Tim Ho

Latest: S. Korea still has the highest percentage of Internet users

2009-11-12T04:09:44Z

Google just announced that 17 World Development Indicators can now be searched in Google search.

Therefore you will see this in Google search result if you look for Internet users of a country:

I’ve always been paying attention to World Bank as they have good amount of high quality data visualization and very useful data.
With Google’s power, I pulled up the graph above in no time using Google’s visualization tool. As you can see, 77.1% of South Korea’s population uses the Internet, it’s the highest in the world followed by the States with 72.4%. China went up quickly in 2006 and still growing rapidly.

Play around with this graph

Introducing: Tim Ho’s Monkey (15 Google Wave invites inside)

2009-11-11T14:16:15Z

I always have things to share online, so much information gets at me each and every day, but sometimes things are just too small or too personal for this blog, and too big for a tweet. Other than that, I just got an iPhone 3Gs and I just have too much data usage to spare.

So finally, I decided to create a posterous blog (blog that can be easily updated with mobile device), which will hopefully give me a chance to share more with you.

On “Tim Ho’s Monkey“, I will share a bit of what I do in my personal life, social life, smaller findings on social media, social media events/ meetings information, or even music, videos, who knows? Tim Ho’s Monkey is just everything about me.

I think most of you have already registered for Google Wave, but I have nothing else to offer unless @dda wants to sponsor me wine to give away
If you/ your friend still need Googlewave invites, all you have to do is to be the first 15 people to tweet this:

“Ogilvy Digital Strategist @timho just launched a new personal blog! http://monkey.tim-ho.com #mthgw“

If you are my friend and just like this idea, you can tweet the same without hashtag.
Look forward to getting more postings up!

Twitter: Winner in “Instant Messaging”

2009-11-11T10:04:45Z

Although I don’t count Twitter as an Instant Messaging service, it’s interesting to see this statistic published by Palo Alto Network few days ago.

In the report, they put Twitter together with other popular IMer like msn, facebook chat, google chat and meebo. Surprisingly, they all went up since Spring this year, and even more surprising is that Twitter beats others as an “Instant Messaging” application. Guys, did we tweet THAT much!?

Feel free to leave me a message for full report.

A 5 minute online chat that worth US$200

2009-11-10T15:06:17Z

It’s hard to gain new customers, but it’s even harder to keep existing ones. I was about to switch to another hosting company this morning, but a 5-minute online chat stopped me from making this decision.

If you own a website/blog, you should know that the customer lifetime value in web hosting industry is very high, which means one customer can bring hosting company long-term revenue, similar to mobile network companies. This is why hosting companies invest so much in customer relationships to keep existing customers happy.

I was thinking about switching all my hosting services to mediaTemple because of their great reputation on speed, and all the positive comments I heard from friends. I even contacted them for information about the services and they responded me in no time. I was going to switch when this current hosting plan expires, which will be next week.
As I was trying to create my Posterous blog (which will be launched soon) with this current hosting with IXwebhosting, I had problem with the DNS settings, so I got on to the 24/7 online support. In 2 seconds, one of the representatives greeted me and asked how he could help, I told him the problem and he set up everything for me from his side in 5 minutes in excellent manner!

I was very impressed and promised him that I would publicly thank Vadim Chichkanov from IXwebhosting.
So that quick 5 minute chat kept me for at least 2 more years in their company.

Playstreet VS Google Street View

2009-11-10T05:15:58Z

This entry is also featured as one of the “It’s Delicious” series postings on Asia Digital Map.
In online content creation, Korea has been the biggest in the world. They have the highest portion of Internet users who enjoy publishing web content, more than 55% of the Internet users have uploaded articles, photos, music, videosand other digital content.

Lately, company Playstreet created this mapping site, which breaks Seoul into 29 areas, users can pick the area and virtually walk on the street. The map shows you exactly where you are, and in terms of accuracy, I think they have done a better job than Google Street View since Google sometimes messes up the numbers on some streets.

Also, as shown on image above, the map shows names for each building/ shop, which I think it’s something Google Street View can learn from.

Now Playstreet has partnered with Web Concepts (NZ company) and working on ShowStreet; a map for New Zealand, and it will be launched in Australian soon. Would be great if they add social media elements to the map in the future.

Play around with it now!

Lesson from Newbie: Don’t show face on Twitter Avatar!

2009-11-09T14:37:12Z

From some of my previously postings about Twitter avatar like “How to be an Eye-Magnet on Twitter“, I suggested Twitter users to “always” use their faces as avatar images. I still think the same on that, because using a picture of you can give your followers a personal but virtual “human-to-human” communication, which means warmer engagement. But I heard some interesting theories today from a friend; Ashleigh Flower, who’s a social media newbie.

Ashleigh just created a Twitter account today, so I asked her to pick avatar carefully from her photo album, but then she told me that she wasn’t going to use her own picture for it. I asked her why, I thought she would answer me something like “I want my privacy” or “it’s the internet, I don’t want people to know how I look like!” But surprisingly, she gave me a very social media focused answer.

She said, “I don’t want people to be judgmental when they communicate with me on Twitter, especially not because of how I look. I want people to communicate with me because of my interests and content.”
I agreed on what she said, because I’m quite sure 98% of my followers talk to me only because of how good I look (joking ), but I do enjoy getting perspectives from different people, especially newbies, who can surprise you sometimes.

Feel free to follow Ashleigh on Twitter and welcome her!

Marketers’ secret weapon during Holiday Season 2009

2009-11-04T15:50:56Z

Holiday marketing has been changing in these few years due to the ridiculous growth of social media. Marketers these days can no longer rely on the old marketing mix. According to a survey conducted by Shop.org, 47.1% of the online retailers plan to increase the use of social media for Christmas 2009. How do marketers use social media as a tool to gain most out of this shopping season?

I did a quick example here by using Apple products:

I use targeted keywords to find online conversations about Christmas gift ideas. Result was that from social networks, forums and blogs, people have been talking about iPod Touch the most, then iPhone 3Gs.
Therefore, most people can be either buying iPod Touch, or thinking about buying it for Christmas.

Marketers can use this data to build strategies to boost sales of iPod Touch, or create special promotions for iPod shuffle, really depends on the goals/ resources of an organization.

Great Visualization: Equal Pay Day

2009-11-02T14:13:57Z

London Media Consultancy Shakeup Media created this jquery based data visualization page that shows the pay gap between men and women from two cities in the UK.
It is a great example of interactive data visualization which clearly clarifies the relationships between two sets of data with good font and graphic use.

If you are interested in creating something similar to this, you can simply use this jQuery plugin, it’s very easy to use.

Click here to visit

Social Media Focused Campaign: Hellmann’s Real Food Movement

2009-08-11T02:45:52Z

It takes more time, effort and creativity these days to effectively grab people’s attention on the Internet. Hellmann’s new campaign is one of them that grabbed mine.
Hellmann’s Real Food Movement is a very social media based campaign that raises Canadian’s awareness on local food production.

The website encourages visitors to share the page through social networks with real time counting the amount of people who have viewed the video, “Acted” and “talked” about it.

Great animation in Video:

See this in Action!

Event: Geeks Need Booze

2009-08-14T16:08:56Z

Time flies! To be in my home town working in a fun environment with great people (Thomas Crampton, Jean Francoise Amadei and more) for 4 months really made me feel like it was just a few weeks. It’s time for me to head back to Toronto.

I decided to create a casual gathering (a Tweetup) for all the social media lovers here in Hong Kong to relax, to have fun and hopefully connect interesting people who haven’t met each others in person before (Twittersphere is full of talented people).

Date: 15th August 2009
Time: 9pm till done
Location: ~~Soho or Lan Kwai Fong (To be confirmed. Suggestions are welcome)~~ Tantra Bar, Basement Floor, 25 Stauntons Street, Central, Hong Kong.
Requirement: As the name of the event suggests, drop your iphone/ blackberry for Booze!

~~Please register with the form below.~~ Sorry, registration deadline has passed.