Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010 by World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum has just released their 30th edition of The Global Competitiveness Report (2009-2010) ranking and featuring 133 economies in the world. This report stand out as one of the world's most comprehensive and respected assessment of countries' competitiveness.

The Top 10 ranking for 2009-2010 are:

• 1. Switzerland
• 2. USA
• 3. Singapore
• 4. Sweden
• 5. Denmark
• 6. Finland
• 7. Germany
• 8. Japan
• 9. Canada
• 10. Netherlands

While Singapore has improved its position from the previous 5th to 3rd, Malaysia has falled from 21st to 24th now. Taiwan shows a good progress from 17th to 12ve. Brunei also moved on from 39th to 32nd. Korea dropped from 13th to 19th.

Click here to read the article in The Star highlighting about Malaysia's ranking in the Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010.

Click here to get more information about the Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010. You can also download the full report there.

Top 40 open source products for business and IT pros (Bossie 2009 winners)

Since 2007, each year InfoWorld's Bossie (Best of Open Source Software awards) will recognize a total of 40 best open source software from various categories for business and IT pros of the year.

The 2009 Bossie winners are...


Best of open source developer tools:

• BrowserShots service
  
• Drools BRMS
• Eclipse Web Services Tools
• Hadoop and Hive for distributed data processing
• jQuery JavaScript library
• Mono .Net platform
• NetBeans IDE for Java and dynamic languages
• OpenStreetMap mapping project
• PhoneGap framework for mobile application development
• WebKit browser rendering engine

Best of open source enterprise software:

• Compiere ERP systems
• Openbravo ERP systems
• Dimdim web conference software
• Drupal for content management
• Intalio for process management
• Jaspersoft for reporting and BI
• Pentaho for reporting and BI
• Magento for e-commerce
• Piwik for web analytics
• SugarCRM for sales and customer management
• WordPress blog publishing platform

Best of open source networking software:

• Cacti
• Nagios
• IPCop firewall
• Kamailio SIP proxy server
• KeePass password manager
• Openfiler SAN/NAS appliance
• OpenNMS enterprise monitoring system
• PacketFence network access control
• Puppet configuration management framework
• Untangle network security gateway

Best of open source platforms and middleware:

• Jitterbit data migration and integration
• Talend data migration and integration
• Mule service bus
• WSO2 modular SOA platform
• Nginx web server
• OpenVZ server virtualization platforms
• Xen server virtualization platforms
• VirtualBox desktop virtualization tool
• Turnkey Linux factory of software appliances

Beside the 40 Bossie winners, Infoworld also named the Top 10 Open Source Hall of Famers from the greatest open source software of all time. They are:

• Linux kernel
• GNU utilities and compilers
• Ubuntu
• The 3 BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD & NetBSD)
• Samba
• MySQL
• BIND
• Sendmail
• OpenSSH and OpenSSL
• Apache

Beside that, Infoworld recognises there are a lot of great open source apps for Windows too, and they've picked the 10 best:

• FileZilla
• VirtualBox
• OpenOffice.org
• Firefox
• Paint.Net
• Media Player Classic
• TrueCrypt
• PDFCreator
• 7-Zip
• ClamWin

Click here for more details about the Infoworld Bossie 2009 awards.

A visit to Packet Hub, HQ of WIMAX provider Packet One

Being one of the contributors in a committee of a local business association, I am honoured to be invited by Michael Lai (赖敬达), CEO of Packet One, to visit their HQ building Packet Hub today.

I was really amazed by the presentations by Michael and his senior staff, which show that this young company has very clear and ambitous mission, vision, direction and goals.

Since the debut of their P1 W1MAX service in August 2008, which was just one year ago, the company has grown exponentially in terms of service coverage area, user base (now already reaches 100,000) as well as staff force (more than 600 now). Packet One is no doubt the pioneer and still the only WIMAX service provider in Malaysia, despite 4 WIMAX licenses have been awarded by MCMC several years ago.

Located at Jalan Templer next to the Federal Highway, the Packet Hub building implements some of the Google-like working environment which can especially attract the Gen-Y workers.

Near the entrance is a Paddock which showcase their products and services. Their customer service area is just next to the P1 Paddock.

They have modern looking meeting rooms named by countries with their presence, equipped with high tech meeting equipments and high quality chairs. They also have a nice well equipped gymnasium, a rest room with several massage chairs and a comfly gamers room. On the roof top of the building is an air garden with nice landscaping and a BBQ area. There is also a WIMAX base station on top of the building (in the photo).

Apparently Michael is a fan of What Would Google Do (WWGD)?, a book written by Jeff Jarvis. He shared with us about his business philosophy, his view of technology future particularly in the IP field, his ambition and market positioning of Packet One, and more. He talked about Business 2.0, a new term that I just know about today.

It seems that Green Packet has made a right choice to get Michael joining them to start up the P1 business. Michael has sound track record while he was with Celcom and later as CEO of TMNet before joining Packet One. Undeniably, he has always been very good in branding strategy all the way from his previous companies till now in P1.