A wonderful way to spend a Saturday night, hanging out on the VOID deck of a 1970′s HDB just behind the Singapore Arts Musuem.

Congratulation to the friendly people at FARM.SG for a wonderful evening of listening to a diversity of local practioners in the Singapore Creative Industries…

Personal favourite was YEO Shin Yun whos “I love collaborations” video showed her work over the last few years. Check her out at www.instinc.com

Looking forward to the next edition..

With so much of my work being focussed on the thinking side of things, thought I would offer my hands to Steve to help him with the hanging of his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy™” exhibition.

Had a wonderful experience and was a pure pleasure to work for steve, his team and with all the artists that participated in the exhibition.

For those of you that missed the opening the exhibition is open daily at 02-02 BloodGroup+ Space, 32 Aliwal Street, Singapore till the 21st of April 2010..

Recently I moved back into city area and finally had a meeting that was in walking distance.

So after a nice early morning walk to the DBS building on Shenton way, I registered for the IE seminar and made my way to the coffee pot.

The seminar was well attended and the speakers proved insightful, clear and provided some great case studies as to how they have helped other Singaporean companies…

The reason for my attendance was to look at the “Exporter Development Program” for one of my clients which on the surface looks to be a well developed program that helps growing SME with understand and develop a overseas strategy for their product(s).

For anyone interested, you can do a quick survey at www.iesingapore.gov.sg to ascertain your export readiness and start the process of communication with IE.

We are half way through our third adventure into China with the amazing ladies of the Huang Yao Foundation and I have to say that I am pleasantly amazed by the warmth and generousity of the people we are meeting that want to help us and the foundations goals.

From the publishers, documentary makers, journalists and animators, everyone has taken the time to undertand what we are trying to do as well as get to the know ‘Huang Yao’ diverse body of work.

I looks forward to the next few days of meetings and love the coffee and variety of teas that are the only thing keeping me warm on these these cold and rainy Shanghai days.

In their own way, all artists are entrepreneurs, and all entrepreneurs are artists.

Though their tools and products may differ, both entrepreneurs and artists are in the same game– the making and selling of work that is personally and emotionally important to them.

Artist. Entrepreneur.

They’re just words.

What’s far more interesting is not what we create, but how we create it, WHY we create it.”

Courtesy of Hugh McLeod, Gaping Void

With the economy being what it has in the last few years it is good to hear what the latest Singapore Governments budget has in store for SMEs…

From the informative talk given by KPMG about it’s interpretation of the budget, the government is providing incentives (in the form of tax breaks) for Research and Development, Intellectual property acquisition and development, equipment upgrading (productivity), training and design of new products our upgrading products for new markets.

The government will release further information from now until June 2010 and to further your research have alook under the broad theme of “Productivity and Innovation Credit” Scheme…

PROJECT 636 features 10 creative talents pitching their projects, ideas and portfolios to an audience of industry players, peers and you!

Really enjoyed the format and the sharing from the different creative projects.

Thanks to Singapore Creative Network and Six Degrees @ Emily Hill for putting together the night and I especially enjoyed “Make your mark | YOLO ambassador” and “Chain reaction | Scott Woodward”.

Looking forward to the next session

What is the Entrepreneurial process?

It involves all the functions, activities and actions associated with perceiving opportunities and creating organizations to pursue them.

A definition of an Entrepreneur

A person who perceives an opportunity and creates an organization to pursue it, by destroying the existing economy order, or by introducing new products and services, or by creating new forms of organization, or by exploiting new raw materials.

The hunt for treasure island began calmly in mid August when Hurrah productions asked for my assistance on a brief they received from Shine.tv in the UK to find a island in South East Asia that had a relatively large list of “must have” for a potential UK television series.

Within the first few weeks we were GOOGLE EARTH experts and with the assistance of www.gotomeetings.comwe were able to short list the suitable islands and draw up and itinerary and share them with the UK clients.

Our trip in late September saw us meet in Bangkok, where we meet the film board and local production house, then fly to Hat Yai, bus it to Pak Barra and take a boat over to Ko Tarutao, were we would explore the island to see if all the moving parts for the production could be accommodated.

Being an old penal island for the Thailand government the infrastructure of the island proved to be quite developed and the island beautiful sunsets, super friendly staff and local chief made the each nights stay easy to forget why we were there.

We spent three days on the island, we decided to take a boat ride around the coastline and then head back to Pak Barra where we would then take a bus to Kuala Perlis and go through immigration and hop onto a ferry to Langkawi…

We started the tour with a bus ride around the island but just couldn’t come up with anything similar to Ko Tarutao.. That afternoon we took to the sea in long boats and made our way around the islands surrounding Langkwai…. It soon became obvious that we had found a special gem in Ko Tarutao and after a catch up that evening over dinner with our fixer, we decided to stop the tour and switch into tourist mode.. (I am the Go carting champion)….

We managed to rearrange our meeting with the Malaysia Tourism board and the Shine.tv peoples  flights back to the UK, so we left a day early and caught our flight to Kuala Lumpur, then back Singapore.

We love work like this….

Last year’s my father was diagnosed “Motor Neuron Disease” and as his condition is getting worse I thought it would be good to send some time with him as he transitioned into cared living.

Not knowing how long this might take our how many trips maybe needed to help him though his phase, I took the decision to close “the dream factory”, a sad moment for me.

The great news is that my father has moved in high care facility, twenty minutes from my brother, and has accepted what the disease is doing to his body and I know “the dream factory” will be back again soon when the right space presents itself.