Brij Singh's Random Musings

Asian politics

Fareed Zakaria interviewing Ashley Tellis on KQED about growing relationship between US and India.

Ashley commented US might play India as Britain while dealing with the new Asian political landscape

Next 20 years in Asia are shaping up  like Europe in the time after WWII - new alignments and lot of introspection.

Mortgage industry

Numbers are pretty big -

Mortgage brokers, virtually nonexistent 25 years ago, now number 400,000 workers at more than 50,000 firms. They are scrappy entrepreneurs and sales representatives who match up borrowers and lenders on roughly 7 out of 10 mortgages. This year, they will collect some $33 billion from their share of an estimated $2.8 trillion in home mortgages.

Was talking to a realtor recently and he sounded very sober about the coming slow-down.

This whole sector is about to cool off.

What it's doing?

Web2.0 season is upon us.  I can sense the rising tides and flying ambition of frogs.  Time to get some wisdom from the scientist we all love

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
- Richard Feynman

What it's doing ? that's what counts.

Blogging,  wikis, search etc are enriching our online experience and in-fact healing lives, as they did during Tsunami and Katrina. Lets build on that success.

X meets Y to build Z-killer is a sign that tourists have started  landing at the SFO.

Trusting Attention

This is slightly old but I am posting it in the context of AttentionTrust work.  Tim O'Reilly posted Linda Stone's views on the emerging crisis around attention management -

The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus.  In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive.  Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation.  Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back

Notion of trusted network will gain importance as Internet becomes more and more like our real world where trust is mostly a function of our culture and biases. Some of this is already happening behind the scenes where same service behaves differently in different geo-political context.  Yahoo and Google are dealing with those issues in China.  Trust is getting negotiated and manipulated. In that context the efforts of AttentionTrust are worth pursuing.

They rolled out new website with more content to understand what this project is all about. There is a firefox extension as well for recording your attention sharing. This introduces new way of looking at the web interaction activity.

Will be playing with this extension to see how this helps in avoiding something like this.

Global urbanization

Big trend towards urbanization in Asian economies will drive next wave of hunger for energy efficient materials. Joseph Quinlan, Chief Strategist at Banc of America -

The world's resource base confronts unprecedented demand as a new urban world unfolds. Against this backdrop, the secular bull market in energy and basic materials is just beginning

This will have big consequences for energy, environment, urban planning and demand for sustainable architecture . More  opportunity for entrepreneurs as well !
 

You can innovate anywhere

How about using railway station coolies for providing extra security !

Or maybe give them cellphone and make them event capturing agents for the 24/7 media streams.