incub3.org

This may be somewhat old news that has been sitting on my backburner but it rates a mention.

EBay’s revenues fell 7% to $2.04 billion in 2008. This meant that the company’s earnings yielded 41 cents per share, lower than 2007 but beating Wall Street’s estimates of 39 cents per share.

The global slowdown has eBay execs worrying their pants off. Not only is the company spending more on marketing while laying off workers, it also sold off bookmarking site Stumbleupon back to its founders which it bought in 2007 for $75 million. Now eBay has also decided to divest its ownership stake in Skype by listing the company in 2010.

Dealbook states that eBay has been involved in 69 deals over the years worth a total of $12.6 billion. Of those 69, eBay was buyer in 57 of them. Some, such as its acquisition of Paypal for $1.4 billion made excellent sense, while it now seems apparent that others did not.

Dealbook’s graph shows that eBay’s shopping spree at the time of the 2001 recession served it in good stead, yielding progressively higher share prices until this effect tapered off in 2005. After that, successive increases in acquisitions didn’t do its share price any good.

Despite all this doom and gloom, eBay recently acquired a controlling stake in South Korea’s largest auction site GMarket for $1.2 billion. GMarket is an aggressive company in its own right as well, but who can resist the overtures of the internet’s retail behemoth. GMarket is serving Singapore and has been endorsed by Yahoo to become the spiritual successor of the now-defunct Yahoo Auctions.

It now looks  as thought eBay is regaining its focus and buying only what it needs, rather than what it wants. That’s excellent advice for any shopper.

Aggregating feedback to rank content according to popularity isn’t a new idea. Digg, delicious and reddit are just a few of the most popular ranking websites. It seems only natural that the next step in the evolution of website rankings should be personalized rankings.

If this trend passed you by, don’t fret. Its still early days. The more interesting startups out there that utilize this concept of personalized content ranking are still in beta, or even alpha-testing stages. My6sense is a little iPhone app or Firefox add-on that learns your preferences as you use its RSS reader/aggregator. It then serves you the most relevant snippets from the sea of information that you use daily.

Taking a slightly different tack is Headup. Headup’s Firefox add-on highlights keywords from websites that you view. When you hover over these keywords, the connections that exist between say, your musical tastes and that of your friends is shown, as well as any musicians that you may also like. This allows you to view content that is most interesting to you and to see the connections between yourself and your social circle.

My6sense’s strength lies in its ease of use. Its creators claim that you don’t need to even choose any preferences or settings. All you have to do is surf as you normally would, and the add-on’s algorithm will learn your preferences. Its definitely a great help to those who need a hand dealing with the deluge of information that we are fed daily. Headup on the other hand, helps users make connections where previously there were none. You might learn, through Headup, that your strait-laced, no-nonsense schoolteacher buddy is actually a great fan of Guns&Roses, or you may discover the links between Guns&Roses, Deep Purple and Aerosmith.

I would personally love to see a combination of both services in one package, but that is an entrepreneurial opportunity for another day.

When a new technology that impacts the lives of many is first introduced to the world, it is common that there will be groups that fall through the cracks and miss out on the revolution. Lets call this the fish that got away, after fish that slip through the net.

Everything from the MacBook Air, the ASUS Eee PC, to Coke Light, SUVs, and even Twitter, were made to satisfy the needs of customers who were underserved by the mainstream product offering. There are always fish that fall through the net, when a new innovation is introduced to the world. Let me share 2 examples.

The latest group to illustrate this is the auntie community. In Singapore colloquially referred to as “tai-tais”. The aunt who doted on you as a child, who showered love on you because she didn’t have any of her own. They are now proudly served by Savvyauntie.com. Not usually considered a significant enough group to have dedicated websites, this is  changing.

Everybody has a friend or 2 who only uses their mobile for the most basic purposes. Anything more than calls and text messaging might as well be attaching a GPS unit to a tribesman’s lionskin headdress. Happy provides prepaid calls and sms cheaper than any telco, making it a dream come true for anyone with an aversion to hype and gimmicks.

The times when the only people that mattered on the internet were young, pimply, english-speaking males with a penchant for technology are gone. What other group now underserved, undervalued and under the radar do you think will be the fish that we catch when we cast our nets again?

Questions without answers are puzzling, and answers without questions are just baffling.

What then is one to make of modern search engines, which provide us with the answers to a nearly infinite catalogue of questions, scattered across the vastness of cyberspace?

Stephen Wolfram thinks he has the answer to our confusion. In his company blog, he announces the imminent arrival of the world’s first “answer engine”. Several pundits have given the demo of this world first a thumbs up, even saying it could be as important as google.

I think this is a fascinating development. Wolfram is the brilliant, if somewhat egocentric child prodigy who graduated from Cal Tech and went on to create the phenomenally successful Mathematica software now so common in schools. There is an incredible amount of promise behind Wolfram Alpha, and backed by the brilliance and financial muscle of Wolfram’s team, there is a lot of room for experimentation and error. I’m just cautious about Wolfram Alpha turning out to be another Quantum porn engine.

I read a thought-provoking article today on The Register. There is a school of thought that says you don’t have to be first in anything as being early isn’t the same as being the best. This point was made by Ming at the inaugural Incub3 talk. Andrew Orlowski makes the same point in his piece on Apple, linked above. Apple, by not being the first to the smartphone game, was able to identify and attack weaknesses in the way business was done in this field. These weaknesses are ruthlessly exposed and condemned in satisfying fashion by Brendon McLean in his vicious article.

The most accurate description of the mobile industry’s failings as a whole is that mobile handset manufacturers forgot that they were making phones for consumers, and not corporate executives from monolithic telcos resistant to change and innovation, except where it padded their wallets and bottomline. When you don’t serve your customer, you can and will lose their business, and dollars.

Even with a product as great as the iPhone, it was no foregone conclusion that Apple would make it in the smartphone business. For instance, the first generation iPhone had no 3G, no Wi-Fi, you couldn’t forward messages, and most annoyingly, there was no “copy-paste” function. Yet, even with these glaring omissions, Apple had a glorious winner on its hands. Even with tying itself to selected telcos, Apple managed to outsell many established brands.

I’m not going to join my iPhone-owning buddies in lauding the genius of Apple, I don’t even own one, but I can’t deny that its really instructive to ponder the success that is the Apple iPhone.

Much as I’d hate to admit it, the incessant buzz of the people around me, looking for their first job, has started to get to me.

The most popular job sites in Singapore are Jobstreet and JobsDB. I attended a JobsDB fair over the weekend and I was left feeling very unimpressed. It wasn’t any deficiency with organization or execution. The fair was managed exceptionally well. It was that exhibitors seemed to be from broadly 4 categories, namely insurance agencies, real estate agencies, educational institutions and government institutions, none of which interested me.

I came across Plaxo jobs while cleaning up my bookmarks today. It was well described in this Wired blog article. Imagine if you could leverage on your entire facebook contact list to search for a job, that in essence is the promise of Plaxo. It’s a really neat idea. I think it would help a lot for people to know a little about the social circle of the people they are hiring, or know where a job opportunity is coming from within their social circle. The social nature of the job search could also improve your chances of finding employment as your friends can be expected to help in whatever small way they can to refer you to the right job.

Another interesting site I’ve unearthed is philes. Again, tip to Wired. Wired’s article puts it succinctly. Jobaphiles is an “ebay for jobs” where potential employees can bid (lower) for a job compared to their peers. I think the idea will have limited traction in industries where salary levels aren’t very flexible. For example, most banks will pay standard remuneration packages that aren’t affected much by a candidate’s desired pay. However, in areas where contract work is concerned, this idea is a clear winner. The question of how successful it will be then becomes a question of how many short-term contract jobs are there in a recessionary environment.

Anyway these are interesting questions to ponder, but I’ve got to start submitting my own resumes now, so please excuse me.

Ladies & Gentlemen we have an announcement to make. After weeks of begging, pleading, cajoling and threats of virtual violence, we’ve managed to invite the two founders of Nuffnang to speak at our inaugural talk.

The two gentlemen are (in alphabetical order): Cheo Ming Shen (Boss Ming) & Timothy Tiah (Boss Stewie). Both these fine gentlemen will be coming over to the University Hall auditorium @ NUS on the 4th of March (Wed). The talk itself will take place from 7pm till an estimated 830-9pm.

For the uninitiated, Nuffnang is as they say, Asia Pacific’s first blog advertising community. It is also a company that grew its user base from 300 to 70,000 in under 2 years. It currently has operations in 4 countries (Aus/M’sia/Phi/Sg) and counts such blogosphere luminaries as Kennysia, Xiaxue, Jeffooi and Dawn Yang among its members. Sometimes, learning about the existence of such a company feels like discovering life on Mars. The odds are stacked against it and the very laws of nature must have been broken.

Are there enough famous bloggers to support this industry? How did they avoid getting crushed by Google Adwords? Can blog ads be as profitable as ads on regular webpages? Do that many people from Singapore, Malaysia or the Philippines actually click on banner ads? Is e-commerce secure enough for advertisers to make money?

All these questions and more can finally be answered.

If you’d like to attend please click here to REGISTER.

We only have 100 places available as the venue is small. We sacrificed seat quantity for ambience. It’ll be great! see you there

Sorry first of all that the first post of 2009 took so long in coming.
Some say that 2009 is the year of hope and change. After all, the much feared global financial system collapse did not materialize, the Middle-East , though not yet at a final solution, was at a tentative peace (at the turn of the year). George Bush was going to finish his term. All signs pointed towards a potentially good year. That was, alas, a vain hope.

Even in an industry as fueled by hope and optimism as web-based start-ups, a new search engine was always pushing the envelope. Murphy’s law states that what can go wrong, will go wrong. I can illustrate this simply by raising an example of a good idea that went badly. “Cuil”, a search engine loudly and widely touted as the google-killer, was unfortunately and very quickly brought to an ignoble death by *drumroll pls* porn.

Cuil started with a bang, attracting heavy media attention from the start. It helps if your own grandiose press release blatantly plays up your clear superiority at every single opportunity This media goodwill quickly evaporated though as journ0-bloggers and users alike discovered its shortcomings.

So forgive me for the pessimism but my 2009 is starting on a note of caution. Perhaps its best once in a while to sound a note of caution, so that we can all seek out sure footing for our endeavours as we embark on a brand new year. Good luck everyone.