The cool folk over at Six Degrees have some interesting things planned, with a slightly different format for this year. Apart from the main conference track, there looks to be many other surrounding events for sharing, engagement and networking, with barcamp styled sessions as well. There are also three different agendas for Social media, Social business and Social TV.

Some initial information can be found on the main site. Other useful links for the event info and speakers. There’s still a couple of days left for the first early bird discount on passes, so check out the link on getting passes.

More to come soonish!

New style has appeared, it seems. Fun.

Simplicity is Sweet.

100% galaxy noted.

Just another one of those shelved pieces that have been sitting on the table and in my mind.
Paint, Photoshop and some nice filters off the phone. Interesting editing trajectory but the fastest way currently to final artwork….

Also a bit of the undigitized behind the scenes version.

What does push button Photoshop mean about art anyway? I get that question a lot. I’m old school and partial to a nice pencil sketch.

#this is also a test of the WordPress Android application.

Amongst the many rather random questions that come to mind after the first session (I hopped into the Introduction to Sociology course at Princeton)

• What this will mean for “branded education”. Coursera claim to provide courses from some of the top universities in the world, and interestingly, one of the readings for the Introduction to Sociology course involve an alternative perspective on the admissions to the Ivies. Should education then be limited only to the few who can gain entrance, or be available for all (as what Coursera purports to set out to do)? Can education in the Ivies continue to count as another way to distinguish between classes? Who are the people who will be drawn to this site beyond the first few sessions where they are merely curious, and what will they get out of the experience?
• Impact on learning and certifiable education. Will a certificate from a reknowned institution then hold the same value in the distant future?
• Virtual learning and interaction. This mode of learning takes away all geographical boundaries, if made more prevalent, would disrupt the typical move that would entail uprooting oneself to live on a college campus, changing the rite of passage into adulthood from adolescence for those who choose to learn online. Is this as real as being physically in a classroom, or is it even sustainable? It is one thing to take a single course online, but to do so for four years? Can one’s attention really be sustained this way?
• What is the difference between learning in isolation and learning in a group? Online participants can volunteer to sit into webcam sessions and introduce themselves, interact with the actual classes etc, depending on the modules, which again is mutually beneficial for both sides.

The initiative reminds me somewhat of the LSBF Global MBA which debuted some time back, but this one seems simpler, cleaner, and stickier somehow, at least for me personally. Perhaps those familiar with academics would also be amused at the option to speed up the video of professors droning talking about their areas of expertise. Three options to speed up, only one to slow the video down…hmmm. Not a bad feature. (:

Just out of curiosity, checked out some charts from Google’s Ngram viewer and it seems that the concept of sociology peaked somewhere around 1975, and again in the mid 1990s, before a continuous decline all the way to present, at least in books. Maybe someone can explain the significance of this more.

Another random discovery – for a little red dot, there is a study group already active on the course forum, though nothing really substantial is being discussed in the forum (yet).

The quiz at the end of each video was a nice touch too, I shall take it as a good sign that I must have digested at least some of the main points by getting all these questions right even after dinner and a small pint. (: I blame the Interwebz for our short attention spans and wandering minds nowadays. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how this progresses, and if the community comes into play or otherwise, as time passes. Better than watching TV for sure (although apparently our generation doesn’t do that as much anymore…or so they report.)

My tiny brush is misbehaving at the moment and so, it’s the pencil for today. Love ombre/gradients/colors.

So, I was pretty happy to see some new features being added, even with the FB acquisition of Instagram kind of overshadowing the original news of “Omgpop being swallowed up for a cool reported 210 billion(!!!)” but the rest of us mere mortals are still trying to keep up being drawsome and earning enough tokens for yet another colour palette.

So here goes…the various types of DrawSomething players and their psyche.

The Psychic – can guess what you are drawing with two strokes.

Clueless- The opposite of the psychic. “I have no idea what you just drew dude, and it looks like you’re done with your drawing. Great” or ” How is what you drew even remotely resembling a (insert phrase to be guessed here)??”. Amusement usually ensues, after you have to resort to playing the game like Anagrams because then it’s either give up (but that word doesn’t exist in your vocabulary, does it?) or make wild guesses with the letters.

Cautious Guesser – Wont try to guess without (near) perfect information, i.e The One That Doesn’t Guess Till You Finish Drawing, even though after 3 strokes it was pretty apparent that what you were drawing was totally BritneySpears. Either really patient, or totally risk averse.

The Cheater- unabashedly writes out the phrase to be guessed.

Anyhow Whack - Guessing by wildly filling in letter tiles, and completely missing the point. Your drawing doesn’t matter because they’re just looking at the alphabets anyway. These are the people who should be playing Scrabble, Anagrams or Hangman, really.

MMOminus-the-RPG - Just Involved In Too Many Games At Once. You might have to wait till 2014 before they click on your game again.

The Messenger- (well at this time of observation, DrawSomething was still sans chat function) So there were the people who wrote you a message first on their blank canvas before flipping the digital page to start a drawing proper.

The Crowdsourcer – Posting SOS images on their Facebook when they can’t figure out what on earth the drawing is about.

Crab – Has phone orientaion on crab mode or something. Some people’s pictures just come out sideways. Seems to be something to do with the iPhone, I could be mistaken.

ColourCrazy – Absolutely intent on earning as much coins as possible to get all the available hues possible; ends up not using half of them anyway.

Intensely overkill & spoil market - Drawing a Monet with your phome while the majority of mere mortals stickman away. This tumblr shows it all. Some are pretty good.

The Chronic Mis-speller – Always places that one tile wrong. That one misplaced tile away from perfect spelling.

Spread Spelling – For some reason, fills up the tiles from the middle, instead of spelling the word from left to right. I’m not sure why but it’s interesting to note.

I Don’t Have a Phone That Supports The Game – I feel for you. I’ve had App Envy pre-iPhone/Smartphone days too.

The Late Adopter – Drawn into the game (pun totally intended) only because everyone at brunch seems to be playing it.

I suppose there could be a whole lot more profiles, so leave a note if you have anything to add!

I guess there is a certain vibe, a certain stigma about New York City. It’s a city on overdrive and it will and can fry your senses if you’re not careful. Mentally, physically, literally, metaphorically.

The city is a curious mix of architecture marvels with history and people. From the eco friendly Hearst Tower, the dimly lit chanderliered entrance of the Royal Palace Hotel, eclectic little shops in Soho and the Lower East Side to the rather sterile concrete buildings of Wall street. The Brooklyn Flea houses a collection of quirky little trinkets and items, and itself is housed in a stately building that was converted from a bank; a stark dichotomy.

Graffiti here is spontaneous and in the oddest of places, narrow subway underground tunnels the top of buildings, each a defiant testament to the people who claimed the space as their own. Not in a tightly controlled environment where a canvas is laid out in front of a curious audience. Like at the Night-festival in Singapore, anyone? Cough. I think that defeats the purpose of it. Don’t think the organizers understood the essence behind graffiti. The only people who should see graffiti being created should be the artists and their friends. Watching it appear in front of you, in a space dictated with crowds of curious spectators watching, with no element of risk, danger or mystery as expected just takes away the soul and experience of it.

I could do a photo series entitled subway trash of still lives – even the trash here somehow manages to look like a still-frame out of a movie.

Ben Stiller walked past us one weekend morning, apparently.

The size of rats vary with the parts of the city – the big black mean ones reside in Manhattan; small furry ones are found on the outskirts. The friendly mouse looking ones live in the Jersey PATH trains.

If you are anticipating a long subway commute, you probably want to switch your iPhone off while underground if you don’t want to find your batttery at 60 % even before the day has started. Why there has been no serious motion to actually get reception that works well underground or even in various buildings is beyond me. It is kind of like the weekend commute, when basically, the best thing is to expect nothing out of the subway reliability.

Sirens are your lullabies. You grow accustomed to it. The police and fire engines are just, everywhere.

Phones are socially taboo (at least it seems so at most eating spots) or maybe it’s a function of the crazy bad reception. People are engaged with each other here, and with time being such a precious commodity, one notices that cellphones are hardly the focus and the ones whom you meet grant you their attention, for choosing to spend the time.

Colours do not exist in the NYC fashion palette in winter. Everyone wears black black and more black even though the racks have a staple of black, white, red and the occasional electric blue. Who dictated that fashion has to mirror the season? Even within the line at JFK, I was standing out in a bright and (too) happy red.

Unaccustomed to the landscape so distinctly mirroring the seasons, visual cues start to hint to me the arrival of spring. Lighter coats, rain boots, slight colours, (short) skirts. People complain about the heat but hardly ever about the skirts. Do they not see the necessity of the former for the latter to materialize? Thank goodness for the cheeriness of Summer.

The city is edgy, fast paced, if that is your type of fun. Small enclaves of communities exist and in time, I intend to explore these when I’ve gotten my wings fixed. Sometimes the cashier mistakes me for Korean and rattles musically about the items I’m ringing up until I give a polite “I don’t understand you” in English. At other times Korean guys remark really loudly “a Chinese” as I’m trying to get up the steps to dinner in Ktown. I am unsure of the correct response to this so I do nothing save roll my eyes. Ethnicity seems to be a topic of conversation with random people taking bets as to whether you are Korean or Chinese in the most random of places.

Definitely pay more attention to your Chinese lessons if you are still in school, especially if you want to order take out from Ctown. Actually, make that if you want to order food in general. D:

Outside of the tourist belt, there are hardly any children, teenagers or too many old folk. Everyone seems to float around the college age to the young working professionals. And then there are the others, who seem to have decided that being perpetually in Peter Pan mode is their thing. Over 45 and still living like recklessly 25 is just a little creepy. Just sayin’.

There is also the distinction between “the tourists” and “New Yorkers”. Tourists are roadblocks, the grown up children who still find delight in every cranny of the New York environment. New Yorkers are past that – police road blocks and a barrage of media vans and satellite for Osama’s capture or “that IMF guy” being held in an undisclosed location in lower Manhattan? Just part of everyday life, now will you please, not hog the sidewalk so I can get to my cup of coffee/work/you get the idea? Your local news is global here. Something is always happening; somewhere.

I love how people actually care about stuff here.

Chivary is alive and well in the city because here is nothing more odd in their senses for a girl to be carrying a shelf on the streets.  People have also been awfully kind to help me move my furniture that I got from them, so maybe I have just been lucky so far. You can get quite a lot out of a conversation in the 30 minutes while moving your desk. So awfully DIY, but just one of those things you do before you succumb to the instant gratification that is Amazon. On an aside, if one ever contemplated never ever having to leave your house, Amazon could fulfill all your hermit aspirations.

Door holding is nice and I hardly get any slammed in my face if I am within close proximity. Anyone who has tried to get into a lift in SG with plently of space, only to have the door closed on you because everyone was too apathetic to press the Open Button will understand this. It’s the little things that count.

What’s better than holding the subway door seconds just before it closes, is having two young teenage guys hold it open for you, upon seeing your approach and not even missing a beat in their conversation rhythm. Equally heartening is having a random stranger call out to you when you are at the far end of a corridor which only leads to an elevator, just so they can wait for you to enter.

Well, obviously there are rude people as well, but perhaps the word is not so much of rude than brash.
Weather is a huge factor here because it dictates your life. It’s the first time weather reports are actually accurate or important. The coats change with the seasons, and rain coming horizontally at you renders normal umbrellas useless. Let’s not even talk about the winds.

Things will go on even if it rains. At the Rooftop films, the organizers quipped that “We’re tough , we’re New Yorkers”, and the show went on. Seats were kept and folded after the show by each member of the audience, ” just so a lot of us can get out there faster”.

The weather is unapologetically capricious and erratic – winter seemed never ending with the fresh white snow quickly morphing into black piles of slush. There was a brief dalliance with spring and upturned umbrellas. People marginally freaked out over the earthquake aftershocks. Hurricane Irene brought the City to a standstill whilst everyone went stir crazy being confined indoors. Coming from a country with NO natural disasters, you realize you have no clue what to actually do, but you get by. It snowed in Autumn and this surprised the trees in Central Park and many of them broke under the weight.

It seems counter intuitive to find contentment in a restless city, but that’s what New York can offer you, amongst a whole lot of other things. Transience is the only staple. The city has a routine of constant change, and possibilities in anything you believe in, if, of course, you search it out. Or maybe it might find you instead.

The City will speak to you, if you listen to it. The same City, but somehow in a different language for everyone.

^ And more photos, only because they remind…

What: SNWF New York + Discount codes to the workshop sessions (in this post)

Who: Some of the world’s leading social media thinkers, including representatives from leading brands like Tumblr, Hershey’s, Twitter, Nasa and many more.

Covering a number of key issues around the social media space, discussions will feature insight on measuring ROI on B2B and B2C social media activities, integrating relevant channels into your marketing strategy, social CRM, building and managing communities, social shopping, geo-location, measuring and managing reputation, how social media is changing customer behaviour and much, much more.

Check out these links for the agenda for the conference, to book your place at this year’s event. You get to save 15% on conference passes by entering the discount code DP15 when registering.

If you’re attending, would love to connect on Linkedin or Twitter.  Drop me a DM if you are! More updates soon after the conference!

P.S: Full registration for SMWF also grants delegates entry to another highly relevant, co-locating event, Apps World N. America, which will explore the rapidly expanding apps market, attracting developers, operators, brands and businesses from around the region.

Here’s the list of the other media partners!

It’s been a while since I posted, but I’m most definitely still alive. Between relocation to a new city and other transitions, many things have been going on in the work and personal front.

Nevertheless, here’s a little something that was started in January this year, and only just finished. So continues my affinity for cityscapes, in two different versions (SG & NYC), with the usual mix of traditional pencils + digital photography and Photoshop. I’m really not too sure about that brick wall in the SG version, hardly anything is brick in Singapore. Glass seems to encapsulate the spirit of the city better as well.

Thought it might be fun to have a before and after, so…. original pencil sketch as below too. Hope you guys like it & I should be back to writing and more soon enough.

Also, 500 Sheets of Ink, and then some.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Landed at the login page of Twitter today (one of the rare moments when I’m not on a third party platform) and decided it looks uncannily like an older version of the Facebook login page from the placement of the various elements to the world map in the background.

Imitation, is the best form of flattery, I suppose. Just one of those random afternoon musings.

Mad crowds at the 5th Ave Apple store which kind of contrasts nicely with the minimalistic store design.

View from across the street:

.

Looks the same but apparently with better technology, so. This design doesn’t really speak to me so hopefully next round it changes. I was watching this kid (he must have been about 10) check his Facebook account at the store. At least, I hope that was his account! Hilarity usually ensues when people forget to log off their social networks on public terminals.

On a random note, everything in this post was created on an Apple. It’s my camera, Photoshop, writer, everything!

It’s tragical I’m in NYC without a compact camera because I -thought- an iPhone would suffice. The cold has made any photo ops without gloves mostly difficult and I am pleased to report that you can really use your nose to unlock/operate the iPhone as was suggested to me. Laughing fits kind of affect the results though. Because race and gender issues are more salient here, I also suppose this would work better if one had a sharper nose. Just sayin’.

Too many good sessions, too little time, coupled with an inability to divide and clone oneself meant that one had to be selective about the entire week’s events in New York. The level of discussion was amazing, and listening to people who were really into what they did is always highly inspirational.

Several themes that surfaced across various talks that were of interest:

1. Culture & Digital Identities:

• Don’t confuse Anonymity with Privacy
• Mentions of the shift from hiding behind avatars, even in traditionally privacy obsessed cultures such as Japan
• The question of the impact of culture on adoption?

I love how bits of culture still filter through online. As interactions become increasingly digital, there must be some discount to the 30-70% rule that body language contributes predominantly to non verbal communication. In my work, having a feel of the various digital conversations on the ground also helps – I’ve noticed that posts from India tend to be 2-3 times longer than other regions. Some social media landscapes are much more politically charged than others. We’ve found that there might be higher levels of sarcasm in certain markets than others. A huge bulk of Singaporean netizens might not haVe ReAchEd ThE sAMe MatUriTy LevEl of otheR PlacEs WorXX.~ (Note to self: If someone types like that to you. Run. Do not hesitate.)

Purely digital text conversation is full of nuances. How people behave and participate online is full of nuances. There is all this talk about digital plumage and how people create their identities online, and even how responses might vary to different avatars online (important for all those customer service folk). It’s been 2 years, I am still interested in how research in this field is developing.

The question posed was then, How can brands help people shape their identities, and share? Those who successfully tap into this would become part of the conversation, gain valuable mind space in this attention driven economy.

Another aspect of culture to take note of – organizational culture. Social media empowers a small number of people to change the culture of an entire organization. Like most change, time is needed, but now, all the tools are at your disposal. This is equally fascinating to me about how a dominant culture usually permeates those from a particular organization.

2. A Time Sensitive Idea Economy

One interesting thing about cloning was raised, about how the USA could learn from Chinese innovations. A mature culture will equate to more innovation, and it will not be the first time that copy and paste culture exists.

3. Platforms

• Birth of Hyper relevance- Opengraph, the semantic web. Location based advertising and marketing.
• Facebook positioning as a company to power the next generation of web.
• Question: Who’s going to be the open graph of China? Since Facebook is not in china. Ans: Localized versions of Chinese platforms? They have the money and resources.

4.  Infrastructure, Government & Politics

Big Government and politics also constantly surfaced.  How people used social media to organize themselves in times of unrest.

• Social media is now permeating up especially where government is concerned
• Freedom of Speech – With the law finally catching on to the game and laying down the rules, I’m really not too sure of the extent of this anymore.
• When mobile lines are cut, should an internet “kill switch” actually exist?
• When platforms like Twitter are blocked – How to use other tools to mobilize people?

We heard first person accounts of how some used public phones to stay anonymous, when the sharing of information became their daily goal when dealing with the situation unfolding in Egypt then.

Infrastructure always plays a huge role in communications (do not get me started about the lack of reception underground in the MTA subways.)

• In India, even the roadside florists are implementing mobile orders for their businesses. Free Wifi is increasingly common.
• The Delhi Traffic Police Facebook Fanpage allows citizens to upload traffic offences (hopefully the posters were not committing one themselves when documenting this.)

….and many have never even gone to school.

Interesting discussions & amazing people aside, this should be the beginning of a good trip.

And now, allow me to indulge in some #iphoneography.

Hues of the Brooklyn Bridge

Iconic.

Advertisement v.s Consumer Sentiments:

Horses @ Central Park

Flag.

NYSE; Wall Street.