It’s a long way

It’s a long way to go for me! I have to choose a good starting point

Hardship will pass

It’s exhausting at the beginning, i have to steer clearly to find the most suitable way to realize my idea. It can easily be misled, headed for the wrong direction.

But I am not afraid, it just costs me a little bit of persistence in which I abound in my entire life.

The start of Singapore Bulletin

I don’t deem this as some sort of startup ideas but rather a hobby that I am fond of.

I have recently become clearer of my current career goal (let me put it in a period of ten years), to be involved in the future of information technology as a leader of a company which excels at specific technology or idea and is able to monetize this technology or idea.

However, I have to make it rather straight that the goal of this endeavor is certainly not money – I will be able to earn enough money as I wished, I have no doubt about it, the goal is being the leader, being the one who takes charge.

It’s 1st January 2012 today, and my plan starts.

About current technology

The most popular terms are, “cloud computing” and “mobile technology”. You can find them in almost all the IT news, discussed thoroughly in every possible way. While Google is putting all its service onto the cloud, Apple starts to compete it with iCloud; Amazon, Google, Microsoft, RackSpace and many other small companies are all having their cloud hosting service; supermarkets today are utilizing mobile technology to label their goods; NFC (Near Field Communication) enables smartphone to do almost everything that IC card do; people are accessing internet more from mobile devices than from stationary computers; a more scary thing is that with all these portable yet powerful mobile devices digital media is slowly taking over print media. There are however many more things can be listed here, but one thing is for sure, our world is being transformed gradually.

About my position

I have loved technology since I was, perhaps 7, 8 years old, I have come all the way here to choose my career as a mobile application developer and I am 25 years old now. While the world is rapidly changing, I see opportunities, its just like the world when Apple and Microsoft were born, when the internet bubble was blew, this is perhaps the third technological evolution. And history tells us a technological evolution won’t last long, if I miss this time I would miss forever.

About Singapore Bulletin

My notebook tells me at what time I came out with this idea. It was at 20th Dec when I was struggling looking for a suitable restaurant for the post Christmas gathering organized by me. Though there is a myriad of information returned by just googling “restaurants in Singapore”, it’s still hard to find a really suitable one, because the information is not filtered. I can of course refer to the many websites, such as www. hungarygowhere.com, to refer to in-depth reviews, but this kind of so called specialized website is merely reducing the scope of searched information to a certain level, it does little on helping user to make the decision. Moreover, there are so many different websites on reviewing restaurant, you don’t know which one to trust.

When I encountered this problem, I immediately realized that it’s not just about booking the restaurant, but organizing event, ultimately, find a place to hang out, while booking the restaurant is only an element of it.

I quickly related this to lifestyle, especially the lifestyle in Singapore. The lifestyle here has been boring for me since I came here. Movies are cheap, restaurants are everywhere, year long constant temperature, a sleepless city, a mini and wealthy country. We almost do the same thing every time when we are hanging out, seeing a film, having a dinner, drinking some liqueur, clubbing, utterly unhealthy and stupid. I am always asking – when else can we do? You might want to argue, Why not play golf, join the wine party, trek on the Bukit Timah Hill. But in my opinion, those activities are either too expensive or too exclusive, you can’t bring them to mainstream so easily, or is there a way missing to bring them to it?

I might be wrong about this judgement, but if I don’t try to find out I would never be able to know. I wish to find out if there is a way currently missing to bring those “high-end” activities to mainstream.

The result is simple,

If I am wrong, I can realize how little I know about Singapore, about this society, I would have learnt so much that I can’t learn from school or even work. And the process of looking for the answer will grant me new skills and knowledge to deal with my future endeavor to achieve my goal.

If I am right, i would be so happy to invent a new, exciting product. I should be able to monetize it.

Either way, I am the winner.

The Singapore Bulletin is going to be a website that exhibits all kinds of activities (dining, even finding a nice place to sit together belongs to my definition of activity) happening in Singapore and help users to get themselves involved in those activities with their friends, in a convenient and interesting way.

Just like the project named “MegaBind”[1] I had previously been doing, this is another approach to reduce the information overload.

[1] MegaBind is the project I worked on during Idea.Inc’s business competition 2011, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ijdmg2zEzJJ5NN_cbwBHvf3haSA7hEaI4h1Y9uePrgE/edit?hl=en_US

Wake me up when September ends

• I started my new work as a Mobile Application Developer on 1st Sep. This is a risky movement but I think this one is gonna change my life.
• For the first few weeks of my new work, I had started to feel pressurized, my colleagues are all seniors who have been working in the industry of software development for averagely more than five years. However, the more I am pressurized more harder I can push myself. For the whole year, the only thing I need to do is improving my hard skills (@Lily He Li, I agree with you that soft skills are essential for you to survive in this society, but I have to tell you that hard skills are the key to excel at what  you are doing), more specifically, my knowledge of different programming languages.
• My long term relationship with university professor seems to pay off now. AP Chen recently have provided me some information on the ongoing mobile project/competition hosted by NTU, I am so happy to receive the internal information, it might not get me involved just yet, but I am now kept posted from an authoritative resource. let’s see what’s gonna happen, how I can contribute to this university project.
• During the whole month of work, I was engaged though mildly into different sorts of project and I had been greatly challenged by the broad knowledge needed to complete there projects, JAVA, JSP, Apache Struts, Tomcat, Javascript, html5, Biscuits ML, CSS. The list is far from exhausted. I am happy! Now I get to learn different languages from ground and I know what I am learning is useful, and I am getting paid
• Well, I am flying to Germany (at last!!!!!!) some day in the end of the month, this will be the first time I am going to Europe. I have a big big big shopping plan. As for the training (this is in fact an oversea training provided by my company), I need to get myself ready and prepared. This is the next point.
• Before my trip starts, I have to finish learning all the basic concepts of Javascript, Apache Structs, JSP. I have to make sure I am familiar with Biscuits ML so that I am able to build the interface of a website. When I come back from the training, I will continue studying Java language and enhance my skills of Javascript, Apache Structs and JSP.
• Some entrepreneurial ideas are be incubated  in my mind, probably I can provide a better image next month.
• And last but not least, yes my personal life gets progressed. I… Do you really think I am gonna talk about this here?? Oh come on! :p

See ya!

Thoughts on Jap Food, part one

It just happened today that I walked coincidentally into “Waraku”  and tasted its “Black Pepper Beef Rice”. Largely to my surprise, I found it really delicious that on the spot I felt I could eat two or three more sets. It’s quite recent in my mind as I am frequently wanting to eat Japanese food that I realize I like it more than I do for Chinese food. This is amazing!

On the other hand, whenever I feel like having some hometown cuisine it would end up either that it’s too expensive to have it on my own or that the restaurant is located in a remote region (like maybe NTU).

In my humble opinion, that fact that I am consistently pushed away from having what’s supposed to be my favourite cuisine is caused by two reasons. Firstly, Chinese cuisine is served differently from Japanese food. Chinese food is normally served to a group of people in a less casual occasion, in terms of a number of dishes of which each one who is having this meal can taste a small amount. whereas Japanese food is more often served as a set or combination of a few sub-dishes with less amount which are only sufficient for one person (Whether this is the case in Japan needs to be verified). As a result, having Chinese cuisine frequently demands a less casual occasion in which there are more than four participants. Secondly, the availability of Chinese food is less than that of Japanese food. You can easily locate Japanese restaurants even not within the premises of shopping mall (such as the subway between city mall and suntec) while you hardly can find a genuine Chinese restaurant (one must exclude those Singapore-styled restaurants). However, i’d rather see this as an extension of the first reason that accounts less for my argument. The way in which Chinese food is served defines it’s a more luxurious consumption, or at least seems to be, that it’s targeted at a higher-end market.

In a fast-paced society like Singapore, time is precious, people don’t have the mood to savor the subtle difference among dishes but tend to take a shortcut to enjoy an all-around feeling of one combined dish. Hence, Japanese food grips this need and address to it directly (think about sushi!).

At a larger scale, you can’t just blame Singapore’s pace, Japanese food is in fact much more pervasive around the globe, but countries that are as fast-paced as Singapore aren’t that common at all.

There must be something, something more important that determines the trend, and i’ve got to find it out. Having always been an advocate of Chinese culture, I regard food as one of the pillars, the spine of it. We can’t just let someone else take over us. Moreover, rebuilding the brand of Chinese food is an excellent business idea!

I ought to research more on this topic, more stunning results are coming

Mobile apps services market to reach $17 Billion by 2015

By   SiliconIndia

Tuesday, 01 March 2011, 12:55 Hrs

Bangalore: The mobile apps services market will be a $17 billion opportunity by 2015 for the IT Services vendors, reveals a new Forrester Research report.

The report titled ‘mobile app internet recasts software & services landscape’ by John McCarthy, VP&Principal Analyst at Forrester Research sizes the total mobile apps and services market at $54.6 billion by 2015.

The research firm defines delving into the “app Internet” phenomenon as ‘specialized local apps running in conjunction with cloud-based services’ across smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

“The advent of App Internet will shake up the market big way. The shift to the mobile App Internet disrupts basically everything you knew about building, delivering, and managing applications. It will also dramatically impact how traditional software is sold and delivered. Every part of the IT delivery system will be affected by these tiny tools we call apps,” McCarthy.

The report also defines and sizes the mobile apps+services market segments as mobile apps $38 billion, application development $5.6 billion, mobile management $3.9 billion, and process reinvention $7.6 billion by 2015.

Mobile apps will drive the intersection of product development and IT services. As rate of innovation accelerates across both the platforms and the apps, more product companies will outsource more sophisticated aspects of development.

As the apps become the consumption point for more and more micro content channels, software companies will buy content players.

The action and profit will quickly shift over the next 24 months to less complex and cumbersome rollouts in areas like smart medical and home security networks that leverage the intersection of Smart Computing and app Internet.

Forrester forecasted that many organizations will create a new role like chief mobility officer to manage app Internet efforts that span the call center, customer service, marketing, eCommerce, and IT. The boundary between business and consumer in the tech sector will fall completely.

This is particularly important

Serfing the web

A small spat highlights a big issue: who owns your online identity?

BHIMBGO xxx Liz R

SUCH is Facebook’s attraction these days that even Britain’s monarch has finally joined the 500m-plus users of the online social network. On November 8th Queen Elizabeth II launched a Facebook page to publicise the royal family’s doings. Within a day, it had attracted almost 200,000 “likes” from around the world plus messages such as “Hello Liz xxx”. But it had also turned into a forum for an acrimonious slanging match between supporters of the monarchy and its critics.

Buckingham Palace says that the Queen’s e-mail address, if she has one, is secret. But it will not end in gmail.com. That will spare her from another wrangle—a kind of digital trade war. On November 5th Google introduced a technical change that blocks its e-mail users from automatically transferring their electronic address book in one lump when they set up a Facebook account. It is part of Google’s efforts to defend its dominance of the internet from Facebook’s growing challenge (as is Google’s announcement this week giving all its 23,000 employees a 10% pay rise and a $1,000 bonus, which is an attempt to halt defections to Facebook).

Both Google and Facebook are run like absolute monarchies in which hundreds of millions of users (digital serfs, some might say) have created identities. Rather like mercantilist countries in the offline realm, both companies operate policies to protect this asset.

Google stoked the trade war because it wants to add what it calls a “social layer” to existing products such as picture-sharing and e-mail, making it look more like Facebook. It would help Google if users could bring their contacts to its services from other sites. But Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, wants to keep control of its serfs’ data and therefore stops them exporting contacts easily.

At first, Google argued that Facebook users would benefit if their contact data could be transferred with a click. When that argument failed, the search firm put diplomacy aside and stopped the automatic flow of data in the other direction. Facebook has now partially restored it. Google’s users can manually download their contacts and upload them to Facebook. Google then upped the ante by posting a warning: “Once you import your data there, you won’t be able to get it out.”

This raises thorny questions about digital feudalism and the law. Google believes users own information such as their e-mail address books, and should be able to take it with them wherever they go on the web. The company even has a “data liberation” team that builds tools to simplify such imports and exports. In contrast, Facebook argues that the owner of the e-mail address, not someone who has collected it, should decide where and how it is shared.

Facebook’s position smacks of hypocrisy. The firm has been able to grow so fast precisely because it has sucked in e-mail addresses from new members, enabling them to see which of their contacts are also on the network. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a system in which individuals must give permission each time a friend wants to transfer their contact details. “In the long-run Google occupies the higher moral ground,” says Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, a blog.

For years the web has flourished by making information accessible to anyone online, anywhere. The digital trade wars threaten to reverse the gains of this globalisation. This spat will not be the last, and the combatants in future tussles will include old offline powers. Germany, for instance, recently introduced an identity card that lets citizens authenticate themselves online—thus creating an alternative to both Google’s and Facebook’s systems for proving identity. Britain may wish to follow suit. It is odd that the Queen’s online persona is administered by an empire based in America, with scant regard for constitutional niceties.

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Five years later… I will come back again to read this article!!

IBM Adds Developer Tools, Resources for Expected Boom in Cloud, Mobile Application Development

Vendor’s new survey of IT professionals points to mobile and cloud platforms as most in demand for software development in next five years.

October 11, 2010
By

D.H. Kass

IBM Corp. said that it has added a number of new resources for developers through its developerWorks program to help IT professionals take advantage of an expected upsurge in software application development for mobile devices and tablet PCs.

The moves are based on the vendor’s new, global study—called the 2010 IBM Tech Trends Survey–of some 2,000 IT developers that points to a notable clamor in the next five years for mobile and cloud computing software application development and IT delivery.

About 55 percent of IT professionals participating in the survey believe that by 2015 software application development for traditional computing platforms will lag development for devices such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iPhone and iPad, Google Inc.’s Android and Research in Motion’s Blackberry Playbook.

“To best understand where enterprise technology is headed, one must pay attention to those who have a pulse on market demands, the developers and IT specialists responding to these demands and creating the next generation of business applications,” said Jim Corgel, IBM general manager, Independent Software Vendors and Developer Relations.

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“These survey results clearly demonstrate that IT professionals see a combination of disruptive technologies and industry-specific skills as key to driving near-term business growth,” he said.

Accordingly, for mobile computing developers, the vendor, through its developerWorks network, is offering a lineup of free mobile computing technology resources for mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPad, HTML5 and Android.

IBM also is rolling out an application for the iPhone that allows developers with mobile access to leverage its social networking platform, My developerWorks, to network with colleagues.

For cloud developers, IBM is offering new resources including online workshops, skills tutorials, technical resources and social networking tools to encourage content sharing, the building of online relationships and peer networks to promote innovation.

For example, this month IBM is offering four virtual events for cloud developers in which IT professionals can learn solutions to solve business and technical problems in the cloud, and how to use and build cloud-based applications such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with both IBM and open technologies.

Developers also may access an online site for technical resources, collaboration forums, articles, podcasts and tutorials on IBM and open technologies-based best practices in specific industries, including banking, energy and utilities, healthcare, government, chemical and petroleum.

Technical information also is available on IBM’s Industry Frameworks, a schematic of hardware and software aimed at helping businesses to fit technology to specific industries.

The online Tech Trends study, whose participants were gleaned from the eight million registered users of IBM’s developerWorks worldwide, also revealed that 91 percent of respondents expect that by 2015, cloud computing will overtake on-premise computing as the main way businesses acquire information technology.

Along with mobile and cloud computing, IT professionals in the study pegged social media, business analytics and industry-specific technologies as emerging areas for career growth beginning next year, while telecommunications, financial services, health care, and energy and utilities were rated as the top four industries for job opportunities.

To cement its point, IBM offered up data from researcher Gartner Inc., which forecasts spending on mobile computing applications will balloon from about $6 billion this year to some $29 billion by 2013, while the cloud services market will more than double from this year’s $68 billion to $149 billion by 2014.

In some other (via r a d i o m o v i e s)

I loved it after listening to the first few symbols!!

Here's a piece I wrote about a Utopian place. Rolling fields, no sense of time, warmth and happy solitude… Solo violin by the very excellent Elspeth Hanson. I would say it's ambient, but it's got too many melodic lines. It's a bit celtic, but it's not folk. Looking for a good title – any ideas? If you like this, then try these tunes here. Click here to subscribe, and you'll get a free download of it from my mailing list. Thanks – Philip [soundc … Read More

via r a d i o m o v i e s

Take a glance back while time’s flying

Windows live space is finally going to be shut down and shifted to “WordPress.com”, I am so glad of it. I couldn’t help trying out the new “Lived” WordPress blog only found that my last post was about two years ago during the second semester of my NTU life.

It strikes me profoundly, that even now I can sniff all the feelings I had back then. They seem to have been clipped to my memory forever like a scar, whenever I touch it I still feel the icy cold. I can feel the lost I had then, the helplessness, they are even more real then what I am now!

Yes, they are gone forever, with days, hours, minutes and seconds that I have owned before. I was so fearful, I was so afraid of losing something in my life and it was the fear that led me to them. The only thing I tried my best to protect vanished just like those I have never paid attention to, with time they fly but I can never catch them!

So be it, never disappoint yourself today, because you can never depend on tomorrow!