Yesterday morning, we did our usual pilgrimage to Hay’s Dairies (upon the request of our kid, who else) and I had the chance to use my new Panasonic DMC-FX01 camera. Do join us on our virtual tour and hopefully you can learn a thing or two about how you can attract crowds to your farm-based attraction. Hmmm…. are they a farm or are they an attraction?
Our journey to the North West took almost an hour from our home down under. The trip was pretty rough for a 3.5 year old.
Close to lunch last Sunday, I was looking for a gold coloured tie to go with my black shirt for this event and decided to try my luck at Liang Court. I recalled fondly that they might have some boutiques there, since they cater largely to a Japanese expatriate market. This used to be one of my favourite childhood hangouts, with the lethal combination of a Swensen’s Restaurant, Kinokuniya Bookstore and of course Daimaru.
Of course, things have changed quite a lot since.
The most obvious difference was that Daimaru and Swensen’s were gone. In place of Daimaru’s 4 levels are a budget electronic shop in level 1, some furniture shops at level 2, and Books Kinokuniya (thankfully still around as its one of my favourite) in level 3.
Last Sunday morning, I took my family to Sentosa and spent a couple of hours there.
We visited Sentosa’s Merlion, which is a 10-storeyed attraction on the island and also spent some time walking around the island. Despite being very regular visitors to Sentosa (which is pretty close to my home near Mount Faber), I always found it refreshing to go there. The mix of sun, sand, sea and smiles (by service oriented staff) never fail to make my day.
The island attraction has certainly improved by leaps and bounds over the years, and everybody is waiting with bated breath for the Resorts World Integrated Resort to open there in 3 years time. In fact, this has led Sentosa to be one of the eminent stars at the recent Tourism Awards organised by the Singapore Tourism Board.
Inspirational IT-preneurs sharing war stories
The final session at Nexus 2007 saw three eminent entrepreneurs in the technology field sharing their tales of passion, zeal and fervour in changing the world.
The three occupied very different tech niches. Farzad Naimi’s Litescape looked at integrating business applications, voice and data, allowing greater real-time collaboration on any device. Roberto Mariani’s XiD Technologies, on the other hand, was largely involved in face recognition and other biometric systems. And of course, crowd favourite Cory Ondrejka was one of the guys responsible for the hugely successful Second Life, a virtual world largely owned by its users.
The third session at Nexus 2007, “The Future of the Web”, was led by a fascinating presentation by Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com. He spoke about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Wired magazine, Oct 2004) as well as the following futures:
Future of the individual – From e-business to me-business, and from eco-system to ego-system.
Recently tackled as part of Nexus 2007, “Crowdsourcing the Media” looked at how citizen journalism was changing the dynamics of the media landscape. It saw social media provocateur Kevin Lim moderating a session with online media luminaries Kathy Teo of CNET Networks, Jennifer Lewis of SPH‘s STOMP, and James Seng, Editor extraordinaire of tomorrow.sg (Left to right above).
Discussions centred around citizen journalism and its various forms (youtube, wikipedia etc) and included fascinating insights into how CNET and STOMP operated. As Jennifer puts it, there tend to be more “loser-generated” rather than “user-generated” content, and she does get her fair share of junk being MMS-ed and SMS-ed to her via 75557.
Nat Torkington doing his 2.0-ish thang
At the recent Nexus 2007, Nathan Torkington, crowd favourite and Perl guru from O’Reilly Media, spoke about Disruption, Change, and Opportunity. In case you do not know, its founder Tim O’ Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 and have been in the business of technology trendspotting for quite a number of years. Nat cited key developments in the technology landscape over the decades:
1988 – X Windows Documentation
After hearing my fellow media socialists Kevin, Benjamin, Ivan, Siva, Coleman, Preetam and Vanessa talk about Nexus 2007, I decided that I simply had to check it out for myself. And boy was it a blast!
Before going into the heavy stuff, let me share some photos and tongue-in-cheek observations about what Nexus 2007 is all about.
Iskandar Jalil’s exhibition “The Pottery Voice of Iskandar Jalil”
Anybody who is a collector of pottery and sculptural pieces would be familiar with the works of Iskandar Jalil, one of Singapore’s Cultural Medallion winners and leading ceramicist. Accolades, awards and acknowledgements abound for this inspiring master potter, touted as one of Singapore’s best leading artist and a great teacher to boot.
Iskandar’s recent exhibition at MICA’s Atrium – Material, Message, Metaphor – The Pottery Voice of Iskandar Jalil – was very well received. In fact, I understand that 40% of his pieces were already sold, at prices ranging from $500 to as high as $8,000.
Last weekend, I brought my family to Ka-Soh Restaurant, a famous old chain specialising in Fish Head Noodle. Tucked away in a nondescript corner of the Singapore General Hospital – of all places – the restaurant was literally sitting in darkness in the hospital campus when we arrived for dinner.
Despite its relatively inauspicious location, the restaurant had a good crowd when we arrived. Apparently, Ka-Soh is one of the original purveyors of fine fishhead noodles which does not use evaporated milk to thicken its soup. Instead, the milky white soup came from hours of boiling the bones of “Sang Yu” or snakehead fish. I understand that this dish is especially popular due to its purported ability to heal one’s wounds.
Although the wait was somewhat long, we enjoyed our dinner that night. The decor and ambience was casually comfortable, with a modern and minimalist Zen look. Waitresses were also generally attentive towards our needs and even advised us not to order too much for fear that we could not finish our food. Our favourite dish without a doubt was the fish meat noodles and we lapped up every single drop of the yummy soup.