This is a piece I'm recording for the BBC World Service. It's based loosely on my piece about possible limits to Samsung's impressive foray into smartphones. 

The interesting thing about covering technology for a living is that while pretty much every business within  the sector  very very different, but all are, or want to be, the same.

Take a mobile phone manufacturer like Samsung. These guys are huge and have gotten huge very fast. In the first quarter of 2011 they shipped fewer smartphones than Apple, Nokia or Research in Motion, but is currently ahead of all them ( in profits? In market share?) . Needless to say they've very happy. But actually this success presents them with a huge problem. Because it turns out that making cellphones isn't enough.

First is the problem of the software that run Samsung phones . After all a phone is just a chip or two, a screen, a battery, a microphone, a speaker, a case. Without software they just make useful paperweights.

Nearly all Samsung's phones run on Google's Android operating system. Which is free. Except of course it's not. Because Google knows that the software is in some ways more important than the hardware. Ever tried to get an Android phone going without signing up for a Google account? Can you hear the clink clink of ad revenue dropping into Google's pocket?

Samsung is an excellent maker of things, but not very good at making software. So it saves money, time and the groans of dissatisfied users by running Android on its phones. But the company  knows that this is not a good way to go in the long run, because you may end up like one of those PC makers back in the 1990s. What we call a commodity manufacturer, indistinguishable from other PC manufacturers, with price to reflect it.

So part of the problem for Samsung is not hardware but software. Then there's another problem.

When we used computers in the old days they pretty much stood alone. Microsoft sold us Office, maybe a game or two and the thing sat alone in the corner of the room gathering dust. Nowadays every device is connected to the Internet, and we expect to be able to use that connection to interact with other people, download software, play games andbuy stuff and generally facilitate our lives.

What supports all this is an ecosystem. Payments, catalogues, developers, marketplaces, digital goods. Think Amazon. Think Apple's iTunes and AppStore. Every Samsung phone connects to this world but most do it without Samsung seeing a cent.

Of course Samsung is trying to fix this. It has a store, it has content, it's even hoping people will buy a smart TV that's connected to the Internet and will let you move stuff between a Samsung TV and a Samsung smartphone.

The trouble now is, everyone wants this. A mobile phone maker wants to be a content seller, a search engine wants to have its own cellphone and operating system, an online store wants to sell its own tablet, a tablet maker wants to own its own network. No one player with big dreams can afford not to think in terms of owning the whole nine yards—the whole chain in which we the consumer live. To settle for nothing less may end up meaning you settle for nothing, as just a commodity supplier of hardware, or content, or software to the others.

This is great for me as a reporter because every step takes us into uncharted territory. There are no maps for this anymore, and it will only get more interesting. 

This is a piece I wrote with my colleague Lee Chyen Yee on the ZTE vulnerability. 

ZTE Corp, the world's No.4 handset vendor and one of two Chinese companies under U.S. scrutiny over security concerns, said one of its mobile phone models sold in the United States contains a vulnerability that researchers say could allow others to control the device.

The hole affects ZTE's Score model that runs on Google Inc's Android operating system and was described by one researcher as "highly unusual."

"I've never seen it before," said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike. The hole, usually called a backdoor, allows anyone with the hardwired password to access the affected phone, he added.

Read the rest at ZTE confirms security hole in US phone. 

A piece I wrote ahead of Facebook's IPO, casting a skeptical eye over assumptions that Asia would continue to be a source of major growth for the company.

Even as Facebook fever grips investors ahead of the social networking giant's potential $100 billion-plus initial public offering, its breakneck growth in Asia may be slowing as it moves beyond desktop users to those who access the Internet largely or solely from a mobile phone.

In March, Facebook revised its own SEC filings to scale back its scope for further growth in India - its third-biggest user base and the largest population it currently has access to - China remains off-limits to Facebook. And independent data show that user numbers in Indonesia and the Philippines, its other largest Asia user bases, have actually fallen off slightly in the past three months.

"If you've been growing at such a huge amount it will definitely trail off," said Ganesh Kumar Bangah, Kuala Lumpur-based CEO of online payment provider MOL Global. "You can't expect it to keep growing."

Read the rest: Analysis: Facebook can't take Asian growth for granted

The BBC World Service Business Daily version of my piece on cameras. (The Business Daily podcast is here. Script is here.)

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Thanks to the BBC for allowing me to reproduce it as a podcast.

This is the script for a piece I recorded for the BBC World Service. It' s based on a piece I wrote for my employer, Reuters.

We always assume that when a new technology comes along it will displace the old. And that tends to be the case. But displace doesn't mean delete, remove, consign to the dustpile--which is often what we mean. Radio didn't obliterate books or newspapers, TV didn't obliterate radio. The Internet hasn't obliterated any of them--although if you're in TV, radio, newspapers or book publishing, you probably feel a bit obliterated. There will still be all those things, though they'll have to make way for a digital, online world.

The same is true of cameras. Many of us assumed that just as film gave way to digital photos, so would the camera give way to the cameraphone. After all, who wants to carry more than one gadget around with them? Well, it turns out, quite a lot of us. Instead of a camera in a phone obliterating the need for a camera, we took so many pictures with our camera phone that we started wanting to take better photos. So we bought a better camera.

There's another conundrum here, too. We thought that because all these camera phones could take video, people would be more interested in video than still photography. That's also turned out not to be true. Sure, we get out the video camera out for Junior's role in the school play, but for the most part we take still photos because they're easier to upload, less time consuming to look at. When we do upload video it's in short bursts, and of something noteworthy. In short, we use our digital gadgets not to build up a mass of memories but to select and share the best ones.

In other words, we are finding ways of coping with this digital cornucopia--where we can capture, store, and upload pretty much everything by focusing on quality rather than quantity. However good our mobile phone is at taking photos, we still think a dedicated camera, with a better lens and innards, will do a better job. We don't want 1000s of photos--we want the best one. Same with video. We don't have time to edit hours of footage down to something watchable, so we record video sparingly, and don't dare subject our Facebook friends to anything longer than a minute.

I don't know if there's a law of digital disruption in here, but for sure there are lessons. First off is that people are happy to carry more than one gadget around with them if they think they serve a purpose. Second, the more they do of something the more they want to explore it--so long as they can see an uptick in the quality of the outcome.

And finally, we're learning how to harness the expected tidal wave of data by using technology to filter out the stuff we don't need, while ensuring that what we do keep is the best. It's not surprising, then, that the makes of camera we rely on today are brands our parents would recognise: brands such as Nikon, Canon and Fuji. While the technologies may have changed the way we store and share pictures, the way we take them hasn't.

A piece on how one marketing company is capitalizing on what it says is growing stress among social media users. 

Nestle, purveyor of the decades-old KitKat snack, has launched an app it says addresses a growing problem among young social media users - giving them a break from the stress of posting updates by doing it for them.

The software, Social Break, automatically sends random updates to users' Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. It will be officially launched in Singapore later this week and is free to download from kitkat.com.sg/socialbreak.

While the application is a tongue-in-cheek marketing gimmick, the developers behind the software, ad agency JWT, say it also highlights a serious problem among younger users, especially in Asia: growing stress about time spent maintaining a presence on social networks.

JWT surveyed 900 19-26 year olds in China, Singapore and the United States and found that more than half considered it too time-consuming to keep up with all their social media commitments and conceded that the time they spent on such sites had a negative impact on their job or studies.

More at Social media stress? There's an app for that 

A piece I wrote on potential roadbumps in Samsung's ride to smartphone dominance. 

Samsung Electronics is the world's largest smartphone manufacturer and biggest user of Google's Android operating system.

And, for some, that's the problem.

Samsung's meteoric rise - in the first quarter of 2011 it shipped fewer smartphones than Apple, Nokia or Research in Motion, but is now market leader - has handed it a dilemma. Does it risk becoming a commodity manufacturer of hardware, squeezed like the PC makers of old between narrowing margins and those who control the software that makes their devices run, or does it try to break into other parts of the business - the so-called mobile ecosystem?

"It comes down to this sense of what it is they want to be," said Tony Cripps, principal analyst at Ovum. "Do they really want to be one of the power players or are they happy enabling someone else's ecosystem?"

To be sure, Samsung isn't in any kind of trouble, and isn't likely to be so any time soon. Later on Thursday, it will launch the Galaxy S3, the latest addition to its flagship range of smartphones. Juniper Research expects Samsung to remain the No.1 smartphone manufacturer this quarter. The next iPhone upgrade is expected around the third quarter.

"Android has done wonders for them," says India-based Gartner analyst Anshul Gupta.

But still the company has its critics. They worry that Samsung has yet to address the central contradiction of it making devices that use someone else's operating system. By licensing the free Android OS from Google, Samsung saves itself millions of dollars in software development costs and license fees, but leaves itself dependent on Google.

More at In a Samsung Galaxy far, far away ... will Android still rule? | Reuters

In some ways our world all looks very similar. Prefab coffee and fast food chains, Cars that all look the same. Everyone on Facebook. But what we--and by we I include the people who actually produce and sell these goods and services--don't do a good job of is understanding while the global products may be similar, how they're actually used can be very different. 

In short: Just because your fancy product is doing well in country X, do you actually know why? 

This, it turns out, is kind of important. Because if you don't understand that, chances are you won't know how to keep the good thing going, let alone expand on it. 

Take, for example, Research in Motion, They've done extraordinarily well in some countries, but none more so than Indonesia. Everyone, it seems has a BlackBerry. A friend recently bought one for his six year old daughter so she wouldn't be teased at school. 

This is music to the ears of RIM, because as you may have heard they're not doing so well in other parts of the world. So it made sense for the company to try to sell its devices to another 7 million Indonesians, After all, the first 7 loved them. 

So they've launched a new phone. It has a radio in it, because that's what they heard people in emerging markets like Indonesia want. It has a special button on the side which will take users to its BB messaging service, which is what group-oriented Indonesians love about the Blackberry. And it's going to be cheaper. 

But RIM didn't create its success in Indonesia,. That was organic--a lucky mix of Indonesians' love of new things and their conservatism that keeps them wedded to products after others have moved on. Local telephone providers helped by keeping prices low. And out of it all came a lively ecosystem of program developers, street corner vendors selling accessories and fixing broken phones, and malls full of second hand dealers. 

Now RIM is trying to formalize this, But they may not completely understand the unique culture of adoption and usage that Indonesians have given to the BlackBerry, which is quite different to how a corporate drone in New York might use it. 

As globalization throws up more of these quirks companies are going to have to work harder, faster and better to understand why their products are popular. Because if they don't they may not only find themselves unable to build on that success; they may find their efforts to expand actually make things worse. By trying to expand downmarket in Indonesia for example, RIM may run against one of the very things that makes the brand popular: its exclusivity, which makes a BB a status symbol.

That may sound odd to someone in Canada, Hong Kong or London for whom the BlackBerry is yesterday's news. But that's the point. Globalisation may look good on paper, but going local is the only way to make it a success strategy.  

A piece I wrote for Reuters with Lee Chyenyee: 

(Reuters) – In the 1990s, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei visited the United States several times, hoping to learn from its leaders of industry about how to turn his Chinese telecoms equipment maker into a global company. On one trip in 1992, in the days before China had credit cards, he paid all his bills with cash from a $30,000 stash in his briefcase.

Sixteen years later, Ren was listed among Forbes’ 400 richest Chinese and Huawei was one of the world’s largest telecoms gear vendors, but the United States still treated him as an outsider. He was keen to win customers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint but had secured just $200 million of business in the U.S. in 2007 – in a $23 billion global market. Early that year, the United States effectively vetoed Huawei’s bid for U.S. networking equipment manufacturer 3Com on security grounds.

Outsider Ren pits Huawei against the world | Reuters

You may remember a time, not too long ago, when to make a long distance phone call you had to go through an operator. You would wait as you could hear her asking another operator for a connection. It was not always successful. A lot depended on the perseverance of the operator--especially when trying to call a place like Burma.

But the basic idea worked: Anyone with a telephone could, in theory, reach anyone else with a telephone. That idea has gotten lost somewhere down the line. Remember the early days of SMS, or text messages? And how you could only send a message to someone else if they used the same operator as you? Only last year did Japanese carriers get around to allowing messages from other carriers onto their network.

This is the problem of telecommunication companies writ large. They seem unable to see that what is good for their user is good for them. Take a service called, unfortunately, WhatsApp--app being short for application. WhatsApp is one of those things we called disruptive--meaning it overturns an industry from outside. WhatsApp, and a few other services like it, are once again making a mockery of mobile phone operators.

I always know when a technology is disruptive because I usually hear about it first from my non-techie friends.. WhatsApp at its most simple allows phone users to send SMS messages to each other without paying for an SMS message, Instead, it uses the modern phone's data connection--which is usually cheaper. WhatsApp's viral spread--it sends more than 2 billion messages a day--is largely down to this simple feature. If you and your friend both have WhatsApp on your phone and that person's phone number you can use the service. For $1 a year, and the first year is free.

Mobile carriers hate this because SMS messages were a big part of their business. Consultants Ovum, for example, reckon that they'll lose more than $23 billion in mobile messaging revenue this year.. But that's only the start. WhatsApp allows you to do things like send video, photos and have group chats very, very easily--much more easily than any service the carrier offers, and often more reliably. And WhatsApp have written versions of their software that run on even the most basic phones you see around.

Carriers are fretting, and for good reason. Not so much because they're losing revenue but because they're losing the bigger game. WhatsApp is grabbing their customers by offering them cheap, open doors to all their friends, in the same way that Facebook and other social networks are. They are what telcos call Over the Top services--meaning that they piggy back the cellphone network to build a social network to which the operator themselves don't have a key, Unless of course, they close them down.

That won't happen, of course. At some point operators may just have to settle for  less money being a pipe. Which is not a bad thing: In the spirit of those human operators of old, making sure the message gets through is not that dishonorable a profession.