DESPITE all the gloom and doom of the economy at present, there have been bright spots.

According to IDC, the Singapore PC Market grew by 26 percent in the second quarter while Hong Kong grew by 30 percent, driven in part by people buying mini-notebooks, as well as the University Notebook Ownership Programs promo.

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I noted that security software seemed to be strong, while storage software reportedly grew in double digits at about 14 percent for the second quarter of this year, compared to the same quarter last year.
The big optimist is HP, which reported that sales went up 19 percent for the quarter. But it expects less growth overall in the third and fourth quarters. Some sectors, though, are still gunning for positive growth.

Another bright spot seems to be the continued sale of cell phones, even higher-end models. According to the PEW Internet Project, 78 percent of Americans now own cell phones, up from 65 percent ownership in 2004 and 73 percent in 2006. The percentage also of those owning a smart phone, like PDA (personal digital assistant) and Blackberry, also keeps going up to near 20 percent now.

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DNA KIT AND OTHER INVENTIONS. If you have not done it, read Time Magazine’s best Invention of the Year. If you don’t have a Time Magazine subscription, you can read it online. What is very interesting is the DNA Kit. It is technology that is quite revolutionary. One of the founders is the wife of Sergey Brin, who started Google. What you do is buy a kit (it is about $399), then spit your saliva, and send it to them.
Then they will give you a full study of everything including whether you are prune to blindness, Parkinson disease, baldness or cancer, among others. You can read about it in www.23andme.com There are many interesting inventions, but one of them is the website www.hulu.com. This is a website that intends to rival Youtube.com where you can finally watch and see TV and actual movies. The only problem is that while there are dozens of top movies and shows out there, it is only available to people who log in from the United States.

Another interesting thing is that this year, we finally have a supercomputer that can do one quadrillion calculations per second (can you imagine that the first computer built, ENIAC, could do only 5,000 calculations per second and was the size of two football fields?). The supercomputer, nicknamed RoadRunner, was built at a cost of $133 million and is purportedly used to simulate the effects of aging on nuclear weapons.

Another breakthrough is what they call a Memristor. Basically, it is a circuit memory that remembers even when turned off—if that tech flies, that means our computer can just be turned on automatically, with no boot-up waiting time! Wow, can you imagine hundreds of millions of people who don’t have to wait a mi-nute or two for their computers to turn on?

Another very interesting thing is a new computer game for the computer that was designed by Will Wright—who essentially is the man who created The SIMs, one of the biggest selling game software ever created. It is a game called Spore. It is hard to describe what the game is all about, but just like the Sims, the buzz is very strong.

My son saved P1,500 from his allowance and bought one upon the “very strong recommendations” of his classmates. He has been playing it on his computer in the last two weeks.

Another cool thing is what they call a shadowless skyscraper. In Paris, they are reportedly planning to build a 50-story tower, which will be constructed using computer modeling and with reflective glass, so that the areas around it won’t get shadows.

I think crisis or not, life is interesting, because of innovation and creativity. Who knows what exciting things will come up next?

(www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife)

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(November 27, 2008 issue)
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