From attending few conferences, siminars and even surfing the web there will always be someone who claims he or she is a social media expert. Gary vaynerchuk seems to sum up might taughts as his website. ( What he says is 99% of social media experts are clowns ). I been seeing a lot of young people ( Age 20-35 ) jumping on the social media bandwagon with little or zero marketing experience--not to mention a lack of social media management skills or any campaign track record. And yet they call themselves "social media experts" giving siminars, getting huge contracts, etc.

On of the ways most of the youths in Malaysia earn some extra pocket money is by using SAYS.my and sharing commercial campaigns across various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, or perhaps even that new Google+. I noticed there some people who are still in the dark on the best practices on how to garner the most clicks possible on their campaign links so hence I decided to write this small mini-guide.

Hey I had an interesting discussion with a collegue of mine at work today on how should we handle e-mail replies. The way I currently do it is the SMS Style, aka the short, blunt and to the point method, however some people like my friends have pointed out to be to use more formal robotic style, aka the normal way companies send you e-mail where the beat around the bush, try to be your friend and you just might figure out what he / she is trying to say.

By chance today, I stumbled upon Maxis Communication ( one of Malaysia's Largest Telecommunications provider ) 's Facebook Wall. It seems they were in the process of rejecting social media. Today afternoon, I noticed their wall have disable user's posting, and just an hour ago I noticed the whole discussion forum is gone. I remember yesterday Maxis was teasing users about a whole new social experience, well I think they misunderstood what the world social means, since to me it seems that Maxis only wants 1 way communication on Facebook I guess.

I seriously think that brands are raping facebook, some brands are on Facebook just for the sake of being on Facebook ( then they can claim that they know how to use Social Media ) but now I really am getting the feeling the Facebook Like system is getting worthless.

Well over the last few days all over the malaysia local news media there was talks about the government's annoucement of providing e-mail to everyone over the age of 18. While the idea itself may mean well, but I ensure you it is anything but that. Anyways forget about politics or corruption for a while, that may be some of the reasons on why this project was implemented but it is not the main reason. The main reason the government needs to create this E-mail is because the internet service providers ( ISP ) failed. Why I say so ? just read on.

Yes I am very lucky almost every place around where I live offers free Wi-Fi connection, I can easily take my laptop everywhere and still manage to get online. Few days ago I wrote about my experience of going to McDonalds over the course of the last 6 months. Today, I went over to McDonalds again with a friend of mine, and notice something which got me thinking, is it really worth it to give free Wi-Fi to your customers ?

I am always happy when local websites are successful, one good thing about it is there is less traffic going out of the country hence decreasing our need to buy international bandwidth. YouthAsia, a web company here in Malaysia, currently runs two local websites, one is SAYS.my ( www.says.my ) and one more is Groupon Malaysia ( www.groupsmore.com  ). YouthSays ( www.youthsays.com ) now just went through a rebranding with a host of new features to become SAYS.my ( as I mentioned in the URL above )

I have no problems with blogs who have advertisements as everyone wants to earn a bit. Heck even mine does. But what I started to noticed majority of blogs are no more about "opinions". Many bloggers have started to sell out just to make a few bucks on the side.

Few days ago, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation at Hilton Hotel, PJ entitled “The Magic of the DabbaWalas”. Dabba means Box and Walas means person, but when you put both of those words together, it means Lunch Box delivery person. This presentation was about this dabbawalas in Mumbai (Bombay) India and how they (who consist of mostly illiterate people) delivery many lunch boxes everyday without using any form of technology and yet never make a mistake. Since it was interesting and there are many things I found useful I taught I am going to share it with you guys and girls. It is a story that we don't always need technology for everything.

Social Networks are a double edge sword for most companies, if you know how to use it, great, your brand image improves, but if you just join for the sake of joining like my favorite punching bag, Maxis, it only tarnishes the brand even more. What did social networking (facebook in particular, I won't bring up twitter just yet) mean for Maxis? Read on to find out.

Althought I gave most of my thoughts about this contest in the previous post, here. This is for those who are interested in the trying to take part.

Celcom just announced the League of Extra-ordinary developer challange contest for Symbian now. They can't even handle the Android development contest and now they want to handle a Symbian developer contest. Maybe it is because it is funded by Nokia they can do it better?

Doesn't matter online or even offline, the number of friends a person has doesn't determine if he or she is influential or not. To be honest there is no exact way to tell if a person is influential or not, but there is a way to estimate it to some degree. Here I am going to discuss those very methods.

I have always been thinking, how does one become an important player in the FOSS scene. Well naturally I am thinking of how to do it in my own country, Malaysia. I recently wrote about how the Spirit of FOSS is dead here, this is more of an add-on to that article.

Celcom, one of the telecommunication providers in Malaysia recently hosted a contest called League of Extraordinary Developers ( or in this case it was called League of Extraordinary Android Developers, as the contest was to create an Android application ). So far almost a month after dateline of proposal submission, celcom has not gotten back to the developers who bothered to submit their proposal. I would know, I was one of them.

Yea anyone who reads stuff written by me knows I am from Malaysia. Anyones who knows me well also knows at times I am involved with a few Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) related stuff / community events. Over the last 2 years attending most of the events I can say that most of us don't really have the spirit for it. Here is my musings on it.

The Maxis10 programme is about independent voices giving their free, fair and unbiased reviews of the latest technologies and devices from Maxis. Every review offers 10 new guest reviewers the chance to experience a service or product firsthand. It's an avenue where opinions by people like you contribute genuine knowledge and experience to others who are excited to learn more.

Yea right, I am going to prove that it is all bull shit.

Free Public WiFi Hot spots are becoming a common thing in Malaysia, heck even the small road side footstalls might soon have WiFi. But with all the WiFi hotspots around the country some have a darker side to them, one which you may not like.

With more and more technology companies making headlines, it amazes me how much Microsoft becomes not needed. Yes, Microsoft is not going to fade away into nothingness, this is something I can fully agree upon, but they are 100% going to continue to lose market share to other companies.

I have been using Facebook for almost a year, and I find that they are coming more and more evil everyday.

On September 16th 2009, I gave a talk in APIIT College on "What Programmers Need to know?", well I taught I will share what I did for that talk as I think it might be useful for people after graduation (mainly targeted towards computer science students). I kinda changed the topic, from what programmers need to know to "What Computing Students need to know"

I am starting to get real pissed off at majority of IT Magazines and Newspapers that I buy every month. Most of them claim to give reviews or professional opinion about technology but all they are doing is sucking up to companies. I picked up the november issue of Max IT, a local magazine for technology, they were covering the release of Windows Mobile 6.5, and praising it, even to the extend of saying it comes with the best mobile web browser free of charge. The next page had a coverage of windows 7 launch, and that one was saying we should thank microsoft for giving the first 700 copies of windows 7 at a discounted rate. The way the author handled this two articles, clearly showed that he was being very bias towards both softwares, it was not an honest write-up. Then I began to check other articles in the magazine and found most of it were...well marketing articles.