Tag: Twitter

California Dreaming

TIME spotlights California on its cover this week.

As a country, California would be with the G8 ( between Italy and Brazil, thus displacing BRIC with CRIC  i.e. California, Russia, India and China).

Yet it has no world-class soccer team (despite having in-shored Beckham) just yet. That’s said, it is one of the brownest States in the Union. And it will stand tall, demographically and technologically.

I wrote about the up-trading Taco truck in my earlier blog. TIME also showed a Korean BBQ truck  using Twitter to announce its stops (high-tech high touch).

What surprised me was foreign students’ major in the State: more chose Business and Management over Science, Math and Engineering (exactly what the Chinese need to move up the value chain).

With 13 percent Asian, California has a natural inroad to Asia (just a plane-hop away).

Washington State has also capitalized on its geographic “proximity” to set up strong ties with the East (and sell some apples, Window and Starbucks while at it).

Who wouldn’t want to live in California: paradise and paradox, problems and promises, most congested freeways, yet greenest state. It has a underexploited Modesto and an overexposed Hollywood , clean tech and bio tech; gay and straight.

California is home to dream factories (Disney and Dream Work). So enamoured with the big screen that the State elected actors to be its Governor not once but twice. Its script keeps getting a rewrite even on location (budget cut? well, hold up a knife Governor. “This is a knife” the line last said by Crocodile Dundee on his first visit to the Big Apple). It’s used to be “Go West young man!” Now, it’s keeping going West and follow the sun.

I talked to people in the Orient and they wanted to come and live in California. To them, California is America (especially if they have a free account on Yahoo, own an I-Phone and watch YouTube, all California home-grown, like its wine and raisins). In up scale China, one can find new developments that were modeled after Newport Beach.

“All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray”. If the gubernatorial race is an early indicator of things to come, we are in great shape. After all, anything can happen in a dream, or when we “sit down and pray”. The truth is, my relationship with California has been a dysfunctional one, as is the State.

Despite its high costs of living, California is where you’ll find innovation around the corner, or in the garage .

Californians don’t do attic or basement like East-Coast counterparts. They compose music on wheels (Jewel), produce TV shows on wheels (Jay Leno), and of course, cater tacos on wheels. Year round, they don’t need the bottom half of their jeans (hence the cut off or zip out). This recession and recent gold price peak led a bunch of people to the high mountain, once again, creating a mini Gold Rush, California’s original raison d’etre.

Most listened to is its rush hour traffic report. Least visited is the downtown LA library, before or after the fire. When EReader and Kindle get full adoption, they will turn library into museum .  What’s hip in California (women volleyball, muscle beach) can’t be easily duplicated .  This Wednesday, Google will team up with Lala to help us search for that “California Dreaming” tune. Just a phrase, such as “I walk into a church” can trigger a bot crawl.

Or ” I’ll be back” to pop up the Terminator. It doesn’t hurt to have a Governor with sound bites or once picked up a dumb bell in what remained of  a LA fire.

And the media ate it up: light, camera, action (background lighting, actor, prop and audio). Keep dreaming California.

 

Aimy Telephony

Aimy’s birthday is this Friday.

She was born in Burbank, while I was still trying to close a telephony deal (Centrex or “cloud telephony”).

Phones get smaller (from brick phone to pocket phone) while Aimy grows bigger.

She went with me to many direct sales events, Daddy and daughter singing “We Are the Champions” to psych up for  sales training and rah-rah session.

Now she is nearing adulthood while telephony is nearing zero (pricing).

It seems as if the 60’s movement for social change could only do so much in one generation.

Technology picks up the slacks and pushes the envelope (Moore’s law and eco awareness).

Things have gone from a moral approach to a viral approach , from “the Death of God” to “the Death of Distance”. Amazon, Salesforce.com and EMC are offering data warehousing and data mining service (clean tech not smokestack, time-saving not labor-saving). I just got winked at by an online-degree ad girl on Yahoo homepage.

Voice mail, SMS, Twitter and Facebook help usher in the reputation economy (prosumers’ advertising), where each of us is either the spreader or receiver of viral message (Have you seen the trailer for Amelia?). Distributed worker bees.

As of this edit, Facebook fans are protesting the new “recommended” feed, in place of the old Live Feed.

Telephony and computing converge to give us crisp and clear data streaming transmitted at lightning speed. Our next frontier will be peer creation (Web 3.0), Blu Ray on steroid.

Aimy created her mySpace page at a very early age. Daddy can barely catch up with “friends” on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Amelia flew in the air onto the unknown. Aimy “hip hops” on the ground and online. All the powers to her. There is no better time to live, on this side of medical breakthrough (TB, Polio and cholera, all curable) and on the crest of technological invention (Twitter, Google glasses, I phone). As long as she gets it, that one is to live life as if one were dying. It makes every bit (no punt intended) all the more sweeter. War, Recession, Terrorism can never weigh us down. We are the champions!

Go to Disney Land, Aimy. Or see Amelia. It’s your life now. No permission is needed. My struggle is your strength. BTW, Aimy and company won US Championship in Hip-Hop. (How about that for subliminal persuasion).

I think I am going to text her on Friday. It costs much less now with “all you can text” deal. Near zero pricing Triple Play.

A billion bucks!

Twittering to the tune of a billion bucks?

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2009/tc20090924_956402.htm?campaign_id=related_AK

And the deficit changed slightly to the tune of 1.29 trillion bucks.

Since when we are anesthetized to these huge dollar figures?

But I must give it to the Lab geeks who came up with new inventions: copying over the distance (fax), texting over the phone (SMS), Voice over IP (Skype) and Facebook/Twitter (user-generated content).

During the Tiananmen Square incident, protesters tried to send and receive fax documents.

And last summer, in Iran, people twittered. Signs of the time.

Tech and social change.

And the Beatles albums got remastered.

“All we are saying, is ‘give Peace a chance'” (Lennon Legend).

It’s not that we are lacking the means for social discourse but we certainly lack the will.

Tribal societies just hunt for enough food (no Frigidaire) and the rest of the night, gather around

the fire, to hear the Chief telling his folklores.

Definitely those fairy tales lasted longer than 140 characters. And I bet you any of the people in that community could recite those tales from memory, their version of soundbites . But they wanted to hear it again and again from the Chief. It’s assuring, like a child who needs to be tugged in . Somehow, in the darkness of night, they believe tomorrow will be the same, safe and secure.

Well, today, you can’t even walk out of a check out line without double-checking your receipts (because the line items

might have been charged with the older and higher prices by the computer, while the sign advertised a lower amount).

Supply chain, bar code, algorithm fluctuation (just like airline price change).

We have mutated way past the smokestack era. And it depends on what your view of the future is,

a Billion bucks for Twitter might be too low an evaluation. You see, it’s the Southwest Airlines model for Narrow-Casting. Citizen news, where it happens, while it is happening. No microwave (truck) nor microphone to make news.

Just twitter. I am sure YouTube will soon limit their video length to accommodate the Network effect (more video, the higher value of the network).

We, worker bees, buzzing and pollinating  user-generated content, 140 characters at a time, to a tune of a Billion bucks. By the time the bottom billion joined in, a billion bucks will have been too low an evaluation.

Whoops! I have just passed 400 words. Old school! Forgive me. My first tech sales was a fax machine, then “brick” phones with separate batteries. And way back then, the Chief used to ramble on way past bed-time. What’s the hurry? Isn’t information (hence knowledge) supposed to be infinite. I got it. We are still operating on old assumptions of network and spectrum scarcity. A agricultural-based Malthusian view  as applied to the information age.  When Twitter gets properly IPO’ed, it might have enough cash in their war-chest to increase data rate to 150 characters. I will then be much happier.

 

facebook lite

On Facebook Lite, people with mobile devices can just send a quick comment and get on with hearing the President Speech.

http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/09/11/with-facebook-lite-a-step-deeper-into-twitter-terrain/

Social networking not “for here” but “to go”.

It’s the equivalent of talking to friends while on a moving train or automobile, or  while paying at the cash register.

We are a society in a hurry. Real hurry!

And I must admit, Twitter did give Facebook a run for the money.

Snappy attention. Shorter bursts of data stream. Get to the point and in your face.

“You lie”.

It’s common for us to go about all our lives, doing a million things, good , bad and ugly, only to be remembered by one short burst or comment.

The President warned Wakefield High School Students to be careful of what they post on Facebook.

I might add, especially be mindful when commenting on Facebook Lite. The nature of mobile device might fool one into thinking that it’s just a short text message. No it’s not. It’s micro-blogging. And it meant to post, not sent and be received by an intended audience of one.

Back to consumer sentiment.

According to the latest poll, people (80%) are still bewildered, the state of a deer caught by an incoming head light.

Despite Bernanke being a student of the late Great Depression, he couldn’t make the problems go away.

We need to send someone to jail. We did. We need to get people  a new set of wheels. We did.

We need small wins, consistently. Well, we haven’t. Cash for (rusty) appliances? Cash for bulbs? Cash for clunkers?

I propose Cash for old phones. That way, we are stimulated to move on to Smart phones wired with Facebook Lite.

Nurse a Miller Lite while at it. Friday afternoon, on White House or any house lawn, thumbing your key pad . Can we all get along? But I still am careful about what I post. We got enough to deal with these days, from ID theft to IOU. Who need unwarranted short bursts that will come back and haunt us digitally, and eternally.

You see, bad comments are now so democratized that they don’t belong in the purview of public figures, just like

blogging wouldn’t be just for Martha Stewart or Huffington. Just being at Wakefield High will do. And it’s not the word count that counts. Short bursts, like “you lie”, will do. My short comment is “you win, I win, win-win”.