Colin Charles Agenda

I once wrote a plea to Apple about giving Malaysians access to the iTunes music store as well as selling the iPhone’s in Malaysia.

I stepped into one of the Apple Premium Authorised Resellers the other day, and spoke to someone who seemed knowledgeable about these things. I mean, I purchased my MacBook Air in Machines. I purchased an external DVD drive for it from the EpiCentre store, more recently.

The shocker? RM5 million in sales, sustained, for at least three months, before Apple would consider even opening an official Apple store in Malaysia.

Is this hard to reach? I find it hard to believe that this isn’t already reached. I take buying Mac hardware for granted. My latest iPod purchase however wasn’t in the market – I ordered it from the Singapore online store (I wanted it engraved).

If I want it engraved, I can only imagine that a lot more Malaysians want it too. Of course, I also imagined Malaysians spending more than RM5 million on Apple hardware per month.

Anyone know if this is an Apple requirement?

A recently jilted man, aged 27, decided to post information about his ex-girlfriend on Friendster. The Star reports:

In March he started his antics again, which she tolerated, until she started getting disturbing calls from men who had read the “invitation” for a life partner over the Friendster account, which had been created unbeknownst to her.

Get this. In recent times, there were 19 such cases, with 90% of the victims being women!

There’s just some irony in this (besides it being creepy – men, don’t be creepy!). Today it is your number posted on Friendster. Yesterday, it was plastering your number in some random toilet, with a sexy message. What will it be, tomorrow?

I give a lot of talks, but not a lot of pitches to VCs. But if I were planning to, I’d definitely recommend you to watch David S. Rose on pitching to VCs from TED. It’ll eat up fifteen minutes of your life, but the pitch coach, is simply fabulous. Heck, you can learn a thing or two for normal presentations too…

I took some notes:

* People – convince them that you are the people and convince them you are the one they are going to invest it
** 15-30 minutes at most
* Convey integrity, passion, experience, knowledge, skill, leadership, commitment, vision, realism, coach-ability (ability to listen)
* Business models, financial requirements – this is normal
* Timeline: 10-30s to get attention (grab the emotional attention), and keep on getting better, better, better, and then knock them out. A logical progression (think like a staircase)
** validation, believable upside (don’t lie!), things I know or understand, things that make one think, no typos/errors/etc.
* when speaking? use images, or something like what steve jobs does
* slide deck: company logo, business overview, management team, market, product, business model, strategic relationships, competition, barriers to entry, financial overview, use of proceeds, capital & valuation
* always use presentation mode, always use a remote control, hand outs are NOT your presentation (lots more information as it has to stand without you), don’t read your speech, never, ever look at the screen

Thanks to @ditesh for pointing this out.

I have always recommended the use of OpenDNS, and of late, I’ve decided to stop having to dabble with DNS (in general), and use EveryDNS. For the uninitiated, they both have David Ulevitch in common.

There’s a web interface, its not as simple as tinydns, but it gets the job done. For free, you can host 20 domains, and 200 records (CNAME, MX, etc.). I don’t think I’ll be exceeding that limit anytime soon, but I think its time to make a donation.

Nothing but satisfaction, in the last few weeks of use. One service less to maintain. Anyone else use EveryDNS and is really happy with their service?

When I blogged about maybank2u 2.0, I also mentioned that loading the site was an issue.

It seems they launched the site, and its now slow as.

Our service is currently unavailable.
Please try again later

More HTTP requests… longer load times… its almost impossible to login. And when you do, you see the above.

Its a better design. The UI rocks. But you got to scale the site, dear. With all that increases, you got to increase capacity. Lets hope these teething problems disappear (I don’t know when the site got launched, been away these past few days).

Funnily enough, I was awakened by my dad, who’s pretty tech-savvy, to tell me that the website had changed, and he couldn’t find the login button. I wonder how many people were so used to the old UI, which said “login” on the left hand side-bar, that now they’ve got to look at the top-right hand spot. Little UI changes… can potentially cause big panics!

Update: Classic Maybank2u is still available in the meantime. Its still Web 1.0-ish, but its familiar. Good luck to the M2U team in scaling M2U 2.0!

Going to LCA? We have two days of glory for what is known as The Open Source Databases MiniConf. We have a webpage on the wiki, the announcement went out a few days ago, and the call for participation is open!

Tasmania is a fabulous place to be in January. 19-20 January 2009 is when the OSDB-MiniConf happens… topics on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Derby/JavaDB, Drizzle, CouchDB and many more are to be accepted.

What are you waiting for, submit a talk already!