About Social Wok: Socialwok was founded on the premise that if social networks like Facebook and Twitter were so effective in helping us communicate with our friends, then why should we continue to depend on the ineffciencies of CC or BCC emails to collaborate at work with colleagues. Socialwok was created to allow organizations to harness the ease and power of rich media and feeds to improve collaboration and communication. (Right: Ming Yong Guang, CEO, Social Wok)

About E27 SG and Echelon 2010: Echelon 2010 (formerly known as unConference Singapore) aims to be at the frontier of the Internet and web technology landscape, where the main focus will be in bringing together the top brass of the web technology industry from various parts of the startup eco-system to facilitate discussion on the hot topics in the web startup scene. Founded in 2006, E27 is a community for passionate individuals with fresh, visionary mindsets on the Asian consumer web/mobile industry. Based in Singapore, we have a regional outlook and are committed to growing the industry through support for entrepreneurship and specialized events with corporate and public organizations.(Right: Mohan Belani, E27 and lead organizer for Echelon 2010)

(Source: Neoteny Labs and video recorded by James Chan)

Local entrepreneur, Leonard Lin has been making waves with his very popular game, BattleStations and has even been interviewed twice by us. Recently, he suffered a possible case of media coverage gone wrong.

Leonard was featured in a My Paper article (13th March 2009) that according to him, painted “a very negative” picture that he disputes.

Article in question. Click to enlarge.

Leonard’s comments on the article was sent in an email to MyPaper and also made its rounds on Facebook (you have to be logged in to view the note, otherwise, it’s appended at the end of this article) and has gotten many sympathetic responses. Suppose you are the entrepreneur involved, and you feel that your words were twisted to sensationalize the article, how would you feel?

We are here today not to conclude Leonard’s case but will use this example as a case study for all entrepreneurs who at once hope to get (print) media coverage but are fearful of the ‘final result’. This ‘final result’ is the finished, published article (potentially read by the thousands) and how it makes the entrepreneur and the business look. There are ultimately only two ‘looks’ the entrepreneur can be given: good or bad. And these adjectives are only entered into force when the entrepreneur in question assesses the article him/herself. Basically, it doesn’t matter whether you think the entrepreneur looks good or bad; what matters is whether the entrepreneur thinks the article made him or her look good or bad to readers.

Obviously, in this case, Leonard thinks the article misrepresented him and tried to make a stand against the article. Disregarding the potential success or failure of his campaign, Leonard’s note does two important things that forward his cause:

Personal Voice vs Impassive Journalistic Input

It is personally written, and it helps that he posted his comments from his personal Facebook account, giving a more individual human voice to it. As opposed to the professionally written journalistic input that necessitated a detached, impassive voice, Leonard’s informally-written note speaks directly to readers.

Leveraged On “Automatic” Supporters

By posting on Facebook, Leonard’s note would be broadcasted to his ‘friends’, both virtual and in real life. This pre-selected crowd of target readers would presumably already be on Leonard’s side. And if these people comment on his note, they would most probably be on his side. Strangers or other friends seeing the note for the first time might be influenced by the comments on the note, setting into motion a positive feedback loop.

You may have tried your best to demonstrate that awesome self of yours during the interview, but you still feel like the final article didn’t do you justice, give you enough due credit, simply misquoted you or worse, misquoted you and spun a good story out of it.

Remember that whatever you do in an interview is controllable and up to you. What is not up to you is how the journalist takes the interview to construct a piece on you.

What can you do to mitigate potential negative consequences resulting from less-than-stellar coverage of you? Start communicating with your customers.

1. Have a voice

Write a blog, keep in touch and up-to-date via personal emails. Make sure you start showing who you are early, rather than let the media do it for you (might end up in disaster).

2. Allow customers to contact you

Keep open channels for your customers and readers to contact you. Be it via email, a private message on social networks, Twitter @ tags or direct messages – any mode available helps assure that as many users as possible are able to contact you. Face it, not everyone replies to emails, but send them a private message on Facebook and they reply within two minutes.

3. Accept that the article will not be rescinded

As soon as you accept that the journalist and publisher behind the article will not bother to clarify what went on during the interview, the happier you will be. No matter how many times you email or call them, your ‘bad’ article will not be corrected or noted in the next issue under “Errata”.

4. Attempt to clear your name

If the bucket has already been spilled, use your channels to speak to your customers and readers. This is the time to test the strengths of your communications. Let them know that you think that you have been misquoted and the article you appeared in seemed to have given a misplaced point of view.

The success of your attempts really depends on how much rapport and credibility you have built up over the months and years. This is where points (1) and (2) above are made all the more important. For they need to be done with foresight, and not with hindsight.

Written by Leonard Lin, CEO, Tyler Projects.

A very negative article was written about me in MyPaper today. I would like to make the following clarifications to anyone who read it.

1) I did not say: ““My bottom line is money, not passion like most entrepreneurs.”

I have a strong focus on our bottom-line and I watch our bottom-line very closely (that’s a CEO’s job). I did not say “My bottom-line is money”, that carries a very negative connotation and has a completely different meaning.

I did say I started the business to make money (which should be the objective of any business unless it is a non-profit) and not because of a passion or love for games.

2) “I wanted to be a big-shot investment banker, but I realized I would make more money with this.”

I want to work in an investment bank as an asset manager, not investment banker. I got a job as a risk management analyst but I did not want to be an investment banker.

I’m quite certain I didn’t say I wanted to be a “big-shot”. That’s not my style and it leaves a negative impression.

3) “Their money-making secret? Convincing gamers to pay money for virtual goods such as weapons and action points to get ahead in the game.”

Convincing gamers to buy virtual goods IS the virtual goods model. This is something well known and used by many Free to play MMOs and their players. By labeling it a “money making secret” it sounds as though we are trying to trick and deceive our gamers.

If I did not care about them (our gamers) I wouldn’t stay up till 3am almost every day to help them with their queries and orders.

I also would not have bailed out one player for S$1000 who needed financial aid.

Additionally I do not actively convince or try to sell to anyone that they should buy stuff from our game so that statement wrong.

4) My surname is “Lin”. Not “Lim”

5) The title “Money-driven Gamer” carries a negative connotation.

I wanted to get a bank job to earn a high salary, I decided to focus on my startup because based on my calculations it could make me more. Most people want to be rich; It is NOT the same as being “money driven”.

I’m quite certain I did not express that money was all I cared about in the interview. I care about my staff, I care about our gamers, I care about the games we make.
Personally I feel that the article carries a lot of personal opinion that isn’t mine. I’m not sure if that was intended.

This will certainly decrease our willingness to work with MyPaper on future interviews and press releases.

Editor’s Note: Leonard has given us permission to publish his comments.

We would also very much like to hear from you. Have you, as an entrepreneur, had a bad experience with the press? Been severely misquoted? Are you a journalist and feel like the press has been wrongly painted as the bad guys who seem to give erroneous reports all the time? We need your voice now.

Photo courtesy of mary_gaston22.

Zopim is a company incubating under Garag3 from NUS that helps improve your visitors’ experience on your website. Their product enables your visitors and clients to stay in touch with you through your website, using the most convenient form of communication, instant messages. Of course, they have a larger than life story on how they got started. So, we managed to lock Julian Low and his fellow team mates in the Zopim team (Wenxiang, Royston Tay, Yang Bin) for an interview to tell us about ZopIM.

BL: Hi Julian, thank you for the interview. Tell us about your background.
Julian:Hi Bernard, for the interview, with your permission I would like to include the rest of my core team in this interview as ZopIM is our baby and I feel they too deserved the recognition for all their efforts.

A very brief background of the team is as follows:

Wenxiang is ZopIM’s server side developer & residential punk who despite having a rebellious streak, labors day and night, tweaking away to ensure that everything runs smoothly at ZopIM. Graduating from the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Computer Engineering, WX’s thesis involves advanced customer profiling solutions which is integrated into ZopIM as a very useful tool for ZopIM users to track and understand their visitors’ web path and behavior.

Royston previously honed his engineering skills as a QA/software engineer at FaceTime Communications Inc, a leading company in Enterprise IM security. He helped developed internal stress and monitoring tools, and was involved in some technical marketing as well.

At ZopIM, he is now heavily involved in developing the web-based interface for ZopIM’s corporate customers and also chips in for Business Dev as the official Business Dude

Yang Bin aka YB is ZopIM’s Client & Agent side developer and is also our resident Javascript ninja. A coding masochist, YB has outlasted his peers in coding marathons and at last check, has not left his cubicle since. A gaming enthusiast, YB is the co-founder of Fragnetics.com, one of Singapore’s very successful game hosting companies.

Majoring in Life Sciences, I was previously employed as an intern at Alpha Innotech Corporation based in San Leandro, California. I worked my way to Junior Product Manager and was handling multiple product lines before I left them last summer.

During my stint in Silicon Valley, I was given the opportunity to be part of a 2-man startup company called NandoDrop Array Technologies. ND-array Technologies was a company that was aiming to commercialize a small molecular drug discovery platform that was developed in NUS by my co-founder and which provides a 96% cost reduction in screening for potential drug targets.
Despite early successes in raising funding from local sources, I was unable to garner serious industry interest in the U.S to realize its full potential, largely due to undercapitalization. Eventual undercapitalization forced us to shut the company down and it was a painful lesson but I would still do it again as I gained many invaluable lessons through it. Many of which had benefited me as I venture forth with ZopIM.com which is also aiming to challenge and optimize existing business practices.

BL: Tell us the story behind ZopIM! and how did the whole team get involved in the project?
Julian: ZopIM like many other startups was an idea borne out of idle conversations. I had roomed in with Wenxiang and was classmates with YangBin when we were in Silicon Valley and we had an idea which goes basically like this: “What if you could have a browser-base chat session that could persist across multiple web pages? What if every hyperlink becomes an opportunity for you to interact with a fellow human being in this extremely populated but still surprisingly quiet place we call the internet.”

This remained an idea until 18th April 2007. That fateful day, Tim Draper the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm had arrived in Singapore for an event and was having a dinner meet up session with local aspiring entrepreneurs. WX who was never invited, gate-crashed the event (with the help of Roy) and shamelessly pitched his idea to Tim. As luck would have it, Tim liked the idea and asked when he could see the prototype.

WX, thinking that Tim was kidding, said: “Two months?”

Tim: “Okay, I want to see the prototype exactly 2 months from now, 18th June in my office. I will arrange a meeting with you with my secretary.”

When WX went home that night and received an email confirmation from Tim’s personal assistant Karen, he practically fell off his chair. That was when all hell broke loose.

Realizing that this was a rare opportunity, WX needed more help and roped in Roy who was eager to get in the fray. Within 2 months, Roy+YB+ WX had ZopIM’s 1st prototype up and we presented it to him at his Sandhilll office in Silicon Valley.

Like most VCs, he did not reject us outright but basically told us that he thinks the idea is scalable and that we were to approach when we gain some traction. Despite this, Tim’s encouragement gave us the impetus to continue developing on the idea. Though we were still schooling, we had successfully applied and obtained funding from MDA’s iJam’s program and the rest as they say is history.

BL: As we understand that ZopIM is a next generation sales Instant Messaging platform, how is it different from the remote desktop types of messaging platforms which are available? Also, what are the features in ZopIM! that you deemed interesting for your users?
Julian: Live Chat for customer sales and support is not new. However the industry is filled with cloned solutions that just do not satisfy the needs of small online businesses. If you take a simple Google search and download the ready-made Live Chat solutions today, you’ll find that most are them are:

• a. Cumbersome to use and requiring software downloads.
• b. Have bad user interface design.
• c. Costly and not applicable for small online businesses

ZopIM differentiates itself from the rest of the market by focusing a lot of our developmental energies in solving the pains our customers as well as the end-customer (their customers). You can see this in the features that we offer like…

• a. Offline notifications/messaging and a browser-based Dashboard platform that help our customers talk to people on their websites even while they are on the not near a computer. We believe we are the first Live Chat service provider to offer this for now. (If you do find one, do let us know)
• b. Incorporating business features like customer ranking, canned messages and survey functions that help our customers to engage their web page visitors more efficiently and effectively.

Currently, we are still working on the pricing model with our Beta Clients but one thing we can assure is that it would be a Freemium model where it would be free for most websites till they reach a certain high traffic stage.

BL: Who would be the customers of your product?
Julian: So far, our Beta customers base come in all shapes and sizes. On top of a few Web design & IT firms that deploy our platform, we have a Spa Treatment Website (www.spahaven.com.sg), a Gaming Console Webby (www.qisahn.com), a Bag aficionada cum sales blog (www.cassis-room.blogspot.com) and even a Political Webby (www.voterscentral.com).
However, the one thing that is common among them is that they rely heavily on their websites to reach out and engage their customers.

BL: How does ZopIM! create a sustainable revenue model given that the messaging platform is free and can be deployed on any platform?
Julian: Yes, its free for the majority of our customers. However we will be working on a Freemium model, we will charge our customers an affordable subscription fee when they reach a certain traffic or need more advanced features (e.g SMS notification, intelligent routing, etc).

That way, we can build a sustainable business while providing ZopIM for our beloved customers.

BL: What are the trends that you see in the instant messaging platform space in the web?
Julian: In the social IM space, we see more and more integration and aggregation activities going on. We also see that IM clients which were once mostly desktop-based migrating/merging with the browser. Popular clients like Meebo and Ebuddy are evidence of this. Once dataplans become cheaper and accessible for phones, it’s a no-brainer to postulate that the next Big IM War will happen on the phone.

Ok, what I postulated are boring conclusions that have been debated since the 90s. Personally, I would like to go out on a leg to predict that IM would one day become smarter tools than just a simple text-base medium you see today. I believe very strongly that Netizens one day will use embedded IM tools on the web (like ZopIM) to conduct other activities. (E.g. Book an appointment with your doctor/restaurant, request for information or automate a multitude of online tasks)

BL: What are the three important traits of a young entrepreneur that you think are important?
Julian: Most self-motivational books would tell you that the 3 important traits that an entrepreneurs should have are Courage, Passion and Honesty. However, I would like to propose to SGE’s readers a slightly more non-conventional lesson for young entrepreneurs that we have learnt so far.

Team ZopIM would not be where it is today if not for our Mentor and Friend , Charlie Giang who is a successful entrepreneur in his own right. Through our drinking sessions (where he sponsors our liquor and get us horribly dead drunk), we were able to glean from him a few pearls of wisdom.
Chief among his many advices is that a young entrepreneur MUST have the willingness to “po fu chen zhou“. “Po fu chen zhou” is a Chinese proverb that basically translates to destroying the cooking pots and sinking his boats. The proverb relates to orders an ancient Chinese General Xiang Yu assigned to his army when they landed on enemy shores. The result of the orders hardened his army’s resolve and they were able to defeat their enemy who were numerically bigger and better prepared.

Likewise, a young entrepreneur going into the marketplace should be desperate to succeed. When he/she makes the conscious decision to cut himself off from the comfort of a 9-5 job to fill a gap identified in the market, he has nothing to lose. He/she would naturally have the means to adapt accordingly and to develop other traits (E.g. People skills) as challenges come along.

Thus said, there are no fixed traits or winning formulas any successful entrepreneurs should have. If you wait to develop those traits before you decide to plunge in, it would be too late. When you are young, you have nothing much to lose. So make the plunge today and learn those traits as you go.

BL: Thanks for sharing with your story and thoughts. We wish you and the team from ZopIM the best of luck for your ventures ahead.

In this book, Fannin divided the book into three parts. She explored the rise of Chinese internet companies from the perspective of the entrepreneurs. She picked the six most successful companies which she labelled the copycats, i.e. there is a western counterpart to these companies doing exactly the same thing. In this group, she picked Baidu, Alibaba, Dangdang, Chinacars,  Oak Pacific Interactive and Bokee. Of the six, I am more familiar with Baidu and Alibaba. She explored a bit more in depth about the founders. From the group, there are two groups of founders. Either these founders have spent their time in the US or they are made in China. She also described some of the strategies how these local companies have given the tech giants such eBay, Paypal and Google a hard time.

The next part of the book deals with the investors. Of interest, she discuss why some venture capitalists from Silicon Valley (Perkins, DFJ and Sequoia) have moved to China while some do not. For example, Guy Kawasaki is one of those who did not want to go to China. In fact Don Valentine, the godfather in Silicon Valley has once felt that China is too far and too foreign, and crippled with intellectual property theft, immature stock exchanges and regulatory problems before 2003, and he changed his mind after Sequoia has deeply invested in China. The last part of the book, the author identified the innovators, and selected five of them: Lingtu, Oriental Wisdom, Pingco, Maxthon and Lattice Power Corporation.

If you are looking for a book to give you a headstart on the up and coming Chinese tech companies, then Silicon Dragons will be a good one to start off with.

Author’s note: This review is first published in his personal blog.