October issue of Red Herring featured a cover story titled "How to Win Friends and Influence in Asia". Consisted of showcases of the 'booming' (and busting) high tech industry in a number of countries in Asia, the cover story includes a story of a start up in Indonesia. Funny enough, the story is about the set-up and planning of Orientation.com, a multi-lingual web portal---based in New York City. Now, most of the other stories in the magazine featured local companies reigning their market--why not Indonesia's? There are (as I've heard) an abundance of dot.com, dot.con and dot.kaput start ups mushrooming in Indonesia that may be interesting materials for an article like this. Why aren't they being featured? Another pathetic example would be the cover story Industry Standard, another business-tech publication which featured the advancement (if you may call opening a warnet in Dili an advancement) of East Timor. Off course the 'progress' is done with the help of their buddy, Australia. The article--which contain 90% fart, 8% dream and 2% milk (reality? forget it. Drink milk instead!)--obviously portrayed Indonesia as the devilish, slow, archaic giant of Asia. It seems that we have failed to promote the growth of high tech industry in Indonesia, though we do succeed in promoting the use of high explosives (both home made or professional) in our streets and parking lots to the world. Clearly enough we, as a nation, have failed to win friends, influence, and confidence. Indonesian students of public relation, communication, journalism, international relation and business majors should study why such failure happen, before they return to Indonesia. ;-) regards, yudanta Disclamer: The text above is just the author's wishy-washy scrible in his solitude. It does not represent explicitly and implicitly the view of any organisation, company or institute affiliated with the author. Nor should the writing be used as a tool to measure the author's sanity. He's an idiot disguised as an imbicile anyway. links mentioned: http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,18116,00.html http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue83/mag-china-83.html red herring's article is not available yet online. You can buy the magazine in any newstands. -- Dreams have but one owner at a time. That is why dreamers are lonely. -- Erma Bombeck
