I walk a thin line in my role as a content marketer and media literacy advocate.
On one hand, I am excited about the possibilities which digital and social technologies can bring. On the flip side, I’m mindful of the dangers of digital addiction and how technologies can be used for nefarious purposes.
Courtesy of Five Stars and a Moon
Do you know that banking is now a digital platform business? Or that the CEO of DBS Bank probably knows a lot more about IT than manyย of us?
With the disruptive forces of e-commerce and m-commerce at play, banks need to shift their business model – from bricks and mortar to clicks and mortar.
(Updated 29 July 2017)ย Amazon Prime Nowย has just launched in Singapore, and is taking the local grocery delivery market by storm.
Demand has been so overwhelming that delivery was unavailable for quite some time. Industry pundits are now watchingย how the battle between Prime Now, Lazada’s LiveUp, HonestBee, and other players will turn up.
Classes at TechShop’s Menlo Park Premises (courtesy of The passionate maker)
Can you imagine a future where you can design and fabricate your own vehicle? Or perhaps create a custom-built gadget to solve the prevailing haze problem?
Well, apparently you now can. At least in certain parts of the world.
Image from ahhh_poetry
Have you heard the story of the frog in a boiling pot?
Well, if you drop a live frog into a boiling pot of water, it would immediately leap out and save its life.ย If, however, our webbed protagonist sits comfortably in a pot of room temperature water which is slowly heated up, it would be slowly boiled to death.
Frog legs, anyone?
LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon – the most highly sought after toy for geeks! (source of image)
Everybody loves LEGO. Boys, girls, mums, dads, and construction toy geeks of all ages.
However, do you know that the world’s favourite toy building blocks is also a powerhouse of innovation?
Do you know that in 1795, French despot Napoleon Bonaparte offered 12,000 francs as a reward for a grand challenge to preserve food?
Or that Nike’s gamified platform Nike+ helped it to capture nearly 50% of the running shoe market?
Do you wanna fund a start-up?
If so, good news! StarHub’s Crowdtivate – an Asian-focused crowdfunding platform launched in April this year – now has 12 Asia-based projects available for support. As a rewards-based platform, Crowdtivate mandates that listed projects should provide different levels of rewards for funders of differing quantums, with a minimum sum of S$5. Often, funders will enjoy a special “early bird” price for a new product as its backers.
Poster child of the burgeoning crowdsourcing movement, crowdfunding is estimated by Massolution to have raised some US$5.1 billion globally in 2013. Internationally, US-based players like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and RocketHub have kicked butt, while the Asian scene has been relatively quiet.
Until now.
Courtesy of Applicant
We all know that the world is changing at a blinding pace. Yesteryear’s market leaders like Barnes & Noble, Kodak, Blockbuster and Tower Records fade away. Meanwhile, new business darlings like Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google take the stage.
Time and again, we’ve been told that if we don’t think “out-of-the-box” and reinvent our businesses, we will suffer the same untimely fate. The challenge, however, is how.