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While most of the news coverage I’ve seen of Internet Queen Mary Meeker’s latest trends presentation has inevitably focused on the great mobile monetization conundrum, I personally found the second section on the “re-imagination of nearly everything” to be a lot more interesting.

As she rightly points out in the slide above, the “magnitude of upcoming change will be stunning” as a result of the rapid rate of innovation that the growing ubiquity of high-speed wireless access is enabling. She’s perhaps a little generous, though, in saying that “we are still in spring training” to deal with the sheer scale and speed of the changes that are bubbling barely noticed underneath us. Taking our first baby steps would perhaps be a more accurate characterization.

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Like many people, I’m sure, I recently signed up for Pinterest to see what all the excitement is about and after a couple of weeks of using the site I have to say that I am extremely impressed with it. In this age of instant visual gratification that we are living in, it provides a great vehicle not just for posting your own photos and images but also mixing and matching them with others.

In addition to finding it very useful for organizing the photos in the eBooks I have been writing, I also like the way it makes it so simple for people to add them to their own collections of, for example, places they would like to visit in the future. As a result, Pinterest is enabling me to reach a much wider audience than would be possible through my blog or other social networking sites – and in a much less obtrusive way.

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I hope you are having an enjoyable New Year holiday. The now traditional fireworks display at Taipei 101 was quite spectacular, though a little shorter than in previous years.

My first eBook, the BrownBeat Guide to Hampi, is now available on Amazon here. The US price is $4.99, though it may be a little higher in other countries. I’ve now started on a second eBook project that is centered around a trip I took to the pilgrimage spot of Melkote, about 50km from Mysore in Karnataka, in December last year. My goal is to finish it by the end of February, which should make for a very busy Chinese New Year holiday.

As an experiment, I’ll be posting excerpts of the book on BrownBeat as I write them, plus photos and videos I took on the trip. You can read the first one here.

Towering bright lights

Dominate the Dubai night

The dark desert broods

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How time flies! I can’t believe it’s been nearly ten years since we first introduced the Mini-ITX motherboard form factor into the market, inspiring a tremendous wave of creativity in case modding and subsequently setting the industry standard for small form factor PC and embedded systems.

To celebrate the anniversary, which falls on November 6^th, we are putting together an eBook about the Mini-ITX revolution featuring some of the most innovative mods inspired by the platform as well as interviews with leading modders, industry analysts, and of course, Robert Kuo, the father of Mini-ITX.

We also invite you to join in the celebrations by sharing your favorite Mini-ITX memories as well as your thoughts on the future of the Mini-ITX.

To learn more about the project, please check out the VIA home page here or drop me an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We look forward to hearing from you!

There have been a number of reports about VIA leaving BAPCo. Here is our official statement:

VIA today confirmed reports that we have tendered our resignation to BAPCo. We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization.

We hope that the industry can adopt a much more open and transparent process for developing fair and objective benchmarks that accurately measure real world PC performance and are committed to working with companies that share our vision.

What a joy to go to a 'real' bookshop for a change! Much as I enjoy the convenience of the Amazon Kindle app on my tablet and smart phone, nothing beats the look and feel of a physical book or of spending a couple of hours browsing through the shelves of a store in search of interesting titles.

Sadly, independents like Heffers in Cambridge are a dying breed as a result of the growing popularity of eBooks, and they will almost certainly have to make radical changes to their business model if they are to survive the inexorable march of digitization. Perhaps Eslite in Taipei is a good example of the direction they may need to move in.

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It's encouraging to see that US industry analysts are finally waking up the growth of the so-called white box segment of the tablet market.

According to this article on CNet, DisplaySearch has released a report that sales of white box tablets hit 1.9 million units in Q1 this year. Their numbers are a little conservative in my opinion, particularly for Q4 last year, but they are definitely in the right direction.