Making A Difference…

Always think twice or three or four times before giving out your password anytime you visit a site through a link given to you from any type of source, be it email, messenger, sms, or anything.

I recently received an instant message from one of my messenger buddies asking me to check out some pictures… (duh… this should’ve been clue #1).  I would normally be extra cautious when I get these kinds of messages through emails. This time, however, the message comes from an instant message from a messenger buddy and I didn’t know you could get phished this way.

I didn’t think twice and clicked on the link.  (more…)

Could it be that twitter has finally been brought down to its knee today ?  My updates have been taking forever to be posted and no more twitter updates are received… Silent

Questions have been asked of whether twitter could scale if it really hits the mainstream, when, say, top celebrities joined and are followed by their fans, and twitter has to serve all these updates from these celebrities to all their fans.  Could that day be the end of twitter ?

In any case, perhaps it will be a good thing…. For once perhaps people, including myself, would stop tinkering with their mobile phones… then again there are lots of other social network types of apps to keep us busy on our mobile phones..

Three areas kept coming back to me as being fascinating: information technology, biotech, and the area of clean alternative energy.

Information Technology, ofcourse, has been at the forefront of giving us innovations that better our lives overall. This area hasn’t gotten old yet. In fact, it keeps coming up with new and breakthrough things for years to come. Just look at all the sites covering the topics of new technology: web 2.0 social networks, location based services, mobile technologies. The list goes on and on and on, and it’s always refreshing to discover them:

Biotech is another one that really fascinates me, especially the rapid advancements of genetic science and engineering. The concept that we are now studying how living being work at its most fundamental level, and discovering how to manipulate and harness its powers is just mind blowing. This will have really big impact in the future on how we view nutrition, as well as how we live our lives.

Finally we come to clean alternative energy. Several factors affecting the growth in this area are: Awareness of global environmental destruction, increasing awareness of people about our own responsibility to our planet, as well as the increasing cost of fuel. There are breakthroughs left and right here. There is the research into nanotechnology for solar panels, which increases the efficiency of solar panels by multiple factors, there is also research being done to use/turn water into fuel, as well as the recent news about Tata’s automobile using compressed air.

Fascinating…!

I don’t normally make a fuss about people smoking around me, unless I have my two little kids with me.

It was about noon time on a Monday, several days ago. We had just finished watching our kids perform at school and wanted to grab some lunch. After strolling Cilandak Town Square (Citos) for a while, we decided to have lunch at Mango. We were seated inside, near the drinks counter. We completed our orders and soon after the waiter brought us our drinks.

All of a sudden, two people who were sitting right next to my kids started lighting up their cigarettes. Concern about my kids, I called the waiter and asked to be moved somewhere else that’s a non smoking area. The waiter replied “This is a smoking restaurant. In fact the whole ground level of Citos is designated a smoking area. The only non-smoking area is on the upper floor.” (more…)

I met with a gentleman which has his own IT professionals recruiting services several weeks ago and I had a very interesting conversation with him. In essence he’s indicating that the quality of the IT professionals available in Indonesia isn’t very encouraging. In fact he says only about 1% of all the new IT grads available is really qualified to work professionally. This statistic comes from his company’s own experience with recruiting IT professionals.

There are several factors that come into consideration when he says they are qualified, including, among other things:

1. Technical Competencies
2. Passion for the job
3. Work ethics and attitude.

After grueling screenings, about 99% of the applicants fail and only about 1 % “diamonds” are found. Most of them fail in the passion and work ethics area.

This is a very sad statistic. Just when other countries are gearing up for information economy, we are only producing a measly 1% qualified IT professionals.

How is your experience in this area ? Is it just as bad ?

How much time have we all wasted sitting idly in traffic in Jakarta? Time that we can use to generate more revenues for our companies, time we can use to spend with our families, time we can use to grow this nation? Instead we are spending more and more time within the confines of our car looking at the same sceneries every single day going back and forth to our offices.

On several occasions, my driver has asked other drivers about how long on average their travel times are to and from the office. On average for people going into the sudirman area it takes about 2 hours one way. If they start going at 9 o’clock i n the morning, they’ll arrive at the office at 11. With that long of a travel time, they could already be in Bandung.

If say you consider that you spend 2 hours going into the city and about 1.5 hours going back, that’s 3.5 hours per day. Say you work 5 days a week, in one month you’d already be spending 17.5 hours in traffic. In a year you’d end up wasting around 210 hours. That’s roughly equal to 26 days of work days, or about one month worth of work time.

Imagine that ! Out of the 12 months that you go to work, you actually spend one month sitting in traffic. Can you think of other more useful ways of spending one month worth of your time ?

Everything on the web is expected to be free of charge. Google offers their products for free. Most other things are free as well. Is this a good thing ?

I used to think it’s a good thing since I don’t have to shell out huge sums of money and I can get all these nifty services. That is until you try to build a business on the web. Guess what ? Whatever you are offering is expected to be free as well… Where do you get your revenue from ? Is advertising the only source of revenue that is available for services offered on the web ?

I suppose this can be good if you view it from the perspective that it forces you, as the provider of service, to tap into your creative brains and come up with breakthrough business models.

What types of breakthrough business models do you think is available for services on the web ?

Comments welcome !

Just can’t resist posting this one up..

Who\’s The Leader Of China

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