Finally back

After the one-month trip, I finally came back to Hong Kong, the "home" with friends and my bed. Fighting with the jet leg, It seemed I got recovered in two days, which is a bit faster than I thought.

I took the continental airline back, and met such a happy flight attendant. He, in his fifties or sixtieth, is so happy, either when he handed me the towels, or gave me another ice cream. He talked to passengers just like old friends. When he said goodbye to everyone at last, he even started singing. Such a happy person. Compared to some others, (especialy a young male attendent who has no expression in the face at all), this elder man really make travellers feel relaxed.

So here is what I learnt: love your job; if you don't love the current job, then find the one you love. Life is short, and why don't live happily?

media should stay as the role model

The TV media in U.S. such as CNN and NBC have gradually given up replaying the video sent by the gunman in the Virginia Tech Massacre. But the question is: should the TV media exaggrate those video 24 hours that day? The shocking images didn't send a positive or even neutral signal at all, but instead, increase the pain for the family who lost their children in the massacre, or lead to a few people's bold idea to do something more terrible than this. (A few students or grown-ups in U.S. were arrested yesterday for threatening to destroy some other schools after watching the VT massacre). Also, for print media, Time magazine set a good example for all the other media, while its front page is 32 portraits of the people who were killed, instead of the gunman's pictures with gun and knife.(Many newspaper made the gunman pictures as the frontpage picture, which is really terrifying and disturbing) It's those people, including young students and respectable professtors, that should be remembered and known by the public.

All in all, we have to think about media's responsbility in the current competitive environment, especiall for TV which could show the raw material containing terrorifying or misleading content directly to the public. We used to focus on the quality of journalism a lot, but now with the spreading of unlimited info, could media still stay as the role model and a good watchdog? or should we do something to fight for it?

The media's role in VT's reporting will be a very memorial day to me, especially as I am travelling in U.S. and watching the media's development directly. Luckily, I gave my voice on this. Here is a piece of news reported by WKYC, an affliate of NBC, in Cleveland. I was in the show, telling my concern. (You could either read the news via here or watch video here)

What's going wrong in the media?

After watching the Larry King's show on CNN for over an hour, I decided to give myself a break by turning off the TV. The massacre in the Virginia Tech really disturbed me these days after reading tons of information on the newspaper(almost over four pages every day, such as USAToday) or watch the TV with the gunman's self-shot video with terrifying words repeating again and again. At first, I was in the deep sorry for those young lives; then, I was terrified by the gunman's horror words; and now, I felt I was disturbed by the media who has whrling around those words, no matter where those details, follow-ups are necessarily needed.

Curiosity is one of the most bright character of human beings, but also the weakest one. You couldn't help wondering who the gunman is, his background, how he did it and why. But is it really important for you to know all the details? No, people will soon forget about it in one week, or in one month. The reason why you want to know is because of the need to meet the curiosity, a growing and never-ending, bigger and bigger human need.

However, media doens't really care. It is the world of competition: the first is always important, no matter if the media could report the gunman was from China or turning out South Korea, or the disturbing video of the gunman's threatening words.(NBC must feel honored in some way as the recipent of those video). But is it the first always in a good-quality shape, or it is nonsense stuff, nobody will care. So the gunman achieved his purpose by shooting 30 plus young people and respected teachers, making him famous on every TV station, and then publicizing his character and theories by sharing with the TV station on his video, photos and transcripts. Some Chinese blogger named Zhuweilian (in Chinese) has a good comment, and quote: some youngester must sit before the TV and stare at the news, planning some other "activities" on the classmates or teacher they hate.

I guess one day we will not stand this at all, and I expect some new form.

some secret Google function

Today I diabled some certificates of my Firefox to remove some virus from the computer; so my laptop will not automatically go to certified websites, and have to ask for my permission anytime. Then accidentally, I found I have to go to *.google-analytics.com all the time either when I access to Gmail.com or blogger.com. I tried this website, but seems doesn't open to the public. what kind of this websites should be, and what is its analysis?

Anyone having idea?

Lady on the mission

My next stop is Austin, Texas after the DC. To my surprise, Texas is a quite enjoyable city with nice people who think of the world in a quite ambitious way. As the former "Lonely Star", Texas is quite famous for its arrogance to the other American states. But the good side is that they turned to think of the U.S. policy from a very neutral and unbiased way. It is easy to meet some academic who is very concerned on U.S.'s future, or the working journalists caring about the neglected stories by mainstream media.(Like this one: Texas Obeserver, with very intelligent editors, and supported with an very interesting business model: financing by a non-profit organization)

Topics discussed included U.S. news media, immigrant issue, politics and online media. Of course, I am most interested in the last one. It's amazing to find that so many American media have been concerned on the competition of online media, or even overconcerned, I would say. We visited one of the largest city newspaper here: to my surprise, there is a Web Intelligence Report attached after their daily budget(the story list for editors to discuss every day). "Online is the future to the newspaper", I heard many people are repeating this sentence these days, however, the one making more sense is "online media is one of the pipes to deliver the information, just like the print media". The technolgy is not that advanced now to make print media immediately digital still keeping in the format of "paper", so holding a newspaper on the way is always needed, though the demand is not as much as before.

Austin is not a big city, but is the capital of the country's largest state(the size is bigger than any European countries). Here you could have nice Mexican food, live music and more importantly, a group of nice people welcoming you to their home. I got a red stylish "cowboy" hat, and they now call me cowgirl, haha, cool.

A new window to me

A very refreshing tour to me, I am in Washington D.C. now. The weather is cold and freezing, which made me catch the cold. The 16-hour-long flight from Hong Kong made me sick, too. But all in all, it worths the effort.

I am on a very prestigious fellowship program visiting the U.S. to learn about the media practice here. More important, the learning starts from a policital pospective, which is a totally new area to me, a working financial journalist. The schedule is very tight each day, and I found I could only sleep six hours a day to catch up the conferences, seminars, meetings and then self-readings.

Most of the information we got from senior government officials and research fellows are off the record, so I couldn't speak a word. But the process talking to those people is something really exciting and fasinating. We talked about the new technoloy's impact on the U.S. media(one of my favorite topics), George W. Bush's wrong decision on the Iraqi War, the Cross Straits relations between China and Taiwan, or even who will won the 2008 presidential campaign. The people we met are all knowledge experts, though they may have different biases. And it is very educational to listen to them, challenge them, and also, bring a Hong Kong and China perspective to U.S.

Tomorrow, I will be heading to Austin, the Lonely Star once-to-be. The experience will be very different from D.C. and I know I will learn another U.S. from there.

P.S. the Internet access is very limited here, and very expensive(US$10 a day). So I will keep more time on writing my thoughts and hope to share with you folks soon)

Tornado in U.S. , gone gone gone

My mother has been worried on the Tornado Alley in the middle of U.S. these days. Yeah, I am going to visit the country this month and one of the stop will be Texas. Isn't thaPublisht scared? Hmmm, good luck to me.

The Google story

I am on vacation this week. One of the best ways to spend time is to read, and another is to go to gym.

So I bought The Google Story, written by David A. Vise. It is a quite readable book, describing the whole set-up process for Google, one of the world's most creative companies. I found several things I didn't know about Google from the book.

(1) You could use Google to search on mobile phones. (Is that right? anyone having experience?)

(2) Larry and Sergey, the two founders, was running out of cash at some time and even were refused by a certain amount of companies to sell Google. (wow, if someone bought it at that time, would the world be different now?)

(3) Googler's conveniences: on-site laundry, hair styling, a car wash, day care, fitness facilities with personal trainers, a professional masseuse, beach volleyball, bean bag chairs, even dog. ( You know what it makes me thinking: socialism-type companies, or better......)

(4) The two fournders were also reluctant to hire an outsider as CEO, and even fought with Google's ventural capital investors on the hiring. And Eric Schmidt is one of the last getting good luck, though being tested and kidded around for several rounds. (wow, I thought it was the two founders who admitted they are short of management practices, hence hiring an outside professinal instead)

Just finished the first nine chapter, and the company becomes vivid to me.

More Investment education, or more trust to the government?

I've been reading an investor education book published by People's Bank of China, the nation's central bank. It is like a finance knowledge ABC book, not very hard but a bit interesting. I brought it from Beijing to Hong Kong, and read it just for leisure. The book's purpose is to let the common people understand the financial market better.

I remember both Premier Wen Jiabao and central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said publicly that they hope investors, especiall retail investors, could be much more educated. They should understand the risks in the capital market and be cautious in putting money in.

Speaking of this, I remember when I talked to a Beijing friend who is a fun in buying stocks and funs. If he, or his wife, or his parents, has some extra money, he will be more than happy to buy stocks, or funds, or even properties. He told me: "trust the government, it is more powerful than you could imagine."

If investors all act like him, why they would be bother to be educated????

buying online articles

I don't ususally buy online articles. but when there is something good, I don't mind to try.

One day when I was looking for some job-related topics, I found a research report with the brief sounds very interesting. Unfortunately, the website said it will charge me two yuan on my mobile. Just two yuan for a story, it worths, isn't it? So I sent a SMS to a number it speficied, and was waiting for the reply, under the introduction. However, nothing happened, not even a short reply saying if it was successful. I don't have time to check if I was charge of two yuan, but the experience, with no reply, was really annoying.

The service providers in China should have a good future, but currently with the monopoly of China Mobile and China Unicom, the SPs chose to build a good relation with the two, instead of building a good relation with the customers. However, customers should be a more important source to decide if the SPs' business should develop big. Until now, many SPs are just reaping a quick profit, which made them locate in the worse and worse market condition.

"Customers are always the God", while the shops are only a complimentary, not necessary. Many small restaurants are also having a good business in China, though they are not that fabulous as big ones. That's called diversification, and it applies to the mobile industry, too.

Amy's busy busy days

It's been very busy for the past ten days. I am in Beijing, meeting a lot of different people, senior government officials, businessmen and enterpreneurs. Getting up at six is not one of my strength, and it makes the life those days quite terrible. Luckily, it came to the end and I will be back Hong Kong very soon.

I especially like talking to enterpreneurs, the group of people very candid and frank. I remember one billionaire told me about the government capital granted to support the rural development. "Only 20 percent of the money could be received by the farmers, while the other 80 percent is spent on building nice offices of local government, repaying loans as well as eating and drinking by officials." Those words are very true, but not many people dare to speak it publicly. Now he raised some proposal to the central government avoid those misuse of funds.

Those enterpreneurs are the first group to benefit from the economic reform policy, and you could say a few of them may have some bad behaviors just as you read from media everyday. But some others are becoming more and more responsbile on the society development, and they have become a power to balance with the government. and they are likely to have stronger voice.

Beijing is snowing today

Beijing has one of the most beautiful views today. It is snowing. Viewing from the window of my apartment, the rooftops are fully covered by the white snow. It was quite cold today, even below zero in the evening. However, the air is very refreshing. I just love it. Don't get surprised that I am still in Beijing. I guess I almost fell in love with this city. (though I love Hong Kong, too)

Pity didn't take pictures today. Let me try tomorrow if the snow doesn't melt.

some business opportunities in the BJ subway

The subway in BJ has the largest network among all mainland cities, I guess. What people normall do in the subway?

From my experience in Hong Kong where subway covering much smaller area than Beijing, I usually read the news from my mobile phones via GPRS. I use CSL service now, and I could enjoy the news channle, including Reuters and Dow Jones for free. Though the content is much more limited compared to the wires terminal version, it is a good resource to spend the time and learn new things.

In Beijing, seems many people read newspaper or send messages in the subways. However, if some service providers could serve the passengers free or charged mobile content, such as e-newspaper, e-game. etc, when they get onto the train, it will attract many passengers as well as advertisers, and more efficient than sending the content to someone who are working in the office or sleeping in the home. It will also be more diversified than the TV carrying advertisements all the time on the trains.

However, the problem is the mobile network doesn't really cover the BJ subway very well. sometimes when you call, the signal suddenly disappears, friends told me. So here is the tricky, don't hang off immediately, hold on for another one to five minutes with patience and the call will go through again.(hope the other party has the patience too) . The cut off of the signal will be a bad experience for passengers, but there must be a way to solve the problem some day.

Kind of like location-based service, but should be more professional and legal.

I want some good tea

The best Chinese tea has Chinese tea: different taste after several round of drinking. But seems people nowadays already used to the quick tea, such as Lipton Yellow Tea. After one round of drinking, the teabag remains no taste at all. Is there a way to create teabag with really good tea and different rounds of taste as well?

Is there a future for IPTV in China?

I visited my aunt in Tianjin during the Chinese New Year. To my surprise, her home is already equipped with three television sets, one carried with satellite channels, and the other two are equipped with digital channels.Pretty advanced among all Chinese families, however, my uncle still complained on the channles the family have.

"The satellite one has a lot of nonsense channels such as channels from Middle East or Europe and we couldn't understand even a single word, while we have to pay as much as 20 yuan per month each to the two other sets". My uncle said he will be pretty confused on if he should add another set some day to watch the nonsense satellite TV or pay another 20 yuan per month to add it into the digital channel as required.

With hundreds of TV channels available, we still ended up at watching CCTV 1 together, the general channel you could see even in the most distant corner of China. I couldn't watch Bloomberg though the satellite provides it because none of my other family member could understand it. That's called compromise.

In China, the tradition is still for families to watch TV together after the dinner. I couldn't imagine three or four family members(the normal number for a single family) to watch TV in eachone's bedroom. You could choose not to watch TV, but watching a different one in the different room will be considered as unloyal to the family.

That's exactly what I did. I will watch the "national geography" with my father though I don't really like it. I just enjoy the feeling of watching and talking together. That's why family means.

A bit out of the track. Here back to IPTV, transfering the TV through the telecom network. The technial working theory is the same, but the culture is different. A family could own one single TV, but it is rare that a family could own one mobile handset or talk on the fixed-line phone together. So it leads to the different business operation practices. Telecom operators couldn't just copy their business practice in telecom industry to the TV industry.

Reuters reported today that "BesTV, a Web TV joint service between China's largest fixed-line company China Telecom Corp. and Shanghai Media Group, is talking to potential foreign media partners as it eyes a three-fold rise in viewers by year-end." It is not new, in fact; it was reported earlier that an Australian software provider would invest $7 million to set up a channel on the BesTV on the health development. On one hand, it shows the shortage of content for Chinese operators; on the other hand, it tells that the market need more specialised professionals to provide the best content suited to IPTV. IPTV's advantage is its capability to personalize the content as well as watch any program any time. However, the content itself is much more valuable. And researching on what kind of content will attract the family audience will be much more useful.

TV is public, telecom is private; IPTV, the co-product between the "public" TV and "private" telecom, is yet to position itself properly.

The latest figure on SMS, 14 billion

14 billion pieces, this is the latest figure for the number of short messages in the Spring Festival. It means China Mobile and China Unicom will at least make the revenue of over 1.4 billion yuan in one night.(at least 0.1 yuan for one piece)

The latest figure from Ministry of Information Industry, the regulator of telecom sector:
The mobile users sent over 430 billion pieces of SMS in 2006, rose by 41 percent from last year.

Seems SMS is still the most popular telecom services now. The market needs something new. Standing in the view of mobile users, people will need something more customized and characteristic than a common SMS. And text is not the only way to show the wishes too.

Happy the new year of Pig

Here, I want to send my best wishes to readers of this blog, since I couldn't send the wishes one by one(neither do I know how many there are).

It is the year of the pig in China. and everyone is happy about it because pig is a lovely animal. You could hear Golden Pig all the time, which means you will have great fortune and luck this year.

I am back to the hometown, one of the few times since I started my career in Hong Kong. Yesterday I watched the traditional Spring Festival Show held by CCTV in home, which is really not that bad this time.(Maybe because I have a lower standard towards the show now). Plus, it is quite related to the telecom and IT companies. China Unicom is the sponsor for the call center, while you could send the SMS to either China Mobile or China Unicom to vote your favorite programme. Baidu.com is also one of the sponsors to help vote for the best Chunlian, the couplets written on red papers posted on each side of the front door to get good luck. Even many of the songs got the opportunities to join the show just because they are the most popular rings downloaded to the mobile handsets.

Besides the show, there are plenty of advertisements on the value-added services such as "Color Ring" and songs downloading.

More interestingly, I start to send SMS very frequently to send the New Year wishes, so does my parents. We sit together and send the messages, written by "professional SMS makers", to all the friends, and then enjoy the feeling when someone send back another different ones. There must be a good revenue generated during the period.

Then my father asked: "those SMS, in fact, are really boring, right? There really aren't many customized ones where you could read the sincere heart of others. " Exactly, maybe how to make those SMS more human-related and more characteric to individual people will be another wave of new revenue.

be careful to your mobile, a risk to leak where you are

With the era of 3G coming, are u prepared for the era of leaking more of your privacy?

You may know that there will be more multimedia content in the 3G era, but do u know that 3G network could give the mobile operators a thorough picture on the location of mobile users anytime? Those information is attractive to many parties, including the advertisers, investigators, your friends or even your enemies? How to protect the privacy should be on the agenda of every country to protect the mobile users.

A South Korean media reported that the three largest mobile operators in South Korea(SK Telecom, KTF Telecom and LG Telecom) made a revenue of at least 230 billion S.Korean won by providing location information illegally from August 2005 to June 2006. (Chinese version of the story is here) The story said the three operators provided the location infomation of the mobile users to the third parties without the users' permission.

It should not be a problem in South Korea. In the 3G network, it is easier to get the location information in a dynamatic way. However, the location information should be the privacy of the mobile customers. You don't want to be followed all the time, isn't it?

Google is turning to cable TV?

Google is turning to cable TV to provide more service. This is undoubtfully, no matter whether the Reuters report quoted the exactly right words.

Since Google's successful experience in the searching service, its following moves, from email to blog, have leaded several rounds of revolution in the Internet world. This time, it jumped beyond the WWW world to the cable business.

It's good move in terms of basic concept to give different function to Internet and Cable. Internet will deliver text information, while cable will be still in charge of the transfer of multimedia info. However, the two have totally different character. Internet is a worldwide network, while cable is still based in different geography. Google may be right to lead the technology trends, but how to cooperate with cable to deliver the content is still a problem.

For cable TV operators, Google, to them, may become a threat that they may be reluctant to partner with. They are also carrying more cashes than Internet operators and telecom operators, so the incentives to cooperate with Google may not be that strong.

Anyway, unless Google could buy some cable TV to expand,(better with a controlling stake), things will turn around faster, maybe.

one-way billing model

Major mobile operators in China annouced the one-way billing models from February this year, including China Mobile Beijing, China Unicom Beijing, China Mobile Guangdong, China Unicom Guangdong. I still remember last December when I first disclose this in our paper, many people were suspious of it, and even some analysts from investment banks called me to confirm. Now I could finally tell everyone that I am right and they should have trusted me at the first hand.

Speaking of this, two things I would like to expand a bit more. First, the power of media. The Internet really made the world flat. I remembered when my story was published that day, many mainland newspaper translated and republished again. Checking Sina.com, the best news website in China, you could find at least one hundred translated pieces in print media and online media citied our paper. That's amazing. No one could believe it ten years ago when a Hong Kong newspaper published something and the next day the whole story spread nationalwide. But today it is true. Even big financial media such as Bloomberg and Reuters even quoted some newspaper from nowhere on specific news. My question is how we could clairify the quality?

The next thing is whether mobile operators will suffer from this one-way billing model. Haven't really read some pieces thoroughly covering the whole effect brought by this new model. But I always believe the mobile operator stocks have changed from "fast growers" to "Stalwarts" in the past years. They could generate a lot of cash but not grow as fast as before. They are still good companies with strong cash flows to support, but don't expect it could add another 400 million users in five years. So the one way billing model to them may not be a good news at first, as it will immediately suffer from the loss of revenue from the receivers' side, but in the longer term, it will benefit because of more active calls and talking minutes. So better grade it as "sell" in one year, and then "buy" after that.

The thing I don't quite figure out is the China Mobile stock rose by 1 percent when my story on the introducing of one-way billing system was published that day. Come on, everyone knows it will be bad news. Sigh, the capital market is always hard to beat.