Archive for November 2008

Telegraph partnering with online sites

The Telegraph Group in the UK, publishers of the The Daily Telegraph seem to be embracing the Web world. Take a look at their offers page.

They’re offering services, using 3rd party web providers, like Wesabe for managing your finances, and partnering with Specsavers to tell you what kind of spectacles to choose next.

I don’t know how comfortable one would be, giving a newspaper more and more information (I didn’t find a privacy clause) about oneself, but this is the Facebook-era, where information is mostly free. Wesabe also mentions that with 22.9 million unique visitors to the Telegraph website in September alone, it could mean great growth for the site.

It would be interesting to see The Age/Sydney Morning Herald partner up with some local Aussie startup sites… similarly in Malaysia, now that the newspapers are moving to a more online fashion.

References:

MSC Malaysia InnoTech slide summary

I wasn’t at the MSC Malaysia InnoTech event on the 17th of November 2008, held at the Shangri-La Hotel, in Kuala Lumpur, but I did take a look at the slide deck.

Executive summary? All the talks, save for the ones listed below, were probably a waste of time.

Khailee gave a fairly short pitch (~9 minutes), he even put up a video with bits of his transcript. I saw an expanded 45 minute version of this talk at StartupCampKL, and I reckon that was the better version to be at :) There was also video recording, but it hasn’t made its way online, yet.

Bob Chua, from The Pulse Group, gave a very interesting talk on Funding Trends (OK, his slide deck was interesting). Why? Because it was filled with nuggets of useful information, almost like it was out of the book Microtrends. Did you know that 1 out of 8 couples married last year, in the U.S. met online? His closing thoughts, though nothing new, are generally useful for the entrepreneurial crowd.

Kumaran Singaram, from Cisco, probably gave a product pitch, but there were some interesting nuggets in the slide deck. “The Network Is The Platform for Colloboration” sounds very similar to “The Network is the Computer”, no? Its interesting to see how much of WebEx/C-Vision is used at Cisco, for example (why the details are kept “Cisco Confidential” I don’t know). Its great to see the amount of active blogs, in the Cisco blogosphere (and the growth from February – August is about two times). There’s active use of discussion forums at Cisco, and there’s been a 6x growth from January to August! Lots of Wiki usage as well. I fear these stats might also be from 2007, rather than them being current (I can only guess, based on the confidential/copyright marker in the footer of some slides).

The rest? I think Tom Raftery (of RedMonk fame) might have given a good talk, but the slides didn’t give out too much.

Were you at the event? Did you learn something new?

The Star Online does TV!

I hardly visit websites anymore, preferring instead to muck with feeds, in my current feed reader of choice (Google Reader, on this very fine day, kept in a site-specific browser). But I did visit The Star Online recently, and was shocked to find that they had a multimedia section, that also had video clips! Its called TheStarOnline.tv.

The Star Online - newspaper also hosting video

A newspaper, traditional media that is print, embracing video? I wonder if reporters are carrying around little FlipMino’s :)

Seems somewhat popular even. On Thursday Malacca divorcing George Town had a paltry 163 views. Today, its Sunday, and its up to 1,089 views. Most viewed video is at 9,752 views, in where Thaksin goes shopping in Dubai.

Its interesting to see that they’re hosting the videos on YouTube and embedding them. They have 740 subscribers to their YouTube feed (soon to be 741 as I subscribe to them :P)… They’ve been around for over a year, and have had under 35,000 views in their channel – nothing exactly fancy, but a good start. Its also good to note that they’re not updating it like once every day – it gets updated several times a day.

Kudos to this old media company, exploring new media… As more people think about IPTV, as more mobile phones support fast data access, as more people stop reading dead tree newspapers, this kind of experimentation is going to pay off for them.

The real story behind Maxis Broadband

The whole Maxis Broadband advertising spiel is hitting up again in the Malaysian blogosphere, and I think its time I write about their broadband service a little more.

Point of observation: lots of the blogosphere, probably get paid [not necessarily monetarily] to write reviews, which are generally crap because they never actually use the service. They should disclose this payment/affiliation, but they usually don’t, which is terribly sad. Anyway, ignore the hyperbole – I’ll tell you about Maxis Broadband from the trenches.

I’ve been using the service for what must be about six months now (using a Huawei E220, on a Mac and Linux, but mostly on a Mac – since all I really carry around is my Air). I only hopped on Maxis, because everyone that was a Celcom customer told me that dialup was better than Celcom’s 3G/HSDPA.

The good
It works really well in both my homes, in either Petaling Jaya or Klang. This is of course, not the prime location I would like to use the broadband modem – I have DSL coming through the houses, and its always more reliable than a HSDPA connection.

It works really well in Mont Kiara. The Coffee Bean there, has got fabulous coverage. In fact, so does SOMO.

Where my vet is located in Brickfields, Maxis Broadband shines – 364KB/s. Also, in Cyberjaya, I hopped on WCDMA while I was at MMU… not fast, not slow, but just about usable ;-)

The bad
Uploading to Flickr fails. Anything large (you know, that comes out of even an 8MP digital camera) will fail to upload.

I was at UITM (Shah Alam) not long ago, and the coverage was an epic fail. Nearby the Maxis headquarters (OK, I was at the Sun office in KL), Maxis gave me some amazing ping times – 10761.587 ms! But maybe it was switching cells, far too often?

I was in Cheras (nearby Leisure Mall) not long ago, and was sitting in my car, trying to surf the Internet. Here, you’ll notice that the HSDPA network is weak – it moves to EDGE, most of the time. The Internet is also, virtually unusable.

I took a bus to Singapore a month back. Trying to use it on the North-South Expressway, was not happening. It would disconnect so frequently, it made more sense to sleep. I’ve been told however, that Celcom works a charm on the North-South Expressway. Then again, not exactly a common use case for me.

I have a box sitting in the Jaring IDC. Transfers (ssh -C) top out at about 20KB/s. Ping times are around 80ms, but its just not that fast… Well at least with the WCDMA network in Mont Kiara.

Why?
I’m not slagging Maxis off for no reason… I’m trying to make you, the reader, an informed consumer, so that you don’t simply buy a service, that cannot be provided for.

In fact, I wondered how many users could blog from a single location using Maxis Broadband even. Their service coverage is probably not the best, and imagine a bunch of bloggers (Nuffnang-ers) who want to live blog… These are the camwhore crowd, et al. I’m sure they had a massively enjoyable time, wishing they were at home, with Streamyx ;-)

Motivation?
Well, it seems that Vodafone offers $0 Dell Inspiron Mini 9’s on a $70 plan, with 5GB of data transfer in Australia. I won’t be surprised if Maxis has a similar deal with Dell… A simple Google showed that Dell and Maxis are already in cahoots – RM99 x 24 months with “free” Broadband access for 6 months… more details about the promo, which means you’ll end up paying RM2,376… and assuming you like the Maxis Broadband service, you’ll end up having to fork out RM77 for the remainder of the 18 months, totalling a paltry RM1,386. Wait… RM77 is a lot cheaper than the usual RM138 per month (RM118 if you’re a Maxis postpaid subscriber). RM61 savings!?! That’s RM1,098 one can save… ridiculous. I’m tempted to get this “deal” and just ask for an extra SIM card to be tied to my account… I’m sure that can’t cost more than RM5 or RM10.

Conclusion
I even had other issues with them… upon signup, they said they would direct debit my credit card. It took a threat to leave the service for them to do it over the phone, in the fifth month of service. I still seem to be getting paper bills (costing me an additional RM5).

I am of course, posting this via a Maxis Broadband Internet connection :) It has allowed me to not pay Airzed for Wifi, and if it worked a little better, everywhere else, I’d be mostly happy with it.

What are your experiences with Maxis Broadband?

Taxes (2008)

More for my reference than anything else…

I originally read it in the dead tree edition of The Edge. Its a pity they don’t place all their content online (worried about people not buying your paper for RM5? Place it online after a month, its “dated” enough to be free).

Facts:

  • According to Second Finance Minister Nor Mohamed Yakcop, only 1.2 million of Malaysia’s 10.5 million workers earn more and pay income tax.
  • Only 38,500 earning a taxable income of RM100,000 and above are in the highest tax bracket.

The above via Malaysians brace themselves for higher cost of living. If you can get past the opinion, most of the article is quoted in this comment.

Quran’s costing RM1.3 million – wisest use of tax payer money?

This was in the news recently: Quran in hotel rooms soon. Excerpts:

A copy of the Quran and its intepretation will be made available in most hotel rooms in the country to allow both Muslims and non-Muslims to have “access” to the Holy book.

Ahmad Zahid said Jakim would be printing another 50,000 copies of the Quran’s interpretation for the purpose, costing some RM1.3mil, adding these books were in English to cater to foreign visitors and tourists.

50,000 copies. RM1.3 million. RM26 per Quran. Jakim is the Department of Islamic Development, Malaysia. It’s a Malaysian Government institution.

Now, if you’re in a 3-star hotel or above, you’re getting a Quran, courtesy of the Malaysian Government. Courtesy of your tax payer ringgit. I think there’s better ways to spend RM1.3 million of money from the rakyat – let’s feed and shelter the homeless, for a start.

Another healthy way the government of the day, is spending your hard earned tax ringgit!

Update: @nazroll tells me that this comes out of zakat payments, that only Muslims pay. I still believe there are better ways to spend zakat payments, but I don’t run the country, now do I? Zakat from the Malaysian government or Zakat via Wikipedia… Wikipedia describes zakat as “alms for the poor” – I don’t know how accurate that is, but if you’re staying in a 3-star hotel and above, you aren’t exactly poor ;)

Next up, time to read up on Islamic Banking/Economics. Looks like an interesting topic! (I mean I’m bombarded with signs about it, let’s see how it compares with regular banking)

Update 2: There was active chatter on Twitter! @ditesh tells us that the zakat is a tax credit, and Wikipedia explains the taxation behind it. @nazroll continues to tell us that development is OK, and people are curious to know how the money is spent, and it is available upon request. Lots worry about accountability, and @nazroll hits it spot on.


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