Having earnestly promised myself a “creative surge” this month, I suddenly found myself suffering from a creative drought (or should that be doubt?) in which I found it impossible to string together a coherent sentence, let alone a paragraph. Maybe that’s what hours and hours of writing PowerPoint bullet points does to you.
Nearly at my wit’s end as to how to break the drought, I decided to follow the example of the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy and have a go at composing a haiku – a 17 syllable verse form which originated in Japan.
Is Asia catching up with the US in innovation? This was the question I addressed at an investor’s conference here in Taipei last week.
Certainly as regards the hi-tech industry, my answer was a resounding “yes” and I even went so far as to argue that in some respects Asia, and particularly China, has a great chance of actually drawing ahead.
We are pleased to announce that our recently-launched VIA Vinyl Envy VT1730 USB 2.0 Audio Controller has been selected as one of the Editor’s Choice selections in the February edition of Embedded Computing Design.
The VIA Vinyl Envy VT1730 is the first audio controller on the market to support the USB 2.0 standard and it has generated a huge amount of interest since it was announced. Expect to see products featuring the chip in the second quarter of this year.
It’s good to be back in Taipei after my trip to India and China – even if I’ve been suffering from a nasty cold ever since I stepped back on this island.
Thankfully, I’m feeling a lot better now and I’ve found some time and energy to put together this short video showing the sights and sounds of Taipei's historic Longshan Temple, which I visited a while ago. I'm not sure what festival was being celebrated at the time I went there, but the temple was very crowded with people and there was a vibrant atmosphere around the place.
Here’s a photo of the VIA ART-3000, a new complete, fanless and ruggedized embedded box system that we have announced today.
Based on the Em-ITX form factor, the VIA ART 3000 runs a 1.3GHz VIA Nano processor and integrates a number of features ideal for a wide range of advanced industrial applications, including diskless booting, excellent vibration and shock resistance, dual Gigabit networking and dual LVDS video support. For more information, please see the press release here.
Chips, motherboards, cases, batteries, LCD screens, and connectors: neatly displayed like fruit and vegetables i(or should that be exotic spcies?)in store after store in the crowded warrens of Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei market are all the ingredients you need to build a mobile phone.
Currently, this would in all likelihood be an affordable feature phone rather than a top of the line smartphone, but Android and no doubt Windows 7 mobile based devices are on the way, and, besides, the low cost mobile phone market in both China and emerging countries such as India and Latin America is massive – over 100 million units a year.
During my constitutional morning stroll, I came across the rather grandly named Shenzhen City of Design nearby my hotel.
I say “grandly named” because it’s actually quite a small industrial estate comprised of a few office blocks featuring a rather eclectic mix of images, ranging from the professional stylized artwork of the complex’s logos to huge faces of creative geniuses like Einstein glowering down from the sides of the buildings to inspire us.
Following yesterday’s Lantern Festival, the Chinese New Year celebrations are well and truly over and all the colorful decorations are being cleared away (including these [formerly] auspicious oranges) as China gets back down to serious business.
I can’t help noticing that some “experts” are almost gleefully warning of a Dubai-style property bubble in China as real estate prices continue to rise in various cities throughout the country. But then how would they be able to make money without a crisis?
When I was in India I picked up a copy of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, the first travel book he has written in ten years and a welcome return to form.
In Nine Lives, Dalrymple explores the impact that India’s rapid modernization has had on the country’s multi-faceted spiritual life through “a collection of non-fiction short stories,” with each life “intended to act as a keyhole onto the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition."
Bangalore has always had power problems ever since I started visited it, but this time the situation seems to be much worse than ever.
Every day, the electricity goes off for at least five hours, and although we have a back-up power supply supported by a huge array of car batteries we have to be very careful in how we use it to make sure we can remain operational all day, such as turning off the air conditioning, using laptops rather than desktops wherever possible, and in extreme cases even turning out the lights. It can be a surreal experience typing away on your laptop in semi-darkness.
