mamafufu Q: how is life? A: mamafufu

it was a hot and humid friday evening.  the temperature of the classroom reached 35 celsius/95 fahrenheit with 100% humidity.  it was fully packed with about 300 students from the south china university of technology (SCUT) school of software.  they were mostly first or second year undergraduate students .  the campus is located in the messy guangzhou university city in guangzhou china which is also the home of ten higher education institutions and about 150,000 students.

the event was the commencement of the sun club in SCUT.  it was one of the first sun club in greater china with many more being planned.  the objective of the sun club is to foster, promote and organize various activities such as contests, workshops, seminars and other events revolving around sun technologies and its values.

tae kim and i were invited to speak in this event with the students about sun and a topic on IT career.  hmmm, a topic on IT career with first and second year undergraduate students in a hot and humid friday evening?!  it must be a group of enthusiastic students and sure they were.  the discussion was lively and was carried in english, mandarin and even some cantonese.  here are some of the selected slides:

my mobile service contract commitment ended a few weeks ago. like many others may do, i shop for my next phone. it will come down to do i want to go with iphone 3G and switch carrier or do i stay with my current carrier and go with the newly available LG dare? if the LG dare provides better language support as in the iphone, it will be a much harder decision to make. while the LG phone itself certainly has the ability to support languages like chinese, don't understand why it is opted out in the US market.

so what am i going to do with my perfectly fine moto Q that i use today? i will keep it as a piece of memory or history. this reminds me my first mobile phone. it was a moto 8800 ultra classic upright brick model. it has a LED display of 7 characters, 30 minutes talk time, expensive, ability to store about 20 numbers, big and heavy. it made and received cellular calls in very limited areas mainly outdoor. at that time mobile phone was more like a status thing than necessity for many people. that pretty much sums up all the features and characteristics of my first mobile phone.

in first quarter of 2008 there were nearly 300 millions mobile phones shipped worldwide compared with about 70 million PCs shipped and the gap is widening. with mobile technologies like 3G, wi-fi, bigger screen with higher resolution, audio, video, and web enabled applications, accessing the internet from mobile phones becomes more real, fun and practical, .

as mobile phones become more internet-centric, what does it mean to the service industry? how can existing services use this new opportunity to enhance its offerings or as a competitive edge? what innovative services can be developed to catch this new wave? a colleague of mine alok rishi started a service science blog recently to discuss those opportunities and challenges.  looking forward to learning more ...

i had an opportunity to speak at a conference in the beautiful city of chengdu, china.  the conference was very much academic centric.  it was also an honor to share the same podium with some of the great educators and minds in fields of mathematics and computer science all over the world.  being the only delegation from the business sector, the first challenge was to pick the right topic.  with help from jon, service science came to mind and it turned out to be a great choice.  it made the right "connection" with the academic audiences.

so what is service science?  since the term is evolving and the field is still emerging, there is no one universally accepted definition. or we are still at the blind men and an elephant phase which is perfectly fine.  in a nutshell service science is an emerging multi-discipline approach that accelerates development of innovative service offerings and delivery mechanisms with collaboration from industries, governments, academia and communities.

the service industry has grown significantly globally and it represents 57% of global GDP according to latest available data.  the number is a lot higher for some of the industrialized countries.  while we know how innovation works for products, there are little tools and methods that guide innovation in services.  in order to sustain such growth, industries, governments and academia need to put service innovation as a priority.

during Q&A a great question was asked by a student - sun is known as a "product" company with server, storage and software such as solaris and java, why service and why now?  beside the fact that service revenue at sun for Q1FY08 represents 38% of total revenue, customers are no longer just buying products from sun.  they are buying end-to-end solutions from us.   solutions that include support service, professional service, managed service, educational service and many others.

there are a lot more to talk about service science and it sure is an exciting frontier.  will service science make the same impact to the human kind similar to what computer science has been doing since the 60's?

act now and stay ahead ...

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