- Character -

A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.

Charles H. Spurgeon

* Namecard *

This is good stuff/reference for namecard design ~

http://logodesignerblog.com/creative-business-cards-design-inspiration/


Nice.

Group 1 Crew Walking On The Stars

Ni c e Lyr ic s from Gro up 1

A Paragraph That Explains Life

Nice words from email I received yesterday.


Arthur Ashe, the legendary Wimbledon player was dying of AIDS which he got
due to infected blood he received during a heart surgery in 1983..

From world over, he received letters from his fans, one of which conveyed:
"Why does GOD have to select you for such a bad disease"?

To this Arthur Ashe replied:

"The world over, 50 million children start playing tennis, 5 million learn
to play tennis, 500,000 learn professional tennis, 50,000 come to the
circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach Wimbledon, 4 to semi final, 2
to the finals, when I was holding a cup I never asked GOD 'Why me?'. And
today in pain I should not be asking GOD 'Why me?' "

"Happiness keeps you Sweet,
Trials keep you Strong,
Sorrow keeps you Human,
Failure keeps you humble and Success keeps you glowing,
But only Faith & Attitude Keeps you going..."

THAT'S LIFE.

Food & Body

Here's another proposed artwork created for Rakuichi Restaurant.It's still in the progress.Planned to be produced in sg/china.hopefully.

New London Bus

The Mayor of London unveiled the design for the New Bus for London on 17 May 2010. Find out more about its revolutionary design at http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/transport/new-bus-london

It's Monday ~

“We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

From articles - onemilliontee project

and check out our twitter as well ~

Friday ~

In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he's tired. Everyone is. That's not the point. The point is to run.

From Seth Godin's blog

Sustainable Development

‘Sustainable development’ is jargon commonly used by development experts. But what does it really mean? The most widely used definition appeared in the 1987 Brundtland Report Our Common Future, which was endorsed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio: ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

www.un.org/esa/sustdev/index.html

There are 5 steps of ‘capital’ we can exploit for society’s benefit. We need to nurture all of them and ensure that they are used prudently and effectively:

Natural capital is the basis of life on earth. It includes renewable and non-renewable resources.

Human capital consists of people’s health, their well-being, their knowledge and skills, their creativity, and their motivation to actively make things better. Education, training, and sharing of ideas all help build human capital.

Social capital consists of those institutions that enable people to work together in common cause, including families, communities, businesses, trade unions, schools, and voluntary organizations.

Manufactured capital includes tools, machines, and buildings, which are all needed for production. Invention and advances in technology extend the impact of manufactured capital.

Financial capital is the money needed to make things happen, including investment funds, grants, loans, and microcredit.

God has a purpose behind every problem.

He uses circumstances to develop our character.

In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible. The reason is obvious: You face circumstances 24 hours a day.

Jesus warned us that we would have problems in the world. No one is immune to pain or insulated from suffering, and no one gets to skate through life problem-free. Life is a series of problems. Everytime you solve one, another is waiting to take its place. Not all of them are big, but all are significant in God’s growth process for you. Peter assures us that problems are normal, saying,” Don’t be bewildered or surprised when you go through the fiery trials ahead, for this is no strange, unusual thing that is going to happen to you.”

God uses problems to draw you closer to himself. The Bible says,”The Lord is close to the brokenhearted;he rescues those who are crushed in spirit.” Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days-when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when you’re out of options, when the pain is great-and you turn to God alone. It is during suffering that we learn to pray our most authentic, heartfelt,honest-to-God prayers. When we’re in pain, we don’t have the energy for superficial prayers.

Joni Eareckson Tada notes,” When life is rosy, we may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him, But only in suffering will we know Jesus.”

We learn things about God in suffering that we can’t learn any other way.

Others ~

Some other design for the t-shirts ~

Baskerville

Recently I did little experiment with two nice typefaces. One is G-unit. Another is Baskerville. Others will be uploaded once done :)

Kuroshio Sea

I was amazed on this aquarium in Japan. So I post them to share :D

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Honda - Let It Shine ~

Honda Insight - Let It Shine from Honda on Vimeo.

Last Part - Noah Kagan

Noah’s advice for people who want to work on something and are still looking for ideas is to make assumptions about the next 6 months. Keep on the look out for ideas, and it is not bad to have something that works regionally. It is better to be the big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond, just make sure you create an idea that can be moved from pond to pond

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'Is that YKK on ur jeans zipper?' - (FYI, YKK is world largest zipper manufacturer) - Noah Kagan




this is how AMAZING emerging technology is.

Echelon 2010 Part V

Product Management Keynote

An important questions, can Singapore be a Global Web hub? The verdict: No. Reasons:
* The talent pool in Singapore is too small
* Funding is too easy and focused on locals
* Startups need to start local and go global ( Singapore is too small!)

Some predictions:
* Emerging markets will begin exporting
* Follow the money, especially as users are crossing borders
* International partners may grow in importance

This talk definitely gives new perspective to local startups on how they should be operating and what market they will be able to succeed in. Singapore is a good place to startup, but running a business? Lets look global. - articles were taken from e27 Blog since they're really having a bunch of complete articles on their blog :)

I'll just add up some stuff here :
* This is a feed of the best startup news - http://twitter.com/StartupDigest - http://thestartupdigest.com/

* Office Space - interesting movie which plot summary can be viewed here

Product Management 101 – What Makes a Product Manager Tick
Michael Smith helped marked a point when to hire a product manager, it's when there is ROI (Return on Investment) on the product.

How NOT to Fail-Vinod Nair, Catapult Ventures - focus on sms marketing
Some advise here:
* Figuring out how to monetize your business while building a product
* Start early (not having ext. funding keeps the pressure to make early profit)
* Be lean & mean
* Get Traffic
* Build relationship
* GTFO & Sell! - get relationship with customers

and remember to keep it simple.

Echelon 2010 Part IV

As a closing session on day 1, a startup launchpad were presented by few start-ups such as
Pandaform
MyCube
Maxus Media
Scraplr
Stream Media
zelrealm
Time Voyager
FlickEvents
TangoFX
Foound

During the pitching session, things to be noted, you need to explain what is your product difference from your competitors, not only the features, but also the specific demographic profile.

Day 2
Started with presentation by Bret Terrill, Social Gaming Analyst and Blogger, he is the senior director of corporate development at Zynga, the largest and most popular social game network in the world.

"It is hard to give up on your own ideas but you should not be so in love with your own ideas that you cannot change. However, it is still important to maintain a long term vision that guides you along to ensure that progress is made."

Continue to the panel discussion, some points I've taken here :
* Eveyrything can be socialize in some points, from games, email, messenger, facebook,etc
* Social games is so much powerful that it carries social graphs anywhere with you
* People buy emotions, experience, from your product
* Western-made games will be more successful on Facebook because of their culture Asian developed games may have to modify their content to appeal more to the global crowd. Both Asian and Western social games try to achieve the same goal through different angles. It seems like Asian developers will be able to succeed, once they are able to identify what global-content is for their games
* Non-paying users, who make up the base of the social gaming community, are still important to developers as they are able to pull in paying-users with the buzz they create
* The future of social gaming on Facebook will be, 3D gaming
* The main difference between the West and East is that innovation happens in the East, not in the West. West only has Facebook and they think that that’s all. In the East, there are many online social networks sprouting up like Mixi and RenRen that provides a lot of opportunities for social gaming. - Bret

One last stuff to share- Text-based games like Mafia Wars doesn't need Flash -

Echelon 2010 Part III

During the panel Discussion: Startup 2.0 Silicon Valley Story, the panels were discussing a topic related to startup incubators when a lady told the panels that incubators in Arizona is financed by government, not like in SV (during Q&A).

FYI, A business incubator is a system offering support for start-up businesses or recently founded ones. The facilities it offers go from financing, inexpensive office space, various business services (such as secretarial assistance) to management advice and support.

About Incubator in Arizona

While you can't do it alone, VC can actually accelerate your business. - Saeed Amidi (President&CEO at Plug and Play Tech Center)

Another talk by Gen Kanai, Director of Asia Business Development at Mozilla - http://blog.mozilla.org/gen/

During this case study session, he shared some ideas eg. : goo, a search engine which 15% of the profit goes to environmental-related NGO, pencil project, a sketching & prototyping app. built as an add-ons to Firefox

and for the latest Firefox 4.0, it's going to be fast: making Firefox super-duper fast, powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond), empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience. - we're going to be able to download and use the add-ons w/o having to restart the browser! You can visit the blog here.

Oh and he shared one of interesting stuff here :D

Free Art & Technology Overview from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

As NGO, Mozilla doesn't compete in a traditional manner but rather developing more on their existing features.

Echelon 2010 Part II

-During Panel Discussion : Startup 2.0-

The keynote presentation was started by Dave McClure (@davemcclure). Has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd, he shared a story whereby such an environment provides a rich learning-ground for up-and-coming internet startups and that a Silicon Valley-like model can exist elsewhere, given the advancement of the internet and the lower cost of development, and it is possible to grow a successful business any where in the world with reasonable internet connection, a team who knows what they are doing and some angel funding. 'At Silicon Valley, we have a willingness to believe, (IOW)we're crazy!'

Some points here from his sharing are:

* It's not about a product, forget about it, it's about connecting to the customers. Talk to them, know what they do, what they like and what's their reaction. Design & Marketing are most important than engineer.

* Keep as lean startup : less feature, get more feedback
focus on user experience
keep it simple + actionable
fast, frequent iteration
measure conversion

* Product development is circular
It doesn't go linear, but rather a circular (ideas-build-code-measure-data-learn-back to ideas)

* Marketing/Sales must keep their high volume, low cost, high conversion
* Most importantly, prioritize the users(acquisition and referral), feature(activation and retention), and lastly money (revenue)

Once, we have made a profit, we're no longer a startup .

Echelon 2010 Part I

For the past two days (1st n 2nd June),I had an opportunity to come for Echelon 2010 @Matrix, Biopolis, Sg. It was such an amazing event and I was lucky to get a free ticket from Sixrocket! Thanks so much, guys! :)

For those of you who don't know what is sixrocket, it's a new platform that not only allows each talent to build a free online designer-portfolio/profile/resume system that can do them proud, but also enables creative recruiters to visually present themselves with their own profiles for the first time, allowing both sides to woo each other in a way never before possible. To get to know them better, you can visit their site http://sixrocket.com/ and they're going to expand in other countries as well, how cool is that ! ~

Echelon 2010 (formerly known as unConference Singapore)brings together the top brass of the web technology industry from various parts of the startup eco-system to facilitate discussion on the hot topics in the web startup scene.

You can check out their blog here http://www.e27.sg/blog/. Surprisingly, they cover almost everything, from the talks, panel discussion, idea presentation from startups, audio and even videos streaming!

I'll share some info about the event on the next post.

J.O.Y - Bmw Asia's 1st Interactive 3D Building Projection

Joy is bmw
Did you take joy to your work today ?
Let joy be your gps
Joy is treating mondays as you do fridays
Work, work, work
Only if it brings you joy, joy, joy
Joy is success
Joy is the future
is efficient dynamics

Joy is BMW

Using building projections, BMW promotes themselves by transforming busy office buildings in Singapore from a symbol of work, into a symbol of Joy.

June 1, 2010

Will update and post Echelon 2010 event soon ~