Barely a week after our office warming, we had another crowd coming in to visit our office, this time the delegates of BizAsia. The entourage consisted of students from various international universities which includes the National University of Singapore, Peking University, National Taiwan University, Korean Jinju University, University of Melbourne, Clarkson University NY, Universidad de los Andes and Stockholm School of Economics.

Check out photos from that day here! http://techsailor.jujuya.com/album/view_152.html

Friday, January 29th, 2010; we, at Techsailor, had our Office Warming 2010 party to celebrate our shift in location as well as to evangelize our business focus in Online Customer Engagement.

We had a total of about 40 visitors, including clients, mentors, advisors, investors, business partners, associates, fellow entrepreneurs and past employees checking out our new abode at 156 Macpherson Road; from the first arrivals at 5 PM right to the last to leave at 11 PM and after! Being "glad" would be an understatement to what I'm feeling; I just want to say a BIG THANK YOU to all you fine folks who came down to grace our Office Warming and also to everyone else who offerred their well-wishes. I would also like to acknowledge all our staff for making Techsailor's Office Warming 2010 a possibility.

* EDIT: Check out more photos @ http://techsailor.jujuya.com/album/view_149.html!

To a wonderful (and prosperous) 2010!

Over the past decade, IE6 has officially gained its reputation as the world's most hated browser. Developers and designers (like us) have long irked at the additional development time ineeded just to make the website display and behave right under IE6. One can only imagine how much unnecessary time in the development world is wasted on this aging browser (on our end, we spend on average or 20-35% additional development time to make our websites IE6-compatible).

While countless attempts had been made to kill off IE6, we think the closest shot will be the one made by Google. Although we heard news of Google discontinuing IE6 support for Google docs, we didn't expect them to act so soon. Here's an email received recently:

If you're an avid Gmail user, chances are, from time to time, you would wish to insert an image into the message body. But wait a minute... where's that option on the toolbar?

The feature is actually available, just that you got to activate it. Here's how:

1. On the top-right corner, click on the Settings link.

What do you think of when you think of the color yellow?

Post-it; Lemons; Techsailor perhaps ?;)

Yellow is a pretty tough color to pull off on a website just as it is on print media but these showcases really nailed it! Kick back and have some lemonade while we round up 10 freshly squeezed yellow websites from around the world!

Helveticons

Ikea

In case you haven't read the good news (see the previous post), we're going moving into a spanky new office. Now the even better news is we have room to share!

Below is a simplified version of the rooms we have. As you can see, we're giving away some of the most prime space in the office. We're starting at $2.20 per sqft (not inclusive of utilities)

Do contact Wayne if you're interested.

After spending more than 6 months on the look out for new space, we finally found a place that everyone fell in love at first sight. Situated on the 8th floor of 156 Macpherson Road will be Techsailor Singapore's new office.

The exact location of where we are:

our new office on the map

Apple iPhone and iPod touch in Singapore are at the point where every working adult could fork out ~$300 to get an IPhone with Singtel plan or IPod touch. It's very interesting to own one IPod touch and suddenly realize the guy sit next to you on the bus is using one too.

I like to save my frequently visited website on my iPod touch home screen for easy access. And every time I wonder why some website appear as a nice rounded corner icon looks like its logo and some website is not.

After a while I figured out what it takes to get that little icon out

1. Create an png image call apple-touch-icon.png
2. Place this image at the root folder of website. E.g for http://techsailor.com, it will be at http://techsailor.com/apple-touch-icon.png
3. Verify by browsing your website from iPod touch, click the plus button '+' at the bottom panel of Safari Browser, click 'Add to Home Screen', wait for 2s and you will be able to see the icon you have just uploaded.
   If you are not sure how it work, try to bookmark http://techsailor.com, you should be able to see an icon like the screen shots below
   
   
    
4. Be happy and tell your friends to bookmark your site on iPod Touch / iPhone

One of our colleagues recently shared a blog article written by Dragos Ruoa - The 7 Ages Of A Business.
After reading, most of us agree that Dragos's view on this makes a lot of senses and it is definitely something worth sharing with all our entrepreneurial friends. Hope you enjoy reading this.  I shared my personal comments at the end of this post.

The 7 Ages Of A Business

I had a business for 10 years. I started it from the scratch, financing it by using the 3 F’s (family, friends and fools) and managed it until I decided it’s time to sell, buying my own freedom. It was one of the most interesting periods in my life and one of the most fulfilling either. In today’s post I’ll share something I learned during this 10 years: the 7 ages of your business.

Because, like every other thing which is born, raised and fulfilled, every business has its own life and its own stages. The following is more or less an entrepreneur perspective, it’s a view from somebody who decides to start his own business, but it can be also applied to any other perspective (investors, managers, employees).

1. Enthusiasm

This is the first stage of your business. It’s the first weeks or months, a period in which the deep, almost irrational exhilaration is simply unbalanced by any other feeling you have. The joy of being your own boss, the fascination of seeing your ideas coming to fruition, the faith that everything is possible are simply overwhelming. During the first weeks of my business I used to compare this stage with sex, in terms of thrill. Entrepreneurship being better than sex, of course.

In this stage you don’t know almost anything about the processes in your business, nor about your clients. You don’t have a clear understanding of the cash-flow notion, hence the cash-flow will be almost invisible. You may start it with an initial funding or you can start it out of nothing, as I did, but it’s certain that in the first weeks or months, you won’t really have a cash-flow. And you also won’t give a dime on it.

Also, in this age, you act out of gut, rather than calculus. It’s the most intuitive part of a business, and most of the time you are right. The most important and effective employees I had were hired during the first, enthusiast phase of my business. I didn’t know how to run a hiring interview and all I knew was: “Do you know to do that? Let’s work together!”. And it worked.

This is our 2nd Techsailor Tuesday!
Rex was in Singapore for the week and Wayne is back from Australia with lots of chocolatey goodies, that's why we have decided to have another Techsailor Tuesday! on the same month in July! Without further ado, here are the highlights of Techsailor Tuesday! (14 July 2009).


The news of Michael Jackson's death rippled through the office on June 25. And so to pay a tribute to the King of Pop, Fisher shared with us his favourite MV of MJ. Ghosts. This is the longest MV i have ever seen. The interesting bits were at the end where they show the making of the MV. It's amazing that MJ takes on so many different roles and i never would have guessed it was him behind all those make-up!