11-11 Just Singles. Anti-Valentine. Lots of “Lonely People” in China. Alibaba knows that. It wants to help reduce some of that anxiety and loosen some of those heavy purses. Boom! $2 Billion in sales in an hour. Anything, from toaster to Twitter ( smart phones). Welcome to the new consumer society (used to be Savers…

Virgin Galactic. Undeterred. After all, without the likes of Branson, Kingsford Smith, Lindbergh and Earhart, where would we be today! 2014 marks two major setbacks: Malaysian Air flight and Virgin Galactic flight. Technology wants sacrifice first, mass utility second. Soon, we will surf the net while our unmanned cars do the driving (we are doing…

Seeing Palawan Island on top of CN Travelers list brings back fond memories of my brief humanitarian trip there years ago. Young, idealistic and fearless, I was sent down on rotation to “boost up”  the morale of a remnant of Vietnamese refugees stuck permanently there (later, after decades of legal wrangling, the camp was finally vacated…

One more reason to stay glued to E-commerce to avoid contracting E-bola. Shop until you drop. Our team transited via Zürich on our way to Liberia back in summer 1986. Had it been 2014, our travel might have been banned. Monrovia then already looked bleak. Then the civil war. And now Ebola. More ambulances for 4-million…

I finally picked up the Happiness Project to see what’s all the fuss about. Was it a clever way for the author to make some money while going through her mid-life crisis? Or every so often, someone somewhere is bound to ask those loaded epistemological questions: where I am going? Is happiness awaiting for me…

HP is about to be split into enterprise and mass market. Reminds me of the old Ma Bell break-up ( which took down Bell Labs with it). Long ago, we bought into the economy of scale, to vertical integration (ITT). Now, the pendulum swings in the opposite e.g. IBM spinning off its hardware computer to…

Between Last Days of Vietnam and Too Big To Fail, documentary films all of a sudden get serious attention. I was reading up on the latter story, while being a part of the former. In fact, a few days that led up to “the last days” of the US Embassy, I had invited a friend…

In The Idea Factory, we find a chronicle of great men, among them Claude Shannon, who dedicated themselves to solving big problems. The transistors, capacitors, semi-conductors and the silicon chip (later became the magical wafer of Intel and the Valley industry). Even an unheard-of technology of the time – cellular transmission – was shelved, since it…

For my Aimy, who is a recent college grad, September won’t ever be the same: she is not back to school as in years previous. She is entering the world of work. That world is very different from the time I entered it. She is expected to try her hands at multiple jobs, by sheer…

Eyes glued to the set. All eyes! How can this be! Smoke gets in your eyes. Falling men. Rushing in and about. End of the world (why does the sun go on shinning…..amidst all the smoke). Did we bring it on ourselves? Why was there so much hatred? What were the causes? US “occupation” as…