Geekonomics

Since end Sept, I think the time I’ve spent in Singapore are more like stop-overs, the shortest being 4 hours when I came back to Singapore from Kuala Lumpur and left for Chicago 4 hours later. Let me see, the cities I’ve been to include Moscow, Samara, Dubai, Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo, Chicago, Indiana, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, New York, North Carolina, Kentucky, and a couple of other American states. It was really great to experience the American Elections in the States itself!

I’m in Brunei now and had the chance to speak at a great event - the Inaugural Brunei THiNKBIG National Technology Forum. It was quite overwhelming to be interviewed by the local dailies almost right after touching down! To hear the Permanent Secretary from the Prime Minister’s Office share about their national technology roadmap, to talk about new media alongside great speakers like Dan Neary (VP of Ebay for Emerging Markets), Edward Orange who’s in charge of IBM’s Collaborative Technologies, David Abberton(Partner of Accenture Brunei), Chow Yen Lu(a former Chief Scientist for Apple), and many more distinguished presenters. In many ways, it was humbling to be sharing the same stage with the very best and to be sharing to a crowd which represents some of the very best in the nation. Very eye-opening and a great experience indeed. With the setup of the National Incubator, the iCentre, technology never looked so good in Brunei. I hope this inaugural event will be the tipping point of technology and new media proliferation and adoption in Brunei! The responses I saw today was certainly very encouraging!

Oh, did I mention that the Empire hotel where they put me up is overlooking the horizon of the South China Sea and is decked out in 21k gold? Well technically, this is the first time I’m blogging with gold everywhere around me. Blogging should ALWAYS be like this :p

Throughout my travels, I brought with me the latest Kohjinsha SX and SC series which has been great for travelling because of the small form factor, durability, light-weight, and wonderful battery lives. I’ve been able to work comfortably on long flights, hotels, airports and in the conferences.

I also brought with me the Canon 1000D on part of the journey for capturing some of the moments. I’ve just been too busy to process and upload the photos but promise you’ll be seeing some of them soon!

Next stop is Shenzhen and Seoul where I’ll be presenting at some Tech Bloggers Conference. Think I’ll get to meet the guys from Digg, Engadget, and Gizmodo. Looking forward to that!

I’ll then be back by the 20th to host the world’s first arcade eSports event outside of Japan at Anime Festival Asia ‘08 called the Singapore Arcade Showdown. Street Fighter IV will be launched in Singapore at the event so head on down to SUNTEC Convention during 22nd and 23rd Nov and experience the anime culture like you’ve never before!

And do you remember the fundraiser I was crazily working on with SCOGA 2 months back raising funds for some Singaporean cybersports champions to take part in the World Cyber Games the ‘cyber Olympics’ Grand Finals? One of the gamers SCOGA helped to raise funds for just won the silver medal! Congratulations Danny! Thanks for doing Singapore and SCOGA proud! And thanks to all of you for supporting in one way or another, you definitely deserve to share in this proud moment.

Busy busy. Welcome to the story of my life. I do miss out on quite a lot of stuff back home, especially a few social media events! Things will pretty much stay at this rate till end of January from what I’m expecting now. I didn’t even get a chance to unwrap and play with my Nintendo Wii - but I did manage to get the Apple iPod Touch 2nd Gen and it’s been lovely for my travelling so far!

Hope to update you again soon, stay tuned!

UPDATE : Here’s a lovely story by Rano, the top news blogger in Brunei whom I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting:

Geekonomics and RanoAdidas

and also with former CNET Blogger (Brunei) whom I finally got the chance to meet in person, Reeda! What a cool dude :p

Geekonomics with Reeda of AnakBrunei (Credits to Rano for the picture)

p.s. I have no idea why but I think my server was flooded during the elections where I posted some posts related to the elections. It can be quite frustrating to blog while being on the road when sometimes I have limited access to the internet

Anyways, Xmas is round the corner, what’s your Xmas wish? Check out my wish!

I’m just playing with some themes as I upgraded this blog to the latest Wordpress 2.6.2.

Lots been happening, just landed from some crazy travellings not too long and have to travel quite a bit again. I think I’m gonna do like 60-70k krisflyer miles in 1 month?

Also have some speaking engagements this couple of weeks, one of them is for the Government of Brunei Darussalam’s THiNKBIG NATIONAL TECHNOLOGY FORUM. I’ll be speaking on “Technology Focus: Embracing the New Media”. Recently, I’ve had the chance to do some strategic work for governments in a few areas of technology, one of them being new media.

Another interesting speaking engagement will be this week at National Library Board’s SME Workbench 2008 on 16th Oct, also on new media.

Guess the interest in new media is really turning mainstream. 

I seldom blog or share much thoughts on new media and social media on my blogs. I seldom get much chance to blog. Period. (Well, except for my more regular posts on gadgets and personal tech on CNET Asia.)

I’d really love to share more of my thoughts, especially on social media in this part of the world. Guess I’m holding back because of the lack of context which I’m trying to build. Anyways, I found an interesting avenue to share a bit more at the social media breakfast forum here.

I’m just glad to be back in time (though I totally missed the F1) to catch Singapore Slingers’ games against Sydney Spirits and Beijing Aoshen (translated into Olympic gods). You can read about them at our cool Doc’s blog here.

The Slingers’ next game will be really exciting against Malaysian All-stars on 5th November.

Will we bring back the Kallang roar?

Here’s a photo to share with you from my travels, taken from the Canon S5 IS :

 

JFK to Incheon - View from my window

Had many pics like this, dunno why I never really liked window seats before. But this time I’ve always been requesting for window seats so that I can snap away with my camera. I guess it’s because the Canon S5 IS is really a joy to use for such occasions. I also took some great shots from the Slingers games :

Our "Kungfu Doc" Darren Ng

Hope to share more pics soon, have tonnes of them on my harddisks here :p