Tag: Web 2.0

Transparent trail

I saved up my visual history in 3/4 inch, VHS, slides, prints, CDs, hard-drive, flashdrive and cloud.

Not so much for me, but for my daughters .

That collage documented my fits and starts.

Each person is a narrative whose ending remains a mystery ( ‘in my end, is my beginning”).

In the Year of Magical Thinking, the widow-writer kept wishing that her husband would return (hence, magical ),

and refused to give his stuffs away.

The hard part about closure is to get through denial.

We have come a long way, since Watergate (White House secret taping) to Wikileaks.

The best way to avoid having some thing bad traced back to you is not to leave one in the first place.

What is whispered shall be announced from the roof top.

I blogged about de-clutterization. But this time, it’s not about our hoarding habit (fax machine?).

It’s about using whatever format or latest update (Adobe) as tool and transparency as policy.

Companies spent enormous amount of time, energy and money to whip up great-looking “About us”.

Until prospective customers detected incongruity and inconsistency  (reputational lag).

We live our digital lives one day at a time in open-source mode, with myriads of combinations to collaborate and co-create (the sharing economy).  We will have to relearn TRUST as online currency before Web 3.0 can happen (co-create).

The twin brother-in-law of Congress woman Giffords said on CBS: “from space, I saw this beautiful planet and I wouldn’t guess there were so much – bad things such as random shooting – going on . We can do better “.

Out in open space, with no one watching, one presumes, like Nixon, that misspoken words are not coming back to haunt.

But in cyberspace, the opposite is true. We do live our virtual lives with more-real-than-real-life ramifications. We leave behind our digital fingerprints and carbon footprints, together form a narrative, to be mined years from now by “bots”. Faint-of-hearts need not apply! (as of this edit, Apple just purchased a company whose software can pinpoint where we have been i.e. GPS plus past footprints to predict our next likely frequent stops).

Yearning for the new

The Year of the Cat.

Al Stewart in white suit.

Cyclical, eternal and in sync with nature. No “dominion over the land and seas” as in Western theocracy (in an ironic twist, outside my window, the work crew keeps digging, plowing, flattening and paving the sidewalks – one after another, from water to power, cable to phone companies – one dead-end street, multi-crew, stretching on for months).

People just want to rest, renew and reinvigorate.

Eat the fruit and replant the seed.

Eat the fruit, and remember those who planted the seed.

Greet the young and remember the old.

In letting go, one is free to receive the first visitor on New Year.

I could always tell who was going to be our first visitor while growing up in Vietnam.

Great Uncle, in bow tie.

(It would be an equivalence of man in black during New Year Eve’s party).

The bouquet, the basket of fruit and a bowl of brisket, all symbolize abundance from nature . This was during a pre-supermarket era i.e. fresh, not frozen.

Lunar New Year presents a different perspective.

I remember a movie joke line “the only restaurant opens over Christmas is Chinese“.

And perhaps the opposite is also true: the only establishment that is open in Vietnam during Tet is Circle K. (backpacker’s alley).

I miss the firecrackers. They replace them with fireworks now.

But the scent and sound of firecrackers truly marked the changing of the “animal” (from Tiger to Cat). New Year Day saw various shades of pink and red firecracker’ s ash on rich man’s lawn.

Everyone yearns for the new: new clothes, new money  and new coat of paint. The ancestral altar also got buffed up. My late parents used to pen some poems right after midnight.

If they had Web 2.0 back then, they probably would have gone on Facebook and “status” it. People forgive and forget. Life is hard enough with war, separation and loss.

For three days, food is taken for granted.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Let’s hear it! 10-9-8…count down. No, there is no such clear-cut.

Just a crack here and a pop there, and before you realize it, New Year has arrived . It dropped a ton of optimism in a hurry, like an overtime UPS man running late. Growing up in war-time and in poverty is like doing exercise: you have to do it every day to make it work for you (you learn to look at yourself and others not by the amount of possession,  but by the richness of one’s relationships).

New Year in Vietnam is  a time for communal self-renewal. Everybody yearns for the new, for a better tomorrow. For now, Al Stewart’s the Year of the Cat will do just fine, since it was a top hit back then. Every twelve years, it becomes relevant all over again.

 

I want my Skype call!

By now, we all know about our right to make a phone call when being arrested.

That phone call usually is placed from a pay phone (soon to be a museum piece).

Skype has been down (and slowly back up to full speed), and 26 million users worldwide felt the pinch.

VoIP. Conversation chopped into tiny pieces to be reassembled at the other end (with some help from the listeners to “guess” and fill in the gaps).

The process is called quantization which creates a digital graph of an otherwise analog waves used in landline telephony.

Skype helped sell a bunch of headsets for sure.

And it has been disruptive to incumbent Penny-talk services (Skype could be called Zero-cent talk).

With Facebook founder visiting China, we can expect more E commerce apps. How about Facetalk, with caller’s profile and friending list.

People communicate in whatever way they deem convenient.

Skype and Twitter just happened to be King of the Hill at the moment.

Until the next innovation comes along. No wonder there are titles such as “First, break all the rules”. Who would have thought that which was intended for Data transmission (Internet protocol) can be used for voice and video. Even Google which already “got it” more than Microsoft, seemed to have missed the boat when it comes to Web 2.0. If only they paid attention to the human side of users, who are made up to be social animals (hence, the rise of home networking, which caught the attention of Cisco, now Linksys-Cisco).

Sometimes, the market trickles down (IBM mainframe to Texas Instrument, to Xerox then Atari/Apple computers). Other times, it’s the reverse (Social Media and Mobile apps for the work place, business casual attire etc..).

Whatever the case, I admire the distribution channel: they always make sure we have new stuffs to buy for Christmas e.g. Susan Boyle CD, Wall Street DVD (first, it cheated investors out of their money, then the fictional film version is taking Main Street pocket change), Ipad and Blu-Ray. It’s not a new century at all. It just happens to be the most crowded one. Translation: lots of gift wrapping: toys for tots, text for teens. Skype for all..

 

Act 2

At the gym, I couldn’t help notice two guys with Mountain-Dew T-shirt. We can still have “black swan” scenario in our life time e.g. the US rises again from the depth of deficit (muscle memory), or someday a Hispanic president will seek a M&A with Mexico (will not be the first time the US offer to buy more territory).

When we went through Y2K (getting plenty of water and batteries) we anticipated worst case scenario. People said this has been a Lost Decade. Now, that the worst has been behind us, let’s buy some champagne and balloons.

The challenges of the past decade have steeled our resilience but at the same time diminished our faith in institutions.

While tragedy comes in pairs (two recessions, twin towers, two disasters in Louisiana), luck will also come in pairs. Look at what Web 2.0 has given us: friends from Facebook, free videos from YouTube and millions of Who’s who on LinkedIn. The list goes on and on, as one tweet begets another in this 4-G, 3-D, 24/7 always-on world.

As we defy gravity by going to the “cloud”, our experience will grow much richer

All of our investment in hardware finally pay back with an abundance of software options albeit cases like Iridium, Concorde etc…

Our global village will show case Best of the Best. Stay tuned. The next decade will unleash apps from 20 years old’s who are now in Middle School (Yahoo just bought  Tumblr, and now eying Hulu). The sooner they are bored with texting the better. New toys for tots will spill over as Act 2 for the rest of us (Act 1 being the Ipod, Ipad, mobile apps like Twitter, Social Network such as Facebook). With an audience of 7 billion, any content will be devoured in an instant.

Build it and they will come. Level 3 must have looked deep into the crystal ball. Without the likes, we wouldn’t have Netflix as is. Clusters of innovation all converged in our time while adoption rate has never been quicker.

Instead of shopping for batteries, I will go for balloons and instead of water, champagne.

 

Telcom’s waste in Vietnam

From beepers to printers, from pay phones to city-phones, Vietnam was in a hurry to leapfrog to latest in Telecommunication.

After all, there are a lot of territories to be covered, even now, with 3-G. But some attempts stick, others faltered according to an article in Labor newspaper.

http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=538113

It stated that some rural households were given all three proprietary sets even when not need-justified.

Join the club! It’s not just Vietnam which tries to catch up. It’s the entire post-industrial world which try to connect 24/7. First the device, then the social network. They are discussing mutation of Web 2.0 such as Meet up when your flight is canceled, or rousing young Mexicans to join a dance to promote tourism etc….(too bad the nude photographer did not have this app available to him when he first got the idea of going from city to city to take “artful” group nude pics).

Some wise doctors even prescribed an office with treadmill and desktop combo to combat obesity, to him, an inevitable result of our information age.

I am not sure how CFO’s will buy-in to HR proposal to equip their offices with not only high-speed computers but also slow-moving treadmills (they have just considered cloud computing to get rid of the servers to save on energy bills, now this?).

It lends new meaning to “sweat equity”. Hawkins is no stranger to tapping his key board while on wheels. The guy has always been prescient (except for understanding what love is).

Wi-fi technology has given ways to a host of application (laptop and latte).

Back to our wasted phone booth and city phone (limited range, with no roaming). These apps have not been widely adopted in Vietnam.

Whoever pitched these products did not foresee the ubiquity and fast roll out of 3-G in Vietnam, hence, death on arrival e.g. S-phone. Once you got a hold of an I-phone, it’s hard to come back to beepers, pay phones and city phones. Owning an I-phone is making a statement i.e. I have arrived.

Observers new to Vietnam are marveled at its rate of  I-phone adoption i.e. how can people own an I-phone which costs nearly 2/3 of their annual income!

The same question was asked not long ago and still raises suspicion when people saw young women on Vespa and other expensive import scooters. Often, they were dismissed as being call girls until those critics themselves could afford these newly price-reduced scooters.

The next wave would be cheap auto imports and other electronics manufactured right there in Vietnam for domestic consumption (Canon and Samsung).

By then, the country will be inundated with industrial waste. And rural households will not only receive all three network termination devices, but also a host of other hand-me-down waste components such as tube TV‘s, desktop computers and even a phone booth, if they want to use is as shelter from the storm. I can’t wait to see people trying to place a 3-G mobile call inside a phone booth in the rain. At least, old technology and new technology can both be put to use in modern Vietnam, where nothing is considered waste.

 

Tech rules again

We all saw Google’s numbers surge. I remember the last time I feel this way was a decade ago. Something is in the works. The market responds. New apps, new ways of accomplishing things.

This might be it.

Just like a line in “It Might Be You“, a theme song in Tootsie.

Maybe it didn’t come in the shape or form we were expecting  i.e. green shoots. But it seems right. A surge in productivity, efficiency and confidence. We barely scrap the surface of Web 2.0.

Just as Wall Street and the old guards found more dirt in housing finance, Silicon Valley struck new gold via better apps. Somehow, as a system, we are self-healing, thus ensuring species survival.

We will soon have to do away with yesterday’s vocabulary, such as “the  engine of the economy”, “ramping up” etc.. all belong to the Industrial past.

In their places, let’s talk about “intelligent search”, “smart appliances” etc….

We will come to understand ourselves, with higher IQ, EQ, social intelligence, and cultural intelligence. The deeper the degree of automation, the freer we are to learn and grow.

In short, minimize chores, and optimize passion.

This 90/10 equation was once enjoyed by aristocrats now available to the common man whose hands are holding smart phones i.e. all-in-one information and data sources.

The faster the processing speed, the more available information, the quicker the decision.

The gods must be crazy (remember the coke bottle dropped out of the sky  into a primitive tribe?). Via GPS alone, human now get bird-eye-view, lifting his gaze way above earthen sky.  Advances in medical technology and environment will push life expectancy even more. It used to be 47 back in 1900. Now it is easily in  the low 70’s and counting.

World’s median age is now 28. But in a decade, this median age will change dramatically. Future aging world population.

(Imagine summer concert full of old rockers, wearing golf shirts).

However it turns out, we celebrate the triumph of human imagination, invention and innovation. One day, the machine will finish this blog for me.

It already knows based on a year’s worth of data what I am going to say next.

So I can go fetch my second cup of coffee. Have a great weekend.

 

Deer facing headlights

WSJ most read article is “Why people can’t make decision” (see my other blog, “buy-in behaviors”).

I also found another article that reinforces this period of indecision: companies are saving the money they borrowed at bank’s low rates, thus fail to spur the economy.

Why would people borrow money at low rates, then sit on them? Companies need leadership (i.e. doing the right thing as opposed to “doing the thing right”). They forgot a biblical story about stewardship.

The post- WW generation are now in leadership position. Ambivalence is the norm (don’t blame them, after Vietnam and Watergate).

Right now, both parties are blaming each other for the ailing and failing economy.

And we in turn blame ourselves.

Self-recrimination paralyzes us, resulting in indecision. In short, deer facing approaching headlights.

Charlie Rose series on how the brain works, shows the frontal part of the brain, when damaged, causes moral lapses.

Our economic system got injured and is now in recovery (not as desired, but to be expected).

Any movement helps.

As long as the deer starts moving, and wakes up from its trance.

The stats indicated that it was a 18-month long recession. But it feels like decades.

The last recession, coincided with the dot.com burst, gave rise to Web 2.0 (whose contributors had a lot of time in their hand for Wikipedia and YouTube).

This time,  it shouldn’t be an exception. Something good will come out.

If you saw the recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

With help from emergency crew (near SF), she was cut loose, and immediately swam in circle to show gratitude and joy. Very moving story of giving and receiving.

We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom to enhance our humanity. We should wake up sooner than a deer facing oncoming traffic! Go against our natural reflex to survive and thrive. Keep moving. Let not gravity and inertia win the day.

 

Reflections on connections

The medium (social network) resembles Amazon software source code (we recommend to you these people, read their profiles).

You have to open a personal account like you would at Harmony.com, and boom, you start the handshakes : “Hello, my name is…”.

Personal branding 2.0. Except, when it comes to cross-cultural connection, the First and Last names in Vietnamese are in reverse.

With one or two middle names in the mix, good luck at finding your high school friends. I couldn’t. We met again in the late 80’s.

But I can’t find him on LinkedIn.

Anyhow, LinkedIn has made it as a serious site for professionals to keep in contact, keep each other updated . It is like an elevator that takes

you up to the roof top to join an exclusive party in progress.

There are a variety of personality in life, and online.

Some just show up for the event. Others want to get the most out of it.

For me, I enjoy being exposed to links that I otherwise would miss.

It’s as if through my old and new acquaintances, I have a window to a whole new world (without leaving my desktop).

And not to mention Connections of connections.

The network effect.

At some point, we will be “connection-overloaded”. Like an old teacher at a reunion, who can recognize an old student’s face but cannot recall his name.

But one thing is for sure: we will never be alone again, professionally. There will always be someone out there who needs to hire and fire, to explore an opportunity or recruit a candidate. Or stumble upon an aha moment. And most beautiful of all, when there is a shared event (9/11 or Haiti), we grieve together, as human family should.

No matter how you want to stratify this, at the core, we all want the same thing: building an enduring personal brand, in an increasingly globalized world. Competition gave way to collaboration. And the industrial mind-set is so passe in this Post-industrial age (cloud computing and mobile computing) that if we refused to change, it would be like riding a horse carriage, reading under a lantern. Ford and Edison have done well with or without the buy-in of the Amish.

For my 300 Linked- in friends, you are my Amish family. Interacting locally (on LinkedIn), while living globally. That way, I won’t be like a sales colleague who was caught staring at the office phone and said, “it doesn’t ring”. Well, pick it up and call someone. Anyone. You are in sales. And not at an in-bound call center.

And in this Web 2.0 environment, Google them first before making that call. And be sure to first Google yourself, to see it in the eyes of the beholder.

 

white balance

Digital TV is here. Selected reality represented by a series of 1’s and 0’s. I miss the Indian-head
poster TV studios used to put up to “white balance” and signal align their cameras before each broadcast. The jump from analog TV to digital TV will be more significant than the jump from B/W to color TV. This time, we got mobility and speed, not to mention
accuracy and security. In the old days, opera houses hired claque professionals to start a string of applause. With digital TV, Nielsen will have less work to tabulate audience response (and advertisers with collection) .

With digital TV i.e. 24/7 news cycle when you want, where you want, one no longer has to warm up the TV dinner and wait for Ted Koppel at 6:30 PM to tell us how many days (444)  there had been since US hostages were taken at the embassy in Tehran (79).
One of these days, I might even upload some digital video on YouTube, by far, the best of  Web 2.0 apps, in my opinion.
After all, it’s a tech-enabled global society, isn’t it? Satellite transmission (vertical upload) renders the concept of gatekeepers (one-way information flow) kind of obsolete (well, I purposefully left out fire walls and all that IT stuff. Go IT go!). Just make sure that what’s being uploaded meet the standards of public decency i.e. tasteful and respectful.

Whatever the means, we still abide by the Golden Rules: air that which we ourselves would like to view.