Friedbeef’s Tech

For a country which has been harping on IT development for years, Malaysia has a shockingly low broadband penetration of 2.5%!

One site, RedesignMalaysia.com, aims improve the quality and coverage of broadband in Malaysia, and wants to achieve this through the compilation of relevant news articles, highlighting areas that lack coverage, through giving consumers an understanding of broadband options in their area.

I recently caught up with its founder Josh Lim to discuss how this project was doing, launch strategies for the site, and broadband in Malaysia in general.

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Redesign Malaysia seems like a pretty generic non-broadband name for a broadband project. Is there something behind that name?

The corporate identity also summarizes our view quite nicely – Malaysia needs some tweaking. My web design background has probably something to do with the name, and its really what I intend to do – redesign Malaysia, as things need to be done in a new way.

In the foreseeable future, do you plan to branch out to other projects besides broadband reform via Redesign Malaysia?

Quite likely. I’ll personally like to see lower software prices, later closing hours for nightspots and entertainment outlets, better public transport and pothole free roads. But these are my interests, and its also very much up to what site visitors and the general Malaysian public feel needs to be “redesigned”, and what is feasible.

What are your short term & long term plans for this site, and what do you ultimately hope to accomplish with it?

Short term, I hope to build awareness on the lack of broadband facilities here, as well as stress its importance. Long term wise, I think we stand a good chance of being able to rally the community together to lobby for causes which are of public interest, broadband being one of the most pressing issues which I feel needs to be addressed here.

The lack of broadband here is going to be a problem over the next few years if not addressed – in the shift to a knowledge based economy, the nation’s infrastructure will have to cope with teleworking, more data being sent around, and international relations. We really are going to literally lag behind other countries and face communication problems over the next few years if there isn’t a drastic improvement in our broadband services.

Ultimately I’ll like it to make a difference in Malaysia, and be accessible enough for people to talk about the site its purposes over a teh tarik at the mamak with their friends, as well as attract dedicated people to the cause.

What channels have you utilized to launch this site?

Virally through Blogs (we provide buttons for people to link to us from their blogs and websites), Forums (we announced the site to design and tech enthusiasts, eg LowYat.net, doxob.com) ,Google/MSN/Yahoo (we optimized the site so that it is found easily for Malaysian broadband related enquiries)

…and which of those channels have worked the best for you?

I’ll say the blogs and search engines have been the best so far. The search engines point people to a place where they can get information on what they are searching for (our site). And the bloggers really help with sharing the RedesignMalaysia mission with their audience, so I would presume that we get more “involved traffic” (as in people who would register on the site or comment) from the blogs… So its quantity from the search engines, quality from the blogs.

This site seems like a very good starting point for anyone trying to look for alternatives to Streamyx broadband. Who do you think are the best players out there positioned as a viable consumer alternative to Streamyx?

There are definitely a few players who provide good broadband services, I’m sure. The new crop of broadband service providers who recently exhibited at ACM 2006 seem promising, but it’ll be interesting to see which of them will actually make use of their licenses in the time to come.

I wouldn’t recommend or endorse any names until me or my team have tried them personally and familiarized ourselves with their services. This is something I aim to do over the next few months, and I’ll be touring the premises of a alternative broadband provider in Technology Park Malaysia sometime next week actually.

In your opinion, what are their largest obstacles, and how they best would they overcome them?

I think a lot of service providers have insufficient/inept marketing and exposure. RedesignMalaysia.com has only launched a few days, but its already higher in the search results for Malaysian broadband related results than the official company or product websites. You would think that providers aiming to provide broadband Internet services would know more about the Internet, or at least hire a web consultancy that did.

Some of it is a lack of common sense – like having information available in print brochures that isn’t on the web. The other obstacle is consumer perception - a lot of people assume that Streamyx is the default and only choice for broadband in Malaysia, when in truth there are a lot more. However, the reason for this misconception is well founded, since other players besides Streamyx, while they may have better service quality, the service price is usually higher and coverage areas are limited.

There’s also this major problem: Service providers can’t lower their prices until they have enough consumers. But consumers won’t sign up until prices go lower. A good example of how things change for the better over time is Astro satellite TV – in its early stages, it was very expensive to buy the decoder and subscribe monthly, but now its become cheaper as subscribers increase, and the economies of scale kicks in.

RedesignMalaysia.com has got a plan to solve that chicken and egg problem of price dynamics vs number of subscribers, and how we plan to do it will be revealed as a working model over the next 3-6 months.

Is there business model to this project, or is a free effort aimed to help Malaysians, and perhaps along the way, bring your web consultancy more to the forefront?

This project is a Josh Lim & Associates initiative, and has taken up a considerable amount of resources, over 1000 man hours has been spent planning, researching, designing the site, programming the back-end, coming up with ideas and more. The effort spent has been mainly from employees of Josh Lim & Associates, including myself with a few volunteers. And also, today I found that RedesignMalaysia.com exceeded its Webcasting traffic limit by nearly 1 gigabyte, and I’m probably going to have to pay more. So our costs are monthly employee payroll and Webcasting – which are pretty significant.

An effort this ambitious would die very fast if it were not supported by some sort of business model, so something we’ve planned from the beginning would be that this RedesignMalaysia.com initiative should be able to support itself, and be profitable. I’m not at liberty to reveal our business model at the moment, but its very viable, and involves working with everyone – from service providers, to consumers, to regulators and the government. And everyone will win…except service providers that don’t provide good service.

We don’t aim to charge Internet users for information on the site. We think its pretty ridiculous that Streamyx has an SMS service for you to check if you Streamyx availability in your area. Charging interested potential customers just for them to know if they can subscribe to your services is bad customer relations, especially since it’s a mass marketed product.

I think it lends credence to the project that Josh Lim & Associates are very much involved in it – especially since we are people skilled in the web design field, and are savvy Internet users. Honestly, I think the chances of any other organization having the ideas and capability to launch something like this are very slim, so we would proudly would take credit of this as not only a web design project, but also our own initiative.

Are there any new features coming up? And is there anything else you’d like to tell the world about this project?

Feature wise: We plan to launch the community features on the broadband map within the next few months or so. This feature would enable registered users to comment and rate service providers directly on the broadband map, and I think it’ll be very exciting to see location based feedback.

Content wise: We aim to have more content, for example: service provider reviews, interviews with key personalities in the broadband arena, more polls and surveys, official statistics, and more commentary on the broadband scene. We’ll like to say that yes – RedesignMalaysia.com can redesign Malaysia for the better, for everyone. We will need the support of the citizens to achieve that though, so do check out the website, do comment, do contribute information and do consider joining the RedesignMalaysia.com project team. Imagine, in the next few years, when our combined efforts come to fruition, you’ll be proud to say you helped improve Malaysia using your own unique and individual talents.

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Josh Lim, the founder of RedesignMalaysia.com runs a web design firm at Josh Lim & Associates, and is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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