August 22nd, 2006

What is a Media?

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Just remembered a conversation I had with a friend who now works for the agency that regulate the media in Singapore a few weeks ago. The debate we had is “What is a Media?”.

Anyway, he holds the view that all these “New Media” stuff he heard are just nonsense, that it is nothing more than a webpage put together by amateurs. Afterall, the concepts has being around for years and now people are slapping a new label to it thats all.

I hold a different belief: What defines a media is the audience. A newspaper without readers is not a media but simple webpage with 100-thousands readers daily is one. The underlying technology (be it ink & paper or computer & internet) does not matter.

Currently, “mainstream media” is limited to handful printed publication (newspaper, magazine etc). So, if a “new media” has more audience than a “mainstream media”, what happened? Do we change the Act or do we change the definition?

Given MICA Minister (Dr. Lee Boon Yang) has often stated he prefers a light-touch towards the “new media”, I am glad that I did not convience my friend and we get to keep the definition as it is right now.

And to those Singapore bloggers who tries to argue how powerful the new media is, I think you are doing a disservice to the blogging community.

August 19th, 2006

Gartner Hype Cycle 2006

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Gartner just publish their latest hype cycle for 2006 and their shortlist of IT technologies to watch.

gartner-hype-cycle-2006.jpg

1. Web 2.0 : Social Network Analysis (SNA), Ajax, Collective intelligence, Mashup
2. Real World Web : Location-aware technologies, Location-aware applications, Sensor Mesh Networks
3. Applications Architecture : Event-driven Architecture (EDA), Model-driven Architecture, Corporate Semantic Web

Web 2.0 made it to the peak of the hype-cycle (wohoo! :-) together with the related technologies like AJAX.

But there are a couple of surprises:
– No question that (corporate) VoIP is out hype phase (and even trough) but I think it is too far out right now.
– Was surprised to see Corporate Semantic Web since the last Semantic Web project I did certainly didnt go anywhere. I think the Semantic Web in its full gory is still pretty far from corporate usage but people starting to realized that meta-tagging their resources is critical in information organization.

August 17th, 2006

Website and Marketing Gibberish

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I was often asked to help to look at some company. Google was obvious the starting point which would more likely than not find me the company website.

Now, it is really useful that there is an unspoken practice to have a “About Us” (or somethng similar) link on a well designed company website. It is also often accompanied with a similar link to “Management Team” and “Product & Services” which is great.

What is not so great is these “About Us” and “Product & Services” are sometimes filled with so much marketing bullshit. For example, try this:

Welcome to XXX – the Carrier that offers a broad range of wholesale products and services, namely the best solutions to accommodate your business needs coupled with unbeatable wholesale rates for A-Z destinations around the globe.

How does that tells me anything about what you do exactly? You are a wholesale cheap carrier…okay…but what kind of service do you provide? Cables? Satellite? From where to where? A-Z? Huh?

And people wonder why website dont work well. *doh*

Reading craps like this makes me want to write to the CEO and advise him to send his Marketing Director back to University for a refresher course on Communication 101.

August 11th, 2006

The players in Net Neutrality

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Believe in Net Neutrality
Do not believe in Net Neutrality
Believe in Regulation
Fair Market Thinkers
Believe there is a market failure and that government should step in to ensure fair and level playing field
Bell-Heads
Want a Two-Tier Internet
Do not believe in Regulation
Net-Heads
Want Net Neutrality but do not want government to regulate the Internet
Free Market Thinkers
Believe companies should be allowed to do whatever they want without government intervention

So who are you in this debate? ^_^

August 9th, 2006

Holiday…Ha!

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Today is suppose to be a holiday in Singapore – It is the National Day.

Holiday..Ha! I think I had five “business” meeting today. -_-;;

Lunch was fun: with a bunch of very experience technoprenuers (lots of radio guys :) who now went on to run their own company or now helping others to start theirs. It was also in a way strange because one of them is with a company that I keep coming across lately and wondering who they are. And bingo, there is the guy who did the deal.

Charles Lee is also in town so we met up for dinner. And thanks to Charles, I get to watch the National Day fireworks from the Executive floor of Swissotel. It was an amazing view. But in the excitment of our discussion, I forgot to take any photo! *sigh*

Oh yea, also met up with an former colleague who told me one of the presentations I did a year ago is now being highly appreciated. In fact, it is going right to the top. “Very high up” is what he said. I guess it is going on to Cabinet :-)

August 8th, 2006

Finding a new comfort zone

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Lately, I find I have less and less opportunity to write about what I am doing or my interest.

Having to blog while under Official Secrets Act may seem like a challenge but surprisingly I find it harder to do so now than ever. Perhaps I was more familiar with my work back then before I started blogging. I did take a few knock before I know the limits but luckily my work back then wasnt classified as “official secrets”.

Right now, I was free lancing providing strategic business consulting with some parties and acting as technology advisor for others, mostly for investment purposes. The strategic business consulting part of the work, well, is strategic. So blogging about it would reveal the company strategy and it is a no-go-zone. For the investment work, VCs like Tim and David may be blogging freely about their deals they doing, investors in this part of the world are more conservative. Although they cant put me in jail (like OSA can), they could sue the pants out of me if I say anything that jeopodized their deals.

There are some other work where I cant even talk about what I do. Those who knows, knows.

I am not saying something bad will happen to me if I leak out anything or they would really sue me since I have pretty good relationship with the parties I work with. But my reputation would take a hit but thats enough for me to think twice.

I guess it is finding a comfort zone of what I can blog under the new arrangement.

One thing I can talk about is that I am involved in many broadband wireless projects in Asia for the last couple of months. Shouldnt be a surprised based on the meetings I attended from the last couple of months. In fact, I am invited to iWeek in Johannesburg next month to give a talk relating wireless. Preparing that presentation is a challenge…

August 4th, 2006

MacOSX on Intel

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mac-on-hp.JPG   photo-hp-mac.JPG

A few days ago, I got a few hours spare so I got myself a new Mac…well, kind of. I got Mac OSX running on my HP Pavillion.

Nope, it is not those hacks you do to make your Windows look like a Mac (I did that two years ago). Or the super slow PowerPC Emulator, PearPC.

This is a hack I read a couple of months ago about how to get Mac OSX for Intel to run on non-Apple machine by disabling the TPM checks. I got the patch lying around but never got to trying it until now.

Oh boy, I am surprised how well it goes for me. Almost all the hardware works out of the box, including sound, DVD-RW and even the build in Bluetooth! My ATI Radeon X700 video card has some problem but was quickly fixed with some quick binary hack. The only thing that does not work right now is the Intel 2200BG wireless (wifi) but someone is writing the device driver for that.

I suppose this is the inevitable the moment Apple decided to release Mac OSX on Intel. Despite having TPM that prevent OSX from running on non-Apple hardware, it does not take long for the community to work around it.

True, Mac OSX shipped with fairly limited of hardware support so even if you get it running on a normal PC, it is likely is a lot of your hardware dont work. But since Mac OSX is based on BSD (an open source project), it does not take much to take the open source Linux driver and hack it into BSD/Mac OSX. The few non-open source portion of OSX could also be reversed engineered, given sometime.

I am not going to share how I did this. I probably broke some (Singapore) laws by doing this hack so I am not going to encourage you to do this. Now that I blog about it, I probably should remove the partition and revert that back to Linux. It is a fun thing to do for an afternoon, fun to show it to friends but without the wifi support, it is not exactly usable.

But one day, I hope Apple would releaase their Mac OSX for PC. I know, I know, Apple is a hardware company. But you know, it is a business decision between selling 100M software license vs selling 1M hardware. So never say never. (esp. for those who claims Apple will never release a mouse with more than one button).