My Internet Notebook

Rob Lord and his team is working an open-source project called Songbird, in which the team will create music-playing software that will work naturally with the growing number of music sites and services on the Web. Given that this new software will be based on open-source Mozilla technology, it would be really cool to make this also a conduit between your mobile mp3 gadgets and web-based mp3 stores (even your personal storage of mp3 files.)

Rob’s past credential is pretty impressive: a co-founder of the Internet Underground Music Archive, an online music site predating the MP3 boom, as well as one of the first employees at Winamp creator Nullsoft, he was most recently a product manager for the launch of Yahoo’s music software and subscription service, after his last start-up, Mediacode, was purchased by the portal.

A Firefox for music? | CNET News.com

Now China is officially the 6th largest economy in the world, which output $1.98 trillion of goods and services in 2004. An important note is that the services segment of the economy increased to 40.7 percent of the pie.

This new data essentially puts the portion of China’s export industry at a lower percentage of around 30%. The shear size of the service economy also means there is fundamental demand for new houses and commercial properties.

ABC News: China Increases Official Size of Economy

I was reading the Sand Hill Group’s newsletter, which at the end quoted management guru Peter Drucker: “Don’t tell me you had a wonderful meeting with me. Tell me what you’re going to do on Monday that’s different.”

The essence of the quote is that you will get good advices and ideas everyday from interacting with people around you, but what really matters is how you are going to put those advice into action. In the same spirit, I should start writing down good advices I got and thinking about how to act upon them.

By the way, if you have not do so, it is highly recommended that you subscribe to the free newsletter on Software from Sand Hill Group.

In naming Ed Zander the 2005 CEO of the year, MarketWatch sums up the three/four things Zander did at Motorola.

• Instead of performing major surgery, Zander spent his first months on the job meeting customers and workers.
• create a more open “executive branch” in which senior personnel were less isolated from each other and from the rank and file. A big believer in full-throttle debate, Zander encouraged executives to develop ideas — and then to defend them vigorously.
• Zander also believed the company needed to do a better job on nuts-and-bolts tasks. He sped up efforts to streamline development, get products to market faster and break down organizational walls. No more individual fiefdoms.
• With those goals in mind, Zander also put in place a variety of tools to measure performance and tied executive bonuses to the success of the entire company. Everybody would row in the same boat.

Aren’t they strikingly simple things? But only people who can vigoriously execute on them can succeed.

Big technology business news in the last few days seem to signal an increased level of enthusiasm from American technology companies to invest in and move more jobs to Inida.

There is AMD’s announced chip factory in India worth $3,000,000,000.

There is the Intel announcement of $1 billion in additional investment in Intel India R&D facility and venture funds.

There is the JP Morgan’s plan to hire 4,500 heads in India in the next 24 months, which is is currently hiring between 300 and 400 graduates a month and plans to have a total workforce in India of 9,000 by the end of 2007.

To give credit where it is due, I think India, over the last couple of years, has developed a good reputation / relationship / PR with western nations in a drive to become the largest democracy in the world, with its respect for IP etc.

While China still attracts a fair amount of foreign investment these days, recent events (such as CNOOC’s unsolicitated bids for Unocal) seem to have left a bad impression among the western powers.

Even a nation needs a PR program!