Hmmmm .... random stuff, stuff i found, cool stuff, funny stuff, lame stuff, stuff lah! ... boing boing boing!
Timothy Tiah - Founder of Nuffnang (Link)
Cheo Ming Shen - Founder of Nuffnang (Link)
Amazingly all the Asia's Young Entrepreneurs Award are mostly internet or IT related. :) Guess that's really the path to tread on to succeed!
Another BIG SHOUT for Malaysia, of all the 25 people listed, only Tim & Ming Shen are represented from Malaysia. The rest of the Young Entrepreneurs are from all over Asia (lots of Singaporeans!!)
Malaysia Boleh!!
U know what to do rite? Vote for them at
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/11/1115_young_entp/source/27.htm
A friend recomended me to check out Zedge.net I thought it was another one of those websites that offered a few free ringtones. But after checking it out today ... its a fantastic website!
Have you tried it yet?
I just logged in this morning and tried the Bonuslink E-Game. Its totally similiar to the all loved Bejewelled game, except that instead of jewels you see logos of Bonuslink's sponsors!
You just need to log in and register (need to have Bonuslink Number) and then you all set to play. They give you 3 levels, and each must be completed in 30 seconds! So match 3 or more tiles either horizontally or vertically and get points!!
In my lame attempts this morning, i scored 225 points!! I will definitely play again and see if I can get some higher points!! I think Bonuslink should make it more competitive and highlight the Top 3 Highest Points for the day, so that we all know how much we need to "beat" in order to score some big reward with Bonuslink!!
Bonuslink E-Game Link
http://www.bonuslink2u.com.my/egame.htm
This is the Main Log-In Screen.
Just register it online and in 1 minute you can play the game!
Can you beat my score of 225?
In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo's Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.
Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.
Outside sites include PhotoBucket -- the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace -- or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc. or Snapfish, he said.
"Flickr will get top-billing, of course," Butterfield said in an interview late on Thursday about the plan to give users multiple alternatives.
Butterfield and co-founder Caterina Fake, his wife, sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005. Butterfield is now a director of product management at Yahoo.
Later, Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division, said in a company statement: "We are making great strides in our ongoing efforts to align Yahoo!'s resources and focus on core strategic priorities."
"Part of this progress is today's decision to close Yahoo! Photos to better serve our valued customers through Flickr."
Yahoo's move follows the explosive surge in growth by PhotoBucket, an independent photo storage site based in Palo Alto, California, from a quarter of the market a year ago to around 40 percent last month, according to Hitwise Inc. data.
In the same period, Yahoo Photos' share has been cut two- to three times over to around 5.8 percent of the U.S. market. Flickr, meanwhile, has grown to 4.5 percent, up from 3.7 percent, according to Hitwise U.S. Web audience data.
Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.
Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.
According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006.
By contrast, PhotoBucket rose to 32 million users in 2006 from 12 million users in 2005. It is set to grow to around 62 million users by the end of 2007, PhotoBucket Chief Executive and co-founder Alex Welch said in a recent interview.
Now this is coool and absolutely using technology to help consumers to gauge
our road traffic conditions via the web. Cool Beans!
Free info on traffic situation
Road users can now obtain information on real-time traffic conditions on several highways via variable message signboard (VMS), web portal, short messaging system (SMS) and multimedia messaging system (MMS).
The good news is that all this will be for free, announced Works Minister Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu.
He said the Malaysian Highway Authority’s national traffic management centre, which was based on Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), would monitor the traffic situation on 11 highways.
“Through the ITS concept, the centre is able to collect, store and analyse traffic data and disseminate them to road users through various medium,” he said at the launch of the centre at the MHA headquarters yesterday.
The minister later told reporters that the centre comprised three phases, with the first two phases having been completed.
The first phase includes integration of the centre with the Lebuhraya Damansara Puchong (LDP)/ Sprint Highway, New Pantai Expressway (NPE), Kesas and Penang Bridge while the second phase covers the West Coast Expressway, North-South Highway (Plus), Guthrie Corridor Expressway (GCE), and development of a web portal, SMS and MMS for road users. The third phase will cover other highways later this year.
Real-time traffic information on highways via
Hmmmmm ...... another Search Engine - SNAP!! Pretty interesting that it pulls out a picture, but it sorta lags a bit ... hmm perhaps if our bandwidth improves with speed and capacity, SNAP may be a pretty cool tool to use for Searches!
Google may be the most popular search engine to date but there are plenty of alternative search engines looking to grab a piece of the action – and we're not just referring to Yahoo! Search or MSN Search.
Here's a look at some of the more interesting ones out there.
If you ever wanted to have a more visually stimulating web browsing experience, Snap gives you exactly that.
What is interesting about Snap as an alternative to Google is the way Snap takes a different approach to searching the Web.
Instead of giving you back a set of plain old text search results, it gives you an actual preview of the webpage you are about to visit.
Search results are displayed on the left side of the page, while the other side provides a visual preview of the website (which you can choose to view in small, medium or large).
This visual display of images along with text is a refreshing change to looking at wordy description of websites on other search engines. The beauty of it is that you get to judge whether the search result is relevant just by previewing it.
Another cool feature of Snap is that it actively anticipates your search. From the moment you start typing in the search box, Snap will begin to actively anticipate you want to search for, offering popular terms, synonyms along with suggestions.
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Scrolling through pictures: You can easily scroll through pictures while previewing them with Snap’s new image search function. |
However, the drawback to this is you have to be using Internet Explorer in order to benefit from this feature. Also, users are required to perform an additional step by downloading an Active-X preview control to make direct interactivity active by default in Snap.
Another thing we liked about Snap is its newly added Image search function. While most of us are all familiar with other image search engines like Google Image Search, Snap takes a rather unique approach.
Snap's image search looks very much like an image-browsing program. Images found are presented in the form of thumbnails on the left with a larger version of the picture is shown on the right.
The cool thing about this feature is the seamless transition of images as users browse through images. Still, the best thing about it is that it intelligently checks the previewed images and automatically discards images with broken links.
In short, Snap is a nice and simple search engine with a good layout that delivers search results clearly.
Snap's visually stimulating site preview feature offers something fresh that clearly stands out among the masses of text based search engines on the web.
People using Yahoo Pipes will be able to mix and mashup data sources from all kinds of places on the Internet into combined feeds they can share with others.The latest service from Yahoo makes mashing up RSS feeds from lots of sources
into single powerful feeds much easier thanks to its drag and drop interface.
It's a tool that hardcore information junkies will love.
Here's what they do.
People use search engines billions of times a month. When they look for
something related to your offerings, Pinstorm make sure you’re found. In
simple words, we connect your prospects to you.
Yahoo Inc.'s progress in launching a new Internet ad sales system could be a turning point for its shares as investors bet on faster revenue growth, analysts said on Wednesday.
Yahoo shares rose 8 percent on Wednesday and lifted rival Internet sector companies after it said its new system, dubbed Panama, would be fully introduced in the United States as of February 5, about a month ahead of Wall Street expectations.
The ad system brings Yahoo in closer league with Web search leader Google Inc. , honing the technology that allows advertisers to pay for search terms based on their popularity.
Panama also helps advertisers target the ads sent to specific audiences on the Web or rotate ads based on their effectiveness, capabilities Google has offered for several years.
"Yahoo has not executed as well as Google, has not had as strong a software platform for advertising, but they're still a very strong No. 2 player and that's worth something," said Global Crown Capital analyst Martin Pyykkonen.
"I'm not forecasting any kind of wholesale shift here, that all of a sudden Google is going to fall by the wayside ... but I do think they (Yahoo) will narrow the gap," said Pyykkonen, who rates both company shares "overweight."
If Panama gained momentum, Yahoo's revenue growth could rise to a high-teens to low-20s percentage rate by the end of 2007, Pyykkonen said. That would outpace Yahoo's own forecasts for full year growth, issued on Tuesday -- which fell below average Wall Street estimates.
A legal fund will be set up soon as a means to provide financial assistance for bloggers who face legal action such as the defamation suits taken by the New Straits Times Press (M) Sdn Bhd (NSTP) against bloggers Jeff Ooi and Ahirudin Attan.
Speaking at a press conference held by the Centre of Independent Journalism (CIJ) here, Ooi said the legal fund, an initiative by fellow bloggers, will be managed by those with a good reputation.
“The proceeds would not only be used to protect bloggers against suits but also to provide training workshops in the field of investigative journalism for bloggers – subject to the approval of the trustees.”
According to Ahirudin, possible trustees for the fund include the former Prime Minister’s daughter Marina Mahathir and former NSTP group editor-in-chief A. Kadir Jasin.
On Thursday, the court is to hear an inter-parte application for an injunction on Ahirudin, while Ooi’s inter-parte application hearing will be on Jan 30.
The Prime Minister said these laws were enforceable and bloggers must bear in mind that they could not hide or take advantage of the Internet to do something that was against the law.
“They cannot hope to cover themselves or hide from the laws,” he told Malaysian journalists at the end of his three-day working visit here yesterday.
He said bloggers, just like newspaper journalists, must be responsible for what they wrote or risk facing legal action from others.
Abdullah was commenting on the legal action against bloggers Jeff Ooi and Ahirudin Attan by the New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd (NSTP), its deputy chairman Datuk Kali-mullah Masheerul Hassan, Group Editor in Chief Datuk Hishamuddin Aun and former Group Editor Brenden John Pereira.
He raised the question of “what was freedom without responsibility,” saying that laws must be respected.
On the lack of proficiency in English among teachers and lecturers, he said there was a need to improve the curriculum and methods to teach English in schools.
He added that Malaysians must understand that English was an international language.
Abdullah was responding to questions from journalists on the declining standard of English in Malaysian schools and universities.
Earlier, Abdullah told Malaysian students at the London School of Economics of the need for Malaysia to be competitive, pointing out the paces already made by the Chinese and India.
Malaysians have been asked to develop their websites on local web hosts instead of foreign counterparts, to avoid having to face disruption in Internet service such as the one experienced by many after the Dec 26 earthquake in Taiwan.
Internet service provider (ISP) Telekom Malaysia (TM) business chief executive officer Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa said the recent incident showed a considerable number of local sites were not hosted locally and were thus affected by the disruption in international telecommunication links.
“Malaysia has more than sufficient capacity for web hosting services and it would be timely for us to collectively have a change of mindset with regard to our local capabilities in hosting Malaysian content.
“I would like to encourage all organisations and individuals to host their websites locally not only to leverage on the country’s strong infrastructure for hosting services but also to be more self-reliant to ensure that disasters like this do not have such impact on them,” he said in a Jan 5 statement.
Zamzamzairani said this would be in line with the purpose of the Malaysia Internet Exchange to improve domestic traffic and keep it within the country.
The earthquake had damaged international telecommunication cables, thus cutting off telecommunication services between Malaysia and Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the US.
In the statement,TM said the 7.1-magnitude earthquake off Taiwan resulted in a major breakdown of five cable systems, including Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2).
“All these cable systems route the country’s Internet traffic, with the bulk of it going through APCN2 (submarine cable fault between Shantou, China and Tanshui, Taiwan and between Lantau, Hongkong and Chongming, China which route the main bulk of Internet traffic for Malaysia),” it said.
Traffic had to be re-routed through Europe and China to the United States,with the assistance of TM partner carriers in Europe, China, Hongkong and Japan.
Clive Chen, 23, a freelance web developer for businesses and individuals, said most of his local clients preferred Malaysian web hosts such as the Malaysian Institute of Microelectronic Systems (Mimos).
“This is because local web hosts are ‘closer’ and hence, faster (bandwidth) whereas if they choose host websites from say,the US,they would have to go through a ‘further’ distance which inevitably has more activity and traffic in between,” he said.
Even so, there are others like blogger Kenny Sia, 24, who opted for international hosting.
“Cost is a major factor for sure, when it comes to choosing a web host. International ones give you five times more storage space and bandwidth for the same price,” he said.
Privacy is another concern. While both local and international web hosts can hack into the e-mail accounts of their customers, it is less likely to happen on an international web host, Sia said.
“As for the fear of services being disrupted during instances such as earthquakes, I don’t think it’s a problem for me. After all, earthquakes don’t happen everyday,” he added.
Sia spends US$5 (RM17.74) a month for 55GB of storage space despite the two-second ping (response) time.
Localhosts can be slightly faster – 33-millisecond ping time – but usually at a higher price.
Local ISP TM Offers a promotional price fo RM988 a year for 1,000 MB of space.
