Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been walking around Paris recently and it’s becoming quite common: the iPad is used as a camera. I’ve seen tourists do the same thing in Munich as well, but not as common as in Paris.

Beyond just taking photos with a larger screen, people are doing entire tours, with video and audio. I’m unaware if there are such guides, but people are walking around with the iPad 2 in portrait mode and are recording their experience. There are so many experiences to be had in Paris, so it is not surprising that people want to take it home and their iPad’s have become the device they turn to for it.

I’ve always thought that the large screen on the iPad makes a perfect “back” for a camera. When I first started carrying my Canon G10 (a point&shoot, with zoom, that has controls like an SLR to some extent) I was always trying to use the viewfinder. A trait from shooting with SLRs and dSLRs all the while. Today I’m quite happy to use the larger LCD display to compose my photos (largely out of frustration of not having a viewfinder that covered more of the frame).

I notice LCD composition generally becoming the trend. Many cheaper digital cameras don’t even come with a viewfinder any longer. People are used to using larger LCDs for composition with their touchscreen phones (like iPhone’s, Androids, most of Nokia’s touch devices, etc.)

So why does the iPad 2 come with an inadequate camera/video camera? The iPad 3 will definitely improve on this, as will future revisions. I think Apple just had no idea that people would take on using such a device as a camera…

FWIW, around conferences, I’ve seen people use Playbook’s and Xoom’s to do the same thing (but that, I’ve always presumed is the alpha geek crowd using their devices).

My last few weeks have been spent in China, Korea and Japan. I’ve been roaming with my cellphone, with my data connection turned off. The question is for how long?

It’s interesting to note that in both China and Korea, you can roam, with unlimited data for about RM36/day (USD$12). This is common in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and several other countries that have roaming agreements.

I landed in Korea and the first thing I heard? The familiar sound of Whatsapp. I’m sitting here now in Haneda, and it’s again the familiar sound of Whatsapp.

The way I see it, roaming data is becoming more affordable. It can only get cheaper.

Why is this big? The way Blackberry Messenger (BBM) has disrupted SMS amongst blackberry users is what I see Whatsapp doing as long as you have data.

Applications like Yes Life which gives you a real 018-number, and does SMS and work entirely over data? Brilliant, especially if you plan to send more than 36 SMS messages per day, or even want to entertain phone calls. Imagine forwarding your regular number not to voicemail, but to your 018 number. You pay a flat rate for data, and you enjoy really cheap call rates. Similar deals with pfingo (Singapore), PennyTel (Australia/Malaysia), and so on.

With data, you can also run Skype. That also does cheap calls and SMS messaging. Incoming calls work too via a real number, though there is no option to grab a Malaysian number.

Apps for mapping and navigation on iOS and Android? They will flourish with on-net connections, meaning there is little reason to cache.

Walking around Japan, we had a mifi, with an amazing battery life. Three connections, on-net, 6 hours! And it was close to 20mbps down, on a mifi!

I see lots of roaming companies (Flexiroam, for example) saying they provide foreign SIMs for cheap. I’d rather just always have a data connection, unlimited, for a flat rate anywhere I go. And a configured mifi. Maybe an extra portable battery pack ;)

We were in Penang over the weekend for a bit of R&R, a little bit of work, and a lot of eating. We stayed on the beach and on our last afternoon, Sara saw that you could take the horse for a ride on the beach. Guided, of course. I told her to go for it, and she protested, saying we had no cameras on us at the moment.

To which I decided, that we do. In my pocket I carry a HTC Google Nexus One and a BlackBerry Bold 9700. She had on her an iPhone 3G. So between us, we had three rather capable cameras, that do video to boot.

My strategy was to do still images with the Bold 9700, and take video using the Nexus One. I have to say the results were quite pleasing. They’re not of the calibre of my Canon PowerShot G10 (which I always seem to have in my backpack these days), or of any of my SLRs (which I’m carrying much less nowadays as I don’t have time to focus on making pictures), but they seem to get the job done of capturing the moments.

I have heard praises of the iPhone 4 and the Nokia N8 (from a camera perspective). I’ve been going to events these days, taking photographs with my Nokia N900, and they seem to be passable, suitable for on-screen viewing. You’re probably wondering what about print, and to that I have a retort: when was the last time you made a print of a photo? I’ve got about four years worth of holiday photos to print for my mother, and we’ve still not gone on to this batch operation.

Today, we are capturing our moments with our most personal devices, the mobile phone. There seems to be a megapixel race in the mobile phone space, like there was in the camera space, but all this gets reversed eventually (see Canon G10 vs G11 for an example). Its about sensor size. It is about the optics. Its about the value-add of having built-in geo-location. It is about the apps.

What makes the iPhone 4 a great phone camera? Not only it’s amazing quality, its HDR capabilities, but also the apps you can use to make better pictures, in-phone. While I was in Istanbul, a colleague was stitching panoramas with his Nokia N900. I’m sure Nokia knows this, with regards to apps on the N8 in the Ovi Store.

Where does this leave pocket camera manufacturers? The low end of what Canon/Nikon make will become less and less useful, as more consumers ditch the second device, and go for the integrated solution. Is the iPhone 4 or the Nokia N8 there? I’ve not played with either for a significant period of time, so I cannot judge.

But the Nexus One, the BlackBerry Bold and the Nokia N900 already perform better than the first digital camera I owned (a Kodak, from about ten years ago). Heck, they even perform better than the standalone cameras from about five years ago. The image of The 12 Apostles, which has been printed for a gallery show, was from my second digital camera, a Kodak DX3500, and taken in 2002. It was a mere 2.2MP camera!

A very smart photographer Stuart Murdoch once told me “the best camera is the one that you have on you” (someone’s decided to trademark this age old wisdom, unfortunately). His colleague Nigel even discouraged putting on lens caps on lenses, because you never know what you’re going to miss with the lens cap on. Stuart is also the man famous for the “mophone” tag on Flickr – he loved shooting abandoned shopping carts using phonecam’s of yesteryear.

So, when will I look back at this post and say I’ve stopped carrying my Canon G10 equivalent and just rely on whatever is in my pocket? I don’t doubt that SLRs will go out of fashion (they have their uses), but I do think that pocket cameras will eventually disappear and have SIM cards in them. I’m all for device convergence.

Here’s to the age of the phone cameras!

Learned a few things during my trip to the Philippines this time. Another country that amazes me. For the first time in history, Philippines attracted more foreign direct investments (FDI) than Malaysia, in 2010 (see: Malaysia’s FDI plunge).

Mobiles

There are a lot of people here using prepaid phones as opposed to postpaid phones. This is because the requirements of getting a postpaid account is quite tough (you need bank documents, etc. before they give you an account).

Many people carry more than one phone (or have more than one SIM). Smartphones face an uphill battle – they cost too much and there is generally no operator subsidy because everyone prefers prepaid accounts. It makes economic sense to have more than one SIM, as you’ll end up saving money (operators like to offer free text, calls, etc. from time to time).

It’s interesting to note that SMS is very common in the Philippines. At the conference, you ask questions the traditional way – going up to the microphone. Here in Manila, you can also send a SMS message and it will be asked on your behalf. Very handy use of technology, especially in Asia, when people are occasionally scared to ask questions in-front of a large audience.

Data plans are not very common here. The cost of mobile data only recently took a price cut here, it would seem. USB dongles with data can be had for about PHP1,200-1,500 per month, with no implemented data cap (they’ll tell you its 3GB, but apparently nothing happens if the limit is hit). That’s quite impressive, since you might also just plug it into a MiFi and get data for cheap, on the go.

Social Networking

Facebook is the social network of choice. Multiply is losing ground. Friendster is the network of the past. This is true with the universities, and it is also true on popular TV shows (I caught a VJ talking about the shows Multiply and Facebook presence). Twitter seems to be pretty large here.

Foursquare and other location based services (LBS) do not seem to be very popular at all. In the Makati area, you’ll find people checking in, and there has been some use of Facebook Places even. You’re usually about 4-9 check-in’s away from becoming the mayor from what I’ve seen. Students have next to no use of these LBS services; I have a feeling that it should largely be attributed to data plans being uncommon.

Gaming, payments, OFW’s

People love to play Farmville and other Zynga games online. Credit cards are not common here. You can buy prepaid cards to buy credits for online games. Virtual goods is a large market here. Social gaming – I see this more and more now. Online shopping/e-commerce is not too widespread.

Gaming (gambling) is common. There is legalised e-gaming (presumably with taxes going to the government), but there is also a growing number of illegal gaming making lots of money. Apparently this industry is quite large. Here gambling also has another problem – the Catholic church is not necessarily very happy with it.

Today, remittance can happen via mobile phones from overseas. From what I understand, if you are an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) you can remit money from Singapore to the Philippines using your mobile phone. Telcos are going past banks, becoming clearing houses. It turns out that last year, through official means, OFW’s contributed about 20 billion dollars to the Philippine economy. That is something in excess of 15% of the GDP of the nation. About 11% of all Filipinos are overseas as an OFW. Population currently stands at 80 million.

In conclusion

There are lots and lots of smart people here. UP has about 80,000 students. Over 19,772 people attended Y4iT. The crew did a fabulous job in terms of organising and getting people together.

The people are all very friendly. They all speak English. I know many people outsourcing work to the Philippines through services like oDesk.

Generally, good stuff is happening here. Manila is the only place I’ve been to, but I know there are DevCon’s happening elsewhere and there are other IT hubs in Cebu, for example.

I’ve been going around China for much of my vacation, and one thing that amazes me is the work ethic of the Chinese people.

China is well known for having its one-child per family policy. Once you leave the main hub cities, you are generally allowed to have two children, especially if the first child is a girl.

When you visit a trader, you see a husband and wife team running the store. They also usually have at least one child, who joins them at their store. What happened to the grandparents you might ask? Quite simply, living the entrepreneurial dream and also operating stores of their own, hence finding no time to look after their grandchildren.

What amazed me? A child sleeping on a trolley cart, with just a little cloth to act as a blanket. Another child sleeping on cardboard, with just a little cloth to act as a blanket. Children no older than three, helping their parents sort out items they have received from wholesalers.

I read in the newspapers about the story of a cobbler who went to Shanghai. He earns about RMB1,000 per month. He spends RMB300 per month on rent (he shares a room with four others), and he spends another RMB300 on food (he says he has two man tau for lunch). He saves RMB400 per month. That’s a 40% savings rate. He has a family far away from Shanghai (about 8 hours by train), and he’s OK with living away from them.

We went to get a massage. It was to last a total of 90 minutes and it would cost us a mere RMB75. Do you know what a massage therapist gets paid? RMB17 per customer for 90 minutes of hard work. None of them are also local, preferring to come from towns about 5 hours away. There are no benefits, there are no rest days, and there is no daily wage – if you have no customers, you’re straight out of luck. You do however get lunch or dinner depending on which shift you take.

Quick calculations show that at RMB17/90 minutes, if you can massage 4 customers a day, you walk away with RMB68/day. Do that for 22 days (an average work month), and you’ve got about RMB1,500, without tips. This is more than a Foxconn employee making high value items like iPhones, iPads, and more get per month as a base salary! Yes, there have been increases recently (sometime in May 2010), and you can make a bit more via overtime.

There are showrooms and warehouses that do not ever close. They operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can go in at anytime you please to take a look at their products.

Traders or workers, everyone does their job with lots of zeal and a smile on their faces. They’re working hard. They’re saving hard. The entrepreneurial spirit is just alive and kicking.

All this provides great inspiration. It makes you want to strive as hard. The Chinese work ethic amazes me, and there is a lot to learn from them.

We planned for a company meeting to be in Iceland, with just about a month’s notice. You can do that, when you’re a fairly small company. Having been back from London during the winter, where it was snowing in the New Year, I was not exactly jumping high to visit Iceland. Ice? Gasp.

It was not exactly easy to get to Iceland: KUL – SIN – FRA – CPH – KEF. Five countries, in a little over a day (would have been about it, had it not been due to a delayed flight from Copenhagen — seemed that the plane was snowed in from Iceland). Upon getting my boarding pass for the last leg, I was asked by the SAS ticketing agent if I’d like a window seat – I naturally replied aisle, and he confirmed my choice with me, as if shocked. Then I realised, there might be some interesting sights from the plane, so I took his advice and got a window seat. Icelandair is nice! (in comparison to Lufthansa). Odd plane though – they run Windows (noticed from the mouse pointer), but the entire entertainment system is touchscreen based. Their magazine made a special mention that their playing cards were mentioned in Monocle’s Travel Top Fifty 2009/2010; they were for sale for 3 euros. I figured I’ll pick it up on the way back. Anyway, the view from the window seat? Completely amazing.

I arrived for the meeting on Friday, so missed a bit of the first day. It was pretty much in time for dinner, when I arrived at the Radisson SAS 1919 (important detail – there are 2 Radisson hotels here), so we headed to a restaurant called the Viking Village. Here we tried shark, had some nice lamb, and tried skyr, which they seemingly adulterated with something rather sweet along the way!

The next day, we had dinner at Orange. Before we stumbled upon it, we somehow found that on the 2nd floor, there was also the Malaysian Embassy. Very interesting :) Orange was beautiful, and Monty got us a tasting platter – something like a 5 course dinner, matched with appropriate wines, for each course! We ate like kings. It started with langoustines, then we had whale (which I think tastes a little like beef, maybe a little rare beef?). After that we had beef, and we got some pre-dessert strawberry foam, followed finally by our dessert (another variation of skyr). Being Friday, we all headed out for some drinks, so it was a night infused with lots of salmiakki, whiskey, and beer (this after the wines we had!).

Dinner on Sunday was at Hereford Steakhouse. For me, it started with a Cognac-infused langoustine soup, and for my main, I decided that I’d go for a steak and lobster tail. Skipped dessert, as I was pretty damn tired from the night before.

Monday was an excursion day. We tried our hand at horse riding. These Icelandic horses are apparently quite pony-sized, due to living in extreme conditions, thus eating less. We rode for about two hours, and it was the first time for me (and many of us). Let’s say I now have new respect for horse riders, and those folk at the races. You’d think it was cold; but the coldest part was stopping, giving the horses a break, and allowing the few to have a smoke break. I failed at getting my horse tied once we reached the stables – maybe I just had a stubborn horse (it was apparently a willing horse, not one for beginners). Consequently, I hurt a finger on my left hand, making it rather difficult to type!

The Blue Lagoon. Another photo, showing the steam.

For me, our visit to The Blue Lagoon was the highlight of the trip. I absolutely loved it. This alone, is worth visiting Iceland for. We were told that we’d be bored within an hour. Rubbish. We spent a good three to four hours there. They have a steam room, a sauna (which was a bit too cool for my liking), and of course, the geothermal spa. If more time permitted, I would have probably gone for a massage; apparently you can get one done while in the water. They clay-like mud, is quite relaxing when applied to skin. Your head is above water, but your body is submerged in the warm water. So when the cold winds do come, you still feel quite nice. Lifting your body up a little out of the water is also fun – kind of like “hot/cold treatments”. The experience is truly indescribable – you must experience it for yourself. Before going in, we decided to also grab lunch here – a day of lamb. Well presented, and very tasty, especially with the accompanying wine. Beware the bus journey: it took us over an hour to reach Reykjavik!

Monday’s dinner was at a restaurant close-by to the hotel. It was at Laekjarbrekka, situated a little on top of a hill. This place screamed romantic diners and fancy dining. They had good value for money sets, so I grabbed the langoustine set. It started off with a most amazing langoustine soup, flavoured with cream and Cognac, and we moved quite quickly to the main course (pictured), which consisted of langoustines, a langoustine tempura, and a baked/puff pastry item filled with langoustine. Paired with some rose wine, and a few shots of vodka before (I’m told that if you feel a cold coming, you should have some vodka – keeps the gremlins at bay), this was a most excellent meal. Dessert was home-made ice-cream, and again the presentation was fabulous. Truly a restaurant to take your romantic date to.

Anyway, the entire set of photos is on Flickr: Reykjavik, Iceland.

A few other notes:

• You can buy shark meat at the airport.
• Whale meat you need to visit Noatun.
• The airport Skybus is cheaper when you buy a return ticket. But when the flight leaves at 7am, you’ll have to get a taxi to the bus terminal, and then board the bus to the airport from there.
• Keflavik airport was voted #4 best European airport in 2008. Beware, their security insists you remove all electronic items from your hand carry. Cables included. This process can take some unnecessary time.
• Credit cards are accepted everywhere – taxis, kebab shops, pizza parlours, the post office, etc. I have yet to see Icelandic krona, because I survived quite well without it. If your transaction is under-1000kr, you may not even be required to sign the docket.
• The Keflavik airport does not have free WiFi. Power plugs are non-existent at the waiting lounges, but there’s plenty of power at the coffee places before you hit your departure gates.
• Nightlife is pretty disappointing if its not a weekend. Even on March 1, to celebrate the end of “beer prohibition” (beer was only legal in 1989, afaik), the crowds were not all that great. In fact, not many bars were open, even!

All in all, it was great fun meeting everyone (a lot of old colleagues from MySQL now work at Monty Program), I think the meeting was rather productive (I’ll write about that in another post), and the time outside of the meeting was simply fabulous. Good choice for a meeting Monty!