Focus on business, excel in technology

I attended the Entrepreneur27Singapore event a few days back. In fact, I'd like to thank them for pushing me into action and starting this weblog. Seeing so many smart and enthusiastic young people sometimes can really kickstart your otherwise dormant desire to do something.

Much has been said about the event. You can read more from Entrepreneur27Singapore site and from SGEntrepreneurs.

I'd like to offer my perspective on what I saw and felt that evening. Indeed, seeing so many young people testing their new ideas and putting them to work is really encouraging. And everyone is so warm to one another and walking up to chat to anyone is really comfortable. This I think is a good way to showcase your stuff and network to know more people. Plus, I get to meet some of my friends there - Nick Pan and Edmund Leng of Nanyang Polytechnic.

I'm indeed impressed with the presenters. They showed great knowledge of their technology or website. And it's obvious they had spent quite some time coming up with their presentation slides. I'm glad to know that there are quite a few sharp technical chaps from the audience too.

I'd like now to draw out an important point from this event - Concentrating on business. I felt that the ideas presented or floated around were really good, although of course they need some polishing. I'd just like to comment on the team from Yearbook and Xshare, as I was in a conversation with someone else when Choon Keat was presenting RSSFwd.

As a business person and a non-techie, I could not see how the two teams are going to drive revenue from their business. I could not see a reason that compels me to part with my money to use their service, both from the perspective of a consumer and an advertiser.

In the case of Yearbook, to me, it's pretty much a social networking site and the revenue stream is going to come from advertisement. There is success now because of the novelty of the site and the high amount of traffic that is driven from the mrbrownshow. However, I cannot see beyond a few months time how this traffic will be maintained. Likewise, I do not see beyond the first few advertisers why they are going to stick with Yearbook, especially when there isn't much conversion happening.

I've had the opportunity to email chat with Jeremy, founder of Yearbook, two days before the event and the day after. My suggestion to him is to focus. Focus on building a great community. Give his users a very strong reason to come back again and again to his site. Never mind about the advertisement for the time being. If there is traffic, advertisers will come.

For the XShare team, they've got a great technical product. What XShare does is to allow the user of a mobile phone equipped with camera function to be able to send his pictures or videos to anyone in the world or to send them to the user's blog or other designated sites he wants by using a simple to use software application on the phone. Great! Who doesn't want that?

I don't. I just don't. For example, I'm on holiday in Europe and I am now right in front of Buckingham Palace in London. I like the guard on duty so much, because he doesn't move whatever you do to him, that I snap a pic and want to share it with my friends. The question is, how soon do I want to share with my friends. Would it be now, because my urge is so strong that I must immediately share with my loved ones back home, or can I defer my urge for instant gratification of this desire? I think I can wait and there are, I'm sure, a quite a few people in this world who are like me. I can always go back to my hotel or hostel or an internet cafe one hour later and sync my phone with a USB port to an internet enabled computer and upload my pics from there, and email or post those pics to the people or websites I want. Maybe, I'm old-fashioned, but aren't you sometimes?

So I thought that the XShare team is really good technically. No doubt about that. But my suggestion to them is to think about who their consumers really are and how many of them are there in this world. Moreover, the price of today's MMS sending is quite exorbitant at the moment. Perhaps that will change when 3G finally arrives.

Someone in the audience, in fact my friend Edmund Leng, pointed out an interesting example of how a similar picture sending technology is being used in Japan. He shared with us how one cosmetic company tied up with a mobile operator and allows users to send pictures of their skin back to the company for analysis. Within minutes, the users will get back a report and recommendation of which cosmetics they should use for their particular skin type, at which point they might make a purchase decision on the spot.

There is a big difference here between the business model of this Japanese company and XShare. First, the business model of the Japanese company is C-B-C. Along this chain of interaction, there is value added in the information or content provided by both the business and the consumer. While the picture of a user skin to her is not valuable, it is so to the cosmetic company. The minute that the company receives this data, they immediate add value to it by giving suggestions on the type of skincare the user should use. They might even throw in advice on how to improve and maintain that user's type of skin. The user receives value back from the company by initially providing something which is seeming non-valuable to herself. In this simple scenario, both parties are happy because both receives valuable information. This example is a perfect example of customisation and efficiency and economies of scale.

Moreover, the company, having collected so much data from thousands or millions of users, they could use all this information to do further research on improving their skincare products. This seemingly useless information, in fact, provided double or even triple-fold value to the company.

For the consumer, the information that she receives is way more valuable that the friction of the transmission fee paid to the mobile operator. For a few yen, she knows exactly what she needs almost instantaneously. Moreover, she can trust this information because it comes from real experts analysing her skin. This is way more powerful than being introduced cosmetics by friends or MLM sales people because of how great the result is on them, not herself.

XShare's busines model on the other hand is more C-C. Like most of us know, and the presenter mentioned it, we send crap to one another. Sometimes, you just want to share a snippet of your life with your friends but this information might not be really valuable to your friend seeing it. Why? Have you had experience before when you spent a lot of time arranging and decorating a nice picture book of a beautiful holiday trip you recently took, and when you showed it to your friends and family, they flip the album so fast that you wonder why you bother showing it to them in the first place? I think we all know the answer. The reason is that those pictures you took are valuable only to yourself because you were there, and you saw the beauty of that scenery or that moment and it's still fresh in your head and emotionally strong in your heart. But to those persons who were not there, they can't feel the special moment that you felt.

My suggestion to XShare is this. Find out how you want to position your business. What's your angle? And what's the angle for your business partners, eg. the mobile operators? Once there is value created, in this case for the consumer as your business is still consumer based, I'm sure you'll be rolling in the cash in no time.

Well, it's been great sharing some of my thoughts on this event here. I hope you've already taken some good ideas away from here, just like I did at the event. If you have any comments, just post them up.