Fusion View

What if we were to hook up with old friends in real life the way we do on Facebook? What if we related to our friends in the real world as if we were on Facebook?

This video gives us a taste of what may lie ahead for our friendships…

It’s a curious thing. While I am a great fan of Starbucks in the UK (see my earlier blog post, Three Cheers for Starbucks), I am much more ambivalent about its presence - and the presence of Starbucks clones like Gloria Jean, Coffee Bean or the like - in Malaysia.

Why?

Well, unlike the UK, where coffee was hideously undrinkable before the appearance of the American chain, coffee in Malaysia has always been wonderful - so the Western-style chains seem a poor second in comparison to the original, local brew.

Let me tell you what I love about coffee in Malaysia. You can have it hot or with ice - and I love it with ice: not a few cubes plopped into a glass but a tall glass full of ice with a couple of straws, over which the coffee is poured. As for the coffee itself, it’s thick and flavourful, served black with nothing added or with sugar, or with condensed milk or evaporated milk - or both. It packs a punch - and if you have the sweet version, you’re ready to race around all day in spite of the tropical heat. If Malaysian coffee were a person, it would be Michelle Yeoh. In contrast, the chain store Western variety is refreshing but rather feeble - like Woody Allen.

I also love sipping a kung-fu kicking Malaysian coffee in the old-fashioned local coffee shops, where you can look out into the street through the open arches on all sides, a grimy fan churning the stuffy heat around. On the walls would be tatty Benson & Hedges posters and a Chinese calendar flappy wearily in the slow breeze. Flip flops and old wooden clogs might clack against the tiled floor as the char kuey teow stallholder brings you a steaming plate of noodles on a plastic plate and the drinks boy in a singlet bangs another kopi peng on the formica table top. You’d leave awhile later, stuffed full, with the smell of fried fat and cigarette smoke clinging to your hair and your T-shirt drenched in sweat.

I can see, in contrast, the joys of an air-conditioned, sleek Starbucks where you can sit in your Guess jeans and light linen Elle jacket, checking emails on your laptop, thanks to their WiFi connection. I can see the appeal of low-fat blueberry muffins and a tall latte or frappuccino. I can see all that.

I just hope that there’ll still be room for the old-style coffee shops in the new, modern Malaysia. I hope that all the roads won’t be turned into 3-lane freeways and all the lovely, old houses won’t be pulled down to make way for another skyscraper that might be the tallest, highest, biggest, fanciest in the world. I hope that not all the shops will be in giant-sized malls nor all the restaurants hidden inside office complexes. I hope that when I’m in KL in 10 or 15 or 20 years time, I’ll know that I’m in a unique, multi-cultural Asian city and not a concrete jungle that could be Anycity, USA or Anycity, China. There have been huge changes in Malaysia in the last decade and the country’s prosperity continues upwards. Malaysians enjoy a great lifestyle and have many opportunities to thrive. Having stylish air-conditioned places to where you can sip internationally renowned coffee is one of the signs of that good life. I don’t wish that to peter away. I just hope that the old-fashioned way of having a Malaysian coffee - and all that that signifies in terms of Malaysian tradition, heritage and roots - will still endure.

Photo: thanks to goosmurf from flickr.com (CCL)

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

Mark Wu and I have been reading each others blogs for awhile now but we’ve never met. He blogs at OneInchPunch.net and is also very actively involved in the Chinese community here in the UK. When Mark invited me to be featured on his website VisibleChinese.com, I was very honoured. I’m delighted to to return the favour and introduce you to Mark here on Fusion View.

Mark writes:

Unofficially named “Mark Wu” (my Chinese name being my legal identifier), I’ve led a quite straight-forward life. My parents came to the UK when they were teenagers and met and married young. My brother, sister and I were subsequently born into the British Chinese culture which labels a generation of young Chinese people whose parents immigrated to the UK, and where the majority of families were involved in one way or another, in catering. With a talent for drawing, at an early age, I was “destined” for the arts and eventually found myself drawn to digital design.

In the last decade, I’ve spent most of my life focusing on working through my co-founded design company Kibook Interactive Design, which at its peak in the dot-com boom, grew to eight people plus freelancers. Aside from working quite alot, doing the company thing also meant meeting and working directly with a variety of clients and living a life that combined freedom (sort of) and choice with responsibility.

Some of our clients were British Chinese organisations such as Yellow Earth Theatre and The Pearl Foundation and that was great for me personally, to be able to tap into my own culture professionally. Working with them in the last five years or so, meant being involved with what I perceive to be an important time in the UK’s Chinese culture, with its growth and development being quite passive initially but which is now continually increasing in pace, encouraged by the Olympics in China this year.

Promoting Chinese culture in the UK is something I am passionate about and as a result, I am a Trustee of The Pearl Foundation, Interactive Associate of Yellow Earth Theatre and a core member of The British Chinese Project which is an organisation that works to help integrate more British Chinese people into politics.

Visible Chinese

Bringing together my passion for promoting British Chinese culture and design for the web, I also created another website which came about through a simple idea. The website is at VisibleChinese.com and it aims to become an Authoritative Independent Listing of Achievers within the UK’s Chinese Culture. Pretty much like a Who’s Who.

Visible Chinese is a site that is focused on profiling just individuals, as opposed to organisations, putting faces to names, as I insist on a photograph to accompany each profile. Profiles can be flexible in what they say, as long as they are biographical in some way. People can also outline what they do professionally and include links to their websites, so Visible Chinese serves as a great advertisement for their services and a useful tool for networking. I like to think of it as the sum of its parts being greater than the whole. Someone I met recently mentioned how it would be useful to see what people looked like in order to help recognise them at a future networking event.

The site doesn’t take long to maintain, and also doesn’t have the same pressure as a blog requiring constant (perhaps daily) updates, so all in all, the whole concept is a win-win situation for both the people featured, and for myself in gaining the satisfaction of creating something useful.

Not so silent minority

The Chinese community in London seems to be advancing and growing in voice and confidence, from the media labeled “silent minority” it began as. Traditionally, the visible aspects of Chinese culture seemed to consist of takeaways, large suburban supermarkets and the annual Chinese New Year event around the UK’s Chinatowns.

However, in recent years, there are signs that the next generation of young professionals are beginning to influence the community. Young professionals who have grown up in both Chinese and English cultures, and who are not just comfortable, but fluent in both.

As the British Chinese population increases, the diversity of talent also increases and is steadily gaining exposure. Take The Pearl Awards for instance. An annual event which will be in its fifth year in 2008. Each year saw the awards grow in profile and diversity with the fourth awards in 2007 set in the Royal Festival Hall, including HRH The Prince of Wales as one of its distinguished guests.

The British Chinese Project is also a significant initiative, founded by the prominent Chinese Solicitor, Christine Lee and which is supported by the UK Chinese Embassy, representatives from the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and a variety of different organisations and Chinese community groups. It aims to encourage more British Chinese to take an interest in politics, particularly the younger generations, but in itself, also counts a number of young professionals as members, the like of who are increasingly looking to play active roles in the community.

Go Croydon!

In the North-South London debate, I was a classic, born North Londoner who believes everything there is better, alas more expensive, than South London. A few years ago, I moved down to Croydon to my partner’s place and have been there ever since.

Croydon has a kind of stigma attached to it, but one which I think is over the years, being slowly eroded. It might be because of this, but everything in South London does seem to be cheaper than the North. Redevelopment in some areas is happening, and so I think the South is in someways, quite an exciting place to live. What I can’t fault is the convenience of being so close to shopping areas like North End, and the fast rail links into Central London - a bonus since I’ve been able to avoid getting on the claustrophobic tube to work.

Bruce Lee still inspires

I started my first blog One Inch Punch in December 2006 - during a quiet Christmas break, when I felt I really had no excuse not to. I had been working in the web industry for more than eight years and aside from a small portfolio site, had nothing of my own to show for it.

Building a blog was something that I wanted to do for awhile and it was also a good idea for several reasons. These included knowing the ins and outs of the process - which I could easily advise my clients on. “Walking the walk” as they say.

For almost a decade, I had been nurturing an idea for creating a large and complex East-Asian community website. Several visual designs came about, and the idea was refined, changed, amended and refined once more. I had never got beyond that, partly because of the time required and also due to lack of technical know-how required to get the idea made. However, in the last few years, blogging technology has improved massively - enough for me to fine tune my comprehensive ideas down to a simple (and practical!) East-Asian entertainment link site. Hence, OneInchPunch.net was born.

Comprehensive as the ideas were, keeping things simple inspired the name OneInchPunch. I basically wanted to aim for one post update a day, which would consist of a visual and a link. Something short but effective, which literally speaking, is basically what a One Inch Punch is. For those who don’t know, the “One Inch Punch” is a martial arts technique, made world famous by Bruce Lee, which unleashes explosive internal (as opposed to muscular) power² from a very short distance. So the name was not just dynamic-sounding, but also indirectly name checks probably the world’s most famous East-Asian.

Note: This article has also appeared on Dulwich OnView where I am the co-editor.

From the high culture of last week’s Film on Fusion View (Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press), we get down to some slo’-mo’ violence with high speed bullets ripping through a variety of objects…

These days I usually buy a coffee on my way into work - and that means most days. It feels very extravagant to spend £1.50 most mornings on a drink I could so easily make myself at home or once I got into the office. But it feels invigorating to walk up to my desk with the steaming ‘tall’ paper cup and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting up to wake me up. It also makes me smile to exchange inconsequential banter with the baristas at the local café who are now familiar with my regular morning stop-off on my way in from the suburbs.

I would never have bought a cup of coffee so easily or so readily in England 10 years ago. Back then, the UK was still a staunchly tea drinking nation and it was a rare thing to be able to get a good cup of coffee anywhere. You would be served instant or some semblance of filter coffee that was stewed too long and sour or so weak that it was tasteless. Either way it was disgusting. One time, I ordered a coffee in Hay-on-Wye, booklovers capital of the UK, in a wannabe trendy café-bookshop which had one of those fancy Italian cappuccino-making machines. The coffee here should be good, I thought.

But here is how they served me: they poured some thick cold coffee ’stock’ which they had boiled down in a coffee filter pot into a cup and added hot water from a kettle. It was the most hideous concoction I had ever tasted. And they were a bit miffed when I demanded my money back.

And then along came the Seattle Coffee Company that made fresh coffee, latte, cappuccino and all the other varieties that we’ve become familiar with. It was bliss, walking into their slick, clean, minimalist outlets and ordering coffee exactly how you want it, with all the associated lingo: skinny, wet, dry… The company was soon taken over by Starbucks, which then proliferated all London and eventually throughout the UK. I hope there’s now one in Hay-on-Wye.

Many people complain that Starbucks, as a global chain, destroys the local economy and makes every high street look the same and have the same shops. For me the significance of Starbucks in the UK is that it has raised the standards of coffee everywhere. For awhile after they arrived, you still could not get a decent coffee in restaurants and cafes - they would stare at you blankly if you asked for an Americano or bring you a weak cafetiere coffee or slop some thick filter into a cup for you. But it wasn’t long before most places realised that they had to keep up with the times and invest in the big Italian coffee machine contraption that hisses and spurts steaming water and milk into freshly ground coffee. Nowadays, you can usually be assured of good coffee wherever you are in the UK - and it’s a delight.

Photo: thanks to Roberat on Flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve been exploring the mobilesphere recently - partly for my own interest (since I got a new mobile phone with internet browsing, email and a camera all-in-one) and partly for a section on mobile phone marketing in my book New Trends in International Public Relations.

Websites are currently optimized for a browsing experience from your desktop or laptop, both of which these days have speedy and powerful processors so that the website loads very quickly on your screen. The consequence is that many websites - as well as blogs and other social media spaces - have been designed with a lot of features, including multi-media, so that a visitor has a top-notch experience on the site. All means that a lot of data (measured in bytes - as in byte, Kilobyte (Kb) and Megabyte (Mb)) is transferred from the website to your computer for every page that you access. Mobile phones at the moment do not have the same processing power so access to many websites can be very slow.

WiFi is often free at cafes, offices and some public spaces - and of course, if you visit someone’s house with WiFi, you can log on to their system there. So, using WiFi, you can access the web for free. But if you are someplace where you can’t access WiFi, you have to pay for data transfer to your mobile phone provider to use the 3G connection - this is charged on a per byte basis. You can usually buy a monthly package data package eg so many Mbs for £X and there are some unlimited packages (though read the small print: in the mobile world “unlimited” doesn’t actually mean that at all!).

Data rich websites and costly data connection means that surfing the web by mobile phone can be a painfully slow and expensive business. And yet, more and more people seem to be accessing the internet from their phones. You can see the appeal - the phone is the communications gadget that many people have with them all the time. And many people have a lot of time where they are hanging around in between home, office and seeing friends eg while on the train or on the bus. A good way to while away that time is to access the web - check or write emails, chat with friends online, faff around on a social network and all those other things that you would do on the computer.

To best capture this audience, there are applications that can minimise the time it takes for webpages to load as well as minimising the amount of data transferred so that the mobile browsing experience is fast and cheap - while at the same time maintaining an attractive user interface. I’ve discovered a couple of these applications so that I’ve enabled my two blogs, Fusion View and ZenGuide, to be accessed as mobile versions.

The first is via www.mippin.com. I signed up for a free account and created Fusion View Mobile at mippin.com/fusionview and ZenGuide Mobile at mippin.com/zenguide. Mippin positions itself as a mobile social network for news and blogs so that you can access such sites entirely from within the Mippin network. I like Mippin because of the attractive first page when you arrive at my blogs - there’s a list of simple headings with photos from the relevant posts. At the bottom of each post, you have the option to email the post, Twitter it or Share it on Facebook, which gives an added interactive, social media experience. The main mobile Mippin site itself offers you mobile-optimised aggregated news and blogs to read when you access it on m.mippin.com.

You can get Fusion View on your phone via Mippin by clicking on the “Make it Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

The second mobilising application is www.mofuse.com, which also offers free accounts. I created Mofuse versions of Fusion View Mobile at fusionview.mofuse.mobi and ZenGuide Mobile at zenguide.mofuse.mobi. This applicaiton has one specific function, which is to optimise your site for mobile browsing. The first page when you arrive on my blogs offers a neat list of the post headings but without images. Clicking through takes you to the whole of relevant post with the photos as well. You can access the comments to the post directly within the Mofuse interface (in Mippin, you have to leave the Mippin interface to do that) but there is no social media element whereby you can email the post etc in the way that you can within Mippin.

You can get the Mofuse version by clicking on the green “Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

Do check out both versions and let me know what you think. Do you prefer one over the other? Are you more inclined to email a post / Twitter it or Share it on Facebook - or are you more interested in interacting via the comments section?

This is a fascinating look at an early media technology that changed the course of history from pop culture Renaissance man Stephen Fry.

For the remainder of the programme, sliced into a further five YouTube sized bits go to Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press, which may only be online for so long as it’s not subject to a take-down notice from the BBC….

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with a response to my post about Doctors in the Family.

He writes:

Why do Chinese parents pressure their children to be doctors? The usual quick answer is that doctors make money and therefore that is the attraction. Looking more deeply into the question this may not be the only answer and is certainly not the most important answer. My remarks here on why parents pressure their children to be doctors are limited to my observations in Malaysia during the period starting about 1940s to the present day.

Most children who became doctors in the forties usually come from homes whose fathers were already doctors or members of the professional class like lawyers or engineers. So these children had come from reasonably comfortable homes and from their own experience these children knew that if they wanted to continue to have a comfortable life they should join one of the professions.

They would have seen and felt the respect given to their fathers as doctors and they also want to have that respect. Like most young people these children have a large dose of idealism too; they saw doctors doing good work with the sick and if the patients are poor, often, the doctors waived their fees and the cost of medication. Practising medicine had not become a business like the big private hospitals you have in the present day where you have to pay a deposit before you get to be seen by a doctor.

There are also children that come from poor homes who are idealistic and would want to serve the sick and who also want to be doctors but the medical course lasts for 6 to 7 years and their families could not wait for them for such a long time to contribute to the upkeep of the family. They could become lawyers or engineers but Malaysia in the forties did not have law or engineering schools which meant they had to go overseas and this the family could not afford; they would have to get a scholarship. A few did for engineering but there were no scholarships for a law degree.

All this is not to say that there was no father, who did not say to his son at the dinner table “Son/Daughter, you must study hard to become a doctor.” But by and large I believe a lot of people who became doctors have a large dose of idealism and humanity in them. The Chinese and their community have a great deal of respect for doctors because they know doctors have gone through a rigorous learning process and the Chinese instinctively respect learning and scholarship and also on the whole doctors have conducted themselves well in their community thereby earning its respect. Doctors, in my experience, are generally kindly, soft spoken, gentle and compassionate all qualities that appeal to the young idealistic and usually shy school boy. So there is little need for a father to exert a great deal of pressure to direct his son to read medicine if he is scholatiscally able.

Another reason for fathers wanting their children to take up medicine is this: in the history of the Chinese, the Chinese had always suffered the ravages and disasters from wars, civil wars and other local fighting from neighbouring warlords famines and floods. Any of these could occur at any time in the forties and before, especially, in China. So in the psyche of Chinese fathers their children must be able to move at short notice whenever any of these occurred, even from one part of the country to another in a vast country like China, or to move to another country and not only to move but to be able to earn a living in the new country. A doctor will often be accepted as an immigrant because he will not be a financial burden to the new country. (Actually being a scientist has this advantage too; Chinese children are also encouraged by their parents to take up science.) The recent generations are more relaxed about having to be prepared to suddenly drop everything and emigrate and then to earn a living. As a sign of this I have come across names of Chinese students from Singapore in the class lists of Greats in Oxford. It is well and good to want to do medicine as a safety net but it is also necessary to be able to pass the examinations. This requires concentration of the mind, attention to details and other intellectual abilities. The Chinese students appear to have enough of these mental requisites.

The new Chinese children now want to be rich in the quickest possible time when they grow up and being doctors do not bring in wealth quickly enough so they are going into studies in business, finance, banking, share brokering and such related subjects. Presently they can find employment in these sectors in their new country and in their own.

I have to declare my connection with the doctor profession. I am not a doctor but my Father and one of my siblings were, and my son and the wife of another sibling are. My wife’s Father was also a doctor and three of her siblings became doctors. My wife is the only one who is not and she is therefore regarded as a bit of a duffer by her family because she did not take a medical course but she did extremely well when she took up English literature instead. She is therefore not a duffer; she simply does not like to deal with blood and nasty sores and wounds and see people in pain.

Photo: thanks to laburbuja on flickr.com (CCL)

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