Colin Charles Agenda

Last Monday, I attended the Maybank2u 2.0 Launch Preview at Delicious @ MARC Residences, in KL. Since then, I’ve been playing with their beta site, doing my day-to-day banking, using it.

The executive summary? I’m impressed. Not that the new site is leaps and bounds better, but I’m impressed over the improvement that was the previous site.

In Malaysia, 15 banks offer Internet Banking services, and Maybank2u has about 60% of the market. Apparently, statistics show that in 2007 alone, there were about 4.5 million Internet Banking users registered in Malaysia, with m2u – really? The queues at the post office for bill payments seem to tell another story.

Maybank’s Ahmad Shareza even went on to boldly say that the m2u website is the number 1 site (sometimes number 2 site, depending on AirAsia’s cheap flights promotions) in Malaysia. It sounded like a fib, but we’ll leave it at that.

The website launched in 2000 (so its been about 8 years due for a redesign?). With 4.5 million registered users, there are only 1 million active users (explains the post office queues!). However, registration is growing at 90,000/month. Impressive. There are over 30 million monthly transactions handled in the system, with over RM3.3 billion ringgit monthly value. The page view stats stand at 157 million page views per month!

Its important to note that they’ve taken a scientific approach to redesigning the site. They went through interaction design stages, usability studies, design first then only rebuild, and so on. It took them about 6 months, and the abilities of David Wang and the rest of the team at AGENDA.

Interestingly enough, they benchmarked the site against 25 other banks – they picked on UK, US and Australian banks. Smart move. For a bank to want to offer personalisation services, I say its a real win.

OK, a bit about their previous architecture… They had 3,000 pages all coded manually. There were 4 master templates, and 6 sub-templates, but overall, there was nothing being pulled out of a database, or anything. Nothing has changed with the current architecture – they’re still using JSP, and the backends are still the same. However, just look at it as a progressive UI redesign (templating, if you must).

Site Loading
Its slow. The previous site gets an F(56) from YSlow, and is 148KB in size (taking me about 5.47s to load), with 41 HTTP requests. The new redesigned site gets an F(50), weighing in at a whooping 195.8K, with 61 HTTP requests (now, load times are at 10.68s). Lets hope they fix it, at some stage.

The UI
Its cleaner. There are tabs, they make use of rounded corners (easier on the eyes), there is a messaging system. In fact, it reminds me of what Commonwealth Bank offers, minus the silly Java applets.

The cue has been taken that a lot of laptops are now 1280×800, in terms of display resolution. While the wide-screen aspect part of it doesn’t come into play, with my browser running in full height mode, I did manage to see the entire website. This of course meant turning my dock into auto-hiding mode (on Linux, the way I run my desktop, 800 pixels in height wasn’t enough).

The colours are streamlined.

A little peeking shows that they have mobile CSS capabilities now. Asked if there will be a mobile site (not with some silly applet that sits on the phone), I’m told they’re looking into it. Of course today, there are no rules – hopefully by the mid-October 2008 launch, there will be.

Functionality
The website still doesn’t work past midnight till 6am. Oh wait, there’s a grace period till about 1am. Its useless when you’re overseas, because sometimes that’s the best time to bank. I mean, who keeps track of what time it is in Malaysia? Its interesting to note that about 10% or so of the m2u users are not from Malaysia!

A lot of people complain about not receiving the TAC in time. Most find it useless. The TAC is of course is a mechanism for two factor authentication. The 6 digit code comes via SMS, and works a charm even when you’re overseas (and roaming, of course). But apparently, it only works well with Maxis – other providers have delays. So, Maybank is looking into using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). This uses the voice stream, and is most reliable (more so than SMS anyway). Why limit TAC sending to local phone numbers only? Allow it for international numbers!

M – annoys me. Its not LiveChat (there was no due diligence on anything besides the solution from Microsoft). You need MSN Messenger to get it going. I find this silly. Its an AI bot, so there’s no one on the other end, but why the lock-in to Microsoft? Oh, naturally, because of a partnership with Microsoft. Take a look at a chat with M. Reminds me of the Emacs Psychiatrist.

Pull-down menus, having things you need on hand, most useful. You can even choose services based on some criteria the bank set out for you.

Post-choosing, you can even compare and contrast between cards (and other services). The UI there needs work (horizontal scroll when its not needed), but the previous site would’ve sent you hunting and pecking and left you frustrated.

What else?
The more I use it, and the more I get annoyed with it, I’ll be sure to update you. Now I have Shareza’s email address, I’ll be sure to drop him regular comments :)

Interestingly at the event, I met a bunch of tech folk whom are in the usual tech circles, but most of the others were bloggers. Very cliquey, but maybe I exude an aura of aloofness. They also blogged: kclau, jason, liewcf (whom I finally got to meet after all the chatting previously), suanie, davidlian, pin?, josh lim (interesting chatting to the Adverlets guy – maybe next I’ll find a Nuffnang guy – my thoughts on the local advertising industry coming right up). There are probably more, I found these links through Google BlogSearch :)

Today, you can discover their all you portal. A bank is blogging! This might be a first? From there, you too can try out the new maybank2u!

Happy banking!

Sun is a huge company. So it comes as no surprise that I’m finding out about Project Kenai via Tim Bray, instead of some internal mailing list (believe me, there must be thousands).

Tim’s got a Q&A with Nick Sieger, who’s one of the chieftains behind Kenai. I find it amusing that the comparison is made against Google Code and GitHub – has SourceForge hit irrelevancy? I’m surprised Launchpad isn’t mentioned.

Very Cover Flow like UI, with slider, etc. That’s Elliot Murphy, ex-Dolphin, current Ubuntero in the pic above

Nick goes on to say “We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control” – can control. Control is a loaded word, no? Especially in the land of open source.

The architecture is such that they’re on Sun servers (SPARC based), using GlassFish, Apache, Memcache and a single MySQL 5.0.45 database server (I’m guessing there’s a maximum storage of 146GB because they’re using SAS disks – they will implement replication soon). It seems they’re currently on 32-bit MySQL – they’re getting less than 10% CPU usage, and the query cache is working well for them (98% hit ratio). If graphs, et al turn you on, look at the slides from Fernando Castano, Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails.

Its interesting to see the mix of software offered – Mercurial and Subversion (for project hosting – there be choice, unlike the other services out there), Sympa (as opposed to common Mailman), and Bugzilla as the bug tracker. Oh, its built on Rails, so it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless, to see how Rails scales.

Why does Kenai interest me? Because for every project, you have a forum, a separate wiki, access to source code, mailing lists, and a bug tracker. Why should Kenai interest the MySQL community? Because maybe down the line, there will be integration with the Forge. Today, the Forge does not offer hosting (we have got the bits built-in, technically, but Launchpad seemed like a better bet for us, in the long run – the Forge is not in the storage business, its more a catalogue of information), mailing lists, forums, or a bug tracker.

After all, the tagline is “We’re More Than Just a Forge”. There look like there are some social networking aspects to Kenai as well – maybe some ohloh like features will make its way in due time? Maybe a Facebook application, created using Zembly will mash things up even. Who’s to say what the future of Kenai can bring.

I’m used to separating my trash. Recyclables, non-recyclables, never greens because I don’t dig gardens. It came as a surprise to me that here in Malaysia, recycling is not compulsory, and all trash just hits the landfills.

I am however, pleased to say that for the last couple of months, the trash has been separated. Not only has in been separated, its been mounting in the back yard, needing attention.

I gave it its due attention today. Behold, the PJ Recycling Centre (thanks to @nazroll from Twitter).

All the newspapers, plastic containers/bottles, aluminium drink cans. All recycled! And you know what’s amusing? Its not free. They pay you to take away your trash! A trunk load of newspapers, and 3 bags of cans and bottles, garnered me RM38. You’d dream of the city council in Victoria paying you for trash ;)

They however, don’t take glass bottles. Does anyone know how I can recycle glass? Typically, I have quite a bit of it – think used Scotch, wine, and champagne bottles.

Something about bloggers supposedly writing things as they happen right? No wait, those are blogger-wannabe-journalists *grin*. Anyway, if you’re up for a write-up, read Aaron Chew’s entry about the Sloggi, Art for Humanity day at Sunway Lagoon Resort. The only way I aim to please, is via photos – Sloggi: Art for Humanity – a set of nearly a thousand photos.

I had a media pass – all thanks to Talents Magazine – not that it really mattered, as there were lots of amateur photographers there, crowding the area, looking to capture the moment. Want to know what successfully separated the wheat from the chaff?

The rain. It came, and it poured. Some scurried under tents (and tried to get people to move out of the way). Some managed to scurry under an umbrella. Most ran away, to protect their precious gear. I, I stayed. And shot through the rain. Much to everyone’s surprise.

The highlights, from me?

Suki, a singer, who ate at Mr. Teppanyaki before performing, because I ate there too

The Balloon Competition Winners

The Balloon Competition Winners pt. II

How quickly can you take off a bra?

The models, with body paint

The models, with body paint

I’m too lazy to wade through the entire set of photos again… You go ahead and enjoy the set. Sloggi: Art for Humanity is where its at.

There, that wasn’t so bad. August 23rd 2008 was when the event was at… Its only September 9th 2008 now :)

The really big difference is that I don’t have to participate in interminable conference calls. That in itself makes a job worth quiting.

link

Passion/Poppy, you failure of epic proportions.

Poppy is downstairs, Passion is upstairs. Today, is Thursday, traditionally lady’s night everywhere, right? Passion is closed, Poppy is virtually empty. This alone should have alarm bells ringing in your head. But my experience there, takes the cake.

Firstly, it took a grand total of 35 minutes to find our bottle of stashed Chivas. In the end, they admitted to not being able to find the bottle (they admitted that someone has stolen it), they gave us someone else’s bottle, scratched out their details and put my name on it. We noticed that there was less alcohol than what the custody card stated, and they gave us a couple of free glasses of drinks to boot.

Service, for an empty night club, SUCKED. Getting the lethargic wait staff to do anything, was mostly a waste of time.

So after all this waiting, guess what? They refused entry for a friend of mine. He so happens to have tried to come in via the main entrance (I just walked in from the side entrance, post valet parking). The excuse? Its ladies night and men have to pay.

I call a waiter over (the same guy that fumbled for 35 minutes to get me a bottle that wasn’t mine) to talk to the staff at the door. There are about four of them. Two beefy guys, and one spectacled fool who kept on insisting that they had procedure to follow. This after the waiter saying a bottle was inside.

I start to speak. I inform them that there is no one in the night club and there is really no reason why anyone should pay. Spectacled fool, insists its procedure and there’s a cover charge. I honestly feel like going in, taking my bottle out, and smashing it on his face.

But, some sense comes over them… Because one of the beefy guys decides that we mean business. My friend, and the three girls that accompanied him, come in with no hassle now. I say, rather loudly, “You did the right thing, or else…” The bespectacled guy isn’t impressed.

We finish the bottle as soon as we can, and this marks my vow to never go there again if I can avoid it. In fact, you should never go there again, if you can avoid it too. They are apparently only popular on Friday and Saturday nights, anyway. I recommend them to close, if possible.

If you need to go somewhere, in that area, might I highly recommend Thai Club (two floors of entertainment – upstairs is heavily air-conditioned, and serves a younger crowd), or even Rum Jungle. I know, I know, I considered Rum Jungle harmful before, but that was before they were opposite Poppy. They’ve now moved to the side, and are so much more sensible. Rum Jungle and Thai Club also have got good bands… Passion/Poppy? Just a DJ. Want eye candy? Definitely skip Passion/Poppy. Besides, only Passion/Poppy have a “dress code” even – Rum Jungle have learned from their ways, and I can walk in in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals (okay, Crocs nowadays).