I changed jobs! Now working with IE. In SFO for a secret but not so secret event. Been crazy busy these past 2 months on this. Since what I was working on needed to be mum… I’ve kept my mouth shut. However, I should be able to share much more at the end of the week.

Advanced Visualization of Data

I work with huge amounts of data … typically all within Excel. However recently, Excel is starting to strain at helping me quickly make decisions. More importantly, Excel sucks at helping me communicate my points of view (decisions are easy to make but getting support from my peers can be nuts).

I recall a while back reading Slashdot about the visualization tools that USA Today uses to make those pretty little graphs / charts. I wish my problems can be that easily summarized but heck… worth a try.

Here is a quick dump to links I found during my research.

http://visualizeit.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/interactive-visualization-at-your-fingertips/

http://mashable.com/2007/05/15/16-awesome-data-visualization-tools/

The tool I was talking about:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

Here are some samples on what the tool can do. Interactive also!

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery

Pictures from South Korea then North Korea then South Korea

Melissa thought going to the DMZ was going to be interesting.  When I thought DMZ, I thought of some sort of fence so I personally wasn’t very keen. 

I was wrong. 

There is a lot of history (albeit short and sad) around the DMZ and the area itself is very beautiful. We joined a tour sponsored by the USO.  The most interesting part of the tour for me was the area where the North and the South gathers on occasion to meet.

The picture here is from the South Korea side looking into the North.  The blue buildings are where the meetings take place and straddles the North / South border.  If you look carefully, you’ll see this cement bump between the buildings demarcating the border.

The South Korean guards have this strange posture (I think it is some sort of martial arts stance) and stare into the North.  Very intimidating.

A single North Korean guard appeared on the North side and looked down on us with his binoculars. 

The USO mentioned that at times, the North Korean side sends guards down to the border to talk to the tour group.  We were not to speak to them should they say hello.  This white tower on the hill keeps an eye on things and is responsible in ensuring there is no comms between the North and the South.

 

The most interesting part of this tour was going inside the central blue building that straddles the North / South border.  The building hosts dignitaries.  You can see the super nice tour guide rushing us out.  We have to keep to the military’s schedule.  The picture is from the South side looking into the North side.  That rear door leads into the North.  The guards lock that door when we are in the building. 

The microphones demarcate the border.  Here, I’m in the democratic South side.

Here, I’m in the communist North side.

About to go to Korea…

I am heading off to Korea tomorrow for a long overdue vacation.  I actually lost vacation time last year and I promised myself not to let it happen again this year.  I can’t complain though, my work is too interesting so even if I was on leave… I would probably be working anyhow. 

Hence the post, I’m testing Windows Live Writer (a blog editor client by Microsoft) as I hope to compose a few post while I’m on my flight.  The tool allows for offline composition.  Very useful when you’re stuck in transit while still keen to be productive.  When I click send, I should know if everything ishooked up correctly.

Here is a crappy photo I took of Melissa when we visited the Singapore Marina Barrage.  Not sure what a Barrage is but there are lots of pipes and a great view of the city.

Two years… 11 blog posts?

Yup, it has been two years and I have only blogged about 11 times. Many of you have sent me emails wondering if I was ok… or maybe joined the army. Happy to report I am ok and no, have not joined the army. The new role post my evangelism days has been crazy busy and crazy competitive. So mush so, most of my efforts – I won’t be able to talk about for a few years.

Rest assured though, my team and I have been hard at work behind the scenes to provide more choices to our beloved local audience and drive much-needed investments into Southeast Asia.

One thing I have been looking at during my free time throughout my past five years in Asia – the crazy boom in mobile. Everything from the iPhone craze thru to Blackberry weirdness in Indonesia. I made a commitment in 2010 to write more about my experiences in mobile (payment, social, location and devices) so look forward to raw brain-dumps to the blog.

Trials being fully mobile

I have been trying to find time to try out the heaps of mobile tech I have in our Innovation Center. I use Windows Mobile daily but finding it harder and harder to find useful apps for it. Going to try the iPhone for the next while to better understand the buzz (or possibly hype).

So far I am rather impressed. Word Press has a mobile blogging and management app for the iPhone from which I am making this post from.

Learn more about SEO and news related to web technologies

Want to learn more about SEO and news related to search and web technologies as a whole? Check out the technical blog of one of my guys on the team (Yizhe Shen): http://www.cloudfex.com .  Yizhe is writing on all kinds of cool technical goodies plus learnings from the SEO work he has been doing. 

Location Aware Apps (cool but is it really?)

Location aware applications are great!  But then… there is a scary side.  One of our interns in the Singapore MIC sent me a great article in Wired.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig?currentPage=1

We are working on a number of local innovation projects on LBS (the enabler of location enabled apps)… it will be interesting if we these concerns in the article will ever show up here in Southeast Asia.

When reaching out to an audience… don’t forget word of mouth!

The folks from BzzAgent (an agency focused on word of mouth marketing) released a really interesting e-book about word of mouth.  This book gives some great examples of it but does not go much into the “how to” except maybe to hire them.  None the less, a very interesting read.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bzzagent/The_Word_of_Mouth_Manual_Volume_II.pdf

ISO Recorder now for Windows 7

We get a lot of ISOs (typically through MSDN) and getting them on DVD/CD is a painful process given all the reinstalls I do on my machine.  Recently found a great (and FREE) tool to burn ISO images.  AND IT WORKS WITH WINDOWS 7.  Yeah!

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

We love you Alex Feinman.