Could I have lived my life the way I do now 10 years ago? I don’t think so. I only had my first mobile phone around ten years ago. Thankfully, the world do change in good ways (sometimes). Although I never had to worry about the petrol prices ten years ago.

In the last 10 years, communication speed and cost have improved exponentially.

I can now run a distributed development team across Australia, HK and China. Firstly, for political reasons, it is much harder to start companies in China 5 years ago. Now that China is heading to WTO, there’s less and less barriers to enter China. Also, only recently the 80s born have just graduated from University, this is the group of people that are grown with the internet. It would be much harder to find web development talents in China 5 years ago.

Crossing borders between HK and China, especially Shenzhen, has dramatically improved with the introduction of self-service finger print smart ID gateways. Direct bus service to shenzhen airport from HK with check-in service has just opened 2 months ago. Opening RMB account is alot simpler now than before.

With the new technologies like Skype , 3G, blackberries, I can communicate with anyone anywhere cheaply. I use the 3G mobile modem plan in Australia, I can basically work anywhere. In HK, there’s a new 3G skypephone plan that only launched 2 months ago and it gives 4000 mins / month on skype. Online applications are also useful for communication and collaborations, like basecamp, facebook, google reader (sharing feed items) , del.icio.us

The power of the laptops and CPU are already over delivering. The size of the macbook pros with such great power is just unimaginable 10 years ago. Multi-touch technologies were only seen in research videos even just 3 years ago. From the walkmans to the ipod to the iphone is just amazing. Now I can pack all of my songs and work anywhere with a macbook + iphone. With this mobility empowerment, I think there’ll be alot more interesting ways on how people interact with each other. We’re not locked inside an office anymore. I would really like to see how will the office space change in the next 10 years.