The invisible red dot in the room

The saying goes “the elephant in the room…” when there’s something that needs to be discussed, but it’s so large and obvious and obviously incongruent that no-one can bring themselves to mention it.

Singapore isn’t an elephant, it’s a “red dot” – but nevertheless, I’ve read a couple of articles recently that were obviously relevant to Singapore, and yet this island wasn’t mentioned.

The most recent is this article in the Times about Dubai, and its rise as a financial capital. I’ve mentioned Dubai as a rival to Singapore before, if you’ll pardon the rhyme. Obviously, it sees the need to diversify away from dependence on oil, and is choosing to go down the road of developing as a financial centre. Key quote:

Dubai has another incentive to succeed in what may be a winner-takes-all game to become the Gulf’s financial capital. Unlike Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, it has scant reserves of oil and gas. To be assured of success, it must be financially clean, and accept principles of accountability, transparency and regulatory rigour. Its development in the past decade has been extraordinary and proves that the Middle East is not, by definition, a basket case. To continue to be a model for the region and the world, it must continue to invest in integrity.

No natural resources, just people; a reputation for integrity, incorruptibility, and the rule of law. Where have we heard that before..?

So if Singapore now has a rival competing on its own turf, it needs to be making the most of its only resource, namely people. Another article that made me think of this regards China, in The China Vortex: Where’s the Fantasy, Creativity and Imagination In China?I know, it’s just about gaming. Yes, I know it’s about China, not Singapore. I know, Singapore is throwing lots of money at developing its creative industries. And yes, I know, Singapore is also trying to attract world-class industry leaders to set up shop here. And yet, and yet… I’m not convinced yet. I hope it will work, I really do. I know for sure that there are lots of bright and talented young people here… but there are so many obstacles in their way, in the shape of ‘B-Arkers‘, the middle managers who don’t contribute much and can’t see beyond “the way things are done”, who fear change and resist it, who try to stifle anything that changes or challenges the rules… These people exist worldwide, of course, but the type seems firmly entrenched here….

Beijing to get city-wide Wimax coverage?

I’m just acting as part of the echo-chamber here, but this article from Ogilvy suggests the rollout has begun, and will really impact from next year. Cool.

Chinese phone design

I was writing recently about losing my Nokia 6708, and was talking about it off-line with Niti. One of the annoying things about it was the lack of a password, meaning that the handset can be sold on and re-used by whoever’s got it now. The only security measure available was for the SIM card, not the phone itself; we were wondering why such an obvious and needed feature wasn’t available for what was quite an expensive smartphone.

Happily, my new iPod does have password-protection, so at least if this goes AWOL, no-one will be able to benefit from it…

Anyway, I read an article today on Virtual China, about a Chinese-designed phone that seems to be pretty well-protected, with fingerprint-ID required. This is the CECT T100 (heh, sci-fi fans will be smirking at that). By the way, beware the CECT website – every link seems to open in a new window, and they have horrible background music on every page. But if they can’t do web design, their phones seem to be done very well – to me, it’s a reasonably nice-looking phone, with an interesting set of features that will suit the Chinese businessman on the go! (Not necessarily what I would want in a phone myself, but it features streaming TV and Karaoke as well as the usual multimedia features). Most important, though, is the biometric access control. Pretty cool…

When China Tech News reviewed the T100, the comments list seems to indicate that it already has a substantial global following; the most common query is about the lack of a manual in English. This suggests to me that people are buying it from Chinese suppliers based on its design, but that the company isn’t actively marketing it outside China.

I know from my time living in Beijing that the phone shops are very well-stocked with locally-designed handphones, and it would appear that their quality is just getting better and better. China definitely seems to be innovating fast in this sector, and once they start making a serious effort to market internationally, they would seem set to transform the market – particularly as here in Asia there’s none of this ridiculous locking of handsets to one particular network, as I read about in the US and Europe…

New feedburner RSS link

I’m thinking of moving this blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation, with a new domain name (or rather, back to the old one). Those of you reading via RSS, could you update your feed to this new one:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/trigram

Hopefully, you won’t lose track when I migrate…

Flying kites saves world, thank Google

Is that over the top? You decide for yourself. I’m just kind of blown away by the latest I, Cringely column. PBS columnist Bob Cringely has put together a team for an X-prize-style competition intended to stimulate innovation for a lunar mission. In the course of his team’s research, they came across proposals for generating cheap electricity from huge tethered kites, drawing energy from the powerful high-atmosphere winds. Read the column for the links and implications, but essentially the possibility is there to completely replace all current forms of generating electricity, and ending almost all need to use oil. The political, economic and environmental implications are plainly enormous…

The man proponent of this idea, a New Zealander, now works for a California-based company – whose main investor is… Google.

According to the article:

According to [the]figures, then, to completely replace the one million megawatts of electricity generated in the U.S. annually by a total of 16,000 generators of various types would require 10,000 of those 100-megawatt tethered flying wings.

That’s not many kites at all — enough to require approximately 3,600 square miles of territory, or about the size of Puerto Rico.

A quick search on Google suggests that:

Chinese experts estimate that China’s annual electricity requirements will increase to 4,400 TWh by 2020.

China Clean Energy Program

Now, it’s Saturday morning and I haven’t had enough coffee, so I’m not going to bother doing the sums, but I suspect that China has enough unused land – in the Gobi, perhaps? – to fly enough of these kites to meet its energy needs completely. And oh, wouldn’t it be delicious for China to establish energy security by flying kites! Hahaha, they could certainly afford to buy or manufacture as many as necessary – it might even help the US’ balance of payment with China, who knows…

Picture source: therefromhere on Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

iPod’ed

I gave in, and bought myself an 8Gb iPod touch. It’s actually a fairly pathetic amount of storage, given that even my old 1st 2nd generation iPod has more storage, but let’s not go there. They’re pretty popular, it seems – most of the shops I tried were sold out, and won’t be getting any more for a month or so. Some had a couple of 16Gb versions left in stock, which suggests that people here are, like me, going for the slightly more affordable version. Eventually, I found a shop in the Funan IT mall that had stock left. I didn’t let myself think about it, and just bought it.

Setting it up wasn’t quite as smooth as I’d hoped. It actually doesn’t work with my old iBook, which is still running OS X 10.3 something, which was a bit of a surprise – in all of the reading I’d done in research, I hadn’t seen it mentioned that older Macs won’t run the iPod Touch. Boo for Apple. So, I had to run it with my Windows XP laptop. It makes little difference, in that most of my multimedia files are on an external hard drive, but it was a bit annoying.

I set it up for local time etc, and a number of other things, before I ran the update to 1.1.1 – which then wiped out all of my settings so I had to do it again. That was also annoying. Setting it up to use the wifi in my apartment was actually pretty straightforward, though, and the web browser works pretty well.

I took the iPod with me when I went to the cinema last night, and I liked it: watching videos while on the MRT was enjoyable, and the screen is plenty big enough. Sound quality was excellent for listening to music whilst walking around town on a Saturday night. I haven’t bothered to use the Apple earphones, though: the lack of a volume control immediately makes them useless to me, since I know I move through widely varying areas of environmental noise, and I don’t want to be constantly getting the iPod itself out of its carrying pouch to change the volume. Speaking of the carrying pouch: although I’ve been pretty careful with it, and kept it in a soft pouch while I was out and about, the iPod’s chrome back picked up a couple of scratches within the first few hours of use. Hmmm.

Overall, though, I think that with its small size, great screen and wifi access, the iPod Touch fits my personal requirements; I won’t regret buying it.

More phone thoughts, Emerald Hill

I’m so indecisive.

I took a look at the Nokia N73 last night, and it just… doesn’t speak to me, if you know what I mean. I know, it’s only a phone, but still: if I’m going to spend a fair lump of cash on something that will be with me for most of the day, I want it to be something I like having around.

Also on my mind are the new toys from Apple. I was taking a look at Preetam’s iPod Touch the day before yesterday, and I was pretty impressed. Then last night,after I’d seen the Nokia, I went to meet up with a friend, a Singaporean, who I know from Beijing. She’s back for a few days, along with a number of other Beijing-based foreigners. One of them, a Norwegian games developer and entrepreneur, had an iPhone that he’d bought, unlocked, in Beijing for RMB 5000, or thereabouts. It had a number of applications installed on it, including SSH, which he was using to connect to his servers. Cool.

Now the iPod Touch has far fewer 3rd-party applications available than the iPhone, and Apple seems to be doing the best it can to keep them both crippled (shame!). A bit of searching shows that there are a lotof people working on opening them both up, which raises the possibility that in the not-too-distant future, an iPod Touch might be able to run SSH, Skype, and lots of very useful software. And given that Singapore has an increasing number of places with free wifi, a wifi-enabled iPod would certainly be a better option than changing my current, very cheap, phone plan in order to get expensive internet access. I can still keep using my old Nokia 6108 to make calls…

…until I go to China again, probably early next year. By then, the Meizu MiniOne will be on the market, and the latest specs do actually make it look very attractive – more than the iPhone, if I’m honest. Of course, by then, the Asian launch of the iPhone will be closer, and maybe Apple will have improved it – but according to what I read now, they’ll enable Japanese and Korean input, but not Chinese. WTF???? Unless that changes, I will definitely get the Meizu! Of course, by then there may even be a new Apple PDA in the works…

Anyway, back to Emerald Hill… The reason there were so many Beijing residents there was that China is really tightening up its administration of foreign residents. It seems that anyone who has been living there for five years or more has to leave for at least a month. Next year, the Public Security Bureau will be enforcing the rules on registration much more closely, while it will be harder to get visa changes or renewals through the slightly dodgy companies that advertise all over the place… All natural as China modernises, of course, but it does mean that some of the edginess and bohemian ways (in Haidian, at least) will vanish. Oh well.

Looking for a new phone

A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.

Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now – especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.

Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:

• a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
• mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything

I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work – constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy – are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were – to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!

So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…