Mind Map Trend in Asia

Ten years ago, I learnt about Mind Map during a psycholinguistics course. Asking students to associate the colour of red with anything relevant coming up to their minds, Dr. Mulyani Djojomihardjo, demonstrated a Mind Mapping technique. It was quite interesting to recall that students who used to be silent and passive became curious and actively engaged in the class discussion. At the end, we were all astonished to learn that we could associate the colour with different interpretations. Since then, I have used Mind Maps to generate, organize and visualize my work and research ideas.

Several years ago, I co-designed a board game that use keywords to facilitate design communication among multidisciplinary players. We applied Pair Mind Mapping to generate a set of keyword seeds with potentials users during the development stage. It was interesting to find out that even though we gave the same keyword seeds, each pair produced a different set of keywords. In a Card Sorting session, we categorized the generated keywords and eventually chose some keywords for the board game. We learnt that Mind Mapping was powerful in generating creative ideas.

Today, Mind Mapping seems to become the latest trend in Asia, including Singapore. During the month of September, Tony Buzan, one of the Mind Mapping gurus, will come to Singapore and lead a series of Mind Mapping seminars at SIM University. It is also announced that Tony Buzan will introduce his new Mind Mapping software called iMindMap. It is good to know that the professional community in Asia starts to be interested in Mind Mapping and see how the information technology has become a tool to facilitate the use of Mind Map for professionals.

It is also encouraging to hear that Mind Mapping has started to be introduced widely in many parts of Indonesia through a number of teacher training and student development programs.

Thanks to Victoria Tio and her work as the source of inspiration for this writing.

Will NFC become a killer technology

While contactless credit card is still a hot issue in the island-country of Singapore, several vendors in the region have started to buzz the concept of contactless mobile payment during a seminar last week.
The keyword is: NFC. The question is: Will it be a killer technology?

Near-Field Communication or NFC is a short-range 13.56 MHz wireless technology that can transfer data up to 424 kbits/s. Using standardized protocols developed by industry-sponsored NFC Forum, inter-device NFC communication is expected to establish two-way link and exchange data among different consumer products, such as mobile phones, televisions, personal computers and digital cameras. Touching and waving are the most common interaction styles that promise convenience as any other contactless technology. Nevertheless, the current usage of NFC technology is still limited to contactless card payment, contactless mobile payment and interactive smart poster.

Thian Yee Chua, the CEO of CASSIS, during a seminar in Singapore last week, emphasized the need to build an NFC ecosystem, an environment for consumer-service, for a wide adoption of NFC technology. Lim Boon Heong, the Marketing and Business Development Director in NFC business of INSIDE Contactless further detailed the importance of NFC handset availability, win-win business models and an open standard.

Contactless mobile payment is one of the applications highlighted during the seminar. Several pilots planned and initiated have involved major credit card companies, banks, merchants, mobile service providers, mobile network operators, such as: VISA, JCB, MasterCard, CCV Holland B.V, KPN, Nokia, PaySquare, Philips and ViVOtech, SK Telecom, Orange, France Telecom, China Fujian Mobile Communications Co. Ltd., Xiamen Branch and Xiamen E-Tong Card Company Ltd, 2-Eleven, Gemplus, CASSIS.

Yet, Bank of America that has conducted an NFC trial in collaboration with Venyon Oy and its 5000 employees at one of its corporate campus in Delaware reported in May 2007 that the NFC portion of the trial has flopped due to variety reasons, including undesirable mobile phone model and problems in downloading payment application to the handsets.

In addition, a security issue in the form of protocol vulnerabilities may become worse if NFC-enabled mobile phones can act as cards or terminals, can be programmed by their users and can communicate with each other (Anderson, Ross. RFID and the Middleman. Retrieved on 06-08-2007).