Idris Jala
Read this.
Maybe being exposed to the cabinet for extended periods has the reverse effect on one’s IQ.
People do business with the Japanese and Koreans despite the language barrier because of the value of what they have to offer. Culturally they are far more advanced than us. They reverse engineered key technologies and created far superior products than the west. Cheaper too at one point, so much so that people were desperate to do business with them. The entire cycle is repeating itself for us to witness first hand. Just look at China.
Huawei was founded in 1988. Within 10 years they entered a strategic partnership with IBM, and soon after a joint venture with Siemens. Today they are the second biggest telecoms infrastructure provider behind Ericsson. Look up their entry on Wikipedia and you’ll see allegations of technology theft. Call it what you will but they learnt hard and fast and made full use of their low-cost advantage. Now everyone has to do business with them. Its no longer an option but a necessity if you run a Telco and want to remain cost effective. In just two decades, Huawei is now at the cutting-edge of next-gen mobile technologies. They have successfully moved from copycats to innovators.
How long has Proton been in business by the way?
At this point we can only hope that because we are fairly proficient in English, people will still choose to do business with us compared to the other countries in the region. But that is different from people wanting to do business with us despite the language barrier.
hype machine redux
a couple weeks back i posted this on my facebok thought stream
Hardesh Singh Proton should concentrate on developing low-cost electric vehicles for the masses. Why do we keep missing opportunities?? http://tinyurl.com/b7drdb
About the same time, this story developed linking Proton with Detroit Electric. The name rang a bell, I checked my delicious tags and was lead back to a feature Wired ran back in Mar ‘08. Read about Zap Corporation and the apparent scam in developing low-cost electric vehicles for the North American market. Detroit Electric and Albert Lam, both connected to the Proton deal, are mentioned in the article. specifically on page 7.
Will Proton be the next Hype Machine?
Rethinking physical text
Physical text is dead (as in static). Information is alive. It’s dynamic. The previous post is a piece I wrote as guest columnist for Klue. Information is constantly evolving. What bugs me about physical text is that it is one dimensional. And printing URL’s on paper doesnt work either. In most cases it is too long and looks like gibberish to be of any use to someone trying to type it into their browser. So I thought about a way to make the jump. To link physical text to digital information.
Remember ‘Quantum Leap’ from the late 80’s? The Quantum Leap Accelerator caused Sam to jump back in time and set certain events right. What is interesting is simply that time is no longer linear. Well, information in the digital age is non-linear as well. We can edit, update & remix information, everytime adding to the pool of knowledge because it is practically impossible to erase previous copies. But how does physical text, which is still a major source of information consumption, benefit from a so called ‘quantum leap’?
This isn’t a new problem. Shotcode is one of many potential solutions helping bridge the physical and digital realms. It requires a camera-phone (which is getting cheaper by the day) and WAP capability. Cheaper phones are starting to have WAP capabilities too, but it’s still nowhere near practical due to data charges.
So there shoud be a simpler opt-in approach that can work on existing infrastructure. I thought of simply using keywords next to sections of the story (much like tags online) that readers can key in to their browser which then open a list of resources tied to that article. The keywords will replace the URL’s (just like tinyurl does online) and create a bridge between physical text and dynamic information.
Having thought about this further, I’ve since come up with more ideas/features to make such a service useful. Ultimately, consumers will decide if this is really as useful as I hope. That is the best way to build something after all.
The Klue column (Dec ‘08) is what I think to be the first (and very elemental) test of the concept. See the sample here (note: this is not the final version of the column)
