Sesawang Dua Titik Sifar Untuk Perniagaan...

Our first major activity in creating awareness on Web 2.0 (for business) and promoting technopreurship here in Penang was a blast. Over 100 people showed up at the Penang Technopreneurship Dialogue & Web 2.0 Sharing Session 2008, held on last Friday, 1st of February at Level 4, Bayview Hotel, Georgetown. Thank you to MDeC for graciously stepping up with the effort of bringing the movers and shakers from the local scenes, flying them all the way from Kuala Lumpur, and sponsoring the entire event venue and food - good breakfast, lunch buffet and afternoon tea. And USM & PDC for hosting and making sure the event went through smoothly, particularly for the registration and making the guests (& speakers) all comfortable.

We were worried earlier that not many people would show up for an event so focussed on a single technological perspective, instead of the all-in-one ones (with sizable marketing budget) like earlier Penang i-Land 2004, Global Technopreneur Forum 2005 and Penang Technopreneur Forum 2007. But in a prior meeting, so convinced and upbeat I was, I bragged to folks from PDC, MDeC and USM how we'll be able to get the crowd quickly - "No worries - run, and they will follow!" Well, it took us much less than a full week, with the online registration opened to public from the Friday earlier, and the final three days of emailing, calling, and blogging about it from Monday to Wednesday to get people to sign up by ~30s per day -- A good exercise on the power of Web 2.0 I suppose... Now imagine if we had marketed it longer and wider, we'd definitely get hundreds of people to come and talk about the buzzy topic! (but then, the concern would be where would we squeeze these people and how to feed them ;)).

Is Malaysia ready? Is Malaysian businesses ready? Are Penangites ready to take advantage of Web 2.0 and positive trends in technopreneurial ventures to crunch in the numbers - the products and new companies? Take a look at the numbers... I started the sharing with my observation and hyping up the crowd. And I just had to showcase the "Bubble 2.0" video to the audience (amid some technical hickups - no ways to synchronize the play in three laptops at once):




Enjoy reviewing the slides:-

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Azrul Hasni from Bill Adam (and formerly from Sun Jtrend) then explored the technicals and explained the buzzes surround Web 2.0, plus shared some of his experience on serving a CTO for a Web 2.0/Mobile 2.0-centric company which markets it products in the UK. Then came Kamal Fariz from Malaysian Ruby Brigade evangelizing the fresh platform which he sort of claimedwould take over the world including the local development scenes by storm. Kamal's presentation was a very light walkthrough on programming using Ruby, but still the crowd looks a bit dazed and fearful when codes start to pop up on the screen - codes that produced great looking photo albums. Khailee finally moved the eyes around as he explored his wild ride in technopreneurial ventures from joining a fast-moving startup post university days up to playing with ideas that bear fruits for his future ventures, perhaps independently (own company) as he had hinted. [though, he might actually end up sticking for a while with Mind Valley]

After a good lunch, (and Jumaat prayer for Muslims), we continued with a dialogue session with distinguished panelists - Colin Wong (Prosperati), Ashran Ghazi (New Entrepreneur Forum), Lilyana (Asia Stream Group), Rizal Alwani (Cradle) and Azrul Madisa. Many questions were thrown in, some were serious, some were downright entertaining, and some were the bits for further discussions. In all, the event was a good chance for the locals to network among themselves, as well as to network with folks coming all the way north from Sintok & Kangar, and south from Klang Valley.

I'll let Azrul & Kamal release their own presentation materials should you desire them - Ask them via email etc. For Khailee's stuff, hmm, did somebody videotaped the whole thing? Or just ask him to pop up at your future events, and he'll do the mumbo jumbo stuff all over again... ;)

And here are the snaps:-




Plus me with other speakers and dialog panelists:


And me with Colin:


BTW, if you've been to the event, but have yet to join in the crowdvine, it's never to late to share with us your profile and network with the rest of the crowd. The address for our dedicated crowdvine is: http://penang20-08.crowdvine.com

And use the following link to subscribe to the blog posts:-
http://penang20-08.crowdvine.com/feeds/show?scope=site&type=post

We'll keep you updated on subsequent events, information, materials upload etc. at that site.

p.s. The 1Mbps "broadband" from TM Streamyx is getting me under 300Kbps download today, during Chinese New Year holiday! No wonder, it's taking me ages to complete this single blog post... Big wonder how this "broadband provider" keep winning awards locally and overseas as the best this and that provider/telco....