My Internet Notebook

So the ‘hammer’ finally hits today. People’s Bank of China annouced that it will revalue the Yuan (a.k.a RMB) immediately against US dollars by a 2.1% increase. The annoucement came quietly in the backdrop of noisy national security talks surrounding CNOOC’s takeover bit of Unocal. No leaks, smart moves!

Although some US congressmen labeled this as a ‘good start’. In my view, this is a significant development. Once you start loosen the grip, there is no way back!

Why do I care? Simple: because I have a lot of friends and relatives in China, and my family and I travel often to China. Now with this currency revaluation, my US income doesn’t afford me the purchasing power I used to have. I know 2% is small, but what if that number becomes 40% as the market seems to think so …

An article at the SF Chronicle enumerates the crises effects of baby-boomer retirement that is going to happen in the next decade or so (www.sfgate.com/jobs). Is it time to panic? As the old chinese saying goes, wherever there is danger, there is opportunity.

But it is always to be prepared. Resources to get yourself prepared: Boomer Crisis Update from the Hyde Group, The Aging of Aquarius: The Baby Boom Generation Matures from the Segal Company, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Ken Norton talks about how to hire a great product manager. In the process, he pointed to a number of important issues in shipping great products, with or without a Product Manager:-)

Personally I think the role of Product Manager is too essential to not have in a product organization. But if you happen to be in a company that does not currently have such a person, you should definitely step up to the challenge and play the role of Product Manager.

Run across a sales article for Microsoft CRM Mobile

It is a sales collateral but does have some interesting information in there, such as this bigger picture on mobile CRM:

Mobile sales solutions will constitute a nearly $1 billion market by the end of 2006, a better than seven-fold increase over the $132 million spent in 2002.

Worldwide, mobile workers number about 60 million, or about 40 percent of the professional work force.

Leading early adopters of mobile technology include pharmaceutical and high-tech manufacturing companies, with insurance, retail, real estate, and consumer packaged goods industries making up the second rank.

Saw an interesting press release in which former Smartner CEO (now at Seven) talked about Nokia will have Seven’s push email technology on every Nokia phone.

This could be just Seven’s marketing tactics but it does bring up questions on Nokia’s strategy on push email. As a device provider to carriers, Nokia has to entice individual software company to build software on its mobile platform at the same time it has to work within the constraints of mobile carriers. And the software providers also want to work (i.e. sign deals) with carriers. Jury is still out on which partnerships are going to get customers faster sooner.

In the push email space particularly, there are already a growing number of software providers such as Research in Motion, Good Technology, Seven, Microsoft etc. RIM seems the clear winner in the enterprise space but nobody seems to have a clear lead in the consumer space.