Welcome to The ABR Blog!

In this first post, I'll outline who I am and what I'm trying to achieve with Asian Business Radio. To start with, I would like to introduce myself. I am Alex Trup, founder, CEO, producer, host and all round director of Asian Business Radio. I live in Taipei, but have also previously lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou for varying periods of time and I do continue to visit them on occasion. After studying a mix of business, marketing and Asian languages (Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese) at university, I moved to Asia where I have worked as Digital Marketing Manager for a regional marketing and communications company.

I've always had a passion for media, business, business media and the media business. I've also always been quite a tech geek, building websites and exploring new media since first getting Internet access in about 1995. Over the past few years, I found myself consuming an increasing amount of audio podcasts, which I thoroughly enjoy listening to at my leisure when working, when working out, when travelling and when thinking about sleeping. From my personal experience, podcasts can be educational and entertaining while also keeping you up-to-date with the goings on in your areas of interest. Over the past couple of years I did attempt to record my own podcasts, but found myself short of time and a solid network of contacts I could rely on to help produce engaging content. Podcasting was also very much an unknown media back then with relatively limited audience scope.

Today I believe we find ourselves in a new era for the potential of podcasting. The majority of people online are now accessing the Internet via broadband connection. Apple has majorly promoted the finding and downloading of podcasts through iTunes. Almost all the major media companies in the world have produced at least one series of podcasts. Decreased costs for and increased accessibility to professional recording equipment and the technologies associated with podcasting hosting and distribution have resulted in an explosion of do-it-yourselfers creating podcasts that server and entertain microniches the world over.

Even with this mass of new user-generated content, I felt like my interest in Asian business was being under-served. That's not to say the guys already doing it for 10s or 100s of episodes have been doing a bad job - indeed I thoroughly respect all the great insightful content they've created to date and hope they will at some point participate in Asian Business Radio themselves - but I did think I would be the best person to produce the content I felt would appeal more to myself and of course hopefully to a broader audience.

So what did I think was missing and what do I think I could bring to the table? Well for starters I think a lot of the content about business in Asia is a little bit dry. Either it is often self-promoting monologues or stale "PR friendly" interviews. In short I felt many of them lacked personality. I believe in friendly, honest conversation between peers challenging one another is more engaging to listeners.

Another complaint I had was that there wasn't really much programming I came across with panel discussions about business in Asia. To my mind, what 3 or 4 people can bring to or develop within a conversation, is far more interesting than what a 1 persons monologue or a 2 person dialogue can. That's not to say those formats don't have their place and that we won't be using them ourselves here at Asian Business Radio, but that there needs to be more programming formats out there.

With all that said, I give you Asian Business Radio, which as the Ronseal people say, it "Does exactly what it says on the tin". Asian Business Radio is not a single show in itself, but rather it is a network of shows or what you might even call a station.

So what shows can you expect to see (or rather hear) from ABR? Well, we have 3 shows already in the planning and production pipeline which we hope to launch in the first quarter of 2009 and we do of course hope to expand our selection by further after that. Here's a sneak peek at what you we'll soon be releasing:

• WoW: Words of Wisdom - a weekly one-to-one interview with those describing their experiences of business in Asia and offering their tips for success (what to do and what not to).
• CBC: Chinese Business Chat - a fortnightly panel discussion covering recent news about business in China followed by group discussion on a certain business topic and then answers to listeners' questions
• TAT: Talking Asian Tech - a fortnightly panel discussion covering recent news about technology in Asia as well as topic based discussion.

If you would like to participate in any of the shows above or have an idea for a show you would like to hear about or host, then by all means contact us. For businesses interested in advertising on any of our shows or sponsoring the creation of their own branded series of shows (e.g. for an industry event), again do feel free to contact us and we'll talk about the possibilities.

Finally, I would like to explain why I decided to start this blog. One of the first things you should learn about business in Asia is that it is conducted primarily through trusted networks of friends, family and contacts of contacts (I won't limit this to the term Guanxi as it is not purely a Chinese practice). I hope that through my openness to discuss the content ABR will create, our distribution methods and other technology practices, as well as later the business models we will need to develop in order to sustain and grow the business, I will earn your trust and support.

Alex