Chinatown stuff
Coaches Corner
Mike’s 1600 SAT and recording
Greater Good Radio name sounds like church
Podcaster’s meeting at Kakaako Park
Appeal to older demographic
Bill Richardson tomorrow
Transcript:
Today is August 3rd 2005. This is Evan’s Journal here in Honolulu, Hawaii. Okay, so we are going to start off with a little bit of ranting.
[00:0011]
I am still absolutely bothered by yesterday’s Chinatown meeting and the gist of this Chinatown meeting for those you guys, who don’t know what it is, we started this off as a Executive MBA Project in order to do our community service and then fulfill our class requirements. And we went through this whole Mayor’s vision team thing, where you had a ton of different people from different parts of Chinatown. So you had neighborhood board and then de-bed and land owners and arts people and stuff and it was interesting. I mean there was a really good mix and a number of key people there. But the problem with that meeting is that nothing got done. I think we got into involved in it a year and a half or two years into it and nothing was done. A consultant was paid a pretty enormous fee and they had no results so we were brought into help this project along from a friend of mine, who said yeah, come and join this project, it would be perfect for you and then never showed up after that. So, we started that in September of 2004 and we got into it, we started doing work on it. We were developing a mission statement and a vision statement and getting people together and we got some momentum and everything was looking pretty good until January came around and then nobody started emailing back. And then February rolled around, nothing was happening. March came around we were like holy cow. We needed to get on it because there were no meetings happening, nothing was happening and just to give an inside on what happened, that’s the time that the new Mayor took over and he ended up canceling all the vision teams from the previous Mayor. So, in essence the initiative was dead. I guess it’s still going on but I would say limping at best is what it seems like. So we were stuck because we needed a 150 hours worth of work for each of us in this group, there are four of us and we’re stuck now. It’s already March we’re about 45 to 60 days out from when we were supposed to turn in a final project and we were just stuck. So, scrambling I said why don’t we do this? We contacted the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and said what can we do to continue this project because we want to stick with Chinatown, we feel that we can add value here. What can we do? And they said well, there are three Chinese New Year events now. Three Chinese New Year events run by three organizations that have not talked to each other, have not dealt with each other and there is no coordination. So the community is confused because they will call one organization and say when is your Night in Chinatown? And they will say ours is not night in Chinatown ours is Chinatown Open House and there is a lot of confusion and the marketing budgets for each organization were different and staggered and it’s just quite a bit confusing. So what he said was why don’t we put together a joint marketing campaign, bring everyone to the table, get them to agree we’ll put the joint marketing campaign to maximize our dollars spent and then also to centralize all the information into one central calendar and one centralized piece of information so that the community can get one message and the correct message and then that can be a marketing piece as well for hotels and crew ships and tour companies and so on. So we set off on that project and interestingly enough it went really well. The initial thought process was, okay, we’re going to put this project together and then a person from the chamber was going to go and pitch it to everyone else. But we said you know what, we have decided, that’s not going to work. We need to have everyone involved from the beginning build it from the bottom up so that by the time we are done, there is no more selling. Everyone had a say in it, everyone had a piece in it and then it can continue. So that’s what we did. We knocked it out in six weeks or so about six weeks or eight weeks and then decided to stay on with the project. But lately, I got to tell you it’s been extremely frustrating, (1) We need city support. For fifteen years they have had the events going on and parades and all that, they never had a problem. But this year the police want to collect ten-grand and that’s out of the budget so that’s one thing we are dealing with. Another one is firework issues, another one is closing the roads, another one is each organization’s agenda. And the big one is our legal entity. How do we structure the legal entity so that we are protected in terms of liability because any idiot can sue anybody these days and regardless of whether they have any merit or not, you still have to pay defense lawyer fees. So that’s been a huge frustration for us right now and I got to tell you it’s really absolutely bothering me. So anyways I submitted a piece to a friend of mine, who is on the Economic Development Committee and she’s going to be submitting that to that committee and then hopefully we can get some support on this or even some answers because it’s truly holding our progress. And I don’t know if any of you folks are doing non-profit work or any kind of community related stuff, where there is a lot of moving parts but I tell you what, I know how you feel, man? I truly know, I know how you feel. It’s frustrating. So I will keep you posted more on this and on the events coming up and of course Chinese New Year is at the end of January so, we have a lot of events planed. Hopefully we will get support on it, so they can go through.
[00:06:15]
Okay, well back to the Greater Good Radio portion of this Evan’s Journal. I don’t know if I mentioned it earlier because my mind is going but we are talking about doing a Coaches Corner and the thing about Coaches Corner was to have coaches such as June Jones or Dave Shoji, Cal Lee people who have spectacular records. June Jones came into Hawaii and regardless of what you think about June Jones, he took a team that sucked for one year. They couldn’t win a game, they were horrible but he took the same exact players and the next year they won a ball game and how do you do that? You can like him that to a company. You come into a company, it’s dysfunctional or your own company may be dysfunctional and then how do you turn it around because it’s all dealing with people. And if June Jones can come in and explain that to us in his language may be we can use that as a metaphor, may be it can just be just direct on how to improve our own businesses and our own teamwork and our own moral. I mean think about it. Football players, they will fall a sleep in class. If they even go to class and but when you hit the football field or when you talk about football games, people are jacked up, ready to go. Excited, motivated they will go, they will run, they will lift, they will kill themselves out there, to play football. So how can the football coach bring that out of them and then how can we apply that into our businesses, so that’s what Coaches Corner is about. Also we are looking for athletes that have turned into business entrepreneurs and then how is that athletic experience helped them so that’s what we are looking into for Coaches Corner and keep an eye out for that.
I am actually waiting for Chris or Randall to give me back feed back on the introduction to those people because they have their own shows or they have interviews going on all the time at the radio station. So once they get back to me, I will update everyone else.
[00:08:18]
This morning we went into to record our promos for the radio show. And they call them — actually today’s one was what they call Billboards. Billboards are the intro part for your Radio show and then that closing portion. So it was like you have the music and then may be little clips or whatever in it builds into the show. And it was pretty fun doing it with Michael Bennett who is our I don’t know if you call that a producer or engineer or what but he handles the boards and he is putting it all together so I guess you can call him producer. Normally, Michael is just behind the boards and sometimes he comes out and asks a question but I was surprised to hear that he went to Berkeley and so I asked him today said you know what? What was your SAT? And he is like, I scored okay, I scored pretty high. I said what was it? 1600 perfect, I was like what? 1600, that means you are national — president scholars? He said yeah. So (1) we have a good producer but (2) the guy is a genius. I was really impressed with that but the funny thing about it is Michael was using his voice over to record these introduction parts and they would be Greater Good Radio, Welcome all, Greater Good Radio educate, motivate, inspire and then he would talk normally. And then after when we would record it will be like, Greater Good Radio educate, motivate, inspire and the voice was changing and I swear I couldn’t stop laughing because his face was so funny. But the guy is really cool. He has done a great job and I am sure once we get the finished product. But our first show that he is putting together for our self Michael Bennett Show, will be done on Monday so we will be able to hear that and I will give you the update on that on Monday.
[00:10:20]
Another thing that’s been coming up is, they keep telling me that Greater Good Radio, we don’t like that name. But hey, you know what I don’t have a better name, so we are far into this already. They say you don’t want to hear Greater Good Radio I think of a church, but in my mind I think who cares, if you did think of a church, great, you know why? Because the church Podcast and the church in general has a ton of listeners also people have no problem giving money to church. So why not have it sound like a church? I mean we’re doing along the lines of the Greater Good. We’re doing better, we’re in the process of trying to do our best for the community, help out where the causes and so on so hey, the name fits and we are going to wear it.
[00:11:07]
Another thing interesting is, we had the Podcasters meeting at Kakaako Park. Hawaii Association of Podcasters which Ryan _ is the president of, has the meeting at Kakaako waterfront. And if anyone is listening that’s not from Hawaii Kakaako waterfront is really nice. It’s a park right at the edge of the beach but the beach area is rocks and then past out is surf and there’s a surf break called, point panic out there that a lot of people body surfing occasionally you see surfers. So it’s I mean having lunch at the beach and talking Podcasting, where else can you do that? Peter Kay went over his town Podcast idea and that was real interesting. And then Peter Kay has an interesting slang on how he is going to be doing his community service too so rather than going into that we will just have him on show after and he can explain it for himself.
[00:12:02]
But, another interesting thing is as I was talking about the show and what we are trying to do with this show another gentleman came up to me, he is a little bit older may be 40s or 50s or so and he was saying this show appeals or the concept of the show, it really appeals to myself and a lot of others in my age group which is something that we hadn’t initially considered because we initially considered that the show was going to be targeted at 20 something and 30 something year olds because it’s more or less our age group Kari and myself and it’s easier to target to yourself because that’s what you know. And the feedback that I am getting from 40s and 50 year old people is that they have a number of years left to retirement or may be they have had even a situation, where their health hasn’t been good and then they recently got the health back in order. And that’s made a huge impact on their life and they’re saying you know what, we don’t want to wait, we want to do something and this fits perfectly into, what we are focusing on doing. So hopefully the demographic is a wide range and we can create momentum so that we can create social change. I thought that was really interesting.
[00:13:20]
Tomorrow’s interview again is Bill Richardson, who is a Venture Capitalist locally. He is one of the people responsible for taking Digital Island public also Hoku Scientific, which is going public next week. He is instrumental in that and we are going to find out more about Dragon Bridge and Dragon Bridge is the fund that was put together by Barry Weinman and number of others too. I guess they’re bringing in Chinese companies to the United States or Chinese investors, I don’t know, we are going to get the specs on that tomorrow though. So until you tune into that, we will have the schedule up on the website soon. Of course website is in alpha still and not even in beta yet but once it gets up and running and it’s actually good to go, I am sure that it will be something worth talking about. So hopefully this is helpful for you to understand a little bit more about where we are going with this and the process involved. Not everything is roses, but if you are doing something that you absolutely love to do, you are not really spending time working. So we’ll talk with you folks tomorrow and this is Evan Leong saying, Aloha!
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