Tomorrow I will be giving a talk on developer performance at unconference 2009 in Singapore. A sneak peak of my presentation is available here.

On Friday I attended Infocomm Live an event where Matthias Kunze, a serial entrepreneur and now head of Yahoo! Mobile APAC talked about the secrets of his success.

It was an interesting talk and he had a lot in common with similar people I have heard speak or talked to before. It was all good stuff.

What did stand out particularly was his background as a keen athlete and his strong believe that balancing hard work with other interest and a healthy lifestyle was a key factor to maintaining motivation and most importantly avoiding burnout. This seems to be a common view amongst successful people such as him.

I was fortunate to be able to ask him a question after the talk and he reinforced my belief that while exercising is when some of the best ideas or solutions to problems just pop into your head. He said that when he has a problem he finds that if he goes for a long bike ride by the end of it a solution is likely to have appeared in his mind.

He also told an interesting story about how the idea for his second start-up came to him and his colleague while they were sitting in a BA lounge at an airport. This again reinforces another thing I have found; more ideas appear when you are out of you normal context and in terms of what I have read about brain function and creativity in the past I can see why that would be true. I plan to investigate both of these things further.

All in all it was a very good event. I also want to thank Susan for telling some much interesting information about the IDA and Singapore and Ruohan for sharing his interesting product ideas with me, long may his enthusiasm and innovation continue.

During my short time in Singapore I have now accidentally dropped a note from my wallet on the street three times. Each time immediately someone has very politely said excuse me and handed it back to me.  I am impressed with the honestly although I could of course have dropped money more than three times and not noticed

Being in Singapore at the moment and not being fed UK news for the last six months gives me a slightly different view of the Global Economic Crisis.

What is becoming clear from my simplistic understanding of economics is that there are two types of countries in this crisis; ones with borrowings and ones with savings.

Singapore had a surplus before the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Although Singapore went into a recession it was in a stronger position to recover well.  Since then it has continued to built a surplus until the current financial crisis. To me this is like someone loosing their job but finding a new one quite quickly and thinking; “that is a relief from now on I’m am going to be careful with my money and build up some savings in case this happens again”.

The UK however has not experienced a recession since the early 1990s and had lulled itself into a false sense of security. It is like someone who has been in a secure job for years. As a result it has spent and borrowed in the same way as many of its population and saving for a rainy day was not something it worried about.

So now both countries are in recession. To me they are like two people being made redundant. Singapore has a load of savings in the bank however the UK has a mortgage to pay and a load of credit card debt. Their room for manoeuvre could not be more different.

All the UK can do is cut back as much as possible and borrow to cover its living costs. However Singapore is in the enviable position of being able to reluctantly dip into its savings.

The example I have noticed this most is in education. Singapore has a very well funded education system in fact when visiting a Polytechnic the other week and a library another I was hugely impressed with the facilities available. Faced with the current recession Singapore’s reaction has not been to cut budgets but to increase the money it puts into education by 20%. It also has all sorts of schemes into place to pay companies to put people into training instead of making them redundant. This is smart as when the economy recovered Singapore’s population will have and even higher level of education and be even more competitive in the world.

The UK on the other hand only really has the option of cutting back on education and is proposing increasing university fees for students. I was interested to see a couple days ago there was an article in the Guardian by Brian Cantor where he suggested the UK taking similar steps to Singapore. I totally agree with him that it is the right thing to do but I cannot see it happening. The UK does not seem to think in that long term way and even if it did it probably could not afford it. I fear when the UK comes out of recession the population is going to have a lower educational level and be a lot less competitive in the world than at the moment.

I don’t know exactly how typical the UK’s position is of Europe and how typical Singapore’s position is of Asia but from what I understand this is reflected in other countries to an extent. It seems to me that there is potential for a large skills gap to open between Asia and Europe and it will be interesting to see if economic power shifts as a result over the coming decades.

Yesterday I went along to Blogout 2009 in Singapore. Up until very recently blogging, although being something I had been aware of for years was not something I fully got. I am pleased to say I now get it. This is both thanks to a talk by Preetam Rai at Blogout today and Mr. SquareCirclez whom I talked to at BarCamp last week.

From my point of view a blog provides individuals working in a narrow field a boost in credibility that they could only previously get from being associated with an organisation.

For example, say I was really interested in fossils. I may enrol in a university on a PhD. programme, read a lot, research a lot, write a thesis, graduate and stay in academia researching. As I publish papers in academic journals, speak at conferences etc. I will build a reputation as someone who knows his stuff within that academic community and be accepted into it.

Now suppose I am not interested in fossils but the history of paper clips. The likely hood of being able to take that up as an academic subject in a university is small. However I could read a lot, research a lot and write a blog with interesting and original articles on the history of paper clips. Marketed correctly the paper clip history community (if it exists) will find my blog and comment on my articles.

This in turn with statistics on how popular each article is would give me an idea of what people are interested in and give me a direction to go in when writing further articles. As more people get to know about my blog so my reputation in the community will build and soon people all over the world will be asking me for your views on the history of paper clips. I would then be part of the community or so the theory goes

I believe that in a wider context this is another way that the internet is providing individuals with an alternative to reliance on large organisations but that is another story.

On Saturday I went along to BarCamp Singapore. This was my first experience of a bar camp which is essentially an adhoc IT conference where anyone can come along. The days is split into multiple 30 minutes sessions with up to five running concurrently. Anyone is free to host a session, they just put the topic they would like to talk on on a board and attendees vote for which ones should go ahead.

There was a good selection of people mostly young technical people with some early stage investors thrown in for good measure. The thing I noticed about the demographic is that the male bias was not anywhere near as strong as you would expect for a similar event in the UK. Mac users were out in force and probably the majority of laptops people had bought along were Macbooks.

The sessions generally were about up to the minute “cool” subject as you would expect when IT people talk about things that are interesting to them. There was a lot on mobile devices especially location based services. I also noticed that blogging and social networking was also a popular subject which is not surprising as I was told Singapore is the blogging capital of the world. More surprising there was quite a lot of mention of social entrepreneurship which seems to have come from the open source movement.

In all I found it a very positive event. There were lots of people with ideas and enthusiasm and I look forward to attending the next one. For anyone interested in exactly what happened there is a good writeup here.