arya [at] posterous

Introducing my daughter

My newborn daughter, Anindita Radhiyya Nugraha, was born on November 27, 2009 at 06.45AM. 3920 gr and 50cm, Hermina Tangerang Hospital.

Google, Rupert Murdoch, and opportunity

I've been thinking, if those hassles between Google and Rupert Murdoch and Bing end up with the de-index of News Corps from Google, then it will hurts News Corps badly. Everyone with a business orientation shall see this as business opportunity.

Murdoch's move is bad already, since many will think the same way as me. Innovate Murdoch, not remove yourself from the internet. That's not the way in internet.

Meet my newborn daughter

She's so beautiful.

Google tests a redesign search page: it's getting bloated I think

The search buttons have become blue and the overall look is a bit like that of Google Wave. More significant is the redesigned search results page which features an always-on sidebar for narrowing search results by type, date and view.

Excerpt from webmonkey.com.

It seems that Google is always launching something every month before end of Y09. It's good at the innovation point but Google need to make sure that the innovation is really going somewhere and not simply use it as a market test and let it die slowly.

My wishlists to RIM: Twitter application that loves my battery

Dear RIM.

Would you develop a Twitter Application with a better memory handling? And it would be much better if it does not DRAIN my battery.

Thank you and sincerely yours.

I think that will do.

Indonesia, why can't you stand behind the President and give him the best you can do to support him?

With all hassles on Century and Bibit&Chandra, public demands the President to speak his mind. So he spoke his mind on Monday. He said something, he decided something.

Why can't you Indonesian stand behind him, support what he already said, already decided?

What's with these analysis on his speech, protests to his speech? I'm afraid that all you want is the President to speak only what you want to hear. You don't even have a full knowledge on what really happened. Oh, wait. What? Media has full coverage on this? And you use it as your base knowledge?

I really respect Polri who has acted quickly as a respond to what President has said. That's what I'm talking about: just do what you got to do and do it quickly.

Give the President the best of you to support him. Afterall, you chose him to be your leader.

Pages, Microsoft Word, and OpenOffice.org: do you really need all of those features?

I'm lucky enough to be able to play with those three applications on my Mac. Pages and OpenOffice are both native application for Mac while Microsoft Word is a Windows application that I have to run under Parallels Desktop. It's been two years since the first time I used them and I think it's the time to say that cross platform compatibility is my biggest issue. It doesn't matter what application you use to create the document, if you want your receivers to get the same feels, looks, and even effects you have to make sure that they use the same application. Or, the other way around.

The hardest part of all is to make sure that numbering format, indentation, and graph and data format is all same within those three applications. Somehow, there will always be formatting loss if you export them i.e. Pages and OpenOffice) to doc format (I'm afraid that most of my clients and customers are using Word, so let's assume that doc is a standard format on this matter).

Personally I prefer Pages for its user friendly interface and easy usage that let you focus on the work to complete. But there is no use of a complete work when at the end you realize that your client can't get the report as you want it to be. Again, that's the main problem. And you absolutely can't tell your clients that they use a "different" application. That won't work.

In an effort to overcome this problem, I always (at least for the last one year) use minimum formatting option. A plain text with standard format is always welcome in every application in every platform. That means standard fonts, standard numbering (though it still has big issue on Word and OpenOffice), justified alignment, and manual heading. For graph and data insertion, I always use picture instead of graph or data itself. In this case, those abundant features are useless. And it's not just in Pages. The abundant features lie within OpenOffice is also useless.

Having this applied for almost a year, I'm beginning to think what use of those other highly-sophisticated-features lies within each application. How many of you really use other than simple standard feature to complete your work? Why can't they focus on compatibility and inter-operability to mitigate this effect?

I believe that this is going to be a major issue for the following years, especially when online collaboration replaces the way we work. Compatibility is my highest consideration point. Google, which I consider as competitor in office productivity application with their Google Docs, has an advantages on this matter. However, Indonesia won't be ready for full online collaboration. Offline is still an option for Indonesia user. So I think Google should also consider this compatibility point, especially during conversion to another format.

The new mining law application: how to overcome the challenges

The Indonesian Mining Association fears mining investment could fall below $1 billion this year due to uncertainty over the new law, although the government has said investment from mining, including geothermal, could surpass $2 billion.

Excerpt from mydigitalfc.com.

New Mining Law was signed on September by former Mining and Energy minister, Purnomo Yusgiantoro, which limits the use of contract mining to specific tasks. The regulation applies immediately to new mining project while existing mining company shall have three years period for adjustment.

The application of new mining law to existing mining company, IMO, will increase the need for huge, and I mean extra huge, capex especially within these three years period. There will be, at least, requirements of (1) capex to acquire new mining equipments to increase the production, and (2) capex to acquire mining equipments as replacement to contractor's equipments.

Hiring new people with good competency will also become a great challenge. Other than the increasing of cost, the challenge lies in the organization structure complexity. Imagine moving contractor's organization into the existing organization of mining companies. This will reduce the organization flexibility to adapt to changes in mining industry. Furthermore, this is somehow out of step with global trends. Mining companies globally are seeking ways to effectively slim down the organization.

How do we overcome the challenges and anticipated to changes?

To this matter, there are several strategic objectives that must be done to anticipate the changes, that will emphasize on (1) improve the organization development and human resources development, (2) enhance online collaboration as IT base function, (3) business process improvement, (4) increase customer delight, and (5) economic value added improvement.

Improve the organization development and human resources development. The elaboration of the organization culture actually lies within the organization vision. However, vision is not enough. Key to the success of organization development is the ability to translate the vision into operational terms through out the organization and act upon it. Along the way of developing the organization, human resources development shall also be developed. At minimum, I propose three stages implementation, which are recruitment and fulfill the organization requirement - from top to bottom, increase competency level and mitigate the effect of competency gap, and retain the best people. One stage can be added during five years to the end of the life of mine project that is selling the expertise of the best people.

Enhance online collaboration as IT base function. I truly believe that the IT key issue in the following years is to enable people to collaborate to manage single task or single project. Cross-function, cross-platform, and different time zone are challenges that people have to deal during the course of the project - this is where a collaboration tools is required and to be managed as the IT base function.

Business process improvement. The strategic initiatives are increase the production volume and reduce the cost.

Increase customer delight. Delight is beyond satisfaction. The key is to be able to predict the need of customers even before they realize that they need something.

Economic value added improvement. Two things only: prudent investment and manage cost and risk.

Seeing the big picture of corruption in Indonesia: Corruption hurts the poor, not the rich

Why is corruption a problem?  We shouldn’t think of opposing corruption because we’re goody-goodies and corruption is wrong.  We fight corruption because it hurts what we most want to achieve in society. Corruption slows economic progress. Countries with more corruption have less investment, and each dollar of investment has less impact on growth.  Corruption hurts the poor, not the rich.

Excerpt from The Jakarta Post. A post by Robert Klitgaard, a University Professor at Claremont Graduate University and the author of eight books, including Controlling Corruption and High-Performance Government.

I really like the idea of doing something not because it is right or wrong but because we know how it will strengthen the mission to achieve the vision. It's because we know how it will end therefore we eliminate all obstacles to our goal.

Twitter is a good deal but it's not enough. 140 characters is a challenge, especially for marketing purpose.

Having a huge adaptation in Indonesia, Twitter is a new golden boy among social-media users. Its ability to reach wider audience, compare to closed-society in Facebook, has made Twitter a preferable tool for information sharing. At the very least, it works that way for me.

However, this 140 characters limitation is actually the biggest challenge to me. There are certainly informations and thoughts which I can share within 140 characters. But most of the time the brainstorm ended up with way more than the limitation. Even if I have 150-characters-message, it's still greater than 140 characters and I don't like to use the shrinkage tweet feature (if the application provide one). It, somehow, distracts my audiences from the key point of messages which I'm trying to deliver because they have to interpret my messages first. And I believe they will be annoyed due to this as much as I will be.

To this matter, blog is still a preferable tool to share your thoughts, opinion, and ideas to the world. Blog also provides flexibility in term of the depth of information to be shared. But still, it doesn't provide you with social-media accessibility as Twitter does. In this case, I have to be able to combine both advantages to gain bit detail coverage yet maintain social-media accessibility.

The idea is to write a blog post, covering the brainstorm in my mind, and push the blog post to Twitter with an URL to the original blog post. In this matter, a tweet shall act as a gateway to a blog post.

Posterous' autopost to Twitter gives me the ability to push my blog to Twitter. The advantages of this method are including but not limited to (1) an easy way to manage both streams (because I just need to manage my blog and let the autopost take care of the rest), (2) an easy access to promote my blog post to Twitter's wider audiences, (3) a possibility to merge blog audiences and Twitter audiences, provides you with even wider and vary audiences, and (4) focus to the content and deliver messages without any distortion and distraction.

This method, in my opinion, will benefit any person who try to promote his/her blog or even will benefit any marketing company to convey full messages to the world and get full coverage from wider audiences.