Antony’s Weblog

Yesterday Nokia just announced their new product lines, called NSeries, which combines mobile phones and multimedia capabilities. They will use another numbering of this new category. Instead of using four digit numbers, like 3230, 6680, 7610 and 9500, they will use "N" followed by two digit numbers, i.e. N70, N90 and N91. Despite the lay-off decision in the R&D department inside Nokia Multimedia, this was a very big surprise. Will these products be able to compete with their competitors? The N70 will compete with other 3G phones since it is advertised as the smallest 3G phone. Actually this product will be like 6680 with some additional features, such as 2MP camera. The N90 will compete with low-end digital cameras; it has Carl-Zeiss optic in its camera! Unbelievable, huh? We will be in an era where we can have a "real" digital camera always in our pocket. Currently we do have digital camera in our pocket, but the quality (IMHO) is still not good enough. The most interesting product might be N91, which of course will challenge a very success product from Apple, iPod. Currently iPod has about 60-70% market share of portable music player, although they have solid competitors too, like the Singaporean’s Zen from Creative. I am pretty sure that Nokia is preparing a very huge marketing campaign for N91. A few months ago, they’ve just announced they will cooperate with LoudEye to bring digital music service to the customers. Anyway, welcome to the new era of Nokia NSeries…

Last week, the two biggest mobile phone manufacturers in the world, Nokia and Motorola, just announced their Q1′ 05 financial report.  Both of them have beaten analysts’ prediction saying that their net sales might go down because of very tight competition in the mobile phones industry.  I was actually very surprise too when they announced their net sales jumped 17% and 14% for Nokia and Motorola respectively.

Looking at the net sales only might not reflect the actual condition, but if we look at 10% profit for Nokia for example, it seems they are really in a very good condition.  Why do I was very surprise?  As I mentioned, the competition is very difficult nowadays, especially after China is entering mobile phones industry, especially in the low-end market.  They want to get some "cheese" in this industry as well.  As we all know that Chinese has an advantage in entering low-end market because they have cheap labors cost.

After seeing double growth from Nokia and Motorola, I am very interested seeing how the mobile phones market will look like in the next few years.  Will Nokia still lead the mobile phones industry?  Will Chinese get some more "cheese" from the low-end market?  Will other companies, like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, etc. have opportunities to grow?  Meanwhile, the future of Siemens division of mobile phones is still uncertain until today.  They might sell or close their money-losing division.

I won’t give my prediction about mobile phones industry because I am not so sure (and I guess most analysts too, as we have seen that their prediction to Nokia and Motorola report was not really correct).  But one thing for sure, the entertainment will merge with mobile phones industry.  We will see music, gaming, television and radio will become very common in our mobile phones…

Yesterday I had a very long discussion with my girl friend about investment.  The discussion began because I wanted to invest my money in stock options.  She didn’t agree because I’ve just invested some of my money in mutual funds and their price have been going down in the last few days.

Like many Indonesian people, my girl friend thinks that investing in stocks is actually gambling.  We can lose our money within 1 day!  My mother has the same opinion too, she said don’t put your money in stock options; it’s like betting your money in a casino.  Investing in stock options is not so common in Asian countries.

I have to admit that for some people "stocks = gambling".  Some of my friends had lost a lot of money about 5 years after the economic bubble in the US exploded.  Many IT companies at that time didn’t have any value although they had a very high capital value a few months back.  That’s why Warren Buffett didn’t want to invest his money in the IT companies during that period.

For me, buying stocks is actually another way of investment; just like cash deposit, real estate, gold, etc.  It is a way where we can put our money to work for us; I mean we can get a profit from our money after some time.  Investing in stocks is not easy, of course (if this would have been easy, then it would be easy to be rich).  We have to perform thorough analysis to the company we want to invest.  Looking at the financial report only sometimes is not sufficient.

As a final word, everyone has his/her own way of investing.  Some people don’t like stocks because it is too risky; some others like it because they can get higher profit.  My advice, invest your money in a way that you feel comfortable with….

A few days ago, one of my colleagues sent an email about Adobe Acrobat Reader. Like me, and may be also all of you, he was very frustrated using this software because it takes a couple of seconds to start-up. Finally he found a very useful trick to launch Acrobat Reader within 1 second! Yes, may be less than 1 second on a relatively fast machine. I’ve tried this trick and the result is very amazing.

What’s the trick? Very simple…. Open your Windows Explorer and go to c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins folder. Remove all files except EWH32.api, Search.api and Search5.api. Just for safety, backup this folder before you kill them… That’s it; now try to run your Acrobat Reader…

After I got this trick, I was wondering, why do the software companies give a lot of features that the users don’t really need? Acrobat Reader is one example; there are many plug-ins that we never actually used. Basically plug-ins concept is very good; we can extend software easily. This is good for the users and for the software companies as well. What I am thinking of is, isn’t it possible to load plug-ins when they are needed only? Not loading all of them during start-up…

I had the same experience with my mobile phones too. When I was using my old mobile phone (Series 30 phone from Nokia), I can switch it on in less than 10 seconds. Now I am using Symbian-based phone (Series 60 phone from Nokia too), and it takes almost 30 seconds to reboot. Unfortunately, I don’t have any tricks yet to speed this up…

Blogging is really booming now! A lot of companies are offering blogging services, including all big players like Google, Microsoft, and even Nokia.

As far as I remember, the blogging era was popular after Google bought a small company Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger, about 2 years ago. After that, all big players, one by one, jumped into this business. Nokia, the largest mobile phone company, launched their service, LifeBlog, last year to allow us blogging via mobile phones. Friendster, the most popular social network site, just launched a blogging service beginning of this year. The competition is becoming more interesting because Microsoft launched "another blog service" in their MSN Spaces. What is MSN Spaces? It is a brand new service from Microsoft which is like a personal web site where we can share personal data, photos, music, opinions, etc.

The next interesting question is, who will be the winner in this competition? Who doesn’t know Microsoft? They have killed many of their competitors in the history. They have killed Netscape Navigator, the most popular web browser a few years ago. They have made ICQ users migrate to MSN Messenger. On the other hand, everyone knows Google too. They have a very good competence and are very creative in building good services. Remember they’ve just announced video blogging service last week.

Let’s see what will happen in this industry. From my opinion, this would be very interesting…

Almost one month since my first blog.  Yeah, as I said in my first blog that I don’t have so much time to blog.

I’ve just relocated to Singapore from Germany.  The reason why I relocated here is because my girl friend is working in Singapore.  I want to spend some time together with her.  We had long distance relationship for about half a year and it was a very difficult time.

Unfortunately relocating to Singapore didn’t solve all the problems.  Firstly, I don’t really like living in Singapore.  The weather is too hot and humid for me (may be because I have lived quite some time in Europe).  Besides that, the country is so small and crowded.  Singapore is the country with the second highest population density in the world.

Secondly, I have got a very good job offer in Canada (still in mobile phone industry, which is my dream job).  I am in a very difficult situation at the moment.  If I relocate to Canada, we have to face long distance relationship (again).  If I don’t accept the offer, there might not be another golden chance in the future.

Actually I had an idea to get married with her so that we can go together to Canada.  However, her parent still doesn’t allow her daughter to get married too early…. yeah, let’s see how I can sort this problem out….

Hello, this is my first blog…
Actually I know the word blog since last year when it was booming. At that time, I was simply not interested in blogging… and another reason, I didn’t have enough time to write blogs. Mmm… I am a little bit confuse now. Is blog a noun or a verb or both?
Anyway, welcome to my first blog (blog is noun here)… I cannot promise that I will blog regularly (blog is verb here).