TEDx MIT Club NUS Singapore

Sitting in the TEDx MIT Club NUS Singapore event, the first of its kind under the TEDx banner.

Wiki info here: http://tedxmitcs.pbworks.com/

Speakers are:

• Jeff Murphy of Singapore Pump Room

Introduction about, beer, the history of beer, the gods of beer and the catholic church of beer.

• Beer is carbon neutral
• Its about hand crafting beer, and not mass produced beer. The difference is IKEA vs a hand made furniture artist. IKEA makes industrialized, boring stuff, while your hand made furniture artist does what exactly you need and adds the craftsmanship to it.
• Beer is going green
• Some places to get crafted beer , place name (famous beer type) – brewerkz (oatmean stout), red dot (Lime Wheat / Monster Green), Archipelago (Samui), Brotzeit – VivoCity, Charlie’s corner – Changi Village
• Craft beer is a social lubricant
• And be responsible, don’t be a binge drinker.

The talk opened the eye to some new terms about beer, lager and some new places to sample some craft beer.

Next up, is SIR Ken Robinson’s talk on how schools kill creativity – its one of the more inspiring talks I have seen through the TED Channel – you can watch it here:

Sitting in the TEDx MIT Club NUS Singapore event, the first of its kind under the TEDx banner.

Wiki info here: http://tedxmitcs.pbworks.com/

Stockholm Syndrome: Nah, not bad after all

I am officially done with my seventh semester in NUS (although grades present a whole new meaning for the word “official”), and its been quite interesting 4 months – getting back to old friends, making new friends, trying to balance work and studies, roaming around in the streets of Clarke Quay – its not so bad to be in Singapore after all, quite contrary to what I felt when I took the flight out of Stockholm. The stress level is definitely higher in this life style compared to the European one, and the people are little bit caught in the details, yet I think if one can hold on and continue to do cool things, the place offers a lot of interesting things for you.  

The people who I met and spent time with in Stockholm have been the highlight of my whole overseas experience, and I realize that finding the right groups of people in whatever settings can still kick things in the head, and make you enjoy the present. Cliche, but true, so true that its been an amazing 100 odd days so far, catching up with the crowd, and finding new things to do. 

Practical Branding and Marketing

At the practical insights into branding and marketing event organized by NOC Alumni @ China One. The Facebook Page for this event can be found here.  The speakers for the evening are Andrew Wee who is going to focus on internet marketing techniques; Jacky Tai on Branding and Kelvin Lim on Guerilla Marketing. 

Bizbuzz – case study evaluation

Bizbuzz is a competition organized by the students from National University of Singapore (NUS) in Silicon Valley, Bio Valley, Shanghai & Stockholm. It is a case study based competition where each team is given a case study which needs to be analyzed and presented to the jury in Stanford. The rules are pretty simple & each team needs to have atleast a local student (from KTH, Stanford, Wharton & Fudan) along with the folks from Singapore.

Myself, Bernice & Serdar Temiz are pairing up to form a team. The competition is on this Saturday and the case study is already out. It is a very interesting case on a Web 2.0 based e-Commerce company in Palo Alto called Zazzle. They allow users to choose / design their merchandise which will be shipped within a day. As you might have guessed, it is pretty much only in the US and so I have never tried it before. But in general, I think I need to choose / try my dress before I buy and hence I am not a great fan of e-commerce clothing. At the same time, I think there are millions if not billions who love this & are hooked onto such stuff. Zazzle is not just a user generated e-commerce store but also allows one to make money by putting up designs in their market place – something like on demand merchandising combined with selling.

I have just read some articles about their revenue sharing agreement with MySpace & Facebook but not actually managed to find what is the question / issue to be addressed. Hopefully I get this done by tomorrow in time for Saturday’s presentation.