One of the things I enjoy working at RSB is the 10% personal project time given to each team member to pursue their own interest (sure, we’ve all heard about Google’s 20% time and we hope reach that as we grow). Anyway, that works out to 4 hours or one afternoon’s worth of time. I choose to focus this time on building the Malaysia.rb community.

Ever since Malaysia.rb started in May 2007, we’ve had regular monthly meetups every third Thursday of the month at various locations in the Klang Valley. And, with the first meetup of 2008 coming upon us this week, it is my duty to send out the event announcement:

Malaysia.rb is kicking off 2008 with a bang! The January 2008 Meetup is happening this Thursday and it’s gonna seriously rock.

Four reasons why you shouldn’t miss this meetup:

1. Meeting room with AV facilities and FOOD - MDEC has graciously stepped up to sponsor this month’s location.
2. Special guest, Colin Wong, a Malaysian ex-Googler turned investor. Look out for his talk details below.
3. Free pre-meetup PeepCode screening of “Rails From Scratch Part I” for early birds
4. Two free PeepCode episodes to be won

When:

Thursday, January 17th 2008, 8:00PM

Agenda:

  7:00 - 8:00pm   Pre-meetup PeepCode screening
  8:00 - 8:15pm   Opening by the Organizer
  8:15 - 8:45pm   "From Batu Gajah to Mountain View and Beyond" - Colin Wong
  8:45 - 9:15pm   "Rails Fragment Caching with Interlock" - Kamal Fariz
  9:15 - 9:35pm   Open Lightning Talks
  9:35 - 9:45pm   PeepCode episode lucky draw and close

Cost:

Free. No registration required, just come right in, have a seat, and join the crowd. Invite your friends.

Contact:

kamal.fariz@gmail.com
+60123099143

Where:

PJ Hilton
No 2 Jalan Barat
46200 Petaling Jaya
Malaysia
Location

Directions:

Take the Kelana Jaya LRT line to Asia Jaya. It’s across the Federal Highway from there.

Hope to see you there!

UPDATE The meetup location is now confirmed to be at PJ Hilton. Please RSVP directly to me if you plan on attending so that I can estimate the number of people coming (for food, mostly).

What a great event! … the MDeC InnoTech.my 2007, held on Friday, 7 Dec. Congratulations to MDeC TeDD team for pulling this off.

This year’s forum was themed “Connecting Innovation, Capital and Technopreneurs” where various VCs from different parts of the world (namely US, India and China) spoke.

A particular VCs that we Malaysian can probably better relate to, is Colin Wong. Colin was born in Batu Gajah, Perak, an ex-Googler, the founder & president of Prosperati, and now the CEO of ZoeCity.

Colin started off by presenting the VC landscape in the US–the top three investment areas were software (USD$1.11B, Q3 2007), biotechnology (USD$1.1B, Q3 2007), and clean technology (USD$844m, Q3 2007). It was also noted that there was an investment trend shift towards internet/consumer media, consumer hardware, and material science. Regardless, Silicon Valley remains as the top US innovation ecosystem, where research (universities) meets venture capitalism and entrepreneurs.

The gist of Colin’s talk was about risks and failures. Both the VCs and entrepreneurs in Malaysia shouldn’t be afraid of taking risks in new ventures that may not have proven business models, management teams or technologies.

Fail fast, fail often to find success. It’s all about risk.

(And yes, Colin, it would be awesome if MDeC were to set up office in Silicon Valley ;))

All in all a great event, except there was no vegetarian food for lunch (ouch!).

* Picture courtesy of my friend Azrul

I was at MIMOS Technology Forum 2007 yesterday. Met a couple of friends from Cradle, there was Dato’ Abdul Wahab Abdullah (MIMOS Preseident and CEO), Dato’ Kong Cho Ha (Deputy Minister, MOSTI), and some really smart researchers.

What I find most interesting is that the amount of R&D MIMOS is cooking up in their kitchen.

In particular, MIMOS has a project called Wi-Wi. This was presented by Dr. Mazlan Abbas (MIMOS’s Head of Wireless Comm Cluster). Wi-Wi is a MIMOS patented wireless technology, featuring peer-to-peer WiMax-Wifi combo that promise to bring wireless Internet access to the most remote part of our country. The device is small enough to be mounted on lamp post, and …. well, you get the idea.

Now here is something for MIMOS to think about. Instead of having one (or a few) monopolistic company deploying Wi-Wi, make Wi-Wi device easy enough for anyone that want to deploy it. And that person get to share the revenue generated from his Wi-Wi device. This is not dissimilar to FON.

So Wi-Wi, … something to watch out for!

Unfortunately I did not manage to stay for the whole event, as I have to run for a workshop (which is awesome by the way, but that’s for another post).