Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi T. Ahonen & Alan Moore

Actually I have not buy this book yet but I have it on my Amazon wishlist. I met up with Tomi¹ last Friday who is in town to give some talks on 3G. We spend a couple of hours debating on various technology development; I love discussion that screwed with my brains, and best of all changed my perspective. Suffice to say, Tomi certainly did :-)

Anyway, his latest book is on “Community” something which is quite different from his previous four books on 3G. I am attracted to this book because it is perhaps the first book I am aware of written for business and marketing folk on how to deal (leverage) on bloggers. Some of the concepts introduced by the book totally would turn traditional marketing upside down :-)

Given that many non-bloggers businessman and marketing folks are still trying to figure out how to deal with bloggers, this look like a timely and great book to read.

¹ For those who don’t know Tomi, Tomi is the former head of 3G group in Nokia and now he is a consultant on 3G to every handsets and 3G operators you can think of.

OECD has released a report on Next Generation Network Development in OCED countries over the weekend (via ITU SPU). This introduction stick out…

Even though there is no universal and precise definition of NGN at this early stage of deployment, NGN could be defined as all-IP or packet-based integrated networks. In a NGN environment, applications and services will be separated from the transport network and all kinds of applications and services such as voice, data and video can be organised into packets and delivered on an integrated IP network.

Damn. They are getting it now. Oh dear, now we (as in we the technologists) now need to go find new technologies to confused them.

Hmm, how about stop thinking of there will be a ‘service provider’ on one end and ‘consumer’ on the other or the network ‘as a platform to deliver XXX service’? For a start, everyone on the network is a ‘application provider’ and ‘service provider’ and ‘consumer’ all at the same time. And that the network is a conduit for communities to be build.

On a related note: ITU-T announced VDSL2 standard which promises 100mbps up/down stream.

Nokia comes out with a Internet Tablet Nokia 770. This is not a surprise to me but … erm, let me ask: “what’s so special about this?” Other then a better resolution, it is inferior in everyway compared to a Sharp Zaurus C3000.

I know it is cool Nokia, a mobile handset maker going into this direction and I also hear the soft whispering (sshh..wifi/wimax and voip). But erm, tell me why again would I as a consumer buy this?

Regardless, Nokia is pretty gungho in my opinion. As a sign of support for them, I am going to get one when it is available. :-)

It started with a SMS from my boss: “Saw your blog quoted dbs in straits times today”. And I learnt it is not such a good idea to reply “Huh?” at this point in time. So quickly, I flipped through the papers and found the article written by Grace Ng, taking quotes out of my DBS Phishing entry.

Mr James Seng, assistant director of enabler technologies at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, posted a warning at 7.47pm on Sunday. He said in his weblog that the bogus-email message “actually comes from hostpymes.com, registered to someone called Soria, Luis based in Peru”.

There goes my effort to try to stay out of the local papers.

*Raise my hand* Honestly, I have no idea they going to quote my blog. I wasn’t informed of this prior by anyone either. Now, I can’t complain of me been misquoted. (If anything else, they actually corrected my grammar hahaha. Thanks for not making me look stupid! :-) Neither was it a badly written article (I actually think it was pretty well written!). And since I put my blog on Creative Commons, I cant complain they use my quotes either.

But if they have contacted me first, I would have stop her from mentioning IDA. As I said in my disclaimer, I speak for myself and myself only. While the reference to IDA wasn’t inaccurate, it does create an impression I am speaking for IDA, which I don’t. You might as well shoot me now, before my corporate communication people calls me. *sigh*

Anyway, the article as is below. As I said, it was pretty well-written. Kudos.
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Remember the days you buy a CD player bundled with a free headphone? That’s just barely a decade ago. Today, you buy a headphone and get a free CD player¹. This is very much like Criagslist looking to offer news or as someone said “the classified eating the rest of the papers”.

How technology and commoditzed has changed the world and flipping everything upside down.

¹ Read the thoughtful blog entry by Steve Hall, a VC in the states.

Okay, I can come out clean now that ST has published the article on Tomorrow.sg and also the Blogger Convention.

I was in a dilemna because on one hand, all of us are suppose to reply to the reporter and on the other hand, i really don’t want to appear on the local papers. So I come up with a perfect plan – answers which the reporter would never use :-)
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There is a DBS phishing spam targeted at Singaporean mailboxes. You probably get something that look like this too:

Do not be fool by it.

Look at the raw email and you will find that it actually comes from hostpymes.com, registered to someone called Soria, Luis based in Peru.

Already as early as last year, we were aware the biggest problem of spam isn’t penis enlargement, viagra or even porn spams but rather targetted phishing attacks like this. Estimation of the phishing problem are in the billions in US alone. It is the reason why we still talking about Antispam (I know, most people have given up and have learnt just to delete them). It is also the reason why FBI is attending ICANN.

btw, this isn’t the first phishing attempt in Singapore. There is a smaller and poorly done phishing last year.

Okay, I got the musical baton from mrbrown so must give face to Singapore Number One Funny Man.

Total volume of music files on my computer:

14.87Gb – 3895 songs – 11.3 days

The last CD I bought was:

Sonates pour piano n° 14, 8 & 23 – Alfred Brendel

Five Songs I listen to a lot, or that means a lot ot me:

Tears – Dondevoy – Chyi Yu
Mizu no Madoromi – (Russian) – Fantastic Children
La Paloma – The Hi Fi Sound of Latin Guitar
At the Carousel – Gigi Leung – Turn Left, Turn Right
Etude Op. 25, No 1 in A-flat – Chopin – Nikita Magaloff

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

Joi Ito
Dewayne
Loic Le Meur
Chiao
Huileng

Two taiwanese guy made a spoof on the Lord of the Ring (via Tomorrow.sg). The spoof is dubbed in Hokkien (Taiwanese) and it is extremely funny if you can understand it. If you can’t, well there are subtitles too :-)

黄龙 (Huang Long) : it is like Heaven…