Colin Charles Agenda

I’m surprised not a single local media site in Malaysia covered the fact that Google Apps & Chromebooks are coming to Malaysian classrooms. That’s 10 million students, teachers & parents getting Google Apps accounts. Primary & secondary schools get Chromebooks. This, I guess has something to do with the fact that there will be a laptop provided for every student if BN wins again.

It looks like the only cost to us is the Chromebooks. The Google Apps for Education accounts are free, implying a significant investment into Malaysia by Google.

Read more about large deployments of Chromebook. It seems that the deal is between YTL, Frog, Samsung, Acer & Google. YTL provides the Internet connectivity via YES4G/1BestariNet. frogasia is a YTL subsidiary, and it looks like they’re providing learning apps.

I worried about generations being tied to Microsoft Office. Is it time to worry that the next generation gets tied to Google Apps? I continue to worry overall that the focus is doing everything in-browser, and while I’m a big proponent of the idea that the browser is the OS, I still do a lot of things outside the browser.

It seems like Chromebooks can be provided by either Samsung or Acer. There must be something custom being built for YTL’s WiMAX chips to be popped in. Nonetheless, I doubt that there are many Malaysians experienced with Chromebooks or accomplishing everything within a browser.

Further reading: Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2015, Classrooms, Chromebooks & The Web: Lessons from Miami to Malaysia.

I’m buying a Chromebook (not the Pixel) to take a deep-dive. There are virtual machines too.

I came home after a long day of activities to find myself locked out of my Google account. I was told that there was suspicious activity and it had decided to lock me out. 

The verification code to set everything going is via a text message to your phone. After that you enter a completely new password. 

Now comes the fun. You have to regenerate codes for all your 2-step authentication authenticated applications. This is a huge pain for me – iPhone, Galaxy S3, Nexus 7, BlackBerry, Mail, Adium, etc. The list is really long. 

Overall this seems counterintuitive. I checked my account history. I did get connected via one odd IP today, but beyond that, nothing. It was me, my mail client connected from that IP.

Saw a bounce. Seems that I forwarded a message from google groups, it got rejected, and automatically it triggered that I might be a spammer. Seems like a bug more than anything.

Overall, I spent about 45 minutes just sorting out this problem. There has got to be a better way considering how important the Google account is to us these days. I didn’t notice a phone number either so if I needed to call someone, I’d probably be quite out of luck.

In times of “war”, Wikipedia can be used to sway Google results. Read: In Lahad Datu conflict, Google bombs & Wiki-wars. That’s pretty much what I tweeted yesterday. Just check out the revision history for Sabah.

Wikipedia tells an interesting tale. Even since 2005, you can see from the Talk page, that there have been Sulu sultanate claims. All in, just look at the traffic stats to the page and you see a marked increase in people wanting to know about Sabah.

The page is now semi-protected till March 14, but I doubt the standoff will be over by then, so expect Wikipedia editors to be paying close attention to this page. As for Google, there are benefits to getting the latest information from Wikipedia, but you’re also vulnerable when non-neutral points of view get displayed (thus making many people claim that Google was hacked!).

I checked DuckDuckGo and it seems that they use a much older cache of Wikipedia so was not affected by these Wikipedia changes.

Today I was on a phone call when I hobbled onto Twitter to see that DigitalNewsAsia’s #disruptmy was happening (follow the money – more panelists) . I found a link to a Google Hangout, so I plugged in my external monitor and decided to watch. In the meantime, I setup Twitter to be a second screen. On my main screen I did tasks that needed to get completed: catch up on IRC backlog, reply to lots of emails.

What has Google Hangout done for me?

The event starts at 5.30pm sharp. I probably joined not long after and I didn’t feel like I missed much. Do you know what it takes to get to The Gardens at 5.30pm? Traffic jams in the country will mean that I probably should leave at 4-4.30pm at the latest to be there safely. No looking for parking. Not paying for parking. No driving.

What did I miss out? The potential to socialize with some of the panelists & attendees. However I’m willing to bet I know most of the folk in that room, or can be connected to them at best by one degree of separation if required.

Overall, these Hangouts are awesome as you’re going to save time. It’s a secondary thing, like watching TV while you get work done… or listening to a podcast. Very different experience to actually being there.

Come Q&A, I got pretty bored and could tune out relatively quickly (except maybe the part about not getting excited by the Techcrunch hype; I think it goes down to the fact that many people just don’t understand finance). Next up, Team DigitalNewsAsia remember to take Q&A via Twitter. Remember folk, events are fun & all, but don’t be a conference ho. Back to work!

Written 23 July 2012, but for some reason it never got posted. Better late than never I guess.

I tweeted (17 July 2012, 4:40am UTC+8): 

There’s an interesting link between Yahoo!, Microsoft, Bing, Facebook and Nokia. The bigger picture is competition against Google, Apple

This was literally moments after the news broke that Marissa Mayer resigned from Google to become the CEO of Yahoo!. I thought I’d expand on this link that I see.

Search is today not something that Yahoo! cares about. Its served by Bing from Microsoft. Bing is also the default on Windows Phone, the operating system that Nokia has taken a bet on (when in the USA, I use a Lumia Windows Phone and cannot complain). Search on Facebook is also powered by Bing thanks to a deal that Microsoft has with Facebook. Bing is a strong contender to Google’s search, and this space is clearly still getting investment (see how DuckDuckGo recently got VC funding too).

Yahoo! has mail that is very popular (it might still be the most popular out there). Microsoft has Hotmail. Facebook has “Facebook messages”. Nokia canned Ovi mail services. Yahoo!, Microsoft Messenger and Facebook Messenger also has instant messenger (IM) capabilities. Imagine a day when they all interconnect? It would be a straight fight against Google Chat.

Picasa is Google’s photo sharing site. Today the stream might be Google+. Yahoo! still has Flickr which is the Picasa equivalent, and for streaming? Imagine if there was a quick link to Facebook. Nokia can build in sharing to Flickr and Facebook quickly from their phones (they already have been doing this from time-to-time between phone releases including their MeeGo stint).

Videos seem to be missing from this big picture. Google has YouTube, and the rest of them have nothing with the exception of Facebook.

Maps? Nokia has got great mapping technology loaded on the Windows phone. It can supply this quite easily to everyone.

I haven’t once mentioned Apple yet. They use other search engines (and maybe the longer term strategy is something like what the Dolphin browser does: use Siri to search multiple search engines and aggregate the results so the user has no idea what search engine is being used). They have their own messenger service in iMessages. They have their own photo & video storage site – the iCloud. For maps, they are using OpenStreetMaps after having ditched Google Maps. I see Apple building their own ecosystem and going it alone.

What about developer appeal? I see many a developer hacking on a Mac OS X laptop or a Linux laptop. With the Apple ecosystem, it is obvious to develop on OSX. With the Google Android ecosystem and the rest of their toolkit, its clear you can be OS-agnostic (they support Mac, Linux, Windows). With the Microsoft/Nokia ecosystem? It seems like you need a Windows box, and that automatically turns me away quite quickly (though upcoming HTML5/CSS/JavaScript will allow more development on this platform, in an OS-agnostic sense). Facebook is OS-agnostic too.

It is an exciting time ahead. All of this is great for consumers! Ecosystems are a building and it is awesome to see alliances being built

Pages. They are becoming very popular. If you’re a brand, you’ve got to keep track of these things. This is sort of a dump of my thoughts on this.

It was quite common in the day to get a Twitter page. Multiple people can update a Twitter page. There are tools for this, and Twitter has an API. You have desktop tools for this as well.

Facebook pages are common if you have a product or business. The more like’s you get, the higher chance of getting your message spread on the newsfeed. Facebook has an API, and there are tools for this. Multiple people can manage the account.

LinkedIn pages exist. The target audience is a little different. There doesn’t seem to be an API or apps surrounding it, so you end up using the web-based interface. It seems to be the least popular.

Google+ just launched pages. The target audience currently seem to be the alpha geeks. It doesn’t have limitations like Twitter, and I see people posting more long-form status updates that resemble blog postings. It has no API (yet?). It has no multiple user management (yet?). And you have to build a crowd amongst circles, because its still relatively new.

We’re told to be present on all social networks. If you’re a brand, you’d be silly not to be where your audience is. My question is, with all these social networks how do you focus?

Don’t forget, you have to manage your website. American brands are now just pointing to a Facebook page in ads (fb.com/brandname) which is fine, but its something you don’t control. Your website is something you fully control. Your blog is something you fully control. I see things like Clojure Notes and wonder the permanency of something like this.

Facebook looks to be trailblazing and seems like its going to be around for a long time. Your content will live for as long as Facebook lives. Twitter is all temporal content, you forget you even have archives. LinkedIn I have no idea, but there’s always the emails it sends out. Google+ is something that worries me — they’ve killed Buzz, Wave, Orkut, etc. and while you can take your content and run with it, you lose links.

Some people don’t care about continuity of content. I generally do.

Short names. Facebook and Twitter support this. Google+ has something ridiculous in terms of a number.

I read somewhere that the average human can keep track of at most three social networks. I can’t find a reference to this, and I know its not Dunbar’s number.

Walled gardens. If you have a Google+ album, you can’t link to an individual picture. Facebook pages and what is attached to it is not searchable via a search engine. You generally duplicate updates on sites just to keep up with these walled gardens of Web 2.0.

Bottom line: we’re all looking to engage. We all want a large audience. We all want to get the message across. But how much time are we spending on this? When do we get all the tools we need to manage all this “at one go”? Where do we put our eggs in for 2012?