• Reid Hoffman, Chairman & Founder, LinkedIn (Social)
• David Hornik, Partner, August Capital (Investor)
• Julie Hanna, Chairman, Kiva (Micro-Finance)
• Nick Beim, Partner, Matrix (Investor)
• Jose Ferreira, CEO, Knewton (Education)
• John Lilly, CEO, Mozilla (Internet)
• Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook (Social)
• Allen Morgan, Partner, Mayfield (Investor)
• Joi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons (Publishing)
• Sheila Marcelo, CEO & Founder, Care.com (Health)
• Piraye Yurttas, Co-Founder, Cellmatix (Biotech)
• Nancy Lublin, CEO, Do Something (Social)
• Ted Shelton, CEO, Open-First (Internet)
• Adam Nash, VP of Product, LinkedIn (Social)

I’m hightlight my favourite (paraphased) bits here:

From Reid (Chairman & Founder, LinkedIn), ‘The most interesting disruption of technologies rarely comes from those who are close to the problem.  It’s those who don’t know much that poses the questions that completely change the way we think.‘  Coming from his rich experience of working with PayPal and LinkedIn, ‘what’s cashback? *chuckles* yeah we found out later, oops’.  That’s quite true.  That’s why never stop a child wondering why.  Perhaps they are right in asking those questions, perhaps you have been too busy with your life to stop asking those questions.

David (Partner, August Capital), ‘I don’t worry about the big companies.  Remember the day when we all thought that AOL got it.  They have the best design/product.  There’s always someone out there doing something that can disrupt the system, even as big as Facebook – look at MySpace, it used to be the crown jewel and darling of social networking.  Look at where it is now.‘  What is more interesting is the mood of the panel.  Despite being hosted at Google, there wasn’t a speaker from Google.  John added that he loves Google, ‘but seeing that Google has to raise salary to retain talent, it is recognising that it is a big corporation.  Reasons to work for Google is no longer just about innovation.’

Julie (Chairman, Kiva), ‘Look at Microsoft.  10 years ago people were afraid to launch something because Microsoft might crush it.  Now you don’t hear them being mentioned anymore.  10 years and there is lots of changes and we are working in one of the most fast-moving industry and you must stay current to keep up. I am sure there are a few companies out their working hard that may take on big companies like Google and Facebook.’

When David said, ‘Thanks to Facebook my wife is losing 2 hours of her day everyday,’ Mike said, ‘you’re welcome.’  That was pretty funny considering he’s the VP of Engineering for Facebook.

I particularly like Sheila’s (CEO & Founder, Care.com) crisp approach to start up (she’s founded two and now working on the third one), ‘I founded care.com because I’ve done enough start-ups to start doing what I care the most.  I have a daugher and I know how hard it is to find trust-worthy carers.  Many people live with loved ones whom need to be cared for and it’s a challenge to find trustworthy care for them.  I do what I feel most passionate about and I make money out of it, which I have no problem with.‘  She’s really inspirational as a female entrepreneur.  Like what Paul Graham says, the best startups solves the problems that founders what to solve for themselves.

Nancy (who found a site that enables young people to literally do something), ‘The most competitive jobs in the US for fresh uni grads aren’t what you’d expect.  There are the elite students competing to teach in the most under nourished parts in the states, the acceptence rate of these jobs is as low as 7%.  Teens that I talk to today want *meaning*.’  Really heart-warming to hear.  Wonder if it’s a global trend?  That really resonates with the book I’m reading currently, Hackers & Painters, of why ‘geeks are unpopular’ in school.  The urge to search for meaning, and the urge to be smarter (hence no time to work on being popular and maybe actually don’t want to be popular because that’s more work), and having outgrown your surrounding and the yearn for meaning.  Did I say meaning twice?

Incidentally yesterday I came across the threat (or it is a matter of fact already?) net neutrality was dead,

U.K. Communications Minister Ed Vaizey will say today that Internet service providers should be free to favor traffic from one content provider over another, provided customers are informed, the Financial Times reported.

For those who are not familiar with this ‘net neutrality’ thing – in my own words it means that for companies that can afford to do so, they can pay Internet Service Providers, like BT or Virgin in the UK, to speed up your site access to these sites. It bothers me because it disrupts the market and it’s not fair to smaller companies (innovative ones) that are not yet ready to compete with the giants.  It promotes an uneven landscape for development.  It poses futher challenges for little sites to reach critical mass (as if there’s not enough).  It aggrevates existing unfair advantages of big companies.   Posted it to the discussion, and John Lilly (former CEO of Mozilla) jumped on it, adding that, ‘what we want isn’t just the big bang innovation, we want to the little innovations.‘ In fact, the panel did seem as concerned as how the tiered approach can hinder the openness of the internet and innovation.

If only there’s a hashtag to yesterday’s discussion?  I wonder what the others think.

It says a lot about Britain today that a violent, non-fatal racist attack would generate only a few paragraphs of news coverage. But an on-screen, non-violent row, in which race is a dimension, gets the whole nation talking, and the media and some politicans into a frenzy.

That, though, is the curious power of Big Brother — a format that means little or nothing to the over-40s, but in the post-modern, war-is-only-on-the-news era, it is able to animate millions. Amid all the talk of the death of broadcast television, and the shift to advertising online, there is no clearer reminder of the incredible power of the small screen.

I would recommend for those who have not seen the clips, please see it yourself to feel the ‘power’ of Celebrity Big Brother, if not mass popular culture: Clip (1), (2)

One exerpt of Jade, the main girl who had made touchy remarks directed toward Shilpa, may gave a full-fledge flavor on what this is about,

You need a real life in your life. That is what you need because you’re so stuck up in your ass you cannot think of anything except your own ass. You’re so stuck up in your own ass you can smell your own shit.

In an interview, John McCririck’s, the previous participant of this show sums it up,

‘Institution racism inside her and unconscious of it.. what people in this country who do come from another countries have to endure is the subtle nasty horrible continuous undercurrent of ill-feeling that Daniella is giving her […] Racism is so strong in the country that we ourselves do not understand it.’

You may not agree with what he says, and I have not stayed in this country long enough to make a fair judgement. But living outside my hometown for the real first time, I become much more aware of the attention simly because I am not ‘Western’. One main row in the Big Brother that made me empathize is on food. Shetty got teased at because she put onion in her curry, and that reminded me how some non-Asian folks I met looked at my food and actually said ‘yuck’ or ‘oh that doesn’t look too inviting’ _while I was digging in_. To me, I know that they are kind people, but it diffuses a hinted, subtle kind of ‘outgroupness’ that got to my nerve. But you also ask yourself if this is cultural misunderstanding, or they just do not know that saying things about other food, especially when others are still eating, is considered very ill-mannered in Chinese culture. Also could it be sheer curiosity, and are these legitimate justifications as well?

Finally – I think what the local press have not raised yet is the classism exposed in this incident. The register UK, depicts Jade, the supposedly bully of Shilpa as follow,

Specifically, “Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara have ganged up on Shetty in the past few days”, while Goody’s mother Jackiey couldn’t pronounce the star’s name and referred to her simply as “the Indian”.

The way this article describes the mother of Jade hinted ignorance of Jade mothers, whether that stemmed from her indifference or class status, we don’t know.
At the end, I just feel severely disturbed by the classism hidden where people were not talking about. As much as Jade has been mean to the other girls, and as much as the other girls ganged up against her, I feel that it is the TV company that capitalize on the constrasting scene between the high-class Indian and ill-manner (which could mean lower-class as well) contestants who happened to be Brits. What do you think of this use of insecurity? On our own class? Gender? Appearance? Or even race?
London is going to get colder soon.

Notes: The title of this blog, ‘race is the new sex’, is a direct quote from the essay Prof. Richard Howells wrote on Borat, which is a fun read as well if you’re interested in this topic.

“Is it Because I is Black?’ Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G” in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Volume 26, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 155- 177. ISSN 0143-9685.

The good thing is, I am informally a MPhil!  That sounds really cool because I never expected myself to study more than a Bachelor since I was a kid.  Not that I don’t want to, but as I said, I am sloppy.  Hence to this date there are a few people that I have to thank, especially Dr Ng, Andrew, M and A, who gave me a lift (actually numerous lifts) when I was lost and confused.  I have to admit my superficial side – sometimes getting an extra degree doesn’t help much in terms of personal growth, but it does bring a sense of security… Though I don’t know how exactly a research degree in Wikipedia is going to help!
And my two weeks in Hong Kong had been completely bomblastic (is there such a word??).  It was really nice seeing all my mates and family, while there are weird ad hoc computer problems that happened during my stay, and unfortunately most of them were outside my range!  For example M’s ibook went through a phase of kernel panicks – from once every week to once every 2 minutes.. I tried everything I could, restarting the power management, ram and etc… Still it didn’t work – so probably there are times I just have to admit my limitations in IT :s

Also got hooked up with second life – well not that I am addicted, but it’s quite fun flying around… the learning curve was incredibly steep though; it took me a long while before I understand what’s going on there.  Meeting G from Romania here in london is nice, and she actually asked me if the avatars can take of clothes and…. of one another… Hm.. that sounds quite tricky, huh.. Potential suing and assault cases right there if these actions were possible.  /knock knock If Marshall McLuhan was still around, probably he would get quite excited about these possibilities

Hm.. I do want to blog about Hong Kong – was stroke incredibly by the familiar cultural environment and yet all the drastic recent changes, especially when I’m reading Lung Yin-Tai’s new book..  Will definitely blog more on that.

Okay okay, enough procrastination from Adorno.  Happy new year to everyone, and may your new year’s resolutions (mine seldom) come true!  xx

Pardon my lazy and not-so-academically-precise paraphasing – medium gets hotter if they deliver information on an one-way street, such as books. Authors decide the narratives and the rythm of wich the stories are being told. On contrary, medium gets colder if users are given more discretions in responding to it, such as the Internet, which can be quite user-oriented if you think about it.

Incidentally my movie-guru mate, Ed, had kindly reminded on tonight’s BBC program, ‘Imagine’.

It explores the potential of the Internet and interviews some of the main key figures, such as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; David Weinberger, the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined (great overviews of the New Media and its potential). It was nice seeing them as a reminiscent to the Wikimania conference last summer (actually Weinberger has kindly posted about my presentation ) (I know I know, I’m being, well to some, a geek)… Over all it’s balanced and informative documentary on how the Internet provided opportunities for user-generated content, with prominent examples like youtube and myspace. But – their criticisms or suggested potential threats about the Internet remain a bit over-simplified by viewing the corporations as the monsters. I do hesitate to agree with this traditional dichotomization of commercial-as-being monster versus participatory-as-the-saint argument.

There are, well, various degrees of ‘evilness‘, so as to speak. For example, although Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all agreed to bend their corporate practices in China, they did it substially differently. While Yahoo had been accused of leading to the imprisonment of the Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, by giving out his personal information, Google vowed to do no evil – and so far – apart from imposing censorship, Google has not given out personal information of its users. In Zuckerman‘s words,

In launching Google.cn, Google made an interesting decision – they did not launch versions of Gmail or Blogger, both services where users create content. This helps Google escape situations like the one Yahoo faced when the Chinese government asked for information on Shi Tao, or when MSN pulled Michael Anti’s blog. This suggests to me that Google’s willing to sacrifice revenue and market share in exchange for minimizing situations where they’re asked to put Chinese users at risk of arrest or detention.

Obviously I also understand that for an one-hour program, they have done what possible to fill in the information matrix. What I like in particular, is that I get to see the author of the 1 millionth article on Wikipedia as well as Clay Shirky in ‘real’ for the first time. And may I say – he’s actually quite charming. (Yes I like reading his blogs on many-2-many).

Finally – hm everyone is talking about second life now.. I downloaded it months ago and never have time to play with it. A quick yardstick would be there are already 17,723 photos on flickr. For those who are interested in knowing what it is but dont’ bother to start one for yourself, flickr is a good way to start your exploration. The only question I have is the copyright policy of the secondlife – how far can I play around with the screen captures? One prof was kind enough to share a moment of having a meeting with grad students on second life,

For more information, please visit their wiki.

The Innovation Labs are a series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers. We are inviting independent new media companies from across England and Scotland to pitch ideas in response to a briefs set by New Media commissioners across the BBC. Up to 10 projects in each of four regions – Scotland, N England, London and S England - will then be selected to attend a 5-day long Lab. During the Lab, they will work with BBC commissioners and other mentors to develop the idea and prepare a final pitch. On the last day of the Lab, the ideas are pitched to the BBC commissioners for further development funding.

So the idea is to have a bunch of tech-savvy folks (well I’m not as hardcore, for sure) to sit together to envision the potential of BBC’s web-based contents, and how these visions can be implemented and facilitated. It is expected the actual technologies and means should be discussed as well during the pitching sections.

I was very impressed when Matt Locke, the head of the innovation unit, showed us a prototype of the BBC 2.0 (Radio 1) of which most contents were build from syndication of technorati’s blogs, flickr‘s pictures as well as other live-feeds. Extremely sleek interface, probably adopting much of Ajax-like technologies. Love it.

But of course, that is a prototype; actual (as well as political) considerations are in place to hail up the implementation of such interface. For example,

• Corporate liabilities – stemmed from BBC’s respectability and as a public body
• Meta-filtering/Censorship – By opening up the content it may attract vandals and obscene content – so do you filter the information (risk being accused of censorship)? If so, how and who (to implement)?

I am also interested in actually teaming up to see if we can pitch on some ideas. But not sure if this is going to happen yet – will need to see how the ideas go… After all I am not a programmer at all. Still I learnt a lot today, especially on marketing and brain-storming; felt like I have been to a crash course today, such as the Stanford’s NABC:

Value propositions provide a common language for systematic, high-value innovation. SRI’s name for a value proposition’s four essential, defining ingredients is “NABC”, for Need – Approach – Benefits per costs – Competition:

• A statement of an important customer and market problem (Need)
• that proposes a way to use resources (Approach)
• to deliver superior customer features (Benefits per costs)
• when compared to others in the market (Competition or alternatives)

For our team I was kind of too over-caffeined and did not really touch on these four elements well enough, plus the atmosphere was quite reality-TV like (with a panel of ‘judges’) – but more fun. I particularly like the group on designing features for kids – not sure if the content of the meeting was supposed to be confidential – I better stop writing here!