Beyond CRM
3 hours ago
Today our Unispace blog had changed from unispaceworks.blogspot.com to blog.unispaceworks.com. This is to reflect a more streamline our websites addresses. Hope this will make easier time for our readers or customers who are following our blogs.
Today i just made some changes in my blog. There's been ages i have updated our blog. As a programmer, i always fascinated with animated programs. So today i made some adjustments to the blog to show a really cool tag clouds. It's combination of flash and some fancy javascripts.
It's a product from WP-Cumulus made by Roy Tanck which meant for WordPress. But there are different implementations for WP-Cumulus and for blogger i found from Amanda Fazani. In her article, we explain how to install BlogCumulus by changing Template and voila we are done! there are some tweaking to it, such as fonts, background color. So for more info, check it out here.
Today found an interesting slides on Business Model and it's business example is Skype, an VOIP software company.
Interesting to know how to position our business model based on this slides? Will update in the next post. See if that helps us.
Please leave your comments if you have other ideas on your Business Model.
Interesting to know how to position our business model based on this slides? Will update in the next post. See if that helps us.
Please leave your comments if you have other ideas on your Business Model.
Something to share about Social Media which a buzz this couple of years. Here's a video showing what is social media about and their impact to our current world...
Heard of facebook before? :-D i guess so.... Enjoy the show....
Last week, Veyron and I attended a 1 day workshop. The title of the workshop is "Gold Mindset for Technopreneurs". It was organized by Mdec and Change University.
It started our abit late where i'm late as well. It suppose to be start at 9am and i reach there about 915am.... but luckily i'm not the last, there are couple of people that are late as well. Thus we start about 930am. We started off with some ice break sessions and then our first game 'Blue and Red' game. I'm not going details on the games but i play that before in my Asiaworks course, thus i was relegated to Observer role. But it's pretty good to see those people playing the game and i thought it will be alot of twist but in the end, ethics prevails and one participants points out maybe the stakes of the games is not high enough.
the sharing sessions after the game, i felt dragged abit long and mostly due to trainers really want us to know about what we want to achieve out from the workshop. About 1230pm, we break for lunch. Nothing fancy about the lunch but i had ot with the trainer and we had a good chat about power presentation for senior management like CEO.
we resume our workshop at 130pm and we started off with focus games and how focus enable us to reach our goals. i think the highlights of the afternoon is on the next game we about to play, the speed game. the game is really simple, the goal of the game is achieve the fastest time for all 19 person from the outside of the room and sitted on the chair. the time is counted from everyone come in and last person sit down on the chair. Well first i thought this is going be boring.
the first time we did it, from opening the door , rushing in and scrambling for a chair, all of us took 14 seconds and we thought it's okay. Trainer ask us can we do better than 14 seconds and we say we can. for the next few times, we did from 14 seconds to 8-9 seconds. We did alot of strategies like rearrange the chairs nearer to the door, line our selves up before go in and synchronize our movements and many little things. But our trainer told us that little things only will improves little time as we tried a few times and we still achieved about the same time.
Thus this seriously need a new way of doing it and we did. Most of the time i was the follower, follow whatever other self-elected leaders says. We in the end split ourselves into 2 groups as there are two doors and we achieve 5 seconds. But now trainer told us this is not even bronze timing. And we were like how can this be. We adjust and coordinate better and change some people in two groups. In the end, after i think 20 times of trying, we manage to break the record of 3.58 seconds. We really relieved we made it and break the previous 2 groups record.
i think this help breaks the ice for all of us and we feel we really achieved something that day which we never thought possible. So i think everyone that day learn about change and how learn to change and cope with change can lead us to some better place. We are all champions that day.
We end the day with alot of sharing and from everyone sharing i guess alot of people is learning something and some participants that in the morning seems withdraw or uninterested suddenly by end of the day, all come to life and willing to share their thoughts. Which i can really change and those people has truly "stretched".
As for me, that day i learned something about myself and makes me think alot, deep into what is i want to achieve the days forward. For the past 2 months, we as a group has learn alot and for me is a really eye opener to world of entrepreneurship. But i'm glad i'm part of it now and enjoy the ride and see where this will take us forward. So readers, if you have any interesting stories, let us know. cheers :p
It started our abit late where i'm late as well. It suppose to be start at 9am and i reach there about 915am.... but luckily i'm not the last, there are couple of people that are late as well. Thus we start about 930am. We started off with some ice break sessions and then our first game 'Blue and Red' game. I'm not going details on the games but i play that before in my Asiaworks course, thus i was relegated to Observer role. But it's pretty good to see those people playing the game and i thought it will be alot of twist but in the end, ethics prevails and one participants points out maybe the stakes of the games is not high enough.
the sharing sessions after the game, i felt dragged abit long and mostly due to trainers really want us to know about what we want to achieve out from the workshop. About 1230pm, we break for lunch. Nothing fancy about the lunch but i had ot with the trainer and we had a good chat about power presentation for senior management like CEO.
we resume our workshop at 130pm and we started off with focus games and how focus enable us to reach our goals. i think the highlights of the afternoon is on the next game we about to play, the speed game. the game is really simple, the goal of the game is achieve the fastest time for all 19 person from the outside of the room and sitted on the chair. the time is counted from everyone come in and last person sit down on the chair. Well first i thought this is going be boring.
the first time we did it, from opening the door , rushing in and scrambling for a chair, all of us took 14 seconds and we thought it's okay. Trainer ask us can we do better than 14 seconds and we say we can. for the next few times, we did from 14 seconds to 8-9 seconds. We did alot of strategies like rearrange the chairs nearer to the door, line our selves up before go in and synchronize our movements and many little things. But our trainer told us that little things only will improves little time as we tried a few times and we still achieved about the same time.
Thus this seriously need a new way of doing it and we did. Most of the time i was the follower, follow whatever other self-elected leaders says. We in the end split ourselves into 2 groups as there are two doors and we achieve 5 seconds. But now trainer told us this is not even bronze timing. And we were like how can this be. We adjust and coordinate better and change some people in two groups. In the end, after i think 20 times of trying, we manage to break the record of 3.58 seconds. We really relieved we made it and break the previous 2 groups record.
i think this help breaks the ice for all of us and we feel we really achieved something that day which we never thought possible. So i think everyone that day learn about change and how learn to change and cope with change can lead us to some better place. We are all champions that day.
We end the day with alot of sharing and from everyone sharing i guess alot of people is learning something and some participants that in the morning seems withdraw or uninterested suddenly by end of the day, all come to life and willing to share their thoughts. Which i can really change and those people has truly "stretched".
As for me, that day i learned something about myself and makes me think alot, deep into what is i want to achieve the days forward. For the past 2 months, we as a group has learn alot and for me is a really eye opener to world of entrepreneurship. But i'm glad i'm part of it now and enjoy the ride and see where this will take us forward. So readers, if you have any interesting stories, let us know. cheers :p
A fews weeks ago, i was discussing on the LAMP architectures based on a slides i'm found in the internet.
Today i also want to share another quite interesting slides on scable web architectures. This has more details to it from presentation layer all the way to data layer which is find most interesting. As we all know data layer is hardest to scale as it's quite hard to seperate your data out and merge it back in one query. And if you keep all you data in one place, sooner or later, you'll find that it will degrades faster than you say 'We have problem, Houston'. But of my recent reads in internet, all methods involves open source.
So how about microsoft stuff? Do microsoft have architecture to scale? Or they just don't have what the open source has? Or should architecture be technology-agnostic to be fully effective?
Well i will let you enjoy the slides or leave me your comments on this.
Enjoy!
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Today i also want to share another quite interesting slides on scable web architectures. This has more details to it from presentation layer all the way to data layer which is find most interesting. As we all know data layer is hardest to scale as it's quite hard to seperate your data out and merge it back in one query. And if you keep all you data in one place, sooner or later, you'll find that it will degrades faster than you say 'We have problem, Houston'. But of my recent reads in internet, all methods involves open source.
So how about microsoft stuff? Do microsoft have architecture to scale? Or they just don't have what the open source has? Or should architecture be technology-agnostic to be fully effective?
Well i will let you enjoy the slides or leave me your comments on this.
Enjoy!
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Today i come upon a interesting slide that discuss about architectural of a web based workflow platform. It has interesting concepts that made up the platform.
The one i want explore more is they sugges to used LAMP platform which consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and
PHP
Perl, hence LAMP as the platform to host the system.
PHP
Perl, hence LAMP as the platform to host the system.
But what about if the other rest of the population uses Microsoft technologies? So what it should be? Is it Windows, IIS, SQL, ASP.net? WISA... sounds abit weird, is it?
But whatever it is, seems like these are the only 2 that i know of. So i'm just wondering is there other combinations to create web platform that has the similar features. So any takers anyone?
But if you don't have any opinions, just enjoy the slide. :-D
For the past 2 days, I have been attending WPF workshop organized by MDEC / NTDC. I was clueless on WPF and since Puan R has been asking me to attend it, I registered it knowing that i need to come back from singapore earlier. As our project will be using Silverlight, a subset of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) as part of our a Rich Internet Application strategy, so WPF subject is quite important topic for us. This is one of the pre-seed programme benefits that we have received recently. I hope many more to come in the future.
For WPF, I was exposed to fundamentals of WPF about the XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) and was able to create simple animations and pretty interesting controls which never could have been so easily done via Winform or javascripts. Though XAML is at first hard to decipher, but using tools such as Expression Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008 ( the intellisense in VS2008 does help alot which Blend don't have) does help me learn about XAML much easier and faster.
Well WPF is all about XAML and without it, it will render it useless. I learned alot about WPF concepts such as layouts, templates, controls, binding, events, commands and many many many more. I now know more about WPF capabilites on 3D, manipulating graphics, controls and many more. I also learn about differences on WPF standalone (exe), WPF Browser Application and the more famous plugin, Silverlight.
Tomorrow i'll be learning more about data binding and 3D topic. Hope my trainer, Mr Lee Daqing can cover all the topics by end of tomorrow. Below is my first WPF application which has a circle bouncing up and down mimicing a bouncing ball although my example will ignore gravity as it will bounce indefinitely but hey this is my first application. Enjoy and comments on my XAML on how to improve it further.
<Window
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
x:Class="WpfApplication2.Window2"
x:Name="Window"
Title="Window2"
Width="640" Height="480"
xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
mc:Ignorable="d">
<Window.Resources>
<Storyboard x:Key="Storyboard1">
<DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00"
Storyboard.TargetName="ellipse"
Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform)
.(TransformGroup.Children)[3].(TranslateTransform.Y)"
AutoReverse="True" RepeatBehavior="Forever" >
<SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:01" Value="220" KeySpline="0,0,1,0"/>
</DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
</Storyboard>
<Storyboard x:Key="StopObject"/>
</Window.Resources>
<Window.Triggers>
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="UIElement.MouseLeftButtonDown"
SourceName="ellipse">
<BeginStoryboard Storyboard="{StaticResource Storyboard1}"
x:Name="Storyboard1_BeginStoryboard"/>
</EventTrigger>
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="FrameworkElement.Loaded"/>
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Mouse.MouseEnter"
SourceName="ellipse">
<PauseStoryboard
BeginStoryboardName="Storyboard1_BeginStoryboard"/>
</EventTrigger>
</Window.Triggers>
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<Ellipse Fill="#FF5055D2" Stroke="#FF000000"
HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="62.72,112,0,0" Width="81"
RenderTransformOrigin="0.485,4.014" x:Name="ellipse"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="70">
<Ellipse.RenderTransform>
<TransformGroup>
<ScaleTransform ScaleX="1" ScaleY="1"/>
<SkewTransform AngleX="0" AngleY="0"/>
<RotateTransform Angle="0"/>
<TranslateTransform X="0" Y="0"/>
</TransformGroup>
</Ellipse.RenderTransform>
</Ellipse>
</Grid>
</Window>
Alot of happens since our last blogs and we are extremely busy on our projects and daily lives. Well this blog is not about our project progress but just want to share on some of the things we did last couple of month.
April and May is certainly a busy month for us. On April 20th, we finally met up with our development manager, Encik S (full name is not provided to protect personal info :-p) and was briefed on our deliverables and Mdec expectations. More important is that we received our first cheque on first schedule. This is truly a memorable day for us as this justify our efforts for the past 1 year since Veyron floated the idea of Pre-Seed fund to me almost one year ago.
In April also, both Veyron and I attended a one day workshop organized by EO (short for Entreprenuers Organization). The workshop is coincidently name as "Surviving the Crisis" - Going Global Getting Lean as the main tagline for this year. It was an eye opening for us as we get to meet lot's of entreprenuers, CEOs and world class speakers for the event. There are 3 keynote speakers this year namely,
- Verne Harnish, author of "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits"
- Guys Parsons, a leading practitioner in applying Lean principles
- Prof George Kohlrieser, author of "Hostage at the table: How Leaders can overcome Conflict. Influence Others and Raise Performance"
All the speakers really give me alot of inspring and information especially on being surviving and thrives in times of crisis. It was eye opener event as well for me to hear from them and i guess i was slightly more knowledgeable that day. All the keynote speeches has alot of impact on me, while all speakers come from different perpectives but all has a common message which is how to thrive in time of crisis and that's important to know in times like this.
Unfortunately i did not take any pictures from the events to share here or more details on the keynotes as the amount of the info was hummagous and you got to be there to learn it. Another highlight of the event is the Super CEO section which featured Malaysian Airlines (MAS) CEO, Dato' Sri Idris Jala. This section definitely change my mind of MAS as Dato' Sri Idris Jala certainly has the criteria of a great CEO where he shared with us how he become a CEO of MAS when MAS was on USD400 losses in 2005. He shares with us on his 6 principles of busines transformation which he manage to turn around MAS less than 2 years to profits (more than profit USD265 in 2007):
- Games of Impossible
- P & L Anchorage
- Discipline of Action
- Situational Leadership
- Winning Coalition
- Divine Intervention
These 6 principles are those he uses while he was in MAS to transform MAS from red to black and he stressed alot on BRF (arconyms for Big Results Fast). The way he told us on these principles are highly entertaining and informatives as we was laughing and busy writing down on his principles. In between he manage to squeeze in a brief sales talk on the MAS promotion that launched on the same day. But the most suprising part of Dato' Sri Idris is he is good guitar player as he wrapping up his session, he play his sons' own pen song with acoustic guitar. This shows a good CEO is versatile person which is not only a leader but also a salesman, entertainer, a visionary and much more. I also find him to be a down to earth and man with good principles based on faith which I find rare it nowadays. I can only can compare within my limited knowledge of business leaders like YTL group CEO Francis Yeoh.
As we just started this journey into technoprenuership, the next 12 months (11 months left as time of writing.. :-D ) is crucial before we start our commercialization next year (hopefully it can be earlier... maybe end of the year perhaps?), we are looking on how to survives after this period. As we were on this journey, the event certainly make me realized that this is the road I want to go even i'm not sure what is lying for us in the future but i know it will be good for me and my partners and it's worth trying for.
Today i have known something new about marketing. Marketing isnt something about skills or technique but is all about mathematics. Well indirectly it is still touching a little about skills and technique but to rate the effectiveness of the marketing, its all back to the basic mathematics.
When a sales or marketing person is doing their job, they are to follow a certain guidelines or pre-prepared scripts from the company to make their calls and to negotiate with their customers. These scripts could be refined versions or even could be some old skool scripts which was created at 'who knows when'.
When they use this specific scripts, they are only getting that specific amount of feedback or reply from their customer. Lets say the ratio is 10 calls, 5 appointments, 3 presentations, 1 business closure.
Its all about RATIO. Let me explain it.
When a sales or marketing person is doing their job, they are to follow a certain guidelines or pre-prepared scripts from the company to make their calls and to negotiate with their customers. These scripts could be refined versions or even could be some old skool scripts which was created at 'who knows when'.
When they use this specific scripts, they are only getting that specific amount of feedback or reply from their customer. Lets say the ratio is 10 calls, 5 appointments, 3 presentations, 1 business closure.
This means the ratio of this marketing or sales script is 10:5:3:1. Therefore plainly said, in order to get 2 business closure, the employee will need to make 20 calls to get 10 appointments which will result in 6 presentations and 2 business closure.
A company will always need to review and upgrade their so called "scripts" to increase the effectiveness which can be easily evaluated via the numbers on the ratio. Some really refined scripts will not obtain a 100% effectiveness but through all the fine tuning, it would really get there.
A lot of companies out there actually do not work via a script and thus unable to evaluate their own company's performance thus causing no adjustment or tuning to be done. All companies out there have a sales and marketing department and i always strongly agree that they perform their duty via script basis. They could even come up with multiple strategic "scripts" which they could use over the time to judge how effective they are.
This is highly important espacially during economic downturn times like this.
When the times are good, all company will prevail and make big bucks BUT during hard times like this, only the most disciplined company will outlast the economic meltdown. Think about it and let us know what you think.
When the times are good, all company will prevail and make big bucks BUT during hard times like this, only the most disciplined company will outlast the economic meltdown. Think about it and let us know what you think.
This is Unispace First Blog and also mark the beginning of the a long journey for Unispace to become what she destine to be. My name is Masterbear (pseudoname of course) and i will be the Unispace's first bloggers and in future they will be more.
First, i need introduce Unispace and explain why this blog is being setup in the first place. Unispace is a soon-to-be-project between four young aspiring technoprenuers. Unispace in short is a Web 2.0 workflow system that has some unique attributes that other current workflow system does not have which are collobrations, connectivity, and easy to use. We also plan to have many Web 2.0 features in this project to make this project more exciting for us.
This project is work in progress still and this blog marks on how our journey to make Unispace workflow from the beginning till the end. This blog also serves other purpose such as sharing news, feature updates and our antics in Unispace. It's my aspiration to this blog to share our product to the world. I hope i will see the end product and remember today when i write these words today.
And so god bless Unispace and Good luck!
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