be listed here – and this was the only place showing anything remotely looking like a schedule. It actually said the show was 9pm-2am. Given that the F1 was not over till after 9 and that linkin park was playing in the field – we figured the show wouldn’t get going to 11 or later. We decided to get there before 11 just in case seating/standing was a pain. The bar boy told us that some opening act wast around 12 and that the Chemical Brother was around 1:30am. Late but what can you do. Let’s just say that by 2am the club was so full of the fake smoke that even if you were standing on the DJ platform you still couldn’t see the DJ’s. There were no announcements, no lighting changes and zero visual cues as to who was spinning. For all we know there was no one spinning – just some music playing, some smoke smoking and the lights lighting.
• By 2:30am we decided to give it up. Pack our VIP tickets, our booze card (oh wait they dont have booze cards and are somewhat confused as to how to explain the process for coming back to get your booze) and our inhaled smoked and head home.

Disappointed? Just slightly. Appalled? More than a little bit.

Avalon needs their over payed developers/management to get actually show up to the office and fix the place before the word of mouth kills it.

One could buy some booze at the 7, hang on the clarke quay bridge and have a similar experience but for a lot less money and attitude.

Anyone know if the chemical brothers actually played last night?

The signal just goes away.

My phone goes from 3G to o to searching to no service. Stays that way for a bit and then the 3g comes back.

I was actually trying to tweet when I took this screenshot – couldn’t even email it to myself.

SingTel used to never give me trouble and I was always bitching at StarHub.

Is anyone listening?