Suw Charman participates in ETech virtually, thanks to KevinMarks

Here are a few things I picked up on ETech Day 1

a) Daniel Hillis from Applied Minds demostrated some video clips with very cool user interface they developing. Looks like a huge LCD/Plasma on a table, it is able to display map, zooming in, out, pan and flip through ‘layers’ etc very intuitively. And another one that rendered the map into 3d – no really, into a 3 dimension object on the table that you can touch and feel! Damn, I was too stunned to take any photo then!

b) Richard Rashid from Microsoft Research demo a few research work they did. Telsa, a “Explorer” replacement inspired by some of the things happening in the blogging world – photo sharing, tags etc – couple with a Mac-like drag-and-drop interface. Cool! Spoke to Richard later and he said Telsa is so new that they have nothing on their website yet and this is the first time they show it in public.

Another nice demo they did is a 3D Sketching software they did with Cornell university. Basically, you use a TabletPC and draw some isometric images and it will rendered it into 3D. Ah, finally sometime really cool to use with a TabletPC that you can’t do on a normal PC.
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I am now in San Diego for O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I bang into Marc Canter on my way to the registration. Marc is the co-founder of Macromedia but he is really more well-known as a “connector” – he is a social animal who literally knows everyone! We spoke a bit – need to get him to come to Singapore one of these days.

Went to #etech @ freenode.org and arranged lunch with Allan (aka cybaea) who is a founder of a very interesting Business Consulting group in UK on helping organizations manage disruptive technology innovation.

Oh yes, look at what CarBot folks did to a (Mac) Mini Cooper!

David Sifry posted an updated on the state of blogosphere with some interesting information:

As of March 2005, technorati is tracking 7.8m weblogs (937 millions links) growing at 30k to 40k per day.

Another interesting part is this paragraph:

There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs – fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.

Of course! Since spammers are finding it harder and harder to spam other people blogs, they setup their own! :-)

Looks like Mobile Dating Sim has reached in China (via xinhuanet)

记者日前了解到，曾经在年轻人中风靡一时的饲养电子宠物的游戏如今已有了“升级版”——用手机养“虚拟情人”成了现在最流行的一种玩法。有专家指出，这类游戏的流行不仅会损害女性形象，让人将感情培养功利化，更严重的会影响游戏玩家的身心健康和人格发展。

Mobile Games like 口袋情人 [Pocket Lover] (typical Japanese dating Sim) and SMS Games like 宠物情人 [Pet Lover] is getting popular in China and experts are concern about the social effects of such games on youngsters.

These games don’t come cheap either – the virtual “lover” requires gifts which cost real money – US$0.50 to US$2 – beyond the monthly subscription fees. Wow, talks about ARPU :-)

Dave Farber (and his wife) was in San Jose for another event and I snatch the opportunity to meet up with them for breakfast this morning. I am glad I did because I really enjoy our breakfast conversation.

[ This entry is also on CircleID. ]

One thing that amazed me about the ICANN community is the creativeness in finding new business models. I am not even talking about new technology like Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), the number of business models created from the vanilla DNS (actually just .com) are just mind boggling.

ICANN was formed in 1999 and introduced the concept of registries and registrars model to the DNS business. With that, we witness the rise of register.com, an IPO darling in the dotcom days, in the early 2000s and subsequently overtaken by the ultra-cheap high-volume reseller model of GoDaddy. We also see new registries like .info and .biz and several others that didn’t do so well.

There are also after-market (aka ebay) for domain names like afternic and registry outsourcing, DNS hosting, Dynamic DNS etc.

That’s about what most outsiders know of DNS business models, mostly revolved around the registry-registrar-reseller model. But there are really more and I shall discuss two not-so-well-known but interesting models below.
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Went to University Ave @ Palo Alto (just outside Stanford U) for dinner and saw this Soundworks (aka Creative Shop) selling Creative.

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While I am in US this week, IDA¹ concluded our 5th Infocomm Technology Roadmap (ITR5)².

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) today unveiled its fifth and most significant Infocomm Technology Roadmap (ITR5) to date. This inaugural 10 year Technology Roadmap discusses the next era technologies such as sensor technology, biocomputing, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies and provides insights into how these major revolutions and evolutions in infocomm will help to grow the infocomm sector and build a well-connected society.

Traditionally, ITR is event we organized to share our findings of how infocomm technology is going to developed over the next 5 years. But ITR5 is very different this time round -We’re looking at 5 to 15 years into the future and looking at how nanotech, biotech and infocomm is going to come together to shape the future for Singapore. Hopefully, this will help Singapore companies adapt and leverage on this broad trend and to bring such services for Singaporeans. (Any wonder why we took the number 1 spot? :-)

We also have many distinguish speakers including John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox, Paul Reynold, CEO of British Telecom, Dr. Tan Geok Leng, CTO of IDA. Before I left last week, I think we already have 600+ sign up. (I was told ~800 turn up in the end :-)

So while I really enjoy VON, I also kind of sad I couldn’t attend this event back home.

¹ More specifically, Technology Group of IDA, the division I am working at.

² See also ITR5 homepage. Slides and the report itself can also be downloaded from here.

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (the author of The Tipping Point)

Absolutely love the book. And I can relate to the many stories cited by Malcolm especially about intuition – sometimes people asked me how I know what technology to focus – I don’t know how but I just know it.

There is also another important lesson to learn : When you asked someone what they want, they often give you the wrong answer. For example, when Herman Miller rolled out the Aeron chairs, everyone they survey pre-market love the feeling but hated the look. It was rated 2-3 out of 10, where 1 is really bad aesthetic. Yet, after Aeron hits the market and won several industry design awards, the score jumped to 8 out of 10!

The lesson here is that when you present someone with some so radical different from what they used to, they are going to reject it just because it is different. (at least initially)

Now, this has some relevancy to VoIP: Many entreprise cited QoS and Security as two main issues why they didnt deploy VoIP. But is that really true? Could it be because the CIOs are unfamilar with VoIP, and therefore not comfortable with it, and hence, QoS and Security problem is the mind trying to give a logical reason to that uncomfort?

Back in the early 90s, I heard similar arguments about why Email cannot be used as entreprise communication – poor QoS and Security. 10 years forward, sure, we have secure email now but are people using that? Nope, most are using unsecured email no different from the early 90s except for a handful, e.g. government, who really need secure email. What has really changed is that CIOs are no longer uncomfortable with Email.

So good luck to all those who believed the survey and invested to solve the so-called “QoS and Security” problem for VoIP. It is, indeed, blind leading the blind.