Clubbing in South East Asia

I know I haven’t updated this blog in the longest period of time, never got the time to sit down & write something good enough. Guess I’m not the real blogging type of a person but this one i couldn’t resist. Just got back from a couple of weeks of holiday in Malaysia, Singapore & Thailand and the clubbing experience was truly awesome. It took us a lot of time to read reviews online & find good places, that too from Mobile Phones on slow GPRS connections, before we continuously found luck day after day by ending up at some of the best pubs & clubs in the region. To make things easier for those of you who plan to pay a visit to South East Asia, here we go >>

1) Zouk Club - Singapore

Zouk Club - Singapore

This was the first place we went to in Singapore after landing post midnight & just having checked into our hotel. The place was suggested to us by one of our friends from India even before the whole holiday was finalized. Zouk, as I now learn from Wikipedia, is 3 old warehouses renovated, albeit completely! Trust me you won’t feel that it was ever been a warehouse, when you are there. It’s 3 interconnected clubs in one building - Zouk, Velvet Underground & Phuture. The club was fortunately very near to our Hotel on the Havlock Road, adjacent to the Singapore River. The entry fee is below 30 SD though Phuture is more of a member’s area. Zouk is the most happening of the 3 whereas Velvet is a ‘bit’ more elite types. You can obviously read the finer details & type of music etc from wiki & elsewhere.

Fair reviews here, the official site here & their twitter account here. There is a Zouk in Kuala Lumpur also, though i haven’t been there, am pretty sure it would live up to expectations.

2) Attica - Singapore

Attica - Singapore

This one, also in Singapore, is at the Clarke Quay area. We were here for the Christmas Countdown cos our friends living in Singapore forced us here. We badly wanted to go to Zouk for a second time. After much persuasion we decided to check out Attica not realizing that it would turn out to be an equally wonderful experience. Party was on till around 5 in the morning & the place was jam-packed. Again, wonderful music, crowd, tons of beautiful girls, amazing sound systems, fabulous DJ’s, great drinks which are all traits of all the places I’m listing down here. There is a second club, again connected, upstairs called Attica Too. I was among the lucky few who got some Attica T-Shirts, thrown into the amazing crowd by the DJ I personally liked Attica Too over the one downstairs primarily cos of the crowd & the music. They had 6 DJ’s in total, one of whom was extraordinarily amazing with his beats. Truly out of the world experience.

Review is here & official site here. They are on twitter too.

3) Bed Supper Club - Bangkok

This one will take you for a surprise cos you will find beds here instead of seats. So the board outside says ‘No Drugs, No weapons, No Sex’! The ambience is very different from the usual pubs & clubs one would frequent in most parts of the world.  Again, has 2 clubs both having upper decks too. The most striking difference apart from the music obviously, is that the beds are white in one & black in the other. I liked the white one more, the crowd is more fun & mingling especially on top of the central bed which evolves into a mini dance floor over a period of time. The other one has a bigger regular dance floor & often live drums to go with the music. As the name of the club suggests, they have a restaurant area too, on the outside on ground. Food is really good though a bit expensive. You can guess that seeing the Lamborghini’s & Ferrari’s parked outside. Entry into the club is 700 Baht per person out of which 600 is drink coupons. The tip is, buy a bottle instead of ordering drink after drink if you are more than 3 people.

The official site is here & review here. Twitter page here.

4) 808 - Bangkok

Club 808 - Bangkok

This one is a personal favorite. Though a bit away from the heart of the city, which is the Sukhumvit area, this is located in the RCA (short for Royal City Avenue) entertainment complex off Rama IX road. For a change, this is not a 2 in 1 like Bed Supper Club / Attica nor a 3 in 1 like Zouk. This just has an upper deck & is happily single. But the OMG statement is that it is an Open Bar, which means that once you pay the entry fee of 700 Baht, everything is on the house. The downside is they have only a limited set of items on the Open bar menu but that is fair enough as they essentially cover atleast a couple of decent brands of all types of drinks be it whiskey, rum, vodka, tequila, liqueurs or whatever. The sound system is superb, the woofer-speaker sets positioned right in front of the DJ booth will have atleast half a dozen people dancing on top of it once things start to spice up.

Official Site here.

5) Route 66 - Bangkok

Route 66 - Bangkok

Take a step out of 808, look left & you see Route 66. Entry is 380 Baht & they seem to promote Smirnoff Ginger Ale often given as the first free drink. Again a 3 in one Club with 3 different kinds of music & the whole club is open on one side to the huge outdoor area with tables. This is probably the club in Bangkok you will find maximum number of people. In fact it’s a bit too crowded at times.  But it’s a fun place to be in. The seats outside are good for an occasional rest after all the shaking you can do in one stretch.

Official Site here & review here.

6) Beach Club Cafe - Kuala Lumpur

The board outside says ‘Don’t feed the Sharks’ & I giggled, going in to realize that they actually have small sharks in an aquarium just next to the dance floor. The club is very close to Petronas Towers & has great music. Thatched roof, the tropical feel, the small bridge at the entrance is all good & different in it’s own way. The only & very noticeable downside is that it is kind of a major pick up joint these days, so not a family place at all. KL, though a bit more expensive than Thailand is considerably cheaper in comparison to Singapore. Maybe because Malaysia being a Muslim country with a bit of regulations here & there, they close down at around 3 am.

Exact location here.

7) Insomnia - Pattaya

Insomnia

This one is pretty much mid way on the Walking Street right in the middle of zillions of infamous Go-Go bars of Pattaya. Fantastic sound system, you will feel your heart thump throughout if you stand close to one of the speakers & there is no running away from speakers as there are lots of them. You won’t get to see many people at 12 am but it’s all happening by around 2. Drinks are moderately expensive & i hate it when they charge for water, same case with most of the clubs these days. Entry is just 140 Bahts for the upper floor i-Club, the ground floor sister club charges 100 baht but is not worth the time.

8 - MiXX - Pattaya

The best club probably in Pattaya, this one is at the Bali Hai Pier end of Walking Street. This is a 2 in 1 club one named Crystal Palace & the other Rouge Club, both situated on the third floor of the Bali Hai plaza & is connected by a small passage. Great ambience & good dance floors, great crowd and good music. This one is in a different league from the rest of the clubs in Pattaya. A bit expensive but you wouldn’t probably mind because the place is that good. And there is no entrance charge though there are a lot of waiters looking out to see if you are ordering something or just wasting their space!

BTW, by ‘expensive’,  wherever I’ve used the term, I mean when you think in India Rupees or some unfortunately week native currency of yours. If you are lucky soul earning/thinking in Dollars or Euros, none of these 8 places are expensive. In fact they are really cheap for the quality clubbing experience they offer.

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Tags: apac, asia, bangkok, club, clubbing, dance, disco, hip hop, house, kuala lumpur, malaysia, music, nightlife, party, partying, pattaya, progressive, pub, SEA, singapore, sound, south east asia, speakers, thailand, trance

A comment that became a post!

This was originally posted on Pluggd.in, a blog covering Digital Media, on Aug 1st 2008. The intro part is written by Ashish Sinha of Pluggd In & you can find the original copy here.

Here is story of one kickass startup that in the first place sounds very lucky (they have got all the cool partnerships and mentors in place) - But the real story is quite different and is a mix of extremism, courage and of course, fun! - These guys raised 200K USD when they were studying and are kicking everybody’s ass since then!

Well, I am talking about MobMe (profile) - Kerala based startup.
In the past, I have asked Sony and his team to share their story with pluGGd.in readers, but somehow we never got the thing going!

But, Prashant’s earlier post on ‘on ‘Can Indian Society produce Gates/Larry/Zuckerburg?” got an emotional (and quite a lengthy one!) reply from Sony and with his permission, I am sharing the mobme story here (as-is)

———

Let me start by saying that we’ve had a very different experience altogether! Ashish had asked to write about our journey some time here on pluggd.in but never really got the time to do it. But this post makes me write a bit about it. Consider this as a trailer!

Lack of forward thinking at early age

Prashant explains the lack of computers in educational institutions & opportunities for a teenager to fool around at an IT giant’s place.

I don’t disagree with the first part. You know what we did? We bunked college as much as possible! The entire team was academically above average/brilliant till 12th & after joining Btech realized that you could crack this in the last week of study hols for semester exams. So we had a lot of free time.

We made a lot of money while in 4th sem in college by coming out with a special sim for college students in Kerala in association with the then BPL mobile. It was a pure viral marketing stuff with no advertising but we managed to make close to a million in under 3 months. That gave the much needed kick & a thought in our mind that bunking classes (not exams) is not that bad an idea.

We registered a company, got good tech hands (we were mostly marketing types & couldn’t even think of coding) and then went back to BPL with a zillion ideas and finally put up voice servers in their Kerala circle to do outdiallers & in-diallers. Can you belive that? Bunch of teens hanging around in their data center trying to figure out what is SS7 & PRI and all. We finally cracked it on Asterisks (open source) cos we didn’t have the money to put the proprietary ones! Also we managed to do stuff on the lines of what a hungama & mauj does on content business. Still very much in our teens & before 6th semester we had tie-ups with Onmobile, Hungama, Nazara, Mauj, India Times almost all others in the content business. We had sealed the malayalam movie industry & held rights for ALL the major artists.

While all this happened, we had also registered in Technopark, Trivandrum as Kerala’s first student incubated company & had strong support from IIITM-K, STPI, Kerala Government & most importantly, the education department & our university. So our attendance shortages also stopped giving us bad dreams. Had a tough time with some teachers but pretty much we were extremely lucky nothing nothing tragic happened to our studies. We chose the start-up route & left the idea of getting high marks in college.

Our Aversion toward extremism

Contrary to this, we got some really brilliant tech guys who never wanted to waste their life working for high paying IT jobs but wanted to work with an exciting start-up. Again lucky on this front, but there are lots of people like that. Our lead tech person actually left us for a year to join Uzanto (slideshare.net) & came back after product release with tonnes of experience & excellent exposure. So now you know that extremism is the norm out here.

Our Approach Toward Money

This will drive you crazy. We raised a neat $200,000 while in 6th semester from Angel investors in Kerala. We knew that if wanted to make it big, leftovers of our college earnings wouldn’t help much. If could do this at 19, a lot many people can do much better. And as Ashish had posted once, we took in a second round of funding just after 8th semester - same amount but 10X valuation from more Angels. And trust me, these Angels are really ‘Angels’. They stand with us no matter what. In between we have had small investments for minority stake sell outs from people who saw the passion in us. We are lucky to have a lot of really good mentors/supporters. From hot shot CxO’s in the IT industry to movie superstars to really good finance guys to some amazing bureaucrats to conventional business biggies to silicon valley chiefs to top brass media people.

Our Approach Toward Exploration

We traveled the length & breadth of the country cos we felt that business never happens in India if you haven’t even met the person with whom you are trying to do business. We make it a point to meet everyone atleast once & then technology steps in to take things forward. Just out of college we went to Dubai on an absolute exploratory trip & in two weeks got some good inroads to a lot of business opportunities. Now we interact with them almost on a daily basis over emials/calls but the first trip really helped forge the relation.

Lack of Role Models

All of the people in that list plus a lot more of them are our inspiration. Internet helps a lot to keep track of what’s going on in the industry, especially with many high quality blogs like this in every part of the world. They give you a lot of insights & information & analysis, i feel there is not much lack of role models around. From ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ of Robert Kiyosaki to ‘Screw it, Lets Do it’ by Richard Branson to ‘IT happened in Inda’ by Kishore Biyani, there are so many wonderful inspiring stories around you.

Luck factor - I’m adding this one

I’ve started believing that fortune favors the brave! The BPL we started out with became Hutch & then Vodafone. Now we do stuff nationally cos they know us since ages. Many decisions you make are subject to a lot of luck. We were lucky to avoid all the 5 points (ref. to prashant’s post) above. We got investment at the right time. Met people at the right time. Media people loved us so much that the attention that we got in regional media was amazing. Maybe its because there weren’t much business stuff happening in Kerala after all the ‘hartals’ (strikes)! So much attention that we ended up even meeting the president (Dr Kalam) at his office - a 45 minute chat that inspires you to achieve the unachievable.

Now we personally know/mentor a dozen such start-ups from Kerala who are working hard to do tread the same path. Its such a joy when you receive a call from a new teenage ceo in the middle of the night saying he enrolled with Technopark as a Student start-up. You can feel & see what in his mind & what lies ahead for him. We are happy & thankful to all those people who supported us.

At 22, journey so far has been really exciting. Its been a thriller all the way. Lets wait n watch what more is in the pipe.

BTW: Being a trailer, the most of the ‘most exciting stuff’ have been carefully kept aside for the big one

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Tags: ashish sinha, comment, kickass startup, mobME, pluggd.in, post, sony

The mobME Story

This was part of a presentation I did at Start-Up Saturday Delhi April Edition. Its very hard to put all the excitement & fun we had founding the company onto a bunch of slides but it kind of captures the timelines & some of the milestones we passed. I always say this to smart youngsters that starting up while in college was one of the best decisions we took. And it applies to all, because that’s the phase in life when you don’t have any obligations/burdens/distractions. I won’t recommend dropping out, but if you have some brains, you will always be able to manage the studies parallely. Doing some business, no matter the nature or size of it, gives you more insights & learning experience than any MBA degree can give you. Many wannabe entrepreneurs ask me, shouldn’t they do an MBA before taking the plunge. I won’t say no but its not mandatory. The biggest advantage of going to a B-school is the amazing network you will be able to build over time. That applies only if you go to the best of institutions. Maybe couple of years after you pass out, you will be able to spot your peers in some good decision making roles in companies that matter to you & that should help get you inroads way faster than a random guy out there. And business always happens on the relationships you build. But having said that, there is the alternate option of hiring good MBA guys to work for you!

When you are just out of college, you think out of the box. You don’t know the limitations, barriers or boundaries. You tend to think big & on that perspective i would say ignorance is bliss! But the mandatory trait in your mindset, is the ‘never say die’ attitude that is totally essential to keep you going when you face challenges. The joy of breaking a barrier is beyond words. It gives you a different kind of high that makes you feel you are capable of conquering bigger heights. And its all in that feeling. What you think is what you are, and if you think you can’t change the world around you, starting up is not your cup of tea!

Things to take away from the presentation is that >>
a) You need a great team with complementing skills. (I’m not for the idea of starting up all alone)
b) If you have a good idea & a feasible financial model built around it, funds will never ba an issue.
c) You need some sensible people to guide you & advise you but finally the decision has to be yours.
d) Clients rule! They decide if you will grow or decay. So keep them happy always.

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Tags: college, college startup, excitement, Fun, MBA, mobME, presentation, starting up, story

First post on SonyJoy.com

A lot of my friends have been asking me to register my own .com for quite some time now & finally I registered this domain. Sonyjoy.com being available was an irresistable temptation. I’ve just started playing around with a couple of themes & it will take some bit of time before i get familiar to this new playground. But once i’m, you can bet, you will have a fun time checking this out once in a while. I don’t intend to be a very frequent blogger, but i do plan to put up my thoughts on a varied set of topics including but not limited to starting-up, our company - mobME, life, friends, technology, mobile, music & movies, entrepreneurship, India & whatever stuff that comes my way that would make me think! For everything in between my blogs, you can follow me here.

Being a very special picture, i wanted this to be part of the first post here... Don't ask me why!

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Tags: blog, first post, intro, Life, sonyjoy.com, start