2014 - galloping into year of the horse

We're two thirds of the way through January already. How did that happen?

Sure, it's good news for those in the west who are trying to have a "dry" January after an excess of Christmas partying and good news for those of us in the east who having skipped the pre-Christmas slowdown we might be used to, are looking forward to the pre Chinese New Year equivalent.

Chinese New Year decorations go up for Year of the Horse.

Year of the Horse is galloping towards us, the decorations are going up around town, the people are emptying out of town noticeably day by day. And we still have nearly 2 weeks to go! 200m people are likely to be on the move around China over the next 2 weeks. Sure, of the 1.3b people here, that's a drop in the ocean but that's not how it feels if you are anywhere on the public transport system.

Christmas holidays for those that had them are already a distant memory, CES has come and gone bringing with it more focus on wearable technology as the personal data monitoring theme gathers momentum, and "computers" as once we called them get ever smaller, more flexible and more powerful.

CES is just the big shiny toy show for the gadget geek, but as its' name suggests -Consumer Electronics Show,...it's all about marketing really. Who wins in buzz makes share prices rise and fall.

Ray Kurzweil, Google's Chief Engineer, has a more long term view with a remarkable track record / ability for seeing (& in some ways defining) the future.  Shiny toys round-ups from CES abound, but 5 minutes reading Ray's latest prediction piece will be 5 minutes food for thought well worth indulging in.

Albeit, I'd then follow up with this piece from an ex-Googler who moved to China, which gives a good helicopter view of why China is an exciting place to work at the minute. I love it! I can't wait to see what the "mountain thieves" (Chinese copy-cats) make of the e-ink opportunities.

Windows on content... a tablet view

November skipped by without a single post here... mostly because I moved to China and I've been sharing my adventures and discoveries over on tumblr & instagram.

But that doesn't mean I've been digitally awol.. instead I've been busy embracing and exploring growing mobile social network platform WeChat...the power of which is blowing my mind as my Chinese and better connected colleagues demonstrate how they are using it to bank, shop, check in, check delivery statuses.. "shai" (share/show off) anything they eat / see / buy.

As far as I can tell everything integrates seamlessly which is more than can be said for Windows 8.1... which I had to buy with a new laptop before I left the UK, only to find to my utter dismay Dropbox doesn't work properly and I can't get my Skype Voicemail from the Windows App.  Truly appalling. Skype is owned by Microsoft for goodness sake. You'd have thought they might have got the functionality on their own platform right!

Anyway, rant over...albeit I'm going to be mightily cheesed off until that stuff gets fixed.

I've been talking / thinking a lot about mobile & tablets since I got to China... the numbers make the mind boggle and user experience is clearly part of the brilliance of well integrated executions for the platforms.  I found this interesting 360 "you decide what you see"  via the angle of your tablet project courtesy of Springwise. Smart & well worth a watch.