Category: ranting

Five years on and what have we learned?
Nothing.

Five years on and is anyone any safer?
No.

Five years on and has anything changed?
Everything.
Nothing.

After close to four years since my last move I have changed jobs. Why? I decided it was time to move on, enough said.

My new job is still in Singapore –thats good since I am going to be married here in a few months– and it’s still in the same industry. It’s going to be a real challenge as it’s a move up the responsibility ladder but at least it’s a new challenge. It should be fun too. Anyway. I don’t like to talk too much about work on this site so I’ll leave it at that.

After paying $15 million for the exclusive rights to show the World Cup in Singapore the local cable monopoly screwed it all up. Sure all the games were on but the entire episode was a dismal example of how monopolies screw things up from the outset.

First off Starhub should get it’s various groups together to talk about strategy. With less than a week to go in the World Cup Starhub started advertising it’s Smart TV—a DVR. Whoever thought it was a good idea to wait until now should be fired. Half this football mad country should have pushed, prodded and stampeded to to get a DVR before the World Cup if it had been advertised correctly. “Get your Smart TV from Starhub and pause the game when the delivery guy shows up!” I can’t imagine a better time to sell this kind of thing to people than just before the biggest TV event of all. Fire the moron who made that decision.

Second. Starhub provided four channels to watch the world cup on. But even when there were two games on at the same time they only showed one of them on these special channels and they showed the others on some premium channels that somehow were not included in the pay-per-view price of the special channels. When I got up at 3 AM to watch a US game I ended up watching someone else because I don’t subscribe to the over-priced premium sports channels. This must be the only cable provider since the early ’90’s that does not include ESPN as basic cable—this is what government supported monopolies do. Morons.

Finally. Lets revisit these four special channels. There was also an option for the digital cable subscribers to watch the game in a ‘multi-view’ where the four special channels were shown on the same screen. Now instead of using every inch of screen real estate to make this something worth watching the geniuses at Starhub came up with a layout that made the player look like ants, only using 60% of the screen for the windows showing the four channels and reserving the rest of the screen not for advertising—there was a grateful lack of that except for a small Starhub World Cup logo—but instead for nothing. Just a crappy green background. The guy who designed that should get in trouble for wasting my time.

Talk about three ways to screw up a great opportunity. Show your customers you don’t appreciate them and screw up a marketing bonanza.

I’ve seen this reported in several places, MSNBC [msnbc.msn.com], Slashdot [slashdot.org], The Guardian [guardian.org], and others:

in a letter to the British Medical Journal that usually when someone is struck by lightning, the high resistance of the skin conducts the flash over the body in what is known as a flashover. But if a metal object, such as a phone, is in contact with the skin it disrupts the flashover and increases the odds of internal injuries and death.

So my questions is what about other metal objects that I have one and are in contact with my skin all the time? What about my glasses? What about my earrings –surgical steel? What about the copper rivets and button or zipper? Am I going to be lit up like a Christmas tree the next time I take a walk in the rain?

The government of Singapore recently unveiled a plan to provide nationwide WiFi access by the end of 2007. Yes. Nationwide WiFi. The Straits Times [straitstimes.com] (you have to pay to see the articles so don’t bother) ran this quote:

Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lee Boon Yang said: “We will offer broadband connectivity anywhere, anytime and on any device.”

This is part of a larger package of projects aimed at helping Singapore catch up with places like South Korea and become a truly wired (or wire-less) nation. In addition to the free WiFi there will be a new island wide (very) high speed wired network and computers for the elderly and poor. The whole plan is to be completed by 2015.

But in a country know as the “nanny state” were national ID cards and censorship are the norm. What else could Big Brother do with a nationwide wireless network?

Singapore already has a Road Pricing [wikipedia.org] scheme called ERP that uses RFID cards to charge drivers for entering congested areas at peak times. With a reliable island wide wireless network this could be extended by adding a WiFi antenna and a GPRS unit to every car such that you could dynamically charge people based on things like how long they were actually on the road inside the ERP zone. Once you’ve taken this step it is easy to start tracking cars all the time, charging based on the number of miles driven, the time of day they are driven, event track the speed and issue tickets automatically.

And why stop at tracking cars? Rather than issuing a national ID card why not implant a small wireless transmitter into nationals? Big Brother could have a lot of fun with this one.