Barcamp KL 2009 – The Things I hear about Entrepreneurship & Bloggers

April 6, 2009 by Bernard Leong
Filed under Events

I set off to Subang Jaya for Barcamp Kuala Lumpur (KL) on Friday morning. I reached a day earlier to meet up with some internet specialists and organizers of Barcamp KL. The last Barcamp KL was held in the KLCC area (where the Petronas Towers are). This event was held over the weekend (4 and 5 April 2009) in Inti College, Subang Jaya. The trip turned out to be a good one because it grew to become Barcamp Southeast Asia, with other organizers from Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo & Cambodia. This time round, we have wi-fi available, and the other thing I liked about the location is that the Inti College is located besides the Asia Cafe and also a Starbucks Cafe where I can grab a cup of grande vanilla latte.

Like the last barcamp, this is a two days event with different topics from different speakers. There are significant differences about this trip as compared to the last trip. There are seven to eight rooms available for speakers to get into the frame and spread their thoughts and ideas. Other than technology (mainly in the Internet space), we have topics ranging from social & youth entrepreneurship, corporate brands with social media, bloggers, to even salsa dancing. I did one presentation (which I will talk in another post) on Saturday (so that it will be cosy and fun for me on Sunday) and took part in lightning talks this time round with the ever enthusiastic host Fadil to get all of us rolling. Of course, I picked up a couple of interesting thoughts and facts on entrepreneurship which I will not find elsewhere other in the barcamp:

Entrepreneurship, Wealth and Innovation: Meng Weng, one of the SG angel investors created an interesting about entrepreneurship and wealth with a U-curve, with the x-axis being the wealth an individual have and the y-axis being the necessity of entrepreneurship. In his model, there are basically a couple of conditions which are of interest: if you are poor and hungry i.e. low wealth and high necessity of entrepreneurship, there is a need to be an entrepreneur to keep yourself alive. Hence you end up starting enterprises (from chicken rice stall to basic goods trading). If you are rich and you are an entrepreneur, you will also end up on the other extreme end of the U-curve, and you will focus on setting up enterprises with competitive advantage and innovation. Hence everything in between falls in the dip of the U-curve, which means the middle class. That may be an explanation to why there is a shortage of entrepreneurs in Singapore. Most of the citizens are in the middle class where they earned enough wealth and there is a lack of necessity to start new companies. The inertia is that you will prefer to work for a big company due to parental and peer pressures. People who are into setting up new companies have to deal with different realities that most people do not face. We also have a long discussion about innovation which I think that I will soon write a post about sometime in the future.
Youth Entrepreneurship: There is the panel entitled “Perils to Youth Entrepreneurship” with my counterpart, Daniel Cerventus (MY Entrepreneurs), Aidan A Chew, Michael Teoh, Jason & Melvin moderated by Hakim Albasrawy. Most of the discussion centered around whether there is a need to spread awareness of entrepreneurship, and dispel the myths of entrepreneurs do not need to stick to a 9 to 5 schedule. However, one interesting issue that popped up during the discussion is that Singapore has the same problem with Malaysia on dealing with the problem of MLM marketers, traders and dodgy Ponzi scheme players running around with the false flag of entrepreneurship. If there is a good take-home lesson, all the panelists with the audience agreed that entrepreneurship is a very difficult endeavour and packed with suffering. While I myself advocate telling the bad parts to scare away young people from it (and let them decide if it is right for them), the panelists prefer an positive approach with some warnings to the young entrepreneur. One other myth that most people dispelled is the issue of education. In fact, even the panelists concede that some of the more successful entrepreneurs in Malaysia have top class education in the UK and US. The norms and the exceptions should be played out properly. In fact, strangely, both Singapore and Malaysia have very similar support structures for entrepreneurship and yet we faced problems that are common to both countries. If there is one take away from this panel, the question for anyone who plan to be an entrepreneur is “What do you want in life and why are you doing this?” If you do have the answer for this, you should reconsider.
Colin Charles talk on Advertising & PR, Bloggers & Integrity: A talk that grew from a small number to full house was Colin Charles (aka bytebot) about blogger, PR and integrity. In his talk, he discussed the differences between a blogger and journalist, the issues with blogging advertising networks and how media buyers are directly engaging the bloggers without them. He advocated an interesting policy about Google on social media. Apparently, if you do not have public disclosure on writing a review about a product and get paid by the agency to do it, Google can penalize your Google page rank if they found out about it through their automated analytical tools.

Lastly, when I was in barcamp KL, some friends believed our April joke and told us that they thought that SGE and MYE are planning to merge. I just smiled and say, “Why not if the conditions are right?” Indeed it has been a great event and brought together barcamp participants & organizers from Thailand, Cambodia, Japan and Singapore. We should have more and not less barcamps. :)

Photos for the event:

[1] The event stands on Pre-Barcamp Night