Retrospective Perspectives 2020/2021
Retrospective
My year started well. Instead of doing a digital detox (which is what I usually do during the last few days of the year), I decided to do a body detox instead and fasted for a full week in January. No food, no medicines, no tea, no nothing. Just water. Little did I know back then, that in many ways this would prepare my body and mind for what would yet to come. Given this experience, I plan to make this an annual affair, especially as I felt a strong positive reset of my entire immune system. No wonder “no food” is sometimes considered the “last remedy.”
UIB’s six year-anniversary event (24 hours before Singapore went on orange alert during the early days of COVID-19) was a big success. It also made me realize that there is no overnight success and that we have, to date, gone through three pivots. We started as a “Unified Inbox,” then turned into a social media broadcasting solution, and finally found our sweet spot in becoming an omnichannel AIoT Messaging Service Platform (which is also what we successfully sell today with the help of many partners). Another highlight in February was the World Innovation Leader Award in Mumbai, which forced me to compress my understanding of innovation into a 30-minute presentation.
Soon after, the pandemic hit and the crisis prompted me to tap back into my creative side. After a nearly one year-pause of blogging and piano playing, I started to write again, e.g., about remote working (which is now commonly named as Working From Home - or “WFH” - but I also wanted to remember the many in-person interactions I was lucky to have over the years. For my love of traveling, I recorded Schumann’s “Of Foreign Lands and People” and once it looked like the first wave was over, a “Song without Words” by Mendelssohn, for hope and confidence of a better future.
Like everyone, I was speaking online, e.g., at the V-Vent Trans Tasman and Singapore Business Circle and as part of the CommsLife Series by APCO Worldwide about topics like “How to lose your job successfully to an AI” or “How bots are taking over the world.” In August and September, I was lucky to be able to travel a bit and could attend my only in-person conference during the pandemic which made me realize the importance of live, face-to-face interactions. I also started to mentor for the German Accelerator South East Asia bringing German startups to Asia and vice-versa.
Mid this year, LinkedIn officially rolled out a cool “Newsletter” feature which allowed me to further discipline myself in regularly writing articles about “Modern Times and Opportunities” (which is also the title of the newsletter), with the following editions out already:
I can highly recommend starting a newsletter if you’re an active LinkedIn user. It’s very effective to reach your audience in comparison to simply writing posts and articles.
The highlights at the end of the year were winning the SICC Awards with Bosch, publishing my first composition on Apple and Amazon Music (a ballad with variations for solo piano called “Into the Unknown,” which was also used for various sci-fi videos and documentaries and is available as a free download on my Soundcloud), and, that within just a couple of weeks notice, well over 200 people registered for the Heart-Soul Meditation event at the end of the year, sponsored by the Baleno Foundation from New Zealand.
Perspectives
I’m personally very grateful for this year but I realize how much agony and pain it has brought to hundreds of millions of people globally. I’m a big believer in paying-it-forward and simply doing what we can, no matter how little the act may seem at the time.
For instance, many years ago when I assembled the first UIB team, we started a lending team on Kiva for microloans and impact investing by team members. Since then, we’ve funded 684 projects and it is one of the best things we can do with very little investment to help people in need help themselves, especially those that are easily overlooked during the pandemic.
Another project close to my heart is that of a friend in Indonesia who runs the Indonesian Street Children Organization (ISCO) Foundation. Children this year were particularly vulnerable to neglect, mental stress, and abuse in general, and we are far from understanding the long term consequences 2020/2021 will have on entire generations to come.
But even in my home town in Germany, and coming back to my original profession in music, the initiatives that I saw and cherished while growing up were under threat of not surviving the government-mandated rules and restrictions, simply due to oversights in support of the arts and culture.
It made me realize we need new and different perspectives and to value our different points of view, not shut them down. The constant blocking, censoring, and channeling of information across a wide range of social media platforms, of even moderate “critical thinkers,” are of no use to the longer-term evolvement of humanity as a species. Perhaps, after a few hundred years, and independent of what opinions we individually might have had at the time, this great silencing and censoring of mainstream critics could be compared to the book burnings which have been happening repeatedly in our history over time.
We need to support initiatives like The Internet Archive to keep ourselves accountable for our history and must gain a much bigger picture view of time. Long-term thinking is something which the arts have inherited, but unfortunately, perspectives such as the 10,000-year clock from The Long Now Foundation are far from entering mainstream thinking and media.
As we are about to enter a "photonic age" (you will be able to read more about this topic in my next LinkedIn newsletter to which you can subscribe here), things will only accelerate. The best we can do to ourselves is to keep physically and mentally fit, with an open mind and clarity of thought, and by looking out for certain trends at large that can impact our economic and societal wellbeing. Think global, but act in your tribe.
The rise of crypto this year for instance is different from previous years. In particular, I’d like to point out Pi (π), which is a new digital currency developed by Stanford PhDs, with over 10 million members worldwide and a real bottom-up approach (if you need an invitation code, you can use “alternatinc”). Bitcoin Cash and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust are also interesting. While none of these will replace the dollar or the euro any time soon and don’t represent ownership in a company, it doesn’t stop them from soaring, as people flock to a rising share price and easy ownership with fast liquidity which is often a problem when dealing with crypto.
Finally, let’s take a look at what is currently going on geopolitically in this world. If you were still in doubt whether there is a major conflict between the US and China brewing, just see the launch of “The Clean Network”, NYSE’s Delistings of China’s Major Telecom Operators, or, the mystery of Jack Ma’s recent disappearance.
But somewhere in-between “The Great Reset” and new geopolitical alliances fighting over a new world order, I’m convinced we can find new opportunities, other perspectives, and old friends. So let’s watch out for them and each other, together.