PopOut! Singapore: The book nerd who wowed the crowd
Out of the five presentations at PopOut! Singapore, Bookjetty.com’s Herryanto Siatono was the one that was highly recommended by Mozilla’s Gen Kenai.
Herryanto also shared his solution on how to make online sms to mobile phones affordable to other web2.0 startups looking at offering sms services.
“The presentation I enjoyed the most was Bookjetty,” said Gen.
“I felt that Herry had a niche and create this service which extract that niche.
“This service provides a significant benefit not only to the people of Singapore, but now to everybody who like books all over the world.”
Bookjetty.com is designed as “a social network for book lovers, where users can catalog, rate, and review their books, and check the books availability in the libraries seamlessly”.
Too much backdoor entrance to Singapore National Library Board
made the board let Heeryanta accessed their system from the front.
During the Q&A session, Herryanto was asked on how he could afford to provide users with the SMS service.
The SMS service on Bookjetty.com allows users to receive SMS about details of the book, especially that of the index number of the book in the Library. The previous Web1.0 way was to either print out the details or write it on a piece of paper.
“Do you all know Twitter?” replied Herryanto.
“Twitter actually offer SMS notification free of charge.
“When Twitter released its API, the first thing I saw was a free SMS gateway. I wouldn’t be able to afford the SMS service on my own, but thanks to Twitter, Bookjetty.com now offer SMS service.”
Necessity is the mother of all of invention. In Herryanto’s Bookjetty.com, it was his ability to adapt other web services to meet the needs of his users that well appreciated by the PopOut! audience.
PopOut! Singapore: Mozilla earned USD60million in 2005 from search box
Mozilla Japan director of marketing and partner relations, Gen Kanai, revealed yesterday the earnings of Mozilla from the search box alone and how the funds were also re-distributed to fellow Mozilla developers for projects.
Visitors to PopOut! Singapore, organised by The Digital Movement, was also treated to a preview of Firefox3.0.
“In 2005, we published an earnings for Mozilla about USD60million,” said Gen.
“That earnings are primary driven by the search box with our relationships from Google and Yahoo worldwide, and with local search engines, like Amazon Japan, etc.”
“We donate earnings to our community members helping us and to other open-source projects.”
Gen demonstrated new features of Firefox3.0 which grew a huge applause and “wows” from the audience.
“We will be providing off-site features for Firefox3.0, more malware protection and be adding new features around SSL,” said Gen.
Demo of SVG in Firefox3.0
“Future versions of Firefox will include have a scalable vector graphics for both images and videos which will allow users to move and resize them on the browser without a need for a plugin.”
A question was thrown to Gen about what motivates him to work for Mozilla which he answered that innovation was his biggest muse.
“The motivation is the chance to work on projects that affects over 100million users worldwide ,” said Gen.
” I really believe Firefox and other Mozilla projects are a benefit to everybody in the Internet.
“When IE was only the dominant player for 6 years, a lot of those innovation stopped for that period of time.
“But now that there is competition in the browser space, all of us are now innovating and this will benefit all of us, the Internet users.”
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Should journalists blog?
This was a question Eileen Yu, for ZDNET Asia, asked a week ago.
“Should we, or shouldn’t we allow ourselves to blog in our capacity as journalists?” wrote Eileen.
“Do we need to differentiate blogs from news articles, and if we do, how should we go about doing that?”
Eileen answered her own questions here.
Of course journalists should blog.
Besides being able to write something that a journalist wouldn’t put as news, it also helps readers to understand the persona of the journalist.
Who is the journalist? Why is he/she interested in this particular technology? etc..
Journalists should be celebrities, especially those in the tech publications. An example would be John C Dvorak. Look at his group of followers from PC Mag, Cranky Geeks and Twit.tv.
A blog entry itself need not be long and the journalist can use it to his/her advantage by putting short posts on the latest technology.
Using the blog to share their favourite technology links, it helps to portray the tech journalist as somebody who is especially interested and up to date with the latest in tech.
Should journalists blog? Yes they should and their publishers should also encourage them.
Examples of journalists’ blogs include Loosewire , Iantan.org and budiputra.com .
Skype ring tone goes silent
(Update 17082007 10:00am: Skype log-in is ok now. Updates can be found here. 30 mins later, Skype went down again.)
Skype has been down since afternoon and it is still down.
It seems there is a software bug in the P2P software.
"Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype," wrote the Skype blog .
"Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in."
Dead man’s phone bill will help improve MY GDP by the trillions!
How much of a SMS, talk time on a mobile phone and 3G data would a dead man need to use in order to have a bill totaling a few TRILLION Ringgit?
USA Today picked up the news from the New Straits Times that a Malaysian "received a USD$218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to pay up within 10 days or face prosecution ".
The report also reported that the bill belongs to the Malaysian’s late father who passed away in January 2007 and the account was closed since.
The bill total? 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit!
If the bill was already in the trillion of ringgit, one would have thought that with good customer service Telekom Malaysia would do away with the 0.01 ringgit.
