Ian On The Red Dot

Came across a rather old article on Gamasutra about how a team of students ran a project with the goal to prototype a game in under 7 days.

“Rapid prototyping can be a lot like conceiving a child. No one expects a winner every time, but you always walk away having learned something new, and it’s usually a lot of fun!”

The common way of affiliate marketing has been to write copy, stick it on a website and hope the copy convinces people to purchase your product. I’m simplifying of course but you get the drift. New York Times has an article about a new system for affiliate marketing from the company TrialPay.

I’m actually more interested in how the idea for this company’s innovative product and service came about.

Mr. Rampell started TrialPay in 2003 as he looked for creative ways to entice software customers to pay for his products. In the first incarnation of the service, he offered customers his PC-security software free, as long as they signed up for a Netflix account.

He started with the desire to find a solution for his own needs. This is something I have been a big believer of - companies with products and services which work tend to be those that meet some need. It helps if the needs were those that the founders had.

You can read about what happened during the event at E27 and Sg Entrepreneurs.  I just have one thing to comment about the night and that is what I learned about Trey who is the programmer of the F8-winning application.  He isn’t a computer science student nor a computer engineering student.  He is majoring in philosophy.

When he shared this about himself, I started wondering about the oft mentioned lack of innovation in Singapore.  And I wondered if it is because students in Singapore are not interested in knowledge across domains.  In other words, are we too specialized?

In NUS, we are made to take modules outside our faculty as part of the university requirements.  Most of the people I knew in Engineering would try to bid for the easier modules - the non-Arts faculty modules.  There was the general consensus that Science modules would be easier for an Engineering student, followed by Business, then Arts.

The friends I had in Arts would try their best to stay away from Engineering modules and go for the Science or Business ones.

There is a tendency to choose the easiest possible module from another faculty with interest in a module sacrificed as a result.

Of course, not all NUS students are like that.  There are those who do choose a module out of interest and worry about grades later although I cannot help but feel they are the minority.

What are the backgrounds of the people interested in being entrepreneurs in this Web 2.0 phase?  More importantly, do we have cross-domain knowledge?  Do we pursue interests outside the domain we are supposed to specialize in?

Why would that be important?  There are many reasons, but one of them is that a problem in one domain can be abstracted such that solutions to that problem which have been solved in other domains could be applied to it.  Increasing our knowledge in other domains adds to our arsenal of problem solving tools, tunes our pattern recognition and trains the abstraction of problems.  These can help us in being more innovative.

I wouldn’t presume that it was Trey’s philosophy background that helped him in being the winner with his application.  But maybe, just maybe, it was because he wasn’t in a computer science course that he didn’t have the ‘we must add more features’ hang-up that programmers arguably seem to have.  Maybe, just maybe that helped him spot that application which was simple in concept and technicalities but was what people wanted and needed.
It is time for us to step out of our little circles.