Our friends across the causeway will be holding Barcamp KL on 4th & 5th of April 2009 in Level 4, Inti College Subang Jaya. You can check out more information about the sessions and venue via their wiki page. If you are keen on web development, social networks and new ideas from Travel 2.0 to Fashion, this is definitely the event to go. BarCamp is basically a very open, participant-driven workshop event where people share knowledge and ideas and expand their social and business network. There is usually no particular theme. Those people who want to share ideas and knowledge – of any subject, in any field – could register for time and room to host their session. Then, the rest of the people could come to event for free and join any session that they are interested in. If they find that the session uninteresting, they could just leave and go to the next one. Note that Barcamp Singapore III is just over and we are looking forward to the KL and Bangkok one in the coming months.

Even though there is no wi-fi access despite the best efforts by the organizers to procure one, I felt that the event was very successful and exciting. The first thing I liked about the event is the people. The Malaysian web/tech community is made up of many enthusiasts and interesting people from all walks of life. I am heartened by the fact that some of them just come up to me and introduce themselves. Another thing about their community is that they all shared a deep passion in what they are doing, particularly the talk by Ditesh Gathani on the Malaysian Free Software Movement.

For me, it is a very fruitful trip to really get to know a different community who shares similar interests to the groups I have worked with over the past three years here in Singapore. In fact, here are a few lessons which I thought the Singaporean community should also think about.

• Working around the lack of resources: Unlike Singapore, where we have some much wi-fi access and resources from the government, the Malaysians has to work around with the lack of resources. During the 2nd day, there is a session done by a local hacker on “Wireless Hacking” where he was talking about how to seek wi-fi access around the area, and tried to do a local demo. What is more impressive, he demonstrated how to get around the servers in the KLCC area. This would not have happened in Singapore because the hypothetical hacker in Singapore will likely to get in jail for breaking rules. While I am not advocating breaking the law, I can see that a lot of necessity innovation that arises in the Malaysian tech community.
• They have a vibrant technology developer community than us: I was telling Mohan in E27 that their developer community is far more advanced. They dabbled in open source from Drupal to Firefox extensions, and they do a lot of interesting things with these open source software. In this event, the developers provide very deep insight on the coding aspect which I don’t see that much in Singapore, except maybe the Singapore PHP User Group. The other difference is that the Singaporean developers tend to work with APIs from the more established companies: Google, Microsoft and Facebook, since all our events tend towards working with the established corporations. Almost all the technical sessions I attended require some knowledge of the programming language or the platform used, for example, the Drupal sessions done by Ahmad Najib Habeb and Joeri Poesen. It seems that our community in Barcamp Singapore should note some best practices from this event particularly on technology and developer sessions from our Malaysian friends.
• Problems in technology entrepreneurship in Malaysia are pretty similar to those faced in Singapore: While moving around and interacting with different people, I find that the problems of technology entrepreneurship are similar in many respects, except that in Malaysia, you see more entrepreneurship because of necessity. The lack of talent is cited to be one of the major issues. I actually agree with one perspective that if some of the talent can put together something and succeed is better than each one of them venturing out on their own individual project. The emphasis on ideas rather than execution is the other issue that the younger entrepreneurs need to avoid. While I reflect with Mohan and Daniel Cerventus about the state of things in Singapore and Malaysia, there is one thing which the community has not delivered: success stories. It is important at some point that each one of us in the community achieved a degree of amount of success even if we have to venture abroad. I am starting to see that the reason why Singapore and Malaysia will find it difficult to emulate the success of Silicon Valley for very good reasons. While we rejoice the stories of the successes we read from Silicon Valley, we don’t realize the failure rate in that place is far more astronomical than both Singapore and Malaysia add together. The context for fundraising in Singapore and Malaysia is totally different from Silicon Valley, and hence a lot of things don’t really work in our environments. It is up to the ground level to make some adjustments in those issues. The technology entrepreneurs in both countries need to step up and compete at that pace with those in China. I will actually talk about this more in my blog about the session on investing, valuing and funding start-ups in both countries that I facilitated during Barcamp Malaysia with Mr William from Ingenious Capital.

All in all, it has been a great event and I am sure that my fellow Singaporean friends who are there, share the same sentiments, and we look forward to more interaction, collaboration and fun in pursuing our passions in web/tech with our Malaysian friends across the causeway. Of course, this is not the end but just the beginning. So, watch this space.

Related Links:
[1] Barcamp Malaysia blog – Check out the various Malaysian technology bloggers’ entries about the event. Check out Cheryl Goh (winner of the best blog for Barcamp Malaysia), Grey Review, Khai Lee about doing what you love, Perry Loh and many others from the Barcamp Malaysia blog.
[2] My Flickr pictures for the event.
[3] BL, Barcamp Malaysia: IVF Drip III – Comparisons btw Singapore and Malaysia.

Photo 1: The Registration Booth on Barcamp Malaysia Day 2

Of course, the Widgeous Team started the ball rolling with their presentation of the platform. Throughout the day, the event is divided into various tracks. One of the tracks is totally focussed on the content management system, Drupal, where the developers led by Joeri Poesen started from the basics to the advanced, talking first about the platform and how to make use of Drupal to develop more interesting applications.

Another interesting discussion I have gone to is done by Wong Meng Weng (a successful Singaporean entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley). It is a discussion to use the analogy of wizards in fantasy role playing games and try to generate new ideas and insights about technology in the real world. One major lesson that I learned from this session is that the Internet has facilitated not just transactions without face to face, but also a platform to coordinate chaotic activity such that useful and organized output of information helped to create value for people and make their lives better. I thought that this type of ideas generation is sole lacking in our sessions back home, and urged Mohan to get Meng Weng for a session like this in the next E27 Unconference or related event.

The most interesting panel that I have attended is the session where the Malaysian entrepreneurs discussing going global where the issues and challenges they face are not so different from us in Singapore, and discuss about the entrepreneurs in terms of their mindset, and the execution risk as pointed by one of the panelists Vishen Lakhiani, co-founder of MindValley pointed out that the execution risk is a major issue among entrepreneurs in Malaysia. Dr V. Sivapalan, from Venture Partners Sdn Bhd, made this acute observation that there are actually enough talent to build four to five great companies in Malaysia, but the issue is that all the talent wanted to do something for themselves and hence you have 25 small start-ups where that combined strength can do 5 great start-ups. In some sense, it is also very reflective of young Singaporean entrepreneurs, where all of them do their own start-ups and not thinking of combining together to form a bigger start-up. The most interesting lesson is froom Ganesh, the CEO and President of MOL where he pointed out he has to modify the business models of his business to one that is of revenue generation. One thing that all of them agree is that ideas are cheap, and the execution is more important than idea.

For more updates on the event, please look at the Barcamp Malaysia Blog as the bloggers in Malaysia discuss and narrate what happened in the event.

Here are some pictures for the event:

Photo 1: The venue for Barcamp Malaysia

Photo 2: Daniel Cerventus and one of his teammate at the Registration Table

Photo 3: The session on Drupal by Ahmad Najib Habeb and Joeri Poesen

Photo 4: Meng Weng‘s interesting session about technology insights and ideas generation

Photo 5: Panel on “Entrepreneurs Going Global” – (From the left) Dr Sivapalan (Managing Principal of Ventura), Roslan Bakri (GM, MDEC, Technopreneurship Development Division), Ganesh Kumar Bangah (President, CEO of MOL AccessPortal Berhad) and Vishen Lakhiani (Co-founder, MindValley)

Photo 6: Preetam’s talk on interesting web 2.0 companies in Asia

Photo 7: The Singaporean speakers for Barcamp MY: Meng Weng, BL and Preetam Rai