Mavista Blog

I have used a fair number of mobile phones since the 90’s, from all sorts of different vendors. Nokia is a prominent one (from the 6110, to my current one E71), and I have also used Ericsson (Sony or no Sony) ones (the one with the long antenna that you can use to pick your nose with [in private of course], and the T68). The Palm Treo was a bit of a ground breaker and I loved it until the antenna fell apart and the screen went yellow (yes, I dropped it about half a dozen times). There was one that stood out like a sore thumb though, and that was the Dopod C730 – yes, and it was the only Windows Mobile phone that I have ever used (it was equipped with the latest WM 6 at the time). Suffice to say that I would not touch another WM device anytime soon.

So, it seems like I have made a sound decision judging by the travails that I have read about what is/will happen to Windows mobile experiences (and I would not use the word “premium” with their stuff). I won’t repeat them again here, but let me just say I will not be recommending any of my friends/family to buy another Windows mobile powered device (be it WM, Pink, Danger, or whatever). My recommendation as of today will be if you have money, go get an iPhone. Otherwise, get a Nokia E71, especially if you use it as a business phone.

Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372525-56.html

Exclusive: Pink Danger leaks from Microsoft’s Windows Phone

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/09/exclusive_pink_danger_leaks_from_microsofts_windows_phone.html

You can take the Appleinsider article with a pinch of salt, as the general consensus is it is a bit bias against MS. However, at the same time, I would not believe all the facts are fabricated either. Go search on the web for other related info and judge it by yourself.

I read an article on CNET this morning about IE6 refusing to die despite being totally archaic. This led me to recall what could turned out to be a defining moment in IT history.

It was 1998 and I was on a training course at IBM learning Java. News had just came in that the US Department of Justice has brought an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft claiming anti-competitive behaviour. The class broke into a little applause as the general consensus was this would be good for choice, for some of the other “interesting” technologies to thrive such as Java (Applets), Real Player, Linux, network computers and what not (Apple was just coming out of the doldrums at that time with the return of Steve Jobs). I began following this line of news very closely.

One of the central tenet of the case was on whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows (since this practically killed off Netscape Navigator). Microsoft defended itself vigorously claiming this was merely a result of her innovation, which of led to some major debates between the two sides. The case was “won” by the Justice Department in 2001 as the judge ordered the breakup of Microsoft into two companies. The “joy” was short lived as Microsoft lodged an appeal and the decision got over turned, and case just ran out of steam and an out of court settlement was made (this, conveniently, coincided with George W Bush winning the election and it was alleged he was not keen on the case).

Hind sight is a beautiful thing, and if you have been a personal computer user for the last 10 years, do you see Microsoft as an innovator in the technology space? Consider the following:

A) IE6 came out in August 2001, and it hardly set the pulse racing as it mainly fixed many of the instabilities of IE5.x and had PARTIAL support for web standards (e.g. CSS,  DHTML, XML/DOM, …etc). IE7 was not released for another 5 years and in my opinion, only happened as a result of competition from Firefox. Where is the innovation?

B) In Sept 2002, the first version of Firefox came out (called Phoenix at that time, rising from the ashes of Netscape I guess). It introduced tabbed browsing, themes, pop up blocker, has tiny footprint, was lightening fast, stable and more secure. Subsequent versions then introduced themes, plugins and anti-phishing protection – all of this before Oct 2006. Now that’s innovation. Oh, did I mention it’s support & adherence to web standards were light years ahead as well.

C) Fast forward to today, and whenever I read about there are still tons of people using IE6 it makes me laugh and cry. Laugh at the folly and excuses about not able to upgrade (the IT department said it will break our OS setup), at the fatal nature of browser vulnerabilities that exposes the heart of the Windows, and how her own “innovation” is biting her up the backside big time. Cry at the countless hours that me and my colleagues sweat over fiddling obscure CSS directives just to make a webpage look right, and the non-standard JavaScript that breaks practically every other browser. I have used Firefox since 2002 and never did I have any trouble causing a conflict with IE or Windows after installing it.

D) The iPod is an innovation, Firefox is an innovation, the Palm Treo is an innovation, the Mac is an innovation, the iPhone is an innovation, Playstation is an innovation … can you spot the common theme – none of these came from Microsoft. It is all about embrace and extend!

Just to finish up, can you imagine what it will be like if Microsoft did get broken up into 2 companies (one selling the OS and one selling Office software) back in 2001? I will probably not have the “privilege” in using Windows ME, XP and Vista. I’ll probably be running my favourite Linux and my Mac with the latest Microsoft Office, complete with MS Project and Visio. We wouldn’t have to code websites using proprietary extensions, and programming environments such as Java, PHP, Flash and Ruby will have access to simple yet powerful APIs to manipulate office documents.

Now the thought of that brings a little smile to me when I wind down for the day …. until the next morning when I realize it had all been a dream.

We all know there are many free amd convenient SEO sites or tools out there for particular functions and sites, but the SEO process can usually gets cumbersome and boring , expecially when you are trying to check the stats of your site on a couple of search engines.

I found an interesting SEO tool yesterday. It is a add-on for Mozilla Firefox which offers a collection of SEO tools for major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN (now Bing) and also the page ranking site Alexa.You can preform functions like check backlinks, indexed and domain links and on each site with just a single click.

Download Here

Here are the functions of the add-on: Read more…

What is robot.txt?

You might have heard of robot.txt  before when you are trying to build a website or looking over a webpage’s root directory, but what exactly is this robot.txt? Robot.txt protocol, also known as the robots exclusion standard, is a file to instruct the search engine robots which pages and files to be indexed or ignored. Robot.txt can prevent disclosure  of privacy from search engines and  reduce unnecessary bandwidth load to the server. A web administrator can decide what instructions to give to the robots by filling in the robot.txt. Just like the META tags, robot.txt is not a necessary component of the webpage, but it doesn’t hurt to create one, as robot.txt will give the search engines an idea how should they treat your webpage, which might help your page ranking a bit!

Create your own Robot.txt

You can create robot.txt with any text editors, such as notepad and wordpad. There are only two fields in the text file. They are user-agent and disallow. User-agent represents the name of the spider/bot, while disallow stands for the directory or file you want to exclude from crawling. The basic format of robot.txt is as follow: Read more…

Meta elements are special HTML codes that contains the metadata, which is the”data describing data itself”. Unlike regular codes, meta elements do not affect the appearance of the website. Its purpose is to specify and provide certain information of the page such as author and copyright, identify and assign proper values.

Once the meta tags play a major role in the algorithm of the search engines. Although they are no longer the primary factor, they are still important to a website and good to have regardless, since they can give your page a unique description to the search engines. Meta tags are relevant for a successful website SEO process.

There are four valid attributes of meta elements. They are : content, name, http-equiv and scheme.”Content” provides the property of the meta information, while”Name” provides property name for the corresponding value. The”scheme” formats and interprets the property value.” Http-equiv” is used to indicate the property as a HTTP header for HTTP servers to gather informantion and respond.

The <meta> tags should always stay inside the <head> element.

Here are some common usage of the meta tags:

Read more…

We are in the midst of developing a Facebook application for a client to exploit social media as a marketing vehicle here in Hong Kong. This is the client’s first foray into new media and we are naturally very excited about the project and also very eager to see how well it will turn out given that is focussed on a local business (admittedly with an international feel to it).

Then today, when I logged onto my Facebook page, I saw something that made me cringe, but at the same time, made me felt very good (and no, I do not have self mutilation tendencies). I saw a friend who posted a link to a local baby clothing retailer, who in turn gave away a 20% discount coupon – great stuff, and the clothes do look nice! Problem is, the company got it a bit wrong on how the coupon will be delivered to the participants – it claims you just need to post the link and the company will be able to send the coupon to your Facebook mail account. I don’t think this is actually feasible, and many mums probably found out as well, so I guess one of the smart ones decide to join the page as a fan and then also proceed to leave a message on the fan page with her email (ok, may be she was told to do this, I do not know). Before you know it, many other mums followed suit and now the fan page is full of people’s email addresses – (oucch, privacy 0 hackers, cringe! cringe! )

Now, I don’t want to reveal the name of the company cos it’s a bit unethical, and I am not here to diss the company either. What interests me a great deal is to see that the rise of the social networks has really turned the tables upside down on marketing (and I am no marketing guru). This company has over 1000 fans on the Facebook company page, and it managed to garner a great response to her Facebook 20% discount campaign – that is she has managed to generate over 50 leads in about 2 hours! I think for a small retailer, this is pretty astounding. I also think the conversion rate is going to be very high, as the mums look mega keen to get the coupon.

As a side note, an interesting analysis of the 50 or so email addresses that are on the fan page reveals 32 belongs to a Yahoo Mail address of some sort! Just goes to show that Yahoo is / can still be a major player locally in targeting the 30 somethings (assuming most mum with a young child will be in this group).

Well, enough of my rant, I am going to take away 3 things from my little exercise

1. Selling online + marketing though social media is going to be awesome! Even for local businesses!!

2. Better solutions are needed to help businesses large and small to use these media properly, so I do not get to harvest the emails of 50 mothers.

3. Trying to come up with something funny to do with 50 mums but that will probably put me in a bad light so better leave it at that … and I have total respect for mums … honest.

Until next time …

Social media is make up by a variety of components. Blogs, forums, media-sharing, networking…and these are all driven by the integration of human communication and connections. Making use of the technology, everyone can express themselves and share their thoughts through the social media platforms. Many businesses are trying to advertise themselves and gather data through social media sites – IBM even opens up its own social network site. Here are my 10 recommended sites for businesseses: Read more…

Alibaba is one of the biggest online business trade and retail platform site for small and medium-sized enterprises. There are two Alibaba sites aiming for different users. Alibaba.cn is a trading platform for traders within China, while Alibaba.com is an English language site specialized for international buyers looking for trades with China and other Asian manufacturing countries. The two sites operates independently , which means if a seller in China wants to promote his products to both International and China buyers, he/she have to register one account at each site and manage them separately (This review will be focusing on Alibaba.com) .

Users will be offered a “Website” for users to show their company information and promote their products. You could list the information of your product or services on your website. Premium users can create a customized layout for the site to attract visitors. Put in mind that a product will take up to a day to approve before it is going to be listed. Read more…

My first task is to setup an account at BT Tradespace, a young and rapid growing business networking service dedicated to small and medium businesses, provided by the BT group.

Everything is just like your regular social networking website, you can create your personal profile for yourself and your company, join communities, but most importantly, you can create your own 「Tradespace」. It’s a platform for you to promote your business by putting up your product information. The site supports Paypal, so you could actually sell your product through your space, there will be 5% transaction fee if you have successfully make a trade.

I specially like the uploading feature of this platform. Other than posting pictures and texts, The site allows users to upload up to 10 podcasts and 10 video files to promote their products or services for free users. I think this is an excellent way to show show your future clients what they are going to get from you. There is also a simple blog function for users to report and share the recent activities of your company. Read more…

In the past few years, online marketing platforms and social network websites are becoming ubiquitous, promotion for business is no longer a difficult task for a marketing newbie. Through the internet, the reach of your promotion could be easily extended to the planet in a second.

As an intern, I’ve been guided and asked to promote my company’s product, a CMS web design tool . Aside from making phone calls, marketing can also be done through the world wide web. At the beginning I thought it’s going to be tough since this is my first time doing any online marketing, but in fact it isn’t. I found some of the things I am doing is very familiar: Register an account at a community, posting decorative messages to attract visitors’ attention…Hey, Isn’t that just what an average teenager will do over the internet everyday?

Of course I did learn tons of new things . I’ll try to share my findings and leave a record of useful tidbits that I have came across during my experience here. I hope you will like it.