The Digital Movement

Details of PopOut

PopOut! is an important platform to engage the community, students, entre/technopreneurs, venture capitalist and startups interested in the Web 2.0 services or for the matter of fact any web services & products that is worth taking note of. It is a place where open sharing is encourage and aim to be the most sought after platform by aspiring and existing entre/technoprenuers to showcase their services/products as well as a place for all to learn, share and interact…

PopOut! is the new name for Geekout, an event we put together as a pre-Nexus event early 2007.

Date: 4 October 2007 (Thursday)
Time: 6.45 to 9.30pm
Venue:          Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition Centre, Ballroom 1, Level 2
Number of attendees: More than 180

Program:

6.30pm: Registration

7.00pm: Start of Event

7.10pm: Sharing Session with Ross from Bezurk

7.30pm: Demo by Quaffs and followed by ZopIM

8.00pm: Break

8.10pm: Demo by BookJetty and followed by Recruit.net

8.40pm: Short Speech by Gen Kanai of Mozilla

9.00pm: Chill-Out with the Peeps!

———————–

Live blog:

A warm welcome to everyone who is present, and ahem, absent from Popout’07 - the event of the year to engage the community, students, technopreneur, venture capitalist and startups interested in the web 2.0 services. Today, we will have a sharing session with Ross from Bezurk, as well as demos by Quaffs, ZopIM, BookJetty and Recruit.net. This event is also graced by the presence of Gen Kenai of Mozilla, who just landed in Singapore not too long ago.

And behind me are Huiwen and DK who are happily enjoying their cake behind me. Mmm… the cake tastes nices. Oops!

There is a slight glitch now as Estee’s trying to get the crowd to come together for the start of the event, which is immediately being attended to by the AV team. This event is made possible by IDA, Suntec and Recruit.net. This event is attended by 2 groups of people, according to the now broken microphone - geeks and their guests! Erm…

Anyway, do nudge and say hi to your neighbours if you happen to be here for the event. :)

Bernard Leong from SG Entrepreneurs has also live blogged a portion of the event here. Do check it out.

720pm A little about TDM is that it is a young organization and we are trying to get people who are interested in Web 2.0 to come together. A previous high profile that was known is Nexus and Conference iX. Estee is currently introducing Howie, who is taking care of the Popout event. He is a UI designer in Creative in real life, and takes care of the arrangement of features in the MP3 players that are sold off the shelfs. And for the information by Estee, he’s engaged already…. *ohhhhhh*

Howie’s idea of Popout came because… the idea just “popped out” from his mind. This event is a small step to getting people together and interacting together with their ideas. To Estee, Howie’s just sold his life to TDM. Good for him. :)

For today, there is going to be 5 demos on stage and 4 on the floor; and our special guests for the evening are Gen Kanai from Modzilla Asia, and Shin from Mitsunishi. It’s really great to have their presence here today, and for those who are present, there are some goodies from Gen at the registration counters. There is also going to be a lucky draw at the end of the event. So do stay tuned.

The official opening of Popout is going to commence with party poppers! Pop!!!!!!!!!!! Wow! Everyone is definitely in a party mood today! :)

728pm Now, we are going to have Ross to give us a short intro to Bezurk.com and the things that he knew when he was starting up. The travel vertical demanded a new way to search - taking into account the dynamic variables of travel pricing. Bezurk’s eliminates the time-consuming task of searching individually through multiple websites to find the best deal - which includes going through airline and hotel portals. So what they have done is to do these tasks for the users. The search results are displayed on the fly as information is gathered and sorted from multiple travel partners, and where the pricing is concerned, users are able to convert to whichever currency they like. This is just one of the many functionalities that users are able to make use of.

The revenue model is based through referrals to their travel partners for booking - generally a cost-per-click (CPC) arrangement. Once users have found the best deal that matches, they click onto that and it goes into the system. Bezurk hasalso established partnerships with travel suppliers and online travel portals. They also have distribution partnerships with Yahoo! SEA, News.com.au, Lonely Planet and other major websites across the region.

Bezurk has also bee named one of the World’s Hottest Startups outside the US.

From the technology point of view, they would want to keep it as siple as possible. They started off in Java, particularly in Ruby, which has helped them simplify their codebase a lot. Caching is also important because they integerate many things, external or internal - particularly to prevent bottlenecks. Bezurk is also an expert in integrating external services - you name it, they’ve done it.

Key tech skill sets include rails, ruby, java and JSm which are their core languages. They are possibly the first company in Asia using AJA. They also have a Web Standards Nazi, and behavior driven development keeps them sane while maintaining a growing codebase.  They now have 17 staff: 9 nationalities and 10 languages and there is no IT headcount because they use 3rd party web apps wherever possible! Google apps, basecamp - and they are still hiring!

800pm Next, we have Eric from Quaffs, who is really quite a personality! He started by getting the crowd to put up their right hands…. come on, you too! Put up your right hand and put it on the shoulder of the person on your right and ask him to off his mobile phone! =)

Quaffs.com is a social network that rewards members for building the community and SHOPPING! But, what’s so interesting about Quaffs? It’s OOD - objects of desire - like ipod nanos, jeans, bmw, yatch and all; and Quaff’s mission to realise the vision of fulfilling your OOD. This is through a unique rewards program through the use of Q.Dollars. By getting members into Quaffs, the introducer will gain some Q.Dollars, these Q.Dollars can help the introducers and their members get closer to their OoDs. Till date, there are 13,249 absolutely unique members without the use of advertisements.

Quaffs boasts themselves to be one of the hippest social networking websites around because they embrace black which is basically cool. In the new revamp, there is a brand new engine called wazzup. They do find that there are a lof of blogging engines out there that are not really easy to use - and they want to make it even simpler. So, wazzup enables people to use text, photos and videos easily for their blogs. Even for embed tags that are not really that easy to use, Quaffs make it simple by provide a simple UI for their users to include external media.

Even for this, Quaffs takes simplicity to a higher level! Because not everyone blogs, they introduce wazzup on quaffs. which provides a toolbar on your internet browser for your to just click and capture whatever that is interesting on your browser! Easy as that!

Next is Qool Factor - which is a simple favourite counter that acts like a rating system - this is used as opposed to stars because a lot of people do not know what do stars mean.

Quaffs is currently in beta and will be opening in November, so if you have friends who are in Quaffs, you can get them to get you in quickly for a glance of Quaffs and take a faster step to fulfilling your objects of desires!

Eric is showing a negative demonstration of Quaffs now. His occupation is not being saved online. Perhaps it’s just the Internet connection. ;)

820pm Next up, we have ZopIM - Zopify your website. ZopIM is a 4 person team - Royston, Wenxiang, YB and Julian, who aspires to empower users to have better interactions with their customers by allowing integration of their tool into your websites so that you can chat with web visitors, rank visitors as well as send messages.

Julian is now doing a demonstration on the use of ZopIM - to show how easy it is to integrate their tools into your website. However, due to bad Internet connections, a better, more detailed demonstration is available on the floor later.

Some of the cool stuffs that they are developing includes page persistency, customer profiling, and CRM tools. They are currently in private beta, and they look forward to simplifying tool integrations for users.

835pm Recruit.net, who is also one of the sponsors for today’s event, told us that “job search sucks!”, at least from their first slide of presentation. The motivation behind recruit.net is to gear towards job seekers - and not having them spend a lot of time moving from site to site.

So, where do you search for jobs? Corporate websites? Job search engines? Then perhaps it’s time to relook into how you look for jobs. Asia is still behind teh USA in transitioning from offline to online classifieds - but the gap is closing fast and more are going towards the online trend. So, come recruit.net, which aspires to provide a quick and simple solution to job search. They believe that people just want 1 place where they can quickly and simple search and track all the jobs that match their interests. What Google does for search, recruit.net does for job search. Push button technology is what recruit.net provides for job seekers.

And because recruit.net serves across different continents, they make use of GeoIPs to drop the users to their respective regional websites so that language barrier will not be an issue and users get to interact with a localized experience. There are also many tools that allows, for e.g. users to look at job and skill trends, or to get job suggestions that the users might be interested in based on their requirements. Users are also able to track the job arket via email alerts of RSS feeds. Most importantly, job seekers are able to find out the most current average salary based on their job options. Recruit.net also partners with regional sites such as CNet to provide better channels and avenues of job searches.

So, how do they get their revenue? They use a results-based advertising method, which is more commonly known as a pay-per-click network advertising. This is sutiable for promoting all types of online services, is measurable and is performance based. Advertisers are able to log in to a centralised console to track how their adverts are performing.

All in all, recruit.net is a cool platform for both job seekers as well as people who are interested to advertise with them. Importantly, choose a job you love and you’d never work a day in your life.

855pm BookJetty up next, which is presented by Herryanto Siatono. If you forget anything he said in the next 10 mins, you should just remember that what you will be 5 years from now depends on the people you meet and the books you read. This got Herry to keep track of what he read through a book catalog - in the form of a spreadsheet, which eventually became too troublesome to update.

So where does Herry find good books? He thinks that Amazon is a good place to start searching for them. However, reading can be an expensive hobby and at the end of the year, he feels that “oh shit, he’s spent so much!“, and this started his transition between Amazon.com and Singapore NLB, giving him the idea of bookjetty, which roofs both Amazon and NLB. A quick history of BookJetty show that they have come a long way till the integration with more than 3oo libraries worldwide using web services.

Herry - the one man team behind BookJetty, is currently providing a demo using BookJetty. The Internet connection seems good. =)

915pm We have Gen Kanai up on stage next, who is presenting Mozilla, which originated from Netscape Navigator that gave rise to Phoenix and eventually Firefox in November 2004, which saw 10 million downloads in 30 days! They now have various applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird, Tomtom, Joost and Stumble Upon which are based on Mozilla. They now have more than 100+ million users worldwide with more than 2500 community-contributed extensions, in 43 languages and growing and 16% worldwide market share.

For those who are familiar with Firefox knows that there are a lot of customization. In addition, Mozilla responses fast to security risks, hence reducing the amount of risks that users face due to internet or codebase exploitation. 37% of the code contributed to Firefox since November 06 has come from the community, include localization codes. Offline features that are available will include the storage and access of data offline, just to name one. There is also Malware Protection, new features for better identity. And even aliens prefer firefox! (See field picture… erm, somewhere in google).

Gen is doing a demo on Songbird which is interoperable across different vendors, and provides web search facilities. Firefox 3 is also available now, and you may want to consider testing it out, though not using it as your main Internet browser.

Gen feels that the presentation that he enjoyed most came from BookJetty because Herry had an itch that he wanted to scratch and he went ahead to do it. At the same time, Gen also feels that an important issue for online startups is that of privacy - as they are consistently dealing with user data. Hence, all startups should be cautious when dealing with such data.

930pm Estee has opened the session for the audience to mingle with the presenters on the floors, and also for the lucky draw. Go for the bowl!!!

1005pm Prize presentation, starting off with tokens of appreciation to the various presenters, while awaiting for the great lucky draw prize…

1015pm And the winner is….. …. …. still waiting… … … Joseph from NTU!!!! Woot! And a speech from him is ongoing now, that popout is a very interesting event!

And now, we have come to the end of the event, and there’s a chill-out session going on now. So, have fun guys! I hope you have had as much fun as I had blogging and stuck on the table. =P