Colin Charles Agenda

Via NYT: Days Are Numbered for Unlimited Mobile Data Plans

In Indonesia, nearly a third of the population is younger than 15 years old. So Telkomsel, the leading mobile operator in the country, offers a data plan called FlexiChatting for customers who want to do just one thing: gain access to and update Twitter and Facebook accounts on their cellphones.

Once more of this starts happening, we’re looking at inspecting packets. Some sites are more free than others. Consumers will love this because they save money and access services that they believe are important to them: Facebook & Twitter.

However this stifles innovation. How will the next Twitter or Facebook start? The startups that are coming to disrupt will be the underdog and will only be available to data rich folk; not the average joe.

Today I read a re-tweeted tweet by a fellow Malaysian who said:

@etp_roadmap @IdrisJala_ c what I meant u all cant change. U only RT tweets that favors U all but never on negative tweets..learn 2b fair

This is probably true. You can retweet whatever you want. Naturally, you’ll only retweet things that you find are positive to you (or align with your points of view). This is the thesis behind things like Tumblr and other reblogging platforms.

This is the beauty of Twitter as a conversation medium. You can actually just search for a string. And with the @reply mechanism, you just end up searching for “etp_roadmap” and you see heaps of amazing commentary.

Granted, this is not something everyone would do. But with social media you get the choice. With traditional media, you’re forced to look at one point of view. Letters that get published don’t necessarily have to be “independent”. Social allows those that are interested to dig deeper. This is true power.

Do the cybertroopers know this? Its easy to figure things out, if you’re looking.

It is widely stated that the late Steve Jobs had a uniform: mock turtleneck, Levis jeans, and New Balance sneakers. He did this because he didn’t want to think about what to wear daily and there was a sense of everyone being in a uniform. It didn’t catch on at Apple, but I’m sure the many fanboys do dress like him.

I’m totally with Jobs on this. In school I had a uniform. I never thought about what to wear. My last uniform at high school was a short-sleeved white shirt (long-sleeved only on Mondays afaik), blue pants, and a pair of white-ish sneakers. Oh and a blue tie. There was not much thinking, and it took a load off for me.

Nowadays, I don’t have a uniform. For most part of the 2000’s, I was just wearing free t-shirts from the various opensource projects I was involved in. After meeting Sara in 2008, I learned about the Polo tee. I’d still have to pick what shoes to wear, what pants to wear (be it shorts or long pants or jeans). I usually just ended up with cargo pants due to the many pockets that come with it.

So, my uniform lately is that I usually have a Polo t-shirt on. I’ve not figured out how to ease the pants problem — sometimes its shorts, sometimes its jeans, sometimes its pants. I very rarely need to wear a suit. I’ve also not figured out footwear.

All that aside, the idea of a uniform makes sense. I’m still figuring out what’s useful for me. Here’s to cracking the uniform code!

I’ve been on a plane quite a lot this month. Consequently caught quite a bunch of movies.

• A Good Year – a romantic drama with Russell Crowe.
• One Day – I like Anne Hathaway but this show is probably not one of her best. They pick moments from one day every year for some twenty years. Male star gets out of whack when she passes. Makes you always remember to seize the day. Carpe diem. Sometimes the best things in life are standing right in front of you.
• What’s your number? – romantic comedy, just to pass the time over a meal
• Killer Elite – most of Jason Statham’s movies tend to be action packed and this one is no exception. It’s based on a true story. I highly recommend watching this.

In non-movies, it’s worth noting that Californication is back! I’ve learned to watch Community, seems season 1 & 2 are complete so they are easy to watch back-to-back.

I just read that about 100,000 most likely Malaysian Facebook accounts have been cracked. Well their passwords are available for all to see in pastebin. Upon checking, I only saw a little over 75,000 since the third file has been compromised. From that sample, I quickly derived that the most popular Malaysian passwords are:

1. 123456
2. sayang
3. brokenheart
4. 123456789
5. rozaliqa75
6. effaluve
7. akucintaallah
8. zzz999
9. pradeebkumar123$%
10. 12345678

The least popular ones in that sample set include having spaces, hashes, brackets, and more. So there are some secure ones!

Using one’s phone number seems to also be popular. Sometimes appending or pre-pending a string (like a name) to it. Using birthdays seems to also be quite common, sometimes also appending or pre-pending a string like a name to it.

And for those wanting to “further analyse” the dataset yourself, I just quickly used standard Unix tools, and you can do it too.

grep "Password:" part_* | awk -F":" '{print $3}'| sort | uniq -c |sort -n

Pipe to less, use head/tail, etc.

Paul Graham recently published a new request for startups titled Kill Hollywood. It is definitely worth reading. The motivations behind such thoughts are clear. Filesharing is not killing the movie & TV industry.

“What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people.“

Better ways to entertain people. This thought has been sitting in my head for the last couple of days while I’m just a stones throw away from Hollywood & have a pretty good view of the Hollywood Hills from outside my window. The RFS goes into more detail about games, apps, the possibility that exercise might take over, but to think broadly and figure out where the entertainment of folk are going to in the next twenty years.

The studios are making less profits because the way Hollywood is structured. This is why Sarah Lacy says to kill Hollywood, you’ve got to learn their game. Someone like Ryan Kavanaugh is using math to beat Hollywood at their own game — you may have seen Relativity Media, and that’s the company who’s funding many successful movies today. Sarah Lacy sums up the content game that will help us win against Hollywood fairly well:

“The lesson: Eyeballs aren’t equivalent to one another. For Hollywood to be killed, the Internet needs to focus on a metric other than eyeballs. It’s not about mass, it’s about good. That’s absolutely anti-YouTube and anti-Farmville and any other content which we expect to be rapid, mass and disposable. Disposable content isn’t bad, it’s just not everything. And as long as that’s all that the Valley is putting out, we won’t kill Hollywood.”

There is an experience of going to the cinema in where I am happy to pay USD$12 or RM25 for a seat. In the USA I believe in the ratings system, but in Malaysia where I watch most of my movies I feel cheated by the censorship board. But I still go and spend cash because there’s an experience. However I’ve noticed my TV & movie watching habits have changed — I wrote about how I consume Hollywood in 2011. I believe that in Malaysia (and most of Asia), one is forced towards looking at content via filesharing. Because Hollywood hasn’t grown up and they believe in making money from regions, delaying releases by regions, etc. Traditional models.

Of late I’ve quite enjoyed watching the Sundance channel on cable. On Friday in the USA Today, Robert Redford, founder of the channel and the film festival had this to say: “With the new technology creating all the voices and noise from bloggers and tweeters, it’s chaos,” Redford says. “Where are you going to get the real truth with so many loud voices barking? I look to documentaries as almost investigative journalism.”

That covers a set of genres. But independent films rarely cover comedy, action, etc.

People get entertained by different things. At different times. Some days a romantic comedy makes sense. Some days a chick flick is all that gets you going. Then you’ve got days when action is all you crave. And the list can go on…

So what are better ways to entertain people? Games? Interactive movies? How does everyone get paid fairly when you get away from the big studios? Do production costs then go down when you bypass them?

This is why people love the Cheezeburger Network. Or 9gag. These are new ways for people to entertain themselves. However the metric there is eyeballs and the content is disposable. People need substance to entertain them. I once said that paying $10 for Plants vs Zombies provided me with a lot more entertainment on my iPad than going to maybe 2-3 feature length movies.

I’m still thinking about different ways for people to consume media. Different ways for people to sink their time in. And I presume I’ll be thinking about this for long.

As an aside, don’t assume that independent media folk get “new media” either. Classic examples in Malaysia would be Nasi Lemak 2.0 and Relationship Status. Nasi Lemak 2.0 stars the controversial Namewee, who not only made the movie on the cheap (independently), he went on to getting it in cinemas and also at the same time did the entrepreneurial thing of in tandem getting it showing on cable TV. This subsequently got his movie pulled from the cinemas in question, rather abruptly. He disrupted the cinemas and the cinemas reacted in their traditional methods to pull his movie. But even today, you can’t buy a DVD or download a digital version… Even if you’re willing to pay for it (I know I am). More recently, Khairil M. Bahar made Relationship Status; however still with the traditional model of going to the cinema. No DVDs. No downloadable digital version. Its worth noting that I’d pay RM35-40 for a digital download (though I don’t think that might be everyone’s price point – experimentation needs to happen clearly).

Its sad to see that even young independent film producers aren’t moving where their audience is moving to. They’re thinking like studios are thinking. They need to be disrupted. After all, these Malaysian producers are forgetting that there is such a large portion of the Malaysian diaspora spread across the world whom are unlikely to step into Malaysian cinemas anytime soon. Imagine a day when I can read a review about the show, then automatically click on a link that allows me to either stream the movie now or download a copy. If it is a service that has my credit card details on file, this is a seamless process; if its individuals, I just checkout via PayPal, and am either seeing the movie on my TV or waiting half an hour or so for the download so I can pop it on my iPad.

Back to the drawing board. There are better ways to entertain people. There are better ways for consumption of media & content.