Sales, Social and Tech

One of the interesting things I learned working with a millennial is that they are have the Internet easy for them but this ease forgot how "difficult" life was back then. Take hosting a video online. Today, all you need is a smartphone, Internet connection, a Youtube account and viola, you can host a video online for the world to see. As one who grew up in the dial-up generation, hosting a video back then was quite a challenge. You had to buy expensive video equipment and the video was to be captured on VHS video tape. Once the video was ready for to be shared, you had to convert VHS analogue to digital.That wasn't the end. You had to consider the storage and bandwidth cost and the biggest challenge was that you have to handle codes to allow the video to be played. You also had to consider how to disseminate your video.Today, you don't event have to worry about bandwidth or storage cost. Just upload onto Youtube, embed the given codes and you have your vide...

Nokia announced the availability of the Nokia Lumia 625 which will have a bigger screen but with a small price with the other smartphones. It will also support 4G. Rumours have it that that the Nokia Lumia 625 will cost €220 or about SGD370, without contract. If based on Singapore contracts, the telcos here might charge you around SGD50 or nothing for a value contract. This will be challenge for Nokia. Will Singaporeans even grab the phone at this price or free for a contracted plan? But Nokia needs this to succeed as the low-end Symbian phones will be phased out around this time. The jury is still out there for the two 90s juggernauts which somehow lost out in the age of the touchscreen. From the Press Release, Fun, Fast and Affordable: Nokia Unveils Lumia 625 Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced the  Nokia Lumia 625 , an accessibly priced 4G smartphone to help people see more of what they love. The Nokia Lumia 625 delivers high-speed entertainment to a wi...

Evernote celebrates its 5th birthday and those who use it can immediately agree that it has become their external brain. Evernote is like a notepad online and on steroids. Here are a couple of reasons. No pesky need to hit the save button. When you use Microsoft Word, you constantly need to keep reminding if you pressed the Control S button. If you don't press that occasional Control S and you accidentally quite Word, good luck to you. YMicrosoft Word may saved your draft, but sometimes, you really can't be so sure. Evernote syncs the note to their cloud server through quick intervals which are non-intrusive. If you are not online, it will just automatically update into the PC. No need to save documents as files When you save a Word document, you have to think of where to save it and what to name the file. Sometimes, you just save it to desktop and your desktop becomes cluttered with docs. Evernote, on the other, sees each note as part of a notebook and automat...

Many have voiced their disapproval of Singtel new reduced mobile data cap when the telco announced the launch of its 4G network.  http://superadrianme.com  has a good write-up on the launch. Here are some tips for your consideration to optimise mobile data usage with the reduced data cap. Tip 1: Monitor your data usage There are many apps out there that will help you monitor your data usage.  For iOS and Android users, just search "monitor data" and you can find tons of free apps. Those on the new Ice-Cream Sandwich (ICS) Android version will find that this latest OS comes with a in-built data monitor app, under settings, that also provide alerts when you are about to reach certain cap levels.  By monitoring your data usage, you will be able to identify which of the apps uses the most data and thus you can either reduce using that app or remove it completely.  Tip 2: Keep a look out for data compression app. So far, I have ...

This is an interesting story to share about Cloud technology. A senior IT director was said to refuse to even consider Cloud technology because he cannot see the physical Cloud at work. He prefers to invest in physical servers so can see them at work at the data centre. This despite the fact that going onto the cloud will cut his IT expenditure byron the 50%. I dread to ask him about God. But like how God works is mysterious ways, Cloud technology is already all around us. If you are using Whatsapp or iMessage or watching YouTube, you are already engaging the cloud. Besides the fixed infrastructure cost, Cloud technology can also negate other operation cost. For example, when my IT guy had to be in Vietnam, we communicated through whatsapp to get a project running. As it was an app, he pushed it through a cloud hosting site so end users can easily download with a link from an email. IDD cost between Singapore and Vietnam was totally non-existence. We didn't had to ...

Challenger took up the challenge in March 2011 to operate for 24 hours at Funan. Some described it as an alternative to Mustafa. In an edm received today, Challenger @ Funan will return to normal hours operation on Jan 15, ending their 24 hours endeavour after 10 months. Challenger @ Funan will operate from 10am to 10pm. Now there is one less place for geeks to go to do their midnight shopping.. Wait, geeks do midnight shopping?

Most IT vendor will tell you that they have up to 99.99% reliability. This means that for an entire year, the system will be down 0.01% of the time, or 52.44 mins for the entire year of 2012 as it is a leap year. eNets, however, lost that 99.99% reliability score on the first day of 2012 along by being down for 11 hours. This means eNets has a reliability score of 99.87% for the year 2012. eNets went down because the company forgot to renew the domain, eNets.sg, on time. eNets failure meant that many websites, especially those for government sites, were not able to pay with eNets online payment system. mrbrown, a popular Singapore blogger, noted that eNets did renew their domain but only for one year. Wrote mrbrown , One year?! Are you guys planning to be around in the epayments business next year? Are domain names so expensive that you can only afford a one-year renewal (which you might forget to renew again)? If an epayments company cannot keep track of a simple thing like...

I am on the 12GB  monthly mobile data plan and I seldom get pass 4Gig per month. But if you are looking to get more data from your monthly usage, I found the Onavo app that lets you do just that. The Onavo app is the mobile data tracker app which allows you to track the size of data that you use to visit a website or when you are using an app. For iPhone users, it helps to compress your data so you utilise a smaller data size from your data plan. From the session details above, it shows that the app helps to save data usage especially for apps and the web.  I was testing out the McDelivery SG app and the Onavo app was able to save up to 71% of data used. Maybe McDelivery should look their app to reduce data usuage. The Onavo app doesn't save much on video/audio though. This screenshot came with only 1 hour of usage so it would great to see how much savings can occur in a month.