I had a crazy month traveling across Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Palo Alto, Los Angeles and finally back in Singapore. It was great trip, mostly business but in between some personal stuff, catching up with ex-boss, old friends and making new ones. A great evening with Marc Canter and his family (love the Canter’s song! :-)

It was also a great time traveling in US as a Chinese. Taxi drivers rave non-stop about the amazing Chinese Olympic openings and for the first time, see China differently. (Well, I wasn’t born in China but still I am a Chinese :-)

On my way back to Singapore, AIMS published the recommendation on the changes to media policy in Singapore. I was one of the stakeholder they consulted early in the process so I got swamp by reporters who got an early preview of the document. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to read the final version before them so I couldn’t really answer most of their questions. Anyway, suffice to say, I was happy with the progress. It is a much bigger step in media liberalization that I expected.

So I was back in Singapore and I met a fund manager yesterday. She asked an interesting question:

“Why are there so many P2P companies in China and not in US?”

It is worthy to reflect on that question because in some ways it is true. In US, we have bittorrent.com but other than that, most P2P applications have pretty much gone. Napster, Kazaa, etc, gone.

Wait, what about Skype? Firstly, Skype is not US company. Secondly, Skype P2P is actually very simple - connect A to B, both behind NAT, via a supernode C. In fact, their Kazaa background has more complexity than Skype architecture.

Now compared it to China, the land of P2P Streaming with PPLive, PPStream and UUSee. There are numerous P2P downloads the most famous being Xunlei (backed by Google). And all of them are very successful : PPLive has over 100M installation based, 34M active users monthly.

So what happened?

I think it has to go back to the early 2000 when music industry decided to clamp down Napster. The defining moment was when Napster was shutdown by the court after years of lawsuit. Since then, anyone with a bizplan that even has the word “P2P” is unlikely to get funded. Innovation in P2P basically stop dead, with the exception of bittorrent and Skype, but both become relatively successful without VC backings.

On the other hand, P2P has no such stigma in China. Investments in P2P continues to flourish and today China can claim to have one of the most advance P2P technology in the world. To the extend that when people are finally trying to do video these days, people are looking towards China and see how video are being delivered in the number 1 broadband country in the world by number of subscribers but probably one of the worst by quality.

Look at the Olympics numbers. PPLive alone has more peak concurrent viewers (1.6M) than NBC (600k) and BBC (200k) add together.

There is a lesson to be learned: The unintended consequences of slapping a “evil” label on a technology where in reality, technology is neither good or evil, but rather the use of it.

Disclosure: I am associated with PPLive.

Goodbye lands of the Vikings.

Waiting for the plane to go back to Singapore for a short transit (a warm bath and change of cloths) before flying to Shanghai. See you on the other side of the globe.

It is a close door session and I shall respect the decision of the organizer to keep the close door discussion, which is very interesting, private.

But I raise up two points at the event that I am at a liberty to share:

1. Actually the impact of New Media has being felt in the Singapore 2006 GE before the Malaysia 2008 Elections.

While there is no doubt PAP will come back in power, PAP was very confident that it will win at least 80% of the popular votes at 2006 GE. The result? 66.6%.

Despite a ban on all political discussion on the internet like blogs and forums, political blogs continues to thrives during the election period and discussions are vibrant. While the traditional media continues to behave like typical Singapore traditional media then, people has turn to the new media. In fact, the new media forces the traditional media to eventually cover stories that it has shunned.

While not all the differences between 80% and 66.6% can be credit to new media, the new media certainly plays a role.

2. I am anxiety that the power-to-be seem to take an attitude that New Media is some sort of anti-establishment uncontrolled platform that needs to be tamed.

New Media gains creditability not because it is anti-establishment. It gains creditability every time the traditional media makes a blunder, forcing people to turn to New media as an alternative news source. Each time traditional media tried to “shape” the opinions of the people that does not reflect reality, it loses readers to the New Media. The more controls you have on traditional media, the more people turn to New Media, whom they feel *reflect* their views.

Thus, New Media is like any media - what is important is the stories that can connect and engage the readers. It seem anti-establishment because the anti-establishment get no voices in the traditional media and thus this is the avenue for them. It seem uncontrollable because the power-to-be never want to contact and engage in the New Media, afraid that any contacts using New Media will add credibility to the New Media, afraid that any engagement with the readers is murky because they will get questions and god-forbid, they have to answer those questions.

I respect academic freedom but once in a while, a paper got through that makes you think “WTF!?”

<br /> <blockquote style='margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 1em; border-left: 5px #ddd solid; '> <span class="content comments_count_2 withoutphoto" ><span class="text" ><br /> <blockquote class="comment_body comment_body1" > The sociology paper published last November, which has been making rounds over the Internet and was recently picked up by The Atlantic, uses illustrative statistics and qualitative data to conclude that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups. The authors have found that graduates in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world. The authors also note that engineers, alone, are strongly over-represented among graduates who gravitate to violent groups.<a href="http://r1.sharedcopy.com/5tcpm7#shcp1" > ^{link &raquo;}</a></p></blockquote> <p class="comment_body comment_body2" >Okay so I am now an &#8220;Islamic Terrorist&#8221;???<a href="http://r1.sharedcopy.com/5tcpm7#shcp2" > ^{link &raquo;}</a></p> <p> </span></span> - from <a href="http://r1.sharedcopy.com/5tcpm7">EETimes.com - Holy War! Researchers say EEs have a &#8216;terrorist mindset&#8217;</a> via <a href="http://sharedcopy.com">sharedcopy.com</a></p></blockquote> <p>

3 months, 27 companies & research institutions for 1 hour demo. Phew, it is finally done…smooth and well received.

Not my show so not for me to talk about it here but I work with some of the most amazing companies in the last 3 months. As I was watching the 1 hour demo with the VIPs, I was asking myself “Wow! We actually have all these stuff in Singapore!”

On a related story, I found sometime to watch The Secret History of Silicon Valley. Amazing talk and definitely worth the 1 hour of your time!

Jun Murai just informed IETF that Vint Cerf has won the Japan Prize for his work on TCP/IP. Congratulations!

Update: With my wine adviser in Beijing and conspirator in Washington, a lafite 1986 was delivered successfully to Vint 48 hours later. Not exactly the prized 1961 but 1986 is still a classic. Enjoy!

Phones/PDA that comes with a touchscreen usually comes with a stylus. As such, the user interface for such touchscreen devices assume you always work with a stylus. It requires at least two hand to use which means you cannot use it while walking (usually carrying a bag) or driving.

There are devices that does not require a stylus but the user interface for them aren’t much better.

Perhaps because of the past experience with touchscreen PDA, I really don’t like touchscreen devices. This is why I stick to a non-touchscreen phone, because it forces the designer to not assume you will use it with a stylus and therefore, generally more user friendly.

So iPhones comes really as a breath of fresh air when it comes to touchscreen - it is simple and easy to use.

Now the really cool thing is the multi-touch capability which you can *zomg* zoom pictures but I dont think we have fully explore the capability of multi-touch. In the next few years, we will see more ways we will use the technology.

But what I think would be really interesting comes from a friend who complained that it is pretty dangerous to use the iPhone while driving.

I like to see a screen that can form curvature on the surface so you can “feel” the button on the display.

Now, that would be really cool and useful. Anyone knows such technology?

I met up with Dewayne two weeks ago in San Jose. Part of our conversations are (somewhat) confidential so I won’t talk about it here. But two things I like to share here.

1. There is a general mis-perception that broadband is cheaper in Asia than US. ITU recently publishes the cost of broadband on a per 100kbps basis and Wired made a pretty picture.

The picture made by Wired clearly shows that broadband prices in US aren’t as bad as it perceived to be. In fact, it is one of the cheapest broadband, far cheaper than many part of Asia.

US still have one of the cheapest bandwidth wholesale rate (transit cost) in the world, as low as $15/mbps and peering cost is almost negligible. In Asia, you would be lucky to get US$100/mbps transit and local peering is non-existence except a handful of country.

Broadband is cheap in Asia despite these because of a handful of exceptional country, like Japan and Korea and China. Traffic in these country are mostly local since their users consume local content - hence, cheaper to provide high speed Internet access.

2. The debate on 700mhz auction is heating up. GigaOm has a great intro article on 700Mhz. It is extremely attractive because (1) 60Mhz is up for grab and (2) 700Mhz has great propagation property which makes it very good for wide area wireless deployment.

Beside the carriers, Google has expressed their interest to bid for 700Mhz. The min bid is US$4.6B and it is expected to go up as high as US$10B per carrier. FCC can expect to get as much as US$30b from this auction.

Google has fought for open access on the spectrum as part of the auction rule. Eventually FCC puts in a waterdown requirements on open access in the auction rules. Verizon decided to sue FCC last month on the inclusion of open access.

Okay - they are suing FCC for a rule that is so vague that you can drive a van through, for a condition that is not yet enforced, for a spectrum that has not be deployed and for an auction that has not being held. The (economic) liberal in me say “Heck, if you don’t like the rules, don’t bid!”

The question then is WHY did they sue?

The answer become clearer if one assumed that Verizon don’t expect they will win the lawsuit. With an uncertain lawsuit hanging over 700mhz, the auction is going to be difficult to proceed - FCC would hesitate to call for the auction and potential bidders would be concerned over the outcome if the auction would be invalidated by the lawsuit.

By working the legal system, Verizon could drag this lawsuit to go on for years. They already “won” the moment the file the lawsuit.

On the bright side, I rather not see this auction happens under a Republican FCC Chairman so derailing the auction isn’t that bad idea for now.