Nano City

Today I attended a talk by Sabeer Bhatia, who is taking on the impressive task of founding an entire city in India. He is a serial entrepreneur here in the Bay Area, with his most notable accomplishment being the founding of Hotmail (which he sold to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998). This pales in comparison to the estimated cost to build Nano City--approximately $5 billion in its currently planned stage.


Bhatia envisions Nano City as the new Silicon Valley--the future breeding ground for scientific dicsovery. He is trying to address many of the problems that currently exist in India that are precluding this type of innovation. They include:
-Lack of proper infrastructure (a seven minute drive in Bangalore at night takes 3 hours during rush hour!)
-Non-reliable sources of energy
-Fragmented and unsustainable growth in urban areas
-Lack of reasonably priced, modest homes for young professionals

Even with these barriers, India has had impressive growth since it became a democracy in the late 80's. Here are a few statistics:
-3rd largest pool of scientists and engineers (trails only U.S. and China)
-2nd fastest growing economy (and will most likely overtake China in the near future)
-Extremely young--50% of the population is under 25
-2nd largest consumer market
-It is a democracy

Bhatia's goals for the city center around an education system that he describes as being "the finest education in the world: kindergarten through PhD. He is working with Berkeley and Stanford to make this possible. He also envisions Nano City as a model to the world in sustainable development (both economic and environmental). His goal is to start by attracting youth (25-40), in hopes that companies will then establish themselves there. He sees this process as something similar to the evolution that has occurred in Austin, TX over the past 25 years--it has grown from a college town to arguably one of the top three producers of IP (intellectual property) in the U.S.

The city itself will be about half the size of San Francisco, with construction beginning at the end of this year. The best guess of when people will first inhabit Nano City is at the end of 2010. Bhatia believes the population of the city eventually will be in the 250.000 - 500,000 range.

For more information on Nano City and Sabeer Bhatia, I suggest reading the following article from forbes: http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2006/1030/156.html. A couple of questions I have about the city are: How much development can actually be planned? How do you coordinated development? What political risks exist that may delay and/or stop the construction of the city? How many services should be privatized vs. provided by the Indian government?

Apple iPhone

The news is in from Macworld 2007--Apple, Inc. (no longer Apple Computer) is releasing a new cellphone in June of 2007. The iPhone is a combination of an iPod, phone and internet mobile communicator, according to Steve Jobs. See the link below for more information:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/

A few of the highlights:
-uses "multi-touch" instead of a stylus
-runs on OS X
-syncs with iTunes
-has a 3.5" screen with 160 ppi
-only has one button
-is a ridiculous 11.6mm thick, which is thinner than the Q and Blackjack
-has a 2 megapixel camera
-contains visual voicemail (so you can select which vmail to listen to)
-has WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0
-free push IMAP email (Yahoo!)
-5hrs of talk battery life, 16hrs of audio playback
-will be released by Cingular, $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8GB

This looks like a ridiculous phone, though it will be interesting to see how easy it is to use a qwerty keyboard that appears on the screen. Call quality may be another concern, but this appears to be superior to the Treo. Not very good news for Palm.

By the way, Apple's stock is up 8.5% as of 1pm today :)

Pictures from China

This is a picture of Ash and Ash (yes, there were two Ash's on the trip) at the Mongolian Hot Pot restaurant were we had dinner on the first day of the trip in Beijing.

The following are a couple pictures from the Great Wall:

One difference between China and the U.S. are the toilets. Needless to say, some people didn't feel quite as comfortable using these facilities.

These are soldiers marching outside of the Forbidden City.



Here is an interesting advertisement for KFC in Zhu Jia Jiao (a water town an hour dirve from Shanghai)--chicken is very popular in China! Over half of the menu at McDonalds is chicken sandwiches as well.



This is a picture of the TV tower in Shanghai. The next picture is from the Urban Planning Museum--they have planned out all the construction through 2010.

The following is a picture from the silk "factory" that we visited. This was the only machine in the room, and I'm pretty sure they stopped after we left the room. This was by far the most expensive place we visited!

Here is an example from the Yu Garden of some of the translation issues you run into all the time.

On our trip from Shanghai to Hong Kong we rode on the fastest commercial train in the world. It cost $1.2 billion dollars to build an 18mile track. The train travels a top speed of 268 mph and the ride is about seven minutes long. Interestingly, a train from L.A. to Las Vegas using maglev technology has been recently proposed.

Because gambling is illegal in China, Macau has become a huge tourist spot and many people believe it will be the world's next Vegas within 10 years. The Wynn opened up just three months ago, and the whole city is under construction (The Venetian and the MGM, among others, are expected to be finished this year). The gambling revenues in Macau have already surpassed Las Vegas, but one important thing that hasn't is the ambiance. There is nothing resembling The Strip in Macau, which makes it almost impossible to travel from casino to casino.

The last few days of our trip we spent in Hong Kong. This city is absolutely amazing--it is a combination of New York, San Francisco and Miami and I would definitely consider living there.

Homestay in Shanghai

For the last night we spent in Shanghai, we had homestays with local families. I stayed with Cynthia Shen, a fellow classmate at Stanford. Her mother and father cooked dinner for us--it was a ridiculous amount of food for 5 people. We had spicy dried duck (like beef jerky but REALLY spicy), chicken (with the head, though nobody ate it), boiled spinach, soy glazed baked fish (the whole fish, head to tail), prawns (to eat them you rip the head off first), fried bamboo, soy and cilantro soup (same consistency as egg drop soup), BBQ pork, and chicken stir fry. Cynthia told me it took her parents 4 hours to cook dinner, and that spending that much time is pretty normal for dinner! To drink, we had tea, water, wine, and a traditional yellow rice wine that was 103 proof! And for dessert we had rice, and kiwi slices. I couldn't believe how much food we had.

After dinner we walked around the Bundt, which had ridiculous views of Shanghai--this city has an amazing amount of skyscrapers, and they are all lit up with neon colors. Finally I met with Cynthia's friend from AT Kearney, and slept at her place so I could experience a traditional home in Shanghai. It was very modest, but not too different than a house in any other major city.

A couple of my observations from the trip:
-We haven't eaten nearly as much rice as I thought we would--I've only had it for 3 or 4 meals.
-I have been served way more food than I thought I would--it seems like the dishes never stop coming out. Even the lunch boxes served at the Chinese film studio had a lot of food, and that was a normal lunch for them.
-I met a foreign investor relations manager who had a Master's in Economics from Brown, and informed me that only investment vehicle other than saving is houses. People will buy two or more houses as investments.

Next on the trip is Hong Kong--we are taking the Maglev train to the airport. The train can go as fast as 270 mph!! After a couple days in HK, we are flying back to Beijing and then to SF on the 6th. There is a lot of stuff I hope to post in the near future--internet has been available only sparingly but I have a ton of cool pictures to post.

New Year's

The internet finally works now so hopefully I will be able to post more often. We traveled to Shanghai today from Beijing, and took it easy before beginning our New Year’s Eve festivities. We ate dinner at a very nice restaurant, though the first half hour was a little awkward because the dinner conversations were pretty serious and intense—not exactly what I was expecting as a pre-party for New Years. For dinner we had a lot of food; some of my favorites were the squirrel fish, frog soup, and fried jellyfish.

After dinner we left for Attica, one of the hottest clubs in Shanghai. The party was great—I’ll post some of the pictures when I get back to the U.S. Our group had three tables reserved and maybe 7 bottles of alcohol. What we didn’t have was mixers, and a can of coke was 40 RMB ($5) at the bar. This on top of the $150 for cover and VIP access made the night pretty expensive, but it was definitely a lot of fun. Too bad we couldn't find a 24 hour KFC early the next morning! (By the way, I definitely did not expect to see so many KFC's here in China--it is probably the most common American fast-food restaurant I have seen here).

The next morning Eric and I woke up at 9 am (I don't know how), just in time to make it to the bus for today’s visit of Shanghai. We traveled an hour outside of the city to the suburbs. We had lunch and also got a tour of the city through a canal. After lunch we went to a silk “factory”—in reality it was a tourist trap for very expensive silk items (about ten times as expensive as the silk in the Silk Market in Beijing). The building had a couple rooms where people were spinning silk, but it was very apparent they were there for the tour only. It was very similar to the trip the official group took in Beijing to a pearl house—they said it was pretty apparent that the trip was a kick back to the tourist agency.

Tonight looks to be pretty chill as most of us are extremely tired from partying the past couple of days. Tomorrow we are going to a GM factory in the morning, and in the afternoon we are meeting with our homestay families—I am really looking forward to learning more about Shanghai from someone who is from the area.

Beijing Day 3

Today was definitely the best day of the trip so far. We went to the Great Wall this morning, which was really beautiful because it was snowing. On the bus ride up we played 15 person liar’s poker with wilds, so bids got as high as 38, with 36 7’s winning one hand! After visiting the Wall, we went to a noodle place for lunch which was ridiculous—we had so much food and the Pi Jiu (beer) was only 3 RMB (approximately 50 cents). My favorite was the sweet and sour chicken, which tasted more like caramel corn than the American version.

After lunch we went to the Forbidden City, which was HUGE. Our tour guide told us there are over 8,000 rooms. We met a group of Penn students who were traveling the area after singing in Beijing a couple of days ago—they sang an a cappella version of a Radiohead song for us.

Our final stop of the day was a massage parlor—the whole group got foot and head massages for about 200 RMB. They were very relaxing, and after taking a quick dip in the pool in the hotel we went to Suzy’s Club, which is one of the newer clubs in Beijing where a bunch of ex pats go to party.