Traveling to Singapore is like stepping into a tropical version of London. The city is a fantastic place to do business and an even better place to watch ex pats make fools of themsleves. First off, prepare for humitity, think New York City in July, but never ending. Second, get ready to have a great time. The food is fantastic, the bars are a blast and you can eat and drink outside along the river or harbor. As the regional hub for my business I was excited to be in town to get to know the local markets and understand some of the challenges our team is facing, however I got much more than I ever expected by discovering a truly great international city.

Some must do things if you visit:

1) Have dinner at one of the fine restaurants on Sentosa Island, you will feel as if you are in a tropical wonderland

2) Go out drinking along Clarke Quay (I recommend the fine establishment One Night Stand, and no it is not a whore house)

3) Eat, Eat, Eat - from fine chinese to great indian the food is fantastic all over town

4) Shop!! - Every brand you have ever heard of has an outlet along Orchard Road

One thing to avoid at all costs, the live music, unless of course you like slow 80’s tunes, every bar seems to have a band and every one is awful (Except the band at one night stand which totally rocked the joint)

This time I found the MakeSomeNoise Podcast. MakeSomeNoise (aka MSN) is a podcast from Andreas Churchill out of London who mixes some new and old mashups. You can get the last 8 podcasts over at makesomenoise.co.uk/podcast. He has track listings, and great links to the creators. Each one is 60 minutes long too! I hope to show some of these off at a BBQ this weekend.

I went on a Beta binge this week and grabbed the new Microsoft Windows Media Player 11. I love it! Super fast, and a nice interface. I’m not ready to give up iTunes yet until this is out of beta, but I like what I see. The only downside currently is that the WMP 11 tray doesn’t function, so you can only run it in a window and not on the taskbar. Grab it from Microsoft.

UPDATE WMP11 Beta doesn’t work with Windows Live Messenger 8 Beta’s “What I’m Listening To”

Schlosser posted a great summer mix last week, and this week I suggest grabbing some hot mash-ups by Pheugoo (Pronounced P U Goo). There is even a wicked mash-up video of Madonna and BEP. Check it out!

My top 2 tracks:

• Hot N Cold Pussycat Dolls (Basement Jaxx vs. The Pussycat Dolls)
• Humps Up (Black Eyed Peas vs. Madonna)

Everyone was wondering what the Origami device was, why it is special, and if Microsoft was going into the hardware business.  Personally I think it is clear that features and devices they showed in March at CeBIT didn’t live up to the hype.  These Ultra Mobile Portable Computing (UPMC) devices are supposed to fall between Tablet and PDA.

Samsung has the Q1, which is basically a small 7-inch tablet pc with an 900MHz Intel Celeron and 512MB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive.  The only differences between tablet pcs and this thing are extra controls/buttons, instant-on multimedia player (no XP load to play). Why in the world do I need this thing? It costs close to the same as some tablet PCs at around $1100.  It isn’t going to have a longer battery life, which will be 3 hours to start.

I personally predict this thing will flop.  People have not been flocking to tablet PCs like they have to PDAs and ultra small media players.  I think this market won’t pan out until the battery life is there and the device is thinner and lighter.  The idea is great, but I think there is a disconnect between the current offerings and what would be successful in capturing the consumer market. I could be wrong since pre-orders at Best Buy sold out within 24 hours. Sure that grabs some media attention, but I don’t think the marketing for UMPC was done properly. Next I’ll post on why and how I think Microsoft should change marketing techniques.

Okay so last weekend officially opened the bbq season here in Seattle. I am guessing that many of you around the world are thinking about firing up the bbq this coming weekend and need some great music to keep your party going all night long. If you find yourself beat challenged then check out the link below, you will not be disapointed. Great funky house music featuring many of this summer’s top tracks. I have been rocking out to this mix all week and think you guys will love it. Go download it, play it at your bbq and then post a comment to let me know what you think and what the reaction was. All summer long I will be bringing you the latest tips for great music downloads and I want to know what you guys think.

 I recommend downloading directly from Funky House, see link at the bottom of the page.

Great Summer Beats!!!

Okay so lets take this whole web 2.0 thing to a new level, how about open source business plans? I have created a backpack page for us to work on a brainstorming for healthy business ideas. I propose we focus on two key tasks to start, first what are the principals a “healthy lifestyle” business should abide by? See my initial thoughts and add your own in the main body section.

Second who are possible customers, what are the key segments that we could target with a business?

By combining these two areas I hope that we can combine principals with target customers to find a unique opportunity that will launch a ground breaking business.

Clearly business terms are also needed to govern this space, here is my proposal:

1) All are welcome to use the thinking to establish a business on their own, if you do post ideas to this page they are available for any member of the group to use.

2) Any business’ that do start using these ideas must credit extra8 as an inspiration and must always include extra8 promotion on their site and in any physical location.

3) Revenue and Profits, the real reason to start a business, in my view these are the property of the crediting organization and owners of the business, with risk comes the reward. If we do find some good ideas we may want to create a sub group to actually work on launching the business and then this group would share the revenue in some yet to be determined fashion.

Thoughts? Interested?

Check out Business Plan 2.0

Check out Jamie Oliver every Monday night on TLC. In Jamie’s School Lunch Project Jamie Oliver is out to improve the school lunches for kids across the UK. In one amazing bit, Jamie asks the kids to identify a number of veggies. They struggle and can hardly name one. He then holds up a Domino’s Pizza logo and every kid in the room jumps out of their seat yelling Domino’s. It gets even worse when he holds up and McDonalds’s golden arch logo. This all has me thinking: America is FAT, not just overweight but FAT, orca fat and hardly anything is being done to fix the problem. For the first time kids born today are expected to live a shorter life than their parents. This is simply one of the largest, most important problems facing America today. Do you know anyone who has had a Gastric Bypass? Know anyone who has had a heart attack? How about anyone who is constantly dieting? Clearly we need to change the way we eat, exercise and live. Jamie Oliver is on to something, and in his show (TLC 7pm EST) he explores the idea that if we are going to change our eating habits we have to start with our children. Watch as he struggles to get kids to eat veggies, and works even harder to get their parents to stop feeding them crap.

Click below to watch the trailor from the original series in the UK, and join me in thinking about how we change America. Now I am certainly a business man, and I smell a HUGE opportunity in here somehow. The question is how do you improve peoples’ lives while still making money. Much like Whole Foods or your Local Gym, I believe that you can help people live a healthy life and make money doing it. Got any ideas on how to launch a business? I do and I will share them in an upcomming post.

Jamie’s School Lunch Project on TLC

As I’m sure my fellow coffee addicts and friends will attest, Starbucks has entered an interesting new area with the support of their first movie, “akeelah and the bee“.  For the last month or so, every Starbucks I’ve been to has been littered with paraphernalia related to the movie.  

This is an interesting move for Starbucks.  The way I understand it, Starbucks is actually taking a percentage of the box office in return for marketing the movie in their retail stores nationwide.  Starbucks has long been working on becoming the ‘third place’ in peoples’ lives, and now they are going to attempt to use that influence to generate profits for themselves at the box office.  

I must say, I’m impressed with Starbuck management on this one.  They are taking it upon themselves to generate returns for a movie that otherwise might have flown under the radar and gone unnoticed.  This is a nice example of how I think advertising partnerships should work – a big guy getting on the bandwagon of a little guy and promoting the little guy to the profit of both.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the rest of the world always worked that way?