Thang Nguyen 555
Cultures on Collision Course
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Tag: United States
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Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc.. to be topped up by cloud. We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes. More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a “thinking machine”, they were just happy if…
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In business parlance, we call them “entrenchment” and “creative destruction”. Find a niche, dig in. By the time you crossed “valley of death”, someone had already elbowed in to eat your lunch. As Venture Capitalists scour the globe looking for “the” deal, they find new energy and risk-taking in places like Rwanda, Indonesia and Israel, the new “BRICS“. Emerged…
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Each represents a distribution venue in various era. Now, the man behind “As Seen On TV” wants to do away with call center altogether. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/business/media/30adco.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1309474819-WalLu/L4Q4AdzzCWZqpw4g Essentially, he just keeps the container, while relying on the “cloud” and the credit card to elicit impulse buying. Welcome to the future, where pundits who blamed off-shored call centers…
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We conjured up symbols, codes and instructions for machine to act. Now that the machine does most of the work. It’s time to play? Not necessarily, because machines get smarter. So, we have to upgrade our own software to keep up since there is no return to hunting and harvesting.From Malthusian and Moore’s law. from Bowling…
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In some cultures, people felt ashamed to put on clothes, or if they dressed at all, they would go to the middle of the house in plain view instead of the far corner (where it would draw more attention to the act of changing). Au contraire, at 24-hr fitness, I notice most of the corner…
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By now, we all have seen the picture of Congresswoman Giffords, in glasses, recovering from a near fatal shooting. Let’s rewind to 1980, and imagine John Lennon with that same “luck”. I can only see Lennon as the nemesis during the 80’s, if not again during the Iraq war. We would have been stronger, not…
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The New Jersey blond lost her apartment, moved West, went to Planet Hollywood to have the crown place on her now-red-hair. Our Miss USA, from California. Down turn happened for a reason. It forces us to take stocks, to reinvent and innovate. A lot of people would rather move to try new places and opportunities,…
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Retailers in Europe figured out a way to push merchandise in this time of austerity: shop in your underwear, leave fully clothed. Meanwhile, a reporter from the BBC went to Hanoi to learn about another way of shopping: buying paper clothing for the dead (old Hanoi, pho “hang ma”). http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h35lv That’s how different East and West…
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Stories of tourist boats that capsized, ship builder that went default on loan payment, and fishing boats got intimidated by a gigantic neighbor, kept coming out of Vietnam recently. When you live along a coast that spans from San Diego to North of Vancouver, sea-related incidents are bound to happen. The latest dispute centered in the…
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If it weren’t for people like Shawn, I wouldn’t be where I am today. You see, Shawn was a shy Penn State student of the Horticulture department who wanted to volunteer his time. It turned out that the Foreign Student Conversant Program matched us together in our first year of college. That year as it…
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