Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Today I attended the “Ideas Generation Workshop” organized in the MIRC KL SME ICT Summit 2008.  All participants should agree that we have been so blessed by the sharing of the speaker David Lo from sixbrands.com, who has a wealth of experience in business, branding and marketing.

I was in the workshop to learn about how to generate and evaluates new business ideas.  Actually I already have some ideas myself,  some even few years old!  I want to know how to choose the best idea to work on, or as the speaker said, which idea to sell my house on!

At the end of session, we were told to submit a one-page summary of our business idea by next week in order to apply to MDeC’s (the organization behind MSC Malaysia) pre-seed fund for up to RM150,000 in order to further develop.  Never did I notice that the workshop was aimed for the fund applicants.

But now I’m seriously considering applying for the fund.  It’s a grant, free money!  The money will help in bootstrapping the new business and shorten the time to market.  Also, I will go through some process and learn things that I never learned.  In fact, I will be paid to learn!

Perhaps most importantly, this will instill discipline in me to act on my business idea now, rather than letting it collect dust for another few years.  Since it is a conditional grant, I must achieve certain project milestones and develop a prototype within certain time period, failing which I will need to pay back!

So now, which idea should I submit?  Well, this is not play play and I think I will submit the best one.  Wish me luck

I missed the just concluded FOSS.my event which was about movement for free and open source software.  Heard it’s been AWESOME!  Of course it is.  Who in the world will want to devote so much time in helping to develop and promote a software free of charge?  It must be for their belief and passion in the idea, product and community of people.  Long live FOSS!

Daniel Cerventus of Entrepreneurs.my led a session in FOSS.my and shared what businesses can learn from the open source.  An open source movement, or any movement for that matter, is all in and about its community of people believing in its cause and collaborating together to move it forward.

It makes me think that an open source movement is like a religion, or even a cult with its own sub-culture.  The people are crazy for the idea, work tirelessly to build up something for the good of all, and become “evangelists” to promote the software.  In fact, the term “evangelist” is a religious term, isn’t it?

Daniel likens the community to the supporters of a restaurant who strongly believe the food and beverages it provides.  I have a real story to tell here.

A customer recently asked me to join a cafe restaurant business as “member”, having joined herself.  The idea is that, the café owner offers “shares” (not real shares) of profit to all members of the public who invest into the business.  In return, the owner shares the monthly profit back to the members, with minimum fixed returns guaranteed.

In effect, these members will naturally want to help the restaurant do well and become “evangelists” for the restaurant.  It’s a “community café restaurant”.  Isn’t it a good idea?  What a different business model for an F & B business!

By the way, are you interested in investing in the café? Let me know and I’ll gladly connect you with my customer.

Now what if the members also help to develop every part of the café, from the decoration to the menu, just like the software developers help in open source software development?  Will it not become a real “open source café restaurant” then?

Is this achievable?  So what can we learn from open source movement for business?

Years ago when Google was already successful, I was in a coffee house with a friend.  We were discussing how to beat Google and build a better search engine!  We wanted to become Larry Page and Sergery Brin in Malaysia!  Ambitious, huh?

Google search result was then very much based on PageRank to calculate the “popularity” of web sites.  One main factor for the “popularity” of a web site is the number and quality of links from other web sites to it.  The more backlinks your web site has, the more “popular” it is, and so the higher ranking you will get in Google.

So how to outsmart Google?  We thought of the possibility of ranking web sites based on their traffic.  The more a web site is visited, the higher ranking it should have.  We thought of calculating “popularity” based on hits, not backlinks.

But how are we going to track the traffic?  We can’t get site owners to put a counter code on their sites.  We also can’t access their web server logs.  So finally we did nothing and dropped the idea.

But now Microsoft seems to be on similar line of thought when they proposed something called BrowseRank, which calculates popularity based on traffic and usage.  The more a web site is visited and the longer period of time it is spent on by users, the higher ranking it should have in search result.

I don’t know how they could do it.  But if they succeed to beat Google and become the number one search engine (which I think is not likely), I and my friend have only ourselves to blame for not further developing our idea.

I heard there are three kinds of people in this world – those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who don’t know what happen!  Apparently I belong to those who watch things happen!

I have a little idea for IT service providers to come together to promote your products and services using blog.

You can be selling computer hardware, doing computer repairs, setting up computer networks, providing web hosting, web design, e-commerce services, writing computer software, doing Internet marketing, teaching computer classes, or providing any other computer-related services.

But if your target customers are the SME/SMI (small and medium sized enterprises) in Malaysia, please consider this proposal.

You can’t be providing ALL computer services yourself, even Microsoft and IBM don’t.  But from the point of view of our target market, especially the less IT-savvy Malaysian businesses, these IT-related services are all just “computer stuff” to them.  So if there is a single, one-stop portal which can provide all their “computer stuff”, why not?

All of us can congregate to this neutral online blog platform.  We can write “advertorials” for our reader.  It could be some computer tips for our readers.  Of course, don’t forget to promote your services, include your contact details, and link to your web site at the end of your article.

This is like a tech and IT business blog geared towards the enterprises rather than individuals.  You build your credibility as an expert in your IT service and get customers from your blog posts.

So if you don’t already have a blog or a web site, you can consider this. It’s zero cost to you.  Just need your time to write about your area of expertise.

But if you are already blogging, why still join?  Simply because there is strength and synergy in working together.  While keep on blogging on your site, you can also copy and post your articles on this IT blog.

Anyone interested?