I perceived about a 50% drop off in attendance for the second day. It's often a problem with conferences, I really think a focussed single day is often a better event. People have real work to do or other commitments so turning up to two full days can be a bit of an ask and I think the extended 'adverts' at the beginning of the first day weakened some resolve for the second.
This is my write up of day two's presentations at the SingTel Accelerate 2010 conference. There is also an overview and the first day's content.
Mitchell Baker
Chair of Mozilla Foundation
This was perhaps a little dry, but then in that unforgiving hanger it was very hard to build any rapport with the audience, I get the sense she even prefers presenting in a more collaborative environment! Mitchell talked through how Mozilla had used it's open and chaotic nature to compete and improve the open web.
Things feel like they're speeding up even compared to a year ago. How do we build value in this setting? Mozilla use openness, participatory, decentralization, flexibility, and tries to make it easy to try things out and to develop structures that promote these attributes.
Internet, blogosphere is all distributed, using these models. Mozilla is focussed right on the extreme of these models, due to it's civic, nonprofit status. Open source for the public benefit, over 400m users. Mozilla invests in the web as a platform for technology innovation. They don't see the improvements to IE as a problem, the improvements to to web, in general, are the goal. The competition in the browser market is a great thing for improving what we can do with the web.
Mozilla need to be open to compete, as their competition is much bigger. The ground underneath them is changing and they can't keep track, so need to be open. In 2004 they were 15 people and are now 300 but still over 50% of patches are from volunteers.
Make it easy to try. It's important to realise that secrets feel safe, but are not cost free, sometimes outside eyes can help. Policy is also important, how much negotiation do you have to do before you can do something?
Open innovation, not one size fits all. Certainly requires commitment as the hardships is that it's tough to fail in public. However it gives great flexibility and you can benefit from others innovation.
An open world is part order and part chaos, the key is to balance the two.
Rob Goldberg
VP of Business Operations at Zynga
People are spending huge amounts of time on social networks. Combined with the app economy & virtual goods there is a gaming industry revolution going on. Social gaming is a $15b industry. Online games grew 7% in the last few years but Facebook/social gaming grew 300%.
Taps into human needs. Social communication through shared experiences, the network is the substrate beneath the game.
A social game is a fun and easy to play, three minute, guilty pleasure. Not WoW, MW2 or other online gaming. The basic gameplay is free, to get broad adoption. Between half and three percent of users buy virtual goods, to enhance the gameplay.
The key is that they are universally themed and played with real friends. Generates authentic social interactions creating real social communications. Everybody wins.
Why does it matter?
Consumer
- 321m installs, people you know are playing!
- Real communications are happening, families playing together to make connections. The game provides a mechanism to grease the wheels of communication and add a little fun.
- Provides self expression. Could it be the new email, chat room or IM?
Mobile Operator
- Social Gaming is the leading application use on mobile.
- Consumers find apps through carriers and they prefer to pay through the carrier for convenience and security.
- Drive data plan adoption, smart phone adoption and there is a revenue share.
Consumer website or business
- Time spent is huge, can be an hour a day.
- Games drive engagement, don't think about producing a game for my brand. How does the game crossover with your brand? Would you make a movie or newspaper for your brand? Games are the same.
- Ads, branded virtual goods, in game integration.
Hong Qu
Designer at YouTube
YouTube would try and work out who their users were and created personas to guide their engineering. They stayed close to the customers, listen to support emails. Everyone got a weekly email of site stats
(the second appearance for this at the conference). Also a sense of ownership amongst the staff, no QA - everyone tested, everyone fixed.
Think like a game designer. Formulate strategy at a systemic level, work out how users interact, work out their motivations and patterns of behavior. Throw engineers at the stuff users are actually using! Don't get bogged down in develping non-performing features. Simplify. Release minor fixes every week, major features every month and full redesign once a year.
Why do user research? The later you collect it the cost of change is higher. Tough to change paths once a direction is set. Like google with google video.
You have to be careful with A/B testing, it can turn into an arms race between competing goals. Know what you're trying to achieve. Causality is better, work out why people are doing things. Multivariate testing is even better.
Localization was important for the continued growth once YouTube was bought by Google. Marketing message for local markets was prospect of global success not just local.
Michael Galpert
Founder of Aviary
Michael's speech had a lot of 'cool shit' in his presentation, but there seemed very little to link it all together other than it was 'cool shit'. And once again the massive room did it's damage.
He made some interesting points about incentivizing innovation, like the X Prize or the Netflix prize. He also discussed allowing people freedom to try things, citing Google's infamous 20% time that produced GMail.
Richard Kelly
Associate Partner at Ideo Shanghai
Once again a talk full of interesting stuff that didn't seem to fully hang together for me, but I think that was more to do with the videos (that didn't quite gel) than the content, which did have more of a message.
He posited that design is everywhere: having design as just cool or pretty is missing the point. Designers solve problems in different ways. He contrasted the difference between choosing (analytical thinking) and creating (design thinking).
Designers diverge to create choices, and IDEO allows and encourages that. You have to focus on people. You can't start with business models or technology. You have to understand your customers unique point of view.
A useful technique at IDEO is prototyping. Build to think. Don't come to a meeting without one. Make things really simple, what can we build to answer the questions we have? Prototypes enable a better conversation.
The second message of the talk was that IDEO is clearly a super-awesome place to work. :-)
Noah Kagan
Founder of AppSumo
Probably the most entertaining talk of the day and although he'd struggled (MC'ing) in the big room like all the speakers, in a more intimate setting he was able to work his charm on the crowd.
Deliberately provocative in content there were many little vignettes of 'stuff' that encouraged the crowd to do something a bit unusual.
The structure was loosely his career journey from (literally) sleeping on the job at Intel, through getting fired at Facebook, marketing success at mint.com and then his current project AppSumo.
Consider alternative ways of pricing. Freemium, deep discount, virtual goods, service pricing.
Outsourcing is the norm, Noah uses a virtual freelancer in Bulgaria and he earns more than his parents. It works, but it's not so much about the money, it's about the value of your own time. Reconsider how you spend both.
But then look at how you spend time in your business. On AppSumo support is actually a high ROI activity, because he learns what his customers are looking for.
Marketing has changed. People can complain in public which is both cool and shit at the same time. Social recommendation is better than a link.
Lean startups are just common sense. You don't have to spend the two years to get to validation! 9 months before the launch of mint.com and they knew it was going to be a success when they launched due to the marketing activities they were doing before the site launched.
Chaos is your friend. Try lots of stuff. Explore new things.
Do four things tomorrow...
1. Call your customer.
2. Cancel a meeting. 5-10 minutes every morning seems to be effective
3. Find a thing taking too long and improve it.
4. Go for a walk, focus on the best use of your time.
And try to get fired! It's extremely humbling.
Two great things to try and live your life by: Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework (4 mins) and Steve Jobs' Harvard commencement speech (15 mins). NB: Only twenty minutes of video and I would really recommend them if you haven't seen them
Panel - Investments in South East Asia
NB: I have paraphrased people's comments here, get in touch if you'd like me to correct anything that you feel is a misrepresentation.
Probably the most interesting panel, given the excellent moderation by Darius, of
McAfee (nee
Tencube). He wasn't afraid to ask searching questions of the panelists and put them on the spot. Plus Joi is always very quotable!
Straight out of the gate Darius quizzed Joi about comments in his BBC World Service interview that seemed to indicate that his passions lay in Dubai (where he lives) and Tokyo (where many of his business interests are) and that Singapore was a handy stop off on his preferred airline!
He responded that he'd 'tried' Singapore 12-13 years ago, but at that time it was hard to make progress. He admitted that investments in Singapore were not something he looked for and they did make him a nice offer but the government make it very easy for the private sector to get involved if its something they see as needed for the country.
Why Singapore? Singapore could be anywhere, but isn't. You do not need to be in Silicon Valley, you can create a hub for this sort of innovation with a friendly government and a decent Internet connection. However it needs critical mass, which is why he's making a lot of noise, need to get to a tipping point. Didn't notice from outside how nice it is!
He also made it clear that on his investments in Singapore, he can take a lot more risk because of the government help. The 'swings of the bat' are even cheaper for him. Outside Singapore he'd have to know the entrepreneur, be the first investor and for them to have a product and already have scalable distribution plan. In his more typical investments you can't pitch ideas, with just slides, without a working product, but in Singapore he's more willing and able to try early.
As an investor you have to add enough value that they would want to hire you.
The top level of government in SG is very agile compared to governments elsewhere but the average SG student wants to simply know the answer to the test. Entrepreneurs have to question authority.
Difficult to give general advice to entrepreneurs. What attracted Joi back was a group of civil service people that were allowed to be unique inside the bureaucracy.
Are there any common qualities in entreprenuers in which he's invested? Not really, they are all very different characters. You have to spend a lot of time with these guys and like them more. Good intuition. Some VCs invest in assholes, some VCs are assholes, but I have a no asshole rule. Humble but confident. Give advice but they have the final choice. Co investors are more often the people who screwed him!
There seems to be a high quality of entrepreneurs in Singapore, but Joi can't tell if Neoteny Labs have met them all yet! Investors in Asia often are less savvy than the entrepreneurs which is tricky as they have to provide more advice when the money is smaller.
Ed Hardless (also interviewed by e27) was also on the panel and gave a much better account of the Innov8 fund than had been provided in the midst of the first day's messages from the sponsor.
Innovation is important to Asian companies, more recognition. Next five years an exciting time. Singtel think they can help with going to market.
What would make them invest? A focus on mobile: the next 1 billion users will be accessing the Internet on mobile.
Singtel know the pain points in the telecoms industry in SE Asia - sourced information from their group companies. Taking that information and identifying companies who can identify and help those pain points. If they invest in a company the company can be sure that someone in the Singtel group will be a market for them!
They are not looking for control from day one. Influencing companies for preferred terms is not really in the interests of the fund.
There were also some good 'Why Indonesia?' points made by Andy Zain.
The four large Asian markets are somewhat closed for governmental or other regions. Indonesia has a latin alphabet and a large enough single country market to be a good big stepping stone to other larger markets like the Philippines. It does have unique infrastructure problems but that provides opportunities. For example the telcos can be tricky to deal with and take a big cut. Mig33 managed to get around this by having their own merchant system.
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Well if you've made it through all this you've done well, there's also my overview and my take on day one. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.
