Pandora Squared - Web and Business Architects, Consultants, Social Media Marketing, Software and Blogging hope not hype

Its great having the entire team here but they Whine: we are too busy to blog… They say in Unison although it isn’t as if the 18 hour days haven’t taken their toll. Hunter flew into Manila roughly two weeks ago and hasn’t left the front of his Mac mini since (not as expensive as a laptop and small enough to travel)

The team is here working on a pretty huge project for us. We mean huge, when launched we will have something like 4.4 million users on the Genesis Engine. Not bad, as we see it that will put us on the radar a bit more.

Well its been another beer soaked 1 hour night (Note: We are so busy on this project we have only had two nights out in a month), Jay Aggarwal flew in from Brisbane to join Hans, and the crew, Hans was first he flew in 3 weeks ago from San Jose.

The nights have been mostly quiet however this past evening was full of madness a technicolor parade of Australian beer drinking humor, Mobius hosted chill club at Mcafe, and all I know is somewhere around 4am I was phoned by a concerned Philippino telling me to save the boys from Burgus street. So I rescued the guys from an exponential bar tab by dancing terribly. So on a napkin late last night or early in the morning (I cant remember) I compiled my

Top ten list of international startup rules for South East Asia.

10) Don’t blog about the rum episode, motorcycle helmets or the bet about testicles on the dinosaur egg. Ok so what that I kind of sort of just did just that.
9) Mexican Food is not international bring your own premium tequila and tapatio sauce.
8) Karaoke is acceptable form of team bonding, Poison and other butt rock band songs are never allowed.
7) Don’t interupt Hunter or Luis while they are programming. After the sign language you hit the three thousand yard stare, then have to draw pictures and slowly explain, what you mean when you say do you guys want any lunch?
6) It is a rule of thumb that everyones girlfriend will hate Kevin.
5) Always wake up your drunk buddies and drag them to work. Sleep can occur while working on UI.
4) Trying to explain AJAX while drunk and struggling in a foreign language is a nogo.
3) No one, I repeat NO ONE is excited about your technology as you are. Even when though you get goosebumps trying to explain it to really attractive nubile South East Asian women, they are only smiling so you stop talking and leave.
2) Asking “Dude does your wife know” to old beer bellied American Tourists at girlie bars usually ends in some sort of altercation.
1) Guapo means “Give me your money” if you have no money your name is “Joe”

I can remember the first time I read the book, As a Man Thinketh.

It was a pretty cold day I was in Australia wondering what to do with my life. I drove to Ben Buckler (which is the phenomenal overlook of Bondi Beach), and being that the sea’s were incredibly choppy, and a winter storm pushed in from the South I was the only one in the world on this cliff face overlooking the black seas.

Sitting midst this approaching storm I sat alone in a Black VW Golf and just like the nerd I am I read this on a Mac Powerbook via PDF, You can download for free at www.asamanthinketh.com

As a Man Thinketh So is He.

The aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

Anyway suffice to say, I ended up crying you know the real kind with snot out the nose and everything. Here I saw an answer, philosophically taken to action that I could understand.

Only by much searching and mining are gold and diamonds obtained, and man can find every truth connected with his being, if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul. That he is the maker of his character, the molder of his life, and the builder of his destiny, he may unerringly prove, if he will watch, control, and alter his thoughts, tracing their effects upon himself, upon others and upon his life and circumstances, linking cause and effect by patient practice and investigation. And utilizing his every experience, even the most trivial, everyday occurrence, as a means of obtaining that knowledge of himself which is understanding, wisdom, power.

So here I realised in pretty plain language that my thoughts dictated everything in my life. I was the perfect result of my thougths and my energy. I started another leg of my journey that afternoon when after my revelation I decided to pursue my ambitions in developing innovative technology. That was 4 years ago.

Ok. How does this relate?

As a Company Thinketh So is it.

One of the things that we as a company are seeing manifested before our eyes is the result of our thoughts years ago, our repeated actions based upon those thoughts and the discipline to continue despite the toughest tests. As Jim Collins writes in the Startup Bible Good To Great,

• First you get the right people on the bus.
• Then the wrong people off the bus.
• Then the Right People in the Right Seat.
• Disciplined Thought
• Disciplined Action
• Hedgehog Concept (singleness of vision and purpose)
• Technology as an enabler (not business purpose)
• Greatness

It all starts with thought.

If you enter a phone call conversation speaking to a new prospect or lead and your not thinking about the client and what they need, you end up speaking versus listening, resulting into the typical sales chest beating.

If I enter a weekly meeting and not controlling thoughts and I let that get to me, I may bring an entire section of the team down into my state.

• Disciplined Thought

However, working together- if we realise our thoughts are the key, that if your thinking about value, compelling reasons for clients business needs just come forth.

By helping (sometimes teeth pulling) your development team into thinking they are a not development but a sales team delivering the solution to the clients needs, you see powerful focused client specific results. We have found that what was taking us 30 days can be done overnight when we pull together and through the dawn.

• Disciplined Action

It isn’t fun, people may yell and scream and everyone from the AJAX RoR ninja’s to part time computer tech realises that a Startup isn’t hard but it is work. You have to answer client emails, you have to return phone calls, you have to help with sales information…

It is rewarding for us now to see that our previously held concepts about almost everything were false! Our thoughts are what held us back these years…

Now:

Everyone is a salesman, everyone must not ever think, That isn’t what I am good at, or That isn’t my job, or This is impossible.

But its always thought that gets us over the next sales call, over the next month with no salary over the 27 hour work day hacking out code to make sure its bug free for the sales presentation in the morning.

As your Company Thinks so is it.

I usually don’t write posts like this in the official Pandora Squared blog. I regularly use my personal blog, livingtrends.blogspot.com for things like this.

We are standing at the precipice of humanity staring down into complete and utter crash and at the same time massive blessings of promise…but it as always is the waiting game… midst our struggles it is here I learn the most.

Well- I don’t know if it is voice, I don’t know if conversations and that blogger is buggy or down at the moment, but I can’t seem to get in to post my thoughts. My understanding of the collected unconsciousness is that the blogosphere brings to the real world the ivisible conversations and allows me to write my thoughts here- on the corporate blog so here they go.

Black marks on a phosphorescent screen that stands as a metaphor for the enunciations of sounds that make up voice and the fabric of conversation, identity and community are here. These black marks are hyper linked permanent indexible and archivable.

Funny thing. These things, these qualitative concepts of black lines on paper then eventually screens moving today into social sciences are not as easily sold to those whose strength is ERP, or supply chain management. They say conversations are a soft science unable to be quantified, unable to have a real business value. ERP looks inward. CRM looks out, Social Software enables invisible markets and employees; Social Networks show us the strength of ties…

Ask Dan Rather. Ask Kryptonite bike locks Ask the citizens of Iraq, Israel, or Lebanon who blog midst political crisis, this is why blogs are linked 8 times over a corporate search result.

Markets are conversations indeed.

So my point?

A letter by our COO TOM W. LEE to a client, made me exceptionally happy tonight. It enforces what I have always known, any success is not I, it is the team that makes us great. I absolutely love everyone (I have hand picked to work with us), the fire passion and zeal pave the way and again you cannot outsource passion.

Personal Comment, keeping in mind, we have put four years of Blood, Sweat and Tears to bring the Genesis Engine Product to this 95% stage of completion. I agreed to join with Pandora Squared, because I have belief in what they are moving to do and I believe they are a Wave of the Future.

In my own career, I have been part of Start Up Teams that have taken five successful companies out… to going Public or significantly Upsize Revenues… Diablo Systems/Xerox, with George Comstock from Singer… Apple Computer, with Steve Jobs and Wosniak’s Team… Conner Peripherals, with Finis Conner’s Team… Quantum Peripheral’s with George Brown’s Team… and the Larry Sander’s Turn Around Team that took Fujitsu’s Storage Products Division from USD250 Million to over USD3.5 Billion in three years. A pretty good track record methinks. Five winners in a lifetime. I done picked some Winners… Tom W. Lee

Thanks Tom Lee

So. We had a fire at Pandora Squared’s home office last night.

Not an “extraordinary meeting of minds” kind of fire, but a regular one, with flames and smoke. The fire department came. We lost some stuff. Thankfully no one was hurt.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Thursday night, Kevin, Tom and myself were at an aussie bar in the middle of Makati City talking to the CEO of a prominent Sydney-based IT company, knocking back a few beers, enjoying a game of rugby on the big TV. We had each gone our own way afterwards, and I was just finishing up having dinner with Kaye when I got a call from Tom.

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of Kevin,” he says to me, “Someone told me that his house was on fire.”

Mind you, the past 6 weeks have been nothing but twists and turns for our little group, and this was STILL the craziest news yet. (The running joke is that every week we have a new bit of insanity going down, and well, we missed last week so I suppose this news made up for it.)

So I go off to meet back up with Tom and Kevin; it turned out that the situation had already been resolved. The fire department had come, the fire had been put out, and the house had been properly secured. There was, in short, nothing more for us to do until the next morning.

When we finally got to the house earlier today, it looked positively serene. There were none of those things that you usually associate with a big fire, i.e., scorch marks, ashes in the air, charred bodies strewn over the pavement. The only room that had been damaged was the bathroom, where the fire had ironically started. (I still don’t really understand what started it, but the airconditioning unit had melted.) The power was out, but pretty much everything else was intact. Oh, except for one thing: we had an envelope with a little over US$300 stashed in one of the office drawers. The envelope was still there, but the money was gone.

The thing about the fire department in third-world countries, you see, is that like many poorly-funded public institutions, they are fairly desperate for cash. And fires in big houses in the suburbs are great because there’s always cash hidden somewhere. In our case, the money had been fairly easy to find; it wasn’t even in a safe or lock-box or anything.

We’ve basically taken all this as a sign to look for some other place for Pandora Squared’s headquarters, as the day we had the fire was the day we were supposed to sign a year-long lease on the house. If that isn’t a big, fat omen, I don’t know what is.

Brand x:

— Kevin Leversee
Chief Courage Officer
- converse -
+639064623142 (manila)
pandorasquaredkevin (skype)
kevin@pandorasquared.com
http://www.PandoraSquared.com
Hope not Hype 2.0

Pandora Squared is a Web & Business Architect firm that helps business grow through search, social sciences, software and technology enablement.

We have: Built and delivered social networks to 7 markets in South East Asia.

Robust social software engines and tools in Ajax and Ruby on Rails. http://www.PinoyWeb2.com

Built News Corporations first blog site. http://www.AlphaMagazine.com.au

Market representation in Sydney, Australia, Manila Philippines and San Francisco, California.

Search is the lifeblood of your business. We show the why, and the how.

Conversations are taking place already. If you are not ready to join in, your business must have a mechanism in place to listen. We show you how.

We make invisible markets visible.

So, myspace or yourspace?

brand why? and tell us WHY.

— Kevin Leversee – Chief Courage Officer
Pandora Squared- Hope not Hype 2.0
Web Architecture & Consulting / Online Social Networks Development / New Marketing
http://pandorasquared.com
London, Manila, San Francisco, Sydney
Phone: +63 9064623142 (Philipines)
Skype: pandorasquaredkevin
http://www.pandorasquared.com/pages/products
http://www.pandorasquared.com/pages/services

Pandora Squared is a Web & Business Architect firm that helps business grow through search, social sciences, software and technology enablement.

From slashdot this morning comes Software Wars....

‘ the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft.’

The war on microsoft will go on, and on, but this image sums it all up for me….and who said a pictures says 1000 words ?

I know that any piece of Web technology is not a purpose but an enabler, but how does one really extract value from social networks that it is supposed to underpin?

Then I hit upon the ideas of Game Theory, Pareto Efficiency, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Nash Equilibrium and even the game show Friend or Foe.

Very elementary, you might say. Trust and Collaboration. But the devil is in the details. Not necessarily with technology but when it involves people. Time to unlock the hidden side of social software.

Perhaps the ideas behind freakonomics could help.

The Jolie-Pitts have done it, Britney was too slow, Gwen Stefani was on the ball. According to this article [SMH] , it’s now the done thing. Once you have a baby better get the domain name.

Tom and Katie….oh your so 2005 you missed out. Suri Cruise

Oh and don’t forget….Free Katie

As some longer term readers may know I love visualisation. Completely by accident (well OK, discoverd on digg) I came across an little Java app that visualises the html code on a website and makes some beautiful graphs. This is the graph for Pandora Squared:

It gives a great idea of what a site is using for their HTML markup. From our site you can see majority div based markup with lots of text related tags and links (yep, its definately a blog). Its fascinating to see the representation of how the site is built.

I wonder if it would be possible from the graphs if you can find a designer/developers signature from the use of particular tags or choices in their document structure. Time for some exploring.

Want to be one of the Cool Kids? Well come on by and deck yourself out in some stylish Pandora Squared and Prometheus Fire gear.

We have just launched the Pandora Squared shop where you can buy lots of gear. Shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers and lots more to come.

So come on… what are you waiting for…