Meeting With Google’s Jolly Good Fellow

Yesterday was the inaugural launch of the IDA’s InfocommLIVE series of talks. For the first talk, they invited Google’s first Singaporean employee, Tan Chade-Meng, to share his personal experiences, philosophy and anecdotes on working withnGoogle. The event was held at DXO in the Esplanade Mall.

Meng, as he prefers to be called, turns out to be a shy yet funny person. He talked about how it was like working in Google. Not much I didn’t already know about actually, after having read so much about Google’s work culture on the Internet. Google is a fun place to work. Meng’s personal anecdotes were more interesting though: The antics that he played in Google, the other funny stuffs that happen around in Google.

An interesting tidbit I learnt about Meng was that he’s probably the only person “so famous” that he’s appeared 4 times in the New York Times on the same day, and all on the front page. Meng’s vision for World Peace was great to hear too. It has got to do with what he’s doing and why he’s now in Google University.

The event was organized together with The Digital Movement. I’ve not heard of them before, but they are apparently a new non-profit organization striving to build and connect thought leaders in the digital space. They have a detailed blog posting of the event on their blog, so you can check that out if you missed the event.

Personally, I felt the event fell short of the excitement that I was expecting. The best part of it is Meng’s talk, of course, and good that it is so since that was the whole point of the event. But many other supporting factors were somewhat disappointing. The place was small. That’s still okay. The place was really stuffy and hot, like the air-con wasn’t really working. Even Meng noted and commented about it. That’s not so good. The worst bit had to be with DXO’s service. They were so deplorably slow, fumbling around, trying to figure things out. It’s like this is their first day of work. Maybe it was their first day of work?

I was also growing impatient waiting from 6:30pm, when registration started, until 7:35pm before the event started. It wasn’t until 7:45pm before Meng got on stage. Maybe it will not be so bad had it been known up front that the event actually started at 7:35pm. But the only “timing” given was registration at 6:30pm.

We were advised to bring our own notebooks for a “live chat”. Well, wireless was mostly not working, there was no Wireless@SG, and the only “live chat” was the conventional Q&A with moderator on stage and microphone passed around.

Okay, this is IDA’s first InfocommLIVE. Let’s hope it gets better.