Today is a local Singapore newspaper. Several VoIP articles published today on Today created quite abit of storm so much so that i can hear it from the far-away land in Amsterdam. Check it out :-)

Is that my PC that’s ringing? by Yew Hock Meng (old friend of mine from LGA).

Taking the shackles off IP telephony by Tan Ming Liang (another friend now with T-System)

VoIP gains traction as quality, reliability and ROI issues are resolved – dunno who…

Dinner with Arun followed by an early meeting with Jeff Pulver. Spend a little more then 3hrs at Jeff’s office and it is an interesting experience to see how pulver.com works :-)
[Update: Jeff posted the picture on his blog :-)]

Have to leave after lunch immediately to catch my flight to Cape Town for ICANN. So here I am, transiting in Amsterdam. Luckily, they have a 10Euro/day wifi in the transit hall.

Update: Did I mention JFK has the most expensive WiFi service? US$2.50 for first 10min and 50cent every minute there after. This makes it US$27.50 per hour access, enough to pay for one month of broadband access. Totally rip-off.

I am going to kill by travel agent. First, she tells me there isn’t any direct flight from Korea to New York so making me to come back to Singapore to transit. Then I asked for a direct flight from Singapore-New York and she got me on the flight that transit in Frankfrut. Argghh!

On the bright side, I arrived in New York safely…Or actually on a dark side, because it is is raining and gloomy outside right now.

The Daily Drucker – by Peter F. Drucker

I am a great fan of Peter Drucker. His articles on business, creativity, innovation, management are not only ahead of his times but also rightly on the mark. He invented numerous terms we used daily, like cost-centre (altho he regret it), management-by-walking-around, knowledge worker and knowledge economy. He talks about innovation for values, looking for future that exists now, and outsourcing before anyone heard of the these terms.

He has so many articles, so many books that one will be totally confused where to start. So this book simply summarizes 366 best snipplets from Druckers writing over the years. Highly to anyone who is new to Drucker.

Update: This article is also published on CircleID.

Last month, John Klensin wrote an article published on CircleID regarding Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Top Level Domains (TLD). Based on his Internet Draft, John suggests using language translation in the application for TLD. The advantage of this method is that all existing TLDs can now be represented in any number of languages without additional need for ICANN to create new TLD.

While this sound like a clean solution to the IDN TLD problem, I don’t think it is viable for the following five reasons:

1. Similar idea has been proposed in the IETF IDN Working Group for IDN (See uname and vidn). While John proposal has some minor technical differences, the fact that these similar ideas has been considered and discarded by the IDN Working Group is worth noting¹.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have the honour to be mentioned by Jeff Pulver as one of the VoIP bloggers. Thanks Jeff.

I have great admiration for Jeff: continue to evangelise VoIP after so many years and willingness to put a greater cause (VoIP) before his self-interest. His perseveration afterall these years finally paid off and he is definately the most influential figure in VoIP industry right now (quote Leo).

Did I mention I am going to meet Jeff on this trip to New York?

Okay, packing my stuff to go to New York. First time going to New York in three years actually so kind of looking forward to it. This is a personal trip, visits friends and running errants.

And why do they call it Big Apple?

Okay, the flight is further delayed so I have a bit more time. I also realized the last few entries has been pretty boring (except for my wife and my boss who needs to keep track where I am :-) so let me talk about some of the interesting things I saw this trip.

1. KIST developed K*GRID, a GRID middleware which builds ontop of Globus Toolkit and fill up a lot of gaps in the toolkit, including resource broker, accounting and also a nice portal to do admin interface.

2. NIDA has an interesting project called MDS (Multi-code Directory Service), a RFID middleware. Based on EPC-ONS, you can register multiple RFID code (such as EPC, ucode or ISO) to the MDS with the relevant Web Services (prob based on EPC-IS) you want to provide to others (e.g. product info). As part of the trial, they also developed an Object Tracking Service (OTS) which will provide track-and-track for RFID-tag items.

3. NIDA has also launched IPv6 resolution for .kr but the statistic is pretty insignifcant right now. Nevertheless, at least you can do IPv6 resolution on .kr, which is a first step :-) Compare to Japan, ya, late but still early compared to many other countries (including SG)

4. LG has a booth reselling Hitachi IPv6 routers. One of them is targetted at SOHO which is a dual stack (v4/v6) gateway but also comes with 6to4 support. Sure, I can hack my FreeBSD to do the same thing but it is still pretty cool.

5. TTA, the telecom industry standard association in Korea, mention two technologies which they are focusing on: WiBro (aka WiMax) and DVB. Triple play is coming over wireless coming near you :-)

And yes, the new tagline is “u-Korea with IT839” so IT839 is still the talk of the town here.

Update: One of the noticable missing technology is actually VoIP. And despite having the highest pentration of broadband in the world, VoIP is surprising missing in their telco strategy and no CLEC is coming forward either. Altho there is a VoIP Forum, the only IP Telephony I heard is some whispering of some trial.

Bad weather in Busan! All flights cancelled until 3:40pm. This means I will only arrive in Gimpo at 4:40pm, and no way I can catch my flight back to Singapore from Incheon at 4:15pm.

Trapped and panic, I took the 3hrs train from Busan to Seoul, then 1 more hour to Seoul to Incheon. Arrived at 5pm (still late) and luckily, there is another flight going out of Incheon to Singapore at 6:30pm. Going to catch that flight or else I am going to miss my New York trip tomorrow.

Phew…Going to board now! See ya.

I realized I never mention why I am in Busan – I was invited to give a tutorial at Korea Internet Operation Conference (KIOC) organized by NIDA. Other then myself, Jun-ichiro Hagino, Jim Reid, Michael Harberler are also here. Jun gave a tutorial on IPv6, Jim on DNS IPv6 and Michael & myself on ENUM.

KIOC is “opened” in a typical Asian style, graced by the Busan mayor, the former Korean IT Minister, the chairman of KISPA (Korea ISP Association), and of cos, the President of NIDA, Dr. Song. Dr. Song and his right hand man, Dr. Sir are both old friends and it is nice to catch up with them.

I also have a fun time with Prof. Han, who is one of the chair of KIOC. Prof. Han is one of the close friend who has given me a lot of help over the years. He is also just promoted to be the Dean of his school. Congz! ;-)

The last time I gave a talk at KIOC (or at least, the pre-cursor to KIOC) was in 1999 where I talk about IDN in Daejeon. Five years later, I am here to talk about ENUM. Wondering what other new technologies will I do again in 2009 :-)

ps: Shin has been a great host! Thanks for all the Korean BBQ, Sashimi and Cass Beers :-)