Podcast: Hotel Business Centers
Spending a week in the Philippines at one of Manila’s fancier hotels reminded me how far hotel business centers have to go to catch up with the rest of the leisure industry. A weekly column I recorded...
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Facebook’s Asian Growth: Not Everywhere is North
I’ve seen some posts recently suggesting that Facebook is not doing well in Asia-Pacific. This, for example, from Forrester’s Reineke Reitsma: For example, Facebook is struggling to gain ground in Asia...
View ArticleFacebook in Asia: Seeds of Decline?
Some thoughts after trawling through data I’m collecting on Facebook membership in selected Asia Pacific countries Membership of Facebook in developed Asia Pacific territories declined for the first...
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Facebook’s ‘Locality of Friendship’
This visualization by Facebook intern Paul Butler illustrates what he calls the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived...
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Southeast Asia’s Third Mobile Tier
The mobile revolution is moving from second tier countries in Southeast Asia to the third and final tier. Whereas previously Indonesia and the Philippines were seeing the biggest growth in mobile...
View ArticleFacebook can’t take Asian growth for granted
A piece I wrote ahead of Facebook’s IPO, casting a skeptical eye over assumptions that Asia would continue to be a source of major growth for the company. Even as Facebook fever grips investors ahead...
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Innovative Complacency or the Wisdom of the Deceived?
This is where I see a real problem for developed Asia: a complacency and disinterest in the role of technology and innovation. Or is it the clarity of vision from too much innovation? Source: Avaya,...
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For the tech hubs of the future, look to Asia’s smaller cities
This is an update on a piece I’d written for Reuters six years ago on remote freelancing in emerging markets. It was written in part for a new Cisco report on Technology and the future of ASEAN jobs...
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Big, or Bigger: Southeast Asia’s Tech Economy in 2025
Google and Temasek have been taking a crack at estimating and predicting the size of Southeast Asia’s ecommerce economy for the past four years, starting in 2016 (yes, I know that’s three years but...
View ArticleThe Future of Work Rethought
I recently did two things I hadn’t done before. One was to cancel my membership at a co-working space. The other was to meet, face to face, my virtual assistant of seven years. I belatedly realised...
View ArticleNews: WiFi To Go
Now you don’t need sniffers and chalk anymore. The Premier Online WiFi Location Directory, launched a free searchable database today, featuring over 8,900 WiFi HotSpot locations representing 136...
View ArticleFax Over Internet: Still Around
This is a bit old, but I hadn’t noticed, so perhaps some of Loose Wire’s Asia-based readers hadn’t either: j2Global Communications, provider of the eFax Internet fax service, have this year started...
View ArticleIBM. It’s About the Service, Stoopid
I’m no great fan of big companies. They’re rarely innovative, their products are lousy, and unless you know how to get around them, they don’t like talking to customers. But some get it. Or at least,...
View ArticlePhones As Emergency Tools
The excellent textually.org carries a piece about a technology which would allow people to “receive emergency messages on their mobile phones via an audio system — even when networks are down or out...
View ArticlePiracy Helps Some Countries Grow
One can only imagine Bill Gates’ discomfort: Standing silently as the Romanian president told the world that pirated Microsoft software helped his country become what it is: Pirated Microsoft Corp...
View ArticleTime to Give the Telephone Back to the Cellphone?
Was interviewing a guy intimately involved in the mobile phone industry the other day, and we were comparing the various features of our sophisticated smartphones, when he suddenly leaned over and...
View ArticleFacebook in Asia: A Limit to Growth?
Here are the latest figures for Facebook populations in Asia-Pacific: Country Users Australia 7,395,200 New Zealand 1,279,260 Indonesia 15,254,060 Singapore 1,763,340 Malaysia 4,155,880...
View ArticleEvoting? First Bad Omen
I’m in the Philippines to look at their preparations for an automated evoting election in May. This morning’s visit to the hotel’s business center wasn’t a good omen: no antivirus software on their...
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