Tag: New Year

Contagious innovation

Last week, I installed a new Search engine (w/ a slash).

Today, there is a whole new browser altogether. Rockmelt.

It does improve Facebook quite a bit.

Steven Johnson calls this phenomenon (of one bright idea led to another), the adjacent possible.

It’s like my New Year resolution of hanging out with positive people to “catch” their enthusiasm.

Yes, we can.

It’s been more than a decade since Netscape. Now we got Rockmelt, built on Chrome.

Fast we browse.

One can go through life and not see at all.

Suddenly, bright light city (imagine driving from LA to Vegas at night through the desert).

Innovation city is full of creative people. Vibes.

Energy. Unbound.

Take a deep breath.

And be steady for what comes your way.

Life is full of surprises.

Yes, we can.

I like the interdisciplinary approach in Steve’s book  ( Where Good Ideas Come From).

No wonder former Netscape founder hangs out with Creative Artist Agency man.

His point: it took a long time to build relationships with creative people, who tend to clusterize.

While the speed of chip set increases every 18 months, it takes time for artists and writers to cross-pollinate.

Thus, science (and tech) needs to learn from the arts, and the art side certainly benefits from innovation by engineers.

Bloomberg series on Game Changers show us that even in down time, creative genius won’t sit still.

They keep innovating their way out of  chaos and crisis.

It was great to see people scan their bar codes stored in smart phones for airline check-in.

I am sure we won’t stop at just one “adjacent possible”.

May the best innovation win.

 

summer breeze

Rolling black-outs in the city occur here quite often.

So it’s refreshing to ride through District 1, where the Saigon River occasionally delivers some wind-tunnel effect. Lightings are up to prepare for the upcoming holidays. Bakeries are setting up kiosks everywhere in town, pushing their Moon cakes.

We got Givral joining the confectionary space traditionally belongs to Kinh Do and Dong Khanh. Sweet tooth and sweet spot.

Summer to many is now officially behind. Moon Festival is next.

Children enjoy lanterns, candle lights and of course, Moon cakes.

We used to light our lantern each year, our version of Christmas tree. Being kids, we knew this season was ours.

I hit the nerve when I ordered mini-moon cakes as give-aways at MCI booths back in 1995.  With lanterns, moon cakes, even grown-ups wanted to switch over. They knew that someone cared, and paid attention.

Marketing is not difficult if you begin and end with the customers.

Another childhood imprint was when my parents took turn to recite their freshly composed poems on New Year‘s Eve ( I had barely finished sweeping the floor in time to greet New Year).

The poems were to usher in luck and new hope for the entire year.

I wonder if the tradition still carries on at that sacred hour.

But for this Moon Festival, the children certainly will sing that traditional song, while carrying around their lanterns.

And sure enough, lingering summer breeze might snuff out their candles as it did mine long time ago.  May I have some lights please!

strong as an ox

I am back to the land where people work animals into daily speech:

– strong as an ox

– wrinkle as a monkey

– dumb as a cow.

Everything gets used more than once (recycled): plastic bags, banana leaves. In Understanding Vietnam ( through literature) published by Berkeley Press, the author, after surveying many well-known pieces, came to see that the tension between “Hieu” and “Tinh” is key to understand Vietnam.

I would posit that this tension gets new expressions and variations in today’s context. For instance, the “Hieu” (loyalty to parents and extended families) could easily evolve to loyalty to a team or support system (women group).

Meanwhile “Tinh” gets complicated with the introduction of Western understanding of sexuality (even homosexuality).

I can understand why Asian young struggling with changes challenges.

PBS has a piece on this subject. A Chinese peasant girl went to the city for work (garment). She saved up enough for the annual trip back home on the train. Upon arrival, her independence came to a head- on with traditional mores.

Bang! Conflict. Collision. Compromise.

Changes in morality, changes in the tools we use and changes due to the influx of FDI and foreign influences (smoking or non-smoking?).

Web sites are discussing a country bride who was set up to marry a Korean man through a matchmaking service, only to die a week after her arrival to the new country.  Groom wasn’t well in the head and did not take his medicine, or so they said.

Infrastructure need FDI. People need Foreign Aid even without “Tinh”, as long as the “Hieu” gets taken care of (building country houses with modern electricity and plumbing for parents).

This tension intensifies with each new element gets added-on into the old system.

So the parents of the dead bride now experience the most extreme of unintended consequences.

This leads me back to the bamboo as a symbol of strength, but a quiet one.

Bend with the wind. Unbreakable. Resilient.

I would rather use plants to describe strength, than animals (the Zodiac leads first with the Rat, yew!).

Western world, on the other hand, works machine, instead of plants or animals, into their daily figure of speech: robust, retooling, reboot.  Whatever the dominant factor at the time in that society becomes the mental construct of the day.

With 90% back then, and 60% today, Vietnam can’t help using the buffalo to describe strength (Buffalo Boy vs Cowboy). Everyone can relate to the usefulness and stamina of an ox, a traditional symbol of strength in Vietnamese literature. After all, it has been around helping to cultivate the field for thousand of years. (Similar to Wolf Totem in Mongolia).

But it’s bamboo that helped mobilize Quang Trung‘s troop to traverse the entire expanse of the country, during New Year, to defeat the invading army. Two soldiers carry the one who rests. Very much like Spain during World cup. They were unselfish. They stayed with their triangular formation.

They claimed victory, rightfully. History (rewritten one) always favors the strong. But the strong have known this for  some time: strength alone doesn’t assure victory. Just go to the museum of Natural Sciences and see now-extinct dinosaurs for yourself.

 

Traditions: collide and compromise

East meets West. New Year and Valentine’s. Families vs lovers.

In Vietnam, with a strong Confucian foundation, filial quality stands above all else.

So on that first day of this year of the Tiger, sons and daughters are expected to show up first thing at the parents’ door steps.

Then, in the evening, this year only, they can sneak out to rendezvous with their sweethearts on Valentines Day.

http://english.vietnamnet.vn/lifestyle/201002/Tet-trumps-Valentine%E2%80%99s-Day-in-Vietnam-894718/

If you took the fireworks in major cities into the mix, we are talking about Western traditions wrapping around Eastern culture.

Today, it’s President Day in the US. And President Obama will face tough choices: to meet with the Dalai Lama, risking to alienate a huge bond holder.

We expect Presidents to take a stand at the crossroad: Kennedy facing up to the Cuban invasion, Johnson choosing between the Great Society or inheriting French Vietnam, and now Obama electing to have government intervention and involvement in financial institutions.

Values often collide and force a compromise.

You can measure a man’s maturity by seeing how many of those compromises he has made. (And his integrity by how few).

By design, we are made of “opposites attract” from a set of parents. No wonder we walk that tight rope our whole life (at least I have) with the creative tension of push and pull.

The only way to keep the balance is to move forward, inadvertently, creating a Third force, a synthesis. Einstein once said life was like riding a bicycle, you needed to keep paddling forward to stay in balance.

Those in sales can recognize this dynamic: corporate expectation versus market reality. Customers expectations ride on top of lab engineers’ vision.

(Google video store had been a flop before the YouTube acquisition).

So, red lucky envelope or heart-shape chocolate? Just one day, but an important one, we saw a rare eclipse. In Vietnam, young lovers have never celebrated  New Year this eagerly. They have their own agenda. And sneaking out will only make forbidden fruit taste all the more sweeter. And years from now, it will be their turn to scold their young ones for not showing up first thing (with a mischievous smile of course). This generation wants it both ways, without compromise. Text and talk.

Amuse ourselves to the next level

Neil Postman didn’t see the rise of game online when he penned “Amuse ourselves to death”.

But he was on to something worth discussing: we are heading toward becoming a couch-potato nation

or in China, Internet-addict camp.

When Chinese kids get sent to these internet addict camps, we witness another unintended consequence of our high-tech living.

This puts Mr Watson in the early days of IBM to shame. He said the world market could use a few, but no more than a dozen machines.

Nobody could foresee the fall-below-the-line price of the chip, maybe except for Gordon Moore who predicted the doubling of chip speed every 18 months.

My kid watches her cartoon on Hulu. Asked why she didn’t want to watch it on TV. She said on broadband, she could watch it when she wanted it.

This kid even wants control, and not waits for a scheduled time by the network.

I will have to put a cooking alarm clock next to her desk just to limit her screen time.

Or let her “amuse herself to the next level”, the highest of which is at the Internet addict camp. Long way from Florida. And she will have to speak Chinese to

understand guard’s command. Maybe it’s not a bad idea, the unintended consequence of it all: internet addicts from the West get sent to Chinese internet-addict camps,

thus picking up a foreign language.

Neil Postman built his premise on the 4-hour average  (TV watching). Now it’s 5 hours, not counting the many hours online.

No wonder advertising appears in most unlikely places: pop up (download wait), stand-on (beer aisle), stare at while in a moving elevator or taxi cab.

We are living on New York minutes, even if we are  not physically there. Because New York is now more than a New Year countdown. It’s every day’s ticking, a state of mind. No more Crocodile Dundee coming to New York.

New York is now in Dundee’ Australian back waters. Hello, hello, hello…..

Luckily, we have a built-in alarm clock : it’s our bladder. Nature break. Machines will have to wait. Human will survive and be adaptive. Continuous re-invention.

To the next level of distraction and anesthesia.

On being a foreigner

Train, plane or automobile, we all try to get somewhere, point A to point B.

Far enough to be looked at as “foreigner”.

The Economist has a piece on this subject to highlight the decade of globalization.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108690&source=hptextfeature

I was surprised to find Vietnam, especially in HCMC and Hanoi, to be very cosmopolitan i.e. a large body of expats and international tourists. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese themselves travel overseas for educational and occupational opportunities.

Recent news showed violent incidents among the Vietnamese expat workers in Eastern Europe and Vietnamese students in Taiwan.

This is a withdrawal syndrome of a minority group (cocoon) when facing the “threat” of a larger majority, the Others.

And while regrouping, they turn onto each other, love or hate. It happened in Paris with the Russian immigrants, Little Italy in the US etc..

In the 1920’s, Americans found Paris, its cuisine and culture (as Parisians perhaps now discovering Big Mac and small Mickey) fascinating. Hemingway and Maugham all had memorable recollection on this era.

Something about greeting the New Year in a foreign land, far away from home.

The balloons, the balls and booze are the same, yet in the company of strangers, one experiences “lonely crowd” syndrome.

And everybody is aware that while it is New Year there, it’s not yet New Year else where (a testimony to our globalized world) e.g. Russian New Year lands on the 13th, Chinese a month later etc….

The Greek have two different words to express this sense of time: kairos and chronos.

Kairos is the fullness of time, while chronos is just the ticking of time (like 60 minutes on CBS, or 24 hours with Jack Bauer). In Kairos, one can greet the New Year with a sense of awe and anxiety e.g. a decade ago with the Y2K scare. Kairos brings about convergence of chances and choices. Cultivation and harvest time.

Other time zones will have to endure the chonos, to take their turn at counting down. Ten, nine, ….

Everybody sings Abba’s “Happy New Year“. Cheap champagne was passed around. Balloons were popped. Kessler described this experience of Russian celebrating their expat New Year in lowly quarter of Paris (The Night of the Emperors).

It is only to show that we have no control over the passing of time, and the changing of places.

More and more cities are being transformed to accommodate population growth. And real estate are in demand, driving the poor to the outer edges. Dark side of change.

The hard part is to get pass that denial: the more things stay the same, the more they have to change.

Thatcher was found to be utterly against the influx of Boat People into former British Hong Kong.

And look at where things are now . The economy in Asia is resilient, just as its people.

In this 21st century, the real foreigness perhaps lies within ourselves: that ardent refusal to admit that the world had moved on, and that it will be easier to be Margaret Mead than Margaret Thatcher. Not with the broadband penetration, not with the mobility of smart phones, and not with supersonic boom in E commerce and global commerce. If Made-In-China is no longer foreign, then nothing is foreign today. Just a hop on the plane, you will be from point A getting to point B.

Global shuttle and reshuffling of the card deck. An illness or blessing? All in the eyes of the beholder. But no longer a foreigner in 20th-century sense. Not with I-pod, I-phone and I-nternet.