Updated: [Event] mySimplifieds' 1st Meet-up (2009)

Hello everyone! We've been planning this for a while to have a community meet-up and now, three months down the road, we're actually doing it.

Why do we want to meet-up? Well, other than putting faces to the names we see on our site, we'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on our site. Plus, we'd like to show you a couple of things we have planned for the future and find out what you think.

So here's what we have in mind. For our very first meet-up, we'd like to invite you over to our workplace at the DiGi Headquarters where the mySimplifieds team hangs-out during office hours. We'll provide food and drinks from DiGi's lovely (Norwegian) café and make this an informal session of discussion and feedback. Of course, there will be games, prizes and goodies too!

Date: 25 April 2009 (Saturday)
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (we call it brunch)
Venue: D'House (DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd, Lot 10, Jalan Delima 1/1, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, 40000 Shah Alam)

Places are limited for the meet-up. As much as we'd like to have 10,000 people attend, it's going to be pretty difficult to fit everyone in one place. So for this first meet-up, we're setting a limit of just 50 people.

If you're interested to attend, just shoot us an email to: [email meetup@mysimplifieds.com] and we'll write back with a confirmation.

Hope to see you there! Till then, happy buying and selling!

Regards,
The mySimplifieds team

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I think I was among the first ones to arrive at D'House at 10:05 am that Saturday and was greeted by David, Erna, and Ninie (the EOs for mySimplifieds members meet-up) and Mark Darren from DiGi. I recognized Mark as Mark Darren. David was kinda surprised and said, "Oh Mark, you're famous."

Breakfast was great, we were served with pastries and bread prepared by D'House's very own in-house café and of course, there's the famous, piping hot Norwegian Coffee. Since this was the first members meet-up, everyone took a little bit of time to mingle around and engage in hearty talks while enjoying breakfast.

Later on, I saw Kin, from Kasatria and Aishah, product manager of mySimplifieds.com. Surprisingly, Kin recognized me and guessed correctly when I introduced myself and what's my job. Of all companies, he could give the perfect guess. Oh-uh. :)

The event was held at the Studio @ D'House, a great place with cool lighting and sound system and perfect for such gatherings with not more than 50 people. Upon entering the Studio, we were given a little gift bag containing a mySimplifieds T-shirt of your preferred size (mine is "S", obviously :P), a Yellowman (mousepad?), and a Kit-Kat keychain. Cool! 

Before the event started, everyone was invited to introduce ourselves. So, we could see a variety of personalities here. Some attended the event out of curiosity, some came for business purposes, and most came because we wanted to know what mySimplifieds could provide us. :) Then, of course the core personnels were introduced to us as well: Aishah (product manager of mySimplifieds.com), Kin (from Kasatria, the technology backbone of mySimplifieds.com), Mark Darren (Consumer Marketing), Prashan Chitty (Events), and Azizi (Online Media).

After an opening word from David, the event went on with Aishah and her speech about the journey of mySimplifieds.com, continued with Kin and his super-duper presentation about certain going-to-be-launched-soon interfaces, as well as an open Q&A session to the floor to gather feedback from everybody. 

The fun part was the "Pitch of the Day" session. A few volunteers took the challenge to make a pitch of the goods that they want to sell. The winning pitch was by a Mr. Chong who pitched about his walking sticks for the elderly people. Mark Darren made a pitch about his colleague, Prashan with this - the best thing about Prashan is that he reminds us of DiGi's Yellowman. But he also added that Prashan could sing really well. Oh yes, he did! :)

Kin's presentation plus the open-to-the-floor Q&A session was very well received by the audience with quite a number of positive responses and feedback.

Finally, Mark Darren conducted a before-lunch-tour around D'House for those who were keen. I left after a brief chat with Aishah and Kin because I got something else to do.

All the best to mySimplifieds.com!