NAFIS, Shabbir Husain

Checked my gmail account, I am glad all my mails and folders are as it is and have not disappeared as have been reported by a few.

The Tuesday evening earthquake in Taiwan has left Hong Kong without internet connectivity. We are back in the ice age.

We have no internet connectivity – no emails, can’t log on to websites (local or external) and no inbound faxes to Hong Kong. Websites are taking ages to come up. Typing google.com on a 8Mbs net connection used to take milli seconds (if not nano) to come up, but now takes more than 4-5 minutes.

At work the traffic has been routed via India and hence we have some connectivity to emails and net, but definitely not like what it used to be earlier.

Have not witnessed such a kind of an outage personally ever.

Source Business Standard (India):

• The number of foreign institutional investors (FIIs) registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) crossed the 1,000 mark. 
• The total number of FIIs having their offices in India has now increased to 1,030. In the beginning of calendar year 2006, the figure was 813.
• As many as 217 new FIIs opened their offices in India during the current calendar year. This is the highest number of registrations by FIIs in a year till date. The previous highest was 209 in 2005.
• The net investments made by the institutions during 2006 was $9,185.90 million against $9,521.80 million in 2005.
• In 1993, Pictet Umbrella Trust Emerging Markets’ Fund, an institutional investor from Switzerland, was the only FII to enter the Indian market.
• While in 1994, no new registrations were reported,
• Between 1995 and 2003, an average of 51 new FIIs opened their shops in the country each year.
• The break up of FIIs in India is as follows:
  1. US – 368
  2. UK – 167
  3. Luxembourg – 73
  4. Singapore – 51
  5. Australia – 35
  6. Hong Kong – 35
  7. Canada – 32
  8. Ireland – 29
  9. Netherlands – 27
  10. Mauritius – 25
  11. Switzerland – 22
  12. France – 20

With the Indian economy looking strong in the coming years, I am sure the numbers will increase to look better.

Today is the final trading day of 2006 for the following asian exchanges:

1. Australia
2. Sydney Futures
3. Taiwan Stock Exchange
4. Singapore Exchange
5. Singapore Derivatives
6. Hong Kong Futures
7. Hong Kong Stock Exchange
8. Korea Stock Exchange
9. Korea Futures
10. Tokyo – TSE
11. Osaka – OSE
12. Jasdaq
13. Bombay Stock Exchange
14. Nation Stock Exchange (NSE – India)

Happy New Year and all the very best for 2007.

I created my login - shabbirhusain in orkut over the weekend.

This was the very first time I closely interacted with a “social networking” website. The concept is brilliant. Search for your friends, communities and get connected to them. And in turn to a huge network of like minded people, which other wise would have been close to impossible to imagine to grow and get connected so quickly and easily.

I found the user interface of orkut very simple and plain. I was having difficulty searching the users using a different location criteria. The only 2 options I was getting was “hong kong” and “everywhere”. Anyways I will try and figure that out.

I am glad to have got in touch with 2 of my friends. Kensy Joseph from my school days in Kuwait and Manasi Sathe from Fergusson College days in Pune.

I am going to continue searching for friends and like minded people over orkut. Especially for those interested in forging a partnership with me in starting a tech firm. I am eagerly looking out for enthusiastic and talented partners to get the venture kick started. Cheers!

Hope you have a healthy, happy and a prosperous new year 2007.

source: discoverhongkong.com

“Dong Zhi is the second most important festival of the Chinese calendar. Celebrated on the longest night of the year, Dong Zhi is the day when sunshine is weakest and daylight shortest. The coming of winter is celebrated by families and is traditionally the time when farmers and fishermen gather food in preparation for the coming cold season. It is also a time for family reunions. This celebration can be traced to the Chinese belief in yin and yang, which represent balance and harmony in life. It is believed that the yin qualities of darkness and cold are at their most powerful at this time, but it is also the turning point, giving way to the light and warmth of yang. For this reason, the Dong Zhi Festival is a time for optimism.

All of my colleagues and most of the entire floor today in office had gone home as early as 1pm. And were in fact advising all to leave as early as possible . For many traditional Chinese this festival is more auspicous and important than the Chinese New Year itself. All spend time with their family today and have dinner with parents.

I have been advised to keep away from Chinese restuarants as it will be extremely crowded with long queues and advance bookings. In that case I will try a non-Chinese restaurant and go to Chinese restaurant on New Year or X’mas . This festival marks the beginning of the Holiday / Festival season in Hong Kong. We have a long weekend here with Monday (12/25) and Tuesday (12/26) a holiday. And we have all started to talk in the “see you next year” mode.

Looking at the strategies adapted by tech companies in China seems like tying up with a local partner is the ONLY way to go.

Firms seek to enter the Chinese market to gain a share of the internet/online services and local software business, attracted by the vast population of the tech savvy people and the high IT demand in the local market. Initially the firms, like done by them in other non-US markets (which seems logical anyways), enter the China market all by their own, trying to establish a presence and gain dominance by rolling out their services for the local consumers. However seems like the China market though lucrative is not all that easy to setup a shop and run all by your own.  It has become increasingly evident that the firms struggle to topple the local rivals and are forced to abandon their strategy of doing it all alone and end up tying up with a local partner. 

Since I got to know and use search engines, this is the first time that I have ever used any other search engines other than Google for a sake of comparison. But off lately I have been reading a lot about the trends and analysis of the internet service industry. And Google and Yahoo are invariably in most of the discussions.

I thought of comparing the results of Yahoo search engine with that of Google’s. The string that I had at the top of my head was my name – “Shabbir Husain”. On hitting the enter key once my name was typed on the text boxes for both Google and Yahoo search engines, I was surprised to find that the first link returned by Google was the link to my blog. Where as my blog was the 9th link returned by Yahoo.

Not sure what made the difference internally (technically), but I am glad that I managed to be on the first page of the results . And I know which search engine I shall continue using.

Try it yourself! But you never know you might get different results.

As I am currently in HKSAR, I am invariably interested in IT developments and trends of this region.

Source China Web 2.0 review has details from the Baidu’s second report:

According to the report, as of November 3rd, 2006:

1. There are 19.87 million Chinese bloggers worldwide.
2. 52.3 million Chinese blogs.
3. Every blogger has 2.6 blogs.
4. Number of bloggers increased by 24%.
5. The number of blogs increased by 41%.
6. Almost half of bloggers (48.5%) update their blogs in day time or working hour (from 10 am to 6 pm).
7. Currently there are 1460 blogging service providers in China.
8. It (number of blogging service providers) is an increase of 55% year over year.
9. The top 10 service providers are:
   • QQ-zone,
   • Sina Blog,
   • MSN Live Spaces,
   • Sohu Blogs,
   • Baidu Space,
   • Netease Blog,
   • 51.com,
   • Bokee,
   • Blogbus and
   • Hexun Blog.

Additionally, to get a flavour of the global trends, as per Technorati, the number of global blogs are doubling every 7 months.

I was informed by Dr. John Ure from the University of  Hong Kong about the following program.

TRPC – the services arm of the Telecommunications Research Project (TRP) of the University of Hong Kong - in response to industry demand, has announced the following course of six one-day training modules. They are designed for participants from companies in any industry 

Courses:

1. Telecoms 101 – 26th Feb. 2007
2. Enterprise Networks – How to Profit? – 27th Feb. 2007
3. Web Technologies – Logs, Blogs and Plogs – 28th Feb. 2007
4. Disruptive Technologies – Future-proof your Business – 1st Mar. 2007
5. Building the Business Case – Price your network and the people who run it. – 2nd Mar. 2007
6. Regional Telecom Markets – China, India, Vietnam and the region. – 3rd Mar. 2007

Each of the above modules can be taken separately. And the cost is HK$ 8,880 per person.

More information about the course contents, speakers and further contact details can be found here.

Please pass the word to those interested.

Seth Godin’s book of wisdom for entrepreneurs – The Bootstrapper’s Bible is available online for free.

Source Amazon:

Editorial Review:

In The Bootstrapper’s Bible: How to Start and Build a Business with a Great Idea and (Almost) No Money, Godin shows precisely how his own venture, and a slew of others like Dell Computer, Burton Snowboards, Bose Corporation, Starbucks, and many lesser-known companies, ultimately managed to turn that nothing into something quite substantial. “Bootstrappers built this country, and they continue to make it great,” he writes. “Virtually every business–from IBM to the local dry-cleaner–was bootstrapped, usually by people with far less smarts, less money, fewer connections, and less vision than you have right now.”

Book Description:

A short e-booklet that is designed to give you the confidence and insight you need to pursue the American dream–starting your own business with little or no money.

The book is a 5 star. And it would be great to hear words of wisdom from a successful entereprenuer like Seth. I am looking forward to reading the book ASAP.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.“  –Mark Twain.

I read the above quote on Vani Kola’s homepage, while reading Vani’s impressive profile and her return passage to India.

Its been nearly 4 months since I moved to Hong Kong and since then I have not been able to contribute to my blog much. As usual a lot of time was spend in the initial teething phase of my life here trying to settle down. And once the basics were in place from a family and accommodation perspective, it was time for me to focus on my new project, office environment, people, processes and expectations. And all this took a toll on the frequency with which I was writing and was hoping to write with.

Nevertheless, the reading, analysis and communication has not stopped a bit. I still am on a very regular basis analysing the IT, Telecom, start-ups, business, offshore outsourcing, Web 2.0, etc landscapes from a global and an Indian market / potential perspective. And the more I read the more I begin to believe that there is a lot of potential and opportunities out there. I am constantly in touch with family, friends and mentors.

With this post, I would like to break the ice and hope to continue wiriting on a more regular basis.

I would also like to thank my friends and family members who have encouraged me to re-start my blog once again. With that I would like to re-commit myself to my blog.