One of the important skill CEO must have is the ability to talk. Not just normal talk but one that is passionate, powerful, slick and smooth: whether to motivate your staff, paint your vision to the customer or sell your company to the investors.

Put him on the stage and he can just go on and on about how great his company is. Doesn’t matter if he missed a little fact here or there, or that sometimes the stories jump around disconnected. But listening to them, all seem so clear and conviencing even as your brain tells you ‘it does not make sense!’.

It is rare indeed to find a CEO who can make that human connection with his audience and all the great CEO’s I know seem to have this ability. And this morning, I met a master: Alex Lightman, CEO of Charmed, evangelist-extraordinary for 4G, IPv6 and Visualization.

An advertisment for Windows appearing next to an article about Windows causing 800 planes pile-up. Hahaha (via MrBrown).

James Seng’s Principle of Bureaucracy #1 : Any problem left unsolved long enough will eventually disappear on its own.

I quote this to Antoin who was ichat’ed me about a recent policy by Irish regulator (Commision for Communications) : Protecting Phone Users from Internet Dialer Scam.

You know, those programs you can download that promises free porns which ends up hanging up your call and then make an IDD call without your knowledge, until you receive a 2,000 phone bill. Happened in Singapore too a couple of years ago but it kind of disappear on its own after people moved on to broadband…(and hence the quote ;-)

…is you meet too many people in a 2-3hrs session. And you dont have the time to pause and reflect who just spoke to you. After receiving x numbers of name cards with ‘VP’ or ‘CEO’, everyone looks the same to you.

Case in point, at one of the evening receiptions last week, I have a long and interesting discussion with a gentleman from Australia. He is trying talk to me about the ‘fiber & duct’ problem in Singapore whereas I was trying to talk to him about the IP Telephony. And I kind of forgotten about the conversation … until saw his face on the newspaper today.

OMG, I was speaking to Mr Alston, the former Minister of Communication, Information Technology and the Art from Australia!

There is a opening in my team in IDA for Senior Consultant, Enabler Technologies. Senior Consultant in the Technology Group is a pretty senior position equivalent to a ‘Senior Manager’. Candidates must have at least 5 years of ICT experience and deep technical knowledge in the Next Generation Network. It is definately a plus plus if you know the following technology: IPv6, IP Telephony, GRID, Virtualization, Semantic Web, Social Software etc.

If you are interested, send in your resume thru JobStreet or to me directly.

Since we are on this topic, let me say a bit what we do in IDA. Essentially, we monitor emerging ICT technologies especially disruptive technologies that has significant economic or social impact to Singapore. We would then evangelize the technology and prepare the top management (or higher) on the new trend and also assist in formulating strategies to leverage such technologies for Singapore benefit. In the last 2 years, my team have been responsible for several initiatives such as Open Source, Antispam and recently IP Telephony & ENUM.

In a way, we are also the trusted technology advisors to the management and other divisions within IDA. So while IT vendors would be telling how good such and such technology is we would be whisper to the management¹ “actually hor…it is pure BS”. :-)

We are one of the smallest team in IDA under the CTO but our work is extremely important to ensure Singapore is not blind-sided by technology development. And the (almost) all-geeks team are innocent, fun-loving and are crazy over technologies and gadgets (like Dilbert :-).

¹ Of course, we have to do our homework and that involves hands-on technology evaluation before giving any advises.

IETF shutdown MARID working group. (See Ted Hardie’s email to the MARID mailing list). No more SPF, CallerID, PRA/SenderID or MAILFROM/SenderID…

I don’t know what I feeling now. On one hand, I have been a strong supportor of SPF/SenderID and it is sad we lost one tool to fight spam¹. On the other hand, I have a discussion with Microsoft folks just two weeks ago in Busan wrt to SenderID, IETF, IPR. They were quite certain their IPR wouldnt pose a problem so in a way, I am feeling ‘I told you so…’. But alas..*sigh*

¹ Yes, I am aware SPF/SenderID doesn’t stop spam. But in order to enforce any antispam law, you must first be able to identify the spammer and that’s what MARID can help (to certain extend).

It has been a busy with with APEC TEL 30 hosted by IDA/Singapore. For those who don’t know about APEC TEL, it is a group that meets once every quarter and reports to the TELMIN, a gathering of APEC IT Ministers. It has 4 steering committees looking at technology, business, liberalization and human resource development. But most important of all, APEC TEL is an incredible networking week, esp. for Government-to-Governmnt (G2G) collobrations. Dinners hosted by telcos, Lunches hosted by operators, receiptions in the evening just went on and on. (I have dinner at Lei Garden twice this week. my god!).

Surprisingly, I met some pretty cool people! The Head of Delegation from US, Elizabeth W. Shelton from Department of State was an incredible smart lady. Then, Al Vincent who runs the Institute of Telecommunication Sciences under NTIA/Department of Commerce is a fellow Doom’er (Yes, he loves Doom3). He just went over to Singapore Poly and turned their VR room for molecule-simulations into this super-immerse-reality-Quake-game. :P And Simon Lin who runs Academic Sinica spend a large amount of time educating me about their work on LCG (Large-Hadron-Collider Computing Grid Project (LCG) for the CERN’s particle accelerator) and have been extremely kind and helpful in introducing many other interesting people to me.

In addition to this, Brian McBride and Paul Shabajee also choose to come to Singapore this week to work on the Digital Content Exchange project. And David West who is trying to put together the TIEN2 project is also in town!

Now this is over, let me see what do I have in my email…OMG!

There is a APEC TEL NGN Brainstorming session this morning. I was one of the speaker for the session and did a presentation on IP Telephony and ENUM.

Singapore also made a contribution on both IP Telephony and Spectrum management. Both my presentation and Singapore contribution was well-received by the participants and I got a lot of feedbacks after the session.

IDA also announced a proposed policy framework for IP Telephony and ENUM this afternoon¹ and it is open for public consultation! It is a long journey for our virtual team who has spend over a year on this!

As part of its continuing efforts to engage the public in policy development to benefit the infocomm industry, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) seeks views on the policy framework to facilitate the introduction of Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony and Electronic Numbering (ENUM) in Singapore…more…

Some highlights:

1. IP Telephony will be classified under SBO(Individual) license instead of the more heavy FBO license.
2. Licensee is entitled to apply numbers in a new number block +65 3xxx xxxx.
3. Optional interconnection with PSTN, no QoS, no emergency service and no universal obligation.

It is as light touch as you can get … :-)

¹ In other words, it is not announced by me.

² There is also a short explaination of IP Telephony & ENUM.

Today is the 2nd day of APEC TEL 30, which is hosted by IDA in Singapore. I spend my afternoon at a side event, organized by APDIP to soliciate feedbacks from AP region on Internet Governance issues as part of the WSIS process workings towards Tunis 2005.

And I gave a presentation on my fav topic, Internationalization and IDN (What else? :-)

I know I was late but better late then never. Singapore two most famous bloggers, Xiaxue and MrBrown was featured on local TV last week, on a segment calls “What’s matter”. You can find the bittorrent of the segment here (via MrBrown).

Oh yea, I also feel quite shiok this morning, having done a presentation on my paper on Social Software. :-)