Singapore Entrepreneurs

The Nexus 2007 conference, organized by the Digital Movement is finally over. Of course, it turned out to be a great event with a great turnout of people from all walks of life, a list of interesting panel discussions and a group of impressive panelists assembled. Of course, it will be some time that I will be doing live blogging of such an awesome event. So how did the panel “Future of the Web” go? Other than pulling off a stunt with my fellow panelists (Andreas, Nathan, Bobby and Reza) with no mention of the word “Web 2.0″, I offer a short narration on what happened during the panel.

For the years of moderating a panel, I will say that this has been the most challenging one in my life. First, I am standing on the shoulders of the heavyweights, who have extensive and diverse experience in the internet market: Andreas Weigend (former CTO, Amazon), Bobby Napiltonia (Senior Vice President, Global Business Development and Alliances, Salesforce.com), Reza Behnam (MD of Yahoo! South East Asia) and Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly Radar, Perl Foundation Board).

The whole panel is actually longer than what you have thought. There are three phases to the whole panel.

• Pre-Panel discussion: All the panelists met in the speaker room (room 702) at noon and spent all the time until the beginning of the panel to discuss what the interesting lessons about the evolution of the web would be. Of course, through our discussion, we were also trying to frame the discussion into several themes around the experiences of the various panelists. In the end, we came down to these four themes which I have to direct the discussion towards: Discovery, Innovative Business Models, Evolution of the Internet Ecosystem and What’s Next?. It will be interesting to refer to an earlier article written by Nathan on the future of Web 2.0.
• The talk and the panel: Andreas started the talk with his thoughts on the internet, and gave a primer to the long tail concept, particularly how the internet is moving towards a user-centric viewpoint given the democratization of the tools on the web and the creation of niche markets. Following that, I invited Bobby, Nathan and Reza to the stage.We started the conversation by addressing one of the key challenges from Andreas’ speech. The question focuses on how the creators of content can create trustworthy and credible content and manage that content with a greater degree of transperancy coming from the other users. A couple of key points emerged from the discussion, and one of them is the emergence of new business models arising from the internet. Bobby and Reza provided examples of how Yahoo! and Salesforce.com have managed media content and software distribution respectively. The other point is about the incentives that companies use to gather more users to their internet communities. Nathan and Andreas both commented that monetary incentives are not helpful and have the capacity of distorting the market. They suggested alternatives such as credibility ranking. In fact, they believe that most users contribute to the internet out of their passion for the subject.All the panelists felt that the management of credibility will be an important issue for the development of the web, for example, the reliability of the wikipedia as a trustworthy source. The common consensus is to rely on the wisdom of crowds and the quick response from the community to quickly correct misinformation on the web. Another theme that was discussed is privacy. Currently many companies can acquire your information and profile the users easily by what kind of search terms or information they place into the web. We got a question from the floor on the use of OpenID, where Reza responded by giving an example how Yahoo! has adopted it in the management of their users. There is a common view that technology has provided more access and means to profile users and determine their spending patterns. In fact, Andreas talked about the RFID technology as a good example in the offline world.Finally, I asked everyone to look into the crystal ball for what the future looks like, and they offered their different perspectives of the future. Of course, you will hear about them once the podcast for the panel is officially out.
• Post panel discussion: After the panel is over, we did a post panel podcast on some of issues which we did not cover. Other than Bobby, the rest of us did that post panel podcast with the addition of Ming Yeow. Of course, Nathan and I switched roles, as he takes over from me the moderator of the panel. He took the opportunity to ask Reza the question from Chris Anderson. The discussion centered more on the development of the internet industry in Asia, particularly in Singapore. I offered the view that the internet has created a mechanism to adjust pricing and value in traditional markets by redefining the business models or even destroying these traditional industries, as seen by my interaction with the web 2.0 examples seen in the world.

It has been an exciting and interesting experience for me (actually, to be honest, I felt that it was not one of the best sessions that I have moderated), and I look forward to see more of such conferences in Singapore. As Bjorn commented about the conference, it felt like being in Silicon Valley for 3 hours.

Acknowledgments: I thank the organizers of the Nexus 2007 conference for the opportunity to moderate this challenging panel and also fellow panelists Andreas, Nathan, Reza and Bobby for a lively and interesting discussion. The pictures are extracted from the flickr site under tag Nexus2007.

Updates from other bloggers (Do check them out):
Justin Lee, Bjorn Lee, Kevin Lim, Ridzuan, Benjamin Koe, DeadPoetsCave.com, Harish, Soul Soup 2.0, Geek Goddess, Van Tan, Decay On Net, Clapping Trees, Marina, Manas, Traceable Knowledge (Roberto), Tinker Tailor, James Seng, Raine Lai, whysgentrepreneurssuck, Walter Lim (Cooler Insights) (with additional commentaries on web 2.0 (Nathan’s talk), citizen journalism and future of the web), Siva, Alvin Loo, Darell Tan, Astroboy, iFoundries, Ryan (Cool Gadgets And Technology News Online), Andrew Peters, Ong Jiin Joo, Web Standards Group SG and Ian have provided commentaries and press for Nexus 2007.

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