In an electronic text communication media, much of the facial and vocal expression are not immediately obvious. The way you say “You sux” with the appropriate facial expression could be meaning apart.

It is not surprising that people dont communicate as well as they think on email. And if you do click on the link, you can see what I mean when I say academics like to turn a simple answer “No” into 12 page paper with over 100 citations. :-)

It is also not surprising that emoticons like “:-) and :-P” is not just fun little things teenagers and kids do but also serve to cover the emotion/expression gaps in the email communications.

That it also helps to prevent misunderstanding is perhaps something we should encourage not just on personal emails but also in the office where people-to-people relationships are more fragile and more prone to misunderstandings. Such as when you send an email “You sux!” to a co-worker, he would not know if you are trying to insult him or just merely being playful without the “:-)” at the end.

It is time for management to embrace ^_^ and -_-; or when you are really angry >:O

Warren Buffett, a man who I hold great admiration for, is now giving away (85% of) his fortune, worth US$40B. That’s what I called donation.

Buffett has pledged to gradually give 85% of his Berkshire stock to five foundations. A dominant five-sixths of the shares will go to the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the $30 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose principals are close friends of Buffett’s (a connection that began in 1991, when a mutual friend introduced Buffett and Bill Gates).

The Gateses credit Buffett, says Bill, with having “inspired” their thinking about giving money back to society. Their foundation’s activities, internationally famous, are focused on world health — fighting such diseases as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis — and on improving U.S. libraries and high schools.

You should also read the one-to-one interview with him .

I had a dinner with Brough Turner last night. Brough is the founder and CTO of NMS Communications, a NASDAQ listed mobile application and infrastructure company.

I really enjoyed our conversation that covers from all things technie from mobile to net neutrality. But above all, the story of the original community fiber project in Sweden fascinated me most. He has being kind enough to dig out thru his email and share the story on his blog.

Umea in Northern Sweden goes down in history to build a community fiber to their neighbourhood (60 houses), providing 10/100mbps broadband service in 2000. Yes, six year ago, when we still call 256kbps broadband. Last year, they upgraded to 1Gbps and expanded the network to include a nearby neightbourhood, adding 100 more houses to the network.

This may be a small project but it is impressive in that all was done by the community. Most of all, the capex isn’t as high as I thought it would be. Check out how much each household need to pay to join the network.

Plenty of meetings today, almost back to back, scheduled and unscheduled. Sadly, it also mean I missed a few meeting with some vendors…my apologies.

Anyway, in between my meetings, I managed to grab some snipplet of some interesting stuff.

1. WiFi SIP Phones or rather the lack of it. The only one I saw on the right. As you can see, the sale guy was trying to prevent me from taking a photo of it. If you are here for an industry exhibition, please explain the logic why you allow people to see but not to take a photo? Afraid that someone copy your idea? Flash News: It is a bloody SIP phone. There are hundreds of Taiwanese manufacturers making these.

2. The phone ring (NTT Domoco) must be the coolest gadget, definitely on my wanted list. It is small bluetooth device which you wear it on your finger like a ring. You answer the phone by plugging your finger into your ear. No kidding. And yes, it works.

2. Flybook VM got to be the coolest notebook I seen. It is actually a simple notebook but you can pull out the screen to turn into an iMac-like form factor. The sale guy told me it is designed to be airplane friendly; if you imaging how it feels like sitting at a back of a guy who insist on putting his seat fully backwards while you trying to work, you will understand why this is so cool. Oh, it is also thin (25.8mm) and lightweight (1.64kg) with 3 or 6 hrs battery.

They also have another very small form factor notebook on display, the Flybook V33i, which I unfortunately forgot to take a picture of. Beside being a 8.9″ traveler notebook, it comes with build in 3.5G WWAN supporting HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GRPS/GSM. This got to be the first HSDPA notebook I seen in the market! The estimate retail price is also fairly reasonable, at US$2,500. Considering HSDPA PCMICA card is going for US$800-US$1,000 retail, this is a bargain!

3. On the product & service side, there is a Taiwanese company that is trying to provide a Skype-like service called FreePP. The difference is there is a hardware focus of it, allows you to buy adapters or phones which you can “plug-and-play” for both home and entreprise use.

On a related note, I drop by Qool Lab booth to check out their Qool Skycube, a Skype adapter. My friends at Skype Journal tested it a few months ago and was impressed by it. I was more impressed by the design than by the features tho. (Okay, maybe I am just jealous. They sent one to Stuart to review all the way to US but not to me in Singapore? :)

4. Last year, many people heard about NTT hits 1GPS in their 4G trial but has very little info of how they did it. They finally unveil some technical info on their trial (click on the picture on the right to enlarge). Downlink using 4.635Ghz, 100mhz channel and uplink using 4.870Ghz, 40mhz channel using VSF-Spread OFDM (Variable-Spreading-Factor Spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and 4×4 MIMO antennas. No info of how they did 2.5Gbps trial tho.

I was down with a flu yesterday so only managed to get to CommunicAsia 2006 this afternoon. I was told there are a lot more exhibitors this year but I “feel” there is less crowd compared to the last year.

Yesterday, Minister Dr. Lee Boon Yang unveil the iN2015 IT masterplan so I went to the IDA booth to chat with some old friends and got a copy of the nicely printed plan. Since I was in IDA when this was cooked, and that it probably change a lot in the last couple of months, I shall reserve my comments about the masterplan. But I would love to hear what you think.

I only have a little time to look around the Wibro products catch my attention. Beside the standard CPE in the form of wireless modem or PCMCIA card,

there is also this prototype wibro handheld game device and PDA

But what is cool is this dual mode CDMA/WiBro handphone from Samsung.

This is really surprising because I got mixed message from Samsung about Wibro. On one hand, the marketing folks are promoting Wibro like it is next wireless revolution that will take over the world, the message I got from the product folks however is that they arent really ready to talk about Wibro as all their products are tied in Korea deployment.

I remember in Hong Kong, one of the speaker say that if you can wait, Wimax 802.16e will have mobility products in 6 months but if you want mobility now, Wibro is here. Even if the latter is true, I doubt 6 months window is worth being tied down to a propiertary technology. Wait for Wibro to harmonized with Wimax.
Read the rest of this entry »

When you discover a wasp nest in your car, it is a sign you should be spending more time at home.

On my way back to Singapore for CommunicAsia next week, I decided to drop by Jakarta, staying at Marriott again.

…Okay, that is oxymoron ;-) Anyway, I am here for a day before pop’ing back to Singapore tomorrow.

Incidently, if you notice the increase of the use of photos on the blog lately, well, say hi to my Nokia N80 thanks to the 3 megapixel camera. So far, I love the little device, except a few minor complains like (1) the phone crash (2) the browser crash (3) the apps keep running out of memory (4) connecting to WLAN may fail and crash, and end up sucking up all your battery.

And oh, I found out the phone has a new firmware upgrade which suppose to fix (some of) these problem. So happily I went to a Nokia Care center last weekend, waited an hour for my queue number only to be told the firmware upgrade will take FOUR (4) hours. What a great customer service Nokia is providing!

Other then these, it is a pretty niffy device. I love it!

Was wandering in downtown KL yesterday and walked pass this very old hawker place. I remember as a kid that I used to go to hawker center like this, old, rundown, bad plastic chairs and tables but the food are always great. This is a great contrast to Singapore which is always clean and these days even with aircon.

But walking past this hawker, it brought back memories and I couldnt resist walking in. I end up buying my dinner here.

If my weekend trip is crazy, my trip to Hong Kong is worst. I got notice to fly to Hong Kong with less then 24 hours notice, then a delay in a meeting yesterday caused me to missed my flight and there is no more flight to Hong Kong. So I end up buying a red-eye ticket to Macau, then took the first ferry to Hong Kong. Crazy but here I am at Shangri-la Kowloon.

Anyway, I am fuming right now! And as we all know, this is the best time to blog and probably getting into legal trouble.

So I am here in Shangri-la for the Wimax conference. One of the speaker is Mr. Chan Kin Hung, SVP of Starhub who is giving a talk on wimax from a mobile operator perspective. In summary: “There is no business case for Wimax” and he repeat that through out his 30mins talk as he made comparison to HSDPA.

Now, I don’t disagree with what his analysis. In fact, I find it very well thoughtout and presented and I agree, it is indeed difficult for Starhub to make a business case for Wimax in Singapore.

What I am so angry about is that if Starhub) don’t see a business case for Wimax, then WTF do they bid (and won) for 2.5Ghz auction when it could be better used by other smaller operators? In fact, Mr. Chan himself concluded that Wimax is more suitable for alternative operators.

Something is obviously wrong when spectrum (and something as valuable as 2.5Ghz wimax spectrum) goes to someone who dont want to use it in the way it was intended and deny others who does.

Had a crazy weekend. On Sat, I was sitting happily at the Starbuck in Time Square for my usual coffee, recieved a phone call at 1pm and I was back in Singapore in Shangri-la at 5pm. And now I am back in Starbuck in Time Square at the exact same spot…

Speaking of Shangri-la, I was surprised at the security around the hotel. I was stop four times, twice along the road, once for the taxi before I align and one more before I can enter the hotel. Security wasn’t even so tight in Jakarta!

Apparently, there was some miltary defense conference going on in Shangri-la and Donald Rumsfeld was a speaker among all the miltry bigshot. I swear, this has nothing to do with Cruise Missile Conference… I am not involved in miltary!

I remember it wasn’t that long ago that Americans can go anywhere they want and would be welcome with a smile. Today, they cant seem to go anywhere without army of bodyguards and guns…what happened to all the goodwill?