My family loves to go to the Singapore Botanic Gardens, one of our island’s most well-loved tourist attractions which draw about 3 million visitors annually. Its enticing mix of free admission, beautiful 52 hectare landscape, awe-inspiring greenery and thoughtful touches makes it a must visit for us. We always feel rejuvenated after our trips there.
Our journey begins near the Visitor’s Centre section of the Gardens. Most of the amenities are located near here.
Thanks to my new toy, my latest posts tend to be picture heavy. This one revolves around the Singapore Petroleum Company (SPC) petrol station at Havelock Road.
Those active in share investing would know that homegrown SPC has been doing extraordinary well in the local bourse. Most notable amongst their achievements was the ability to fend themselves against much larger foreign competitors like Shell, Exxon-Mobil and British Petroleum (BP).
SPC’s biggest coup was in purchasing all 28 BP stations in Singapore. It broke away from convention by maintaining an attractive price-based discount instead of offering customers loyalty points which can be redeemed for products and services. This subsequently led the other petrol giants to follow suit.
As I was opening the door to my home recently, out popped this slip of paper which looked like a hastily scribbled personal note.
When I looked closer at the details, I realise that this was actually a printed flyer and not a request from my relative. Yes, it wasn’t blue ink but print! While the language left much room for improvement, the note does catches one’s attention. It appears to be a genuine request for help, with the offer to pay high cash price for a unit in my estate. Pity that I am not in a hurry to sell though.
Compare that flyer to this one.
Apparently, I was (faint) according to the cool folks at the Digital Movement. They apparently liked my 5 parter on Nexus 2007 so much that they have given me a free T-shirt for Best Coverage Award. Wow!
Thanks for the cool accolade folks. I really appreciate it and I think that you guys are doing a swell job too. Keep it up! The future is bright for Singapore 2.0!
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.