The Last Chance In the Capitalism World ?

Frankly speaking, I would have never imagined this day when USA is struggling with its economy. For instance, the automobile industry is really struggling and gives warning for serious consequences in the wake of collapsing.

It seems these days that people around the world are buying Toyota more often that you think. My uncle in Singapore told me that the two best brands are Toyota and Honda where the former is rugged, tough and economical and the latter is ladylike; smooth, desirable and not-so-tough. He warned me not to buy Nissan and etc. But I think Nissan Grand Livinia is cool.

So, nobody really cares about buying USA made cars, I suppose so. And it seems like the Americans also don't care about royalty anymore.

We have heard the story that Lenovo Thinkpad and Apple Macbook is not the most popular laptop in Japan, it is Toshiba because of royalty culture. Similarly, we also know that Koreans will only use Korean-made technology, so forget about selling to Koreans. There is actually not much different from Taiwan.

The point now is that culture differences has succeeded in helping the economy to become more diversified and helps with competitions which in turn promotes better economy.

But the Internet and globalized media is probably the spoiler. End-users' opinions have never been so important than before, couples with proliferation of blogs, the trend of buying is shifting to one-brand economy. Just think about Microsoft, Google, Toyota and whatever, you would understand.

This may not be a bad thing after all. This offers a window of opportunity for those rising stars to capture the global market with high possibilities faster than we could imagine. My take is that it could happen to you pretty fast, but you have to work hard and fast. Internet is definitely going to be the ultimate market place, we need to find a way to engage users more proactively and effectively through the Internet. And it is low-cost thing to have access to the Internet.

However, what's bitter is that when it is over, it is over. Entrepreneurs today running a risk that there will be no more loyal customers, it is possible that anyone can replace you.(Unless you become the one-brand)

The one-brand economy could perhaps be the peak of capitalism and the world needs to be ready for the next economy and I don't know what it is.

Anyway, the timer is still ticking.

7 Days Left to Receive USD$10 Millions from Google

The submission date for Google's Project 10^100 is on October 20th, 2008. That means there's 7 days left for us to submit our ideas for a chance to be picked to receive funding of USD$10million to turn our ideas into a reality. It's USD$10million for a good cause to help as many people as possible. What best way to celebrate their 10th birthday, by giving.

Ideas on how we can help our own communities is something quite noble, it does not have to be hi-tech or grand. Let's encourage Malaysians to submit as many ideas as possible to make the world a better place to live.

Check out the full press release.

Google's Thoughts on the Future of A.I

A.I (Artificial Intelligent) has always been around, but ever since the emergence of search engines, its importance become toned-down. But it is always important.

Long time ago, we did explore the issues of A.I research, check out here. The conclusion then was the study of A.I is too broad for a subject and no one knows the exact boundary, rendering research seems forever.

Google recently published their own version of the boundary in the blog; The Intelligent Cloud.

In a way, I must say that the evolution of computer science is to make human obsolete that its ultimate aim is to program a human brain, we are still far far away.

Google's approach will be focused on searching intelligence couples with cloud computing. Pretty much a lot of semantic web. Check out the blog entry. It is always interesting to know what industrial leaders are thinking ahead, this is why we must read blogs.



Finally, I just want to conclude is that when the world has descended into the reality as depicted by the movie The Matrix, our foresight may be flawed; human may be the one who wanted to kill the 'live' machine and not otherwise based on one simple premise; life is at stake.

However, according to Google, we are still far far away.

Why must machine be the bad guy ?