Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Last week I led a class in Shanghai for Smith School MBA students.

The course was titled Doing Business in China. Its main focus was China’s financial sector, including China’s banking, insurance and and securities markets. We also explored general themes of doing business in China and looked specifically at foreign direct investment (FDI) in China’s manufacturing sector.

We met with a number of insightful people, including those listed below. (The list is arranged by topic, not quite chronologically.)

General Themes of Doing Business in China

Patrick Cranley, managing director of Asia Media, a communications company in China.

James Golsen, a representative of the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service.

Alick Sun, China manager for Schering-Plough, an agricultural biotech company (and Maryland MBA).

Prof. Zhou Dunren, a former Fudan University faculty member who now works for the Pudong Institute for the U.S. Economy.

Xiang Wang, an attorney with Jones Day who specializes in IP law.

Banking

Julia Wu, a deputy general manager for Deutsche Bank in China.

(Stephen Green of Standard Chartered also discussed banking).

Insurance

Dean Cowan, a senior manager and insurance specialist with BearingPoint who has been stationed in Shanghai for over a year.

Terrence Cummings, an actuary with the American International Assurance (AIA).

Michael Yu, a vice president of AIU in China.

Both Mr. Cummings and Mr. Yu spoke to us at the headquarters of American International Group (AIG) in their old building on the Bund.

Securities Markets

Situ Danian, a senior research fellow at the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Li Gang, a Shanghai-based managing director of China International Corporation (CICC), the leading investment bank in China.

Stephen Green, senior economist with Standard Chartered in Shanghai and author of China’s Stockmarket.

Foreign Direct Investment & Manufacturing

Qiu Xiangrong, a deputy director of investment promotion in the Pudong New Area department of commerce. Ye Fan also joined the discussion and helped with translation.

Officials from the Suzhou Industrial Park.

Zou Qin, a vice president of Black & Decker, in charge of their Suzhou Industrial Park factory which we were able to tour.

Natalie Annmitoraj, a vice president for quality with Shanghai General Motors (no photo). The SGM factory tour was interesting, and we were grateful for the chance to see first hand what may still be the largest FDI project in China. SGM’s speaker gave us a brief presentation about the JV, including statistics about its booming sales (from 20,000 to 500,000 cars in 6 years). However, her expertise was mainly in operations, and I think for this group of MBA students it might have been even better to hear from someone who worked with finance, management, law or some other “corporate” department. The speaker was unable or unwilling to answer many of the students questions.

These meetings were all held during a single tightly-packed week.

Prior to arriving in Shanghai, the class met for nine hours in the U.S. These pre-departure meetings, spread over three Sunday afternoons, were designed to give the students initial context for what they would experience in Shanghai. I lectured about Chinese language, culture and history. It was radically truncated, but it did at least give them some highlights. I didn’t have to persuade them of the relevance of history; between our first and second meetings, anti-Japan protests erupted across China, making the relevance vividly clear.

In the final U.S. meeting students made group presentations. I had divided them into teams and assigned each team to one of the main topics we planned to explore in Shanghai (general themes and issues, banking, insurance, securities markets and FDI/manufacturing). Each group gave the entire class a preliminary briefing on its respective topic. This allowed a subset of the students to become conversant with a particular area and enabled the entire class to gain at least one exposure to some of the vocabulary they would be hearing in China (NPLs, SOEs, SAFE, CSRC, CBRC, CIRC, etc.).

Besides providing an initial briefing, each group was asked to post material to a course blog while we were in Shanghai. The idea was that they would cover our activities in China related to their topic, providing a journalistic account of what we did in Shanghai along with some analysis and links to other resources relevant to each group’s respective topic.

I think the pre-departure group presentations were helpful, and I think the idea of a course blog is generally a good one. But there is substantial room for improvement in the execution of the course blog assignment. I’ll write about that separately.

Overall, I though the course was successful. Many of the students were, predictably, captivated by Shanghai. They could feel the momentum, and they saw the physical transformation the city has already undergone. Like many visitors, they became convinced that what is happening in China is profoundly important for the future. The could feel it, which is something classroom-based education doesn’t always inspire. However, I was pleased that, along with being seduced, they also heard about some of the real difficulties of doing business in China and some of the enormous challenges the PRC faces.

I assigned the book Mr. China to the entire class. It is not a theoretically rich work, but its stories about how some Western business people lost enormous sums in China and were sometimes defrauded by their Chinese partners is sobering.

Once there, the students heard a lot about infirmities in China’s banking system and stock markets. They also got a sense of some of the regulatory hurdles that many foreign investors face. Thus I think they got a relatively well-balanced exposure to the enormous opportunities and challenges confronting those who do business in China.

Many of these students will probably return to China on business. Even if they do not, what happens in China is likely to affect their lives and careers. These students will be equipped with some very helpful background for grappling with that aspect of their future.

One delight of this trip for me was that I didn’t have to fret about logistics. The Maryland China Center, a quasi-state agency of Maryland based in Shanghai, provided great support, as they have for each of the last three years when we’ve offered a Smith School of Business course in China. Above I am pictured with MCC staff members Karen Sun and Jim Curtis, our minders for the week. When I took a group of undergraduate students to Hong Kong in January, I didn’t have such help and personally made dinner reservations, booked buses and counted noses at each stop to be sure we didn’t leave anyone behind. All that was exhausting. The MCC relieved me of all that, so I was able to concentrate on structuring the course and other purely academic dimensions of the trip. Moreover, they helped not only with “logistics” but also with the substantive content. Having worked in China before, I had contacts in the sectors I wanted the class to focus on, but the MCC arranged meetings with many high-level people whom I didn’t know. They made the course much better than it would have otherwise been, and I am very thankful for their hard work and valuable help.

A few impressions from my time in Shanghai last week are posted here and here. Images from my visit back in January are here.

Often very interesting things in Shanghai are hiding off the main streets, down alleys. In some of the shots included in the album linked to above, I spied “hiding” building, relics of old Shanghai. Below is another such image. Click on the thumbnail to see the effect of walking down the alley a few steps.

Last week in Shanghai my students were asked to post material to a course blog. The idea was that they would make near “real time” entries about our experience in Shanghai, posting journalistic accounts of our meetings (I imagined with both text and pictures), analysis of the issues we were exploring and links to additional resources.

The students are continuing to post to and improve the course blog. Perhaps one advantage of a blog over a traditional academic assignment is that it can more easily be incrementally improved, not frozen in time. I think it will soon be a good record of our trip. However, the experiment was not as successful in “real-time” as I had hoped. I’ve been reflecting on how things went and how I might be able to improve the exercise in future classes. Some initial thoughts are that next time I need to:

1. Communicate expectations clearly–explicitly– and don’t assume they imagine the assignment as I do;
2. Encourage students to write portions of their blog entries in advance, so that the can easily add information, including quotes and photos, based on what each presenter actually says;
3. Schedule time for them to work on the blog;
4. Schedule time for the entire class to view the blog while in-country, probably at daily breakfast meetings.

I gave the students a brief introduction to blogging before we left Maryland, but I think a disconnect remained between what I hoped they would do while in China with respect to the blog and what they imagined they needed to do. I hoped they would at least post a basic daily entry, providing a journalistic account of our activities (whom we met with, ideally with a photo or two) and links to some other resources. More extensive material would of course be welcome, but I didn’t intend for them to write a magnum opus while in Shanghai (nor did I allot time on the schedule for them to do so). Some of the teams managed to do this, and I was pleased by their enthusiasm for the project. They plan to upload audio and video files. But I didn’t clearly explain that something is better than nothing, and I think students in some of the groups imagined that they needed to post a comprehensive report. Consequently, some of the groups failed to post anything immediately.

Besides more clearly explaining what I want, I will also try to provide explicit time on the schedule for the groups to work on the blog. That seems obvious, but having failed to do that this time, groups had to work on the blog at night when, after our long days of meetings, they were 1) fatigued from the day’s events, 2) suffering from jet lag and 3) distracted by Shanghai night life (moderate sampling of which is not antithetical to the course objectives).

One of the students suggested daily breakfast de-briefing sessions, and I agree they could be useful in several ways. I could use them to amplify any particularly valuable points from the previous days’ information (or offer alternatives perspectives and make corrections when needed). During them we could also look at the previous day’s blog postings. Knowing that their peers would be seeing it would I imagine be a strong inducement for doing a good job.

The day before 20-plus MBA students and I arrived in Shanghai, the latest Star Wars movie was released in both the United States and China.

To test the efficiency of the PRC market in counterfeit (盗版 or daoban) DVDs, I offered a bounty to the first student to bring me a copy of the Star Wars DVD. The movie was released on Friday. I offered the bounty on Monday. I got a copy on Tuesday. By the end of the week, pirated copies were commonly available on the streets of Shanghai.

Like most pirated DVDs, the market price was RMB 7-10 (a range covering slightly less than to slightly more than one US dollar). The copy my students acquired was of viewable but inferior quality–the resolution was a bit blurry. It was not obviously made by someone holding up a cam-corder in a theater (as some pirated DVDs are), but it was not studio quality, either.

I arrived in Shanghai last night. Some initial pictures of the journey and my excursions so far today are here.

It feels good to be back in China.

On the plane I ran into Prof. Hillary Josephs and her husband. We had seen each other in New York last month, at a Columbia Law School conference on Chinese law. We were both on our way to Shanghai to teach a group of US students a summer course.

Well, I’ve taken the plunge and ordered an unlocked Treo 650.

I placed the order with a vendor on eBay. The price directly from Palm is $700. With overnight shipping I paid $600. The seller has literally thousands of transactions resulting in positive feedback, so I feel confident the unit will be “new and factory sealed” as described.

Most US mobile service providers offer the Treo 650 at a reduced price with a one or two-year service plan, but I expect to be in China a lot from now till August 2006. Thus I don’t want:

1) a long-term service contract or

2) my phone “locked” to one vendor.

If mobile phone hardware were normally sold separately from access to mobile networks, life would be better. It seems the U.S. is exceptional in keeping, at least from the average consumer’s perspective, hardware and service yoked together.

Anyway, I look forward to receiving this phone and trying it out. My brother has already had a Treo 650 for several months, and he loves it. His office Lotus Notes calendar pumps data out to Microsoft Outlook, which is then linked to his Treo in real-time. If he makes a change to his calendar while using his computer or while using the phone, the change instantly appears on the other device. He doesn’t have to synch the devices through a wire or even a Bluetooth connection. I want to learn that trick.

I am also interested in experimenting with moblogging.

Several things influenced my decision to buy this device. My brother’s enthusiasm for his Treo 650 was a major factor. It will be fun to have the same phone as him and compare notes.

Besides his endorsement, I had read several online or magazine reviews that raved about the Treo 650. The consensus seems to be that the 650 is the best PDA/phone merger yet.

My dissatisfaction with Windows Mobile was also a key driver of the decision. I’ve never recovered my affection for “Pocket PCs” (the name borders on fraud, I think) since my HP iPAQ 4705 lost all its data and a lot of programs I’d installed after a hard reset (which could be brought on simply by letting the battery run down).

The handwriting recognition in Windows Mobile isn’t that great, either. On a long plane ride back from Asia I determined that trying to write anything lengthy with HWR in Windows Mobile will produce a major headache, literally. During a brief experiment with a Blackberry, I concluded that for me thumb-keying is faster and more accurate, at least for short notes (and as I say, writing long notes on a PDA or smart phone is uncomfortable and inefficient). Plus, the Treo’s keyboard means when I misplace my stylus (as I often manage to do) I won’t have to use my fingernail to tap on a tiny on-screen keyboard.

Finally, the specific Pocket PC I’ve been using–variously branded as an O2 xda II mini or an iMate Jam–hasn’t thrilled me. It is I believe the world’s smallest fully functional Pocket PC (which is a kind of oxymoron). If I were to actively use the Pocket PC features, I might appreciate it more, but I don’t. Also, it is hard to operate it with one hand, and one-hand operations turns out to be a really important with phones (there is a little rocker button for one-handed operation on my current phone, but the software just doesn’t work with it very well). I’ve tried using the 650 with one hand and found it much better.

Originally I had hoped to use my O2 mini for GPS navigation. I purchased a Bluetooth GPS receiver, and I did get it working with the O2. But the O2’s screen is too small in my experience to be useful for navigating (at least with Microsoft Streets and Trips). I could never see enough on the map to help me get my bearings; the few blocks I needed to see wouldn’t fit on the screen. If I zoomed out to see more, because of the screen’s dimensions everything became too tiny to be discernible. Perhaps if I’d tried other mapping software I would have been happier, but I don’t often drive more than a few miles from campus and so haven’t bothered to experiment again. The Treo’s screen is actually smaller than my current’ phone’s, so even thought the Treo has Bluetooth I think I’ll be using my GPS receiver with my Sony T from now on.

Soon I will sell my O2 xda II mini (aka iMate Jam) on eBay. Somebody with different tastes than me will love it (or perhaps somebody like me may want to try it!).

I’ll post more about the Treo 650 as my experience with it unfolds.

This week I have installed the Linux operating system on my desktop computer at work, pushing me into the community of “open source” software users.

I’ve been drawn into the open source computing “movement” gradually, in keeping with my proclivities as a second-wave adopter.

First I installed the Firefox web browser from Mozilla. It’s now been downloaded more than 50 million times, so Firefox has gone mainstream. It is really eating into the Microsoft hegemony in the browser space.

Next I got Thunderbird, an email program that also comes from Mozilla.

Then I tried OpenOffice, a substitute for Microsoft Office, the collection that includes MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Then I started using WordPress for my blog. Through it, I have also begun to discover the elegance and utility of software that is open to third-party plug-ins.

I really like all these programs. Each of them is functional, stable, easy to use and of course free. Though they all come from different sources (different volunteer “projects”), my good experience with the collection gave me more confidence in the open source “brand.” But until this week I was still using all these tools only in a Windows environment.

As a former Mac user (and Apple employee), I was no great fan of Microsoft. I used the Apple Macintosh operating system from my first experience using a computer in college until my graduation from law school in 2000. I reluctantly bought my first Win-tel PC because I’d joined a large law firm with no Macs. I expected to be there a while and wanted to become more proficient with the planet’s dominant computing platform. So when my daughter was born and I was buying my first digital camera I decided it was also time to get a Win-tel box. I bought a small Sony laptop. It came with Windows 98 installed.

My sense is that Windows was dramatically inferior to the Mac OS until at least Windows 95 and probably until Windows 98, but versions since then including the current XP iteration are pretty good products (not perfect of course, but quite usable). I may buy another Mac one day, but I haven’t felt any compulsion to go back.

My decision to embrace open source computing now is is not really motivated by financial considerations. Internet Explorer and various email programs I could use are free. As a faculty member at the University of Maryland, I am able to buy copies of MS Office for personal use for a nominal fee (they charge just enough to cover some of the expense of burning and distributing the CDs). Plus, after using versions of MS Word for nearly 20 years (even on the Mac, Microsoft dominates), I felt no compulsion to learn a new word processor.

But a few things helped me decide to take the plunge. First, using those open source applications in Windows got me more comfortable with the whole open source notion. Instead of it seeming like a “movement” of disgruntled geeks, I learned first hand that the products are stable and easy to use. Second, I knew that Linux was gaining critical mass; I sensed using it now wouldn’t put me on the “bleeding edge” with those who code their own drivers when a ready-made one cannot be found. Third, I admit there is a certain attractive mystique to Linux, what I’ve called a “geek chic.” Also, with blogging through WordPress, the main software I use is on a server anyway. Then finally I had problems with Windows. It was misbehaving on my office desktop, often being oddly slow to respond to commands and not doing what I expected. It felt like a good time for a change. My original plan was to experiment with Linux by putting it on my Sony PictureBook. But I had problems doing that, so I decided to take the plunge at work. I wiped Windows from my hard drive, not even installing Linux in a way that would let me choose whether to boot in Linux or Windows–it is now purely a Linux machine.

As I wrote, the installation process was amazingly smooth. Seems to me Linux is ready for the mainstream.

I did a Google search for “second wave adopter,” the label I applied to myself yesterday. I found a pithy description of exactly what I was talking about in a document filed with the SEC by the company WebEX:

The adoption of web conferencing may follow a pattern similar to that which has been observed with other computer-related technologies. According to this pattern, the first users can be grouped into a category called early adopters, a relatively small percentage of potential users who first discover and are able to understand and make use of a new technology. If the product seems useful, a second wave of users may arise which is often many times larger than the number of early adopters. In the usual case, this larger number of users materializes because of workplace usefulness: employers start to understand the utility of the technology in the workplace and encourage or require employee usage of the technology. Eventually, if the utility of the technology is compelling enough, the technology may become a staple of most workplaces and the technology is deemed mainstream. Under this adoption pattern, the greatest growth in the market occurs during this migration from second wave to mainstream usage. One such example of this adoption pattern is usage of the desktop computer during the 1980s. Another example is usage of word processing software associated with the desktop computer during the 1990s. In each instance, time required to migrate from the early adoption phase to the mainstream phase exceeded ten years.

Conclusion: desktop Linux installation is easy, laptop installation can be hard.

Last night I tried to install Linux on a Sony PictureBook. I worked till 4 in the morning, but when I surrendered the laptop still only ran Windows. By contrast, today I installed Linux on the desktop in my office in less than half an hour.

Indeed, within 45 minutes I had it up and running with all the applications I most commonly use, including Mozilla’s browser Firefox and email program Thunderbird (85% of my computing time taken care of right there) and OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets and PowerPoint-like slide presentations (Fedora actually installed OpenOffice for me).

Installing all this was shockingly easy. I never once had to deal with a command prompt–just a simple GUI install. Basically, I just clicked “next” several times to confirm the default settings and changed the CD at the appropriate point during the install sequence. The keyboard, mouse, monitor, CD ROM drive and speakers all worked perfectly from the get-go. I didn’t have to do anything to configure the network access–I never removed the Ethernet line, and Linux easily found an IP address and let me surf immediately upon reboot.

I haven’t yet tested printing or accessing the other drives on our network. But so far, the only surprises have been how easy it all is.

I do expect to miss a few Windows programs. Not Microsoft Word, for sure. But I really like:

Picasa, for managing my digital photos and doing some light retouching;

MindManager, for brainstorming, organizing my thoughts and making diagrams (”mind maps”);

Wenlin, for occasional Chinese input and its phenomenal bi-lingual dictionary.

There are no doubt Linux programs that perform similar functions. But I like these programs so much that it is hard to fathom that I’ll find satisfactory substitutes.

Still, right now, I am quite exhilarated to have joined the Linux community, and I am stunned by how easy it was. This open source thing is real!

People who habitually are among the first to try new software and gadgets are often called “early adopters.” Installing Linux today–which I think of as a kind of geek chic thing to do–has prompted me to think about where I fit on the curve of new technology adopters.

By some measures (or from some perspectives), I may seem like an early adopter. I’ve actually kept a blog for about two years now, making me one of only a tiny handful of bloggers on Maryland’s campus (the only one among my business school colleagues, I think). Thus I was keeping a blog a good while before bloggers helped bring down Dan Rather, before MSN created its blogging features and before Business Week ran its cover story on blogging.

In addition to blogging, I often try devices that are somewhat out of the mainstream. Years ago I had a Newton personal digital assistant. More recently I’ve tried a Pocket PC, Tablet PC and Sony U ultra-portable PC. And now my main office computer is running Linux.

But for all that, I really don’t think of myself as an early adopter. I recoil from command lines and have never studied programming. I know how to use a few basic HTML tags, but the only thing I know about CSS is what it stands for. I haven’t gotten around to trying Skype yet (though I plan to soon). I know PHP and SQL are important to WordPress, but if they passed me on the street I wouldn’t recognize them. My poor blog doesn’t even have an RSS feed (does it?).

Thus I think it’s fair to say I live near the early adopter neighborhood, but not in it. I didn’t start my blog until Google had acquired Blogger. I may never have even seen a computer running Linux before today. Certainly I had never tried it. Yet Linux has been around for more than a decade.

Thus I’d call myself a “second wave adopter.” As a second wave adopter, I follow the vanguard at a safe, comfortable distance–I am not right on their heels, but I do keep them in sight. I’m ahead of the masses, but not by leagues.

People like me can be a transmission belt between the true early adopters (who follow closely behind the discoverers) and the teeming masses who may follow. There needs to be a little, a maybe a lot, of public validation of a concept before I try it, but frequently I will try it earlier than most folks. And when I like something, I tend to evangelize others about it. So, brother, have you heard about Linux?

Well, my first attempt to install Linux isn’t going well. I got nowhere with my Mepis CD. Using the Fedora Core CD that came with my Linux for Non-Geeks book, I created a bootable floppy and was able to get an installer started, but then it quickly snagged.

I was able to choose to install with a graphical interface, tell it English is my language and that I have a US keyboard. But then it asked me a question that I think can be translated as “where is the copy of Linux you want me to install?” I couldn’t get past that point.

The copy of Linux I wanted to install was on a CD that was in an external drive connected to the computer by a PCMCIA card (actually, the CD drive is one I bought for my Mac many years ago, so I had a SCSI-PCMCIA adapter connecting the drive to the computer). Running from a floppy, the computer apparently couldn’t recognize the external CD drive.

The reason I needed a bootable floppy in the first place is that only certain Sony drives will boot the PictureBook. I don’t have one of those.

So, how am I going to install Linux without a CD that will boot my computer?

An apparent workaround is offered here. The person who wrote it is some kind of uber-geek. I laughed aloud when I read it.

A note on installation
The C1VE model which I bought came with no external drives, and Windows ME installed. Since I didn’t have access to an appropriate USB floppy or CD-ROM drive, and wouldn’t need either for day-to-day use (I make my backups, and install new software, across the network), I had to start the Linux installation from the hard disk, but Windows ME doesn’t allow you to run Real Mode DOS programs, such as the Linux bootloaders that worked under, for example, Windows 98. After a lot of stressed fighting with Windows, I succeeded along the following lines:

* Install an appropriate patch to restore access to some form of DOS (the possibility for this is still present in Windows ME, but all ways to reach it are blocked)
* Use a hard disk partitioner (e.g. FIPS) to shrink the FAT hard disk partition and create a small additional partition
* Install a more useful boot manager (e.g. SBM)
* Download Debian 2.88 MB rescue disk, base system and drivers archives
* DD the Debian rescue disk onto the new partition - I couldn’t find a DD that worked under Windows ME, so:

o Download BeOS trial, boot
o Mount new partition, unmount again (so that there’s a /dev entry for it)
o Mount DOS partition, cd to appropriate directory
o dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/whatever

* Reboot, boot rescue disk from new partition, and continue Debian installation process as normal.

What’s Debian? Install the BE operating system to install Linux? Um, no. I’m going to try to find another way–some kind of network installation? Pay Sony extortion to buy a bootable CD? Give up?

When I first began test-driving WordPress, I complained that it didn’t have a good utility for adding images to posts. Later I waxed enthusiastically about the Image Browser plug-in. In conjunction with the Upload command within WordPress, Image Browser made it easy for me to add images to posts–including thumbnails with links to fuller versions. Since then, I’ve been trying a modification to the Image Browser plug-in that makes it work even better. Called IImage Browser, it puts the upload and insert functions in the same place.

I installed IImage Browser on the copy of WordPress that my students will use in Shanghai in two weeks. In fact, it was after finding IImage Browser that I decided to use WordPress rather than some other blogging tool for the course.

I am also a fan of the WP Picasa Gallery plug-in (I wish Picasa took plug-ins, so that I could add buttons to it to post images and web galleries of images!).

I offer the above flowers to express thanks to WordPress plug-in writers, especially those who built WP Picasa Gallery, Image Browser and its progeny IImage Browser!

Other flower photos are here.

Test post, sent through my O2 xda II mini (same as iMate Jam).
Posted by using Pocket Internet Explorer and WI-FI to access WordPress, while sitting at a table on the outdoor deck of the Barnes & Noble cafe at the Inner Harbor, Baltimore.

While test-driving my new Sony PictureBook, I made what I thought would be a harmless adjustment to the screen resolution. The result was that I had to create a boot-able DOS floppy disk and use it to install an updated system BIOS.
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Today was the third and final pre-departure meeting for the Doing Business in China course I am teaching.

Twenty-five Smith School MBA students and I will arrive in Shanghai in two weeks. We will meet with a variety of PRC government and business leaders, packing many activities into an intense week.

The course includes 9 U.S. classroom hours, divided over three separate Sunday afternoons. These sessions are designed to provide the students with a richer context for appreciating the travel portion of the trip.

The students have been divided into five teams, each to focus on one of the topics we will explore while in China:

1. general themes of doing business in China,
2. banking,
3. insurance,
4. stock markets, and
5. foreign direct investment (particularly manufacturing in China).

Today the teams assigned to these respective topics made presentations. The idea was for them to give the entire class a background briefing in advance of our further exploration of the topic in China. I was pleased with the quality of the presentations.

I also gave the students a crash course on blogging. The students are going to produce a course blog at this address.

Xiaoping Chen has organized the China Law Digest website which offers some interesting news and analysis about legal developments in China. There is a strong public law focus, reflecting Chen’s background as a constitutional law scholar and activist. Both Chinese and English versions of the site are available. With free registration you can subscribe to newsletters in English, Chinese, or both.

Today I got a new computer. I bought it on eBay. It is a used Sony Vaio PictureBook, model PCG-C1VPK. I’m writing this blog entry on it.

It was not a rash purchase. Before winning the auction for it, I had bid in more than a dozen PictureBook auctions on eBay. I never got caught up in a bidding frenzy, and I think I finally got a good deal. On average this model sells for about $700 on eBay (the spread last month was $500 to $900). I paid $500–not a give-away, but towards the lowest end of the range.

These computers do seem to sell reliably in the secondary market. I imagine this owes to several factors. First, the Sony brand name helps (overrated now in terms of quality I think, but that just shows you the power of a brand). Second, the distinctively small size is a draw for some people (me included). Third, I think a good number of computer geeks want to buy one of these and put Linux on it (as I do).

I don’t need another laptop. But I’ve been wanting to try out Linux, and I’ve been reluctant to install it on either of my new laptops (a Toshiba M45-351 and a Sony Vaio T 250P). I am willing, however, to experiment with this cheaper, older unit. If I cannot get Linux to work, I’ll just re-install Windows and then probably re-sell the unit on eBay (in fact, I’ll probably re-sell it on eBay even if I get Linux working on it).

This PictureBook is about three years old. It was one of the last models in the PictureBook series. The PictureBook series was the smallest laptop series Sony sold before the current “T” series (the U series is even smaller than the T series, but I don’t think you’d call a Sony U a laptop–it belongs to another category, more like a handheld).

My used Vaio PictureBook lacks many things in comparison to my newer Vaio T. The PictureBook doesn’t have built-in wireless, Ethernet or Bluetooth. It doesn’t have a built-in CD or DVD drive (or come with an external one for that matter). Its specs are not overwhelming: 666 MHz, 172 MB RAM, 15 GB hard drive. (The T in contrast has 1.2 Ghz, 512 MB of RAM, 60 GB hard drive).

The PictureBook has a Transmeta Crusoe 5600 chip, which is supposed to be power-efficient. However, on my PictureBook someone installed Windows XP, “upgrading” the original OS from Windows 2000. XP runs on the PictureBook, but slowly. Maybe Linux will be faster.

I don’t have a wireless card for it (I had one for the Sony laptop I bought in 2000, but I sold that computer and its wireless card on eBay last month). But I did find an old Netgear PCMCIA card in a drawer full of technology junk. I didn’t have to install a driver to make the Netgear card work. I just put the card in the PictureBook and voila, it was recognized. Thus I was immediately able to connect the PictureBook to the internet through my WI-FI router (connected to my cable modem). I presume this is one upside of having XP installed–driver installations are really simple!

Because the PictureBook is so light it is very comfortable on my lap, but the keyboard does not seem quite as ergonomic as the one on the T (both are reduced in size in comparison with standard keyboards). I may get accustomed to it, but right now I find myself making more errors than usual. I peck at the places where I expect certain things to be, but I often land on some other key. This seems most common when I am aiming for a shift key or something like that. But the keyboard is certainly functional–I am talking about levels of accuracy and comfort, not basic usability. The PictureBook lacks a wrist rest. They didn’t need to extend the body to support one since there’s no optical drive. For me, the lack of a wrist rest is surprisingly awkward. At some angles it quickly becomes uncomfortable.

I’ve got to test the battery on the PictureBook. It arrived utterly depleted, and often older batteries won’t hold a charge. But it does appear to be recharging, so I’ll have to see how it performs.

The PictureBook has a novel camera mounted above the screen. It captures still images or video. It swivels around so that you can capture images of yourself or things you are facing (or above you, I suppose). I used it today to take a few random shots.

My idea, besides trying out Linux and maybe making a little money by reselling this unit on eBay, is of course to try out this device out as a writing tool. That’s been my thought for every computer I’ve bought in the last 8 months (NEC Versa LitePad Tablet PC, HP iPAQ 4700 PocketPC, Sony U 750P, Toshiba M45-351, Sony T 250P and finally this Sony PictureBook). Because it runs a bit slow and doesn’t have several functions built-in, I doubt the PictureBook will displace the Sony T in my affections, but I do like its compact size. It may be the better computer to tote around Shanghai. I can leave the T safely back in the hotel and use the even lighter PictureBook for excursions. I still have a GPRS card, so if I re-up its SIM card (pay China Mobile some more money), I should be able to get online in China with this PictureBook, even when away from the hotel or another WI-FI “hotspot.”

It occurs to me that MindManger probably will not be available for Linux. That’s a problem. I suppose I can set the computer up to boot in either Linux or Windows, but if I have to reboot every time I want to use MindManger that will diminish my enthusiasm for Linux.

Another note: it’s amazing what people leave on computer hard drives. I can tell there were at least two previous owners (or users) of this computer. One was a guy named Lee. He worked as a pharmaceutical salesman. Among other things, an offer letter from an employer was left on the hard drive–nice salary, Mr. Lee! The other owner/user was a devout church member. I have a Visio chart detailing the process for approval within the church of certain items for publication, plus various religious clip art images. That’s just the stuff visible without running any recovery tools on the hard drive.

Tonight I ran across the interesting blog of Clif Figallo, one of the founders of the Well, a pioneer online community. In Social Alchemy he writes thoughtfully about the social dimensions of computer networks and communications technology.

I am going to experiment with blogging as a tool for the MBA class Doing Business in China that I am currently teaching.

The course is a travel course. In about 15 days, 25 MBA students and I will leave for Shanghai. We will stay there a week, having an intensive series of meetings with PRC government and business leaders.

Only one of the students has been to China before. I am sure many of them will be captivated by China and the astounding changes going on there. I’m excited about accompanying them and helping structure their experience. I think keeping a course blog will be a good way to get them actively involved in what we do in China while also being a good group collaboration exercise. It offers the additional benefit of helping acquaint them with an important technological and communications trend.

In January I taught a similar travel course for undergraduate students. We went to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. For that course I asked each student to keep a daily journal. I hoped that writing a journal while in Hong Kong would help them keenly observe and reflect on their experiences. I asked them to test in their journals the “book learning” they got before the trip against their more direct experiences in Hong Kong. The journals would also, I thought, provide them with a meaningful record of what for most was their first trip to Asia.

Generally I think the journal assignment was effective in meeting those aims. But one disadvantage of the journal-keeping was that it tended to keep the students cooped up in their rooms, writing in isolation.

MBA students are accustomed to teamwork. That’s something new for me. In law school we hardly did any group work (nor did we do any in my East Asian Studies graduate courses). In my previous teaching I’ve not assigned any group work either. Thus I was ruminating on what kind of group project to assign for the Shanghai course when it occurred to me that I could get the students to build a group blog.

Each day in Shanghai we will focus on a particular topic, specifically:

general overview of doing business in China

stock markets

insurance

banking

manufacturing.

It occurred to me that I could assign a group of students to the topic for each day, asking them to create a blog entry for that day. I hope the blog entries will 1) chronicle our meetings that day– including photos and a journalistic account of what we did 2) provide some analysis about the topic, plus 2) link to or reference other resources for more information on the topic.

We’ll see how it goes. I’ve set up a WordPress blog at www.doingbusinessinchina.net/shanghai2005/blog/

Sunday is the last of three preparatory meetings (each one a three-hour affiar) before we fly to Shanghai. Each team will present a briefing on their topic to the entire class, giving everybody at least a little background on the discrete areas. And I’ll give them a crash course in blogging.

A few weeks ago I’d never registered an internet domain. Now I find my collection proliferating.

Many, many companies offer domain registration and web hosting services. Each one seems to do things a little differently. Thus far I have not found any company whose web interface I like so much that I want to consolidate all my domains to that single hosting company or registrar.

I have just registered the domain prcsecuritiesregulation.com through the hosting company Media Temple. I wanted that domain for the obvious reason that it relates to my principal research interest (I was frankly surprised it is still available). I am hosting the domain on MediaTemple because they offer to install the blogging software MovableType when you buy a hosting plan. I want to try MovableType because it purportedly allows you to keep multiple blogs through one installation. WordPress, which I am using for walterhutchens.net/blog, does not support multiple blogs from a single installation. I want the multiple blogs feature because, as I have recently noted here, I want to find a way to publish a subset of my blog entries (those on PRC securities law) to a specific domain while keeping the general blog elsewhere. I want to see if MovableType is the tool for that.

MT operates much like its simpler cousin TypePad. I tried TypePad before moving to WordPress. I’ll happily pay for MT if MT will help me do what I want to do (without requiring me to learn a lot of stuff that I want to stay away from), but right now I am having problems just getting it to upload images to my site hosted by Media Temple.

Meanwhile, as shown by the image above, I have discovered that WP can do what TypePad’s insert image command did so well. First I use the “upload” button in WP to move an image from my local hard drive to the server. Then I use an “Insert Image” plug-in to add a thumbnail of the image to my blog entry. When clicked, that thumbnail links to a bigger version. TypePad accomplishes the same function with fewer clicks, but WP seems elegant enough to me.

So, if I can find a way to get WP to push my PRC sec reg entries out to another blog, I will probably stick with WordPress. Meanwhile, though, I’ll also experiment more with MT.

Today I ran across this interesting blog, Antipixel. I like its name, too.

I’ve been using WordPress for about three weeks now. My impressions thus far include the following.

An apparent lack of themes and a spell-checker were two of my initial complaints about WordPress. I’ve scratched both issues off my list. I found a WordPress plug-in that spell-checks entries. I had a little trouble installing it, but now it works quite well.

I also learned that there are oodles of themes for WordPress, and one nice feature of WordPress is that it lets me change themes quite easily. With Blogger, my original tool for maintaining my web log, it is possible to change themes, but the process isn’t nearly as smooth as it is with WordPress. With Blogger when I selected a new theme I had to re-publish the entire blog to see it. That re-publishing process took minutes. By contrast, with WordPress I can flip between themes instantly. There is even a WordPress plug-in that allows visitors to a site to flip between themes and choose they one they’d like to see when they return.

The support forums and codex documentation for site WordPress are also quite good.

I’ve imported into my WordPress site the many entries I had created with Blogger plus the few entries I created with TypePad. I like having everything in one place, and I like that WordPress allows me to password protect specific entries.

But there are some things I do not like about WordPress. One problem is that WordPress is not set-up to support multiple blogs with a single WordPress installation. As I recently wrote, I want to create one site with just my entries on PRC securities regulation while maintaining a more general blog that will include those entries and a variety of other stuff. I did not do this with Blogger, but Blogger does easily allow one to keep multiple blogs through a single interface, which is something WordPress does not yet do.

A second frustration I have with WordPress is that it doesn’t allow me to easily add photos to my blog entries. By contrast, Blogger is well integrated with Picasa. Both Blogger and Picasa are Google products, and they work together quite well. I use Picasa to maintain thousands of photos on my hard drive, and I could post one to my blog maintained with Blogger with just a few clicks. TypePad, which is a product of SixApart, not Google, was not tightly integrated with Picasa, but it did allow me to easily pick an image from my hard drive and insert it into a blog entry with just a few clicks. When I did that, I could choose for the image to be set to the left or right margin, and TypePad would automatically create a thumbnail for the image and upload the full size version so that when someone clicked on the small version in the blog entry the large version would be displayed. TypePad also put in the code to have text flow around the image.

Finally, I found it very easy to modify a template in Blogger, but I’ve not yet changed a WordPress template. Of course it can be done, but Blogger makes it obvious how to do so.

Aside from these things, I’ve been happy with WordPress overall.

Bill Gates showed a prototype of a small hand-held computer last week and discussed the specs he hopes it will offer.

The full speech is available on-line here. It it is quite long. The part on what Gates called “an ultra-mobile 2007″ occurs at about minute 56. It only last a minute and a half. I see no clear evidence the prototype was functional in any sense, and the specs Gates talked about seem to be aspirations rather than currently-feasible build instructions. He wants the UM-PC to offer the following features:

The main problem delivering such a device in the form factor described (ultra-thin and ultra-light) would seem to be battery life. An all-day battery currently means a heavy battery, which undercuts the size aspirations. Also, I found my Sony U tended to run hot, and it had an Intel M chip and included a cooling fan. Thus it seems chips will have to run cooler before a full-blown PC can be as thin as the UM-PC prototype.

I am also skeptical about the appeal of an all-in one device. On the drawing board all-in-one devices seem attractive, but in the marketplace more focused devices like an iPod, Blackberry or Palm Pilot seem to do better in terms of initial adoption. As small as the UM-PC is, will people want a device that big to replace a tiny phone or a tiny camera? Maybe they will for video conferencing. But to me it looks too big to be attractive as a camera or phone per se.

On the other hand, as a PC small enough to take with you virtually everywhere, I think it is promising, particularly at the described price. I would certainly pay $800 for one.

I really like the handwriting recognition available in the current Tablet PC version of Windows and am willing to pay a good bit for something highly portable with that capability available. Still, I found in my experiment with the Sony U that I prefer having a keyboard for substantial text input. So I think Gates as right to describe this as an “Nth PC,” meaning the second or third (or more) PC that someone will have, not a primary device.

James Kendrick, whose JK on the Run blog is one of my favorites, has compared the UMPC to the existing Sony U here. I completely agree with him that the device should be a full-blown PC, not some anemic, crippled version of one.

A couple of other pictures of the device are here.

The device was shown at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) held in Seattle. The Gates speech was on April 27.