It’s quite obvious, 80 hours (or even 80 days) are not enough to explore this dynamic city. And in fact out of the 80 hours, I spent most of the time in meetings so not much photos were taken in this trip. Pictures aside, found something interesting in the trip …

• There are lots of private jets in the airport taxi area (i.e. lots of rich families);
• The Hyatt Regency Mumbai Hotel is high-tech and traveler friendly;
• The Kindle works perfectly in the plane and a great way to kill time when waiting in lounge (no free Wi-Fi);
• The in-flight entertainment system of Cathay Pacific, the movies District 9 and Inglorious Bastards are great;
• The GMail is smart enough to insert a pull down menu in the editing area to let me input Indian characters;
• You can live like a James Bond, or Jackie Chan … just hire a cab;
• And yes, the Indian food in ITC Maratha Hotel is really delicious.

Okay, here are some photos:

After the Kindle devices, the applications Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC … now we have the Kindle for BlackBerry. The Kindle family is getting bigger and bigger. I can imagine soon we will have Kindle for Android, Kindle for OSX, Windows Phone Series 7 etc. etc. However, something new to me from their press release …

• Search and browse more than 420,000 books, including 102 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, directly from their BlackBerry
• Read books in full color, including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books, textbooks and graphic novels

Wow, 420,000 books !! And books in full color !! May be because I didn’t downloaded any cookbooks or travel books before, so I don’t really know whether my Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC have this function or not. Anyway, good news for all BlackBerry users.

Don’t forget to check out other Kindle posts !!

Time flies and it’s the Chinese New Year (the year of Tiger) again. Somehow the New Year day this year is also the Valentine’s Day (it happens every 38 years I was told), truly a special day that East meets West. To celebrate this, there is one thing the same in both worlds though – beautiful flowers.

Have a great day and great year ahead !!

So we all know Twitter can do many things – other than telling your followers what you’re eating, you can also use Twitter to express your views, to collect other people’s views, and to spread your friends’ views (by re-tweeting). And of course, we’ve heard many stories about using Twitter to find missing teens or getting better customer services.

I for one is a believer that Twitter can help improving customer services but then believing is one thing, can experience one is another. That was an incident last week related to a trip to Mumbai, India in February and I needed to get a room and airport transportation services from Hyatt Mumbai.

Looked like a simple task, I know. But somehow somewhere the reservation record was not right, I had email exchanged with the “e-concierge”, the “Catering Sales manager” (yes, strange I know) and “General Manager” (yes, right), but still could not sort the things out. So I decided … to air my frustration through Twitter.

And then within two hours, Hyatt customer services / Twitter team found my tweet and replied with another tweet.

I then direct-messaged the reservation confirmation number to them. In an hours or two, I was told the reservation was done exactly the same as my request, and then a follow-up email from Hyatt Germany service team (!!) wrapped up the case.

Wow, I love Hyatt’s service and obviously the capability of Twitter. The big question to me is how can one corporation compete without providing the same level of services in today’s world ?

What’s your Twitter customer service stories ?

I use iPhone and Kindle 2 heavily and I also have iPod, MacBook etc. Even though I am not really a super fanboy of Apple … still, I thought a tablet from Apple is something I was waiting for, until I see the iPad today.

It’s thin, it’s beeeeautiful, and the user interface is certainly sleeeek. But wait, where are the new new things ? In fact,

• There is no phone – sure, I can make VOIP phone call … but why ?
• No camera – so no snapshots, no video phone conference / calls, no augmented reality applications,
• No multitasking – I cannot download videos while I am doing something else,
• No HDMI output – I cannot use it as the Youtube video station for my TV,
• No Flash support – I guess I have to wait for HTML 5 websites … but again, why ?

You know, I thought Apple would announce a super new way to browse magazines and newspaper with iPad that can save the publishing industry, but no, again probably need to wait for some super-duper iPad application to do that. So is the iBooks really better than Kindle for iPhone ? Who knows …

And seriously, how can you hold this device for hours to read a book (my Kindle 2 can easily do that, and the battery can last for two weeks) ? And how can you take this from your home to your office, or your frequent coffee shop without adding a cover / bag ?

So far, really, I can think of only one big big reason to get one … that is if I want to share my photos with my friends and family, on the road.

Video from Engadget.com.

Imagine the following scenario …

• You’re a stranger in a foreign land / airport;
• Your smartphone is out of juice or you don’t want to pay hefty data roaming fee;
• You cannot find a (free) WiFi hotspot for your laptop;
• And you need to answer some emails via Gmail.

Sounds familiar ? Now you can do that if you have a Kindle 2, as long as you can live with some constraints. As many of you already know, there is a very simple browser come with the Kindle 2, and there is a mobile version of Gmail with minimal graphics. Therefore, it makes sense to use that simple browser to access the simple web application. The constraints and preparation works are:

1. It works only for countries / cities that support by Amazon Kindle 2’s WhisperNet  (the flip side of this is you don’t need to pay expensive data roaming fee to check emails !!)
2. The screen of Kindle 2 is relative small;
3. The keyboard of Kindle is hard to type;
4. There is no scroll up and down function (you need to use Next Page and Prev Page keys);
5. You cannot read / write double byte / Unicode characters;
6. You will not able to attach files.
7. In the settings of the browser, turn on Advanced view mode and turn on Javascript

Still want to continue ? OK, let’s start, step-by-step :

1. Turn on the wireless in your Kindle. Then go to “Home” / “Menu” / “Experimental”, and select “Basic Web”
2. You will see the bookmark page, and “Menu” / “Enter URL”, and enter m.gmail.com
3. You will see the basic login page and enter your Gmail account information.
4. Somehow, Gmail will display the usual Gmail screen with all the mails which makes the screen very busy. I believe Gmail do this because they know that the request is not from a mobile device. Now, go to the URL bar on top, and enter m.gmail.com again !!
5. Now you shall see the mobile Gmail email list page.
6. Press “Next Page” key till you reach the last page, locate “Compose Mail” command …
7. Enter the from address, to address, subject line and mail content. Add CC, or BCC if needed. Press “Send” and that’s it …

Don’t forget to “Sign out” (in the mobile Gmail page footer) before you turn off the Kindle !!

Enjoy …

One of the very first things I want to do to the blog in the new year is to change its look, with a very simple twist – rotate the header image. The very good theme I installed six months ago was the Thesis theme, but the standard installation does not include a header image auto rotation – something that is a standard for many WordPress themes. As I believe I am not the only one in the world want to do this, so I did a search in Google and of course the search results did not disappoint me. Anyway, here are the step-by-step instructions with some more details.

Step 1. Create your series of rotating banners. All I did was to create a few more header images with a size same as the current image. However, to make it works with the following hook, the header images should have the same name followed by an identifying number. For example, in my case, I created 5 banners from my photos and named them header_1.jpg, header_2.jpg, header_3.jpg, header_4.jpg, and header_5.jpg. Note that if your files are GIFs, then name those files *.gif. And as you may aware, you cannot mix jpgs and gifs with this hook.

Step 2. Upload your header images to a folder inside your site. In my case I created a folder named “headers” inside the “custom” folder of my Thesis Theme. If you don’t like the name “headers”, change it to anything but don’t forget to change the script below.

Step 3. Create a new file in your preferred text editor and copy the following code and then save the file as “rotating_images.php”

<?php
$random_image = rand(1,5);
?>

<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>”><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/custom/headers/header_<?php echo $random_image; ?>.jpg” alt=”Random header image… Refresh for more!” /></a>

Upload this file to the custom folder in your Thesis Theme (the same folder that custom.css & custom_functions.php reside in). The boldfaced texts are those that you may want to change to fit your settings. For example, the second number in the call rand() should equal to the total number of images that you want to rotate. I found that to achieve best effect, try 4 to 5 images for rotation.

Step 4. Lastly, add the following code to your custom_functions.php in the custom folder:

function custom_header() {
include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/custom/rotating_images.php‘);
}
remove_action(‘thesis_hook_header’, ‘thesis_default_header’);
add_action(‘thesis_hook_header’, ‘custom_header‘);

Again, the boldfaced texts are those you can change to whatever you want.

Hope it’s useful to your Thesis theme.

We’ve watched the year 2009 come and go, therefore I think it is about time to check what this blog has done in the past 12 months. First of all, I have to admit that I spent rather little time in writing blog posts last year compare to previous years. The main reason was many times, I just tweeted a line or two about my thoughts and then no longer repeated those in the blog. However, I guess I did a few good things to my blog …

First is I installed the Thesis theme – it is simply the most versatile WordPress theme in the market right now. And I also implemented a few very good plug-ins : The TweetMeme Retweet Button, the No Self Pings, the Where did they go from here etc. Those really made the blog looks a little bit more professional.

The second good thing I did to my blog was I started to post information about Amazon Kindle 2 and Kindle DX from March last year. I bought the original Kindle 2 US version and then detailed how to purchase it from Amazon, how to set it up, how to use it and how to purchase ebooks … the traffic to the blog then surged:

And finally I put the Amazon affiliation network into good use … I did not actively promote the Amazon website and products, but just link to their Kindle products pages. Surprisingly, I start getting some affiliation fee from Amazon. You know, I never thought I can earn some pocket money from my blog … In addition to the affiliation fee surprise, another thing surprised me a lot is what products the visitors bought after they surfed to the Amazon website. And here are some interesting details:

• Other than the 30 Kindle 2 and DX I sold (not bad !!), there were also around 40 e-books sold thru the blog site – and the top seller was the Lost Symbol.
• There were also over 20 physical books sold, and the best performer was the Fooled by Randomness.
• There were some visitors purchased their iPod Touch, Flip Camcorder, in-ear earphone, CDs, DVDs, MP3 from here – even though those products were not mentioned in any of the blog posts.
• But the most bizarre ones are, believe it or not, the rebounder, Digital Caliper, and even Deodorant !!

To this tiny little blog, it is truly amazing !!

Somehow my Kindle 2 always connect to WhisperNet via GPRS network, not 3G network in HK.  A great tips from reader John and also Mobileread.com, you can actually select the network you want !!

First, turn on the wireless connection of your Kindle, then press “Home”, “Menu”, “Setting” and in that screen, press “311” (yap, that’s the magic number) from the Kindle keyboard. Then mysteriously, an application pops up and will warn you about this command, just select “OK”, and then you will see a message – “Scanning for available wireless providers …”.

About a minute later, a full list of network services providers (with both 2G and 3G connections) will be displayed. Just pick the one you want and that’s it !!. Try “Menu” again, and you shall see the “3G” symbol next to the signal bars, instead of previously the “GPRS“.

Please note that it does not matter whether you have a data plan with the network company to make this work, looks like Amazon already has a deal with the one listed …

Now my Kindle not only synchronize faster, it also works a lot faster when browsing the Kindle Store.

Enjoy !!

There is one very interesting discussion in LinkedIn CIO Forum about “If you had one sentence to describe what you did as CIO – what would it be?”

As usual, there are some politically correct answers:

“The organization’s technology evangelist and leader who championed the business goals and objectives.”

“CIO is business leader who relentlessly delivers technology in support of business objectives, all while continuously seeking to drive overall costs down”

“Improve an organization’s IT Alignment, Architecture, Agility and Ability to enhance the organization’s bottom line. “

There are also some practical answers, such as:

“High tech solutions, bottom line results.”

“Ascertain organization’s footprint from a bottom-line standpoint. Streamline operations with intent to cut cost and focus on reliability. Deliver practical technologies in support of the organization’s goals.”

And there are some answers I like a lot:

“Provide what they need before they know they need it.”

“Take information technology where no information technology has gone before.”

“On time, on spec, on budget, no bloodshed.”

“Deliver technology solutions so advanced that they are indistinguishable from magic.”

What’s your take ?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !!