The Early and Fake Christmas

Singapore celebrates Christmas as if we are in the winter latitudes. From early Nov onwards, for 2 months, Christmas trees will pop up all over the island, Santa Claus will descend everywere, the whole Orchard Road will be lit up and every store will be playing the same old tunes ad-nauseum. I bet if there was affordable technology to make Singapore snow over, the Government would do it, just for “tourism”.

This guy is good!

This guy is good. Isn’t it interesting to live a life like this?:

In part, this eclecticism is a product of how Mr. Grazer works, turning his own passions into fodder for a film or a television show. For the last 20 years, Mr. Grazer has met each week with a person who is an expert in science, medicine, politics, fashion, religion — anything other than entertainment. He is so serious about the meetings that he has a staff member whose job it is to find interesting people.

My Chinese Seal - Auto Generated!

I find this website really useful: Chinese-tools.com

Besides many other tools for users to bridge the language gap, it also offers fun tools like the Chinese Seal Generator.

Here’s a seal of my name:

And another, in a different character style:

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Ubuntu Updates Fast!

I’m quite amazed by the frequency of Ubuntu’s updates. Every few days, new libraries need to be updated. I guess that’s the size of the open source community out there, constantly tweaking their libraries and applications.

Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship

If you feel like reading a paper on SNS:

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

It’s elementary but provides a nice overview from the academic perspective.

Open Handset Alliance - A Powerful Payment System is what is Required

More thoughts about the Open Handset Alliance…

The problem is not so much who you can bring into the alliance or what kind of gizmos you can create with the Android SDK.

I think the problem lies in the ability to create an economy across the OHA. One that would provide an economic incentive for developers to create applications and monetize them.

The biggest problem with the current mobile industry is the world-wide stranglehold that telcos have on application revenue. They think that every piece of revenue should be squeezed out of everything that runs through their lines.

Probably the only Telco that shares lots of application revenue is NTT DoCoMo. That’s why they’re so successful. They successfully created the model 10 years ago and nobody else has been able to replicate their success.

If you don’t already know, NTT DoCoMo keeps 10% and gives away 90% to developers who create apps for iMode. Apps are super easy to create using a variant of HTML that’s readable by their handsets. They handle payment so they take the 10% which is fair enough for the convenience.

By doing so, NTT created an economy where Japanese sites and developers could profit and hence a virtuous cycle of profitable content creation was put in place. It became a win-win-win for telco, developers and consumers.

Hence I hope Google would find a way to deeply integrate a billing system into OHA so that economic incentives are there for developers. It’s the virtual economy in Second Life or the alluring draw of Facebook Apps. If there is a super flexible and global payment interface that a) all telcos can connect to and earn a part of the revenues and b) sends money into the pockets of developers, the alliance would really take off.

And when I mean deep integration, I’m referring to the depth of Facebook F8 Platform-seque that extends to the ability to bill for premium SMS/MMSes. Only then would mobile be truly open and accessible to all.

Google’s Android

Google just launched it’s Android project that’s part of the Open Handset Alliance.

Quite an interesting concept. It seems to be much more low-level than even the Symbian OS.

They’re offering at $10m prize to application developers. Sometimes I wonder what kind of applications are worth building onto the phone? A better way to take notes, a better way to store your contacts?

I’m not sure if innovative applications will come out of this. For that matter, would people use it? It’s a classic chicken and egg problem: handset manufacturers need to adopt it. And they wouldnt adopt if there were no applications.

And in the era of iPhones and Web 2.0, the fun part is at the application layer and not so much at the operating system area. It’s also much more worthwhile to write a flash app or java app and deploy through J2ME/Brew than to write an android app. For that matter with 3G and good quality web browsers able to run ajax coming to mobile phones, it might be better to concentrate on create web apps that can transcode on to the smaller form-factor of a mobile phone.

However, all is not lost. 1 thing about Android that could be good is providing people with deep workflow customization. Imagine being able to download themes which can change the entire workflow and UI of your phone. Say for example a Hello Kitty theme that totally metamorphosizes your phone into a Hello Kitty gizmo with its own workflow, menus, fonts. I think that would be the “next big thing” after ring tones. The thing we’ve learnt most about the mobile market is that customization is the where the big aftermarket is and for most consumers, it’s about experience customization rather than being able to run the most apps on it. Running apps is only for that very small niche of power users.

Great Takeover Opportunity

The collapse of E*Trade just sounds like a fantastic takeover opportunity for anyone with the financial stability to bail the company out. I.e. Google and synergize it with its Google Finance product. Considering the kind of money Google is paying for stuff in the tech world like the YouTube acquisition, a purchase of E*Trade really makes lots of sense because it is a very well known brand name with a good sustainable business model. If only I had the $$$!

How Low can the USD go?

It’s S$1.43 to US$1 now.. time to visit USA!

Given the massive inflation in Singapore in recent years, I think it’s cheaper to live in the States now!

The dropping USD is actually very good for the tech sector. Because when you charge in USD now, people don’t mind paying because it’s cheaper. And also because tech sector has less direct exposure to commodities and raw materials.

test from flock

testing a blog post from flock