Taggo is launched!

Check out the press release here.

Analyst sees massive pain coming for the states, recommends Visa and MasterCard

Analyst Meredith Whitney says state budgets could be the next systemic financial risk. The only companies she recommends investing in are Visa and MasterCard and Taggo (OK, just joking).

BBC interview on entrepreneurship and Taggo

BBC was in Singapore this week and did an interview with me on entrepreneurship and the launch of Taggo fan recognition. We did the interview at Paulaner Brauhaus, a German brewery and restaurant that will be launching Taggo October 1st.

To get a feel for Taggo, go to Paulaner's Facebook page, become a fan of Paulaner, and click on the taggo me tab to register your Singapore transit card. Taggo then links up all of your Liked pages to that card number so that we can easily identify you as a fan when you are out in the real world.

For overseas friends, if you have a Singapore transit card from a recent visit here, you can register now but you'll have to come back and visit again to enjoy fan privileges at Paulaner and other places.

Our next goal is to integrate lots of other tap and go cards in other countries.

(Credit to Aaron Koh for the picture.)

Taggo highlighted in article on entrepreneurship and innovation

Singapore's e27 is doing a "series of guest posts featuring first-hand insights, experiences and advice from personalities in Asia’s startup scene".

The first, by Jacob Joseph, looks at entrepreneurship in Singapore and highlights the work we are doing with Taggo.

Check it out here.

Only clueless management lets technologists drive innovation

If you've worked in a technology firm for any length of time, you may have sensed that innovation within your company somehow never seems to be truly innovative. At some point, the company's developers take control and something that starts out as a relatively innovative and useful idea gets whittled down to a small incremental add-on feature that is not very exciting. The technical people all explain how difficult and even impossible it is to get something done, and you end up thinking that maybe there is something wrong with you and maybe you should be happy with this stupid little feature that they have come up with.

If this sounds familiar, cheer up! Even the big boys with lots of cash suffer from the same problems!

An article in the Telegraph reminded me of the frustrations I have had to deal with. The article looks at Google's new feature, announced with fanfare. Here's an excerpt from Google Instant: the technology anti-climax of the decade:

Google is faced on all sides with explosive growth from networks and platforms that aren't even indexable, let alone visible to Google for the purposes of ad sales, and it unveils a slightly faster way to get your search results? What am I missing here?

"Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly," said the boffins from Mountain View in their blog post announcing Google Instant.

So, after years of research, in response to the question, "What next for Google?," that's what all those billions of dollars and brain cells have come up with. Wow.

This is what you end up with when management puts innovation in the hands of the technologists. You can't count on technologists to understand the company's high level strategy and competitive threats. They think they do. But what they really understand is the code and how difficult it is to change things when legacy systems are involved.

Management that leaves innovation in the hands of technologists is management that doesn't have any clue where they are going. It is a dereliction of duty that most board members are incapable of even seeing.

The only worse thing is leaving innovation in the hands of salespeople. But that's another story.

I once read a rant like this from Steve Jobs but have never been able to find it again. It must be a passage from a book that I lost years ago.