Rick Warren at Davos

Via Scoble's QIK video feed I discovered Rick Warren was at the Davos World Economic Forum.  Worth watching.  Quick summary:

He sees 5 problems that are facing the world right now:

1.  poverty

2.  disease

3.  illiteracy

4.  spiritual emptiness

5.  political corruption

He advocates a three-legged stool approach to solving these problems:

1. public sector - government must set the agenda and the priorities for their nations

2. private sector - business must bring innovation, expertise and investment to solving these problems.

3.  faith-based sector - while not usually considered, there are several advantages of involving faith based organizations in solving for these problems:

  a.  universal distribution - in 10 mm villages and 1000 language groups more than the United Nations.

  b.  manpower - 2.3 billion Christians, 1.0 billion Muslims, 800 million Hindus, 700 mm Buddhists.  Over 80% of the world population is part of one faith group or another.

  c.  local credibility - "NGOs may come and go, but the local village priest will always be there."

Great framing of the advantages of involving the faith-based sector in addressing the largest social issues facing the world today, and presented in a way that makes it understandable to people who ordinarily may not see things in a faith-based lens.

Here is the QIK video from Scoble.  He talks a little about his church Saddleback Church and his book Purpose Driven Life.

Shanghai Maps in English getting better and better

The biggest problem for non-fluent travelers in China is the lack of high quality maps that are both up to date, and in English. This is true in print and online. It seems that this is changing! Here is a cool metro map on SmartShanghai via Micah Sittig.I'll keep updating this page with more maps as I find them.

Back from Shanghai Ad-Tech 2006

I went to Shanghai Ad-tech 2006 expo in Pudong Shangli-La Hotel this morning. Compared to the number of talks, the number of exhibitors is kind of small, only 20. I talked to 65% of them. There are several foreign companies, coming from Japan, USA and even Slovakia, to look for Chinese partners . There must be much more in the audiences.

85% exhibitors are Internet companies, a few are mobile marketers.

They are in three categories:
1. Search engine: Accoona, a business directory and information search engine providing advanced search to modify result by region, scale of company, and person’s name.
2. Marketing/ad technologies: Lyris (ListManager) and Radica (Email Marketing Management, EMM), iCast (Rich media technologies)
3. Advertising network: Creative, campaign management, data management, analytics, and affiliate

Interesting conversations:

Grigo: I heard that your company is No. 1 in China, but while I was visiting your Web site, I couldn’t find much.
Answer: Well, we are a big but low profiled company. (To be honest), we don’t want people (competitors?) to copy us through our site. You can find out more with this brochure.

Grigo: (with a Hong Kong company) How do you like doing business in mainland China?
Answer: Well, we beat Espolon and got a big client in China, but we want to deal with international/global clients rather than Chinese.
Grigo: puzzled… Isn’t it that China has a huge market and plenty of opportunities?
Answer: (continued)… We found that whenever you deal with Chinese, you need to think about the worst cases of how they would cheat you....

Grigo: I read a piece of news that you got a very important Chinese client recently; do you have an office here?
Answer: Not yet, but we are looking for a partner/partners here today. Actually, it was the client first found us in California.