Anybody who sits down to find out more about Jeff Jonas, is given a first-hand example of how he treats data and information. At one point he even admits, “I’m personally obsessed with search… sometimes, I go to the very end to see how many (results) there really are.”And as one media group at IBM’s October, 2008 Las Vegas Information on Demand conference also found out, Jeff Jonas shows up for his interview sessions, early. The very first thing he wants to know is, “Is everyone here already?” Once affirmative, the second thing he wants to know is, “Who here knows what I do?”
Only when satisfied with the answer does he dive into the interview proper. Perhaps interview is not quite the word to describe what went on, because tracking down terrorists and casino cheats, isn’t something every five year-old in kindergarten usually aspires to. And the majority of us (generally just dumb) press people, who gathered around Jonas that day, were probably hearing for the very first time, intangible concepts like perpetual analytics, context accumulation and so on. But, for Jonas, it’s all at his fingertips. The Chief Scientist for IBM Entity Analytics and IBM Distinguished Engineer who wrote his first software program at age 16 says, “My work covers a number of subjects … but a recurring theme and something I am passionate about is how to make more sense out of data.”
One Pixel is Not Enough!
In 1983, Jonas founded SRD or Systems Research and Development and in 1992, moved to Las Vegas where there was demand for his creative works. “I spent my whole life building systems and IBM bought SRD and our code in 2005… they have been able to take my tech to a whole new range and it’s being sold around the world to sectors like banking, governments, retail, police departments and so on.” In fact, the new IBM Entity Analytic Solutions Group was formed based on Jonas’ technologies. One of the earliest of these is Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness or NORA, that’s now called IBM Relationship Resolution. It came about because casinos are obligated to know who they are doing business with.
Also, in Las Vegas, where single scams can cheat casinos out of a quarter of a million dollars in 15 minutes, casinos simply could not afford to wait to know what they already knew. For example, a casino has three piles of information - one about cheats, another about casino players and the third pile about casino employees. But these three groupings are all separated from each other. Putting them together and analysing them all as a whole, would have told them things like a well-known card counter sharing the same address or phone number as their dealer. Countless scams can then, be prevented because casinos can now see a picture that is bigger and clearer than before when all their information were silo-ed off from each other.
Another way to look at it is this example which Jonas gave, “If someone subscribed to a newsletter and all they give you is an email address, you can use all the best algorithms, all the computers, and all the energy on earth; (but) how smart can you be about one email address?” There is value in relating this single piece of data with other pieces of data because it creates a clearer picture of what’s happening. In this sense the more observations there are, the better. Then in 1998, Jonas had the first inkling of how powerful his solution could be. After addressing an NSA (National Security Agency) conference in Washington, a government employee told him that the technology Jonas had going in Vegas, was more sophisticated than what the NSA had.
Not long after, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm invested in his technology, with the agreement that enhancements SRD created would be made available to its commercial customers as well. Says Jonas, “There was a day when this (technologies) was created just for the casinos. I didn’t know that it would grow up and I’d be sitting here today with IBM. It was just another invention; I just went on to invent something else, NORA moving into my rearview mirror, but it just kept coming back alive.”
Doing More With Data
Maybe having the term ”chief scientist” attached to his official designation at IBM, gives Jonas reason to want to clarify his stance on technology. “I’ve built 150 to 200 systems. I don’t come out of research, I don’t come out of academia, so I’m a practitioner.” He also spends a fair bit of his time talking about the products he’s working on and cautions, “I spent years trying to explain the technology and it’s been frustrating as the creator of it, because I’ll explain it and when they repeat back what they’d heard… it’d be completely wrong.” Having his invention sometimes also mistaken as a form of predictive data mining, drives Jonas crazy. To be fair, his work involves a whole lot more than just accumulating data and have insights surface; making sense of data means a plethora of other concept come into play – sequence neutrality, context accumulation, identity resolution… it goes on (more explanations can be found at his blog at http://jeffjonas.typepad.com). He often thinks about how brains work as he builds these systems and finds there are some interesting lessons and parallels. He is the first to admit however, this capability is still primitive when compared to a human brain.
In a blog post entitled “Santa’s Surveillance Centre Enjoys Big Gains in 2008”, it was easy to draw comparisons with national security missions because Santa Claus; and the Department of Homeland Security for example; would have to maintain “the most invasive, robust 7×24x365 data surveillance operation on earth” to know who deserved a piece of coal, nice presents, or… time in prison. He wrote, “As with any surveillance operation there are always a variety of gaps in time for which one cannot account for the behaviour and location of an individual. However, this surveillance gap closed to some degree this year.” He later notes in an email that this closing gap – being caused by sensor saturation – is “worrisome”.
“Surveillance in our society continues to grow, albeit primarily due to consumers eager to optimise their lives.” For example, consumer interest in their own privacy turns out to be low; they will trade away much personal data for faster service or lower cost. “But with this, control over our private lives is slipping away forever,” Jonas points out. These days, Jonas is particularly excited about anonymisation technology, which could stem this loss of control. Anonymisation alters data so as to hide selected data elements, which means that now organisations can be smarter while at same time know lesser details about specific people. Higher levels of data protection can then, be achieved. The Ideal End State It isn’t enough anymore for organisations or surveillance missions to be able to make better sense of data they manage to accumulate. For Jonas, “A major point is that I believe more technologists need to spend more time speaking with privacy advocates.” This is with the view, ways to build privacy- protective systems, will be created and implemented.
Jonas was also hopeful about the new U.S. president’s impact on what he is trying to achieve. “What will change with the Obama administration… I think… is new perspectives about privacy and (new perspectives about) limits to certain kinds of information flows.” He believes this will lead to more data governance and systems that are more protective of privacy and civil liberties. “This is going to be a good thing,” he surmises. (This article has appeared in PC.com and BusinessToday)
As You Like It
SF: Ever wanted to publish a piece of work? Maybe. Maybe not. But, if you are anything like the average human being, chances are nothing makes your day better, than being able to share how shitty, wonderful or ordinary it is, with friends, family or the whole wonderful world wide web, and getting responses back about it. Like the expressive creatures that we are, we use whatever medium we can - words, pictures, music and so on - to express ourselves in our own special individual ways. Perhaps this is why blogs took off and became such a big hit some four years ago - publishing thoughts, opinions, creativity, has become so easy that basically anyone who had a computer, an internet connection and basic writing or photography skills, could do it.
But for all its popularity, let’s face it - how many of us want (or are able) to write a sonnet, haiku or a 300-word blog post about how we are feeling when just a “I am (insert emotion)” will do?
Twitter launched in August 2006, and despite a range of other similar status-type services like Jaiku, Plurk and so on, it has emerged the most popular one, to date. Starting all those years ago as a simple status feed service, it has evolved into being a whole lot more than just trying to answer the What Are You Doing today question. An average day for an average Twitterer may consist of updates about how their day is turning out and maybe even ambient conversations with other Twitterers, but more than that, the Twitter phenomenon has also allowed an ecosystem of interesting applications, functionalities and possibilities to flourish around the main function of updating the World Wide Web about What You Are Doing. (Sidebar 1)
But, what is Twitter? If you stop to ask yourself that, there actually isn’t an answer, in my opinion. We all know it’s a micro-blogging service of sorts, but it’s plain-as-vanilla simplicity doesn’t give anyone any preconceptions about what it should be. As a result, it’s become many different things to many different people - the neighbourhood pub, a real-time soap drama, a news room - it’s really up to you what you want it to be. We look at a few.
Customer Care in this Social Age
The average person who has a bad service experience tells at least nine others about it, and 13-percent of complainants relate their experience to more than 20 other people. On the Internet, this is amplified many times more because of social media. IDC’s Principal for Research in Emerging Technologies in Asia, Claus Mortensen says that now because of the Internet, there are suddenly all sorts of social media tools to empower the consumer. “The consumer is now driven to find out about products (and services) via the Internet. The Internet also becomes their medium to express whether they were happy or unhappy about it.” This becomes true because social media tools create communities and allows denizens of the Internet to communicate with each other, so much more easily than before.
“If you don’t implement these tools (into your customer care methods), if you don’t start to do social media or other tools of engagement with customers, they will just do so without you. If you are not in there, you will have something completely outside your control and you will have no way of countering any bad press that comes up on the internet,” Mortensen warns. As a result, more and more companies are starting to interact with and engage consumers; but how are they making sense of blogs and feed-like tools like Twitter?
According to Mortenson, the kind of social media tools mostly prevalent in Asia is blogs. But he adds, “Blogs are becoming a little bit yesteryear now, still very powerful, but I think the emphasis going forward, will move a little away from blogs in Asia and onto other social media tools like Twitter. Or it could even be homegrown versions of Twitter and FaceBook and other social media sites. I wouldn’t be surprised if a chinese language Twitter were to come up, for example.”
Social media also has evolved from a few years ago when bloggers became very prominent. “You had a few key bloggers on a few key issues, who had huge followings; they still have. What we’re seeing with tools like Twitter is that you’re sort of democratising the effect. Suddenly, it’s no longer one Twitterer who has a huge following, suddenly with Twitter, you have the voice of many coming out.” So, if you are a company, you may have monitored key bloggers, who had loyal followings and were influential enough to change moods and have an impact on the buying behaviour of a certain community. “With Twitter, it’s a little different. With Twitter, it becomes a matter of magnitude. You have things becoming truly viral - if you have enough people saying this company is bad, it will spread. So it becomes much more of a numbers tool for a company,”explained Mortensen. “Also, unlike with blogs, company can’t zone in or one or two or three Twitterers and say, ‘These are the ones we need to do something about; the rest we can forget.’” Now because of the huge number number of people on Twitter, there is value in that one can gauge sentiment towards a product, company or even public figure. There is also some company culture change involved; letting go of some control and engaging customers in open conversation like how @P1Media, @Microsoft or @Compuware and a whole lot of other companies, do it these days.
First in, first out
When blogging first came about, people found themselves, for whatever the real reason might be, more drawn to new media like blogs instead of mainstream media like newspapers or magazines. User-generated content was often more spontaneous, honest, informal and now with feed-like services like Twitter, it has become immediate as well. Your camera phones and consumer digital cameras are capturing images and videos of events as they happen, more effectively than the professional DSLR and TV station crew, which too often, are too late at the scene. The same goes for journalism, and with Twitter everyone with a mobile phone and an opinion are reporting what they see, hear and think, on-the-fly, as events unfold. It boggles the mind, how someone (for example @smartbrain) can be tweeting in real-time that just a few feet away, police brutality complete with tear gas, water cannons and high-powered rifles is happening. But it is, thanks to Twitter.
For those who make a living out of reporting news, Twitter is a great platform to disseminate information as well as also collect information. For example, if you follow media entities like ZDnet blogs, The Telegraph or even Techcrunch, how is that not akin anymore to getting news from RSS feed services? Whenever you publish an article on your official website or write a post for your hobby blog, you can also Tweet (or broadcast) the link and alert followers about what you’ve written and even get feedback about it. For some with a huge enough following like ZDnet Australia, feedback from the community gives its journalists ideas of the kind of stories that are unfolding.
Broadcasting or tweeting news links is fine; journalists may balk at fully optimising Twitter themselves, because broadcasting news that way instead of officially via the publications they work for, reeks a little of self-promotion. But a lesson can be learnt from ZDnet Australia’s example. On his blog at http://rlemay.com.au, news editor Renai LeMay says, “Journalists are not simply using Twitter to promote their own work and get news tips. This is nowhere near to being the whole truth. In fact, audiences are using Twitter as a powerful tool to engage with journalists directly and force a renewal of journalism and media along lines that audiences have long demanded.” The main objectives are engagement and two-way flow of interaction. LeMay also goes on to say that university studies have shown that a lot of what we know as journalism is composed of “press release re-writes.” If true, then Twitter in part at least, can also help close the gap between traditional ways and new ways of reporting, mediate the differences between what mainstream media has been offering for the past 20 years and what readers already know they should be getting.
Plugging into the online conversation
The Twitter masses themselves also help disseminate news via retweets, although this is something of a double edged sword, actually. On one hand you have a thriving and easy flow of information and opinions, a tiny peek at somewhat global streams of consciousness, which can be very valuable if studied with any number of third-party analytic tools on the WWW. On the other hand, beause of the sheer numbers involved, facts can get blown out of proportion. On the day Michael Jackson died, so did Farah Fawcett and Jeff Goldblum on Twitter. The problem? Jeff Goldblum is still very much alive. As is Rick Astley and any number of celebrities who got tweeted as found dead in hotel rooms, falling off cliffs and whatnot. I was also under the impression that Megan Fox really was a man for a good one week, until I heard two of her fans ethusing enthusiastically about her in her latest movie and the truth dawned, because no hot-blooded male would do that over a fellow brother.
For me so far, only trivial (nothing to do with my job) mistruths have been perpetrated on Twitter, though a few hours after MJ’s death, mainstream media were still reporting about how true that bit of big news could be. But, we aren’t going to get reminders like this to be skeptical everytime we are about to retweet something important that did (or did not) happen. What then when a company’s brand or a person’s reputation is at stake? Twitter has been accused of many things, the most sticking and earliest ones of which, is being mundane. This might seem a stark contrast to what Twitter’s so far allowing to happen for marketeers, the media, celebrities, the average Joe, and basically the world at large. So yeah, there are still going to be people who are going to tweet every five minutes about what they are doing, eating, drinking, wearing, thinking, buying, reading and so on. But there are also smart-and-scholarly types out there who are trying to make sense of all this banality.
And if all goes as planned, Twitter will be introducing paid accounts soon, which will offer useful statistics and analytics never available before, to its premium set of customers (Sidebar 2). This is just one in a string of announcements about Twitter enhancements: there will be a new way to retweet which lets users see the first source of the first retweet and interestingly, this finally offers a way for Twitterers to check retweets for reliability, if they wish to. There is also a location-aware tweeting service in the pipeline… and who knows what else?
Whatever shape, size or function its founders are trying to further define Twitter by now, I’m glad they themselves are doing anything about making the service better because frankly, I’m up to my neck with being advertised savings coupon which don’t work this part of the world, tooth whiteners and a steamy hot good time, by strangers who still haven’t got a clue about me and the kind of tweets I’m looking for.
Sidebar 1
Ecosystem around Twitter
One of the most impressive things that you may first notice about Twitter is how you can update from anywhere and receive from anywhere - the Web, the mobile Web, instant messaging or even text messaging - all these are possible. The second impressive thing about Twitter (for me at least) is the multitudes of various programs that allow you to do so; whether you wish to update via your mobile device, browser, or mobile browser and according to the operating system that you use, there is probably a program that can do that while also adding some sort of feature that will enhance your experience. Twitter integration is already very prevalent; an article you read on a blog or website these days, likely has a button for you to retweet the article you just read, to the peeps who follow you. Another kind of integration is with other social networking sites; a tweet on Twitter like “Having wan tan mee for lunch” will also show up on your Facebook status automatically, if you set it so. An example of another kind of integration which actually extends Twitter’s basic functions is Twitpic, which allows you to post up your mobile pictures to a website and then tweet for your friends and followers to view it. All these are only the tip of the iceberg which is the Twitter ecosystem, and there is no lack of applications to look at, at databases like Twitdom, Twitter Fan Wiki and TwitTown. For example, TwitTown has up to 24 categories of applications like Geolocation and Mapping, Email, Mashup Twitter, Games, Fun and more. Really interesting names emerge like Yoono, Twitterfox and Zellr, but I suspect, there is only so much useful and functional applications one can build and some very simple and mundane (or brilliant, depends on how you look at it) ones have also appeared. For example, there is Inner Twitter which encourages you at the sound of an automated chime, to “pay attention to your breathing” and “become whatever resonates, like stillness, peace of beauty.”
Most of the applications are built according to what developers think matters to Twitter users, and aim to make it easier for you to find hot girls, savings, like-minded people, movie reviews, football teams and so on and so forth. Don’t be fooled however: if you look hard enough you can find real gems, useful apps that make one go “Who would’ve thought that!” These are like Screenr, which will record instant and ready-to-be-tweeted screencasts and also Twuner, which reads (yes, audio involved) out your friend’s Twitter updates from your iPhone.
Sidebar 2
Twitter - then and now
The creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of one-SMS-to-many in 2006, and if you haven’t Wikipedia-ed it already, there is an interesting rendition about how the name transformed from being just Status to a vowel-less Twttr to eventually, Twitter. Now-chairman Dorsey says, “We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere. We wanted to capture that in the name.” That led to the name Twitch because of the “physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket”, but needless to say that didn’t produce the right imagery and finally it was decided that Twitter, which meant “a short burst of inconsequential information” and “and chirp from birds” would be it. Micro-blogging, status feeds, SMS on the Internet or whatever you call it, Twitter’s easy-on-the-eyes design and easy-on-the-senses function has allowed the world at large to take this very, very simple publishing platform, build on top and basically make what they will of it. In the space of just three years, hundreds if not thousands of apps have emerged from this 140-words update service, so it may come as a surprise to some that Twitter still hasn’t found its monetisation mojo.
Early this year however, Twitter apparently leaked documents to TechCrunch (which was later dismissed by Twitter as not relevant) which forecasted 1 billion users by 2013 and USD1.5 billion in annual sales. The company once predicted its 45 employees would be joined by 5,155 more in the same period. The outdated forecast is doubly intriguing thanks to the highly publicised failure of Twitter to monetise thus far and the cryptic way the data became public.
Twitter claims the revenue forecast was an unofficial musing that does not reflect its current thinking. But the leaks give some hints into where Twitter could be looking for revenue after suffering months of analyst jeers over its failure to monetise. The company is in talks with both Microsoft and Google - talks that could involve stated ambitions to turn Twitter into “the pulse of the planet” by signing up a sixth of the world’s population. Google negotiations were active as recently as June, with the pair discussing search syndication and Twitter expressing a fear it was “playing with fire” as the search giant was already “building [a] competitive product.’ The talks appear to involve its “Hosebird” API, which would allow search operators to access the full tweet stream - potentially for a fee that could become its first real revenue stream. Twitter references the Google talks in multiple documents over the past six months, alternately hopeful and skittish the behemoth “would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.”
The documents mention other revenue possibilities, including the potential of streaming tweets to MSN similar to RSS news boxes, digital payments, sponsored tweets, an unspecified Xbox 360 deal and a revised Terms of Service that would allow it to place paid ads in commercial tweets. The company also expresses concerns over dilution of its trademark and the rights of its users, writing at one point it would impose limits on tweet rebroadcasts via API and insist on approval for TV broadcast inclusion - an unforeseen complication that has dogged YouTube after US media companies began regularly broadcasting user-uploaded clips as part of news coverage. Its likeliest revenue gambit remains paid commercial accounts. “Charging more to fewer users is a good model” and “the fastest way to make money.” (Adapted from CommsDay International)
By Catherine Yong
SF: This year’s Nokia Connection came and went with the sense that something was very different. Nokia’s annual regional affair held away from the main CommunicAsia exhibition and conference crowd, has always played up different themes from year to year but this time around, Nokia’s continuous smartphone market share haemorraghing to RIM and Apple is not helped at all by Google’s Android gaining momentum and feedback that the Palm WebOS was building up to be another worthy market player. Furthermore, peeps aren’t as excited about hardware anymore, as they are about software and the capabilities it’s putting in users’ hands, thanks in part to iPhone’s App Store success. In short, if the buzz surrounding “this versus that” reports are being generated by up and coming mobile devices out there, and not your own, it’s time to remind people where you came from and where you are going to.
So, Nokia’s Chief Development Officer, Mary MCDowell flew in to Singapore in June, to give an end-to-end bird’s eye view of the Finnish mobile maker’s business. She says during her keynote, “Competitors will continue to challenge us - we believe we have a strong position based on our brand strength, scale and advantages in manufacturing, product development as well as distribution capabilities and the overall excellence of our product portfolio.” She also acknowledged competitors like the iPhone’s success admitting that, “Some of the priorities for us is to revolutionise the user experience.”
“This brings us back to the original Series 30 and Series 40 user interface which was so simple, one could SMS while driving.” Back then, when voice was still the only killer app, operators were seeing amazing revenue growth from it and plowing capital into building out networks. Nokia did extremely well for itself as masses of users were content to do voice calls and text messages with only minimum personal information management. Nokia also raised the bar for multimedia phones; in Malaysia at least, an N Series phone would be recommended to take photos, videos, music and play them back for you, on-the-go.
Till the year 2007, Nokia was also milking its hardware to the point of neglecting almost everything else.
Services - Wherefore Art Thou? McDowell says during her keynote, “Now, we are at the position where all the elements are in place - very high bandwidth and robust networks, devices that have fast processors with a lot of memory and a robust operating system that allow application developers full flexibility and creativity to create and bring innovation to the mobile platform.” McDowell saying there is a robust operating system only now, had to do with Nokia having had to buy over Symbian assets it didn’t already own, and making it open source along with S60.
Head of Developer Relations for Forum Nokia in APAC, Kenny Mathers gave a micro-level view of why this had to be done, “Moving forward, we see a strong need for a smartphone operating system platform, and that when we looked at the long term viability of how that would evolve to meet what we see as emerging smartphone devices, we felt that the best way to do that, was actually to make that software open source.”
Nokia now has to contend with users who want to do more with their mobile devices because just voice and text doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s N Series range also may perform multimedia functions wonderfully, but multimedia functions mean naught if files created as a result, can’t be shared with the people that mattered to users. That called for Internet services and Nokia besides providing phones or conduits to the Internet for users to access them, also wanted to brand these services, Ovi by Nokia. The Ovi Store was where users could download free or paid apps and content, onto their Nokia devices. After being announced in 2007, Ovi Store launched worldwide in May 2009 and served also as a distribution channel and monetisation platform for Forum Nokia’s over 4 million registered developers.
The Fragmentation Game At a glance, over 4 million registered developers is a staggering figure. According to McDowell, “As we start to see proliferation of services over devices, there is a need to provide the same level of simple access,” also adding that the developer community was very important to Nokia because “Developers help us differentiate our services.” But, developers also need to see value in developing for a platform, be it Symbian, Android, iPhone OS, webOS, Windows Mobile or whatever else operating systems that are out there right now.
The appeal of developing for the iPhone OS is simply simplicity; developers only need to develop applications once for one type of device (except for the iPhone 3GS which has new APIs), for one single online store. Of course, it also helped that Apple built an OS for current times and current needs. If 20 years ago, an operating system was designed to do what was expected of a mobile phone at that time - single-tasking on slower hardware - adding more capabilities on top of it, as time goes by and needs gets more demanding, makes it clunky and clumsy for users to use and developers to develop for. Also, the Ovi Store may have a commendable 20, 000 applications, but it caters to (only) 70 devices, all Nokia-branded. Mathers ruefully admits there isn’t one application that is supported on all 70 devices.
And then, more than a month after Nokia Connections, some semblance of alignment and cohesion between the Symbian OS and the handsets it can be found on (Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson), came in the form of the Symbian Foundation’s Horizon. According to a Nokia website, “developers would be able to tap into services such as in-store promotion, language translation, app certification and marketing programs.” What this also means for Symbian-based app stores in the market like Ovi Store and the Samsung Application Store, is now there is more of an opportunity that a very good application idea would reach their shelves, faster for them to sell.
What Can We Look Forward to Now? Over lunch in June McDowell had talked about another segment Nokia partners closely with. “We’ve signed up a number of operator partners (the past year) to support Ovi, you see operators especially in Europe like Orange and TIM, T-Mobile and others who are actually supporting Ovi because it’s a way for them to get to market quickly with services. Also, when you think about an acquisition like Navteq which cost us USD8.1 billion; there’s not many operators that have the wherewithal to do that class of investment, so by partnering with us, they can leverage the investments and provide these services to their consumers.”
She gave the example of Orange and how their services are integrated, “It comes as a nice mix of Ovi services and services that they’ve built out. So, it’s not an all or nothing proposition; it’s very complementary.”
She also gave a teaser of some of the things Nokia is doing in the research and strategy area and what consumers could expect from the next generation of Ovi services. For example, one of the key hardware changes users might start to see on phones as early as 2012, is embedded sensors which allows collection of aggregate information. Information collection sounds like nosy Big Brother business, but McDowell says that privacy is still emphasised. “We’ve architected it in such a way that we don’t know anything about a single person, but only aggregate information.” This in turn, allows apps like mobile irrigation, seismic monitoring, influenza tracking and even mobile diabetes checking. McDowell says, “We’re also using the camera on the device for anti-counterfeiting apps. With barcodes and such, we are helping consumers understand whether they are buying a genuine product or not.”
That isn’t all the camera is being leveraged for, and when coupled with GPS capabilities, the potential for apps are limitless. “We’re doing some work with some movie companies, so that when you point (your phone) at a movie billboard, it can tell you what theatre it’s at, it can be used in commerce where when you point at a barcode you can get more information about a product and maybe where you can buy it at the lowest price… there are just so many possibilities.”
GPS functions are also set to go prime time if Nokia’s Indoor Positioning trial in Helsinki is any indicator. “Navteq has done a lot to map the outside world, and the next opportunity are some of these large public places, and shopping malls would be a great opportunity, so that now, not only can you find your friends, but maybe also the best deals and other information that may be relevant to your indoor experience.”
But for these things to take off, a whole ecosystem of operators, developers, content providers, individuals and even merchants, have to be convinced to move along. Reaching critical mass is key and developers have to start thinking they are creating for Symbian, instead of ABC or XYZ brands; these next-generation services have to transcend brand, at some level. McDowell admitted, “When you develop these capabilities, they have to be supported across a range of devices; some of these capabilities have to be supported on competitors’ products as well.” Now,that there’s the Horizon program, that’s not so far from reality.
If you were born in the seventies and had your first encounter with a computer by the time you reached your early twenties, chances are the only applications you got very well-acquainted with, were software applications or computer programs that you had to install onto your computer. In the mid-nineties, all we had were 56kbps modems, so downloading big program files was a pretty rare occurrence; we installed applications from CDs instead. These computer applications, be they spreadsheets, word processors, or simply mundane programs that calculated your calories and played chess with you, ensured you had enough going on, on your computer screen to keep you contented. And we were contented. Because we didn’t know any better in the nineties.
By the time the Internet became more widely available, it was already a new millennium. Internet speeds and computers were getting faster and capable of doing more things. Intel had also started to push the portable computing value proposition, and along with it, the idea that the Internet could be wireless via their Centrino platforms. As we all know, the number of notebooks shipped started to overtake desktop computers and today you’d be hard pressed to find a notebook that isn’t Wi-Fi enabled. In this day and age, we are also no longer content to just sit passively in front of an unconnected machine. If we were going to buy a notebook, or a computer, it would be because among other things, it was going to be your conduit to the Internet, all that it holds and all that it enables.
With all this going on, what was the humble computer application to do, but evolve along with the Internet as well?
The Rise of the Internets
Web 2.0 according to Wikipedia, is the second generation of web development and web design. Even as early as 1999, there was the idea that the Internet was evolving to facilitate communication, information sharing, interoperability, user-centred design and collaboration. This meant several things which we also see today - the development of web-based communities, hosted services and web applications. And, if one were to start to think of who’s at the forefront of all this development, one brand really sticks out like a sore thumb.
When Google’s open source program manager, Chris DiBona came to KL for MSC Malaysia’s Open Source Conference, he had a lot to say about open source. But before long the interview also started to include how open source influenced the Internet and vice versa. He says, “I think the Internet needed open source and open source needed the Internet.” DiBona gave the example of how Linus Torvald used the Internet to basically say, “Look I’m working on this kernel, does anyone want to help?” Help poured in from all over the world because many did want to. “And this was before the web (became popular) itself…,” DiBona pointed out. (Sidebar 1)
He reminisced about the boom in the creation of fiber and when companies were, “laying fiber across the oceans, laying fiber across the continents…it was basically a big subsidy program for bandwidth creation.” This Linux wizard also said that as a result, “You saw this really funny thing happening between 2000 to about 2005; basically bandwidth was absurdly inexpensive, and so people started using it for all kinds of things, like moving data around the world; companies like Google and others started to really hog the Internet aggressively.”
“Before this, you tended to shut off images so that websites would load as fast as possible and you can get to the information that you want. There are a lot of things you used to do that you don’t do anymore.” Today, speeds are so fast that DiBona can order up a movie and download it to his TiVo service; something that no one in their right minds would have attempted to do in 2000. He added, “You saw new sites pop up, which were very, very heavy with Javascript and media assets… and as all these things were happening, Google noticed a lot of applications coming up which were kinda nice, but which were kinda chunky and slow, when used in typical browsers.”
What Are We Seeing?
According to DiBona, Google started to think about how to do a better job with Javascript, and as we all know now, this eventually gave birth to the Chrome browser. With simple text web pages having had to evolve along with user needs and expectations, the browser had to become a modern platform for web pages and applications. Rich and interactive features saw heavy usage of browser plug-ins like Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Google had to build a more powerful script engine, V8 which when powering Chrome, allowed it to be speedier and more responsive.
During its launch last year, Director of Engineering at Google, Linus Upson said the objective of Chrome was to “…enable a whole new class of applications to appear when it couldn’t before.” He touted Google Docs as an example of an application which would benefit from a light and responsive browser and declined to reveal much more.
Nine months later today, Chrome has already dropped its beta label, to the chagrin of many who think it shouldn’t and didn’t need to, especially since Google has kept scores of their products in beta for many years. The thing is, a browser is only as good as what it is expected to and would enable, and the true test of its ability would be how well it ran and enabled web applications. This called for mass levels of usage; a form of testing so to speak; and Google started running a quirky cute television ad, in the hopes more people would install Google Chrome, and eventually use Google applications, present and upcoming.
The Future of Web Apps
We stopped wondering so much about what the web’s killer application might be, at about the same time netizens found a shiny new web service to become occupied with. FaceBook, was to become a very popular social networking site, even though interestingly, it operated as a closed platform. DiBona would argue that FaceBook ran on open source tech like Apache and MySQL, but all its millions of users saw was how useful and engaging FaceBook’s interface and third-party apps were, never mind that it was all happening within a walled garden.
The underlying idea one could take away from all this, is that the main function of the web which is facilitating communication (Look at Sidebar 2), is going to remain a very compelling driver behind why a web app is created in the first place. Look at Twitter, another social micro blogging cum communication tool started to gain popularity last year. People on the web are starting to get into the habit of keeping in touch with friends via their status updates and feed-like streams of their activities; there is also a growing sense that FaceBook is so popular because it is able to integrate all these ways of keeping in touch and engagement among friends.
But just last month, we had an idea of what possibly could be beyond FaceBook, Twitter, RSS feeds, blogs, photo-sharing sites, YouTube, Skype and all that. Says DiBona of Google Wave, “It’s exciting. We’re very nervous ‘cos it’s the first time we are showing it to the outside world… it’s always hard showing it to the outside world.”
DiBona describes Google Waves, “So there is a people pane to the left, waves in the middle and then conversations. And I can have a conversation with you, and bring other people in. You can cleave off conversations, and then reintegrate them with other people. You can also drag in elements of photos and and push it out to a blog.”
“We’ve tied it in with Google stuff, but we’ve tied it in with a lot of other stuff too - Joomla, or LiveJournal or FaceBook… It’s email, IM, blogging, and updates, and it’s all these things at once in a conversation, and it’s pretty complex,” he enthuses.
More and more
DiBona also looks forward to a new version of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which is also known as the language of the Internet. The latest version HTML 5 which was developed simultaneously with XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language), is already being touted as a game changer in web applications development, enough to even render RIA (rich Internet application) technologies like Flash and Silverlight obsolete. According to DiBona, with HTML 5, “…a desktop-like experience on a browser…that’s very possible. So, things are moving forward for web applications.”
Overall, this guru of web and apps, thinks that the future for web applications is “More, better and faster.”
The Internet and Open Source – Marriage of Convenience
Before Chris DiBona became open source program manager, he was a Linux commentator on Tech TV’s Screen Savers and even an editor at SourceForge’s tech nerd’s news website, Slashdot (http://slashdot.org). These days, besides running Google’s Summer of Code program, he also manages projects on Google Code and makes no bones about Google’s thought school of choice.
“We try to use open source all the time to help push the industry in certain directions, for example around open source operating systems, to improve development tools and to improve development around the Internet. Google also uses a lot of open source in the creation of their software and he echoes what every other Google engineer who’ve ever made it to this part of the world, say over and over again: “We basically feel that as the Internet gets better, so does Google.”
“More often in my experience, there’s a lot of open source involved in the (development of the) Internet.”
This is why I think the web became so popular from the very first day. You can create something without having to worry too much about permissions.”
DiBona illustrates, “Anyone can create a web page, and pretty much anyone has. If you want to create a web page, you can; I’m not saying it will look good, or people will listen; but you can do it. And that’s an incredible amount of power that didn’t exist in computer science before, and it’s very appealing. And there’s nobody looking over your shoulder and saying, “Well, I’m sorry, but if you want to type in the word, “the” on the Internet, you have to pay.”
“The Internet for the most part runs on open source software, and so, if we can make open source development better, healthier and smarter, we’re doing a very good thing not just for Google but the world. And that’s very good for us.”
DiBona also thinks that Google’s work culture and philosophy resonates a lot with open source principles. He adds, “The best software is usually the software that’s been written by practitioners. Open source software is by nature written by people who need to solve the same problem. That’s a very powerful driver.”
In conclusion, DiBona sums up, “They really are connected, the worlds of open source and the worlds of the people who run the Internet, they create Internet sites or pages, they’re indistinguishable from each other. And when people reject that marriage.. I think it’s to their detriment.”
Power from Your Inbox
The very popular email service has been around for almost as long as the Internet itself, with the Internet probably owing its popularity to the unassuming web email and the communication it enables. Of the few most popular webmail services, let’s look at the one that just turned 5 this year and already has tens of millions of users all over the world.
Not long after Google Mail or Gmail celebrated their fifth anniversary on April 1st, they also launched Gmail Labs in 49 more languages, worldwide. Gmail Labs is an experiment that actually started in June 2008, and Gmail project manager, Keith Coleman, said, it was basically, “… to give engineers a way to take all their crazy, interesting product ideas for Gmail and get them out to the tens of millions of Gmail users around the world for early feedback.”
Says Coleman, “Usually when we have a product idea for Google, we create a demo and everyone inside the company uses it for a while; the world doesn’t see most of these ideas. The idea with Labs is that we want to bring the whole world into the experimentation and design process that previously was only open to people who worked at Google. He underlines, “It was sort of an experiment, we weren’t sure it would work. But it turned to be very popular among users.”
The thousands of apps found in Gmail Labs aren’t there just for show. They are there specifically to gather feedback and so are ready to scale for the millions of Gmail users. Coleman says, “We look at a variety of feedback, the number one thing is – what are people turning on.”
“With all our features and products we measure usage to figure out which things are really working for people and which ones aren’t. We definitely analyse it, and the most popular ones we want to actually graduate out of Labs so that they become part of the core product, so every user gets them by default.” Other not so popular apps, will be gotten rid off and in the 43 weeks since Gmail Labs was launched, Google has launched 44 Labs features; an average of over one per week. Coleman emphasises, “A lot of stuff is going out there and getting a lot of very valuable feedback from users.”
“We find the features that help people from making mistakes, are consistently among the most used,” he observed. For example, Undo Send and Forgotten Attachment detector. Some features involving text messaging currently work in the United States, although Coleman states, “All of our features, we work very hard to have it work all over the world.”
(This has appeared in PC.com July issue)
SF: This year, two Malaysian-based companies, MindValley and Getting Personal, applied to be on a “Most Democratic Workplaces” list. Their employees saw fit to vote a resounding “Yes, we are!!!” By Catherine Yong and Vinodhani K Nair
The way most organisations and businesses traditionally work, it’s rare to find someone who truly enjoys his or her job. If it isn’t because they’re owners of their own companies or turned a beloved passion into something they can make a living out of, then it’s probably because they are happy to live in their own little worlds or have calmly accepted their fate - having their life forces slowy but surely sucked out at work. There is however, one more reason that is starting to become likelier every year as more and more companies worldwide, find their way onto WorldBlu’s List of Most Democratic Workplaces. One of the pioneers of workplace democratisation and founder of WorldBlu, Traci Fenton says, “What we’re looking for are companies that operate, using the principles of democracy, such as transparency, accountability, decentralisation and choice.” It’s main aim? To amplify possibilities of the human potential - and the organisation as a whole. According to Fenton, organisations traditionally are set up so there is a chain of command and layers of bureaucracy; employees essentially take orders and are told to obey and not question their managers. She reminisces about her first job with a Fortune 500 company, once fresh out of college, “First day on the job, I really saw that I wasn’t going to be treated like a human being, I was going to be treated like a number, and I wasn’t going to have much of a voice there.” “It just really struck me hard, how this was the kind of environment that most people worked in everyday. That made me say, ‘Hey, we have to do something differently here, we have to bring more democracy into the workplace.’
Because people are dying everyday, their souls are drying up!” Findings by the Gallup Organization are also no different from Fenton’s observation -73-percent of the U.S workforce, is disengaged at work; in Japan that figure is 91-percent. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. These days, there are more and more reasons to start to do things differently. Fenton says, “There are so many drivers that are demanding we move from command-and-control, hierarchical, beauracratic work environments, into more freedom-centred, engaged work environments.” Besides information and technology empowering people in ways they’ve never been empowered before, an up and coming workforce comprising Generation and X and Y also want to have a different kind of work place. Principles of democracy might exist here and there at work, but what does it take for a company to truly qualify being on WorldBlu’s list?
We hear from two of our very own, MindValley and Getting Personal.
Here’s an enlightened idea - a technology developer that develops people first As many as 40 companies made it to WorldBlu’s Most Democratic Workplaces List this year (http://www.worldblu.com/worldblu-list/worldblu-list), the biggest number since its inception in 2007. In 2008, MindValley was the only Asian company to be on the list, and as testament to its sustainability and authenticity to democracy, MindValley applied and qualified for the second time in a row, after its 30-odd employees were interviewed. One of the founders, Vishen Lakhiani says, “MindValley is a publisher of personal development material.” Thanks to the Internet and technology that is increasingly becoming available, MindValley is able to take famous authors’ knowledge and transform them into mixed media that can be consumed by the public via several ways - podcasts, streaming video, membership websites and so on. Lakhiani who is Malaysian also professes that MindValley is very much an American company, even though it’s based in Malaysia and has employees from all over the globe. That’s due to it’s clients and partners originating mostly from the United States. Even 70-percent of its audience, come from U.S. with 30-percent, from other parts of the world. Lakhiani sums Mindvalley up as a company that takes “…people who have new ideas, powerful ideas in the fields of parenting, entrepreneurship, personal growth, spirituality, and we bring together, the marketing and the technology to help these ideas get out to the mass public.” Getting Personal, is another Malaysian-based company that’s one of WorldBlu’s most democratic workplaces. They develop Statsit, a web analytics and marketing optimisation platform which they began to commercialise after only two-years in R&D mode, but has received overwhelmingly positive response in target markets. Finnish-born founder, Mikko Kotila describes Getting Personal as “a new kind of company, one that puts people first.” Taking a pretty practical approach to the WorldBlue accolade, he says, “Money certainly is one of the metrics of success, but it can’t be the only one.” “It’s great to be acknowledged. But what is even greater is knowing that you’re doing the right thing in building an organisation that empowers people to live better lives.”
Uniquely Malaysian Being one of the very few companies in Asia to have made the cut, also means a lot to the 6-year old company that Lakhiani founded with former Silicon Valley exec, Mike Reining. “What I’ve noticed is that many Malaysian companies have very outdated modes of management. If you compare the way we run MindValley to the way most Malaysian companies run, we are years ahead in terms of the way we treat our employees, and as a result, the amount of freedom and growth that we as the company owners see, is tremendous.” To illustrate, he admits in the last 30 days, he’s spent 21 on paradise islands around the world. “I was at Richard Branson’s private island in the British Virgin islands, I was at Tony Robbins 500-acre resort in Fiji, I was at a friend’s wedding in Cabo, Mexico. In that time, I’ve spent only six days in the office. Yet, in that same time, our company went through one of our biggest, most profitable months, we had our single best sales day.” Lakhiani attributes this to the way he and Reining have constructed their team which gives them the power to run the business when the bosses are away. He adds, “I trust my team, they’re brilliant and I know my company can run organically without me having to be there, despite my company being only a 6-year old business.” And it isn’t because MindValley is an American company or has American principles and American ideas permeating throughout the organisation. Principles of work democracy are universal principles that anyone can practice, no matter where in the world they are, or which country they come from. If in governments, democracy’s definition is “of the people, by the people”, then Getting Personal’s emphasis on people in its organisation, is right on the money. Kotila says, “Our mindset is very different from the conventional way of looking at business. Instead of looking at a company, we’re looking at the group of people. Instead of looking at the individuals and their personal glorification, we look at collective gratification. For us this is about getting together and having a chance to go towards our aspirations.”
Uniquely democratic Lakhiani gives further demonstration of why MindValley is uniquely democratic - every month 10-percent of company profits goes into an employees’ pool and distributed according to performance, position and length of employment. “Because we’ve been growing so rapidly, we’ve had back-to-back profit record months.” “For a small company, we’ve reached the stage where employees are extremely well-compensated. Now because of this, there is immense loyalty towards the company. People at MindValley genuinely believe that we are the best place to work in Malaysia, and perhaps all of Asia. And one of our goals is to be the single best place to work, globally, in the next two years. And we are pretty confident we are going to get there.” Employee’s profit shares is one of the clearest ways, employees are kept happy, but there are other things MindValley practices that are democratic. For example, “We try as far as possible to create an atmosphere of candor in the company. This means employees feel free to go up to their managers and have earnest discussions of topics they want to discuss. Every week I have one to three lunches with employees on staff to try and get a sense of what they thinking, what they feeling, work out how we can help them grow and to get a feedback of how I’m doing my job,” shares Lakhiani. A Linden Lab-inspired idea also comes in the form of the MindValley Sweet Sugar Machine which is an online system where employees can send each other notes of appreciation. “When we did these (three things), we found teamwork, job satisfaction and overall happiness with the organisation just soared,” observes Lakhiani. “It is a great fulfillment to be able to do exactly what you want and do it with the people you want to do it with. I don’t think this is even possible in a non-people centric organisation. If the business is about the company and not about the people, I can’t see how there could be true fulfillment in it for anyone,” opines Kotila.
Malaysia Boleh? Can another Malaysian company repeat MindValley’s and Getting Personal’s feat? Lakhiani says it’s not an easy route. “Basically you’d have to break a lot of rules in terms of how traditionally, people believe companies should be run.” For example, a few traditional ideas are that shareholders should take the bulk of profits and the boss wields a whip of control. Lakhiani points out that at MindValley instead, “Me and Mike, we focus on vision building, on travelling around the world, networking with contacts, on goal-setting… and our employees run the company.” However, one of the things, Lakhiani believes Malaysian companies can do to be more democratic is focus on learning and education. He had interviewed hundreds of people in Malaysia with the belief that they wanted to work in his company for a decent salary. He stood corrected. “In fact; and this has been proven by management studies; most brilliant people under the age of 30, before they have a wife and kid… their number one reason for joining a company is not money, but education…they want to learn,” he pointed out. Interestingly, the number two reason is to have fun; money and wanting to contribute to the world, come in as third and fourth respectively. “We tailor our company to provide people all these four needs. Learning and education is our primary focus and we have created an atmoshere where learning is encouraged and it’s really pushed. ” In a 45-hour work week, employees are encourged to work or execute only 40 hours a week, because the remainder five hours goes into learning, and employees can ask to be provided a book on a topic of their choice from entrepreneurship, to marketing to personal growth. Kotila’s advice for Malaysian companies is no 4-pronged approach like MindValley’s. It’s simply about putting people first.”That’s really all that it takes.” He also adds to “…be wary of falling into the trap, many other companies have fallen into before, with corporate social responsibility. You have companies exploiting employees, customers and community and then talking about morales. Democracy should not become yet another buzzword, or even worse, a disguise for a rotten core. If the people are really first, there is no room for decay at the core,” Kotila believes. For Lakhiani, “I believe that hard work leading to productivity, is an outmoded form of thinking, and in most cases, it’s pure utter BS. It’s happiness that leads to better productivity.
It’s a two-way street Fenton also has some gold nuggets for organisations that are thinking about democratising their workplace and are looking for people. “I think they need to look for employees who are there to engage and learn, not try to “get” something. You need people who obviously have the skill-set needed but also people who are self-starters and have a proven track record of self-management. Good communications skills are a must.” She adds how she once asked a WorldBlu List awardee’s CEO what kind of person it takes to work in a democratic organisation. “His reply? ‘You can’t have anything to prove.’ I I think that speaks to how the individual can’t have a huge ego and must be willing to grow as a person if they are to thrive in a democratic organisation.” One of the things MindValley can be proud of also doing, is actually reversing the brain drain and getting brilliant talent from other countries, to come to Malaysia to work at MindValley. To date, there’s talent from 15 countries, working at the company. “We believe our model is the future of how companies should and will work. We also believe our model, if replicated well can reverse the brain drain because we give Malaysians a better work environment than they can get in Canada, the U.S. or Britain or Australia. And I’m willing to be quoted on that,” Lakhiani states.
Technology - how key? Lakhiani goes on to say, “Here are a couple of amazing things that has happened since we started focusing on creating this organisational structure. The company has been growing like crazy - in the last one year, revenue has grown 300-percent, at the same time, we have seen profits go up 500-percent. At same time, we’ve created the kind of workplace that gets our people to turn down jobs at premier companies like Google or McKinsey and instead choose to work for MindValley for a fraction of the salary that they’d be getting elsewhere.” Yes, technology plays a big role in making this possibly happen, but Lakhiani is also quick to point out that while it helps, it isn’t necessary. “Technology has nothing to do with this at the fundamental level,” agrees Kotila. Take Twitter for example. I don’t see what’s interesting in reading about what somebody had for lunch, but a private Twitter channel is a great and instant way to keep the whole company on top of what’s going on. Transparency is definitely a piece of the puzzle, and one that technology can contribute quite a bit to.” says Kotila. MindValley also uses technology to practice transparency by way of a personal company wiki. Employees are encouraged to document company processes, share ideas, come up with visions of where they want to take their departments. “Our wiki in the last one year, has grown to some 1000 pages. It’s organic, every employee can dive in, edit, write, and organise.” Information not only becomes transparent for people to act on, but it is allowed to grow organically, instead of remaining static and silo-ed off from the rest of the organisation. And winning awards are just a nice by-product for MindValley. “We aren’t in this business to win awards, we’re in this business to change the world, help spread enlightened ideas, to be one of the number one publishing companies in the entire world, to pioneer new models of building business, and to have a lot of fun doing this. Awards are not what we are looking for” Kotila also echoes his sentiment. “The progress we’ve made in the last 12 months is very promising, all our well-being has increased in measurable ways and productivity has reached a level previously unknown to me.” All these certainly beat winning awards, but really at the end of the day, “it’s about coming to a sustainable, plausible way of doing business.” And getting everyone else to join in.
(This has appeared in PC.com and BusinessToday)
Despite being the underdogs in the local telecommunications industry, DiGi Telecommunications for a long time has managed to engage and capture the imaginations of Malaysians, with brilliant service offerings and even more brilliant brand campaigns. One of their many catchy mottoes “Time to Change” tapped into every Malaysians’ frustration with the local broadband services and many waited for DiGi’s idea of what “Broadband Done Right” should be. That day came with the launch of DiGi’s 3G Broadband. But even before it did, it was already all too clear that just broadband wasn’t going to be enough. Broadband is just an enabler, and for DiGi, it really boiled down to what they have learnt and think their customers want enabled for them. That called for a Strategy and New Business Division. Catherine Yong has a chat with its Head, Albern Murty.
At one point, it seemed there wasn’t anything DiGi couldn’t try to do. Late 2007 brought the first sign of this, when they introduced a prepaid service called Happy - it was pared down enough to not directly compete with DiGi’s own prepaid offerings, and yet also endearing enough to remind people which brands they loved, before Mobile Number Portability was implemented and loyalties were tested. Back then, DiGi called Happy an experiment, maintain now that it still is an experiment, and are happy enough to see where Happy will take it.
And then in late 2008, DiGi users found that sending the text “INS YES” to the number 2000, entitled them to one year free Personal Accident insurance; they just had to be active and registered prepaid or postpaid DiGi subscribers. At about this time too, DiGi CEO Johan Dennelind had to keep fielding burning questions about their planned 3G service - how different would it be, how did it expect to address 3G competitors who have been in the market longer - everybody wanted to see what DiGi was bringing to the broadband table.
Having finally gotten their hands on 3G spectrum via a deal with TIME dotCom; albeit some 3 years too late; DiGi was working on the idea that it was pointless to rush their 3G broadband deployment. Instead, why not learn from failures and successes in the market and try to get it right? Create killer apps and the masses will come When DiGi launched the MySimplifieds online portal in February, 2009 Dennelind said, “”We are exploring mobile relevant business opportunies to further seed growth as the industry matures, we are tapping on the growing popularity of online space through the birth of our very own online classifieds portal, mySimplifieds.” Murty himself later summed it up as, “To provide a service to mobile users and Internet users in Malaysia, so that we can take the number of people who use the service, and translate that into advertising space opportunity.”
True to its namesake, the online classifieds platform sought to make buying and selling simple. It also had embeddable widgets so that a user’s wish or sell list could extend to social network sites like FaceBook, Friendster, MySpace and even their blog. The outcome? A viral-like classifieds which within one month, registered 10, 000 members and 6,000 ad postings.
By the time, I sat down with Murty some four months later, the number of ad postings already surpassed 35,000 with each posting averaging about 7 to ten hits. Thanks also to MySimplifieds blog banners and widgets that kept user’s friends updated about what was for sale or wanted, MySimplifieds was really getting around. A clean and simple user interface proved to be a successful formula, and a recent meet-up with users drew feedback to “keep it simple as it is and make sure that the flow stays the same.”
Explained Murty, “They were very, very clear in vocalising what attracted them to the site, even offering suggestions about how to introduce safer payment (methods), and other things in terms of how to make the site a more trustworthy site.” He added, “Communication personally by the site’s CEO herself, Aishah Ali, also drives loyalty to it.” Currently, while the site is a free convenient platform for “matchmaking” people who are looking for products/services with the people who offer them, the actual cash and goods exchange takes place in the real world. However this is going to change soon enough as MySimplifieds is in the process of evaluating payment mechanisms which will finally enable a few important things - transactions tracking and really valuable data.
The no-nos The site’s cosy and personal appeal might make it easy-to-use among individuals and entrepreneurs, but what about small and medium businesses? If they come onboard, what reaction could the site see from individual buyers and sellers? Murty responds, “I dont think we are going to try to control (the direction it takes), as long as it doesn’t become abuse, like a company with catalogues of thousands of products, using that site as a tool to boost sales.”
Also for Murty, “When it comes to SMEs, I’m looking more at individual entrepreneurs and individual SMEs; a real estate agent for example - small-scale, still very personal and selling to the individual rather than to companies. That’s where MySimplifieds puts more focus on, because selling from company to company (B2B)… then it’s absolutely not this site.”
Wholesaling is also absolutely not encouraged; it becomes simply unfair competition as these wholesalers would be able to offer more attractive pricing than another individual seller. That’s why monitoring becomes important and it currently happens based on the number of postings a user makes, tracking of a posting’s hits and also feedback from other users. When abuse happens, “…we will basically clear their content from the site, after informing them and giving them option to clear it away themselves.”
Extracting content from another classifieds and pasting it on MySimplifieds is also a bad idea. Murty rationalises, “It’s online and we’re trying not to get people into the habit of aggregating content and fooling other people. It’s not ethical, firstly and what happens is you confuse people. It’s ok if as a seller, you want to sell in multiple spaces, but each space has to be customised and registered separately.”
Ultimately for Murty, “There’s always need for extra caution, as people will always try to find loopholes and maneuver around it. But as long as there is continuous monitoring… and the feedback that users of the site can give us, is the most valuable thing for us.”
Mobile is still very much DiGi’s core business, and the whole Malaysian mobile community, can eventually derive real value out of a service like MySimplifieds, even though it seems to exist solely in the online world. Murty concludes that if the site continues to grow at the momentum it has for the past few months, its potential for monetisation via value-adding mobile services; not just online and mobile ads; is huge.
SF: These days whenever Google launches a product or service, it’s hard not to see how it ties in with the mission they first conceptualised all those years ago - to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google’s search engine service was one of, if not the earliest ways they did this, and they successfully monetised it via online advertising products which today, sees thousands of users. Along the way also, Google somehow created other products, web properties and initiatives that more strategically aligned themselves with their end goal of making the world’s useful information universally accessible. Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Documents, and so on aside, Google Maps now offers localised information, which finally puts several things into motion.
Derek Callow, Head of Marketing for Google in Southeast Asia had said, “We are a brand that launches early and launches often.” Well, Google may launch products often but; and no disrespect meant, Mr.Callow; another search engine (you may guess which) already tried to offer similar directory services from since a few years ago. This search engine signed up a local telco to offer its mobile search service, and for a time, I was all set to have my mobile phone tell me, for example, where the best bak kut teh restaurant in KL was. But this never materialised; Yahoo’s mobile local search service was never quite able to get off the ground. And now whatever advantage they might have had in Malaysia was gone in one fell swoop mid-May, when Google Maps came to Malaysia. (http://maps.google.com.my)
The Features that Lay the Groundwork If before, a search for “coffee” would turn up an endless range of possible results, Google Maps Local narrows things down and puts a geographical context to it. Now, thanks to an integrated business listing made possible by collaboration with Super Pages, one can look up business outlets at any location, in Malaysia, and more enhanced local content like outlet reviews by lifestyle magazine, KLue, helps one make a decision about which ones to make a bee line to.
Super Pages has a whopping listing of over 100,000 businesses but this is nothing, compared to the number of businesses Malaysia really has. Also, any search algorithms engine is really only able to produce relevant and useful results when there are more parameters and information for it to process. Why just know where to go for bak kut teh, if I can also know where there are bak kut teh eateries which serve oily onion rice, fragrant kopi luwak and karaoke till 3am?
This is where user-generated content (UGC) comes in. There is a Local Business Center feature which allows businesses not already on Super Pages, to list themselves as well as update their information on Google Maps, for free. They just need to sign up at http://maps.google.com.my/local/add to make themselves readily discoverable to more business opportunities.
Maps API and Mapplets also respectively allows third-party data providers to embed Google Maps onto their company website and create mini widgets for Google Maps. For example, iProperty.com embeds Maps onto their website so that visitors can get visual and geographical information about a property and KLue has Mapplets on Google Maps Malaysia, which show up local listings of interesting activities, when clicked.
Another UGC opportunity comes in the form of My Maps which allows users to create custom maps for personal use or public sharing. If there was a collection of locations which mattered enough that you’d like to share with others, besides just geographical information, you can also add text, photos and videos to your My Maps. Showing your favourite hangout spots for example, is now a cinch and your friends can read your opinions and view the pics and videos accompanying it.
Google Maps for Mobile Product Manager for Google Southeast Asia, Andrew McGlinchey says and rightly so, “Every fact is relevant depending on where you are what you want to do.” This is why any search engine worth their salt has to expand to the mobile device, if they want to have a truly complete search offering. And keeping true to their open and free philosophy, Google is operator-independent and device-independent, though in Malaysia they will work with Maxis Communications to market Google Maps for Mobile.
T. Kugan, Senior General Manager and Head of Product Development and Infotainment Services at Maxis says they are enthusiastic about promoting Google Maps for Mobile to their subscribers as a valuable mobile service. “Our mobile subscribers with Web-enabled handsets never have to carry a printed map again, and will benefit from the many location-based services via Google Maps for Mobile.”
Growing the Ecosystem For Google’s Head of Marketing in APAC, “To build a product like this (Google Maps for Malaysia), you really need to be on the ground.” Which is what Google Southeast Asia has done, with its marketing, product development and business development people working towards signing on the four content collaborators they eventually revealed on launch day. “I’ve been to Malaysia three times in the period of just one month,” Callow elaborated, also adding, “This is a great start and we’re looking forward to working with many more Malaysian organisations to enhance the quality, features and usefulness of the local version of Google Maps.”
In fact, the urgency to get things started is to the point, Google does not want to think (yet) of how to monetise the Local Business Centre feature which can be likened to it’s very popular online advertising service, AdWords.
Since Chinese New Year, XOX , Celcom’s latest most visible and lifestyle-inclined mobile virtual network operator has been offering the XOX ‘Hop On’ Mobile Network Portability (MNP) package. Come early May, and XOX launched its 010 prepaid package, promising a postpaid launch of convergence services, a few months after. Ng Kok Heng, President said, “As of end of April 2009, we have achieved up to 20,000 prepaid activations and we expect activation count to hit at least 200,000 by end of the year.”
Claiming to have unbeatable rates, XOX hasn’t been stinting at all from the marketing and promotions aspect. They have been actively engaging the Chinese-centric community through sponsorship of 8TVs hit reality show, Ultimate Power Group and One FM’s Morning Kaki segment, among others. Ng had also revealed that XOX’s expenditure to implement the service and market it, costs a whopping RM17 million at least and he expects XOX to break even in 18 months.
Riding on Celcom’s nationwide infrastructure, XOX has “…coverage that is better than most incumbent players,” he rationalised, and not having had to build out their own network allowed XOX to concentrate its resources into building its brand. Robert Chew, Chief Operating Officer also shared a little formula that is making it all possible. “The success of an MVNO depends on the commercial agreement made with the hosted provider, which in this case is Celcom.”
Not being the first to roll out a new technology, will have its consequences. YTLe may have firmed up some kind of long overdue launch date, but that launch date is some 23 months after current leader of the pack, Packet One, went live. And why the long wait? This sparked off a rumour and a very pressing concern that a lack of good people is throwing a spanner into the works, not only for YTLe but any fledgling service operator that wants to spread its wings.
The local telecommunications industry is seemingly unable to produce enough calibred telco professionals that it even has to practice headhunting from rival companies. Inevitably, pickings are extremely slim when an industry has to accomodate four more new telco players. In fact, pickings might have been already zilch before WiMAX services came into the picture.
For example, Shazalli Ramly, Celcom’s current and very high-profile CEO came from the glamorous field of entertainment, wining and dining with the stars. Last night when Celcom received the Frost & Sullivan Award for Best Service Provider of the Year, Ramly reminded everyone once again, how different his background really is. He even has a story about how he walked into a room full of suits, sporting a Jamaican shirt and long hair. Well, long hair or not, that hasn’t stopped him from leading Celcom towards profitable (at last) financial growth for the past two years.
Do you know anyone who went into an industry they had no experience in, but succeeded to create waves like Shazalli?
This is the NeoNode mobile phone which was first released two years ago and retailed for more than 400 Euros (>RM2000). This time it is available in Malaysia for oh… about RM680? From the photo, its dimensions aren’t easily discernible, but it couldn’t have been much bigger than a name card.
What you see on the screen IS video playback of a Pussycat Dolls music video, with audio that’s louder than the iPhone’s. It does not support 3G or video recording, but there is a nifty 2MP camera onboard and some snazzy finger swipes you have to master to navigate this mini gizmo.
It’s a cutie ain’t it?
