Striped:Shirt

When we arrived at Frujch for Pecha Kucha, you can sense a totally different atmosphere than usual. Frujch was filled with professionals from the creative industry (and there were a few students like me). Before the presentations even started, you can already sense their creativity through the chatter, their outfits and of course the plastic eye-glasses with the funky hair.

Overall, the presentations that night were entertaining (except for a couple) and informative. My favorite from the night was the presentation by Graham Perkins, a consultant, who talked about creativity and the education system. He presented first about a topic that was relevant to the audience. More importantly, he was the only one that stuck to the 20X20 format of Pecha Kucha. Like the way it should be done, he timed his slides to transition every 20 seconds and he adapted what he was going to say to that constraint. I was impressed with the design of his slides so I went to Google him and found out that his career was surrounded with creativity from Adobe down to MTV Asia. Kudos to Graham for presenting Pecha Kucha the right way.

HJGHER somewhat followed the 20×20 format but I’m not sure if each slide lasted 20 seconds. I’ve to review that from the video that I took. They presented a well-written short story accompanied by photographs which made it look like a semi-short film. It was probably my second favorite and it was a nice way to end the night as they presented last.

Andrew Lo from MTV Asia was the most entertaining that night because of his personality and his courage to present the reasons why he hates MTV. Although I think that he should have stopped after his last point and chose not to present about MTV’s campaigns because it completely went off topic and he kinda lost the audience then. (Oh yeah! When I first saw this guy, I thought he looked really familiar. Found out later that he was the guy behind the Spot the VJ campaign which I saw the making of on TV.)

Steve Lawler’s (not the DJ) was visually stimulating. He’s a very talented guy and it was nice to learn about the inspirations behind his work. He fascination with Stanley Kubrick is something worth remembering.

The rest of the presentations were just alright. I felt that they were presenting too much about themselves and their work. Even though Pecha Kucha Nights let you present on any topic, it would be nice to watch a presentation and learn something new. Not something that we can just read off the About page on their website. This is why Graham Perkins was the best of the night: everyone in the audience listened to “ideas worth spreading”. (His presentations reminded me of TED Talks, which he made several references to.)

To sum it up, the first Pecha Kucha Night Singapore was a success! Can’t wait for the next one. I’ve got all the presentations on this Kyte channel. Enjoy!

My heart skipped a beat when I read a post by Daryl from Unique-Frequency that there was going to be a Pecha Kucha Night: Singapore. I’ve always been a fan of creative presentations and the different styles you can experiment with. I first learned about Pecha Kucha through the presentation guru, Garr Reynolds. You can read his post on Pecha Kucha vis his blog, Presentation Zen. According to Garr:

“The Pecha Kucha method of presentation design and delivery is very simple. You must use 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds, as you tell your story. That’s 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Slides advance automatically and when you’re done you’re done. That’s it.”

What got me thinking initially was how or who initiated the first ever Pecha Kucha Night here in Singapore. I learned from Daryl’s post that it’s Peiling, a fellow SMU student, who’s behind this event. She’s been working really hard for this night and they now have good sponsors and a handful of speakers from different industries. (Peiling, if you read this, I just wanted to ask you why you decided to start Pecha Kucha Night in Singapore? and who are the other people behind the event helping you out?) UPDATE: After last night, I found out that it’s a group project for one of Michael Netzley’s classes in SMU.

Here are some of the speakers for tomorrow night:

• Andrew Lo, Creative Director (on-air promotion, multi-platform content & telco digital) of MTV Asia
• Holman Chin, General Manager of Viscion Media
• Keshav, Free Lance photographer (SMU student)
• Mun Hon - engineer by day, soap maker by night!
• Steve Lawler, creative director @ Kult (kult.com.sg)
• Mark Wee, architect @ Annex-A (annex-a.com.sg)
• Justin & Jerry, designers, HJGHER (hjgher.com)
• Graham Perkins, Consultant

Be sure to check out their Facebook event page for more info.

I’m really looking forward to the presentations tomorrow night. It’s going to be a diverse group of people attending so it’s going to be interesting to see what topics they present on.

Do check back for my review of Pecha Kucha Night Singapore.

Daryl Tay from Unique-Frequency has been busy organizing Social Media Breakfast: Singapore for the past few weeks. Participants will finally be able to realize all of the effort that has been put into this event tomorrow. In Daryl’s words, SMB is “mainly for networking and meeting like-minded people who are into the social media space“. Here’s a video trailer that Daryl and Sheylara worked on:

The SMB: Singapore idea was initiated by Derrick Kwa, and both Daryl and himself setup two basic rules for the event:

1. Everyone’s equal. When it comes to Social Media Breakfast, there’s no difference if you’re a CEO or a student. Everyone has something of value to contribute and everyone should be treated that way
2. Law of Two Feet applies. If a particular conversation or discussion is not getting you what you want, feel free to move on.

I’m not really sure what will happen during the breakfast. I had a chat with one of the organizers, Nabilah, earlier and we both agreed that we’ll have to wait and see until tomorrow morning to see what comes out of this event.

Kudos to Daryl and the gang for organizing SMB: Singapore! See you all tomorrow!

It was on the news last night on TV and TODAYonline posted the same info on their site today. Basically, it says that the iPhone ‘may finally launch’ here in September this year and it will be Singtel carrying one of the most anticipated mobile phones.

I doubt how accurate the sources are - “industry sources” and “a local vendor who works closely with Apple associates in the United State”. If @wanidakok, an Apple employee here in Singapore, even does not know any details, how can outside sources find out? Apple is known to be secretive with its product launches and this may just be one of those ‘leaks’ that usually happens online.

For it to be on the news, there must have been a credible source but they don’t sound as convincing as most people would’ve liked. I can safely say that the iPhone should be coming in the near future given that their currently looking for a local iPhone Buyer and Planner plus the announcement on the news. The details on the service provider and the pricing are still shaky.

Meanwhile, follow the conversation here in HardwareZone as the locals discuss the news announcement last night.

I was looking for jobs online and went to search for openings in Apple Singapore and this is what I found:

The Apple COO was quoted in ars technica saying that “We will enter Asia with the iPhone in 2008…”, which then adds a little more credibility to the job opening found online. It’s going to be interesting how the iPhone will be sold here because I think the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) prevents the locking of handsets to a particular service provider. So far, I know that this has happened in France where there are laws prohibiting a mobile phone to be bundled with a specific mobile service provider. Orange is the exclusive distributor of the iPhone in France however they also sell an unlocked version of the phone at a higher price according to PC World.

If Starhub, Singtel or M1 do not get exclusive rights to the iPhone then we should expect it to be unreasonably expensive given it 1.0 state. Hopefully, Starhub (who I am subscribed to) ends up getting the same arrangement as Orange in France where they can sell both the locked and unlocked versions of the iPhone. (After which, we’d see a surge in the users moving from Singtel to Starhub. hah!)

It’s too early to tell but “iPhone Planner/Buyer” jobs does seem intriguing. Now with the iPhone SDK out, and WWDC 08 happening in June, there’s no better time to buy the phone that revolutionized the mobile phone industry.

As for now, people here in Singapore are stuck with iPhone-Singapore.com which sells it at around S$1000. For further information, join the conversations here and here.

In the meantime, I’ll stick with my Sony Ericsson which is about 2 months old.

My Filipino friends and I shoot hoops every Sunday at school to destress. The last Sunday that we played, I decided to take a video of some of the plays and passed it over to Kevin for editing (on his newly purchased MacBook Pro). Check it out:

(I have not posted much since I got back from the trip since I am still on a holiday mood. All my online activity has stopped - I think I have around 2000+ unread RSS feeds. Should I hit the “Mark All as Read” button or should I not?)

Check out this video by Vincent, who’s an undergrad like me in the Singapore Management University. It’s a video to support Singapore’s bid to host the Youth Olympic Games in 2010.

Isn’t that cool? I first saw one of his videos a couple of years ago for a school project and I was really impressed. It was amateurishly-professionally done, if that makes any sense. I’ve been a fan of his ever since.

Vincent’s productions are way better than what I see on local TV. He’s got the right angle, music and style for every video that he shoots and produces.

I can’t wait to see him do bigger projects.