CRM in Taxi

I met a sophisticated taxi driver today.

When I was in a taxi traveling from my office in Wanchai to SOHO in Central for dinner after work, I saw a large PDA (pretty old model of 02 but the screen is huge!) in front of the driver. For no reason, I asked the driver if he keeps his customers' contacts and frequent travel routes in that PDA and to my surprise, he did! You won't believe that taxi drivers have better CRM than some companies ...

Mobile Phone

My department offers a service in various trade shows in Hong Kong to assist buyers in identifying right suppliers and products through a mobile matching system ... I took this snapshot several months ago when I saw these PDA phones on a colleague's table ... I thought I was in the Sincere Shopping Mall in Mongkok where people trade 2nd hand mobile phones ... You know what? Although these PDA phones are a bit out-dated now, they once worth over HKD5,000 each and this picture alone shows over HKD20,000 worth of gadgets ... amazing!

By the way, this picture also signify the end of the old brand name of the marketplace I'm working on ... tdctrade.com will no longer exist ... my company is about to be rebranded to HKTDC from April 1, 2008 and naturally the website address will become hktdc.com ... so the lanyard in the picture is getting obsoleted now ... Guess who will be the first beneficiary of this change? Our supplier for lanyard ... they'll be the first one to receive new orders from us!

G-Phone & the Android Mobile Platform

You may have heard about the G-Phone which people said Google will announce in the past months. But later on, instead of a mobile phone unit, Google announced that their G-Phone initiative is actually not only hardware but they make available a brand new application platform - Android - that mobile phone manufacturers can make use of (instead of Windows Mobile, Palm or Symbian that are being used commonly). The Android platform looks quite powerful that its interactivity with the Internet is almost seamless. You may like to watch the following video to learn more.



The first G-Phone is yet to be seen in the market, but we can already test drive some of its interesting features. I installed the Google Maps for mobile phone into my little Dopod PDA phone. Right away I can see Hong Kong maps either in drawings or satellite images and best of all is that I can even locate myself (like the way GPS does) instantly. Google Maps makes use of cellular networks for location identification - which is a little bit less accurate than GPS. But I think it's already a pretty good application.

Blogging on the move

I used to post new blog entries via my PDA phone but there are certain limitations with that ... having spent a few days researching for my new toy - eeePC, I learnt a new trick by connecting the laptop with my HSPDA-enabled PDA phone. Now I'm able to browse the Net ultra-fast at 3.5G access speed. People may already be doing that by subscribing to some similar services with an external USB device (e.g. Smartone Vodafone). But now I can save that money and bring less gadgets. Sounds good huh!? You may not be as excited as I am when you read this post but frankly, I'm really excited 'cos I need mobility AND flexibility.