So Twitter. You know what it is… right? Of course you do it is that web thing that everyone is talking about. The thing that Zuckerburg was pining after, before he realized Twitter and Facebook solve different needs. The thing that John Mayer was all about before he switched to Tumblr. It’s a public bulletin board / web messaging system / chat room for people to tell the world about the things they do and do not care for, the things they eat, the places they go, the people they meet, break news stories, and talk about sex and everything in between. A year ago we were asking: Do we need this? Do people care about what people are sharing here? Today, those questions are about as meaningless as that poor sap who asked Thomas Edison if we needed the lightbulb. People are using it… but not just using it, they are flocking to it. In April of 2009, Twitter had around 14 million unique visitors per month… a year later that number is closer to 180 million. 

How did Twitter achieve this feat? Well basically by not trying to achieve it. Just think about what makes a tweet work. How do you connect one individual’s opinion, state of mind, or current state of doing to another’s? How do you join a conversation or bring topics together?  You use a #hashtag. Funny thing is, Twitter didn’t actually introduce the hashtag. It was introduced by Twitter’s enterprising early adopters. But it was Twitter’s own open system… its focus on simplicity, and its user centric experience that enabled it to became what it is today.

So in case you missed my point. Twitter is relevant now. Deal with it. The question now is what has it become and where will it go?

My opinion… Twitter is at the very least the megaphone of the web (and yes probably so much more than that). People see something that they like, or read something that intrigues them, or find something that grosses them out, and they tweet about it. A short comment about that thing with a hashtag thrown somewhere in the middle. It is a public messaging system. A BBS… where one can post shout outs, ideas, inane observations. It is a place where communities can form spontaneously and simutaneously around topics of interest thanks to the power of #JustinBeiber #Gaga #Obama etc. Comments (tweets) about Justin Beiber alone monopolize 3% of Twitter’s server. This magnitude of comments isn’t happening on Youtube’s Justin Beiber videos. They aren’t happening on his official fan page. They aren’t happening on Google Sidewiki or Disqus. They are happening on Twitter. And they are happening for thousands and thousands of other topics. I think this is one of the best things about Twitter. People don’t have to go search the web for a place to put their comments. They don’t have to gain entrance to a community first before they can make there voices heard. They don’t even have to know that such a community exists. All they need is a Twitter account, an opinion, and a hashtag.

Anyway assuming that I am right… that what Twitter has become is largely a megaphone for the world, what does that mean? We have heard about Twitter breaking news stories like the Hudson River plane crash, being used as an instrument of protest against authoritarian regimes. Brands have begun to realize the importance of having a presence on Twitter in order to help them manage customer relationships. Marketers and advertisers have noticed and begun exploiting the viral power of the retweet. But what about outside of Twitter? How are tweets being used in third party applications and websites? Well they are primarily being used in blogs where tweets are included to extend their existing commenting mechanisms or websites to distribute their content through an individuals Twitter network. But how else can Twitter be used? How else should it be used?

This is where I think things get interesting, and a topic that I have not seen talked about very much.

When tweets are integrated into blogs and sites as they are right now, tweets are being treated as individual units. The focus of the blog or site is first and foremost their own content. Showing tweets (like comments) is a way for them to gauge how engaged people are with the content that is being displayed, and to encourage others to engage with them. This is good, but it isn’t the only way one can use tweets.

What if we step back and adopt a more holistic view. Remove the blog, the site, the content from the picture. What is a tweet? Well part of that definition I already mentioned. It is an individual’s expression of sentiment and action. But it is much more that it. A tweet does not exist alone. It is an individuals public thought, self organized by hashtag, time, and location. Aggregate it vertically (i.e. the individuals Twitter stream) and you have a good idea of what a person is interested in. Aggregate it horizontally and you have an ever-morphing timeline on any particular topic/event, ranging from the MTV movie awards to conversations with Obama, and the ability to predict the future

A tweet is more than just a tweet. It is an exploration of thoughts and attitudes from millions of individuals of different persuasions. It is a single node of web, a way to navigate, explore, and discover new thoughts, new content, and develop new insights. 

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Thanks to ??? (@josanku) of KT, I had the opportunity to play with an iPad today while hanging out at COUP (pictures below). I didn’t have a chance to play with it for long, but my first impression is that it’s a nice device… but not all that. It won’t replace your laptop, and it won’t replace your smartphone, but if you have money to spare, I can see how it could be a fun toy.

Personally, though, I will wait for the Notion Ink Adam. Same form factor, but none of the limitations of the iPad… plus it has the awesome Pixel Qi display.

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Late 1990s were the haydays of the Korean internet because we had broadband infrastructure that was unrivaled anywhere else. Cyworld, Dialpad, digital goods and other web services and ideas emerged here long before they did in the west.

Korea, China, Japan are the big economies in the east. In regards to the economy their is not that much of a discrepency but in regards to landsize it is very small. If China was a watermelon, and Japan was a strawberry, then Korea would be a pea… actually half a pea.

There are 48 million people in a very small land area. This is bad… until you look at connectivity and broadband penetration. 94 percent broadband penetration in Korea.

Koreans are a homogenous group of people. Things / ideas spread very quickly because of this.

Tehran Valley is the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the US.

Cyworld preceded Facebook by 5 years.

Korea leads the worlds in many areas including how much time ppl spend online.

11 million went to gaming sites. 13 times/ month

Usage is here. But innovation seems to have stopped. Why?

Walled gardens. Portals have lots of traffic coming in but little being sent out. Also mono-culture for browsers… only uses Internet Explorer

Many types of phone plans in Korea but no unlimited data plan in Korea. Korean companies are not giving consumers what they want.

47% of all internet users in Korea illegally downloaded 55 movies per year.

Korean used to be innovators in internet web service but seems to be going backward now.

Mobile data usage is very low too because of the cost.

Entrepreneurs are here. But VCs need to support them.

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Today’s talk will be focused on changes of the web due to technological development and the emergence of the social web.

Our world is like Jampong (a combination korean chinese noodle soup dish).

The future of the web. The next web. What is it? Instead of the PC being the node… people will be the node. Our conversations, pictures, and the stuff generated by us will be the future of the web.

Action Potential – In the brain… neurons need a sort of critical mass to do something.

For the web this is also true. The old web is the data web. The focus was on the structure and connections, not the energy that was created.

Today it is evolving. Take for example Twitter… most tweets and comments get lost. But certain tweets / videos / conversations pick up enough steam that they achieve critical mass. They have action potential.

Twitter party example in Korea – create an event in Korea where Korean twitters can meet each other. It was a success. Got me curious about creating a social action event… so I looked for an example and I found Twistival

I have been using Twitter to test ideas. I throw an idea out there and if people like it… it gets picked up and it snowballs. Large amounts of energy can be gathered and focused in a short time thanks to these new technologies like Twitter.

The brain works similar to this. Brain connections that are not used are pruned away.

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Presentation is paraphrased:

Design is a natural innate human ability that is waiting to be released. By educating everyone in design thinking… it is possible to change the world.

Hosted many design thinking workshops and the results are always exciting. People who attend are from all fields and ages.

Participants build mockups at these workshops.

Three part process to get people to design:

1. Provide the opportunity and enviroment (encouragement) to solve real world problems
2. Materials and coaching to build their solutions
3. Show creative results at the end

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The first speakers are Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – both practicing general physicians

We have a cafe attached to their medical office to bring some humanity back into medicine… so rather than making the doctor office a sterile scary experience… we try to bring some warmth back into the situation. So we are focused on creating a human oriented medical experience using medical design.

Something as simple as hiding a stethoscope in the doll can make listening to the heartbeat of a baby a much more enjoyable experience than it otherwise would be. And putting candy on a tongue depressor makes sticking that piece of wood in your mouth pleasant… who would have thought?

Enhancing communication between doctors and patients begins with looking at the way the space around a doctor and patient is organized. In a typical doctor/patient consulation a desk and all the stuff on it sits between the doctor and the patient. How can we overcome this?

In a conversation between the doctor and patient, also lose the story that the patient tells. In an effort to capture the symptoms that the patient in complaining about, the doctor focuses on distilling the patients story to a few keywords… headache, vomiting, shortness of breath etc. The patients story in the end is lost.

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The line up of speakers is quite impressive, from a former Apple lead designer to the Founder of Tattertools (Korean version of the WordPress blogging service). For speakers who present in Korean, they even have headsets so that us Hangul inepts can understand what is going on. Not to mention the Microsoft Surface sitting outside the conference room to play with… also a first for me.

The event host is this guy…. didn’t catch his name

Here is a list of the speakers:

Jaram Lee – a traditional Korean music performer
Dongwon Hong – designer and founder of Typomedia (Geulsee Media in Korean)
Hwang Doo Jin – Architect fusing traditional Korean and modern western design sensibilities
Jihoon Jeong – Medical engineer
Bill Dresselhaus – former designer at Apple and founder of a design consultancy the Dresselhaus Group
Eungyul Lee – world class magician
Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – General physician
Yeonho Oh – Journalist
Chang Kim – founder of Tattertools and blogger at Web20asia
Chibok Song – Copywriter for among other things ex-president of Korea Roh Moo-Hyun

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Today marks the first working day back in Korea after the whirlwind trip that was Techcrunch50 (TC50). How was it you ask? Simply put it was an incredible learning experience both for the company and for myself personally.

First, background. We didn’t have a chance to present on stage. But we did own the TC50 DemoPit. And we were close… real close to getting chosen to present on stage. Close enough in fact that the big daddy Arrington himself came to speak with us, but in the end we were beat out by SocialWok, an interesting Google mashup application (see we are gracious losers).

That is all water under the bridge though. The important thing here is what we learned at TC50 as a company.

1. Prepare for Murphy’s Law – You have heard of Murphy’s Law. It is the saying that goes, “If something can go wrong it will.” And at a high profile, high energy (read high stress) event like Techcrunch50, you can bet that Murphy’s Law will come into play. Maybe it will be the WiFi, or maybe it will be something else. So be prepared for it. Don’t let it destroy your demeanor and ruin your experience. A flawless demo / pitch is great, but if something goes wrong you have to roll with it. Laugh it off and everything will be fine. Whoever you are talking to will leave with a good taste in their mouth. But make a big deal out of it and believe me… beyond just having a bad demo you will have just turned that person off completely to your product.
2. Have a 30 second teaser and a 5 minute version of your pitch, but more importantly LISTEN – The teaser often goes by another name, the elevator pitch… but regardless of what you call it, you need to have one. When you first approach people, many of them will tell you they are in a hurry, so you need the teaser to get those people interested enough to stick around for the longer demo.
   
   
   The five minute pitch on the other hand is your baby. That is your chance to knock’em dead. And if you didn’t have a solid pitch before the conference, you can bet that by the time you leave you will know your sh*t inside and out. To be honest this may very well be the most valuable thing that you get out of this conference. Here you have the opportunity to pitch your idea to people who aren’t your friends and who aren’t your family. You will receive unfiltered feedback from people who know what they are talking about. LISTEN to this feedback. It is golden. If they aren’t impressed with what you are doing, find out why. If they are impressed, don’t let it get to your head… rather find out what they don’t like and what they would like to see implemented in your product.
3. Bring Swag – This point ties in very closely with the one above. Believe it or not, most of the people there are not there to talk with you, so be ready to woo them in with some sweet swag. And by swag, I mean something cool. Something that people will continue to want to have and use after the conference. Fliers, pamphlets, and things of that nature are a waste of trees and resources. They just end up in the trash.
   
   What we ended up doing was making some really kick-ass T-shirts (pictured above) designed by punodostres and using those to lure people to our booth. Worked like a charm.
4. Work the crowd – In general people will not come to you unprompted, you need to go get them. Everyone there is browsing for something interesting. But despite that fact, people are surprisingly reluctant to initiate the conversation. That is your job. Something as simple as “Hi, do you have 30 seconds?” will do. Once you and your team have grabbed the attention of a few people, the process is self-perpetuating. More people will linger around your booth if it looks like something interesting is happening there, making your job a hell of a lot easier.We kept our booth manned with two or three people at all times, which is something I would definitely recommend. One person may be able to generate sustained interest throughout the day, but it’ll be a whole lot easier with two or three.
5. Everyone at your booth should be doing something – This one is common sense. Don’t have someone just standing around twiddling their thumbs. You don’t have enough space around the booth to be wasting it like that. If you aren’t engaged in a conversation or demonstrating your product, you need to be walking around introducing yourself, and sending people back to the booth.
6. Be prepared to be exhausted – Hours of sustained talking by itself is hard work. But if your experience is going to be anything like ours was, you will be making last minute tweaks to your product that will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning. So my advice is this. Get pumped. Like National-Championship-Gameday pumped. This is your time to shine. And sustain that initial adrenaline rush for as long as possible. Only after that initial rush has started to fade. would I recommend caffeinating yourself.Another thing to keep in mind is that the tokens you need to earn for the last presentation spot on stage are collected at 2pm-ish. For us, it was full steam ahead, afterburners lit up, until then. We were so busy trying to talk to people that every one of us skipped lunch. But once the tokens were collected, things relaxed significantly.
7. Have a unique business card – To be honest, I fought this one tooth-and-nail. But I lost. And I am glad I did. Our CEO decided that something unique was the way to go, and so we had a TC50 special edition business card created. It was basically a little flier. The cover was our company name, and if you opened it up you would see my contact info and a picture of a iPhone like device. A lot of people commented on the design, saying they liked it. Now maybe they were just being polite, but whether or not they really liked it, we had a memorable design and that is the point I think.
8. Be friendly – I can’t stress this one enough. Yes, so maybe it is true that on the day you are in the DemoPit, you are competing against everyone else in the DemoPit for those tokens. But a little competition is no excuse to be rude. Be nice to your neighbor. Some of them don’t even care about the tokens, and they will end up sending people your way if they like you. And remember this event should really be about getting feedback and building your network and being nice helps immensely, so keep focused on what is important.
9. Have marketing / press release material prepared – I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “Hey, but you said no paper swag earlier.” And you’re right I did. And I meant it. What I mean by having marketing / press release material prepared is have something saved to your computer and all zipped up and ready to send off at a moment notice. There are a number of bloggers looking to cover a product just like yours, and if a Techcrunch blogger walks up to you and asks for you to send over a summary of what you are doing, be ready. You can’t ask for better publicity than that, so when it happens you want to be prepared.
10. Was TC50 a better choice than DEMO? – This final point is a really more of a question that I have been wrestling with myself. And the honest answer is I don’t really know. In regards to the price difference alone, TC50 is definitely a better deal (free vs. 30k). But in terms of the weight of the event DEMO may be better.I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine (@tomserres) whose company (Piryx) will be presenting at DEMO in two days time. And he made a great point in that DEMO has been around for 20+ years and the event takes place on a resort outside the city, so everyone there is basically stuck with everyone else for three whole days. You eat together, you drink together, and you sleep together. While at TC50 the people that you really want to meet don’t usually even hang around for the whole day. They show up, do their thing, and leave. Is the increased opportunity to brush shoulders with the movers-and-shakers in the industry worth 30k? I don’t know but it was a great point.

That brings my reflections on TC50 to a close. If you would like to hear more, or want to share a similar experience please feel free to contact me personally (@drebabels) or leave a comment below.

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I personally found the experience itself extremely rewarding.

The energy at this conference is incredible. I can’t say I have been to a lot of conferences… to be honest I have only ever been to one other conference (the Virtual Worlds Conference back in 2007). But the energy at TC50 was off the hook. This place was teeming with entrepreneurs and soon-to-be entrepreneurs. I would have loved to have spent more time just chatting with these guys one-to-one. Getting to know them. Having a few drinks with them. These were kindred spirits. And I ate it up… every single second of it.

I don’t know how many life long connections that I made there. At this point I would be hesitant to even say one, but a few of the connections I made might turn into strong long term relationships in the future. I have my hopes up.

Business Take

The advantages to our startup is a little less clear. Before making our decision to attend TC50, we read Expensify’s take on it. And in short they say that TC50 was well worth the effort. And after having experience TC50 I would say that the majority of their points are spot on. But for us the cost of attending was a major issue. We are based overseas in Seoul, South Korea, so for us expenses were significantly higher than it would have been for a company based in the states.

But with that said we did learn some very valuable things. The most important of which is:

Don’t go to the DemoPit with the mindset that getting that coveted last spot on the stage is the end all and be all of your time their. The stage is a perk… a really nice perk, but it shouldn’t be your sole reason for going. The most important thing that you will get out of this experience is the opportunity to really pitch your idea and get unbeatable, no-punches-pulled feedback from people who know what they’re talking about.

Anyway rather than rewriting many of the same things that Expensify already said in their post, I will quickly run through their ten points and give you my take on them as someone who just got out of the conference.

1. Host locally – Spot on. If your can run it locally, then do it. For us an internet connection was absolutely necessary to demonstrate what our product could do, but I can tell you… more than once we had issues with the internet that made our demo run less smoothly than it otherwise should have.
2. Defend your turf – Can’t relate to this one.
3. Get a solid 3-5 minute pitch. We demoed about 100 times (we maintained a counter). Our pitch was good at the start, but it was absolutely rock solid at the end: there’s a very limited set of questions — by the end you learn them all and will have found the perfect answer to each. In fact, I’d say the #1 benefit to TC50 has nothing to do with press, investors, or anything. It’s the opportunity to practice your pitch in front of real people, again and again. This will pay off a thousandfold when you’re out raising money – This point is golden so I left it all here.
4. Work it – Too true. You gotta hustle. No doubt about it.
5. Get a good business card that doesn’t look like a business – I didn’t believe it until I got there, but now I am a firm believer. Make your card look unique. On a last minute whim, our CEO changed the design of our card so that it folded open to reveal a phone. Everyone complimented the design, and even if they were lying… you can bet they will remember. And that is the important thing.
6. Stay “on” at all times. – Agreed. And I would like to add be prepared. Have your business cards on you and if you have some swag… carry it around with you.
7. Skip the swag. – This is one of the few points that I actually disagree with. To be fair, Expensify was talking about fliers mostly, and on that point I agree. Fliers are a waste. But we brought T-shirts. And those were a hit. Keep in mind the crowd that you are trying to appeal to. These are startup people. They are young. And they work in T-shirts and jeans. Our T-shirts were a hit and if you can afford it I would recommend bringing some. When people wear your shirt, they are endorsing your product… and you can’t get advertising much better than that.
8. 2 people at the booth, no more. Kind of agree. We were running 3 at our booth and for us it worked out great. But more than that would look a little like over kill.
9. Keep going to the very end. Toward the end of the day, just plant yourself at the big-stage exits and keep pitching for that almighty demopit chip. Many people  might have seen you and liked you but never gotten around to deciding. Furthermore, some really great conversations start with “Why should I give you my chip?” – This is part of hustling. You just have to do it.
10. Follow up when it’s over. When done with the conference you’ll have a huge stack of the cards and no idea what to do with them. I’d suggest sending them to Shoeboxed to have them all scanned (even better – buy yourself a NeatCo business card scanner), add them to your mailing list, and then send a “Nice meeting you at TC50, I’ve added you to our mailing list” email. - I don’t know if I am going to be buying a NeatCo scanner, but following up is already something that I have started doing.

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If you have 15 minutes or so to spare from your day, the video is well worth the time. Dan Pink is an engaging speaker and the information he presents  uproots the long accepted belief that motivation using cash incentives works.  It doesn’t.

To summarize: The ideas on motivation that held true during the process oriented do-as-you-are-told methodology of the industrial era, no longer holds true in an age where mechanical processes (manufacturing, inventory management, etc) are being delegated to machines, and creativity and outside-the-box thinking drive the economy. Believe it or not, using money as the primary tool for motivation is counter-productive when you are trying to encourage creativity.

When linear thinking is necessary, money still works. But when you need to think laterally, productivity drops as the monetary reward goes up, i.e. we get less creative so it takes longer to solve the problem.

The solution to  encouraging creative thinking and increasing productivity is not money, it is the freedom to act. The best way to encourage creativity is to stop treating employees like a dog you can train and start acknowledging that they are independent agents capable of much more than you give them credit for. As employees, it is important for us to believe that what we do or what we are trying to do has some sort of intrinsic value.

Now Dan Pink was speaking from a business perspective, but this idea got me thinking. What about education, both from a student’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective?

From a student’s perspective, grades would look a lot like monetary incentives. The higher you score on this test, the more you participate in class, or the more homework you complete… the higher a reward (grade) you get. We are trapping our children in the same do-as-your-told processes that has dominated business for so long. And in doing so we do them a grave disservice.

Those standardized tests that we as a world have put so much emphasis on as the way to measure our ‘ability’ are a perfect example of what is wrong with our education system. Those tests claim to measure intelligence, but all they really measure is how well you can take a test. Walk into any Princeton, Kaplan, or any other test prep center and they teach you the same thing. They teach you how to recognize patterns and types of questions. In essence they teach you how to game the system. And to compound the problem, these test prep course cost a lot of money, so in most cases it is only the wealthy that can take full advantage of this service.

So now what of the teachers? A few weeks ago, Obama suggested implementing a pay-for-performance plan for teachers, where seniority and tenure are de-emphasized as the means for determining pay and merit is elevated. One of the problems with this, as I wrote in my last post, is that merit is a difficult quality to categorize and measure. And if we set our standards for merit wrong, we could easily do more harm than good.

In that post, I didn’t explain what I meant by that, because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how. To me it just seemed intuitive. But listening to Dan Park brought me back to that problem. And now I think I can explain what I meant.

If we measure merit based on how well a student performs in our current system of education, then we are only going to end up magnifying the problems that exist in the system. More focus on grades and standardized tests will result in more subject oriented and do-as-you-are-told teaching. We get more of the same when what we need is a change.

To make a pay-for-performance plan work, we need to first change the system so that we de-emphasize grades and test scores and grant teachers more freedom on how to teach, so that teachers can focus on instilling in our children that which is really important: a life long love for learning.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but the acknowledging and acting on the ideas that Dan Pink presents and others like him argue are the first steps toward solving this problem.

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