Water bottle display at Banana Republic

In a recent trip to a wedding reception in New York City, I came across a window display that was very cleverly done. It is decorated with empty plastic water bottles that were repurposed to create beautiful light fixtures. We need more “outside-the-bottle�?ideas to combat the rapid deterioration of our environment that is attributable to “outside-the-box�?innovations.

Don’t get me wrong, I love innovation. I love watching it, and I love being a part of it. Engineers are often told to think outside the box for innovations in product design, manufacturing processes, and distributions. A life cycle of car design used to take five to six years, now it is less than two years. Moore’s Law of electronics has lasted more than 50 years with no sign of slowing down.

Internet and mobile devices have driven even faster innovation and consumer product cycles. Think about when your contract is almost up on your mobile phone �?you’re ready for a faster, better device. We expect to have a new mobile phone every two years.

Great outside-the-box thinking has had some negative consequences, though. We are seeing unprecedented environmental impact all over the world, but especially in developing countries where economic growth often outweighs environmental, health, and safety concerns until it is too late.

Water bottles themselves are a manufactured demand in developing countries like the U.S., where most tap water is potable. But in some countries such as India, China, and Brazil, manufacturing output has greatly polluted primary water sources, and there is a dire need for clean drinking water.

Several years ago residents in east China began having serious health problems. After an investigation, 23 out of 26 battery manufacturers were found guilty of polluting the local river. China now has more oversight and hardware to combat the growing environmental issues, however much damage is already done. And most corporations still give precedence to profitability over environmental impact.

But some companies are bearing their share of environmental stewardship and corporate responsibility. Here are a few things they do:

• Integrate EH&S practices into their manufacturing process. Our Quantum Compliance (www.usequantum.com) is one of many companies that provide solutions to make it easy and streamlined to do so.
• Reduce unnecessary waste such as water bottles, plastic cups, plates, and etc.
• Make something out of recyclable materials. For example, Tzu Chi Foundation’s volunteers turn plastic bottles into blankets for victims of natural disasters.

I certainly would not mind having these beautiful bottle light fixtures in my home or office!

The post Think Outside The Bottle appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

The trip to Chicago today is the third time I’ve ridden a “high-speed�?train in three weeks in three countries. Each ride gave me insight into how high-speed trains have not only affected the day-to-day schedule of people travelling from one location to another, they have also brought parts of the world closer together for greater, more interesting experiences.

I started my trip going to Fuzhou, China where my father is from to sweep the tombs during the Tomb Sweeping Festival to pay my respects to my ancestors. In 1978 when my father returned to China the first time after 30 years away from home, he took a train from Guangzhou (close to Hong Kong) to Fuzhou. The train was so slow that it took the whole day (24 hours) to cross the neighboring provinces. According to travel restrictions, my father was only allowed to bring 5 large packages and 5 small packages from Hong Kong. Among the 5 big items were a TV and a refrigerator. The 13-inch TV became the only TV in the village that sometimes would bring a ton of people from all over the village into my father’s courtyard to watch it. My relatives were so poor that they could not afford the electricity to run the refrigerator, so they brought it out and plugged it in when my father visited them.

A photo of my cousins who went up the mountain with me. They are standing in front of the tomb.

I remember when they brought out the refrigerator to stock food when I visited China for first time with my father in 1990. It was the first time I had hiked up the mountain to the family tomb. The mountain didn’t have a lot of trees and the trail was clear. My cousins told me that the trail leading to the tomb was the main road for people going north to Beijing to take the national examination in the Forbidden City. The exam brought the brightest students from all over China to the Forbidden City in hopes of being the champion (狀�? �?or receiving one of the highest ranking scores. A champion would receive recognition from the emperor and be guaranteed a nice government job.

Over the past 25 years, that trail going up to the mountain has gradually disappeared. Freeways and high-speed trains are replacing the mountain trail as roads toward Beijing. Nowadays, I could travel from Shanghair to Fuzhou in six hours on a high-speed train at 180 miles per hour. The only time anyone travels through the mountain anymore is for the Tomb Sweeping Festival. The trail has become very slippery and trees have grown everywhere, making it difficult to find the tomb. My cousins occasionally get calls from people asking them how to find certain tomb. I was impressed by their knowledge of gravesites as well as their ability to walk on the trail. I am embarrassed to say that even though they are in their late 60s, they had to grab me several times whenever I started slipping downhill. I asked them how they know their way around so well. They said “When you have to spend four hours a day for ten years trying to find every available firewood to make sure that your family has fire for cooking, you pretty much know every piece of this mountain.�?/p>

High-speed trains and improvements to transportation technology have changed the lives of people all over China. It used to take me five hours to go from our Shanghai office to Nanjing, but now it takes one and half hours. From Nanjing to Beijing is only another four hours on the same train. So in theory, I can stop by all three Logic offices in a day. That was unthinkable when I set up these offices back in the 2000s.

Recently on the way back to the US from Taiwan, my wife and I stopped by Tokyo to see our daughter, Emily, who is now working there. Emily said that a new Shinkanshen (high-speed bullet train) just opened in the northern coastal city Kanazawa. We used our Japan Rail Passes (a pass only for foreigners to get unlimited rides) to see that city. The train was very comfortable with power outlet available in every seat, traveling at 160 miles per hour, and arriving from point to point at the precise minute it was expected.

There was another type of high-speed bullet train that we experienced in Kanazawa. While we toured the city, we also made sure to check out the local restaurant hotspots. Someone at the train station tourist information center suggested we visit the restaurants around the famous fish market in the center of the city. After waiting for 30 minutes in line, we got into a popular sushi establishment. It is one of those sushi train restaurants run with modern technology. An iPad with a self-service ordering app was mounted on every table. I thought the iPad POS app system (www.touchandserve.com) that we’ve developed was very impressive, but these iPad stations were way cooler! After placing an order through the iPad app, a miniature Shinkanshen model train carried our sushi through the restaurant, stopping next to us. We took the sushi plates off the train and pressed a button to send the train back to it’s the home station. It is really cool to see “high-speed�?technology compliment the traditional restaurant experience!

For a country that invented high-speed internet and changed the lifestyles of a whole generation, true high-speed train is still a far-off dream for most major American cities. So many technological advances have improved the livelihoods of millions of people around the world and it will keep finding ways to make it easier. I would love to someday be able to travel to Chicago in just one and half hours. I am also craving for a high-speed sushi train with delicious sushi to come to a table near me. Maybe we’ll see sushi trains in restaurants in the U.S. before high-speed rail becomes available to the populace.

The post High-Speed Trains, High-Speed Technology appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

The new set of faces that greet visitors to Logic’s Ann Arbor office

Every year when I travel to Asia to celebrate Chinese New Year, I usually bring back a ton of stuffed animals for the animal of the year. Last week I brought back around 40 goats. They are so cute and were gone minutes after arriving at the office. Some years, I struggle to give the stuffed animals away because they’re not as cute. Who would’ve thought that goats would be so popular?

Ironically, I recently learned that some Chinese believe they should avoid having babies in the Year of the Goat because goats are thought to be weak animals. A popular Chinese saying describing someone in danger is “sending a goat into the mouth of a tiger (羊入虎口)�? Some people even go as far as to induce labor to have babies born in the Year of the Horse and not the Goat. To me, this superstition is total nonsense. Goats don’t represent weakness; they symbolize gentility and peace, and I am proud my daughter was born in the Year of the Goat.

The most popular auspicious phrase for the new Year of the Goat is “Three goats bring peace and safety (三羊開泰)�?  This is a play on the saying “Three suns bring peace and safety�?because “goat�?and “sun�?in Chinese have the same pronunciation. The saying is a wish for the three suns (who were sons of an ancient god) to bring a prosperous early spring (new year).

I am not sure if I need three goats or not,  but there were many things that happened in the Year of the Horse in sets of three that led to the Year of the Goat that I want to share here.

Three Days of Disasters
There were three consecutive days of disasters during my visit to Shanghai last summer. The first one was on August 1 when a series of explosions from a chemical company’s pipe leakage in Kaohsiung, Taiwan ripped through 6 kilometers of road and killed 25 people. The second one was the explosion at Kunshan Zhongrong Metal Products, an automotive parts manufacturer, on August 2 in Kunshan, an industrial city in the eastern province of Jiangsu, China. The blast killed 68 people. The third one was on August 3 when a magnitude 6.1 earthquake shook the province of Yunnan and killed 617 people.

Each day there was a headline of a major catastrophe, and every morning at breakfast I was shaken. The owners of the chemical company in Kaohsiung and the automotive parts manufacturer in Kunshan expressed their sincerest regrets after they were arrested for negligence. They both said that they knew that there were things that they could have done to prevent such tragedies, but they just had not gotten around to doing it. These tragedies could have been prevented but, instead, these owners willfully put their employees and civilians at risk because they didn’t want to spend the money implementing safety protocols.

Quantum Compliance (www.usequantum.com), a subsidiary of Logic Solutions that specializes in environmental health and safety software solutions, had numerous discussions with companies in China last year. Many companies agreed that our software would greatly enhance the health and safety of their employees, yet I was told over and over again that their management was more focused in growing top line (revenue) so these safety measures would have to wait. Similarly, many city officials in most Chinese cities are so proud of their rapidly-built skyscrapers that they fail to consider the environment or the safety of their cities. As a result, their focus is not on maximizing the safety of their people and the damage done to the environment and the numbers of poorly-structured buildings continue to increase.

As we move forward into 2015, I want to focus on how the Year of the Goat can help us think more about the safety of the people around us and the impact we have on the world.

Three Countries to Call Home
2014 was the first year I was able to travel to three countries that I was or still am a citizen of and that I called home.

Our family reunion in front of the condo where we used to live in Santo Domingo.

I lived in Taiwan from 1963-1978, and in the Dominican Republic from 1978-1980, and have been in the US since 1980. Many months ago, I got an invitation to my good friend Shin-ming’s daughter, Elisa, and her fiancé’s, Chad, wedding in the Dominican Republic, which has become a hot wedding destination in recent years. I got so excited, and told my wife and children that we were going to the Dominican Republic and could also see where I used to live. They’ve all heard me talking about the epic story of how my parents sold everything we ever owned in 3 months, and took my sisters and me to a country that we’ve never been and couldn’t speak the language of. My sisters heard about my plans to travel to the Dominican Republic and said their families wanted to see it as well. Not only that, but we also decided to bring our parents from Taiwan and make it into a big family reunion.

My father was separated from his family during the civil war in China and has been for more than 30 years. Going to Dominican Republic was the ticket for my father to reunite with his family (Taiwan and China were still very much enemy states in 1978). Although my parents paid a huge price to get out of Taiwan in 1978, the one-and-half years I spent in Santo Domingo were unforgettable.

Three “M”s That Gave Us Harbaugh
The Year of the Horse was also a year of turmoil for Michigan sports, but we all believe that we Michigan fans had our wishes come true by getting a top-notch football coach, Jim Harbaugh.

Three “M”s that helped to land Jim Harbaugh: “Millions�? “Mobile�? “Michigan�?

It costs millions to get a pricey coach nowadays, and Jim Harbaugh was no exception. Although he didn’t want to be the highest paid coach at the college level, the $5M salary and $2M bonus were no small package.

After rumors that University of Michigan offered the then-49ers coach a lucrative contract to return to Ann Arbor, Michigan’s huge alumni network and football fans, myself included, took to Twitter in anticipation for Harbaugh’s return. The buzz generated from social media and mobile users demonstrated to the coach that he would be well-received if he decided to return.

Finally, Jim Harbaugh is and was a Michigan man. He was Michigan’s quarterback when I was going to school and I would like to think he would give anything for the chance to return to the Wolverine state. You can take a man out of Ann Arbor but it is difficult to take the love for Ann Arbor out of the man.

Three Wishes for the New Year
While attending Tzu Chi Foundation’s entrepreneur camp last year, I was given a book called “Practice three kind things, realize three wishes every year�? The three wishes the book concludes with has stayed with me since.

1) Say good words to purify one’s mind (口説好話以淨化人�?.
2) Practice kind actions to bring harmony to the society (身行好事以祥和社�?.
3) Make kind wishes for a disaster-free world (心發好願以天下無�?.

Many things came in sets of three this past year. I know that the stuffed animal goats that I brought back will bring a year of peace, harmony, and safety to Ann Arbor. Happy Year of the Goat!

(Our non-Chinese-speaking members of the Management Team agreed to be a part of a video and try their hand at using Chinese to wish our overseas teams a Happy Chinese New Year. I think they did a better job than Mark Zuckerberg at his Beijing interview! You can watch our video below.)

The post Send Off the Year of the Horse and Welcome the Year of the Goat appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

I was asked to meet with the CEO of Tzu Chi Foundation USA a few months ago for a potential enhancement of the foundation’s U.S. website. While I had heard of the foundation through my relatives and colleagues, this was the first time I visited. I was nervous that I was going to a religious place to get an earful of religious doctrine.

I was so wrong. The foundation is amazingly inclusive. They spoke passionately about their mission and their needs for technology improvement.

All of Tzu Chi’s administrative staff are well educated; most hold PhDs or MDs, and though the organization was founded on Buddhist principles, it welcomes people of all faiths. Han, the CEO, has a PhD in biology. There is a retired MD from the Buckeye state of Ohio that is Christian. As a non-profit organization, they have quite a sophisticated system mostly supported by volunteers.

As a result of my visit, Logic helped Tzu Chi Foundation launch the U.S. website (//www.tzuchi.us/) that contains many fascinating stories. Even if we hadn’t been involved, I would still have encouraged everyone to visit this site because the humanitarian effort experiences you will read there are remarkable.

Tzu Chi Foundation’s new website

The other project that we hope to help develop in the near future is Tzu Chi’s eBamboo app for mobile devices. Founder Dharma Master Cheng Yen already had this concept of micro-giving (micro financing) in 1966. The idea of the bamboo bank for Tzu Chi Foundation started out when Dharma Master Cheng Yen started a charity fund by encouraging her followers�?0 housewives—to drop just a couple cents of their grocery money into the bamboo bank each day before going to the market. The message was simple: when pooled together, even a little bit of change makes a big difference, and a daily good deed is a powerful way to cultivate oneself.

This mirrors my experience growing up in Taiwan. My grandmother would buy us a bamboo bank every year. A bamboo bank is a section of a bamboo with a coin slot in it where one can put change. When the Chinese New Year came, we would chop open the bamboo bank and get our money out to spend on fireworks, snacks, etc.

In the early days while the disciples of Dharma Master Chen Yen barely had enough to eat, they still set aside a percentage of their rice before they cooked it. The saved rice was used for relief efforts to give to the most needed later. Giving is no longer the privilege of the very wealthy; the spirit of giving can be embodied by everyone.

Jimmy Hsiao visiting Tzu Chi in Taiwan

While at Tzu Chi’s U.S. headquarters, I learned that there is an entrepreneur camp to better understand Tzu Chi in Taiwan. The camp experience was unforgettable. On the last day, I had the good fortune to be interviewed by the local TV station about my experiences. I said that many of the attendees who were business people running for-profit organizations, and as head of a for-profit company myself, used to think that a company needed to achieve greater financial results, and subsequently greater social responsibility, in order to be able to give back more. Was I wrong? Many of the Tzu Chi volunteers are giving whatever they could by setting aside as little as a few cents a day into the bamboo bank. As a company, we need to think of “giving�?from day one. We want to help Tzu Chi’s bamboo bank enter the digital age with an eBamboo app.

My next stop after Taiwan was Shanghai. Riding on the high spirit of giving, I was happy to give up my seat at the subway train for the elderly. I dropped 10 RMB into a beggar’s bucket when he asked. I took my son Andy to the eco-center of Tzu Chi Shanghai to help sort some of the recycle materials.

Then back in the US, on the Black Friday after Thanksgiving, I was so happy to see Cherry Republic (a Michigan company) advertise “Philanthropy Friday�?

Philanthropy Friday at Cherry Republic

Drop in to any Cherry Republic store today for a fistful of samples and to nominate your favorite charity. Each store will randomly select one of the charities nominated for a $500 donation. Call it Philanthropy Friday!

And then there was “Giving Tuesday�?/a> which made another day of the week very meaningful.

The post Thanks for Giving appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

Part One: Apple

I left for China the day after the keynote speech at the 2014 Apple Developer Conference. Admittedly, I have not really paid a lot of attention to Apple’s talks since Steve Jobs passed away. There is no better person to introduce a product than Steve Jobs. I used to be hooked to every talk he gave because they were just mesmerizing. He had a special ability to lead the audience through the birth of a new product. Some of Steve’s catch phrases such as “insanely great,�?“it just works,�?or “there is one more thing�?have been a frequent reminder to me while doing product development.

I particularly loved his introduction of iPad. It went something like, “If there is a third category of product besides a smartphone and laptop, it must be good in doing something better than a smartphone or a laptop, such as browsing internet, reading emails, listening to music, watching movies, playing games, storing photos, reading an eBook.�?/p>

He went on to show a NetBook in between an iPhone and a MacBook. “Is it a NetBook? Is Netbook the third category?�?He said (and again, I’m paraphrasing), “No. These NetBooks are not good at doing anything. They’re slow, they have low quality displays and they run clunky old PC software. They’re not better than a laptop at anything; they’re just cheaper. They’re just cheap laptops. We don’t think they’re a third category device, but we think we’ve got something that is, and we’d like to show it to you today for the first time. And we call it, the iPad.�?With that, Steve Jobs killed the Netbook category.

Tablets existed long before iPad. I’ve owned a touch screen tablet PC from Toshiba, a Netbook PC from Asus, a Palm Pilot, and more. I bought those gadgets trying to convince myself that since they sounded that good, they couldn’t be that bad. However, these first movers are always bad. Apple, under Steve’s leadership, waited patiently until they were convinced that they had a category killer.

I was interviewed a few years ago by BBC the day after Steve Jobs passed away, after they picked up a blog that I wrote . The reporter asked me the same question that everyone else was asking, ��Will Apple continue to come out with amazing products without Steve?�?I said that I believed Apple will continue to have great products at least for the next few years because of the kind of culture Steve built at Apple.

I almost thought I might be wrong for a while since it has taken Apple many years to have a new category of products. So when I heard that Apple was going to talk about not one, not two, but three major products (iPhone 6, Apple Watch, and Apple Pay), I could not wait to watch the keynote. The presentation replaced many movies that I normally watch on a long flight. A fellow passenger, an anesthesiologist, looked over my shoulder when he saw the Apple Watch on my iPad and said, “Amazing, isn’t it?�?It became part of Apple’s DNA: to have a product for which Steve Jobs would love to make the introduction.

Although most people’s attention was probably on iPhone 6, I was most interested in Apple Watch and Apple Pay. Apple Watch and Apple Pay are potential category killers.

Source: Apple

Recently, my staff wrote an article about wearable devices. To me there is no question that wearable devices will be the next big thing. I have been wondering about devices like the Samsung Galaxy smart watches and Jawbone’s fitness bands. There has been good adoption of those products, but nothing has really wowed a generation.

To me there is nothing innovative about shrinking a smart phone’s user experience into a smart watch or putting a smart chip into a band where there is no display, thus requiring you to sync with your device to get information. Those devices do not “just work�?and certainly are not “insanely great�?

Apple is not the first mover in the wearable category (or many categories), but they usually come out with a bang. I can’t wait for the Apple Watch to come out to put “insanely great�?applications on them, just as they did with iPhone and iPad.

The other category that fascinates me is mobile payment, specifically Apple Pay. I believe it can empower small businesses the same way a PC empowered individuals. Online payment innovations have created a lot of successful companies, including Paypal, Square, and Ali Pay (China).

NFC (near field communication chip technology) technology used by Apple Pay has been around for a long time, but nobody including Google Wallet, Verifone or Ingenico (leaders in the credit processing devices) has made a dent in applying that technology. Apple Pay will build an ecosystem leveraging NFC, iPhone, iTunes and make it “just work�? Despite the new technologies, credit card transaction pains (both merchant and consumer) have persisted for the past twenty years. Now it seems Apple Pay have fast, secure, and effortless transactions that will empower small and large merchants, while providing a great user experience.

I’m proud to announce that Logic’s Showcase will soon include credit card processing capabilities. Our goal is to make personal selling experience easy and seamless so it “just works.�?/p>

Part Two: Alibaba

While Apple was becoming the most valuable company in the world, another, Alibaba, was rising in the east. Alibaba is positioning itself to become the most valuable IPO in history, and there is no question that Alibaba has had several category killers of its own.

Like Apple, Alibaba has not been the first mover in anything that they have done, not even close. By the time Jack Ma launched Alibaba’s eCommerce marketplace in 1998, B2B and B2C commerce were already quite mature in the U.S. Amazon and eBay were already well positioned to take on traditional brick and mortar. In fact, Amazon was the category killer that pretty much wiped out the bookstore industry, including my favorite store Borders.

Not only was Alibaba not the first mover in the world, it was not even the first mover in China. When Alibaba launched Taobao, a C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplace, eBay had already invested $150M in another Chinese commerce site called EachNet. EachNet initially gained about 85% of the Chinese market. Who would think Taobao would essentially take over the entire marketplace dominated by eBay, which has virtually no presence in China any more?

Alibaba did not stop there. Every few years, they would launch a product that would quickly dominate a market in China. After their C2C offering, they started T-Mall, providing eCommerce platforms similar to Amazon. Then there was AliPay, which individuals can use to pay to each other and merchants.

Alibaba pays enormous attention to user experience and user psychology for each and every product it releases. The common theme among users is “it just works.�?Sound familiar?

 Part Three: Two “A�?Players

Although Apple and Alibaba excel in different markets, there are striking similarities between these two companies:

1. No compromise on quality. Rather than being the first movers, they produce products that make a difference.

2. Their priority on user experience is second to none. Steve Jobs once said that Apple “made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.�?/li>

3. They both carefully weave an infrastructure around which they create an ecosystem for their empires. Some people may be taken back by this kind of dominance. One analyst said that the Apple Watch is disappointing because it requires an iPhone. But isn’t Apple’s culture to control every aspect of its products? I would personally rather use a dominant but well designed product than use a dominant but inferior product (such as Microsoft DOS in its glory days).

4. The companies were both led by individuals who possess an extreme passion in pursuit of their dreams. Jack Ma is as much a showman as Steve Jobs was.

Apple and Alibaba have built their empires on quality products that have no equal. For a moment, it seemed as though the companies were heading in different directions. Apple faltered following the death of Steve Jobs and Alibaba became one of the most talked about companies leading up to their IPO. For now, at least, they both look like they are back to where they have always been: at the top.

The post Two “A�?Players, Apple and Alibaba appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

What’s up? WhatsApp! In fact, the company (named WhatsApp) had an almost unthinkably high “up�?in February when Facebook acquired it for $19 billion. The start up has only been around for five years. There has been no company with such a high valuation after only five years. 

With 450 million users, WhatsApp dominates the mobile messaging app markets in the US and Europe, but other apps dominate elsewhere in the world.

Messaging…my mother and my mother-in-law both have one single reason to use their iPads �?it is the cheapest and easiest way to communicate with their children because of the abundance of good messaging apps. My mother-in-law first discovered the beauty of Skype: that she can talk, conference, and message for free. For a nominal fee, she can even make international calls to an actual telephone number. She is only one touch on a big iPad screen away from us. We can’t escape her.

My mother also discovered the power of messaging through an app called Line, which is the top-ranked messaging app in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Now she constantly sends me Chinese text, photos, and video links. Line is pretty much free for messaging, but nonetheless it generated $335M of revenue in 2013, which makes it the all-time highest grossing non-game app with at least 360 million users.

The other big player of the message app space is WeChat ( 微信 ) .  Forbes magazine calls it “One of the World’s Most Powerful Apps.�?WeChat is Tencent’s (one of the big three internet companies in China) flagship mobile app. WeChat was launched in January of 2011, and has now close to 400 million users. There is no application that has such a rapid adoption in the history of software.

Prior to WeChat, which is more a mobile-based messaging app, Tencent was very successful with its QQ internet instant messaging system. WeChat is so powerful that it has essentially created an ecosystem that includes gaming, payment, audio messaging, and photo sharing. Logic’s Showcase product is now “WeChat�?capable in China, because our clients insisted that the best way to communicate with their customers is through WeChat, not email.

With the popularity of WeChat, Tencent’s market value has now surpassed the market value of Intel at $150B. What’s up is not just Tencent’s market value, but also its biggest rival in China, Alibaba, which is about to launch their IPO in the US with a market valuation between $150B and $200B. It looks like that all Mr. Horse got a head start with the year of Horse. (Jack Ma founded Alibaba and Huaten Ma founded Tencent, Ma means Horse in Chinese. Here is my blog post about Year of the Horse that mentioned Mr. Ma) 

Both Alibaba and Tencent have driven up the use of the app in other areas as well. When I was in Nanjing China last time, I had tough time getting a taxi to go back to my hotel. I told my office assistant Olive, “the taxi is difficult to get even at off-peak time nowadays�? She replied, “Actually, it is a lot easier to get taxi now, just use Di Di or Kuai Di.�?/p>

Di Di is the taxi-app from Tencent, and Kuai Di is the taxi-app from Alibaba. With either app, the user can see all nearby taxis and request a pick up from a specific cab. The driver then sees the requests on their mobile app, which quickly leads him via the phone’s GPS to the customer’s location.

The customer acquisition cost has been more than $3B between the two companies, by giving discounts to the customers and bonus to the taxi drivers for every ride. The results of this taxi-app war were incredible. There are 11.5 million uses of these two taxi apps per day. And while these types of apps are new, it took two internet giants only one year to push them from almost non-existence to “the way�?to get a taxi.

Behind the practical use of the free taxi software, there is a hidden emerging business model for other related paid apps. You see, WeChat is not just a social app, it is also becoming a monetary transaction tool like PayPal. After a taxi ride, you can immediately authorize your WeChat to make payment. The driver’s app and the customer’s app talk to each other to complete the transaction. Similarly, most Chinese are used to AliPay from Alibaba since that is the way to purchase things from the enormous eCommerce site of Alibaba. At the end of a taxi ride, you can use AliPay to complete the payment.

Alibaba’s inroad to the financial sector did not end with AliPay. Its YuErBao(餘額�? is becoming the fourth largest money market-fund in the world. It was only launched one year ago.

The words Yu Er means “left over money�? Bao means treasure. The idea is that you can transfer any amount of money, as little as 1 RMB, to YuErBao anytime from your phone without any penalty. The interest rate was as high as 7%, while most of bank rates hovered around 1%. Many people transfer a small amount of their AliPay money to YuErBao to try it out. Once they get a taste of the good returns, they put more money to that account. The accumulation of left-over money from various places over time will become a personal treasure. The front end is easy to use, but back end does all the magic.

So much is up, so what’s down? Well, more and more people’s heads are down. My dad asked me, “are you contributing to the growth of Heads Down Tribe? 低頭�?�?/p>

At first, I did not catch what he meant, and he explained, “Don’t you see all the people in the subway with their heads down all the time reading something on their mobile device?�?The up rise of mobile apps like WhatsApp, Lines, WeChat, Di Di Taxi, are keeping the heads down.

“Yes, I am a contributor to the growth of Head Down Tribe,�?I told my dad, “I develop mobile apps for living!�?I just need to think about what the next trend is going to be to keep user’s heads up instead. Logic Glass?

The post What’s Up And What’s Down? appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

Horse (�? is pronounced as “Ma�?in Chinese. There is a celebrity “Ma�?in each of the countries that Logic has an office. Yo-Yo Ma is a Grammy Award winning cellist in the U.S. He is a role model for my children who love classical music. Ying-Jeou Ma is the current president of Taiwan. Twice-elected President Ma and President Obama both went to Harvard for graduate school. Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba Group, the eCommerce giant in China. Alibaba owns the consumer portal business Taobao (similar to eBay and Amazon), a B2B portal business, and AliPay (similar to PayPal). In 2012, two of Alibaba’s portals earned revenues of $170B, more than Amazon and eBaby combined. In fact, Alibaba is currently the most valuable part of Yahoo, which holds a 24% ownership. Mr. Ma (Mr. Horse) is a common conversational topic for me in all three countries.

Not only do the Chinese often talk about Ma (horses) in our conversation because of celebrity Ma, but also we really use Ma a lot in our daily conversation. Horse is injected in most conversations because of its multiple implied meanings. Let me offer you a quick lesson in conversational Chinese:

The phrase “on the horse (馬上),�?is pronounced Ma Shan and means “right away.�?When you ask a waiter to bring you a spoon, he might say “Ma Shan�?meaning “I will be on the horse�?or “I will do that right away.�?/p>

“Horse Horse Tiger Tiger (馬馬虎虎),�?pronounced Ma Ma Hu Hu, means “sloppy�?or “careless.�?We often tell our programmers that they cannot program with “Ma Ma Hu Hu,�?meaning they must pay attention to details.

The phrase “success upon horse’s arrival (馬到成功),�?pronounced Ma Dao Chang Gong, means “arrival with success.�?We often wish a team to succeed in whatever they are destined to do with “Ma Dao Chang Gong.�?/p>

In this horse year, we are introducing Quantum Compliance, the EH&S software company that Logic Solutions acquired two years ago, to the Chinese market. I have decided to use two Chinese characters 匡騰 as the official Chinese name for Quantum. Not only is this pronounced exactly the same as Quantum in Chinese, there is additional significance to the choice.

The first character �?means “correction.�?The second character �?means “horse’s gallop,�?and also implies leaping to success. I hope Quantum’s mission to provide software that helps companies monitor activities and issue corrective actions will ensure our customers�?success in EH&S compliance.

I’m optimistic. If the Chinese government makes new year resolutions, this year’s is undoubtedly a commitment to fix environmental and safety issues. What is significant is that the Chinese government has tied the performance evaluation of every local government official to environmental concerns!

It’s easy to see why. During my short stay in China, I experienced horrendous air quality, witnessed poor handling of highly toxic chemical waste (sometimes even an utter lack of handling them), and read about two fires that caused hundreds of factory workers to die. All these issues have fueled an urgency to develop and enforce better EH&S policy, and improve industrial facilities.

In fact, a local waste management facility invited me to bring my Quantum Compliance (www.logicquantum.com) team of Yiwei Chen and Pat Brooks, to pay a visit to see how Quantum’s EH&S software might help deal with industrial waste more effectively. Pat Brooks, Quantum’s founder, toured the waste management facility and held in depth discussions with the management team.

Our conclusion was that only if they “Ma Shan�?implement key measures and do not treat the EH&S issues with “Ma Ma Hu Hu�?attitude, then the EH&S policy and solutions that we recommend will “Ma Dao Chang Gong.�?/p>

I wish everyone “Ma Dao Chang Gong�?for whatever you wish to do in this year of horse. Happy New Year!

The post Year of the Horse �?No More Horse, Horse, Tiger, Tiger appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

• a MacBook Air
• iPod,
• iPhone,
• iPad,
• and Apple TV

He makes about $2,000 per month that has to support a family of three in China, but his story is not uncommon.

Two years ago I took a few iPhones and a few iPads to China to give away as the prizes of our annual Chinese New Year Party. Giving away prizes, large and small, has always been important practice for companies in China during the Chinese New Year party. For Logic, Apple products are always the top draw.

A few days after the party I noticed one of our secretaries with an iPhone 4 in her hand. I said, “Congratulations to winning the iPhone!�?She said, “Oh, it is not from the party. I bought it myself.�?/p>

I then asked, “How much do you have to pay for it?�?She said, “I bought it ‘water merchandise�?(someone brought in from outside China) so it was only 6,000 RMB.�?I was almost speechless. That is about $1,000 USD, which was more or less the entire monthly salary of an experienced secretary in China.

This speaks to the fact that the Apple empire has conquered global users at almost all socioeconomic levels of the professionally employed population. Apple’s products are not considered attainable by only the wealthy. In my opinion, if people are going to splurge on luxury items, I would much rather see them spending their hard earned money on great innovation such as Apple products, rather than Prada or Louis Vuitton purses (which are also highly coveted items).

Rice
In the country where the rice is the food mainstay, it is only fitting that the most promising technology company is called Xiaomi. “Xiao�?means “small�?and “Mi�?means “rice.�?The founders Xiaomi bet their fortune on their confidence of their “small rice�?products.

Those innovative products have taken the market by storm. It is difficult to imagine, but Xiaomi introduced its first mobile phone only two years ago, and it has already surpassed Apple, reaching 5% of the Chinese mobile phone market compared to Apple’s 4.8%.

Xiaomi operates like a combination of Google, Apple, and Dell. Similar to Dell, one can only purchase Xiaomi products directly through their online store. Their speed to market from concept to reality has been unprecedented.

Xiaomi’s attention to details is no less meticulous than Apple’s. Trusting their gut feeling with the details helped them to drive down the cost of supply chain, which is crucial to their success.

Like Android, Xiaomi makes use of open source technology. This applied with a philosophy of direct selling (to maintain profit margin), they were able to commit to a huge volume of production before launch. They hit the market with a fantastic phone at cost only 30% of iPhone or Samsung phones. The buying experience was very well designed. The combination of all factors has made co-founder Lei Jun the tech darling in China. He is often compared to Steve Jobs.

When I was growing up in Taiwan, the most common ways to greet people were “Have you eaten rice?�? 吃飯了沒�? ) and “Is your stomach full?�?(吃飽了沒�?), instead of “How are you?�? which was adopted from the western world. For decades, China’s residents were generally poor, and having only one full meal of only rice was considered a fortune. It looks like that there will be plenty of hungry people for Small Rice Phones in the Rice Country.

Cherries
Although I often talk about technology companies that I admire, there are non-technology companies for which I have equal admiration, especially innovative ones. Three years ago, I had the fortune of visiting Bob Sutherland, one of the legends “up north in Glen Arbor. Bob owns the popular retail chain Cherry Republic.

I first learned about Cherry Republic when every one of my three children came home from an elementary school trip with some Cherry Republic products, but my trip there wasn’t until much later. It was arranged through the MEDC, and I was there to accompany some Taiwanese government officials who wished to investigate Michigan’s agricultural products for possible export to Taiwan. (As a resident of Michigan for more than 30 years, there is nothing more thrilling for me than seeing great Michigan products make their way to Taiwan.)

During the visit to Cherry Republic, it struck me how innovative Cherry Republic was: it wasn’t just a retail store, there are cherry restaurants, and wine bars, among the hundreds of cherry-based products. I was totally blown away by the seemingly limitless merchandising possibilities. I told Bob, “You need to go to Taiwan and Asia where people appreciate good food AND innovation.�?/p>

Two months ago, Bob reached out to me and said that he was ready to take a trip to Taiwan. I jumped on the opportunity to travel with the legend.

Bob is extremely humble and eager to learn about new things. The first day there, we went to a food show in South Taiwan. Bob was like a kid in a candy store, tasting great varieties of food and asking all kinds of questions. He was exited to learn about food innovation in Taiwan, all the while telling me about his plans for innovation. When we went through the catalog that I picked up from his store in Ann Arbor, he excitedly explained his latest innovation: Cherry Sausage.

We visited my friends who own a bakery store in Tainan where most of the famous pineapple shortcake is produced. It is the most famous souvenir in Taiwan. While there, the packaging of various types of food intrigued Bob. Afterward we were driving around and Bob started talking about possible local foods that could include cherry in the list of ingredients, such as the cherry chili dipping sauce for Chinese “hot pot�?(Chinese fondue), cherry shortcake in addition to pineapple shortcake, and more. My friend said, “Bob never stops innovating, does he?�?/p>

Bob spent two full weeks in Taiwan, and I learned a lot more about him and Cherry Republic during this trip, including the fact that he had to really commit to innovation persistence to help him through the initial years of difficult business in a town of only 800 permanent residents.

For more about Bob’s trip to Taiwan, read his blog.

Innovation

What is common about the empire created by Apple, the country conquered by Xiaomi, and the republic established by Bob Sutherland, is the founders�?passion for innovation and relentless appreciation of talent to attract the best and the brightest individuals to help them innovate. They established a culture the encouraged people with a commitment to passion and doing something new. These leaders are not inventors. They are innovators.

There is a subtle but important difference between these two words:

• Invention the formulation of new ideas for products or processes
• Innovation the practical application of new inventions into marketable products or services

I have written quite a bit about my admiration for Steve Jobs�?ability to innovate. Unlike Al Gore, he did not invent internet (haha); nor did he invent Postscript, WYSIWYG design, mouse, smart phone, tablets, etc. He was able to introduce the world to some of the most visionary products in history because he recognized both great inventions and great talents.

Xiaomi’s Lei Jun did not invent Android, Smart Phone, Buy Direct, or the idea of squeezing supply chain. He somehow he put all these ingredients together to make an amazing company. Jun spent two to three years courting the best talent to co-found the company with him. They included the top individuals from Google, Levono, Microsoft, and Motorola. He claims that he spent 80% of his time recruiting top talent.

He recognized the importance of speed to market, and he needed individuals who could execute the best and fastest decision making process. His initial team of 52 people invested an average of $200,000 out of their own pocket so that the company had the initial capital of $11M required to kick off the manufacturing and marketing. These individuals had deep skin in the game, so he can trust them to make various decisions fast.

Obviously Bob Sutherland did not invent the cherry—he doesn’t grow cherries.
I can see the similarities he has with other successful businessman. Bob has assembled a small team in Glen Arbor (a city with a population smaller than that of my parents�?condo complex!) who are so passionate about making new products out of cherries and making Cherry Republic a household name. They continuously come out with fantastic products that are healthy, tasty, and inspiring.

Just as these leaders and their companies don’t see borders to innovation, I don’t see borders to Logic’s innovations, either. I have created a center of innovation at Logic, and have asked Angela Kujava to be our Director of Innovation. Although we have been innovating with products such as Showcase, Q EH&S, Logiclink Dream Apps, I hope to establish a culture where everyone is passionate about the impact they can have on our success, and the opportunity they have to bring their innovative ideas to life. I believe this will take Logic to a universe without borders.

The post Innovation: Apples, Rice, and Cherries appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

A huge painting on the wall attracted my attention. My friend said the subjects of the painting are two famous Buddhist monks having an interesting conversation. Most Chinese know about the stories of these two monks. I was able to understand about 95% of the scripted words that the artist painted. But because I left Taiwan when I was almost 16, my Chinese history and literacy is somewhat behind the locals�? So, I immediately “Googled�?these two monks and learned their stories.

They are among the greatest poets and philosophers in the Chinese history.  The literal translations of the monks�?names are Cold-Mountain (寒山) and Pick-Up (拾得). You can read the stories of Cold-Mountain and Pick-Up on Wikipedia, but I’ll summarize their conversation:

Cold-Mountain asked Pick-up, “If one slanders me, insults me, sneers at me, despises me, injures me, hates me, and deceives me, what should I do?�?/p>

Pick-up replied, “Only bear with him, yield to him, let him, avoid him, endure him, respect him, and ignore him. And after a few years, you just look at him.�?/p>

The original Chinese, which is more interesting, is as follows:

寒山问拾得：“世间有人谤我、欺我、辱我、笑我、轻我、贱我、骗我，如何处置乎？�?/p>

拾得曰：“忍他、让他、避他、由他、耐他、敬他、不要理他，再过几年你且看他。�?/p>

You may remember I wrote a blog a while back that included my admiration for Adam Grant’s Taker and Giver. While we need more givers and fewer takers in this world, we also need to forgive more and offend less. Jealousy, greed, impatience, anger, hunger for power, all cause fights at home, at office, between organizations, and countries.

These days when I get very upset, I think of what Pick-Up replied to Cold-Mountain. It is very difficult to practice in reality, but it helps to try. It helps to reduce my stress level and avoid conflict.

It is so important to give more and take less. It is so much harder to forgive than give, but it is so much more wonderful to forgive and not offend. This would be a much better world if we could all give and forgive a lot more.

Oh, and I can’t forget to say something about technology: Google and Wikipedia are my best friends in learning a lot of Chinese stories and history when I travel.

The post Offender and Forgiver appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.

One thing I find very interesting in Taiwan is the disproportionate numbers of news channels to its population. There are probably 20+ news channels for a country with a population of only 22 million. Each channel has a somewhat extreme political view, similar to MSNBC and Fox here. My dad spends a lot of time watching these news stories. I don’t have the time and patience to watch hours of news stories, but while I am there, I spend at least 30 minutes every day watching something with him.

When I was visiting our office in Taiwan two months ago, a story particularly caught my dad’s and my attention. The reporter was talking about a new Chinese movie called “American Dreams in China�?  As an immigrant, I immediately thought, “Aren’t we supposed to pursue our American dreams in the U.S.?�?So what does “American Dreams in China�?mean?

The actual Chinese name of the movie was “Chinese Partners�? but someone translated the English name to be “American Dreams in China�?which I thought was interesting. Until this day, I still have not watched this movie, but I know that the basic plot is of a story of three people who obtained a visa 20 years ago, to come to the U.S. to pursue the American Dream. They all pursued higher education in the U.S., but each experienced some sort of setback and could not stay in school. Eventually, their “American Dreams�?weren’t realized, so they went home.

With the knowledge that they earned and the wave of economic growth in China, they opened a chain of English language schools.  After a number of years, they became wildly wealthy and realized their “American Dreams�?in China. While the details of the movie had many other interesting twists, I was attracted to the notion of American Dreams, which I can very much relate to.

This might sound like a Cinderella story, but it really is not. The fact is that there are a lot of real American Dreams realized in China. The founders and billionaires of companies such as Baidu, Sohu, CTrip all came to the U.S. to study and returned home to pursue their American Dreams. One of the employees who delivered food at one of the restaurants that I invested in even returned to China around 1997 and now is a billionaire, owning the biggest movie studio in China.

On a different news channel, I was fascinated by another story because I heard someone mention the University of Michigan. This is an American Dream that wasn’t someone becoming a billionaire. Rather it is a story about Daobin Young, who earned a PhD in piano performance from the University of Michigan, returning to Taiwan to pursue a different type dream.

Instead of going into music performance or teaching at prestigious university in Taiwan, he opted to teach at a small elementary school in his hometown, where a lot of children are underprivileged. He knew that there is no such thing as a “really cheap piano�?to achieve the goal of “an instrument for every kid.�?/p>

He started a program in which he collects $50/month for group violin lessons. After 12 months, the child owns a violin. He put in tremendous effort to persuade the violin manufacturer to sell these tiny violins at an incredibly low price, and to convince parents to come up with $50/month for their children. For those kids who could not find even $50/month, he would go out of his way to find money for their lessons. After six years, he organized the largest violin performance in the Guiness Book of World Records, which included 4,650 kids of all the elementary schools of the county.

Somebody later asked Young what his motivation was to teach and promote music in such a small place. He said that when he was at elementary school, one of his teachers recognized his musical talent and offered to teach him violin for $50/month. He happily went home and told his mother. His mother’s tears came down and said that the family cannot afford even the $50/month. After many years of hardship and diligence, he eventually saved enough money to come to the U.S. to study and got his PhD from the University of Michigan. He said he fulfilled his American Dream already by then. Now he needs to help fulfill the dreams of other children. That was his American Dream in Taiwan.

My dad asked me, “What happened to your American Dream?�?I laughed and said, “I have more nightmares than dreams, but some of the small dreams were really sweat.�? After 18 years, Logic still is a relatively small IT company. Every year we recruit the top talents from all over. Many are immigrants and foreign students just like I once was. I am just happy that many were able to be successful in pursuing their dreams, no matter it is a big dream or a small one, no matter it is to become the biggest movie mogul in China or to become an IT strategist at IBM in the U.S. I am just happy that I was able to contribute.

As for me, as a small business owner, I am still trying to wake up from nightmares at times and look at brighter days ahead. I am so grateful while I am trying to help others, I have the greatest staff helping me pursuing my own dream. I am pumped to come to work everyday to see some of the entrepreneur’s dreams are coming together as well such as Larky, JEMS, Hired My Way, My Inch Of the Earth, Digital Edge Learning, and many other technology companies that we are helping.

I am pumped to come to work everyday to see that our own products of Showcase (www.showcasecloud.com) and Quantum EH&S are making a difference in the marketplace. I am pumped to come to work everyday just to see that we are making incremental improvements of our small company and hopefully everyone is making small increment improvements of their life. I could not have achieved even these types of small dreams without many of my very talented staff, American or immigrants.

I participated in a committee to help realize these dreams of international students for a number of years. I am a living example of it, and I am grateful that I was given such an opportunity to pursue my dreams and help others.

American Dreams could be in America, China, Taiwan, or anywhere in the world. I wish everyone’s American dreams, small or big, come true.

The post American Dream in China? appeared first on 雷技信息科技（上海）有限公司.