Ben Blogs

I will be attending this conference from the 15th – 17th March 2011 and I am pretty excited about it!

I am looking forward to the workshop facilitated by Alex Hunter, former Head of Online Marketing  for the Virgin Group.

Live tweeting @benblogs

More information of the conference and the speakers here.

When I was a kid  I would always ask myself what super power I wanted if some genie offered me a choice.

I obsessed over the answer because I knew I had only one chance and I wanted to pick the best possible one.I had fancy ones like flying, super human strength, running at the speed of light, magnetism etc

But I knew I didn’t want something that would make me stand out. I didn’t want the government to lock me up in a cell and do test on me for the rest of my life. So it had to something discreet, yet beneficial.

As I grew older the powers I wanted kept changing. Then, it jumped back and forth between these 3.

1. The ability to read minds

Reading minds has always been my first choice. For some reason, I like to know what goes on in peoples mind and what makes them tick. Which prompted me to question my choice of career. Should I have studied Psychology instead?

2. The ability to see through things

Wanting the power of seeing through things comes and goes. I mean, the only reason why I think its so good is so that I can use it in the casino. Obviously it can also be used for other interesting scenarios.  *wink*

3. Teleportation

I have this love hate affair with teleportation. On one hand I think it would be just awesome to go any place I wish in a blink of an eye. Like how Hayden Christensen does it in Jumper. Rome today, Japan tomorrow. But then I would have to be all secretive and shit. I wouldn’t know if I could trust anyone enough to bring them on my trips. What if the word got out and some terrorist captures my family so that I work for them. Hiding their leaders, teleporting them away from danger.

So yeah, I think I will just stick to mind reading.

What powers did you wish you had?

I feel excited that these books are finally out.

Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions by Guy Kawasaki

Poke The Box by Seth Godin

I really respect what these guys have to say and have been following them closely in the past year. I have read Gary’s Crush It! and a few of Seth’s books. Skimmed through the Art of Start by Guy. It is really the first time that I have followed a 3 book launches so closely, buying into the hype haha!

Interesting though. Watching them promote it and reading various reviews that are slowly popping up one by one across the web.

Just be reading the descriptions, I have a feeling that the ideas presented will somehow gel together very well.

I haven’t purchased anything from Amazon before. Perhaps it’s time for me to break my virginity.

I have been meaning to get  car for sometime now.

Nothing fancy. Something that gets me from point A to point B.

Having said that, isn’t life really about getting from point A to point B?

Point A – Birth

Point B – Death

I often pose this question rhetorically at people just for fun.

“What is the point of living if we all are going to die anyway?”

I think it annoys some people that there is a slight possibility that whatever you work for, all the struggles and sacrifices you make in life, are all for nothing.

But of course, depending on your culture, religions or beliefs we all find a way to make this work.

We all find a purpose in life. A reason to keep living.

I do think about this every now and then. But not that often. I would go crazy. After much deliberation I have settled for “to leave a legacy”

Notice I said “settled”. Oh well.

Whats yours?

Someone posed this question somewhere and I got to thinking.

I can’t remember when mine was.

But I guess kindness is pretty subjective. I mean, I opened the door for the tea lady this morning. Would that be considered? Sounds pretty kind to me.

The topic of  ”random” has always been of interest to me.

The definition of random - “Having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective”

I think the first time I read up about randomness in detail was when Nicolas Cage talked about it in his movie Knowing. As a professor of of astrophysics, he raised the question of “randomness vs determination”

Randomness says that whatever happens is totally random and that it’s all simply coincidence. The fact that we exist is the result of a complex string of chemical accidents.

On the flipside we have Determinism which simple means that all occurrences in nature are decided by preceding events or natural laws. Basically saying that every event can be traced back to another event or set of events.

I don’t really want to go too deep into this subject but  I read this post yesterday that talks about a “The Pattern-Seeking Fallacy”

It is definitely and interesting read. It talks about how we so often seek for a pattern in things and make it sound like it actually means something. Football does this alot.

“Scored in 8 out of 9 games”

“Unbeaten in the last 6 matches”

It sounds great, but does it really prove anything?

I love this experiment that the author points out.

Even a fair coin appears unfair if you’re Pattern-Seeking

The fallacy is clearer when you look at an extreme yet accurate analogy.

I’m running an experiment to test whether a certain coin is biased. During one “trial” I’ll flip the coin 10 times and count how often it comes up heads. 5 heads out of 10 would suggest a fair coin; so would 6 or even 7, due to the usual random variations.

What if I get 10 heads in a row? Well a fair coin could exhibit that behavior, but it would be rare — a 1 in 1024 event. So if my experiment consists of just one trial and I get 10 heads, the coin is suspect.

But suppose I did a lot of trials, like 1000. A fair coin should still come up heads 3-7 times per trial, but every once in a while it will come up 9 or 10 times. Those events are rare, but I’m flipping so much that rare events will naturally occur. In fact, in 1000 trials there’s a 62% chance that I’ll see 10 heads at least once.

Wow 62% chance is pretty high! But if you think this is not doable. Ask Darren Brown. Apparently he flipped the coin for 9 hours to achieve the desired outcome.

I can’t embed the video so you’ve got to check it out here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1uJD1O3L08

Facebook just rolled out another new change.

Now when you click on the “Like” Button, a picture and a short description will be published on your wall.

It’s very much the same as how “Share” works though I think “Share” won’t go away just yet.

Afterall, you do get to write a short personal note if you wish. With “Like” you can’t do that.

There is no doubt that 3rd party publishers will see a small gain in traffic when readers “Like” content. I am very interested to see how this unfolds!

Finally back after being “dead” sick for 3 days. Spent most of my time on my bed sleeping, trying to sleep, thinking about sleeping and dreaming.

Anyway, I came across something interesting.

Back when Facebook just started, the were actually called ‘thefacebook’ (for those of you who have watched The Social Network, you probably already know this)

Sometimes its hard to imagine that Facebook started way back in 2004. They obviously have come a long way since then.

Before is a screen shot of a document that they used to send to potential advertisers. (I thought it was not cool to put ads!)

But look at the statistics. 2.7 million registered users then compared to 500+million now. Crazy.

Go here to check out other screenshots. You can take a nostalgic walk down memory lane to see how “thefacebook” used to look like.

I don’t remember seeing a face on the top left hand corner of the page when I joined though. Hmm

A couple days ago President Obama’s sat down for dinner with a number of Silicon Valley’s heavy weights as part of the drive to create a healthy relationship between the White House and the business community in the United States.

The White House has posted a few pictures of the dinner and to be honest it looks quite epic. The who’s who in the Tech industry all at sitting down in the same table.

Here’s the official list of attendees of Thursday evening’s meeting with President Obama at John Doerr’s palace.

John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Carol Bartz, president and CEO, Yahoo!
John Chambers, CEO and chairman, Cisco Systems
Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter
Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO, Oracle
Reed Hastings, CEO, NetFlix
John Hennessy, president, Stanford University
Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO, Apple
Art Levinson, chairman and former CEO, Genentech
Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, Google
Steve Westly, managing partner and founder, Westly Group
Mark Zuckerberg, founder, president and CEO, Facebook

Everyone has been speculating on what they ultimately discussed. I saw this very funny imagined transcript from a commenter on TechCrunch. Haha!

Transcript of Obama tech meeting in Silicon Valley February 17, 2011
John Doerr: Hi everybody, thanks for coming. I just wanted to start out and remind everybody here that you all work for me.
All: Understood
Obama: Thanks John, we all know who’s in charge, but I need you folks to do something for me. I’ve got to figure out how to turn this economy around by 2012. Or you’re all going to be listening to stories about Moose hunting the next time you want to meet with the President.
John Chambers: Don’t look at me. I voted for the old guy last time. Didn’t think it would turn out this way.
Steve Westly: But I want to tell you about my approach to business, based upon my eBay experience
Doerr: Yes Steve, we all know it’s better to be lucky than good, but that’s not going to turn the economy around by 2012
Eric Schmidt: Look, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about. What we need to do is open source government. Instead of hiring case workers to manage welfare and unemployment offices, let’s just ask users to submit ideas about how these underutilized resources can be used better. For example, let’s sell advertising on the backs of shirts of welfare moms and the unemployed, and then have them pick up trash on the freeways.
Obama: Hmm, I don’t know Eric…
Dick Costolo: @Woodside mansion. Pasta delicious!
Schmidt: OK. Another idea. Instead trying to figure this out ourselves, let’s get on an advisory board of a country that’s working well, say, like Sweden. We listen to their ideas, copy them, and then give the ideas away for free. And we sell advertising on the backs of shirts of government workers.
Steve Jobs: Yes, Schmitty, I know that’s how it works for you. But I think we really need to revolutionize the way this country works. Like what if we combine the prescription drug program, FEMA, and the National Endowment for the Arts, into one thing. We’ll call it the iPFArt. Yes, that’s it…
Carol Bartz: $#@! You boys always think you know the answer. What the country needs is tough love. Let’s cut, cut, cut back the federal employees until we have one thing left that works. Who says we need to grow the economy anyhow? This whole growth thing is over-rated. Why, while I was CEO of Autodesk, for the first 10 years, I turned it from a billion dollar company into a billion dollar company. Nobody complained. They just learned to accept the status quo. That’s what this country needs. To just accept it!
Dick Costolo: cant believe i missed the office 2nite. steve carrell ROCKS!
Larry Ellison: Barack. The problem is you are measuring the economy with someone else’s numbers. Instead you should be thinking like Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. If you don’t like the rules of the game, the change the rules. Instead of publishing numbers about GDP, you need to be measuring the economy with different metrics—how many new jobs there are in bankruptcy law, increases in yacht sales, whatever!
Reed Hastings: I think we need to make army uniforms bright red. It must be hard for you to find all those soldiers. Why not make them wear red so we know what side they are on.
Mark Zuckerberg: Seriously, you guys are wasting my time. I’m sitting here listening to you, while back at the Facebook offices, my colleagues are inventing things that no one in this room will ever be capable of. Look, Barack, if you want to cut the deficit, run all the government’s IT through Facebook. All your employees are spending a couple of hours per day at work using Facebook already, why not transfer all the government functions into Facebook apps, so that that government workers can be more efficient doing whatever it is they do, instead of having to hit the “boss” button to hide Facebook every time they hear footsteps.
And if you don’t like my idea, %*@! It. Look, Tunisia and Egypt were just beta for us at Facebook. We can overthrow your government in a few days. All I have to do is push a button and I’ve got 5 million people protesting on the Mall by Saturday.
Obama: Right, got it. All government functions on Facebook. But only if you can get Russia to do the same.
Zuckerberg. Don’t be silly. I Skyped with Putin this morning. It’s a done deal.

You can check out this Business Insider to see a detailed description of each individual.

What is up with the world today?

According to Daily Mail,  33-year-old Neil Brook sent a text to Josef Witkowski, a friend he’d known for about six months.

In his text, Brook meant to send the word “mutter” but instead auto-corrected to “nutter”. This infuriated Witkowski so he went over to Brook’s house looking for a fight.

A knife fight ensued, which led to Witkowski’s death.

Ok seriously first of all. What the hell is mutter? And how can something like this lead to murder! From what I read, it seemed that there is plenty of time for Brook to calmly explain to his friend that he obviously sent the wrong text.

There must have been some underlying agenda. But whatever it is, these two are nutters indeed.

Speaking of auto-correct here are some funny ones that may or may not have lead to death courtesy of Damn You Auto-Correct.

LOL!

One of my favorite Fan Pages on Facebook is Oreo.

They have managed to amass a huge following by simply engaging with their fans. Their status updates are usually questions like:

“If you had an Oreo today, how much better would your day be?”

“An Oreo cookie without milk is like…”

These are the kind of questions that people might answer if they see it on their news feed.

Just 19 hours ago, they launched a campaign to set the Guinness World Record for most “Likes” to a post in 24 hours! Their target was to get 45,000 “Likes” on a single post.

Before I got to their Facebook page I had no doubt that Oreo would reach it and true enough as I am typing this, they already have 112k+ “Likes” already!

Good one Oreo!

Facebook made two significant upgrades recently.

1. Facebook Pages

- The most significant change with the new Page is the layout. The redesign is very much the same as Profiles. My guess is that Facebook wants to streamline the look and feel of the site.

- Admins can now use Facebook as page. Meaning I don’t need to go through Profiles –> Page anymore. This also means you would be able to receive notifications from messages, likes, comments that are generated on the page. Not bad feature but I can imagine it being a hassle for those popular pages.

A more detailed look  (with pics) of the changes here:

http://mashable.com/2011/02/10/what-the-new-facebook-pages-mean-for-users-owners/

2. Facebook Photos

- Facebook has always said that Photos is one of their most popular product. So it’s no surprise that revamping it.

- I think it will be a while more till they actually roll this out to everyone but here’s how it looks.

Detailed changes here:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/developing-facebooks-new-photo-viewer/499447633919

What do you think?

Activision has officially ceased development of future Guitar Hero and DJ Hero games. citing a decrease in public interest.

While I never really played Guitar Hero that much, I had my fair share being a wannabe rock star on Rock Band.

The news is not surprising though. When was the last time you hear of anyone mentioned Guitar Hero?

I remember being excited about Guitar Hero: Metallica but that’s about it. Played DJ hero once and it felt that it was monotonous and boring.

People are saying that Activision has only themselves to blame for over-saturation of the market, releasing series after series not giving fans time to fully enjoy the game.

Here’s the timeline: