The Yahoo! Youreka campaign has ended and ’somewhat officially’ launch the Yahoo! Malaysia portal. Never mind that they are a decade later than MSN and Google. In the past few months, we’ve been seeing the folks from Yahoo! come down from their offices in Singapore to engage the community of developers and users in Malaysia. It’s great and they have no competition from the other two in winning hearts and minds by meeting Malaysians face-to-face.

But I can’t help feeling like it’s 1999.
The landscape may have changed quite a bit. This time, eyeballs are locked on sticky social media/networking sites, IM chats happen in twitter, email comes through Blackberries and news through RSS readers. If you use Netvibes, you could even get all the above into one dashboard. Why is Yahoo! using aging tech to reach new users. The segment Yahoo! is targeting is not an aging group at all – late teens to 25. Is Yahoo! being arm-twisted to do this by our aging Deputy Education Minister? Or does Malaysia have a third world classification online as well so here’s the best of Yahoo’s third world tech?

I am a paying customer of two of Yahoo!’s services. They also throw great parties, engage the community and give away awesome schwags. I love Yahoo! but they need to do more than just localize a news portal. I don’t remember the last time Yahoo! has announced a new feature or a major product improvement.  Is Yahoo! going forward by going backward? Odd strategy.

Yahoo! Youreka found its winner at a party held at KL Live last night. Semi-finalists who found the elusive tag online, gathered for their final torture, I mean test, to prove their worthiness. They wiggled and pushed their way (as well as pushed JJ to the ground)  in a game of musical chairs to get to the “Sumo” round. Dressed like sumo wrestlers, the pair battled each other to see who’ll be first to form the word Youreka from the jumbled letters. The worthy one went home with a Macbook Air and an iPhone. Congratulations to the winner.

Thanks for the party Yahoo! and welcome to Malaysia.

Innovation is a topic close to my heart. I’ve known, seen or met Malaysians who are innovators and are doing great work outside of Malaysia. I often wonder why they don’t do it here instead and I’ve been told that this country hasn’t encouraged innovation. There are no tax breaks or government support for R&D.

When I was invited to attend MSC’s 12th International Advisory Panel (IAP) Learning Symposium earlier this week, I was excited. The theme for this year was on innovation. Will we finally see the government doing something to promote innovation in Malaysia?

There were two half day tracks running simultaneously. Each track had a panel of speakers with solid track records and experience in driving innovation in education or in business. These gentlemen were also brought together by MSC to be on the advisory board to influence policies that could help the country reach its goals.

The business track, which I attended had on the panel Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Johnity Ongkili, Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (I only just found out that we now have a minister of innovation); Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corporation and President of Microsoft China Research; Christopher Forbes, Vice Chairman of Forbes Publishing Co.; and Dr. John Gage, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, also formerly of Sun Microsystems.

For a detailed account on what each speaker talked about, head over to  Hillary Chan’s write up on CNET Asia. Hillary highlighted an interesting observation. There wasn’t a single Malaysian on that panel. Oh wait, they are all in jail according to Datuk Ongkili. I also noticed there wasn’t a single woman on that panel. Is there no room for women in a knowledge-based economy?

To me, the panelist did not tackle the challenges ahead as clearly as I thought they would. With all due respect, Dr. Zhang presented Microsoft’s roadmap and stressed on their $3 billion R&D commitment outside of the US with a list of cities where research centers are set up. Malaysia is not on that list and there are no short, medium or long term plans to include this country in that roadmap. Datuk Ongkili believes Malaysia isn’t lacking innovators and a lot of them are in prison. With that kind of statistics, we should maybe refocus on prison sourcing next year? Chris Forbes (funny guy, I like him) thinks taking a printed magazine online is innovation but it’s not, that’s evolution. The New York Times is innovating printed news delivery online. Finally we have John Gage (I like him too) who talked about innovating to bring more happiness to the world. People want to buy happy. I like where Gage was heading with that idea. Even if I’m jobless, I guess I would like to be happily jobless. Gage paints a utopia that technology can play a part to bridge the gap but again, little to hold on to as to how we can get from zero to hero.

I was hoping to hear more concrete plans or plans with more common sense. A gentleman I spoke to after the conference told me how Malaysian innovators are not being heard. Instead of an online repository for ideas like myideas.my how about a forum for innovators to post their feedback and opinions? Is the government even interested to hear and fix their pain points? How does an international advisory panel know what to fix or how to help? There is also a lack of recognition for innovation. Could the media have offered some help with a regular column or TV program highlighting innovation in Malaysia? How about an annual Innovation Award?

How about improving our broadband infrastructure? The price companies have to pay for larger pipes is incredible. Surely faster speeds can work in tandem with the government’s efforts in increasing broadband penetration in the country. Why must everyone wait for penetration to reach its target before we can see faster connections? People are increasingly mobile – John Gage also mentioned this. Can the government encourage telcos to eliminate the 2-3GB caps on mobile data plans?  This cap does not help knowledge workers one bit.

So the people have been asked to innovate and pick up speed to compete with the world but is anything being done about the speed bumps all over this roadmap (or lack of one) to an innovation and knowledge-based economy?

Have you noticed what’s different in our second event? Besides having teh tarik instead of beer, we went with Eventbrite to manage  registration. It is a great app for event organizers. The customer support at Eventbrite is excellent. I asked about a paperless option to answer a tweet from @warrentan who prefers not to kill another tree by printing out a ticket. I was told that you can store the 2D barcode (the square one) that is printed on your ticket into a mobile phone. The code can be read by an app on another mobile phone so folks can show that at the venue from now on. Vote Earth!

We had no idea tickets would be snapped up so quickly. The announcement was made on our blog, Facebook page and twitter. Tweets and RTs went out through out the day and all 100 tickets were gone in nine hours. This was definitely faster than Facebook because not everyone is on Facebook yet.

We decided to release another 20 tickets the following Monday for those who missed the first announcement (drop out rate in any event, especially free ones is anywhere between 20-30%).  The registration page on Eventbrite for the extra 20 tickets was opened for only 24 hours. Naturally, not everyone from the first  registration came but 100% of the second registration did.

Like any case study, it’s only good when there’s audience participation. You know how we usually shy away from raising our hands in public so we decided to maximize twitter and asked folks to tweet in their questions with a hashtag — #smcklQ.  A tool from SAP was used to pull in live data into a powerpoint and Ben then quickly groups them into general areas for the panel then specific ones directed to a speaker and finally it was opened to the room where a mic was passed around. There were 23 questions from twitter (not counting retweets) and there were about 3-4 questions from raised hands in the auditorium. The average I’ve seen are 5-8 questions at regular conferences. 

For those who couldn’t make it to the event, the presentations were recorded on video by Integricity and will be uploaded to the blog. Pictures are already up at the Facebook fanpage.

SMCKL meets once a month on the third Thursday of every month. Follow or contact @smckl on twitter for more info.

Was a great night. It had taken 7 days to pull together by essentially 4 people who hadn’t slept much. Most of the planning was coordinated through twitter with updates posted to the hub on posterous. We also had great sponsors, P1/ruumz pushed the message out for us continuously and during the event the twitter community raised the volume so loud, you could barely see any tweets from Malaysia that didn’t come with the #smckl or @smckl0 hashtags

What is SMCKL all about? Read: 10 Interesting Facts About Social Media Club.

The following video was put together with pictures taken by Vernon Chan (@vernieman), Nigel Sia (@nigelais), Reuben Lau (@reubenhot), Christopher @spinzer Tok and David Wang (@blogjunkie)

Niki Cheong, a guy I met on twitter helped me once. I was at a hair salon in Bangsar getting my hair done. It was a Saturday and it’s usually a parking free day in my area so I didn’t think of paying for parking in Bangsar. When my stylist told me he needed more time to finish, he asked if I got another hour on the parking meter. I had not fed the meter at all. I quickly ask on twitter if I could get away with it and Niki replied telling me not to risk it. One of the guys at the salon offered to rush down and feed the meter for me and it was just in time.

Twitter has been an amazing crowdsourcing and networking tool for me. I’ve got help from @LonnieHodge in Guangzhou when I wanted to get from Hong Kong to Shanghai on a budget. @Demonick helped me bring a gadget back from Singapore. And when I was shopping for a netbook, people were sending me links to where I might find the information to help me decide. In return, I do my part to help other people with information and I would meet up with them when they visit KL. I had the honor of meeting @mikechapman recently. Mike was a random stranger on twitter. I use tweetdeck and I have a column to catch all mentions of Malaysia. Late last year, right after the US Presidential election, Mike was in Malaysia and he tweeted about Malaysians loving Obama too. I chuckled, tweeted back and asked if he voted. We started following each other and exchanged tweets. When he came back to KL recently, we met up and had a great time talking and exchanging ideas. These are some of my many adventures.

So when Niki, who is a journalist at The Star, organized a talk on social media for the Public Relations Consulting Association titled “Adventures in Social Media” he invited David Lian and me to be on the discussion panel. David and I were asked to share our experience as active users of social media. The discussion would follow a presentation by Michael Netzley and Niki himself. Micheal Netzley gave a presentation which wasn’t too technical or too basic. Niki did one using Prezi which impressed a few people who haven’t seen prezi before.

The view from the stage

I recognized a few professionals in the audience and I was bracing for tough questions. There were almost 200 people in the room and if I didn’t die from adrenalin poisoning, I thought I would die from the stares if I had no answer to a question. Thankfully the questions were easy.

So my adventures in social media has led to an adventure in speaking on a panel. I wonder what else it will lead me too. All aboard? Let’s go.

Michael Netzley’s presentation. Intro:

Case study #1
Case study #3
Case study #4
Case study #5

Niki’s confessions of a twitter addict
Part 1

Part 2
Part 3

((((Videoblog))))

Niki organized a Poken meetup in Bangsar on Saturday. Of course, everyone came with their Pokens. Then I had a thought, since we got a bunch of geeks together, let’s see what other gadgets they have on them. So I went around the table with the Vado HD. Thank you everyone for sharing what you have.

If this was a group research, here’s my observation:

1. Everyone has at least 1 poken and 1 mobile phone.
2. Most popular phone is Nokia. Only one iPhone owner.
3. Almost everyone has a laptop (wifi ready) or a device that can connect to the internet.
4. And the one with the most gadgets is a girl.

Have I missed anything?

This video wasn’t encoded in HD, btw. My machine has gots no juice. I need a mac (you hear that Santa?).

The second Poken tweetup happened again at the same place (D’lish in Bangsar Village).