Got into Xiamen at 1am in the morning, catch some sleep before going for my 9am meeting. Before I went to Xiamen (my first trip btw), a friend told me Xiamen is one of the best city in China.

It is not as well developed as Shanghai or Beijing and it is a much smaller city (about 1M people). But the roads are not jam, people are more friendly and relax. Above all, yep, it is beautiful little island, very nice beach and a great weather. It is the “Hawaii of China”.

I wish I have more time to explore Xiamen (perhaps next trip) but I have to catch a 4pm flight to Shanghai for a dinner appointment with a friend. I know he reads my blog (hi! :-) and I am not certain if he minds me mentioning his name here. Anyway, he was one of the most influential banker in Indonesia before 1997 (financial crisis) but now retired in Shanghai (but still invest in Shanghai properties). And gosh, he is really funny and I really enjoyed hanging out with him :-)

After a long day, I managed to wiggle my way back to Pudong and now settled down in Andy’s apartment for the night. Thank god he has proper wireless here…but I probably should get some sleep. Another long day tomorrow.

A bit late but still interesting enough to repost here: Scienists found a way to squeeze more bits onto the copper that it is as fast as fiber. See Copper wire as fast as fiber?

The group hopes that the answer will be found in the use of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) to boost DSL speeds. “The main obstacle for the advancement of DSL technology is the interference (“crosstalk”) generated from different DSL lines that share the same telephone cable binder,” said Professor John Cioffi, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, a pioneer of DSM research. “DSM is a promising technology for the future evolution of broadband access networks using existing copper infrastructure.”

“Boss,” you begin, “about that $18 billion we just spent? Well, turns out it wasn’t strictly necessary…” – hehe :-)

Arrived in Beijing yesterday. After a long jam, finally arrived in Haidian District (海淀区), put down my lungage and then head off to Minzu Hotel for dinner with Andy Jacobs who happens to be in Beijing for a company party at the Great Wall tonight.

Went to CNNIC this morning to catch up with catch up with Mao Wei and bang into Shen Yang (沈阳), the editor of the QianLong. Havent met Shen Yang since Kyoto two years ago but he got a new title now: Comittee member for WG for Blog, Internet Society of China (ISC). Apparently, they are having a meeting to discuss the “policy for blogs in China”. Wow, I want to be in that meeting! But damn, Shen Yang said ‘No way!’.

Regardless, I spend a wonderful morning with Mao Wei who gave me an update of what they are doing. They just launched a mobile keyword service, a service where you can search and look things up using SMS on mobile phone. Pretty cool but it is not making a lot of money yet. Speaking of making money, I was pleasantly surprised when Mao Wei said that Chinese IDN under .cn is making as much money for CNNIC as the English domain names. The numbers are still small (~300,000) but Chinese IDN is fetching a prenium (~20USD chinese over 3USD for english). This is mostly thanks to the support of IDN in IE7. :-)

After that, I rushed to Beijing University to have lunch with Dr. Charles Lee who is giving lecture here this week. I met up with the team of MBAs who is working with him on his new venture fund. Young and smart folks! How smart? Statistically, the chance for someone to enter Beijing University is equal to the chance for someone in Singapore to win the President Scholarship. So go figure.

After a wonderful lunch, I went over to PayEase. I think I can finally blog about this now since the deal is closed – we invested in PayEase last month. PayEase is the oldest (>7 years) e-Payment company in China supported by Beijing government with one of the largest transaction volume. It was one of the award winners of Red Herring 100 Asia 2006. I was asked to keep an eye on this investment so I catch up with the management to get a progress update. They did good this quarter! :-)

24 hours in Beijing and now I am back in the airport flying to Xiamen. Going to spend a night there before flying to Shanghai tomorrow.

A friend just pointed me to this article: ICBC’s indicative price range offers discount versus peers

Price range indicates pre-greenshoe deal size of $15.9 billion to $19.1 billion for combined H and A share offering. The offering has the potential to become the world’s largest IPO.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has set a price range for its mega-size initial public offering. The range will value the stock at a discount of 10-22% to China Construction Bank – which is widely viewed as the bank’s closest comparable, sources familiar with the offering said yesterday. Based on current market prices it will also offer a discount to Bank of China, albeit a smaller one.

This was brewing for a while while touted as the largest IPO in the world. Now the figure is out, it looks like it may indeed be the largest one.

Read the rest of the article too as it contains very useful stats. If the report is true, the assets are extremely attractive.

Oh yea, I burst out laughing in the Krisflyer lounge when I read this (I got a few werid stares right now *glump*)

At the end of June, the bank had over 150 million personal customers – equal to the entire population of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines combined – and 2.5 million corporate customers. The number of domestic branches totalled more than 18,000.

Unbelievable!

Oh yea, I am on my way to Beijing right now and perhaps over to Shanghai over the weekend.

Just posted a comment on BeyondSG (George Yeo blogs there btw) regarding Iridium. A Porsche for $750 bucks. Re-post here for archive purposes.

I done a due diligence on Iridum for a banker in 2002.

It was already pretty interesting back then. Iridium went backrupted in Aug 1999 and in Nov 2000 was bought out for 25M USD by a group of investor, including Khalid bin Abdula bin Abdulrahman.

In Dec 2000, DoD awarded a 2year 72M USD deal for 20,000 handsets with an option to extend it for 5 years. Supporting DoD alone covers 40% of the OPEX :-)

They only need 60,000 subscribers worldwide to breakeven.

The 66 “birds” (satellites) however have a lifespan designed for 7 years and would expire in 2005. However, the engineers is able to tune it and it is possible to last until 2008 to 2010 and minimual data service could still function until 2015.

The problem for the investors is that when the birds expire, it is going to be expensive excerise to replace them, probably to a tune of 3.5b, altho Boeing mentioned back then they are willing to share the cost.

Anyway, sadly the deal didnt go through. It would be interesting otherwise :-)

Just bought these babies…couldnt wait to blog about them. They are the standalone wifi skype phones from SMC and Netgear. Yep, standalone, ie no need for PC to work. In other words, I can use them in any hotspot. Yeah!!

Original I thought Netgear and SMC are from the same manufacturer as reported in Gimozo but apparently I was wrong. But for those interested, the SMC (and Belkin) version are made by Accton, a taiwanese OEM manufacturer who made these phones in their Shenzhen factory. I wonder who made these Netgear phones.

First impression is the Netgear is better. It is slightly smaller, heavier and feel more like a mobile phone. The SMC/Accton version feel a bit “plastic” (“cheaper”).

Update: Okay, the SMC/Accton phone is buggy as hell. It complains about outdated firmware but the autoupdater dont work. It hangs whenever I tried to make a call out. The Netgear phone however is wonderful! Everything works out of the box! (Altho I wish they were more patient with the DHCP before they complain the network is not available)

In an unrelated note, I saw this piece of news headline at Funan today (I just touched down): “Free Wireless Net access at public area from next year”

It is old news and reported several times. I want to mention it because it is really ironical that I am sitting in Funan, the IT hub in Singapore and, get this, I can’t get any wifi access.

Nope, not even those paid ones I have from Starhub or Singtel. Zip, zero wifi network I can hook up. I tried in all the different spots in Funan and nothing. In the end, I have to use my 3G phone to post this :P So much for “wifi in Singapore”. In KL, at least I know I can get reliable wifi access in any Starbuck.

Whining aside, the significant of “free wireless net access” and the “wifi skype phone” is not lost to me.

However, given that whoever roll out this “free wireless net access” is likely one of the current operators, I am willing to bet that they will be doing their best to stop this happening. It could be as simple as implementing some very seldom used wireless authentication (e.g. EAP-LEAP) or worst, requiring some special authentication software to be downloaded to your PC before you can use the network.

Success Build to Last by Jerry I. Porras, Mark Thompson, Stewart Emery

The same author of Build to Last :)

Market is buzzing with rumours that Google is making an offer for Youtube for US$1.6B. As of last checked, there are over 800 news article similar to the one on International Herald Tribune:

The Internet search leader, Google, is in talks to acquire the popular online video site YouTube for about $1.6 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

US$1.6b is possible since the shareholders of Youtube had made it pretty clear that they wont sell it for anything less than US$1.5b.

Making it more interesting is the fact that Mark Cuban just made a comment that “Only a ‘moron’ would buy Youtube” on CNN Money a few days ago:

Cuban, co-founder of HDNet and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, also said Thursday that YouTube would eventually be “sued into oblivion” because of copyright violations.

“They are just breaking the law,” Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. “The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue.”

Did Cuban just called Google a “moron”? Perhaps there is a bit of self-interest (Cuban founded HDNet) but not totally baseless either:

“There’s a lot of pirated material on that,” NBC Universal Chief Executive Bob Wright said of YouTube last week. “It will catch up with them. It has a little bit of the Grokster kind of appearance and feel. They kind of know it. We know it.”

Since we are on the topic of Youtube, the whispering among the network engineers (esp. in NANOG) is how much bandwidth Youtube is consuming and the engineering challenges around it. Bill Norton was kind enough to forward me his latest paper title “Internet Video Next Wave Disruption” and there is a nice diagram there.

YouTube, a one-year-old community-based short video sharing service, shared that in February 2006 they are buying transit for 20Gbps of video traffic! Their growth rate, shown graphically below, was documented as 20% compounded monthly!

20% compounded monthly = 891% growth yearly. If they consumed 20Gbps in Feb 2006, by Feb 2007 next year, they would need to buy 178Gbps of bandwidth! Wow!

We almost forgot that Youtube is just a 1.5 year old company. US$1.6B in 18 months, yea, I have to give it to them. *salute*

* Bill Norton was in Singapore on thrusday to present his paper but unfortunately I was not in Singapore then. But he was kind enough to forward a copy of his paper before his talk. Thanks Bill…lets catch up another time.

Just got a new DVD player: Enzer E6068. What so cool about the DVD player is that it comes with a USB port as well as a multi-card reader. You can put in a USB thumbdrive (or an SD card) into the DVD player and it will play the avi :-) Yes, it support DivX too even though it is not stated on the manual. (Actually the manual said nothing about what it can do with the USB…I took a risk and buy it anyway)

“But but..lots of DVD players can do that already”. Yes, but this is retailing at S$99 (~US$60). The other DVD players that comes with USB port is over S$300. The irony is that the thumbdrive I bought is more expensive then the player itself. ;-)

No more burning DivX onto CD before watching it anymore. Ho Ho Ho.

* Enzer is a local Singapore company making very cheap DVD players.

Okay, a group blog is nothing new. A group blog by a group of (post 65) members of paliaments is worth mentioning. Welcome to Blogging, p65.sg.

I know, it is not “launch” but someone already submitted it to Tomorrow.sg and I am willing to bet this is going to be on newspaper tomorrow.

Now lets see how long they will last…or get used to the hostility on the online world. Good luck :-)

* For non-Singapore readers, post-65 refers to member of paliaments borned after 1965.