We don’t do too many interviews here at Friedbeef’s Tech, but social entrepreneurship on the web is something I’m passionate about.  Here are some quick insights on what drives a social entrepreneur, and the challenges they face, and for that we’re talking to Mike Tee from Elevyn.com.

Elevyn helps to connect poor artisans and villagers directly to customers around the world, and effectively cutting out middle men and ensuring higher returns to the poor craftsmen.   This also allows poor artisans to reach a worldwide market previously unattainable to them, and to create a sustainable income and raise themselves out of poverty.

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.

Meet the founders of Elevyn…

1. Why this cause?

Our work is largely inspired by the Gerai OA – a non-profit, volunteer-driven stall that sells crafts sourced from indigenous groups of Malaysia.  Gerai OA plays a very important role in connecting the poor rural artisans to the urban Malaysian market. Being tech geeks with interests in social issues, both Devan and myself constantly salivated at the thought of an online Gerai OA!

At the same time, we had Sze Ning who had, over the years, been volunteering with Gerai OA and involved in various indigenous group projects. In early 2008, one of the projects took her to a village deep inside rural Sabah, Malaysia.  The locals there were subsistence based, and had no electricity nor piped water supply. Imagine this in Malaysia! However – she was surprised that they had high speed Internet in their schools or clinics – powered by solar power and satellite! It immediate struck her that something could be done with connecting the artisans to the world via the web.

So a lot of it goes down to having things "coming together at the right time". Sze Ning shared with us her experience, we decided to try our luck with MDeC Pre-seed, and the ball really started rolling when we won the grant so a lot of credit goes to MDeC as well for making things possible. (MDec is a Malaysian Government linked VC).

2. What obstacles did you face getting this off the ground and what are you doing about it?

Very much like traditional IT projects – a major challenge is getting people to buy into the idea. In our case, it’s many parties:

A. Getting shops to come online – as our objective is really to empower communities in rural areas to start selling online, a lot of groundwork is needed to share with them the idea, and to gain the communities’ trust to join this new initiative. And then there’s the "capacity-building" work needed to get the artisans organized as a group, and producing quality crafts that the market demands. So in this, we work with various field partners who are already established on the ground, and have a few advisors who give us their thoughts on the many issues that we encounter.

B. Getting people like you and me to buy and contribute. One major challenge is how to get people to buy the crafts, and to learn more about the Causes.  It’s very hard to get people, especially the urban ones, to relate to the plight of a rural artisan like Aunt Imboi for instance, for her world is so far away from our every day lives.

So we’re thinking hard on how to bridge that gap – and one thing we’ll be doing is start a blog and start writing on specific themes that people can easily understand, such as Indigenous Peoples. On top of that we’ll also be embarking on traditional marketing methods like Google ads, etc.

3. Which other socially beneficial web sites are close to your heart?

The one that totally blew me away is KIVA.org. Many have heard of this – taking microloans online, but the scale at which it is being done, and in spite of the fact that it started out as a 1-programmer initiative – is amazing. There are few others, but none truly groundbreaking in terms of idea or execution that I’ve found so far. I like to follow the Springwise.com website – they sometimes showcase some truly great social business ideas.

Actually this is one issue that I’ll be addressing at BarcampJB (come to the event if you live in South East Asia). We’ve yet to see much exciting web projects come into place. Maybe the social entrepreneurship field is relatively new, and not many have even heard of it. So a lot of startup ideas are urban-targeted and profit-oriented.

Mike will be speaking at BarcampJB on ‘Web 2.0 & Social Entrepeneurship -  Changing the World’  at 12pm Dec 7th.  If you live in Singapore or Malaysia, come join in!  If you live elsewhere, find a barcamp happening in a location near you.

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You may not know his name, but you almost certainly know his work.  Michael Hart founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. 

Single minded in its mission ”encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks”, the official site currently houses more than 26,000 books with over 400 monthly and caters to a million books being downloaded every month.  This does not include sister sites like Gutenberg.cc which hosts more than 74,000 books at this point.

It’s not everyday I get the chance to pick the brain of an Internet pioneer, so here are some of the nuggets from my interview with Michael Hart. 

Thoughts on the evolution of eBooks

The greatest differences I see for the next five years will be the use of eBooks on cell phones, as the majority of the world will be using cell phones by the end of 2006. . .causing many changes, and the translation of eBooks to many different languages.

Thoughts on translating books to multiple languages

A “Machine Translation Era” is now beginning at about the point where OCR was less than 20 years ago.  [OCR = Optical Character Recognition] Eventually this will be good enough that most readers can get some idea of a book’s content without a human translator… but it has to take a while getting there, and human translators will be quite a bit busier with Machine Translation, rather than out of work. ”

Thoughts on the dropping price of storage and its impact on eBooks

In addition, I see the ability of public to carry entire libraries of books with them on a keychain or a necklace with the RAMsticks, USBdrives, Pendrves, Flashdrives, etc., as they are called. These now carry 1,000 times as much as they did when they were released, just 6 years ago!!!  I just bought some 8 gig versions for $60.  That’s 1,000 times as much for the same price as 6 years ago!!!  Not to mention the new terabyte hard drives for under $400 and the half terabyte drives for under $100. 

Each terabyte can hold 1 million plain text eBooks, uncompressed– or about 2.5 million using compression programs such as ZIP.  “The personal computer” becomes “the personal library.

Thoughts on having multiple sister sites rather than housing everything under the official site

The greatest benefit of the Internet is its multiplicity, the fact that there are lots of ways to get from one place to another, so if a normal gateway is down, you can get around it with no trouble. 

The same is true by having multiple sites for Project Gutenberg, or any other items that you want to be sure people can get.  There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of sites carrying the Gutenberg books, and thus if you can’t get to one, you can almost certainly do an engine search to find any number of other copies

Note: Here are some links to try.

100,000 eBooks easy to download at:

1. http://www.gutenberg.org Official site [coming up on 25,000 eBooks]
2. http://www.gutenberg.cc [already passed 75,000 eBooks]
3. http://gutenberg.net.au   Project Gutenberg of Australia 1500+
4. http://pge.rastko.net 65 languages  PG of Europe ~500
5. http://gutenberg.ca  Project Gutenberg of Canada

Bonus tip: Looking for for the ultimate guide to free books?  Look no more!

[tags] ebooks, project gutenberg, interview, michael hart [/tags]

What do you think about Project Gutenberg, or eBooks in general?  Tell us in the comments!

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Two Malaysian blog advertising networks Nuffnang, and Advertlets recently launched within a month of each other, and I just had the privilege of interviewing the founders of both projects.

The main purpose of this interview would be to give a voice to these two companies on how they would compete in the local blog advertising market and the role they would play in it.  Personally, I feel there is enough room for both parties to succeed and grow the blog advertising market – which also means more business for all of us.  For this reason, I wish both of them great success in their ventures.

This is the longest post ever on this blog, so a suggestion to my good readers would be to zoom down to the questions which interest you, and maybe read the rest in a separate sitting :)

Due to the potentially loaded nature of this post, let me disclose a few things.  I know both founders personally and I wish to keep a neutral stance here.  Identical questions were sent to them via email, and were replied directly to me, with neither party seeing each others anwers prior to this post.  I am quoting their replies directly, so this is not a 3 way conversation.  All opinions expressed below represent their views and not my own.

How do you compete with Google Adsense?  Their ads are contextual, allow specific site advertising – and they will cater all types of blogs.  What’s your edge over them from a bloggers point of view, and from an advertisers?

Nuffnang says: In the case of bloggers, I would not compare ourselves to Google Adsense or see them as a competitor since many blogs (including many whom have joined us today) use Nuffnang Ads as a complement with Google Adsense.

In addition to that, we are also targeting a rather different market. Contextual ads work very well for tech blogs, automobile blogs, or blogs that are of a specific category since certain keywords pay very well. They don’t work so well for personal/lifestyle blogs that write about various topics but that does not mean that the traffic personal/lifestyle blogs have are of no value to advertisers. It just means that they need a rather different targeting method to bring the best out of its audience. That’s what Nuffnang is aiming for.

Now lets talk about advertisers.

To be honest, if I were an advertiser of an online business myself, it will be very hard for me to ignore advertising on Google Adwords which explains why most of the online advertising expenditure to date is spent on Google. That being said, Nuffnang offers an alternative that does not necessarily aim to act as a replacement, but more of a complement. If you are looking to tap the audience of the highly influential blogging community in Malaysia, come to Nuffnang.

Furthermore, because we are a local company, part of our job at Nuffnang is to educate and convince local advertisers that online advertising is just the way to go especially if you’re looking to the younger generation of today. Much of this generation are big spenders when it comes to mobile phones, cameras or computers but they don’t watch much TV anymore, nor do they read much of the daily newspaper. They do read blogs though… and if you want to reach them. You advertise on blogs.

Advertlets says: I’ll start by asking you how many local ads do you see anyway, on Google Adsense? Our competitor isn’t really Google Adsense – the Malaysian bloggers here who make a lot of money through Adsense, manage to make it because their content is skewed towards an international audience, mainly technology or gadgets.

What we offer is the chance for the bloggers to write local content and be matched with local advertisers, and for advertisers to be able to target and the right audience through blogs – using demographics and geolocation..

“Contextual” advertising has its logical limits – at some point, the audience has to tell you about them for it to be accurate. For example, let’s say you ran a blog that posted lots of hot, glamourous female celebrities – contextual advertising might match you with lingerie and clothing ads based on the keywords in the blog – but let’s face is, men like to look at women more than than women like to look at women. Demographic based advertising would make sure that the ads are targeted at the majority of the audience, in this example, it probably would be mostly men between the ages of 20-25.

Your rival blog advertising network has just launched - What is your competitive strategy against them?  Why would bloggers/advertisers choose your over them?

Advertlets says: Our competitive strategy is simply, to kick more ass, from both a design and business standpoint.

We’ve run a poll on our own site, about the poll itself, and 35% of visitors said that they “love the way the poll slides”. It sounds trivial at first, but then you realize – passionate bloggers love to customize their layout of their blogs, and put a lot of effort into the design. Of course it makes sense then that the advertising on their blogs should look and feel just as good. It reminds me of a quote by Steve Jobs from Apple, when asked to comment on Mac OS X’s Aqua user interface – he chose not to talk about the technology, but about the feel. Quote: “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them”

Wouldn’t you choose the blog advertising network that looked better on your blog, and extended its functionality? We also pride ourselves on being less intrusive visually – you’ll notice that our ads are way less intrusive than Nuffnang from a size, color, and font perspective. In the long run, we believe this will pay off, as it did for a certain search engine company that defied the rules of online advertising having to be “big and colourful to get attention”, and decided to go with advertisements that were simpler, but smarter – hence more likely to get clicks. Good design is good business.

Of course, looks aside, we also have a much stronger network, reputation and establishment, based on our track record. Before we launched Advertlets.com, we were and still are a strong web design company (Josh Lim & Associates), which  has done digital/online marketing & production for many local companies over the years, including : Pernod Ricard (Martell & Chivas), Proton Berhad, The Manhattan Fish Market (our current featured potential advertiser – we’re currently looking for qualified bloggers for a campaign, check out Advertlets.com for details), CIMB Group (CIMB Wealth Advisors & CIMB Principal), and more. Also, we have a fair share of non-local clients from Singapore, France, Hong Kong, Australia and the US.

We’re more media savvy too – Josh Lim & Associates has been featured in The Edge, The Star, R.A.G.E, CNet Asia, NTV7, 8TV, TV3, Astro Ria and more. We’ve marketed ourselves well as a company so far, and we also have other previous initiatives to prove it – the hugely popular RedesignMalaysia.com, an initiative that aims to improve broadband here which is ranked among the top 50,000 on Technorati. As of such, we’re pretty confident of marketing Advertlets.com, and making it worth it for everyone involved.

(You can read an interview with RedesignMalaysia.com which was previously featured on Friedbeef.com. ) Our competitor, Nuffnang’s idea of packaging all blogs, including blogs with “20 unique visits a day” who are “too small to stand on their own” together as an advertising package sounds good in theory. However, with an average click-through rate of 1-2% globally, this means that Nuffnang advertisers get a raw deal, and will be essentially, paying for a lot of blogs that bring little to zero returns.

For example, a blog with 20 unique visits a day, assuming a CTR of 1.5%, will only bring an average of 1 whole click, after 3 whole days…Their idea is commendable for the virtue of “wanting to help everyone”, but virtually impossible from a business perspective.

In terms of business model, we at Advertlets.com have a good plan that allows both the targeting of established, high traffic blogs, and also advertising across the whole network, which includes other blogs with more moderate traffic. We have a minimum requirement of 100 visits a day, hence we have blogs with more visibility and higher participation rates – which translates to better click-through rates.

Currently, the average blog in our network has about 400-600 impressions a day. We will also be implementing a feature where users can set a premium on their advertising rates not just based on their traffic alone, but also the audience niche that they have.

Nuffnang says: Competition is good for the blogosphere and we welcome it.

We ‘re not out to make comparisons and give reasons for bloggers/advertisers to choose us instead of Advertlets. Instead, we would rather keep our eyes on the ball in making sure we bring the benefits that both advertisers and bloggers look for in a community like ours. Our bloggers have placed their hopes on us… we are not about to disappoint them.

Yet as much as we believe in this philosophy of concentrating on what we do, Advertlets have come up with a table of comparison between itself and Nuffnang linked from the main page of its website hoping to persuade both bloggers and advertisers that Advertlets is a better option. As much as we accept their decision for going down such a route, many things in the comparison are certainly not true and very misleading.

For example, Advertlets claim on their comparison table that Nuffnang does not have a user login. Yet we’ve been getting many e-mails from bloggers about how much they love  to login to view our Analytics page where we can show not only the Unique Visits and Page Views that each blog gets but also the referrals, the countries of origin and even the search engine Keywords.

They also claim on their table of comparisons that we do not offer targeted advertising which is again misguiding since we obviously do targeting the same way they do it ie through a survey.

That being said, the most important thing both bloggers and advertisers should note is that at Nuffnang, we’re a community and rightfully so. We have brought in bloggers in certain talent pools to help us out and given them a share of the company. All the people behind Nuffnang including the very team of programmers that founded it have a direct or indirect stake in the company. Up till today, we are still looking for bloggers who have specific skill sets to come in and own a part of Nuffnang.

What other new features are you looking to add to this service to give it an extra edge over the rest?

Nuffnang says: You’ll just have to wait to see! Hold your breath folks.

Some features will be brand new and others will not. But as we work closer with the industry and bloggers and understand their needs, we will adopt features that fit their requirements.

Advertlets says: We will also be rolling out new features including:

- A desktop widget where you can monitor your blog statistics right from your desktop!
- More blog widgets: Music players, photo viewers, mailing lists, etc. If you thought the poll system was cool, wait till you see the rest.- Ability to cash out your earnings via mobile prepaid reloads. Of course you can always request cash/cheque, but for our bloggers on prepaid, we feel this is a unique and convenient solution.
- And also, the ability to take part in contests, polls, and win monthly prizes from our advertisers.
- An “auto-SEO” and blog aggregation function, which basically means if you join our network, your site also get better search engine results, and better site rankings. We can’t disclose how we will do this yet – but it’s all white hat SEO techniques, not to worry.
However, some of these features will be only for those who belong exclusively on our network. We define exclusive by “not being signed up to other Asian blog advertising networks”. Taking part in international programs such as Adsense, Payperpost, etc, will not disqualify you from being an exclusive Advertlets member.

Anything else you’d like to tell our readers?

Advertlets says: Joining us means you can find out more about your blog readers through the demographics poll, and we also offer a referral program for qualified bloggers. And through the Advertlets Philanthropy program, we and the rest of our members can help deserving causes through both financial and publicity means, including those who need financial/medical aid, charities, and the local creative scene (local bands & artists).

Lastly, you can read the competitor comparision chart on Advertlets.com

Bloggers and their audiences are far from just being just a niche crowd, and we are looking forward to working together with everyone to take this innovative advertising medium further!

Nuffnang says: To the bloggers at Nuffnang, thank you very much for your support. Whatever success we have achieved so far is only because of this special group of people that have put their trust in us. Each and every one of us can never be more grateful. Thank you.

Readers Question: What do you think the future of blog advertising holds in Malaysia?  Tell us in the comments!

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AutoPinger.com is a free web service which tries to get around this issue by helping you manage all your pings and aggregators in a single location. With 6100+ blogs and counting having signed up, it looks well on it’s way to becoming a success. I recently managed to catch up with it’s founder Vinson Wang, and managed to talk about this fascinating niche he’s carved out on the web.

Tell us a bit about AutoPinger and why your service would be better, or at least different from existing services, say – Pingshot or Pingoat?

When comparing to Pingoat, I would say that the main difference lies in the approach Autopinger takes. Autopinger takes an automated and disconnected model of pinging. This would mean that users no longer need to manually ping their blogs or sites whenever they update the contents but instead Autopinger will check their site for updates and in turn ping their sites for them. All these are done automatically. As for Pingoat, it still relies on the traditional manual ping process

Pingshot, is a late addition to Feedburner’s range of services but it only cover a few search engines and aggregators whereas Autopinger’s core service is to help you get your blog updates across as many search engines as possible. In addition to that, Autopinger provides another convenient way by providing one-click-ping-all button where you can click and ping all by just embedding it into your site/blog and click it to ping all whenever you update, this relieves you of the manual process. Anyone who wishes to get the maximum exposure would certainly like Autopinger services.

Sounds useful. What has the response been like from the blogging/podcasting community?

Autopinger was launched officially on August 2006 and we are experiencing a rising growth over the last 3 months, with over 20,000 pings per day, but I certainly hope millions out there will come to know about Autopinger and take full advantage of what it can do for them.

I would say Auto-Pinging mechanism is pretty well liked by our community of users and our recent survey on our site says it all. I have plans to expand Autopinger service into a blog directory with blog viewer as well as introducing “Friends” option like groups, blogs or internal communities but this will not be in the next few months as my schedule are pretty tight. I have currently no plans on monetizing this site but I may in future when better services are introduced.

This service is completely free. Do you fund this out of pocket, and how do you plan to scale and fund this once this service gets increasingly popular?

Yes, currently it is solely funded and managed by myself. If Autopinger gets really popular, I’m planning to get some investors help by improving the infrastructure as well as the reliability of Autopinger services where I will develop Autopinger into a community driven site by blog enthusiasts and offer premium services with useful statistics and other benefits.

What is next for Autopinger? What do you hope to achieve in the short and long term future with this type of service?

I would say blog pinging is here to stay for at least 3-5 years as this is already a recognized way of site publishing. Autopinger will evolve with time and more services will be incorporated so long as my time permits! I am also looking for partners to expand our services to more areas that benefits our users.

Can you elaborate on any features you would like to evolve and implement in the future?

I will incorporate some developer API for developers to tap into Autopinger ping mechanism to help them develop their own application and also offer better and more detailed statistics but all these will only be possible with a better infrastructure as compared to now.

I guess I would also like to put in a “Friends” factor into Autopinger. Pinging would be the common task that every member does but friends factor provides the cohesiveness among our members like interest groups, blog explorer, featured members, blogs and podcasts, discussion forum and blog review systems to get the members to interact with one another.

AutoPinger covers blogs as well as podcasts. Podcasts are an interesting beast. They take considerably more effort than blogging, but have less clear ways of breaking even, driven by the high cost of distribution, and the amount of time needed to produce one. While blogs can monetize with Adsense, what would you say podcasting’s best bet for monetization, especially for the smaller independent podcasters?

Podcasts are in fact, a more direct way of monetization as it can involve audio and video. It is visual way of monetization! The best bet to monetization with podcasts is to use it as home made video and make tutorials, knowledge based or personal hobby that can attract other like minded users to be part of your community. With targeted users, you are more likely to turn them into paying customers with the products that you promote or develop.

I see… so you’re saying that in your view, the best bet for podcast monetization is to have products to directly market now or in the future rather than rely mainly on advertisers.

Yes, certainly I believe so. With the rise of audio and video publishing, this provides a simple yet effective way of publishing their ideas and products to millions of Internet users. In the years to come, this trend will grow to be one of the most powerful advertising media. YouTube is a good example of how traditional marketing had given way to new wave of video publishing.

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers about AutoPinger or any future projects you have?

I have a few projects in my pipeline targeting to more Web 2.0 users in different niches like content sharing, community building and experimental projects. Keep a look out next year!

—

Vinson Wang is an IT project consultant based in Singapore and founder of Autopinger.

[tags] autopinger, interviews, pingoat, pingshot, ping [/tags]

Are you interested in learning about Linux web hosting? If you are building a website and need a dedicated server to fill all of your needs, our cheap web hosting is just for you!  Before you decided on a web hosting company, do your research! We have the best web hosting prices around!

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An inspiration to those hoping to make a living out of their blog, Liew Cheon Fong of LiewCF.com is Malaysia’s first and possibly only full-time professional blogger. He was also kind enough to take time off his busy schedule to do a quick email interview with me.

You are seen as an icon to anyone in Malaysia who hopes to make a living off blogging. While success is definitely possible, the failure rate is extremely high. Is full time blogging something you would encourage others to do? and why?

Everyone has his/her own talent. Not everyone is suitable to become a full-time blogger. I strongly encourage everyone have some real working experience first. Before you jump into full-time blogging, I would suggest you to do part-time blogging first. Make sure you are able to make money from your part-time blogging. When the income of part-time blogging has become double of your full-time job salary, then you can start consider to become a full-time blogger. You should have a backup plan or enough saving before you decide to be a full-time blogger.

You are now enjoying a good measure of success. Can you elaborate on any difficulties you faced early on?

For a blogger, site traffic is very important. It is not easy to attract new visitors and keeps them returning to your blog. It takes effort to learn what your visitors want and satisfy them. English is not my mother tongue. Therefore, I spend more time than others to publish an entry but it is still full of mistakes. I am still learning in these areas :)

Some have critisised your command of English. Others are fond of the ‘Malaysianised’ style of writing you have. Do you think your current language skills hurt or helped you? and why?

Yes, this is a big problem which I am still trying to improve. Currently, I have a proofreader to help me correct some of the mistakes in my published posts. I’m not aware of anyone fond of my “style of writing” Haha! I don’t think my current poor language skills have helped me. I might even get more local press publicity if I had a better command of English.

Is LiewCF.com your first blog? How & why did you get started?

No, my first blog was LcFwebsite.com, but I dumped the domain name few years ago. My initial idea was to share my computing knowledge with friends, and to write an online diary.

What do you hope to accomplish with LiewCF.com in the long run?

I hope “LiewCF.com” will be mentioned when people are talking about Malaysian blogs. :)

Can you tell me what revenue programs have worked for you and what have not?

Can I put my referral links in this interview in this post? Just kidding. :P .These work for me: Google AdSense, Text Link Ads, Tribal Fusion, BlogAds, Chitika, FeedBurner Ad Network. These don’t work well enough for me: All kind of affiliate programs.

Can you give a rough indication as to how much of your traffic comes from Organic (search engines) vs Referral (website links)?

Search engines make up a large amount of traffic at LiewCF.com, and accounts for around 65% of total traffic. Referral traffic is around 15%. Thanks to my loyal readers, I get quite amount of direct/bookmark traffic (which make up the remainder of the traffic).

You have embarked on other projects as well like the Malaysia Bloggers Forum. Can you tell me how succesful that has been in terms of users/traffic and are you happy with them?

Malaysia Bloggers Forum is quite successful. I believe it is the biggest forum for Malaysian bloggers. Currently, we have 1,685 registered members and hundreds visitors per day.

What other projects are you planning to embark on in the coming future?

I plan to create my own blogging network and help bloggers to make money.

Any last bits of advice you have for any bloggers out there?

Be responsible about your content and to your readers. Do not get yourself into trouble because of your blogs. If you want to make money by blogging, please take note that it takes time and effort. Be patient, and you will get what you want. Good Luck!

Liew Cheon Fong is a professional blogger based in Johor, Malaysia. His main project LiewCF.com is an extremely popular tech blog with more than 1500 feed subscribers and thousands of daily visitors. His other web projects include:

• Ideal Gadget
• Mac Switcher
• Malaysia Bloggers Forum
• Bear The Pooh (owner but not the editor)
• Yummy Malaysia (owner but not the editor)

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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.

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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A truly seamless collaboration work platform has been a holy grail of sorts for many firms, especially global ones which work in decentralised teams. One of the largest issues that face corporations today is the over-reliance of email as an end-all communication tool within the company, which just doesn’t work very well in distributed groups.

cyn.in (pronounced “Sign-in”) is an Internet based service from Cynapse that allows teams, companies or communities to manage, organize, store, version, search through, collaborate & discuss upon, share and publish any kind of information or data.

I managed to catch up with Apurva Roy Choudhury, CEO of Cynapse, and among other things in this interview, we cover business models, and competition – Two increasingly important topics, especially in the wake of Web 2.0 companies starting to go out of business, heralding the dawn of a new Internet bubble.

Medium to small sized businesses. This segment has been, in the last 5 years, the most sought after and chased market space. However, it is also the trickiest to capture. One of the reasons is because usually the small and the medium businesses demand and require technology enablers to be at par with (and some times more than) the large enterprise, so as to get ‘the technology edge over competition’. But never afford budgets close to what their larger counterparts can. They land up using sub standard, custom developed software, with little or no support.

Our SaaS based delivery and support model, allows us to reach out to small businesses across the world, at unbelievably low costs. Now small businesses can buy an enterprise class system which they tangibly ‘touch and feel’ before buying. When they do buy, they can get started with using it within the next 5 minutes. Moreover customers pay for the system for only as long as they are benefiting from it and are satisfied with using it. They do not incur additional support costs because we support all their users through the integrated support forums.

Many web 2.0 companies are struggling with business models (they have none). How soon do you expect to be making money as a business?

Within the first quarter. cyn.in is not a startup. Cynapse is a self funded 5 year old company which has been profitable since the year of inception. cyn.in is a 4th generation product, based on Amieo, which has been a highly successful product by the company. Amieo is an application framework for building highly customized enterprise collaboration and community systems. We already have a large number of pre-commitments for cyn.in from a lot of our existing customers.

How do you expect to price these products?

cyn.in is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service offering, intended to be a rapid adoption, off-the-shelf product. cyn.in is an automated multi tenant web service. Every customer (an organization or a team) is provided with an independent sub system, simply called a site, which could be located at ‘yourcompany.cyn.in’ or at ‘www.yourowndomain.com’. These sub systems or sites are hosted within the secure cyn.in datacenters, and are managed, monitored and upgraded by the cyn.in team.

Customers pay a monthly fee for every user from their team or organization that uses the system. Per user costs will start from $30 (USD) and go as low as $20, based on the number of users. There are no setup costs or other additional costs to the service. Customers can start using the service with a minimum of two users, and scale up to thousands.

Is this Cyn.In pricing similliar to the Ameio pricing model?

No, Amieo was priced in the $30,000 to $250,000 segment. Amieo was always a custom implementation, and hence expensive. cyn.in could be considered a next generation, shrink wrapped off the shelf product based out of Amieo, for the masses.

How interoperable is your data going to be with other software?

cyn.in, if technically described, is an advanced online file system. cyn.in can contain any kind of files, and deep indexes all kinds of file formats including all MS office formats, PDF, etc. However cyn.in in its current version is completely browser based, and does not hard integrate into any desktop software.

However, we do not intend to be a pure browser based system, and are already beta testing various rich clients and integration tools that will allow seamless integration of cyn.in with the desktop file system to further enhance productivity. These tools are currently slated for a later release, and I cannot disclose much about it just yet. All I can say is that the next version of our end user product SyncNotes (www.syncnotes.com) and the cyn.in desktop tools share a lot of the synchronization technology.

Most web applications only focus on Internet publishing. Tell me more about the intranet publishing you also offer?

The Intranet is a logical space within a customer’s cyn.in site. All internal users of the respective site can publish any note to the intranet space. Shared notes can be published to the intranet space too. Let me illustrate with an example: a team of five people are working on a user manual for, let’s say a widget, and have been working on a shared note. They can publish the note containing the document, images and some rough texts to the Intranet space under the ‘SlashTags’: /widgets/product documentation/user manual/ and say /documents for review/technical.

Once published, every user in the organization can view the note and download its contents, while the five authors of the note can continue to work on it and update it. Now consider the product management team subscribes to the RSS feed of /documents for review/technical, they will be immediately alerted regarding the publish or update to the note. Notes can be discussed in the comments, where the team may collect inputs of the management or the rest of the organization.

Can you tell us who some of your clients are?

Amieo has been successfully implemented in custom solution scenarios for Cynapse’s clients. Our disclosure agreements prevent us from disclosing most of our customers, since they are using Amieo internally. INSEAD Singapore, Microsoft India and Microsoft Asia Pacific, and Printo are few of our existing clients.

Do you see yourself as a easy-to-use-and-setup MS Sharepoint alternative? Strange that Microsoft India chose you instead of their own homegrown Sharepoint to manage their information?

Yes we see cyn.in as a sharepoint replacement and more. Amieo however is an application framework that could be used to build various collaborative environments. This makes Amieo and Sharepoint different and incomparable. It wasn’t just Microsoft India, MS Asia pacific was the largest customer of Amieo. Why? Well sharepoint is very limited to intranet environments and it is much, much more an effort and expense to customize Sharepoint and extend it to do things that it doesn’t do by default. Also, we delivered development and customization in time spans of a couple of weeks, as opposed to months of work required on other platforms.

How do you see 37signals basecamp as a competitor and in what way would you say you are better than them?

37signals basecamp is similar to cyn.in only in its delivery model and its philosophy of simplicity. In my opinion, both offerings have very different focuses. Basecamp manages activity. cyn.in manages information. That said, its too early for cyn.in to draw parallels to any existing offering.

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If you’re a Firefox user like 52% of this site’s visitors, you would have probably heard of ‘Spread Firefox’, which is a community aimed at promoting the use of Firefox as alternative browser among the general Internet population.

I recently managed to catch up with one of its active members, South African Firefox evangelist Charl van Niekerk, who was kind enough to provide me with a short IM interview for this piece.

In this interview we cover:

• His involvement in Firefox marketing materials
• Translations of Firefox into Afrikaans
• His thoughts on why the users of this browser are so passionate about it – and why Opera users don’t respond the same way
• What anyone can do to spread it as an alternative browser

James: Well let’s start with your projects thus far. I know you from work with Firefox flyers, Mozilla Wiki, and your involvement with the 5 minute challenge. Is there anything else you’re involved in?

Charl: The main projects I have contributed to so far are those you mentioned, although there was also the Firefox S5 (presentation slideshow) project, and localizing Firefox itself as well as some other materials to Afrikaans.

James: Translations are a great way to reach out, and I’m sure this makes it easier for native speakers to get used to this browser. Do you have direct involvement with the Mozilla organisation for this?

Charl: Not really much more than being involved with marketing; localisation teams are registered with but operate independently from the Mozilla organisation; the localisation team I am involved in is part of translate.org.za which localises various open source packages to various southern African languages

James: Are the translations already live and being used, or still work in progress, and how large of an audience are you targeting with this work?

Charl: The Firefox 1.0 translation was completed and listed on Mozilla.org; the Firefox and thunderbird 1.5 translations were completed but unfortunately a little late; currently we are working on the 2.0 translations of both Firefox and thunderbird and hope to have them ready for the release of 2.0. We hope that with the (official) release of 2.0 we will have a couple of thousand users

James: In your opinion, why do you think Opera does not have such a user community like Firefox hell-bent on conversion? It’s free, safe, arguably follows w3 standards better than Firefox, but yet the level of passion for the browser is not there. Why do you think that is so?

Charl: Opera is a great browser indeed; however, although it is free as in “no cost” it isn’t free as in “free software” as per definition of the Free Software Foundation. The source code is kept closed and nobody is allowed to view and/or modify it.

Firefox is truly “free” in all senses of the word. It is open source which means that any person has the freedom of looking how Firefox has been built and can modify it for their own use or create software packages based on it.

I think this motivates the Spread Firefox community to market it as no organisation has complete control over the software; it is public property in a way.

James: If someone wants to start getting involved in spreading Firefox, what is the easiest or first thing they should do?

Charl: I think the best thing to do would be to register on SpreadFirefox.com, browse around, hear what others are doing and if you have a good idea of your own, to post about it and get feedback. Contributing to others’ projects is normally quite easy also. The more contributors, the bigger the success! :)

Charl van Niekerk is working for a software development company in the city of George, South Africa. One of his current pet projects is an overhaul of Mozilla Materials. If you’re reading this using Internet Explorer, find out what all the hype is about!

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