Okay, I have to eat my words: 13 base stations around my house isnt really that bad because this is what you get in downtown Tokyo.

46 base stations! O_O

Yes, I am in Tokyo right now. Tokyo is one of my favourite city (not the cost of living tho). I always like Japanese people and their culture. One of the things that impressed me most is the “common sense” in their society.

Take a simple thing thing like escalator. I am sure all of us experience some people standing on escalator while others trying to walk. If you are in a hurry, it is pretty irriating to manoeuver around those standing on the escalator. The solution is simple: There is an unspoken rule in Tokyo that if you want to stand, stand on the left so others who wants to walk can do so on the right. That’s just common sense.

Of course, if you are in Osaka, then you stand on the right and walk on the left. Thats also common sense :-)

Anyway, it is sakura season in Japan. Hopefully I have some time for that :-)

On the trip in Cambodia, Boon Leong related to me a story about Michael Yap making a comment to the press along the line “the government should give email to everyone in Singapore”. We were impressed that Minister Dr. Lee actually took time to respond to him (along the line, we don’t need to give email to all). Michael Yap, is afterall, former CEO of National Computer Board (precursor to IDA) and the driver behind SingaporeOne that bought broadband to Singapore way back in the days we still using dialup in late 90s.

But I was particular puzzled why Michael, a visionary, would say something as boring as “email for everyone”. So while lunching with him yesterday, I took the opportunity to ask him what happened?

Apparently, he was asked what Singapore government could do to help spur ICT usage in Singapore. He replied with a fantastic idea: The government should pay and provide a basic wireless access for everyone, say 100mb share among all. Good enough for simple messaging or for emergency but if you want more, then you would pay for it. The wireless technology today is capable to do it: A single wimax base station could cover the central Singapore and it wont cost too much to set it up or to operate.¹

Think about it…It would put Singapore to be one of the highest wireless pentration in the world almost immediately, not to mention the other business opportunities that may arise once everyone get used to this technology. All this for a cost of one (or two) wimax base station.

So where does the “email for everyone “comes in? Apparently, Michael was trying to explain the wireless idea to the reporter and he draw the analogy to the early days of email where email is free for everyone. Somehow the reporter reported the email analogy and not the wireless idea … O_O

¹ There are considerations like how this would compete with the upcoming wimax operators, etc but I am sure a win-win proposation can be found if there is will.

ps: In case you wonder, I dont blog about private conversations unless I got permission. And yes, Michael gave me his permission to blog this :-)

Just got this email reporting the speech made by former FCC Chairman @ F2C organized by David Isenberg

Former FCC chairman Michael Powell is up on the stage at the Freedom to Connect conference right now, and he warns the tech elite crowd here not to be naive about the dangers of asking Congress for legislation on Net Neutrality. As he explains:

The legislative process does not work well when it has a weak understanding of innovation and tech policy. You are talking about 535 members who need to to get this. They have a very shallow understanding [of Net Neutrality]. If you go give them a quiz about the seven layers of the Internet, good luck.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword. It is much harder get a law off the books than to get it on. Someone will think it is a good idea to apply the same rules to the other side’s products and services. Be careful because you are playing their game [the telcos’]. We are talking about resources, ability, and 100 years of skill.

I am pro-legislation on Net Neutrality. I believe there is a cause for government intervention when there is a market failure and there is clearly a dilemma in US right now (although I wont call it a market failure yet as Verizon has not taken any action so far).

Reading this report almost made me a convert…almost.

The lack of understanding of technology in the Congress is indeed a problem. While law making in US are pretty similar to this part of the world, a handful of people will prepare the document and eventually present it to the Cabinet/Congress for discussion, modification and finally approval, the process is more political in US.

At least Asians have one trait which is helpful: They donâ€

During the trip in Vietnam, I talked about Spyware and Malware coming to mobile phone.

First Trojan Spy for Symbian Phones (via F-Secure Weblog). Man, wasn’t that fast?

Today we heard of a rather interesting new Symbian malware application named Flexispy.A. It’s a Symbian trojan spy that records information about the victim’s phone calls and SMS messages, then sends them to a remote server.