Surf! Magazine

SMEs in Malaysia leverage eBay and PayPal to boost export trade

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:34:25 +0000

Kuala Lumpur, October 22, 2009 – eBay, PayPal and Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation (MATRADE) organized a seminar titled, “Empowering Business Through E-Commerce on eBay” for Malaysia’s Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) on Wednesday, 9 September, at Menara MATRADE, Kuala Lumpur.

Over 280 SMEs across various industries such as clothing and accessories, automotive parts as well as consumer electronics attended the full day seminar which was designed to ensure that they are fully aware of the global business opportunities that e-commerce brings. The seminar featured speakers from eBay and PayPal as well as partners such as DHL and UPS who covered topics on e-commerce trends and opportunities, how to leverage eBay’s global online marketplace to sell successfully, PayPal’s safer and easy online payment solution and efficient ways to ship products internationally.

“Malaysia has strong e-commerce potential. According to IDC, there are 16.2 million internet users in Malaysia and online trade is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20% till 2010,” said Jason Lee, Head of Expansion at eBay. “On eBay, Malaysia is one of the most active markets in cross border trade within Southeast Asia. In the past year, total value of goods transacted by eBay users in Malaysia grew by 51%.”

“We are truly privileged to receive the full support of MATRADE, and look forward to a fruitful relationship as we work together to enable SMEs to make their products available to over 88 million eBay users worldwide,” added Jason.

Dato’ Noharuddin Nordin, Chief Executive Officer at MATRADE said, “The partnership between eBay and MATRADE is indeed an exciting and timely one. We are living in the Internet age, where the world does not sleep. With a global presence in 39 markets worldwide, eBay provides unlimited opportunities for Malaysia’s SMEs to reach a broader international audience and create a new business model in today’s competitive environment. PayPal also plays a key role in this partnership by offering SMEs the ability to accept various payment options for their international payments as well as extending their reach to over 75 million active, online PayPal accounts in 190 markets around the world.”

“Working with eBay and MATRADE is a natural fit with PayPal’s objectives to empower Malaysia’s SMEs to extend their reach beyond Malaysia and take advantage of global business opportunities and add to their bottom line profits - especially in key import markets such as the U.S, U.K., and Australia, where PayPal is one of the most preferred ways for consumers to pay online¹”, said Mario Shiliashki, General Manager of PayPal Southeast Asia and India.

The response for the 9 September seminar was very positive. Out of the seminar attendees, over 75% signed up for both the eBay OnRamp program, which features educational sessions on how to sell internationally, as well as the eBay and PayPal fee promotions exclusive to SMEs under MATRADE. The fee promotions include rebates of up to US$600 worth of insertion fees and selected feature fees for the first 100 eBay listings, as well as up to a 25 percent discount on transaction fees for the first 100 payments received via PayPal.

William Wee, Managing Director at Polygon Traders Sdn Bhd said, “I came all the way from Penang just to attend this e-commerce seminar by eBay and found it to be very informative. eBay presents huge opportunities for companies who are keen to take their business online and expand their sales channels internationally, in a low cost and efficient way.”

All SMEs under MATRADE, who would like to register for the eBay OnRamp program and the eBay and PayPal fee promotions, can email onrampsg2@ebay.com.

Malaysian Specialist ICT Security Professionals Recruitment Service Launches Operations

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:16:21 +0000

Malaysia’s Hack In The Box (M) Sdn Bhd (HITB), the owner of HITBSecConf, the largest network security conference in Asia and the Middle East endorsed by MCMC, MAMPU, MDeC and MNCC, today launched a new subsidiary, HITB Jobs (M) Sdn Bhd, which will solely specialize in international ICT security specialist recruitment and placement services. The recruitment will begin at the 7th annual instalment of HITBSecConf Conference in Kuala Lumpur on October 7th and 8th, 2009.

HITB Jobs, a joint venture between HITB and NDMTeam, an information security company in Bulgaria, will search for, evaluate and recruit highly skilled information security professionals for companies that wish to bring their information security ‘in house’ and for those looking for professionals with specific security skills.

“By beefing up their organizations with skilled information security practitioners organizations can tremendously improve the level of information security and lower the cost of supporting their IT infrastructure, nowadays primarily done through vendors and external consultants,” said HITB Jobs Managing Director David Michaux.

“Malaysian ICT professionals have earned the reputation of being both qualified and capable and this country is emerging as a significant contributor to the global ICT industry in both human capital and technological innovation,” said Michaux. “Unfortunately, wages in Malaysia are not aligned with global pay scales. A capable information security professional can expect to earn between three to four times their Malaysian wage in an equivalent position in the Middle East or Europe”, added Michaux.

“Malaysia and Bulgaria are both homes to communities of highly skilled information security professionals, that until recently, have been largely underrated by the global IT community,” said Tsvetan Dobrev, CEO, NDMTeam “Our collaboration with HITB in HITB Jobs is happening at the most opportune time as the HITB Security Conference makes significant strides into Europe through HITB Amsterdam,” he added.

HITBSecConf has earned high regard within the information security community and the Korean Information Security Agency (KISA) recently held an inter-university hacking competition, rewarding the winners with registrations for the HITB’s popular Capture-the-Flag hacking competition On October 7th and 8th in Kuala Lumpur.

According to data presented by Gartner at its Information Security Summit 2009, the global information security market is expected to grow by 8 percent in 2010 to USD16.3 billion (RM56.7 billion). Accompanying this increased spending in information security infrastructure is a growing demand by companies across the world to find ways to wrest the greatest business benefit from their investment. For many companies this is through bringing their information security ‘in house’ and freeing themselves of the expensive product-driven service contracts of security vendors.

“One of our strongest differentiators at HITB Jobs is our close affiliation with Hack In The Box (HITB). By leveraging HITB’s wide range of security technologies, we’re able to truly measure and quantify the skills of information security professionals and test the claims set forth in their resumes,” said Michaux. “As businesses look for greater industry knowledge and place less emphasis on technical qualifications, our independent validation of real-world information security skills allows our clients to hire fresh graduates and uncertified professionals with confidence and vastly expands the talent pool available to us,” he added.

For more information about HITB Jobs and its recruitment drive please visit http://jobs.hackinthebox.org from October 7th onwards.

MRCB, INFOLIENT SIGN MOU IN PERAK BROADBAND DEAL

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:57:12 +0000

One thousand two hundred homes in Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak, will soon have access to information at the touch of a key via wired broadband services thanks to Infolient, an Internet Service Provider.

Infolient Perak Sdn Bhd has teamed with Malaysian Resources Corporation Berhad (MRCB) to provide broadband services to this new high-end development by Seri Iskandar Development Corporation Sdn Bhd (SIDEC), a 70% wholly owned MRCB subsidiary.

The project involves Infolient providing wired broadband services to this development. The collaboration will also allow Infolient to set up wireless access points in phases to provide community-based wireless broadband access.

Bandar Seri Iskandar was one of the towns originally earmarked by Infolient to be part of the KPerak Broadband Project, a project providing 15 urban, suburban, and rural communities in Perak with broadband access.

“As a partner to transform Perak into a full-fledged knowledge state, Infolient will play an integral role in fulfilling our vision of Perak having 51% broadband penetration by 2010,” says Dato Yaacob Nordin, CEO of the KPerak Broadband Project.

The packages currently available for Bandar Seri Iskandar project are the Home Broadband package at RM79 and the Enterprise Broadband package at RM99 per month. Both packages come with a download speed of up to 1Mbps and a free modem with a 12-month warranty.

Will Qualcomm’s Kayak PC alternative fly?

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:10:23 +0000

San Diego, California based Qualcomm, Inc. announced the reference design for its Kayak desktop Internet access terminal, music player and 3D games play with 3G wireless broadband access on 13 November last year.

However will it fly, when several earlier attempts at anything less than a fully-fledged PC have enjoyed limited end-user acceptance, especially on the open retail market, and they eventually fizzled out, as we shall see further down.

Kayak is not a fully fledged PC with all its processing and storage capabilities but instead is a more affordable alternative to a PC intended to help bridge the digital divide over widely available 3G wireless broadband networks especially in emerging countries where there is little fixed line or fixed broadband penetration.

As a reference design, Qualcomm will not make or market Kayak PC alternative itself but will provide the tried and tested circuit design and recommended software specifications to device manufacturers who can then design a wide range of devices based on the reference design, which they then supply to end users.

The Kayak reference design uses Qualcomm’s dual-core Mobile Station Modem (MSM) MSM7xxx-series chipsets to provide both computing and connectivity.

Devices based on the Kayak reference design will offer a fully featured Web 2.0-capable browser from Opera Software which can perform at desktop resolutions, access via the browser to Web 2.0 productivity applications, support both external television sets via composite video as well as computer monitors to be used as displays, is compatible with a standard keyboard and mouse for input, and has a music player and/or a 3D gaming console functionality.

Initial Kayak PC alternative units, manufactured by Taiwan-based Inventec Corp, will be used to initiate user trials during the first quarter of 2009 in Southeast Asia on both CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) networks.

“Emerging markets will be a huge growth driver for the telecommunications industry in the coming years,” said Mark Hirsch, vice president of corporate marketing, Inventec Corporation.

Future plans for commercial Kayak-based devices may include support for Snapdragon solutions.

T-a-a-a-a-a-a-n-n-n-n-g!

However, all this rings alarm bells in my head. Sure, all these ideas for more affordable alternatives to PCs are great and perhaps even noble on the part of their designers to enable the less fortunate to benefit from IT.

However, while there’ve been several attempts to provide more affordable alternatives to full-blown PCs in the past, with few exceptions such as the Apple iPhone and perhaps the netbook PC sized PSION Series Seven personal digital assistant still used by Fairfax Media editor Avanti Kumar to write his stories at press conferences, all the other offerings have at best had relatively limited success, and Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child notebook PC alternative isn’t exactly rocking either.

End-users seem to always want otherwise, as we can see from their current enthusiasm for netbook PCs, which while less powerful than the latest among their notebook PC counterparts, they nonetheless are just more affordable and portable full-blown PCs, running older operating systems such as Windows XP.

Videotex

An early attempt at non-PC IT access was Videotex, which basically was a dialup bulletin board service with rudimentary colour graphics, while a major attempt similar to Qualcomm’s Kayak was Oracle’s Network PC reference design which did not take off either.

Videotex’s greatest success story was the Minitel service in France, where France Telecom gave away Minitel terminals for free and stopped publishing telephone directories, while instead letting subscribers access the directory online with their Mintel terminals.

This also created opportunities for a slew of third parties to provider their information and entertainment content and applications through Minitel.

Research into the Videotex concept began at Britain’s General Post Office (GPO) Telecommunications (now British Telecom) in the late 1960s and it was called Viewdata, and the GPO launched the service under the brand name Prestel.

In 1974, Videotex’s display was standardised as CEPT1 (European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations), which defined a 40 x 24 grid of colour text with some rather rudimentary blocky mosaic graphics characters for constructing simple graphics. These graphic tiles were encoded in the upper half of the extended ASCII code table within the device’s character ROM.

Computers back then were either expensive mainframe or minicomputers located in computer rooms which were off limits to most except for authorised personnel, so Videotex let users with suitably enabled devices dial in to these host computers, usually via in-built 75/1200 baud modems to access the information on them, effectively bringing the benefits of computing to the man on the street.

Videotex terminals came in various forms, including special TV sets, set-top box like adaptors with keyboards, dedicated Videotex terminals with monitor and keyboard and specially adapted PCs, all of which were fitted with internal Videotex modems for access.

It created opportunities for various third-party information providers to provide different types of content and applications either for free or for a fee.

For example, in 1979, Michael Aldrich of Redifon Computers in the UK (later Rediffusion Computers) used a prototype domestic television fitted with the Prestel chip set to demonstrate real-time transaction processing in 1979 and thus he invented teleshopping or online shopping as it is now known.

Selection and navigation of Videotex pages was achieved either with the TV’s remote control of a special QWERTY keyboard which plugged into the TV.

While the GPO had its public Prestel service, Rediffusion had its own Videotex host based on its own minicomputers which supported up to 16 simultaneous callers. The system was aimed at corporate customers to implement their own in-house Videotex systems.

From 1980 onwards, Rediffusion designed, sold and installed its systems with major UK companies including the world's first travel industry system, the world's first vehicle locator system for one of the world's largest auto manufacturers and the world's first supermarket system.

For example, the vehicle locator let salesman in one car showroom locate a make and model of a car the customer wants in another of their showrooms nearest to them.

Aldrich also wrote a book, Videotex - Key to the Wired City (Quiller Press 1982) about his ideas and systems which among other topics explored a future of teleshopping and teleworking that has proven to be prophetic.

He also invented, manufactured and sold Rediffusion’s Teleputer range of PC which could communicate using its Prestel chip set and the company manufactured and sold two models, the Teleputer 1 and the Teleputer 3.

The Teleputer 1 was a straight Videotex terminal, while the Teleputer 3 was an 8-bit Zilog Z80 based micro computer (PC) which ran either under the CP/M operating system or Redifusion’s proprietary version called CP* (CP Star).

At the time, I was a customer service engineer in Rediffusion Malaya’s Computer Marketing Division in the 1980s and was involved with its Videotex products.

The Teleputer 3 had a pair of external single sided 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives, keyboard, internal Videotex modem, 64 KB of memory, an RS232 printer port and it used a modified Rediffusion 14 inch portable colour TV, with the tuner circuitry removed and was being driven via an analogue RGB display input.

All Teleputer 3s came with a suite of applications, consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and database applications written in the BASIC programming language and which ran in a BASIC interpreter, though Rediffusion regarded the Teleputer 3 as a Videotex terminal with microcomputing capabilities, rather than a microcomputer with Videotex access capabilities.

Meanwhile, IBM produced a Videotex card with software which let its IBM PC to be used to access Videotex services.

Telita

In 1982, the Telecommunications Department Malaysia (now Telekom Malaysia) bought a GEC 4000 Videotex minicomputer as a host for its Videotex service which it called Telita – an acronym for Telekom, Lihat dan Tahu – which means Telecom, see and know in the Malay language.

The system occupied half of the fourth floor of its telephone exchange at the end of Jalan Gasing in Petaling Jaya and Telekom provided a four-number short code for subscribers nationwide to dial in at local rates.

One of the information providers on Telita was the Malaysian Medical Association which used it to provide doctors with access to information on the side effects of different medicines.

However, Rediffusion’s Teleputer 3 and IBM’s PCs were priced at RM12,000 and RM14,000 respectively back then, so both were basically unaffordable for most to use for Videotex access.

So Rediffusion did not seriously see the Teleputer 3 as a viable platform for Videotex access, while IBM refused to provide its Videotex card for use in much cheaper clone PCs.

Meanwhile, several other manufacturers provided more affordable desktop Videotex adaptors. For example, Tandata in the UK produced a range of adaptors with integrated keyboard, modem, video and audio ports, and Rediffusion Malaya supplied several hundreds of them to Telekom Malaysia for its Telita service.

However, Telita had a limited end-user uptake and Telekom Malaysia terminated the service in the mid 1990s, by which time the Internet and the World Wide Web had begun to gain traction among end-users and the rest is history.

Videotex in Australia perhaps had wider uptake, thanks perhaps to there being more applications, such as stock trading online and information services.

Meanwhile, while Prestel's two-way features (including e-mail) were interesting, like proverbial horses taken to water, end-users were apparently unwilling to pay much for such a service, so in the late 1980s the system was re-focused to provide financial data, and was eventually bought out by the Financial Times in 1994.

A closed access videotex system based on the Prestel model was developed by the travel industry, and continues to be almost universally used by travel agents throughout the UK, even as late as 1999.

In the late 1990s when Internet was taking off rather healthily in Malaysia, to make it easier for the less PC savvy to access the Internet, Philips Malaysia came out with an Internet adaptor which connected to a home TV set as monitor so people could surf the Web with it using a remote control but it had relatively little uptake, even though it cost less than a PC.

The Network Computer

At the ITU Telecom exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland in 1995, Oracle Corp’s chairman and chief executive officer, Larry Ellison announced the concept for a Network Computer (NC) reference design based on Oracle technology.

IBM’s Lou Gerstner also announced IBMs commitment to the idea.

Like Qualcomm’s Kayak, the NC was to be a dedicated Internet access device rather than a full-blown PC which dialled up to the Internet to access information and applications.

In November, 1996 Ellison launched the NC amidst much fanfare at the Oracle Open World event at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, and he also announced a subsidiary in charge of managing the licensing of its NC reference design to various manufacturers.

At the same time, he also announced Oracle HatTrick, a suite of Java-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics applets for the NC.

HatTrick was to run within the messaging interface of Oracle InterOffice 4.0, its Web-based collaboration software, which would save users from having to open multiple applications to run its different applications.

Written completely in Java, HatTrick also published natively in HTML enabling graphically-enhanced documents created with HatTrick to be viewed with any browser. HatTrick was to have shipped with InterOffice 4.1 in the first quarter of 1997.

By then, several manufacturers had produced their own variants of the NC in a variety of forms, including desktop terminals, TV set-top boxes, TVs incorporating an NC, NCs built into telephones and even a Wireless NC.

They cost between US$300 and US$500. Available immediately then were the Acorn NC and the IDEA Internet Client Station (ICS), which were desktop NCs costing US$400 and US$500 respectively, with the rest to be rolled out beginning December 1996 and through 1997.

Ellison expected the NC to enable the development of the information society by allowing most households, in the United States and the rest of the world, to enjoy the benefits of computer and information technology (IT).

With his palms outstretched and faced downward, and with the stage lighting bathing him in a beam of golden light, Ellison said rather prophetically in his trademark flamboyant and charismatic manner, “With 70% of US and over 90% of non-US households not having a computer, the information society will not happen.”

The rate of adoption of PCs among US households without PCs has slowed from four per cent in 1994 to a projected two per cent in 1996, so with the advent of the NC, Ellison expected 90% of US households to have computers by the year 2000.

He expected that by that time NC technology would cost less than US$100 and would be integrated into a variety of appliances including TV sets, telephones, handphones, calculators and many others.

Being made in many different forms by many competing manufacturers, Ellison saw the NC challenging Microsoft’s dominance over the computers and IT industry.

“The idea that one company can control the most important technology and industry in the world is totally unacceptable,” said Ellison.

To dispel claims by certain quarters that the lack of bandwidth over plain old telephone lines would hamper the adoption of the NC among home users, Ellison demonstrated full-motion streaming video on an NC which he claimed was connected via a 28.8 Kbps dialup modem.

However, Oracle targeted the NC mainly at corporations where it hoped to gain from the PC and terminal replacement market. It also focussed the NC at the education market.

“The NC will save schools on having to hire network administration staff,” Ellison said.

Also present at Open World was Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy, who cradled Sun’s own equivalent of a dedicated Internet access device. When asked he did not know its name and said, “Perhaps, The Earthquake,” because of its stylised split design.

Sun was also behind the NC idea, since it was and still is a strong advocate of the concept of the network being the computer, which shows signs of coming to pass today, with the buzz over cloud computing.

Oracle Open World events are occasions for much grandstanding about one’s products and technologies, with much ridiculing of competitors’ products, especially those of Microsoft’s, and the tone of much of the hubris over the NC was partly due to opposition to Microsoft.

However, Hewlett Packard’s Lou Platt was the most level headed when he proclaimed, “We won’t get involved in technology wars and will continue to support different technologies.”

After all, Oracle, Sun and Hewlett Packard are based in California’s Silicon Valley, while Microsoft is based in Redmond, Washington State and there certainly is a degree of techno-politics and corporate cultural differences between IT companies based in these two regions.

Come to think of it, there even are cultural differences even between the IT industry in Silicon Valley south of San Francisco and the entertainment industry centred around Hollywood near Los Angeles.

I even suspect there are cultural differences between the artistic and alternative culture of San Francisco which the hippies gravitated to, and the technological/ entrepreneurial culture of the Silicon Valley nearby.

It’s unfortunate that the IT media lets itself get drawn into these techno-tribal wars, thus helping to promote and reinforce the kind of Apple versus PC, Palm OS versus Windows Mobile and so on among IT fans, which is not much different from soccer club fans getting into fights with fans of rival clubs, though with a little more decorum.

In Asia, Oracle at the time was soon to announce NC hardware manufacturers in Japan, Taiwan and Korea, its senior vice president for the Asia Pacific Division, Derek Williams said.

Williams expected the English-language version of the NC to be available in the region in the first quarter of 1997 and a double-byte version by March that year.

I had the chance to try out some of its Asian variants in Kuala Lumpur in early 1997 and one hung when I tried to access the website of Thailand’s newspaper The Nation, perhaps due to some incompatible content.

In the run up to Oracle Open World 96 and at the event itself, Oracle touted the advent of the NC as marking the end of the PC era and the dawn of the NC era.

However, two years later, Ellison conceded that the NC was a failure, while the PC era continued unabated and Microsoft is still king of the hill.

A replay of the NC?

Now will Qualcomm’s Kayak PC alternative reference design be a replay of the NC but with 3G connectivity, though unlike Oracle, Qualcomm did not make any grandiose claims of its epoch shattering effects?

SURF! put that question to Goh Thih Liang (Goh), Qualcomm’s country manager for Malaysia.

SURF!: Your press release of 13 November, 2008 says, "The Kayak PC alternative fills the niche that exists between desktop PCs, which normally require landlines or separate accessories for connectivity, and Internet-capable wireless devices" and further down says, "Manufacturers can then design a wide range of devices based on the Kayak reference design…". So what are these different types of devices which can be based on the Kayak reference design and do they include everything from desktop PCs to notebooks and the increasingly popular netbook PCs such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a special version of which has an integrated SIM card is already being offered by Maxis?

GOH: It is up to the manufacturers to determine the types of devices which will be based on the Kayak reference design. Our focus is on ensuring that the devices are affordable and that there is connectivity. Computing is important, but connectivity is the key. It’s not just the digital divide – now it’s the connectivity divide.

Many millions of people living in remote or underdeveloped areas are still waiting to experience the adventure, opportunity and truly life-changing benefits of the Internet. Cost, geographic and infrastructure challenges make it extremely difficult for them to obtain even basic dial-up Internet access. Thanks to the Kayak PC alternative, wireless technology is poised to help bring affordable Internet connectivity to markets where wired connections have been slow in coming, difficult to install or simply unaffordable.

Kayak is a great example of how Qualcomm and its customers are leveraging 3G networks to help bring developing markets into the global online community for the first time.

SURF!: Does Qualcomm charge manufacturers any fees to use the Kayak reference design?

Goh: Qualcomm is consistent with its typical business model for the Kayak reference design.

SURF!: Qualcomm describes Kayak as a "PC alternative," so is it for some kind of PC or some kind of dedicated Internet access device using 3G cellular broadband?

Goh: Kayak is a thin-client-type device designed primarily to allow people to use Internet-based services and applications, like web browsing, webmail and online productivity applications. It includes a full-featured web browser, Opera, as well as graphic and audio processing to make the most of the applications and content available online. Both television sets and computer monitors can be used as displays with a standard keyboard and mouse for input. Kayak devices can also function as music players and 3D gaming consoles. The main advantages of Kayak are built-in cellular connectivity and an inherently lower-cost platform based on high-volume wireless chipsets.

SURF: If so, is Qualcomm resuscitating Oracle's Larry Ellison's concept of the Network Computer reference design launched at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco in late 1996 and which Ellison admitted was a failure two years later?

Goh: In 2009 it’s hard to argue against the importance of the Internet as a source of information and, increasingly, useful applications. With the rise of WiFi, netbooks and Internet-capable mobile phones, getting online is an increasingly important part of people’s lives. We want to make it possible for more people to take advantage of the information and services that are available online.

SURF!: Going back further to the late 60s, Britian's Post Office Telecommunications conceived Prestel videotex, which was a forerunner to the Internet and many manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon with different types of stand-alone consumer terminals to use to access Prestel and other videotex services but that failed, with the exception of France's Minitel service. While it could be argued that videotex, with its limited, blocky and rather crude alpha-mosaic graphics on a 40 x 24 screen was superceded by the Internet and the World Wide Web and web browsers on full-blow PCs, still could both the failure of videotex, Ellison's Network Computer reference design, Philips' Internet access appliance introduced in the 90s and even Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Chile notebook PC be due to users preference for a full-blown computer, including lower processing-powered netbook PCs, rather than a limited function, dedicated access device?

Goh: Telecommunications networks and technologies are very different today compared with the late 1970s. What is important is to have fully functional Internet access and the ability to take advantage of all of the services and applications that make the Internet useful, and then making all of that available to people who haven’t been able to experience it before. Also, because Kayak is a reference design, local partners can design a final product that meets the needs of local markets.

SURF: Why doesn't Qualcomm just focus on enabling integrated 3G, whether CDMA2000 or WCDMA access in various Intel architecture and Apple Mac PCs?

Goh: Qualcomm does that as well, by providing solutions such as Gobi, our integrated wireless broadband solution for notebook computers, and technology for wireless USB modems and similar products. We see 3G as a broad based platform upon which various devices can communicate. But we also wanted to provide a reference design – Kayak – for markets where some people can’t afford a full-featured PC or get access to the necessary connectivity.

SURF!: Further down, the press release says, “Emerging markets will be a huge growth driver for the telecommunications industry in the coming years,” said Mark Hirsch. Which emerging markets are you targeting and how much cheaper than say a netbook or clone desktop PC will be a device based on the Kayak reference design be?

Goh: Kayak is primarily targeted at emerging markets in Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and Latin America. Kayak systems’ cost will vary depending on specific designs and capabilities as chosen by device manufacturers, but are expected to be much more affordable than PCs that are then retrofitted with solutions for 3G connectivity.

It’s difficult for us to pin down a precise price point, since there are many factors which would affect the final price, but based on other efforts in these markets, we do feel that the final devices must be below $200 in order to be successful. Of course, if network operators decide to subsidize part of the device cost as a bundle deal with data minutes, the cost to the user will be even less.

SURF!: Besides Opera browser, music player and gaming, does the Kayak reference design also include a POP/IMAP e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation graphics and personal information manager for people who want work done on the go?

Goh: The Kayak reference design is not for mobile devices – it is a desktop PC-style format. Kayak is primarily designed to allow people to access hosted applications. Today there are powerful online solutions for e-mail (many of which will also connect to POP3 and IMAP servers), productivity and more. And focusing on hosted applications keeps the complexity and cost of the device low. However, the device has to be sophisticated enough to support the audiovisual features that make for a good experience.

SURF!: How will Qualcomm ensure Internet access appliances based on its Kayak reference design will be a success after such a track record of failures of similar devices based on similar intentions to offer a cheaper alternative to PCs -- which have been gradually falling lower and lower. For example an entry-level notebook PC cost around RM7,000 back in 1996 but today one costs less than RM2,000. So how will devices based on the Kayak reference design beat that?

Goh: We do see Kayak as being a very different effort in the sense that we’re not as focused on low-cost computing as we are on Internet connectivity. We believe that computing may be very important to these markets, but connectivity is key to helping these regions build their productivity.

The global demand for low-cost computing and Internet connectivity has only begun to be addressed, and there is still room for innovation in this emerging market. One limitation of current low-cost PCs is the lack of affordable Internet access options for many users. The wide availability of 3G wireless networks worldwide makes wireless an obvious option for Internet access in much of the world.

Elevyn.com

bernard@oneworld.com.my (sifu) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:10:10 +0000

Kiva + Etsy = Elevyn:
How to Change The World One Basket a Time

Pick up a handmade village craft in your local store and you may be rewarded with a warm fuzzy feeling that you’ve helped a poor villager in a remote location. After all, you’ve created demand for his craft. Surely, he’ll be rewarded accordingly.

…Right?

Look a little closer and you’ll see a very different story.

How much of the money you spend really makes it to the maker or artisan who created the item? Let’s see - The store will take a cut, so will the wholesaler, and don’t forget the agents who source the crafts directly from the villages. In the end, the maker – arguably the most important person in this process is left with next to nothing, sometimes getting under 10% of the final sale price.

Elevyn changes all that.

Through the help of local partners, Elevyn helps to connect poor artisans and villagers directly to customers around the world. The result? By cutting out all the middle men and their bottom lines, the maker now gets close to 85% of the final sale price.
You may have heard of Etsy.com, a community specialized in selling hand-made items directly on the Internet. Think of Elevyn as Etsy for the poor. Elevyn stocks everything from belts, baskets, and jewelry to coasters, music instruments, and key chains. All beautifully handcrafted by village artisans.

Sustainable Development
Both Kiva.org and Elevyn.com works on the basis of sustainable charity ie. engaging in charitable activities which help these people lift themselves out from poverty in the long run.

Kiva.org works on the basis of microloans helping small business owners in poor countries. Elevyn picks up where Kiva leaves off by connecting these people to the world and giving them a pool of demand which would otherwise never have existed for these villagers.

Engaging the community
On top of direct contributions to the maker, a certain portion (around 5%) is also donated to a charitable cause, ranging from tree planting to women’s groups.

Elevyn also organizes artisans so they can get together to achieve greater economies of scale and specialization as well as raise awareness about the value of the goods they produce.   Working with field partners to help out with the orders and dealings on the Internet, Elevyn is also committed to capacity building in terms of electricity and Internet access via satellite in these villages.

Yes, you can make a difference
People get jaded when the money they donate goes into a giant fund, never knowing who they helped and what their impact truly was.   Elevyn offers complete transparency where you will be able to see where all the money goes to the exact cent when you make a purchase. You will also be able to see how much money any particular villager has made in real time, and the impact your purchase had on his life.

Elevyn has also built-in trading features which allow negotiation and buying in bulk, and allows tracking of shipments so you know where your package is during transit.

Built by Malaysians, now helping Malaysians
Who’s behind this grand vision, you ask? Malaysians. That’s right. 3 of them. Devan Singaram, Mike Tee and Puah Sze Ning make up the group called Elevyn. In fact their first village in the program is from Sabah (They plan to go beyond the shores of Malaysia of course).

They are partnering with Soning Craft which was founded by sisters Mazeline and Malina Soning, who ventured into the crafts business to help craftswomen in their village to sell their crafts.

All the way from Kampung Tinangol in Kudat, Sabah, East Malaysia, they first ventured to the capital city Kota Kinabalu setting up a small stall to showcase the fine crafts from the talented craftspeople from all across Sabah.

Realizing the need to explore other markets to help better the economic status of the SINOMPURU Women’s Group in their village, Soning Craft hooked up with Elevyn to be the very first shop to launch on Elevyn.

Also, because a rising number of rural schools and clinics in Sabah are now equipped with Satellite Internet and Solar power, their aim is to get these people on board Elevyn as well.

Thinking of getting someone a truly meaningful gift? I can’t think of a better place to start looking. Visit: Elevyn.com.

Friedchillies.com

bernard@oneworld.com.my (sifu) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:41:26 +0000

First Internet Food TV station in the ASEAN Region Leverages Multiple Adobe Technologies to Enable Cross-Platform Publishing Business Model

Business Enablement with Adobe Solutions
Friedchillies.com is a specialist topic content brand that provides food guides, editorial, reviews and community information for afficionados of Asian food, including street food.

Based in multi-cultural Malaysia – the geographical meeting place of a variety of major Asian cuisines – the company is in the businesses of crossmedia platform publishing for online and print, internet and broadcast TV, and mobile content, as well as content licensing and partnering.

Complete End to End Workflow
“With a complete end-to-end workflow, Adobe’s design, print-production and video solutions have enabled the economics and implementation of our entire cross platform creation to delivery model,” said FriedChillies founder and director, Adly Rizal.
FriedChillies.com successfully competes against industry leaders with far fewer employees and a fraction of the operating budget of traditional publishers or broadcasters.

FriedChillies also writes the food content sections of the Official Malaysian Tourist Pages and Yellow Pages, and of a ‘Yellow Post’ mass consumer weekly produced by a subsidiary of the national telecommunications provider, which provides a great cross platform delivery strategy for the company.

FriedChillies.TV was officially launched online in March 2007. Five months into the project, the company was awarded an e-Content Grant from Malaysia’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to further develop the country’s first Internet Food Channel.

Higher Viewership Rate and Broader Audience Reach
With 50% domestic Internet penetration including 10% broadband access at 1MB or above in 2008, the publisher now receives 1.5 million brand hits a month domestically and internationally, giving it a higher viewership rate and a broader audience reach than comparable specialist print publishing and terrestrial television programming in the country.

The publisher expects that as it continues to monetize the content platform, 70% of its revenues will be derived from online advertising and from branded content licensing, within 18 months.

“It’s “all about owning the eyeballs through highly engaging content” according Adly Rizal, “and, with Internet TV, we are able to create an efficient platform to deliver original content programming to our fans and receive in return; their loyalty and their eyeball time.”

Content, Chemistry and Technology
From inception, FriedChillies.com monitored trends in online community creation and video streaming, examining the requirements for a social networking and “Word of Mouth” approach to publishing and implementing on multiple opportunities to deliver high quality at a low cost.

The company has now created its own television studio and intends to begin licensing its unique branded content on a variety of delivery channels that go from narrowcast outlets in retail and in railways up to terrestrial television stations domestically and internationally; while strengthening its fundamentals as an independent publisher via its own Internet portal, its online TV feeds, and its publications.

From using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, and Creative Suite 3 Production Premium for the design and implementation of its off- and on-line publications, the move into online television was spurred by the technical and commercial viability of delivering video directly to viewers via Adobe Flash (FLV) Player, thus bypassing traditional models of video broadcast distribution.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium enabled the economics of PC based digital production for FriedChillies.com while Adobe Onlocation’s monitoring tool provides valuable production support for the directors in the studio, whilst other applications bundled in the suite enable video editing, motion graphics, voice over and soundtracks. Almost the entire suite is leveraged to produce high quality, engaging video for the FriedChillies Internet TV channels.

With two Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium licences, one Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro licence, and one Adobe CS3 InDesign licence, FriedChillies is currently running on an open source platform.

Implementation and integration of Adobe Flash (FLV) Player into the publisher’s current html-based blogging system with mySQL, Apache and PHP architecture, was conducted with in-house resources, after 6 months’ trial use and experimentation.
Fried Chillies was an early user of the Adobe Media Player beta version, and intends to use the customizable desktop platform for users to subscribe to, and automatically download new content as it becomes available. The publisher will be able to “custom skin” content playback screens, carry out sophisticated measurement of usage data even when video content is viewed offline, and further monetize the business model with contextual advertising placement.

FriedChillies is also looking at opportunities to deploy Adobe® Flash® Media Server 3 for streaming media with industry standard H.264 video capabilities and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support, to give the Internet TV station a more efficient, instant-on video experience with enhanced imagery functionality, that is encrypted for digital rights management, to the Web, to the desktop via Adobe Media Player, and to mobile devices with Adobe Flash Lite™ 3 so viewers can enjoy high quality broadcast television both online and offline in an engaging, customized video experience.

Asiastream – an Adobe user’s perspective

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:17:04 +0000

Malaysian company the Asiastream Group is a diversified entity that focuses on information & communications technology (ICT), WebTV, and events/communications.

Its team is experienced in handling each of the industries and also has the capability to cross integrate services for maximum value impact to clients, and provide end-to-end services together with business partners.

The group currently includes Aleph One, a full service event management company; Catz Maya which does web portal development, e-commerce applications, workflow applications, customized systems development, consultancy – usability, e-branding, e-marketing and search engine optimization; and ADTV which develops, produces, transmits, manages and distributes for terrestrial tv, satellite tv, IP-TV, the Web, narrowcast networks, mobile networks, and wireless networks.

Designing for print

An associate company Intercipta’s core businesses is in creative design and communications, as well as brand communication design; and has been using Adobe software for over 10 years, with its main focus areas being in print and the Web.

Intercipta has used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop over the past 10 years to create banners, buntings, brochures, newsletters and annual reports, mostly for big clients such as Petronas, Khazanah Nasional, the Iskandar Regional Development Authority, the Ministry of Tourism Malaysia and others.

A fully Apple Mac based design house, Intercipta uses Adobe Illustrator on Mac G5’s newer iMacs and Mac Book notebooks to do layouts, makeup and prepress of these print media.

The text and boxes are laid out using Illustrator and where a picture is required to be inserted, a link in Illustrator calls a picture which has been manipulated in Photoshop and which are saved in JPEG, TIFF, PNG or some other raster format.

Illustrator is the integrator which calls objects into its file and it saves it in its native AI format.

Intercipta previously used Adobe Creative Suite 2 and 3 and now uses Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

Creative Suite 4 includes about 20 different Adobe creative applications, including Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and others.

“New to CS4 are Tab Navigation and Blob Brush. Tab Navigation lets designers switch between different documents or images which we are working on, while Blob Brush lets us scribble and it’s much clearer,” said Helendri Bujang, a creative designer with Intercipta parent company, the AsiaStream Group.

“CS4 is also faster, its file sizes are smaller, it auto-optimises files, is nimbler and requires only 2GB of RAM on a Mac to install,” he added.

Illustrator’s files use vector graphic images, which are very compact compared to their raster graphics counterparts, such as digital photographs, and they can be easily sent by email without exceeding size limits.

Vector graphics consists of line graphics with a picture and it’s based on mathematical formulae which let the size of images be enlarged or reduced without loss of quality, such as the pixilation visible in photos which are enlarged beyond a point.

CS4 has a facility to do a livetrace – ie. to scan a raster image and import it into an Illustrator file as a vector image and save AI file which mostly comprises mathematical equations.

“For example, our principal and group creative director, Nur-Ruhizan bin Dato’ Noh Abdullah once created a 25 x 13 foot backdrop for a stage, including pictures and graphics which was to be printed on a large format printer and he sent it as an email attachment,” said Helendri. Typically, such files are under 1 MB is size.

Since Illustrator is used so widely, it’s so much easier to find people who know how to use it, its barriers of entry are much lower, and designers can work faster and more efficiently with it.

…and for the Web

Catz Maya uses Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop to design web pages, mostly on Windows PCs and one Apple Mac.

Dreamweaver is a website creation program which outputs in HTML and there’s a tight integration between Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash for video and banners, and for video encoding.

Catz Maya has been using Dreamweaver since version 3.0, seven years ago, and before Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2006.

It has created websites for big customers such as Petronas, the Sarawak state government, the East Coast Economic Development Region and Standards Malaysia.

The website it created for the Kapit Division, Resident’s Office, www.kapitro.sarawak.gov.my which won the Best Government Website award from the Sarawak government, while the website created for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Selangor (SPCA), www.spca.org.my was listed among the top 10 on Google.

The main tools it used were Dreamweaver and Photoshop, and the latter also lets it manage Flash videos, where Flash files can be opened in Photoshop and vice-versa.

The AI file complete with pictures from Illustrator can be imported into Dreamweaver CS4 and converted into HTML format, and the pictures can also be cut into smaller pieces for quicker loading.

Catz Maya also handles smaller clients but they can also do these creations on their own using these tools.

More organised

“In CS4, Illustrator is more organised and lets designers switch between documents faster and to make comparisons,” said Lauralyn Silva, Intercipta creative associate.

“It more easily arranges documents automatically, is faster, more user friendly, so we can view all documents in one screen,” she added.

Another function lets designers make several art boards, such as logos, name cards, bunting and so on, all in one file and it’s easier to switch between different versions of documents.

A new feature in Dreamweaver CS4 is Livesite, which lets designers edit text and graphics since they are tightly integrated.

Also, if changes are made in Photoshop to an image which has been called by Dreamweaver, the tight integration between them results in the image in Dreamweaver also being updated when the same image in Photoshop is saved.

There’s also tight integration with Web 2.0 components, with the Web 2.0 processing done on the client side.

Files can also be saved in ASP, PHP, XML, WML or other online scripts, so it basically lets web designers perform tasks previously done by web programmers and it lets them see their web page take shape in real time.

A new feature in CS4 also lets them view their creation as it will appear on many specific models of mobile phone.

Catering to the mass

It may seem strange that Catz Maya mostly uses PCs, when the prevalent impression is that the Apple Mac is the preferred designers’ tool.

Well over 90% of Catz Maya’s customers use PC, which run either Windows or Linux, while over 90% of designers indeed use Apple Macs but since its customers view websites on PCs, Catz Media likewise decided to develop their web pages on PCs, especially since Adobe provided the same tools and has rationalised the same shortcuts on both Mac and PC platforms to make integration easier and faster; and using PCs also makes it easier to hire designers.

The Asiastream group of companies and Intercipta are in-house functional affiliates of Inter.asia Communications, a regional public relations agency.

“These Malaysia-based affiliates provide specialist design expertise for our regional clients as and when required, and they also let us realise budget savings,” said David Gibson, Inter.Asia managing director (www.inter-asia.biz).

Dhakshinamoorthy

bernard@oneworld.com.my (sifu) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:14:14 +0000

Surf! speaks to the man responsible for bringing the Global Entrepreneur Week to Malaysia.

Dhakshinamoorthy or Dash as he prefers to be called, is the consummate entrepreneur. Little wonder than that when the Global Entrepreneur Week (GEW) was looking for a Malaysian host, it would be Dash’s company, Warisan Global that stepped forward to take up the challenge.

Surf! meets up with the man driven by the desire to develop entrepreneurship among youths.

“I guess I was always an entrepreneur. When I was in school, I was selling matchbox cars, fighting fish and what not”, he offers as proof that the entrepreneur spirit has always been there in his case.

Dash was born and bred in KL spending his childhood in the Air Panas New Village in Setapak. By the time he reached Form 6, he had started his own tuition centre. After leaving school, he had two choices; either go to university and probably end up a teacher or venture out into the world of work and business. No prizes for guessing which direction he took.

He first got articled with Ernst & Young. That made him quickly realise that he did not want to count other people’s money. Next he worked for some time for a small business before setting up his own consulting firm. Along the way, he completed his MBA and his firm grew from 2 to 15 people and he was handling 200 clients.

His next venture saw him bringing in IT grads from India to work in Malaysia. “The MSC was starting up and there was a need for IT workers.” In 2000, he started his own training company. “I thought to myself, why not create our own IT people?”
Dash took on a franchise from the Indian based NIIT education group. He set up their first Centre for Advanced Technology in Malaysia. Unfortunately, his timing was impeccable! “The day we opened, the NASDAQ crashed. The dotcom bubble had burst, and the IT industry went down. Along with it went all the money I had pumped into the franchise.”

Still, he did not give up and instead tried to reinvent that business. “I rewrote the entire NIIT strategy but unfortunately, my recommendations were not taken up by the president of NIIT. “So at the end of 3 years, when the franchise expired, I said thank you and we put up the Warisan Global signboard.

“I dreamed of setting up a social enterprise. I wanted to manage socially focused projects. But dreams need clients to become reality. Thank God, we got clients and grew slowly. Entrepreneurship was hot and we started doing entrepreneur programmes in Universities and so on.”

Warisan Global later tied up with the Judge Business School, Cambridge University and set up a centre for entrepreneur development in Malaysia.

Last year, the Global Entrepreneur Week (GEW) came along. It was a tremendous opportunity for a company like Global Warisan. But hard work was required and the challenges were aplenty.

Again, his entrepreneur background convinced him to take on the challenge. GEW was a success in Malaysia. Dash and Warisan Global spearheaded a project that saw Malaysia become just about the top country for GEW activities outside US and UK.
We had one final question for Dash. What would he like to see happen next? “I would like to see Malaysia right up there on the global entrepreneur map. To show that we are a thriving entrepreneur society.”

Dash would also like to see Malaysian entrepreneurs reach out to their counterparts globally without inhibitions as well as see them connect more with each other locally. Personally, he dreams of continuing the work he has started with GEW. “I would like to be seen as a global entrepreneur connector.”

GO FOR BROKE! Tales of Technopreneurship

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:49:55 +0000

The book GO FOR BROKE! Tales of Entrepreneurship, edited by Oon Yeoh is a rich and highly readable resource for those who want to learn about the various approaches, philosophies, trials and tribulations of 21 prominent entrepreneurs who have made their mark on the local, regional and international technology scene.

The term “technopreneur” is most probably a uniquely Malaysian construct which means a technology entrepreneur or an entrepreneur involved in technology, since the term can neither be found in Wikipedia nor the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

Most of the 21 entrepreneurs are involved in or related to information and communications technology, some are involved in biotechnology, intellectual property consulting, help startups obtain financing and in holistic medicine.

Most are also in their mid forties, while some are even grandfathers. Most also began their careers in the rather conventional way by first joining an established company where they learned the business, made their contacts and built up their finances before they ventured out on their own.

Many ventured out long before initiatives such as MSC Malaysia were even conceived, so there were no such things as Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), MAVCAP, or Cradle Investment Programme grants and hand holding to rely on, so they had to rely on their savings, forego their salaries, survive on instant noodles and water (no pricey lattes), and upon the goodwill of others, and since angel funding and venture capital were things only found in the United States back then, some had to obtain a bank loan if they needed extra cash.

The book also provides examples of thinking outside the box which are invaluable lessons, especially where many who fancy themselves to be thinking outside the box are in fact thinking within a different box, whatever box it may be.

A rather ironic example of thinking within different boxes can be seen in youthful rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s against the conformist corporate man. The youth expressed their rejection through their dress which comprised blue denim jeans, a long sleeved tee shirt, a blue denim shirt and had long flowing hair, which wasn’t all that different from the dark blue trousers, white shirt, dark blue tie and short cropped hair worn by IBM employees.

Mathavan Chandran, chief executive officer of biotechnology company InfoValley and an ethnic Indian, rejects the model favoured by hip technnoprenenurs of growing their business fast and instead he favours the “Chinaman” approach of keeping costs low, hence profit high.

He also rejects the trendy notion that that knowledge management can be achieved through a web-based portal but instead believes that knowledge thrives and is shared among people in face-to-face interaction, since information isn’t knowledge, which is a far cry from the Facebook entrepreneurship which is popular today.

On the other hand, Wei Chuan Beng, group chief executive officer of REDtone and an ethnic Chinese, rejects the “Chinaman” approach of his parents wholesale foodstuffs distribution business in favour of the innovative application of core competencies which generate lots of income, instead of slogging for long hours.

In another example, while MOL AccessPortal’s flagship offering is its MOLePoints online micropayments system, when the company had teamed up with eBay to let Malaysians make safe payments for purchases through MOL SafePay, its chief executive officer Ganesh Kumar Bangah realised that since MOLePoints still wasn’t accepted by most merchants, he adopted a more practical approach to enable payment using MOL Freedom Prepaid Mastercard issued by EON Bank and which is accepted by merchants and available through 7-Eleven stores nationwide to anyone above 12 years of age.

There are others who refused to obtain venture capital in preference for organic growth, while others refuse to list their companies as a means to obtain cheap funds for expansion, since both approaches have their drawbacks in terms of independence and added bureaucracy.

The story of Harres Tan, chief executive officer of HT Consulting is a fine example of having to quickly adapt to rapid changes taking place in the technology industry.

In 1980, Tan joined local computer hardware supplier Unidata to help it grow but 10 years later he realised that the heydays of hardware would be soon over and the future lucrative area was in software.

At that time, an 40MB Ampex hard disk drive like those sold by Unidata sold for several tens of thousands of Ringgit, required at least two persons to lift and like a car had to be regularly serviced by a technician, so it could fetch wide profit margins but as we can see today, a 250GB hard disk drive costs under RM200, fits into a trouser pocket and once installed, can be forgotten until it needs replacement years later.

However, Unidata’s founder KC Toh didn’t share Tan’s belief, so Tan left to found Unify Software which supplied database management systems and fourth generation languages from Unify Corporation in the US to the Asian region and his company made several millions of Ringgit within five years.

Today, Tan is looking at a new business model for HT Consulting, whereby like Fuji Xerox, it will put its computer hardware and software in its client’s premises and charge them for its use on a per transaction basis.

To maintain espirit de corp and camaraderie among his current and former employees, they all meet for happy hours of free drinks and food in HT Consulting’s reception area at 5.30pm each Friday. Thankfully, they haven’t caught the Starbucks/Facebook entrepreneurship bug and they can afford not to.

A past chairman of PIKOM, Tan is also an accomplished musician who plays in his band MP3, comprised of executives in PIKOM member companies, which shows that hardworking technopreneurs know how to play hard as well.

An interesting thing about GO FOR BROKE! is that all of the 21 technopreneurs are men. Surely, there must be some women technopreneurs out there.

GO FOR BROKE! (ISBN 978-983-2992-07-3) is published by GoodBasic Media in collaboration with the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM) and MDEC. It’s available at RM39.95 from leading bookstores.

Invest in R&D to stay ahead, says Mahathir

carjunkman@yahoo.com (Administrator) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:06:49 +0000

Investments in research and development (R&D) in knowledge-based industries is the key for Malaysia to keep up with or stay ahead of its competitors in information and communications technology (ICT), according to Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former prime minister.

During his tenure, Mahathir was instrumental in the setting up of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC Malaysia), launched on 1 August, 1996 so Malaysia could venture into the knowledge age at the beginning, along with other countries and people more advanced economically than us.

“We went into the industrial age much later than the countries which initiated in and we were therefore handicapped and had to depend on the expertise and technology of those who had exploited them earlier,” said Mahathir in his talk, The MSC and Leadership in the Information Age” in Cyberjaya on 22 April.

The goal of the MSC Malaysia project is to provide the infrastructure and knowledge for the people to be trained and to actually be involved in R&D and in businesses made possible by the quick and easy access to information.

Disappointing performance

However, while the project was a pioneering initiative by Malaysia among developing countries, Mahathir was rather disappointed that Malaysia has fallen behind its competitors by a few years in this area.

“Much progress has been made with MSC Malaysia but it’s not quite what we had expected,” said Mahathir.

While an International Advisory Panel helps to guide and monitor the progress being made, Mahathir felt that Malaysia has not yet developed an R&D culture which would speed up our progress and ICT, nor have we learned to use the power of information and the hardware that has been developed, as much as we should to expand our economy.

A university was set up in MSC Malaysia to produce the personnel to go into this new industry but Mahathir felt that it’s unfortunate that having seized the opportunity to start together with the others, we’ve fallen behind and allowed others to go ahead as we neglect this information potential.

“The fact that our competitors are better equipped and are prepared to provide more funds than us has only increased the gap between them and us,” said Mahathir. “To catch up with them will be a difficult task and we may not achieve it even if we try but for certain we will be left behind if we do not try at all and to catch up we really have to go all out,” he added.

Mahathir, a medical practitioner, cited as an example the pharmaceutical company May & Baker which had filed many patents on medicines, not all of which it actually marketed.

“However, if research yields results, the returns can be many, many times greater than the funds expended,” he said.

Worldwide recognition

On gaining respect and recognition for quality, Mahathir urged Malaysian ICT companies to invest in the promotion of their products and services in new markets without expecting an immediate return.

He cited Japanese manufacturer Komatsu which flew its tractor to Ireland by plane to demonstrate its capabilities as being better than the competition, while being prepared to bear an initial loss.

However, the problem with that is that both May & Baker and Komatsu are established multinational with deep pockets, while Malaysia’s ICT companies are mostly startup companies, so how can they afford to make such long term investments, without quick returns?

“Irrespective, they must invest some of their revenue on R&D and like the pharmaceutical giants they may want to consider pooling their resources in shared investments, the results of which they can all share in,” said Mahathir.

“To those in charge of funds, I would like to point out that funding research is not like investing in a business. We cannot predict, and most certainly we cannot guarantee a return on investments. However, the funds expended on research are never wasted, as at the very least, we would be adding to the sum total of our knowledge in the fields concerned,” added Mahathir who sees animation and robotics as areas with current potential.

He also cautioned Malaysian ICT companies which have developed products and solutions to not rest on their laurels but to always be alert to new developments, citing the satellite phone company Iridium which let people make calls from almost anywhere on the planet but which was overtaken by terrestrial cellular phone systems.

Real economy more robust

On Malaysia being affected by the global economic crisis, Mahathir feels that we’re involved in the real business of producing goods and providing services, we will not be badly affected by the crash of speculative businesses in North America and Europe.

“For example, the producing businesses such as in Germany and Japan are not as badly affected by the crash as the speculative businesses and while we will be affected to an extent, many companies are moving here to take advantage of our skills, and as an exporter, we must find new markets for our products and services,” said Mahathir.

Also after 30 years of Neo-Liberal policies, economists, investment advisors and analysts in the most badly affected Anglo Saxon countries are beginning to question the “conventional wisdom” of over 30 years of neo-liberal, von Hayekist, Chicago School policies of globalisation, of shifting their productive industries offshore, of free trade, open borders and so on.

For example in his article, “Doomed by the Myths of Free Trade: How the Economy was Lost,” Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration wrote that the offshoring of manufacturing jobs by US corporations resulted in the loss of well paying manufacturing jobs, which were replaced by low paying service jobs, such as selling products in mega stores such as Wal-Mart.

The later offshoring of professional services by these corporations enabled by the high-speed Internet, resulted in the further loss of highly skilled and highly paid jobs, with software engineers and ICT workers being the most badly affected.

All this not only resulted in the states of the United States losing their tax base but also in the greater reliance by people on credit to maintain their lifestyle, which kept the economy afloat for a while longer but which was ultimately unsustainable, leading to the collapse of the financial services and speculative industries in the United States.

End the neo-liberal era?

Now does this mean an end to ideology of neo-liberal globalisation, open borders and free trade, and a return to a more protected economies with higher tariff barriers?

“The current form of globalisation is not good as it lets the rich exploit the poor,”said Mahathir.

Lopsided economy?

On the impression that Malaysia has placed too much emphasis on the ICT industry while it played down or even ridiculed its legacy agricultural and manufacturing industries, instead of enhancing them as part of an holistic economy, Mahathir said, “Different governments focused on different industries relevant to his period and if they did not focus on certain things, they would not be able to move into those areas.”

“My government focused on ICT not only in itself but also as an enabler for more advanced techniques in agriculture and manufacturing. For example, farmers in many other countries carry notebook PCs, while microchips are used to deliver the correct amount of fertilizer, water and so on to the crops,” he added.

An age, not digital divide

Mahathir believes the so called digital divide is in fact an age divide.

“The digital divide is by age. For example, my grandchildren can handle ICT-related devices in ways which I cannot, while I have trouble even using a mobile phone and also had difficulty adjusting from a film to a digital camera, until I realised its benefits,” said Mahathir.

MSC Malaysia today

“Today there are over 2,000 MSC Malaysia companies, which generated RM17 billion in revenue in 2007 as well as RM5.5 billion in exports and of these, over 80% are from Malaysian companies,” said Tan Sri Halim Ali, Chairman of the Multimedia Development Corporation in his welcome address.

The exemplary ones among them are companies such as XYBase which specialises in airport management systems, regional outsource call centre company Scicom, online employment portal Jobstreet.com, 3D animation movie producer, Les Copaque and software company CWorks, while multinationals such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and TeleTech have set up services centres in Malaysia.

One of the first of MSC Malaysia’s initiatives is the MyKAD multipurpose smart card carried by all citizens, with over 150,000 points of usage covering 10 sectors and integrated into over 300 government service centres.

Also over 80,000 knowledge workers work for MSC Malaysia companies across the country.