Colin Charles Agenda

Congratulations to Khailee for getting GroupsMore sold to Groupon (in a record five months since its inception!). He tells me they’re now Groupon Malaysia and Joel (his partner, co-founder of YouthSays) is going to be CEO of Groupon Malaysia. A lot of people instantly said that since Groupon is now in Malaysia, all the other deal sites can go the way of the dodo.

I don’t think so. For a site that does group purchases to be successful, people need to know it exists. Savvy Malaysians have always been into group purchases because a) our currency generally sucks, b) its difficult to get cool stuff shipped to Malaysia. Of course the currency is improving now, and there are virtual postboxes that ship stuff to Malaysia for a small fee.

But I digress. Group purchasing has been happening for years, heck over a decade. I remember when PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant’s, in case you’ve forgotten) were starting to become cool, there were many forums for PDA owners to hang out at. PDAs require accessories and since it was not mainstream yet, the best place to buy accessories was on the forums with other forum members. Someone would collect the money and negotiate to get a deal done to bring in the items for cheap. Most of these forums probably don’t exist any longer, but the LowYat.Net forums are still kicking. I’ve seen this applied to other niches like photography as well; and I’m probably missing out a whole bunch of other industries where people gather together on a forum and choose to grab something at a better value.

This is why I’ve generally not been too excited by group buying sites. I see it as an old idea being rehashed, except this time the target is the masses. For a group buying site to be successful, I think a few rules hold true:

1. you need to successfully get the word out to buyers
2. you need excellent (convincing) copywriting
3. you need to find good deals that your audience will want to purchase

Am I missing some rules?

Now to address some of the rules. How do you gain critical mass and get the word out to buyers? I focus on buyers because you may have a community, but if your community is only focused on making money rather than spending money, you’re not reaching the right audience. Depending on your target market, you will have to look at ads in the newspapers, radio, television, Google Ads, Facebook ads, and so on.

Malaysia is a melting pot. People generally don’t speak the same language, though English and Bahasa Malaysia are widely spoken. Copywriting needs to be spot on. If you target only the English-speaking audience, it will affect where you target buyers and it also affects the deals the audience are after. No point having great copy (in English), putting up ads in The Edge Daily, and having deals on products from Zaitun, right?

Audience, target and language all play a role for a successful general group buying site. We have to celebrate our diversity. In other words, there’s market for plenty of group buying sites. Do you think forum group buying will disappear? I don’t.

If you happen to run a group buying site, think of your niche and pivot. Why for example, have we not seen people focused on getting good daily (or weekly like GroupsMore does) deals on fashion items? Would a site that said “first 50 people to buy this model Coach handbag gets it at RM1,800 and the deal takes place, and if the number breaches 51, the bag becomes a mere RM1,500 for everyone” be successful? I think it will, if you’ve got the correct target market (people that buy luxury goods very rarely want to pay full price for them — if you’ve worked for your money, you’ll want to save ever penny).

We’ve just seen that in the UK, Facebook has launched Deals. From a cursory inspection, this looks like a cross between Foursquare and Groupon, i.e. it finally makes using a location based service useful. Not that its impossible to do with Foursquare — they sell custom badges to corporations. What I think Facebook will do is decentralise it, just like they currently have done with their ads — let anyone run one. Google Offers will work for anyone that has a Places page — you create a Places page (helping make a better location database, quite unlike Foursquare’s) and you give an offer to people (no check-in’s required). Very decentralised.

Tie group buying dynamics with social shopping aspects, provide useful bargains, and you may just have a very profitable business, that also helps spur the economy!

I have now been a Foursquare user for over a year, basically since they opened it up for international users earlier last year. Here are some quick thoughts on the service.

To the uninitiated, Foursquare is a location based service that allows you to “check-in” to a place, so your friends can know where you are. Every-time you check-in to a place, you are awarded points (if it is your first check-in, you’re +5, for example). If you meet certain check-in criteria, you may also get a badge (for example, if you check-in, shout a message like “happy halloween”, you get a new badge). It also allows you to inform your friends on Twitter and Facebook, though this option is turned off by default (it can get pretty noisy otherwise). It is ideally used through an app, and they have them for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and many more platforms. If you’re on a phone that lacks an app, never fear, as they have a mobile site available for checking in (but not earning mayorship — fake check-in’s exist, even though there’s generally nothing to be gained from it).

Its nice to become a mayor of a place. Its also rather nice to get a new badge. These things work really well for Foursquare. There’s an element of game mechanics throughout the application. For example, if you are at an event with over 50 people, you’ll get a swarm badge. Or if you are a coffee snob, there’s a badge for that too.

Some smarter establishments are giving the mayors of the location a special or a deal for loyalty. Some say if you check-in after five times, you get a free cup of coffee. Its all geolocation based, so if I check-in at a Muji, I might see a special nearby at a Topshop which may entice me to pay it a visit.

Naturally, this has led to spammers showing up. I’ve seen job adverts, private banking adverts and lots more, all of which, generally get annoying.

The game mechanics behind a check-in is such that you are given points for discovering a new venue, checking into a venue for the first time, and how many times you’ve checked in all day. The problem with giving points for creating a new venue (discovering it) is that you tend to get people creating duplicate venues all the time. To be fair, sometimes the database is down so people do end up having to create a new venue, but most of the time its done to game the system.

Why? There’s a leaderboard. It shows where you stand amongst your friends, and where you stand in your city of choice. It gets reset weekly. It seems nothing more than a temporary high, but the problem of dirty data is amazingly bad. I’ve seen dirty data in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City, Istanbul, Bangalore and more. There are “data cleansers”, also known as Super User Level 2’s. Level 1’s can propose merge requests. In KL, there’s a movement called #4sqKLCleanup just to curate the dirty user generated content.

After a year of checking-in, I’ve asked myself what exactly is it I still like about Foursquare that makes me check-in?

1. I occasionally bump into people that I’d like to see if we happen to be at the same mall or location. This has happened twice in a period of twelve months.
2. I like reading the tips and todo’s left by users, especially if they’re my friends (because I then put more trust in what they’re telling me). If people say things that are generally negative about a place, I’ll probably not visit it. Businesses beware.

The badges and the mayorships mean nothing to me. I think deals might make sense, but there are so few of these in Asia, its almost negligible to even mention. I have yet to cash in on a Foursquare multi-check-in deal.

Third-party tools are making Foursquare (and other location-based check-in services) more useful. For example, I’ve seen DontEat.at which gives you a text message whenever you check into a NYC restaurant that is at risk of being closed down for health code violations. I’d love to know if the place I’m about to eat at is at risk of giving me diarrhea. I wish this was available everywhere, but I presume there’s an open data issue here.

I enjoy using Topguest. I travel a bit, and when you check-in at one of their partner locations (be it hotels, airport lounges and so on) you’re given like 50 points for a check-in. While 50 points in my mileage accrual probably means nothing, I do know that after 20 check-in’s at the ICH Group, I get 1,000 points from Topguest, which has a dollar value of about USD$13.50 or so.

People need to find a reason to check-in, and I’ve got basically three – bumping into folk, reading tips, and using Topguest. Are there other uses for a location based service? My friend Bernard Leong started up Chalkboard which aims to answer this dilemma, in where they provide deals based on location. It’s currently very Singapore-centric, and it is getting more use in Malaysia. Chalkboard helps me save money, and who doesn’t want that? They are currently growing though — I believe they just passed their ten-millionth ad impression.

I once thought that Foursquare could replace loyalty cards. The service however is not reliable enough, and fake-check-in’s are not good business.

Where will Foursquare go? It has competition from Facebook Places (not rolled out everywhere yet). I’ve never used Gowalla. In Malaysia, we’re starting to see the coming of Wootfood, which is checking in food items as opposed to just a place (Malaysians love to eat — exploit a niche!). Yelp has basically decided to ignore this market (notice how I usually only care about the tips, from friends?). Google has Places, Latitude and Maps which I think could be useful if Google understood social a little better and tied it together.

I guess the most important thing about Foursquare is its data. Is it big after a year of being available outside of the US? Let’s just say that after two to three check-in’s, I’ve become mayors of places that are in locations that I do not live at! I sincerely hope the focus is more on creating useful tips (give points for that, allow people to vote), rather than just simply checking in or adding locations that already exist in the database.

People are saying RSS is dying/dead. Dave Winer believes in the Open Web, and does not like corporate blogging silos. This started of as a reply to his post, but became too lengthy so it has become a blog post. I posit geeks/news junkies love RSS, but the average user does not care. After all RSS and HTML are different delivery mechanisms with different consumption patterns.

I dig RSS. I’ve been using it for years. I converted my HTML only journal to a blog some seven years ago because it provided a RSS feed. I’ve consumed RSS for probably longer than that, switching between many clients over the years (some on Linux, some on Mac OS X, some on the web, some on the iPad – the winner really is Google Reader for me). I have participated in making some Planets, and using RSS in various other ways.

I am also a geek. I cannot fathom a better way to consume news, blogs, etc. I can read several hundred sites a day by skimming through things – I would physically never do this in a browser. I cringe when people only expose partial RSS feeds, because the click-through ensures people get a view in a browser and the ads start showing up. Google solved this problem a tad bit by providing AdSense for Feeds, but that assumes the content creator is not a lifestyle blogger.

Earlier today afternoon, while I was ending on a conference call and just about to get back into the groove of getting some work done, I noticed Dave Winer’s Twitter feed, in what seemed to be him going all defensive about RSS and baiting several folk. He then wrote this piece: What I mean by “the open web”.

Now, when people state “RSS is dying/dead”, they are not taking a potshot at Dave Winer. Technologies come and go, some evolve, and some die. As much as a group of people like something, if it lacks critical mass, it does not keep going on.

A few days back, I read: RSS is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried. The author points to the Firefox Heatmap, which show that less than 7% of the people that use Firefox, use the built-in RSS reader. In fact, in Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button by default. Chrome already has no RSS reader. Heck, I never click on the RSS button in Firefox, because I have my own RSS reader of choice (Google Reader).

I digress. How many normal users know RSS? How many normal users use RSS?

We are a consumption economy. It seems people rather bookmark sites and visit them on a daily basis, than read RSS feeds. Heck, I would not be surprised that people have forgotten how to bookmark – they just use the location toolbar to find things (AwesomeBar, etc. help in this respect). Besides, how many people need to visit a hundred sites to get their daily news fix? Not everyone is a news junkie.

In 2010, Facebook overtook Google in terms of traffic (in North America at least). People are getting their information via their friends. I see more and more people post links on Facebook, pictures on Facebook, and more. Twitter seems to have overtaken blogging – how many events do you see get live-blogged any longer? They get live tweets which you can follow via a hashtag.

Do I like this? Hell no. The dependance on silos is terrible because these services may not be around forever. In 2010 alone, we saw the demise of drop.io (Facebook acquisition). We probably saw the demise of delicious (Yahoo! claims its alive but is ready for acquisition). What will be next? Bit.ly? Flickr? Worse, live-tweeting an event is useless in the following year – Twitter’s archives don’t go far back, and a blog (HTML) is a lot more permanent.

TechCrunch is a publication, Dave. They are not going to keep all their content on Facebook, Twitter and Quora. They make money through advertising dollars, and none of these silos is going to help them make money. I do not know how much TechCrunch earns via RSS advertising, but they sure as heck earn a lot more from advertising on their website. And for their niche (tech news reporting, some may say), their stats don’t lie. Even the geeks are finding TechCrunch articles via Hacker News or Reddit (for example). Of course, Google News and TechMeme both in TechCrunch’s Top 10 referrer list, probably get articles via RSS :)

Since RSS is dead, according to them, the web must also be dead. I just don’t see how RSS could be dead and HTML would be thriving. They’re really different faces of the same thing.

RSS and HTML are not the same thing Dave. HTML is read in a web-browser, something most Internet-capable devices come pre-loaded with. RSS is useful for geeks who “pipe” things, or people that consume a lot of information. It is however not usually done in a web browser, but another client or piece of software (that is not pre-installed).

Understand that RSS and HTML are different delivery mechanisms with different consumption patterns.

This blog, in December 2010, had a 8:1 ratio of serving HTML:RSS. This month, when I published nothing yet (first post for the new year – Happy New Year folk!), we’re looking at a 13:1 ratio.

Will RSS die? I doubt it. It does not cost a publisher anything to publish a feed. It might be stifled by “excerpt” feeds (partial RSS feeds), and that could eventually kill it, but I doubt its going to be gone anytime soon. Will people consume information via different sources? Definitely. They already are. Flipboard does scraping, and thats a good workaround from partial feeds. Safari has a Reader option.

Follow the user. Follow how they are consuming things. Tablets are becoming more popular. How will that change user behaviour?

Google recently launched a Chrome Web Store. The web browser has always had an “appstore” model, considering you could have extensions and plugins. Firefox popularised this.

What the Firefox add-on‘s appstore does not have yet, is paid apps. You can donate to applications, but you can’t buy applications. The Chrome Web Store allows purchasing applications, as evidenced by their top paid apps page. We’re generally already used to buying desktop apps (I write this using MarsEdit which I purchased, and on my toolbar I can already see OmniOutliner and TextMate). If the future is living in your web browser, you will end up buying apps within your web browser. Google is pushing this lifestyle with their ChromeOS Cr-48 notebook.

You get everything you need for the Chrome browser in the web store. Apps (extension of web pages), Extensions (your add-ons), Themes and they also have curated collections (holidays, students, et al).

In other news, go download WOT. You don’t even have to restart Chrome to have it working. This is a bonus over installing stuff on Firefox (though I hear, Firefox 4 will allow you to install extensions without restarting the browser too). I also installed Chrome for a Cause during the one week where the more tabs you opened up, the more you could donate for a cause.

Do you have a favourite Chrome extension/app? Anything I must try?

There are two search engines that have promise that made themselves public in 2010: DuckDuckGo and Blekko. DuckDuckGo has active search spam removal, you can access it via secure HTTP (HTTPS), and is a search engine that also relies on crowd sourced data.

Web of Trust has reputation ratings of over millions of websites, and has an active community of about 15 million users now. Best of all, there’s no bots doing these ratings, but community members (trust metrics are crowd sourced).

DuckDuckGo and Web of Trust have a partnership now, so you can simply change the settings to display WoT ratings instead of the favicons when a search is done using DuckDuckGo. Visit your settings page and look for Site Icons. Change it from the default of favicons to WoT and you’ll get trust ratings in your search instantly! While you’re there, look at other ways of customising your search experience with DuckDuckGo.

Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo is looking for ideas on how he can further integrate the WoT data, and has a thread at the DuckDuckGo community. Feel free to chime in on that, and lets see more search engines implement such data (even though you can already get such data if you have the browser plugin installed).

Many have asked me why I’ve been actively talking about something called #yes4g. YES is the name of YTL Communications new WiMAX service, and there’s been a lot of hype built up around it. It launched on Friday, 19 November 2010, and it was deemed as a “historic day” for the nation.

If you care about standards and naming conventions, know that this is not a 4G service, by ITU definitions. It is for all intents and purposes a marketing term. The claim is 3-5x faster than regular 3/3.5G services. From a consumer standpoint, I believe most will not care if this is truly a 4G service or not – they just want speed delivered to them at good value. I was not at the press conference (duh, I’m not a representative of a media organisation), but you might want to read an excellent article by Wern Shen on what happened there, particularly the part about YES not being a 4G service (by ITU standards).

The Launch

I was lucky enough to get invited to the launch of this historic day. In fact, I don’t think the halls of the Marriott had ever been so full, considering the standing room audience. Highlights included:

• A live feed from London. The audio/video quality was very good, and I wonder how it was in London?
• There were talks from Francis Yeoh, the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia Muhyiddin, and another minister, Rais Yatim. I found it amusing that there was no bacaan doa, but a praise to the “Lord Jesus to bless this day” by Francis. The day was clearly blessed with a good turnout, but the service since requires some work (more of which I’ll talk about later).
• There was a constant correlation made between GDP growth of a nation and broadband penetration.
• I found out that the average age of a Malaysian today is now 26 years of age.
• They made a very good YES Launch video. I found it rather muhibbah, very Malaysian. In fact all the adverts they have created are also very Malaysian.
• The CEO of YTL Communications, Wing Lee, had a few choice comments including the fact that with YES, you get all of performance, innovation and value, with no compromises. He also went on to add that your address book (on your phone) is your original social network – I wholeheartedly agree. Also, YTL is following a no contracts mentality largely because they do not believe in commitment plans. They believe business comes from earning customer loyalty.
• Some kid in London made a call to the Deputy Prime Minister using the YES network. The call from his mobile phone to the DPM’s was spotty at best. He then switched over to using their YES Life tool (available on Windows and Mac OSX, though I cannot find binaries for the latter) and this worked, including video. From what I gather this is just standard VoIP.

And that was the launch. It was wet and I had no interest to walk over to Lot 10 to check out the YES Concept store. In our goodie bags, we had a YES Go, aka a dongle (a RM99 value). A select few managed to get their grubby hands on a Huddle (a personal WiFi device, aka a MiFi device), and I’m thankful to be one of them. To date, I’ve only been playing around with the YES network using the Huddle, not preferring the dongle; a review of the Huddle is coming up soon.

The select few also managed to score some beers at Shook!, where we received our Huddles. Huddling around a Huddle? By golly that is what happened. Again, much thanks to the folk that invited me to both the launch and the little meet afterwards.

The Service Offering

What do you get with YES? Basically, 9 sen gives you either 3 megabytes of data, 1 minute of a voice call or 1 SMS. However, they couldn’t make it that simple: the more you use the service (i.e. by being a loyal customer), you will notice that rebates kick in, and the service becomes about 30% cheaper.

It is important to note that YES is not an all you can eat service, neither is it one with a quota. They are treating it as a utility. Voice and SMS today are already like utilities: you pay as you use the service. Data in Malaysia is generally all-you-can-eat (Streamyx, UniFI) or comes with a quota (on the mobile networks like DiGi, Maxis, Celcom). This is a very different, yet interesting model, and I certainly hope it does not set a precedent for other networks to follow suit.

So today, YES really is focused on mobility. It is clear by the two devices available at launch (dongle and Huddle), that it is not meant to replace your regular DSL or FTTH connection. It is at best meant to supplement it when you are mobile and on the move.

It is unclear if you have to pay for data that is being uploaded, or is it 9 sen for 3 megabytes being downloaded. In fact, it is also unclear if you have to pay to receive voice calls or SMS messages, but I find this to be highly unlikely as no other service in Malaysia currently does this (and while it would be breaking new ground, will kill the voice/SMS offering almost instantly).

Voice and SMS is not particularly useful if it only worked while you were on your laptop or desktop; so YTL will remedy this by launching a phone (in collaboration with Samsung, to be called the Buzz) sometime in December 2010. This phone will also be connected to the WiMAX network, and is unlikely to have any support for a GSM chip (so you’re dead in the water when you leave the country). All this is now merely speculation, so more on this when there is an actual device.

What is certain is that you will not be using your iPhone or BlackBerry on this YES network. Their Twitter careline does try to mention that it is possible via WiFi or 3G, but this is because you’ll be running a default VoIP client to keep it going. Basically anything that supports SIP should give you access to your 018-prefixed number.

Getting Started

I pre-registered for an account a few weeks ago, picking my user ID, telephone number and password. About a week ago, they said my telephone number had interconnect issues and I had the option to change it, or just wait till December when the interconnect issues were fixed. Interconnect issues simply means you can dial anyone with a 018-prefixed-number (technically, anyone on the YES network; it does not need to be a 018-prefix, consider Malaysia now has mobile number portability), but you would be unable to dial anyone else on any other network. I chose not to act as I did not imagine needing yet another voice number.

I took Saturday pretty easily, and only started playing with the service sometime in the early evening. It was clear that the network was going on and off at that time, and their gateway (172.20.196.1) seemed to be having some issues. Not long after, they switched it back on at full power; I was not the only one that noticed this. Through this, I found that they have no network status page, something I think is crucial for any ISP to have (to show service levels/quality of the network).

I then found out that this service is not truly prepaid. You need to pay a RM50 activation fee, and top-up your account with RM30 per month (at minimum). Any unused credit will be carried forward to the following months. The activation fee is something even pre-registered folk need to pony up.

In fact, if you pre-registered, chances are you still needed to register for a new account. Why? There was clearly some syncing that lacked in their databases (or probably no syncing – no one I know who pre-registered managed to just “sign-on”).

A common error you would see if you pre-registered and attempted to login would be: Persona Id not found (shot).

Signing up was not exactly easy. The YES team claim that their website was under attack from a distributed denial of service. Through some perseverance, I managed to sign up and activate my account. The signup process required your identity card number, address, and of course your race. No race, no signup.

Then came searching for my voice number. The suggestions would not work. I entered my current number and it would not work. The solution? Just enter four-digits and it will suggest a number based on those four digits. I’m willing to believe that this will be fixed when they get their website sorted out.

After that, all I had to do was pay using my credit card. Only Visa and MasterCard is accepted, and it looks like they are using Maybank for online transactions. This also means that you will need some further verification depending on what credit card you use – please note this by asking your bank.

Afterwards, you get an email stating that the payment had been made (4-digits of your credit card are hashed out). You also get an email with your plaintext password sent to you. This leads me to believe that the YES systems are not encrypting your password. Remember to use a unique, throwaway password, and use a tool to keep track of it. In fact, you regularly get emails with your plaintext password, so make sure you are accessing your email over HTTPS/IMAPS/POPS.

You should then go ahead and reload some credit to your account. As you can tell, that list does not seemed to be sorted.

Your credit card details are not saved in your account so everytime you want to reload, you will need to enter your credit card details. This, in my opinion, is quite annoying. But looking at the probable lacking security around the whole YES system, maybe this is a good thing (see above for plaintext password issue).

That’s it! The YES account is now ready, and you’re RM50 poorer (plus whatever amount you decided to reload).

The Network

The network is currently pretty reliable, compared to the 3G services offered by DiGi/Maxis/Celcom. I’ve yet to see it crawl, but its not as amazing as they’ve made it out to be. I’ve seen with real world tests (not just speedtest.net which isn’t too useful), that in some locations I can get 2.5mbps down/1.6mbps up. I’ve also seen it be as slow as 0.95mbps down/0.09mbps up. Ping times vary, around 92-233ms. As I write this piece, on average, I’m getting 2.45mbps down/0.11mbps up. All tests are based on connecting to a box hosted in the Jaring data centre, as well as two more boxes, one in London and one in California. Others have reported greater speeds, but it might be where their Huddle/dongles are located – I’ve been using everything indoors so far, in a few locations that I happen to be.

All YES customers get a public IP (IPv4). 183.78.x.x is your IP range. Some geolocation databases seem to be service up incorrect ads for the region, but it should be noted that APNIC has allocated the range of IPs to YTL Communications. The Huddle allows port forwarding or setting a DMZ host, so it is probable that you could run a server behind your YES connection; I am still unsure if your IP is fixed or dynamic, though so far I believe I’m getting the same IP on my Huddle.

MCMC has a content blacklist that they encourage ISPs to use. It turns out that the YES by default follows this particular blacklist, so forget looking at certain sites with objectionable content, unless you know how to workaround it.

Anyway, when DiGi first came out with their broadband offering, their network rocked too. YES is new, YES hardly has users (maybe 15,000 over the weekend?), so YES might change.

Behind The Scenes

I’m happy to note that the YES infrastructure is mixed-mode opensource and proprietary software.

• From errors like OBRM Error – Failed to check Persona ID existence from OBRM, it was quickly revealed (on Twitter nonetheless – thanks @l33tdawg, @alphaque, @yclian) that OBRM stood for Oracle Communications Billing & Revenue Management.
• From this article in MIS Asia, it seems that they’ve bought in a lot of Oracle tech: Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle Database, and Oracle Contact Centre Anywhere.
• Over the weekend, and even now, there’s been lots of chatter on social media. I guess their tools from Buzzient will come in handy now. Customer Care 2.0 is about talking back to the customer and solving their problems on their platform of choice, but this is a matter for another post.
• They use the JBoss GateIn portal (opensource)
• For YES Mail, they run Atmail, with a pretty usable web interface. It is powered by Exim and other opensource tools.
• The webservers are not powered by IIS (rumour on Twitter?) but Apache.

Conclusion

This is YTL’s first foray into the communications space. This is probably their first foray into dealing with users. Users talk back these days so Team YES have had it difficult all weekend, and are still having it difficult. Just look at one platform: Twitter’s #yes4g hashtag.

The network works. The mail works. Their login to manage your Yes ID still does not work as I write this.

We’ve seen them abuse Google AdWords (well, their agency, Carat Media Services apologises). There has been a lot of hype, every newspaper I read has YES ads, and Edwin Yapp does ask: Is YES stumbling on its own hype?

To me, this launch seemed a little rushed. There should have been some kind of soft-launch. Just look at the image about online security for example – “One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar” – shows they’ve lacked QA and things have been rushed. In fact, today there is no way to check your usage quota. There’s a lot of finesse missing, so why the rush?

When I spoke to Francis Yeoh a few months ago, I asked him about his strategy (for the future when 4G is ratified) and what he will do come launch. He left me with one pertinent thing: “I’ll keep my engineers and management on their toes all the time to respond”. Respond to change, respond to requests, just respond.

I believe they are on their toes responding now. I even got a phone call from their call centre at 6.30pm on a Sunday. I don’t know if heads will roll in due time, considering they hired world class experts. Sometimes a company should look inwardly and realise there are many an expert sitting in Malaysia, and always remember the 7 P’s: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

Good luck YTL Communications. I’ll continue using the service, for mobility, and my next post on this topic will probably be about the Huddle.

Do you want to know about the service? Feel free to leave a comment.

Update (23-11-2010 18:00): Dinesh has a good writeup: YESterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.

Disclosure: I received a YES Go dongle (worth RM99) and a YES Huddle (worth RM399) as review units.

Resources

• Coverage Maps – important, since I don’t see this anywhere
• YES World
• YES Mail
• YTL Communications Speed Test
• YES is on Twitter: @YES4G and @YesCare
• Hack In The Box – watch them for their updates on security of the YES network (they’re upstanding chaps who will only disclose things once the network is fixed; they also went in to offer advice, gratis, to the YES network team on how to improve their network)