NAFIS, Shabbir Husain

Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with my friend, customer and mentor  – Anil Gupte here in Hong Kong. He is on a trip to Hong Kong to attend the Electronics fair that is being held in Hong Kong’s Asia World Expo. 

He is an entrepreneur and a technologist par excellence and a great human being. A serial entrepreneur  having built and sold successful IT firms in the US. He is currently working on his new venture and I had the opportunity to help him build a part of his system, while I was working as a free lance developer / consultant back in India.

Anil is a great teacher and a mentor. He is the one from where I get most of my first hand  lessons on entrepreneurship. The other mentor being my father who has been a successful businessman since the past 30 + years.

Anil is a fighter, persistent, confident, positive, logical, patient, humble, down-to-earth and as he mentions he is not meant to fit into the corporate space. He loves challenges and looks at exploring life to the fullest.

He joined us for dinner at home last night.

Had a great trip to Shenzhen, China. Few of the snaps are as follows:

In the Kowloon KCR station to catch a train to Shenzhen (Lo Wu):

On the train to Shenzhen from Kowloon.

Outside the Shenzhen train station:

Lo Wu Commercial Centre:

Entrance of the Windows of the World:

Had an amazing time. Weather was very nice. Were awe struck to see the developments of Shenzhen, China.

Planning to go to Shenzhen tomorrow with family for shopping and to see the “Window of the World“.

18th February – Sunday, is Chinese New Year. Also known as the Spring Festival. This by far is one of the most important holidays for the Chinese. Most of Hong Kong is decorated with the traditional red color lanterns and flags.

Monday and Tuesday are national holidays in China and I am eagerly looking forward to a long weekend.

I have one more important reason to look forward to the holidays – my parents are visiting Hong Kong tomorrow. They will be here to spend time with us. I am very happy that my daughther – Nafisa will get to spend some good time with her grand parents, which she has been missing since the time she has come to Hong Kong.

Happy Chinese New Year to all! Have a wonderful year ahead!

Lots of sales and discounts all over in Hong Kong these days. I would attribute them to the following factors:

• Chinese New Year, one of the biggest occassions for the Chinese. This is coming early next week.

• Rising weather temperatures is leading to a lot of discount sales on warm wears. I see people buying reasonably priced warm wears now, storing them through out this year to be worn in the next winter season.

I have not seen any web site as such which would list down all the stores with the amount of discount they are offering. Would be nice to have a servive like this.

Happy shopping and saving!

Source here:

One of Australia’s biggest banks, the Commonwealth Bank, has used the latest version of Apple’s music player—the slimline Nano—to compare global currencies and purchasing power in 26 countries.

Along the lines of the Big Mac index launched 20 years ago by The Economist magazine, the survey prices the 2GB Nano in U.S. dollars and found Brazilians pay the most for an iPod, shelling out $327.71, well above second-placed India at $222.27.

Canada was the cheapest place to buy a Nano at $144.20, while Australia ranked 19th at $172.36, cheaper than Germany ($192.46), France ($205.80), South Korea ($176.17) and China where the machine is manufactured. The U.S. was fourth cheapest at $149.

Prices of iPod globally (sorted in descending order of price):

1. Brazil $327.71
2. India $222.27
3. Sweden $213.03
4. Denmark $208.25
5. Belgium $205.81
6. France $205.80
7. Finland $205.80
8. Ireland $205.79
9. UK $195.04
10. Austria $192.86
11. Netherlands $192.86
12. Spain $192.86
13. Italy $192.86
14. Germany $192.46
15. China $179.84
16. South Korea $176.17
17. Switzerland $175.59
18. New Zealand $172.53
19. Australia $172.36
20. Taiwan $164.88
21. Singapore $161.25
22. Mexico $154.46
23. U.S. $149.00
24. Japan $147.63
25. Hong Kong $147.35
26. Canada $144.20

Why is China ranked 15th? If iPods are made out China, shouldn’t they be priced lowest in China. If this is an Apple pricing policy, then I reckon it would really pay off being an iPod dealer or retailer in China. Don’t you think so! One would assume that things in Hong Kong will be very reasonably priced due to its proximity with China, but that is not true either for quite a few items. In fact same is the case in Japan for global electronic models. To many it is a shock to find out electronics (other than Cameras I believe) is expensive in Japan.

I believe digital cameras too are comparatively more expensive in India. Nice to know Hong Kong is the second best place to buy an iPod from . So plan your trip accordingly guys, visit Hong Kong (unless Canada is closer ) and take a trip to the Peak.

Wonder what the price of an iPod would be in places like the Gulf. Dubai and Kuwait have always been famous for reasonably priced electronics, in fact many more things in that matter.

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: 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.

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.

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.

Had (in fact still am) been busy settling down at the new house and office here in Hong Kong and that seems to have taken a toll already on the frequency of my writing posts.

Anyways as you I know I left from Pune on the 5th of August and reached Hong Kong on 6th Aug. morning. The flight was 2 hours late from Mumbai, but overall the journey was pretty decent. 

Of what I have seen so far of Hong Kong, I would say, it is a highly vibrant, energetic and a full of action city. It is as compact as Tokyo, or even more, but they have managed to develop the infrasructure really very well. Huge buildings and crowded streets are a common site. Best of all, people know English here, and hence I am hoping I will not have as much trouble as I had in Tokyo communicating in Japanese.

I stay in Kowloon which is the other side of the Hong Kong island. And office is in central Hong Kong (Hong Kong island). Have to travel by a ferry on the Victoria harbour each day to and from office. The view of the huge (commercial and office) buildings from victoria harbour is awesome.

The view from the harbour is very well captured by – http://www.terragalleria.com/asia/china/hong-kong/hong-kong.3.html

At the end of the day I miss Pune and I miss home a lot.