08.19.07

Saigon

Posted in Asia, Investment, Politics, travel at 2:25 pm by ngkaboon

I recently went Saigon. It is a bustling city destined to make a mark in the next 10 to 15 years. The French influence is clearly still felt, especially around the culture and food. Like any other developing city, there is too much pollution and poorly governed traffic, all the more so under earlier French influence and relatively cheap influx of motorcycles.

Vietnam on the whole as a reasonably large population but it is overshadowed due to the global interest in the two mammoths in Asia, China and India. Having said that, due to its more manageable size and distribution in population, it could still sneakily catch up with the two big players. Definitely a country with much potential..  I cannot help but think that socialist model mixed with international collaboration is the faster mode of development compared to laissez-faire democracy for developing countries.

04.01.06

What I learn about investment

Posted in General Technology, Singapore, Asia, Investment at 11:37 pm by ngkaboon

I first started investing seriously about 6 years ago. I started with subscribing to IPO. I tried internet day-trading which was quite a nightmare. I realized from quite early that unless you are using a direct terminal, it is quite impossible to day trade successfully using internet. I always thought that if I buy technology shares, I would be at an advantage because of my technical skills. It was later that I realized that technology business is more business than technology and Asia-Pacific technology is even more business than technology.

After 6 years or so, my greatest “wins” have the following characteristics

  • Sure-win investment are typically not a regular investment. Like company shares which are discounted
  • Lucky and ignorant about potential risks
  • Well-run companies in a non-sexy industry. But these companies should exhibit high profit growth.
  • Buying good company (esp with government backing) when they are low

My on par performance come from the following categories

  • Large established index stocks
  • Well-run company with a so-so business but not showing good profit growth.

My poorest performance comes from the following categories

  • Company with no profit and most likely have not establish its viable model
  • Company with profits but do not have trading volume and revenue growth. Healthy balance sheets are insufficient (in fact, it is still my greatest loss!)

Interestingly, I learn that

  • One must always be able to bet heavy on right bets to win. I bet heavy on wrong investment. Also, it pays to switch even at loss if you realize things are wrong. And it is easier to switch earlier on than later on.
  • Trying to exploit little known characteristics of a stock exchange has not work well in general.
  • Established index funds company should be acquired during down periods. They should come back up. If you invest regularly on a good company (meaning sustainable healthy balance sheet), you tend to be gain when the market swing up.
  • Profitability is not enough. Growth must be present (especially for very tech-related company).
  • A commodity value chain can have high value at some parts of the chain
  • Good companies tend to continue to grow and I must learn to have guts to buy them at a high. (The only problem is that you tend to buy them at a high and have to wait for them to hold steady or drop before peaking again.)
  • If there’s a genuinely good deal, you must be willing to bet heavy. And you should not wait because you always find ten thousand reasons why this is not genuinely a good deal.
  • The way down takes a while before it bottoms. There is no need to hurry.
  • After 6 years, I realized my investment is more based on luck than skill. This leads me to understand that it takes a long time before a skillful person would be better than his lucky counterpart consistently. (Though I haven’t invest since about 4 years or so back)

01.15.06

Do you know anything about Google localization?

Posted in Localization, Search, English Usage, Singapore, Asia at 2:51 pm by ngkaboon

Has anybody ever wondered if Google returns different results based on different localities (of course, we discount China in this instance)?

Now according to Phil, “mashup” “web 2.0″ returns 301,000 in Google UK (posting on Jan 13th). I keyed in the same search key-phrases (keyphrases or key-phrases?) in Google Singapore today, it returns 261,000. I tried going to Google UK, which strangely did not redirect me back to its Singapore site, it returns 260,000. First question: what happened to the 40,000 odd sites?
But assuming it did drop to 260,000, which 1000 sites is Google not showing for UK but is showing for Singapore?

01.08.06

Technology Adoption

Posted in Web 2.0, Asia, Technology Adoption at 10:17 pm by ngkaboon

When my best friend first showed me her blog, I was unimpressed by the technology. That must have been 4 years or so ago, circa 2001. In Singapore, blogging was definitely not mainstream. Nothing was written on the papers about it. We still did not know famous bloggers in this region.

Now 4 years later, blogging is a mainstream word. You are starting to hear the word blogging from older people (but no, my parents still do not know much about blogging. Note that my dad uses the internet but it is really for pure utility rather than social interaction. He visits youtube for example to see my baby daughter latest achievement. My mom, who is totally internet unsavvy, knows about yahoo, and no, she does not know google). Any case, blogging has definitely hit mainstream.

I had the opportunity to talk to her again this morning over breakfast. I asked her if she heard of RSS and she said no. I did not bother to probe too much about her knowledge of Web 2.0. Interestingly, she also does not know what a wiki is (but yes, she heard of wikipedia). She bought an IPod Video and had convinced her colleague at the office to buy an IPod too.

What does all this tell me? Pyra started blogspot in 1999, and I first heard of it two years late. I started writing a journal in a .plan file in my then-unix account in 1998 and for that reason, I was unimpressed. It was exactly what I could have done with an unix account and I had a symbolic link set up on my web pages directory. In other words, what I write could be viewed by the internet and if the geeks wrote the right script, they could even subscribe to my plan.html. The one thing I did not understand then was that without hyperlink, my text was “flat”. My page is lengthy (ten of thousands of lines) and because my entries were sorted in chronological order, from past to future, you had to scroll down to read the new entries. I reasoned that people would want to read it that way to get the flow. I was very wrong. Later, when comment links were added to her blog site, my public viewable text file became even more “off”. Also, no images could be added to the text file. What started out as almost the same is not the same anymore. I could not understand this well enough. I even wanted to make my blogspot site look like my text file. I did not understand that my old method was being disrupted and now looking back, I am blinded by the faith in old school technology. When a new technology arrives at the scene, you think it is the same as the old and the old is even better in some ways than the new. It is no surprise that people in sustaining technology tend to miss the boat when it comes to exciting new technology. Logically, I could have been an early embracer but I end up adopting blogging 4 years late.

That was the first point. Now, for the second point, despite the success of wikipedia, wiki, on its own, is still relatively new and has not hit mainstream, or even early adopters, at least in Asia. Nobody wants to host a wiki yet. Based on my first point, I certainly do not want to make the same mistake again of thinking everything was the same as before. Wiki promises social editing and self-moderating. Now, you ask, wouldn’t a joint account blog be the same? Yes, it looks the same but the subtleties are important. And most often the subtleties lies in usability and convenience. Wiki may not necessary disrupt blogs though. We should watch what its disrupts and hopefully this time round, I can be wiser.

01.07.06

Asia in a lagging position

Posted in Web 2.0, Asia, Technology Adoption at 8:40 am by ngkaboon

This is a repost from my 360 site.
It is interesting to note that Asia is in a lagging position in terms of information technology. This place is clearly not at the centre of innovation, compared to numerous US locations, some European locations and Israel (to a certain extent).

I spoke to a Portfolio Manager in a technology sector recently and he exclaimed that most of the concentration of funding is in hardware-related companies. Asia has made great strides in terms of hardware, but unfortunately, most of these hardware-focused technology companies are not positioned at the highest value segment of the information technology value chain. The locus of value is still very much with the US and to a lesser extent, European, counterparts.

Given that India is the single most largest software vendor in the world, it is also strange that very few (if none) of the new wave of start-ups originated from India. The attack has been predominantly on being lower cost and when considered as a whole, the strategy is to do simpler programs and lower cost and hopefully eat up the higher value (read more complex) business later on. According to Christensen, the incumbents will flee up to high-end market and eventually paint themselves into a corner. In this race, the plot is quite different, not only do the incumbents move up market, they also convince the customers to move up as well. As a result, if they can continuously force the consumers to go up, Asia vendors will always be selling only commodities.

The main reason for this state of affair is that the US is currently the single largest market for IT products and innovation is driven by customer needs. Hence, if the Asia market grows to become as large (or larger) than the US market, the game should change. We have already seen the change happening in the mobile phone market (or cellphone for the American folks). Players like Samsung are able to penetrate the markets of South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore easily because they can intuitvely understand the culture and the needs of the customers in those few areas, and these few areas make up a large enough user base to promote innovation.

Web 2.0 has largely been a US-driven wave where you see very little play in Asia (or even in Europe). Social web is still at its infancy and the largest market of the social web is still in the US, by virtue of the number of geeks in the US. If the number of geeks in Asia (with internet access) increases to a extent that it becomes large enough to support innovation, there will be an Asia-driven wave of 2.0 users.

The main obstacle facing this new wave is that Asia is disparate in languages (cultures are surprisingly not that far off from each other). This obstacle can be crossed either by technology, perfect translation service or by people’s will to change, to switch to English for geek communications. These are indeed interesting times.