Ho ho ho

Alphabet and close friends decamped to Bintan for this year's Christmas party, and although there was a distinct absence of turkey and fat hairy old men dressed in red, I think we got into the swing of things (see pics).

We had planned to have paintball, go-karting and a guitar-led singalong (courtesy of John and J2's girlfriend), but the rain put paid to the first two - and elephant-crippling amounts of alcohol put paid to the latter.

Happily we did manage to play a bit of ping-pong, and play some laserquest. Interestingly Jianggan revealed himself to be the supreme hunter of men, rushing off into the dark and stalking opponents. In the second game I was involved in, it was our very own little Kelly who turned out to be the ace sniper.

Of course in the absence of turkey and stuffing we still gorged ourselves silly on Chinese seafood at the kelong restaurant, and drank/spilt some pretty passable Aussie red wine. All this and I managed to deliver a dignified peroration on what Alphabet has achieved in 2007, and what it meant to have us all together, better halves included. Doubtless it is circulating on YouTube somewhere - but the gist is that we now have a stronger, happier team than we've ever had before, and this allows us to do great things in 2008 for our customers - whether industry vendors, or end-users - and therefore ourselves.

After my pearls of wisdom had been delivered, and sensing that the bread rolls were about to be thrown, we buggered off to the hotel disco for more foolish behaviour. Thank God Christmas is only once a year!

Oops, we did it again

Our friends at Symantec were kind enough to go to the trouble to exercise the little grey cells of Singapore's media scene with their second annual Pub Quiz Night Competition last night.

Astute followers of this blog will note that we won the competition in 2006, and happily despite the best efforts of Text100 to surreptitiously deduct points, we won again this year.

In a packed upstairs Irish bar just a stone's throw from Boat Quay a team from Alphabet Media held off stiff competition from the cream of the region's trade and consumer titles ("Everybody is coming," we were assured by someone from Text100), to once more hoist aloft the perspex.

Winning once could have been dismissed as a fluke, but twice in a row? Clearly Alphabet is Singapore's cleverest media company!

[Pictured below: James and Jianggan, brothers-in-arms from the 2006 team; John and Chris; James2 and Amelia]

To infinity and beyond

I believe you demonstrate a real commitment to excellence when you look to 'fix' something that isn't broken - and that is what we're doing with our alterations to our big annual government event held every October for the last three years.

From next year we're moving to Bali, the event is doubling in size, we're having afternoon classrooms, and twin morning tracks in order to serve the chief technologists in government - and their bosses.

That's right - their bosses are coming along this time as well.

We retain our unique ability to deliver CIOs and Directors of IT, and are then taking the next step to deliver a programme that attracts Permanent Secretaries, Vice Ministers, Commissioners and Director-Generals.

Standing from the outside of the PSTM community looking in, you might be tempted to say "they won't be able to deliver". But people like Business Objects' Choon Yang Quek said that about this year's event - "I don't think you'll be able to get senior people to attend an event in Phuket" - and they were proven wrong. This is because it is easy to confuse what we do at Alphabet Media with what conference organisers do.

Alphabet Media's magazine-driven communities of senior professionals support us so actively precisely because of their trust in our content, and in the journalists who create that content 52 weeks a year.

For us a conference is not something we run once or twice a year - it is a welcome opportunity for us to meet face-to-face people we are already in touch with regularly throughout the rest of the 12 months.

Many of these people are our friends. We get a lot of Christmas cards from our delegates - just ask IQPC, Marcus Evans, IIR, Terrapinn, Pacific Conferences, Asia Business Forum et. al. how many delegates send them seasons greetings!

So we are not a conference organiser, and hopefully never will be. Instead we are a couple of tightly-defined user communities. And it is this clear focus on the interests of our community which forces us to keep thinking how to deliver greater and more relevant value to our readers - and this is something we do on a daily business.

'What more could we do for them?' is a question that crops up a lot at Alphabet - but I never heard that asked once in the seven years I worked at Terrapinn/AiC Worldwide, and trust me Terrapinn are one of the better conference organisers.

So say hello to - FutureGov 08 (15-17 October). We're no longer the leading Asia Pacific technology event for public sector - we're the leading innovation gathering for public sector leaders in the region, and increasingly beyond. At Alphabet, the future looks bright.