Productivity In Singapore

A unique Asian bun store in United States is currently offering the following services:

· Using a touch screen to order buns

· Make payment with credit card

The store, Wow Bao, did not depend on manpower to be productive.

Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Manpower Lee Yu Shyan indicated that that is the kind of innovation that local businessmen must embrace.

Productivity has taken on different meanings during different periods of economic development. Promoting manufacturing was the focus for Singapore in the 1970s, said Mr. Lee.

“But now, we are in a much more sophisticated economy. At this level of economic development, how do you make people more productive? I think that is the biggest question.”

Mr. Lee believe that Business owners must be innovative and workers must ensure that they are able to use higher technology such as handheld computers to increase productivity.

I stumbled this video on youtube that talks about piracy. Its about the famous rock star Jack Black. Under the information, "Jack Black schools all of you on the truth about piracy. Remember, don't be a douche.". He mention about how he see piracy as some kind of bad practice to download videos, movies and songs without paying. Think of it in their shoes, what if you were the director of a certain movie? would you want others to enjoy it without paying? Letting your hard works go down the drain without earning what you ought to?

In this case of entertainment industry with regards to piracy, downloading songs illegally will affect the Artists directly, in the form of songs popularity, their own popularity and of cause their album sales. Movies box office are not hitting their supposed amount of revenue because people are at home sreaming videos online. This is just one of the few examples. Theres just too much more to list, i'm sure you guys are aware of it but enjoying free music and movies are just taken for granted. Moreover, telling your friends that you bought songs from iTunes and other music stores will be deem as being "stupid" and wasting money when free downloads are available all over the internet.

On the other hand, as read in an online article: "IFPI responds to new UK music downloading study; Illegal file-sharing has an overwhelmingly negative impact on music sales", it states that people who download music illegal are buying more music as compared to average comsumer. This statement is actually backed up by a research done by IPSOS. However, there are other opposing research that is in disagreement with the research statement as mentioned earlier on, hence it is only to some extent credible.

You guys are welcomed to share your comments about this issue and make it more interesting:D

Music piracy in Asia

The global economic downturn has actually accelerated the Internet-fuelled fall in sales of physical music. But however, a survey of more than 8,000 young Asians between 15 and 24 years old found only 11 percent paid for the music they obtained online. Faced with such huge figures, music tries to make people paid for music in a completely new way. Paul Smith, from Nokia, said the handset manufacturer was now offering music services bundled with its mobile phones.
Instead of paying per song, people now are allowed to download and song they want into their phones over 12 to 18-month period. The cost of the music is indirectly factored into the price of the handset and this is like buying a headset that you need and having new songs every now and then for just the price of the headset. I think through this way, downloading music illegally is no longer necessary.

Stop movie piracy : make a difference!

Motion Picture Association actually have a website to tell people about piracy!
http://www.make-a-difference.sg/singapore/
In the website, there are things like the piracy ecosystem where they talk about how movies are stolen and then distributed through international distribution systems. Under the piracy ecosystem, they also talk about the different method on how movie are distributed. Such as, cd-rom and downloading of the net.
They also talk about what they have done to prevent people from recording. As patrons, we can do a part be being alert and when we see someone tries to record illegally, contact the local police. They are trying to tell the people that we are actually victims too when it comes to movie piracy. “Movie piracy is not a victimless crime and you are one of the victims. Long before piracy effects Hollywood it robs local businesses of a livelihood and the capacity to provide local employment. People who steal movies are stealing money from every cinema….and that means fewer jobs”. I think that reading this website really makes me know more about movie piracy and how we can help to fight movie piracy.

Singapore implicated as piracy hub?

In this article that I have found online(http://news.cnet.com/Singapore-implicated-as-piracy-hub/2100-1026_3-991344.html), I got a pretty good idea how is the piracy in Singapore. As the article goes, Singapore is one of the lowest in Asia-Pacific but however, a significant amount of pirated products will passed through Singapore.

As the article state, Singapore have one of the busiest port South-East Asia and the piracy is a byproduct of it. However, I feel that this is a chance to reduce piracy as the products goes through Singapore, the government will be able to catch them easily.

But as a Singaporean, I think that the Government have done a good job in keeping the piracy level down. However, there is a rise in internet piracy and that will prove to be a more challenging problem for the government to solve.