Archive for June 2010

Crocs Malaysia and race based market segmentation

Update – Thursday, July 1 2010, 5.38pm UTC+8: What happened, happened. What was said, was said. Oftentimes, a slip of the tongue, really is no fault of the mind. Maybe I was a little too harsh here, so when reading this 1,000-word essay, just keep that in mind. I’m sure the MarCom Manager did not actually mean what she said. The calibre of her presentation was good, and we learned some new things about their digital marketing strategy. In fact, you might just want to go read the other case studies (Canon, BFM 89.9, MyEG, P1 W1MAX)! To err is human, to forgive divine. Let’s all take a chill pill, and have a beer or something ;-)

I graced a SMCKL meetup tonight. I haven’t been in about a year (scheduling conflicts); it was fabulous to catch up with all my friends, learn new things and I have quite some notes that I’ll talk about soon. But this is about my relationship to Crocs, and Crocs Malaysia, at large.

I love my Crocs Yukon. In fact, I love it so much, I pretty much buy a new pair once every six months! You might wonder why. The soles tend to wear out, not evenly, just around the midfoot, usually towards the forefoot. But this quick wear has never been a problem to me, because I love my Crocs; I wear them everyday. Crocsâ„¢ Yukon | Crocs, Inc.

If I’m on my feet, my Crocs are wrapped around them. The current pair (in its six months with me) is world travelled – it’s been to: Singapore, London, Thailand, Finland, Iceland, Germany, the United States, and China. Its been on numerous planes (Dopplr suggests my carbon total stands at 17,414kg CO2). Its been through freezing winters and rather hot tropical weather. Crocs have been on me when I meet deputy-ministers, ministers, and even a certain prime minister. I wear Crocs to meetings. I wear Crocs when I give talks. Some friends refer to my pairs of Crocs as “government Crocs”. We always have a chuckle at that.

The bottom-line is that it’s quite hard to find me in a pair of shoes. I’m usually always in Crocs. The very rare occasion of me wearing shoes has me wearing a very comfortable pair of Geox shoes, or an amazing pair I picked up from Marks & Spencer.

Back to SMCKL #7 – we had the Marcom Manager for the company that imports/distributes Crocs in Malaysia come speak to us. She mentioned the name of the parent company, but I never did get it, so for all intents and purposes, this is defined as “Crocs Malaysia“. Her presentation was rather interesting, and a few points I took away from it:

  1. They invest heavily in Facebook – they have the regular Crocs Malaysia page, as well as a Crocs Ideas page (which isn’t linked form the main page). They have over 14,652 fans that like their page. Content is largely what’s coming out in the stores, and what’s to become available.
  2. There’s some Twitter engagement (@crocsmalaysia), but it does not seem as popular as Facebook (other speakers had similar comments).
  3. They’re doing blogger engagement. For the year 2010, they’ve picked five: FeeqSays, Rebecca Saw, Marcky.my, MissyCheerio, and Christopher Tock. These bloggers are known as their “official bloggers”.
  4. While the arrangement isn’t made clear with the official bloggers, it is made clear that the official bloggers get free Crocs, in exchange for writing about how Crocs have influence on the daily life of the blogger. Bloggers are basically selling stories, pushing experiences, where their Crocs get involved. I don’t know if there’s a minimum post count/amount of engagement required, or its something you do in passing (which is why I said the arrangement isn’t clear). I do however think that with the proper metrics, story telling and sharing experiences, totally rocks.
  5. To engage with their readers, these official bloggers also get to run competitions on a weekly basis, and the rewards are free Crocs for winners. Good, it gets more Crocs out there, especially to the non-believers ;)

Everything seemed like it was going well, and she was doing a fabulous job at presenting her case study. Until the moderator asked her: How do you choose your bloggers?.

She does not go for “A-list bloggers” like Kenny Sia, or Nicolekiss. A-list Malaysian lifestyle bloggers. She went on to tell the audience that each blogger has value in them. I take it that everyone has a story to tell, and everyone has their own tribe. Then she talked about Feeq. She said that his target market is the Malay market. She did not want to only target the Chinese market. Crocs Malaysia targets all market segments: Malay, Indian and Chinese.

Wait, what? There’s race based segmentation and targeting in footwear? In social media? Online? We live in a time, where Malaysia is no longer just Malaysia; its the cliché of 1Malaysia. And here the faux pas, stated in front of a large audience, the yardstick used, is in which racial segment a blogger is popular in.

I immediately reacted:

Clearly disappointed that @crocsmalaysia is profiling/targeted by race. So much for being Malaysian. Time to find new footwear #smckl

I am trying to break your heartThere was another tweet which wondered what the difference in race brings? And whomever is behind the @crocsmalaysia account stated: it is just our way to reach out to all consumers of all races thru our bloggers. One might think that this is something only I took offence in; lucky for me, I was not alone. People came up to me, replied to me, and even direct messaged me on this very topic.

Social media, and the utility that it travels on, the Internet, does not discriminate against race, colour, creed, nationality, gender, and more. You should choose a blogger because she has a wide Malaysian audience! In Malaysia however, it seems ingrained that there will always be profiling, separation, and a system in where we don’t have one nation, but at least two separate nations. Maybe we only have the incumbent political parties to blame for this.

As an aside, I think it is important to distinguish what you say to a close group of friends, versus what you say on Twitter, versus what you say to a large audience of folk (i.e. when you’re speaking in public). When you start representing a brand, you’ve definitely got to start thinking about how you articulate yourself. A topic to talk about elsewhere.

Either way, I cannot remember when I first shelled out RM209 for my first Yukon. I expect it must have been late 2007, or at latest early 2008. My (extended, truly Malaysian) family is also big on Crocs. However, I think its time to wean myself off from Crocs, and find non-discriminatory footwear.

HOWTO: Make your videos 10 minutes in length for YouTUBE

I recently made quite a number of videos, that span about 0.5hr or 1-hour in length. YouTube accepts videos that are 10-minutes long and up to 2GB in size. Blip.tv allows FTP uploads, but your filesize cannot exceed 1GB per video. An hour long video from the camera is about 2GB in size. This is quick guide as to how I split videos.

QTCoffee exists to solve this problem. Quick, simple install on Mac OS X, and I was on my way to creating split videos. The command I used:

splitmovie -o outputfile.mov -self-contained -no-fast-start -duration 10:00 sourcefile.avi

Now, in that directory, I get outputfile-1.mov, outputfile-2.mov, and so on. Easy as pie. Its donation-ware, but a commercial license will set you back USD$10. It occasionally reminds you to donate by popping up nagware in your web browser at random once every 10 times its used (I’ve not used shareware since Windows 3.1, and nag screens were a lot different back then). You can easily remove it (it tells you how, even!), by executing: defaults write com.pair.3am.QTCoffee BugMe NO .

Now YouTube is happy, and you can concatenate the files together as a playlist.

QTCoffee is ideal for me, because its scriptable, and can work on a large directory of videos. I wonder what the Linux variant for this is?

MyEG, JPJ, VicRoads on road taxes: the difference is trust?

On Twitter today, Christopher Tock stated:

If @myegclub cld have a service to notify road tax of a car nearing expiry date, I’m sure it’ll get more ppl to register under them! ;) #fb

I replied:

Instead, why not send new road tax one month before expiry by mail, and get payment via @myegclub ? @spinzer @nikicheong

Christopher then asked about the situation in which people don’t pay, and they receive their registration labels by mail. And Niki Cheong said that “many people try to find their way around paying for stuff here. ingrained in our lives”.

VicRoads website It got me thinking. In Victoria, Australia, VicRoads sends out registration labels and the certificate every year, about a month before expiry. You then head online, and pay for your registration using your credit card. I believe you might also be able to pay for it in cash at various locations (post office, etc.), though I’ve always done it online. You never ask – what if I don’t pay for it. You just do. I’m sure there are stiff penalties for lacking payment. But the process is easy – it comes to you, there’s no need to remember when things are expiring, and you can pay for it online, all without leaving the comfort of your home.

In Malaysia, JPJ does not remind you when your road tax is expiring. The onus is on you to know this. You then have to head to the post office to pay for it and get the registration label, and settle your insurance at the same time. Or you can avoid all this by sending it to your car’s service centre and they’ll take about two days to sort this out for you. Insurance can be paid via credit card, but your road tax needs to be in cash (or so UMW-Toyota tells me).

JPJ websiteThe government of Malaysia is heavily pushing their e-government services portal – MyEG. You can now renew your road tax online, thus getting rid of the whole visiting the post office or your manufacturer’s service centre. This is similar to what VicRoads does – you enter your registration number and it will tell you if you have a payment to be made or not. This is a step forward – except for the fact, that there is no reminder for you to renew your road tax!

Will it be hard to implement? Of course not. Part of the registration for MyEG includes you giving away your identity card (IC) number. A simple change to the database can ensure that you can tie several cars to your account and you can thus make payment on them. MyEG will know when the road tax is expiring, and a simple SMS message might suffice (bulk SMS costs are cheap). And if they’re more trusting, mailing out of the labels themselves!

But I guess Niki is right – it is ingrained that Malaysians might want to find away around the system, if the labels were sent out, pre-payment. Take a look at petrol kiosks: in Australia, you pump your petrol first, then go in to make the payment. You don’t think about running away after getting your full tank. You do this no matter how much petrol costs. In Malaysia, you pay for your petrol first. Either at the counter, or via credit card authorisation. No payment, no petrol.

I sincerely hope MyEG/JPJ figure this out at some stage. As we move towards a more knowledge-based economy, and the goals of the government certainly include getting Malaysia more in-tune with the rest of the First World, it probably makes sense that service delivery takes a notch up.

As a quick aside, do look at both the VicRoads and the JPJ website. Look at how the information is architected. How its presented. Its an interesting comparison. I wonder how many web designers go through this sort of thought process, when thinking about designing websites that are targeted for mass consumption of government services.

Nokia N900 gets a firmware update – PR1.2 for Maemo 5

Nokia N900 I’ve been using the Nokia N900 since March 2010, when Nokia decided to give one to every person that attended the launch. Its mostly been my roaming phone so far, and its been places ;)

Naturally, I found some problems which I very quickly wrote to Glen, who heads Product Management at Nokia Singapore/Malaysia/Brunei. I’m happy to state that these problems have been fixed in v10.2010.19-1 (PR 1.2) – see the changelog for a more complete list! This was released May 25/26 2010, worldwide, and I’m only now getting to update it. Let’s go through some of them…

Short codes (USSD) leading to “incorrect number”
I could not dial numbers that are formatted like *131#. The error message thrown at me: “incorrect number”. These codes are known as Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes.

I discovered this immediately within 24-hours of using the phone, largely because I had a Starhub prepaid card in it, and pretty much everything related to account management could not be done. DiGi in Malaysia uses this for checking your balance, and so on as well. Naturally, this was not something only I found – it was quite a problem on the forums too.

Pleased to report it has been fixed in PR 1.2.

Web browsing – landscape only?!?
Nokia N900Web browsing only works in landscape mode, and not portrait mode. I understand Nokia is pushing this connected device mantra, and its like your mini-computer replacement, but clearly, sometimes I want one-handed operations.

Today, it works. Not automatically – go to the web browser, look under Options – Settings, and make sure you select Enable Rotation. It takes a little over 1.5 seconds to rotate between landscape/portrait, and to be honest this seems a little slow, but it is at least fixed in PR 1.2.

Improved communications
You can now have video calls in Skype and Google Talk. You can also start using Facebook IM chat. Ovi Chat still remains. A killer? BBM chat integration!

Some things were however, not fixed, and I guess we might wait a few months before the next update happens.

  1. Copy via selecting text on the screen works in the Notes application. In the Messages application (Conversations), you can’t select using the screen, you have to use the keyboard (shift [uppercase] + up/down/left/right). This is still an inconsistent UI bug, and the messages app needs fixing
  2. More in what I consider inconsistent UI: the +/- hardware buttons are reversed when it comes to volume and zoom using the camera application. I know there is no +/- button per se, but I’d still regard this as a bug.
  3. Not a large bug in my book, but there is still no Multimedia Messaging Support (MMS).

The upgrade for me happened over the air. Half way through the upgrade I was a little worried about what might happen to my pictures. But it seems there is User Data Preservation (UDP), so I’m not complaining. Everything remained after the update – photos, contacts, text messages and more.

From a developer perspective, you’ll find that Qt 4.6.2 is now pre-installed. What does this mean to you? Check out the Qt Labs blog post on Qt 4.6.2 for Maemo 5. Kinetic scrolling is one of the things that excites me, with this change.

Anyway, if you’re a Nokia N900 user, get this firmware update. While it was non-destructive for me, your mileage may vary, so you might want to make backups.

Participate in the Web of Trust Community Survey

Do you use Web of Trust (WOT)? Its a great plugin, available for Firefox, Chrome and other browsers, that help you browse the web in a safer fashion. From June 11 to June 18 2010, you can fill up the community survey, and stand a chance to win an Apple iPod Nano.

Apple opens up Podcasts, iTunes U in Malaysia

I just noticed this: Apple now not only sells you apps in the AppStore in Malaysia, but you can also download podcasts and iTunes U content, using your Malaysian iTunes Store account. This is a big change, considering the directory was not available, this time last year. I believe this change is mostly international, across all iTunes stores.

Incidentally, you can now also buy iPad apps in the AppStore (yet, you cannot get an iPad from Apple or any of their authorised resellers; people are generally price gouging you now with their parallel imports). So what do you get in the Malaysian AppStore today?

  1. Apps: iPhone, iPad
  2. Podcasts
  3. iTunes U podcasts

So what’s missing? Music, Movies, TV Shows, and Audiobooks. I guess that’s stuff we should look forward to, in the future.

This could be big for podcasters in Malaysia/Singapore. Audio, video content can go into the directories. We’re getting faster Internet. And there are a lot of iOS-devices out there, which now may have yet another reason to use iTunes (and maybe purchase apps at the same time). Kudos Apple, we’ve waited long enough.


i