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Archive for January, 2008

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If You Listen, the Markets Will Tell You…

By on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 | 2 Comments

Gold prices are going up. Jim Rogers has long been a bull on China, to the point where his daughter’s first language is Mandarin, and is betting on a rise in commodity prices because of demand from China. He highlights this point in his new book A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World’s [...]

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Risk Is In The Eyes of the Beholder Part IV

By on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 | 5 Comments

Yesterday, the new national aquatics center was unveiled in Beijing. This will become the venue for the leading water events of the Beijing Olympics. After the Olympics are over, it will be converted to a shopping mall for Beijing’s masses. Beijing is now the site for some of the most exciting architecture in the world. [...]

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Ogilvy Mindshare Report on Chinese Consumer Behavior

By on Monday, January 28th, 2008 | 2 Comments

I just came across this Ogilvy Mindshare report on Chinese consumer behavior which goes beyond the normal reports which cover exclusively the Tier 1 cities. This one also covers the tier two and three cities, which are becoming increasingly important for marketers. According to the report, consumers are still frugal, and are reluctant to go [...]

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Risk Is In The Eyes of the Beholder Part III

By on Monday, January 28th, 2008 | 1 Comment

Chinese can be very peculiar about some things. One thing which is especially peculiar by western standards is that they get really annoyed and angry when a lot of money is lost, and they are not afraid to say so. Take the Chinese government’s loss, er investment, in Blackstone Group for example. Within several weeks [...]

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Risk Is In The Eyes of the Beholder Part II

By on Monday, January 28th, 2008 | 1 Comment

Chris Masse’s excellent MidasOracle.org, which focuses mainly on prediction markets, has a posting called Journalism Failures – Big Time. The Midas Oracle article links to an article by Risk magazine nominating Societe Generale as the equity derivatives house of the year. (You better check out the link soon before the magazine’s management takes it down.) [...]

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Chinese-Language Search Grows, and the Mobile Internet…

By on Monday, January 28th, 2008 | 3 Comments

Everything else being equal, it is safe to assume that human language-specific search should closely map to populations. For example, the US population is 300M, Canada’s is about 30M, the UK is about 60M, and Australia is about 15M and New Zealand is about 4M. These are the main English-speaking populations, and they total about [...]

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Understanding China’s Youth Through Tencent’s QQ: A New Must-Read Report

By on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 | 3 Comments

As China becomes more developed and sophisticated, more westerners are coming to China to understand the reasons for its success. I don’t believe that the Chinese success can be fully ascribed to China’s rising wealth and development; a good deal also has to deal with how western countries have screwed up in their politics and [...]

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Ruby on Rails, Agile Development and the New Website Development Paradigm

By on Friday, January 25th, 2008 | 8 Comments

I have been spending some time researching Ruby on Rails, how it works, its development philosophy, and how it has affected web development, and will affect business in the near future. The Ruby on Railsframework was released by David Heinemeier Hansson(it’s open source) in July 2004 has had a profound effect, and has been especially [...]

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Risk Is In The Eyes of the Beholder Part I

By on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 | 15 Comments

In the west, there is a whole industry called “risk consultancy”. Basically, this industry is built around informing large- and medium-sized corporations about risk. Originally, this was built around business risk and would answer questions like “How safe is it to invest $500M in an industrial diamond mine in the Congo (formerly Zaire)?” The consulting [...]

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Chinese Face, Chinese Heart Part I

By on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 | 3 Comments

One of the frequent questions I run into in China is how western Internet companies coming into China should position themselves for growth in China. Should they try to be western, or should they try in the shortest possible time, try to become Chinese, hiring Chinese for their local staff and management? Under what circumstances [...]

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