Colin Charles Agenda

Seth Godin is spot on in Where are your assets? Please go read it.

Do work and get paid once. Build an asset and get paid for as long as it lasts.

Key takeaways: real estate pays regularly, stocks are the promise of a later payoff (maybe a little more regularly with dividends). Build your brand by overdelivering to earn trust. Ensure you’re always building value (people miss you when you’re gone). Gain expertise – don’t do the same thing over & over again. These apply to companies as well.

The picture shows a boxed set of Red Hat Linux 7 & 8. Shortly thereafter they became RHEL & Fedora. Red Hat built assets and look where they are now – listed on the stock exchange and arguably one of the largest companies in opensource. Cygnus started with no more than $6,000 in capital, had a great exit to Red Hat and formed much of the basic underlying toolchain.

A salesman would say, “always be closing”. I think the mantra should be: always be building assets.

I never had a cheque book when I lived in Australia. I got my first chequebook when I moved back about five years ago, for the sole purpose of paying for a car (they wouldn’t accept a charge card)!

Cheques aren’t free. Each leaf costs 0.15 sen (this is the stamp duty that you pay – so the book costs RM7.50). I use it nowadays to pay my credit cards at different banks, because the limit for an electronic GIRO transaction stands at RM5,000 per day, plus you have to pay a RM2 fee per transaction. Simple economics suggest that the cheque is cheaper.

Bank Negara has decided to shake that up: from April 1 2014, the issuer now has to pay a 0.50 sen fee. So now, issuing a cheque costs 0.65 sen. (that means each cheque book now costs an additional RM25, bringing the total cost now to RM32.50 over RM7.50).

On the bright side, they want more transactions processed online: interbank GIRO transactions now cost a mere 0.10 sen per transaction effective May 2 2013. I argue that this fee should be brought down to zero, but it is cheaper than a cheque. My only concern might be the silly RM5,000 limit that they may impose (something you don’t have to worry about a cheque).

What irks me is the last statement: “By 2020, pricing of all payment services would be based on the cost of providing the service.” The cost of providing a service in Malaysia goes up tremendously due to inefficient thanks to the lack of meritocracy in the hiring process. We are all paying for the NEP now.

The year 1995 was when I got my first laptop. It was made by Acer, came with a whopping 8MB of RAM (yes, megabyte, not gigabyte), and a 400MB hard disk (read more at an interview conducted in 2004). It shipped with Windows 3.1, but I shortly moved over to Linux when Windows 95 was announced – the laptop just didn’t cut it for the requirements of Windows 95.

The laptop cost an arm and a leg for those features. With PCMCIA cards, external CDROM drive, SCSI scanner, etc. I’m sure the total cost of ownership exceeded RM10,000. I was eleven years old then, but had been computing for over six years already (386 SX2, 286, 8086 – all desktops). I had really supportive parents, so I will always be thankful to them.

Fast-forward almost two decades later and a laptop for a student is used as an election promise for victory! Many view this offer suspiciously. Some wonder if it will cost the government RM40,000 per laptop (has happened before). Some wonder what learning software will be used? Which suppliers & contractors are getting it going?

What about the idea of a smart school, mooted sometime in 1998? I remember going to a school called Victoria Institution sometime in 2004 and installing Linux in a lab and ensuring that OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Impress, Base) could be taught in schools. Later on it was understood that the syllabus (under the Official Secrets Act) was way too Microsoft-centric, which meant that generics of using a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation suite or even front-end database meant that you couldn’t use equivalents but had to mostly use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access). What a shame.

I’m all for children getting laptops or tablets to improve their education. Children of today are very, very lucky. I’m just not sure that the government is right in doling out a laptop.

This wouldn’t be the first time… they’ve already doled out many 1Malaysia laptops (some to the tune of 800,000) to students. Is our education system improving and making use of the new technology?

Many failed items in the past: EPF Computer Purchase Withdrawal Scheme (2000-2002 discontinued) and PC Gemilang / PC Mesti Beli (yes, I was part of the PC Gemilang project getting Linux on them) (2004-~2005). 

From a commercial standpoint, have we forgotten about the 1Malaysia laptops (link)? Or the 1Malaysia Tablet/Pad?

Remember a laptop isn’t the be all and the end all. The laptop goes outdated before the term of the government. Warranties at most expire at 3 years. Software tends to be obsoleted a lot quicker.

Ideas are all fine & dandy, but is there any long term thinking to this? 

I love analysts. The buzz a report can create can drive amazing amounts of traffic to your product and give it a lot of street credibility. My only beef with the whole industry is that the reports cost an arm and a leg.

There are however “open analysts” – the folk at RedMonk, a bit of the 451 CAOS Theory (of the 451Group).

What interests me most is how analyst services are getting cheaper, coming from the media outlets themselves. Look at GigaOM Pro ($299) and BI Intelligence (normally $499, now $299 for an introductory offer).

Those are prices one can muster. $299 for a year. They also get/repackage the news. I’m big on the above services and I think more of this will arrive.

I happened to be awake last night so I caught the announcement via livestream for Facebook Home. I’m glad its just a system launcher. There are many (I myself on my phone use Nova Launcher), but from the demo, this is beautifully designed with a new take on the interface. The demo showed it being smoother than butter ;)

Chat heads look interesting. Some may claim it being bothersome or unintuitive, but most iOS users have this already turned on via accessibility settings assistive touch since the home button breaks far too easily. Why a little white dot when you can now make it do things for you?

I was impressed with the amount of partners on launch day. Buy-in from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Alcatel. Chipmaker like Qualcomm. Telcos like AT&T, Orange, EE. I can only expect this to grow of course. Gives great competition in the mobile landscape for 2013.

You see, FirefoxOS has a huge amount of partners & buy-in. I continue to be surprised that Ubuntu doesn’t have a similar page.

Am I switching from iOS as my main phone? Unlikely. I’m almost certain that many at Facebook, including Zuckerberg runs on IOS. But I will be playing with this on my secondary device (the Galaxy S3). I’m a little surprised that the April 12 launch isn’t available for the Nexus set of phones… and in Asia, the Galaxy Note form factor is popular, where did that go?

HTC First will be the first device to come with the Facebook Home system launcher as a default. I’m not sure how this is different to them applying skins and admitting that Facebook does it better. This isn’t the first time they’re playing around with a Facebook phone though.

Interesting times as Facebook has confirmed that their strategy is clearly mobile first. The fact that they built this on top of Android can’t really impress Google very much ;)

Others have also covered this well, i.e a strategy for Facebook, how this isn’t good for privacy.

In addition to what I wrote last week, Social media gaffes from restaurants & how to make it worse, there’s a few more links/data points to look at:

• The mother of Isadora Chai writes back in TMI, From mother to daughter. A recommended read.
• BFM has an interesting podcast on this: Night on Earth: Vox Populi. Its broken up in 2 segments so listen for the whole hour. Apparently they spoke to Isadora Chai before she graduated from chef to writer: “I’m not sorry to say this, but most bloggers, this is just a glorified hobby with a huge camera and too much time on Facebook.” Seemed like perfect timing. It’s a damn good listen though because she touches on how bloggers lack ethics, and so on.
• BFM had another interesting podcast: Social Media Suicide. Highly recommended and this segment is a lot shorter and has some good call-in opinions as well. Guest is Shankar Santhiram, who has many a training program, including one on customer service & handling difficult customers.