Stone Soup of an Online Business

To answer your question, yes, there are people who speak Latin, but we are few, possibly numbering in the low thousands. Many more know it as a written language, a few hundred thousand fluent readers worldwide. Millions of current and former students, again worldwide. All of us speak another language as our mother tongue. It’s a fabulous equalizer that way: no one is speaking their mother tongue at a spoken Latin conference.

Spanish on the other hand is one of the most spoken languages on Earth. Hundreds of millions of native speakers in dozens of countries. Even more as a second language. The confusion between Latin and Spanish arises because the part of the Americas where Spanish is spoken is usually called Latin America.

Thanks to Peter Sipes. In his recent talk to our team member Eunice, we have finally got a clearer view of how to make our website even more localize for all.

“Changing the water for the roses is becoming the very first thing we wanted to do before we start our daily morning meeting. Never we know this little change bring so much difference!” Said Pin

“Also, thanks Ammie for the lovely roses. They really light up our day!” Said Wanching

5 Reasons you should order one for your office:
- 8 freshly choosen grade A roses by Le Fiores florist
- Beautiful IKEA vase carefully wrapped in box
- Eco friendly, ready to put into vase
- Free delivery within Klang Valley
- Quick design guide from Ammie

To order, email ammie@lefiores.com with your company name, address and contact numbers. The flowers will be delivered to you in less than 3 working days and please write your check payable to Chua Sok Wei with amount RM80. Check will be collected on delivery. No-question-asked refund policy. Please download the invoice here.

In sweden, online buyers are so used to getting the product first before paying. Well, most of their e-commerce websites support two payment options, Faktura and credit card. Faktura remains as the preferred one where the owners value the return rights of their customer more than anything. Invoices are sent together with the products. Buyers will have to just pay the invoice through their local bank account.

Another thing I might it interesting is the introduction of additional fee for a greener-packaging method. Yes, paying extra to have the website owner wrap your product in a more eco-friendly way. It costs 10 kr extra, but makes huge difference. So, opt in for MILJO next time :)

Thanks to Jian for sharing this. Jian just returned from Sweden, he was sent there to do research on how Nordic countries run their online business sustainable environmental…

I found this interesting post from SlowCatchUpKuan in her post on this small pitiful little stray dog. Read more.

I found this particularly interesting. Is that chooing priority ‘Low’ also means I will get my responce slower? If everyone goes for priority ‘High’, then why bother to ask?

This reminds me the one of a song from Shakira, Illegal - “question my own questions on and on..”

It takes you 2-minutes to listen to a real customer about how should the form looks like. I bet almost all customers will prefer a simple one than above.

1. Instruction kills creativity, makes people think less. The person who built this form is probably just want to get work done than how this form can help those who use it.

2. Change is pain. The original paper-based form could look exactly like this online form. Why bother to change it?

3. Users are passive. The form is viewed by countless visitors, yet no change has been done. Design of a building is done first than its construction. When the building is done, it is often too late to change, and suggestions are limited to what is already there.

You are in a book business for 30 years. Story of Amazon.com motivates you to extend your business online. You start to build a website and sell your books online. Your marketing manager busy adopting new marketing ideas including Blog, email newsletter, pay-per-click, etc.

But after a while, you start to think why the result was not as expected. Your cost acquiring new visitors is high, the Blog is not active, no one seems to use the tell-a-friend box in your website…

But, someone next door - without any experience in selling books, started an online book store. They have some funny story and people are spreading the news for them, their CEO can be reached anytime by an email, the way they reply the customer support email is fun.

Start an online business, never extend it from a conventional one!

With Internet flatten the world, you can now take an order from your website without meeting your customer. They are required to fill in a boring and long order form (all the way from first name to where they stay).

You have them all kept in a customer database. A literate society comes to believe that everything can be explained in words. What you’ve just seen is an example of how great a fallacy that is.

I bet the name of customer means nothing to you, especially if you have thousand of orders a day. They are just another must-have record in your customer database, because all online forms are designed the same!

I’m surprised! Most of us only add a friend from Meetic when a picture was attached with a profile, same goes to facebook and frienster! Same goes to the fact that you will never fall in love with someone by just their name!

I wish I don’t have to fill in anything while making an order. Instead, just to upload my picture, why not? At least, I don’t become ‘another record’ in the database, but becoming a friend to the online store owner.

A customer database made up of faces, indexed by nick name! I would love to have this!

When it comes to annual event, what is the best domain to be used? By including the year 2008 after the domain (yes, someone may already registered wcit.com), it is therefore a must to register a new name wcit2009 next year. New domain means you have to start all over again and build your ranking in search engine again! To solve this, if you are using a Blog, you can create categories like 2007, 2008, 2009, etc and assign your post respectively.

An unfair post had recently got us an interview with The Star writer to interview us - about our experience working with our internship students.

What is the most memorable experience?

A nice framed picture, from Henny, Jingkai and Alex!

Do you feel that you are sacrificing a lot when training the students?

We may be spending about couple hours for their training, but they are spending their eight hours here, finding a temporarily stay for just three months, get here by bus.. you realize it is unfair if they can’t learn anything here.

Say you buy a camera with 1 year warranty. The serial number doesn’t hold the date of your actual purchase. That is why, you are asked to send back the Warranty card, which most of us never do.

It is unfair to say that manufacturer do not wish to get the actual purchase date. If they do, they won’t include the Postal-paid thingy on the card. So, where goes wrong?

No one say you must follow the long-winded template of warranty-card design. Make the change!

We’re here! we’re here!

It is until Jo-jo make the final addtion of his voice to save “Whoville” city on a tiny planet, as small as a dusk. If you have not watched this movie, check this out.

This credit card payment page was taken from a famous online hotel booking website. I wish to collect 100 suggestion of improvements about this page (Yes, only this page!). I will send this post to the CEO of this website when the challenge met! I will compile your suggestion and come out with one page mock and included here.

Check this WWF wallpaper to light up your desktop!

What happen if your fridge is not working? You turn off the power, remove everything and send it to repair. You got it back, working perfectly after two days.

You will notice one thing, your fridge is cleaner now, with all rubbish clear and things are in order! I bet you won’t clean it if the fridge doens’t go wrong.

How to apply this to online business?

Create problem virtually! Assumming your customer complaint at you, someone hacking into your website, broken link, page whacked, etc - all these bring positive result!

Yahoo suspend your Yahoo Mail account if you don’t login for long. While, Gmail - reward you to stay longer and login more frequent by counting and increase your email storage while you are logging in!

Can you tell me what is the word of the picture above?

I just had a very interesting talk to three students (Chekey, Chailee and Ryanne), having their internship training here. Well, they are asked to think of the main page interface for one of the new system we want to develop soon. Through they are new, but I would say that they perform really very well in this task!

When come to interface, it is not best programmer or best designer can do the best job. It is one who can think from many different angles, making less choice for your visitors. Best possible, a Physiologist!

A lot of time, the intuitiveness of a system is achieved by understanding how human reacts and interpretes a design, I found this very interesting! Bill gates invented the best intuitive interface at his time, he deserves what he get today!

Post your answer as comment below

“All Marketers are Liars” - Seth Godin speaks at Google. Seth’s interesting presentation will tell you why technology won’t help, and why my parents will not come back bothering me if I send them to Google than Yahoo! :)

It would be the best if every party in the loop go beyond their own scope!

What is noise? When you have hundred of products but only one which is selling well, the rest are noise. When you want to indulge yourself to do something, any interruption is considering noise, as well!

Outsourcing seems to be one of the way to cut off noise. Sony or IKEA will not be of what they are today if they choose not to outsource. Raw materials, production and logistics are examples of noise.

Noise can be passing around. Consumers buy rice from supermarkets, supermakets from distributors, distributors tfrom rice mill owners, and farmers lastly. Each level trying to get rid of noise.

What is the effect of noise? Farmers spent most of their time working in the paddy field to produce rice. In this case, farmers are bearing the noise from consumers, under the hot sun. The digested noise are now turning into experience of how to grow paddy!

Skill is a result of noise!

If Google creates the most amazing website, why not they start their web design business?

When we work for someone, we get paid and at the same time we get the chance to acquire new skills. For example, a web designer creates an online store for someone and get paid for the time spent and the quality of work. Such relationship provides a very good platform for someone to learn.

The owner of the online store will not share the revenue with you. Everyday, values is built into the project and this has nothing to do with you (The very most you get a portfolio). The web designer goes project after project, having bad time during year end when all companies had finished their budget, etc.

This does not happen to only individual, but businesses as well. Most successful companies change their business direction to have recurring sales than one-off profit. All these involve applying their skills in different ways.

Web designers venture into their own online business; contractors builld their own housing project; programmer develop their own software for sale, etc. Remember, the moment you start, you are accumulating your values into somewhere. When you wake up tomorrow, it still still with you, Through you have much more to worry such as operation & marketing.

If you are Google now, would you want to start your web design business?

When you are in another country, and the hard drive of the file server in your company crashed. Working remotely comes to a real test, where:

1. Restoration must be done quickly! Getting ready with second hard drive, moving backup files into the new server, re-install the Linux platform…

2. Tools to get you connected to your office, both voice and video. We use Skype. Broadband connection, power supply, cup of coffee - Starbucks, if only you can be there in time!

3. A team of people back in the office to work as your hands. This also means the whole set of infra for both voice and video must also be steadily available back in your office. I am lucky to have both, infra and a very capable team!

Beginning 19th March 2008, Cradle will now provide conditional grants of up to RM150,000 in the pre-seed level to groups of innovative individuals with great technology-oriented ideas, subject to terms and conditions.

The new amount has been tripled because the categories of funded items using the grant money have been expanded to include market research and access, IP (Intellectual Property) search and registration, product testing and certification, and product packaging on top of the presently funded categories of development of prototypes, proofs of concept and business plans.

A resource centre for innovative ideas, Cradle provides funding, assistance and guidance to help technology entrepreneurs turn their ideas into reality.

In order to pay via Paypal, buyers are required to sign-up for a Paypal account before they can submit the payment. In fact, the Paypal registration process is not as straight forward as it claims. Most of the time, seller will receive questions/complaints from buyer as following.

What is a Paypal Expended Number Program?

Why am I required to enter my bank details?

Why was I been charged for USD1? Is this a hidden charges from you?

First of all, it is absolutely Free for buyer to signup for Paypal account.

To prevent fraud cases, Paypal will require buyers to verify their account via the Expanded Use Program. To prove the ownership of the credit card/bank account, Paypal will charge/deposit a small amount of money to buyers’ credit card/bank that they’ve registered with Paypal. Buyers will have to check their credit card statement/bank statement to retrieve a secret code from that transaction and enter back to Paypal system for verification purpose.

As an Unverified member of PayPal, buyers’ payments are subject to a Sending Limit. By becoming Verified, buyers will be able to send unlimited funds with their PayPal account.

Paypal will refund money back to buyers’ account after they verifiy with Paypal.

The domain pizza.com was acquired by an annonymous bidder for 2.6 million dollars after 14 years. The owner, Chris Clark bought the name pizza.com in 1994, never thought that this can fetch to such a higher price, after he saw an opportunity of the acquisition for vodka.com!

Driving Visitors

If a website is new, without much traffic and returning visitors - a ‘good’ website should be simple and take less time to develop. More time should be spent on the marketing, to drive more visitors to your website.

Increase Conversion

Once a website is getting enough traffic (in our terms, above 500 visitors a day), you should have enough feedback to build a website closer to what your visitors want. In this case, ‘good’ websites are those with initutive layout, content what your visitors like, etc! In one word, higher conversion rate!

If you have any end-of-life or spoilt PC, you can send it to this drop-off centre near Taman Mayang, Petaling Jaya. They pay cash (RM1 - RM10) for your recyclables.

Pls contact Micol 016-2828366 or visit website hebatpages.com. Or, you can send your contact info by fax to them at 03-78806252 to request pickup.

Maintaining more than one Blog can be time consuming, endless patches, new WordPress upgrade (to enjoy the new features in the recent launch of WordPress 2.5), fine-tuning can keep you really busy!

We have decided to use single WordPress installation for all Blogs. Well, we explore WordPress Mu but it is just way too bulky and complicated. WP Mu is like a layer of control panel in front of WP core engine. Yet, due to this fact, it is hard to configure and having problem catching up with latest WP releases.

You can try the Multiblogs solution to work this out. This single WP installation works for everyone by loading a different config file. As usual, these are few issues to be taken note on:

1) Unicode_start, this is one way to show Unicode characters in your Linux Terminal. This is interesting, we thot Unicode filename in Linux was not well supported, looks we are wrong!

2) Symlink, this allows creation of folder structure in our approach to archieve something like /lang/country/destination. The command ln -s . Make sure this command is run in the folder where you are creating the symlink.

3) The clean vuser function in mb-functions.php in multiblogs seems do not support non-ascii language well. It replaces all non-ascii to _, creating problem in the database Prefix name.

Was working on our travel guide business and Weikiat told me a about this… Apparently, the main page of WikiTravel Chinese version was hacked.

My friend asked me, “how to make a website appears on the top of search engines?”

The very first thing I can answer to her is, there is no quick for of doing this! Well, More than 50% of site visitors are directed from search engines.

Passive
Passive in a way, this is nothing new but a lot of passion needed, and often can and must be done on your end. There are unlimited kind of keywords which people used to find your website. In the simplest way, keywords are used by search engines to match content on your website. Now, do you think using keyword ‘石头汤’ can find my Blog, no way! Simply because I don’t have the Chinese translation. What about ‘石头羹’, ‘石頭湯’?

Active
Google sorts website using their patent-pending-never-disclose methodology. One of them, the PageRank, remain mistery but you can always interprete it to ‘the more links pointing to your website, the more popular your website is, eventually you deserve a higher seat’. Question, how to many many website pointing to you? This again, nothing new, not rocket science but a long term effort of making this to happen.

This first-class seat is not available for quick booking, you can only make your way to it!

Buying electronic components online is not something new. RS Malaysia, one of the pioneer in Malaysia who setup their first online store many years ago, are improving from time to time. I am happy to see that as they gradually gather users feedback and improve the website.

Just one thing, I received their email newsletter today. Sadly, I can’t find any link from the email to their website. In Analytics, we refer clicks from email newsletter as Referral. With the link properly implemented, it can give us a better ideas of how effective is this channel in bringing traffic to your site.

It’s been said many times and I shall say this again:

Conversion rate is inversely related to the clicks required to get things done.

Though simplicity is not a necessity, it’s definitely a virtue when attention span is getting shorter every second.

Show your customers you are sincere in helping them out.

Another giant online deal was struck between DoubleClick and Google.

Via Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO, April 13 (Reuters) - Google Inc. said on Friday it would pay $3.1 billion for Web ad supplier DoubleClick Inc., its biggest acquisition, accelerating a push into the graphic ad market led by Yahoo Inc.

The juggernaut of Web search-based advertising beat out suitors Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Yahoo in the final stages, sources familiar with the negotiations said. Time Warner Inc.’s AOL online unit had earlier considered a bid.

The agreed price represents a huge payday for San Francisco private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, DoubleClick’s majority owner, which 21 months ago paid $335 million for the assets acquired by Google, a source familiar with the deals said.

With this new acquisition, Google will further strenghten their leadership role in the world of web advertising.

Here’s the official press release from Google…

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 13, 2007 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today a definitive agreement to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a global leader in digital marketing technology and services, for $3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco-based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity and management. The acquisition will combine DoubleClick’s expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google’s leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.

The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online ads of all types, significantly benefiting customers and consumers:

* For users, the combined company will deliver an improved experience on the web, by increasing the relevancy and the quality of the ads they see.
* For online publishers, the combination provides access to new advertisers, which creates a powerful opportunity to monetize their inventory more efficiently.
* For agencies and advertisers, Google and DoubleClick will provide an easy and efficient way to manage both search and display ads in one place. They will be able to optimize their ad spending across different online media using a common set of metrics.

“It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better - less intrusive, more effective, and more useful. Together with DoubleClick, Google will make the Internet more efficient for end users, advertisers, and publishers,” said Sergey Brin, Google’s Co-Founder and President, Technology.

“DoubleClick’s technology is widely adopted by leading advertisers, publishers and agencies, and the combination of the two companies will accelerate the adoption of Google’s innovative advances in display advertising,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google.

“This transaction will strengthen our advertising network by expanding our access to publisher inventory and enabling us to serve the needs of a broader set of advertisers and ad agencies,” said Tim Armstrong, Google’s President, Advertising and Commerce, North America.

“Google is the absolute perfect partner for us,” said David Rosenblatt, Chief Executive Officer of DoubleClick. “Combining DoubleClick’s cutting edge digital solutions for both media buyers and sellers with Google’s scale and innovative resources will bring tremendous value to both our employees and clients.”

“When we acquired DoubleClick in July 2005, we saw an opportunity to partner with a great management team to further enhance the company’s capabilities and growth trajectory,” said Philip Hammarskjold, Managing Director of Hellman & Friedman. “This transaction affirms the successful transformation of DoubleClick, positions the firm for the future, and greatly benefits our investors.”

Both companies have approved the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close by the end of the year.

Of course, not everyone is happy with what Google is doing with the customer profiles they will be taking over from DoubleClick.

Via Washingtonpost.com

“Google will operate with virtually no legal obligation to ensure the privacy, security and accuracy of the personal data that it collects. At this time, there is simply no consumer privacy issue more pressing for the commission to consider than Google’s plan to combine the search histories and Web site visit records of Internet users,” the complaint says.

In 1999, DoubleClick drew criticism when it announced a plan to merge an offline database of consumer records with its online user-history database. The ensuing uproar and a 2000 FTC complaint filed by EPIC led DoubleClick to cancel the plan, but since then, the online ad industry has become more sophisticated.

The consumer groups also want the FTC to order DoubleClick and Google to destroy cookies that can identify users and to order Google to give people access to the personally identifiable data the company keeps on them.

Of course, with Yahoo and Microsoft eyeing for web dominance, this new acquisition might just land Google with lots of anti-trust lawsuits…

Finally, VPN for our office was in place. This means we are another step closer to working from office. VPN allows me to access to our LAN remotely!

We use OpenVPN. It comes with VPN server & client together. VPN server was installed in our Linux box inside LAN. Since most of the clients connecting to the VPN server are notebooks running Win XP, therefore will use Windows GUI version of OpenVPN.

If you are interested to setup one, you can refer to this HOWTO, which I feel it is most helpful! Few things, remember to allow port forwarding in your router, and also make sure no firewall blocking the client and server.

Including multiple machines on the server side
http://openvpn.net/archive/openvpn-users/2006-02/msg00252.html

Recently, I was looking for the latest Redhat Enterprise 5, to be used for our new projects. Redhat Enterprise comes with their technical support (yearly subscription) which we hardly use, but that is what you are paying for, not the software.

I emailed to one of the Redhat official office in Malaysia, never get a reply (we are kinda used with this, it happens to AirAsia too). Leaving no choice, I tried my luck emailing Magnifix Malaysia. I bought Redhat Linux 3 from them before, 7 years back during my University days.

The good people in Magnifix replied me and advise me how to go around with this. They even introduce the alternative CentOS platform which is compiled from the same Redhat Enterprise source. In a short 2 days, I have received 3 emails from their team…

All these are not going through any complicated helpdesk system which dump you with ticket number to scare you off than helping you… but genuine people who has the passion in their work, and trying to help! Bravo, Magnifix!

Seth Godin’s books are our bibles. When Seth started his new project, Squidoo, we are as excited as him. The building of a knowledge base with Seth’s ‘lens concept’ is pretty interesting. Yet, it is never easy for a market already dominated by Wiki, and the coming Google Knol project!

Looking back, we have started our Kumomo project a year ago. We are ambitious to believe it would taking up and to serve as an Ad Space Marketplace for everyone. It nearly become the albatross around our neck. The file closed when we sell the domain name and successfully funded two schools in Cambodia!

It seems that everyone is finding their way to create their own version of Web 2.0 project. Who will be the next FaceBook or Bebo? :)

Google has done their part to make searching of information more easily. Yet, do we have the tool to easily share our knowledge? The answer could be, NO!

Everyone possess useful knowledge, or having feedback about anything they come across. Can you tell how many of your visitors actually read your post and reply? Why not 100%? Could it because of the unfriendly Leave a Reply form at the bottom of your post?

The Knol project by Google will soon tell the answer!

The concept of no frills works so well with AirAsia, TuneHotels, why not on florist?

We are looking for Florist Partner!

It is important to understand what are the fixed cost associated with an online business. The following are an example of cost breakdown for an small-medium scale online business for your reference,

Setting up
Hardware, backup, setting up servers (RM20k)
Trademarks and copyright (RM10k)
System development (RM800k)

Monthly operation
Co-location, email hosting, domain name (RM2k)
Customer support, 24×7 (RM10k)
System maintenance (RM5k)
SSL certificate (RM50)

Monthly marketing budget
Online & offline campaigns (RM5k)

I was reading our partner, Pat’s Blog. Pat started Webmail.us and we have been working with him to provide email hosting services in Malaysia for more than 4 years!

Recently, they have changed their company name from, Webmail.us to Mailtrust! Through lot of time, energy and money were spent over the years for the branding of this domain, but the hard decision was made recently and this is what Pat wrote,

But then one of my business mentors said something I will never forget. He said, “Pat, it’s never too late to change a bad name.” He’s right. As soon as I heard him say that, I never looked back.

The word Webmail is too generic as a brand by itself. It does not accumulate values over the years unlike many other names such as YouTube, Facebook, and a lot.

Good move, Pat!

A name for your online business

We will be making a trip to Cambodia on the coming October to officially launch the Kumomo Schools, Cambodia build school by Bernad Krisher. We wish to take this opportunity to call for your help if you have any English story books or stationery to be donated to the students.

On behalf of the students, we wish to thank you for your generous help!

It was all dated back to 19 March 2002 when we had registered our first domain name, 1.com.my. Along with this acquisition, we had also registered 1.net.my and 1.edu.my (silly enough to believe that MyNIC may consider awarding 1.my to us if we have all the extentions).

At that moment, there is no other way to register 1.my as MyNIC decided to stop offering just .my registration after 1996! Only few lucky one got theirs, including sirim.my, utm.my, and gov.my (special case, registered after 1996).

“one.com.my or 1.com.my?” asked by our customers. Again, we registered one.com.my during year 2003 to have less confusion.

It was a long way after MyNIC re-opened the .my registration by the end of year 2007. We are lucky enough to secure 1.my finally and in conjunction with the new launch of our website.

Pronunciation, spelling conventions and grammatical patterns are important for website targeting at specific regional markets.

Arguably, we have seen many website using flags to represent a language - in this case, most probably the national language of that specific country.

Let’s look at Jetstar’s website. I was directed to Bahasa Malaysia (Malay language) version automatically when I first landed in their website. Interesting enough, Bahasa Malaysia is the official language of Malaysia, but conversion wise, I doubt!

Google, directing you to Malaysia version, but offering Malaysia Version in English language by default. You can easily find a link ‘Google.com.my offered in: Bahasa Malaysia’, which make more sense!

Cambodia e-Visa, allows you to choose your preferred language by clicking on the name of language. An alternative to using flags too!

It amazed me when knowing Barbara’s husband was trained to be one of the computer programmer in the USA in year 1952. Barbara and her husband Glenn Halliday, was so kind to spend some time with us in an interview on their recent trip to Cambodia and the experience of using the online Cambodia Visa service.

“I can’t think of any improvements, but I wish more websites in the USA were as good–especially those of our governmental agencies…” Read full interview

It was whole-year-round action-packed, but 2007 proved to be another successful and productive year for the 1.com.my team. The WDA project conceived in early 2007 proved to be an important step in bringing together the many talents around Malaysia. With every member in the team focused on bringing their best performance to the stage, we felt that we are getting closer to achieving our next goal!

The hard work and effort put in by the team is clearly evident through the significant growth rate of our online business and also from the positive feedbacks of our customers. Other than the advancement of our skill set, we are also seeing ourselves improving in terms of our ability to deliver customer’s expectations.

The recent acquisition of Kumomo.com, with its donation to build two schools in Cambodia meant a lot to everyone.

2008 will see another action-packed year as we shall accelerate the pace of change, with even better focus and efficiency!

Upon landing in Kuala Lumpur, my French friends who just came back from Cambodia are looking for a place to unpack their luggage and quick rest. They wanted some place near the heart of the city. With their budget and location preferences in mind, I decided to bring them over to Tune Hotels. Furthermore, I’ve always wanted to see how the “Booking” system works in Asia’s 1st No Frill Hotel.

Upon reaching the nearest computer terminal en route Tune Hotels, which “co-incidentally” happened to be my office, I finally got the chance to look at how the whole booking process works. The entire booking process is performed “live” by my friends. Bear in mind that this “live performance” is purely executed from the point of a non-English speaking user.

Bigger input fields and making the Booking Now stood out prominently can mean a lot of difference. The rule is simple, important element should always stand out visually from the rest. In this case, it’s not the Login button.

Most visitors jump into the form without spending much time browsing the entire website. Obviously, the main conversion of the website is online booking, hence creating other pages such as “About Us”, “Corporate Information” and various hotel guest-unrelated information would be counter-productive. Instead, content that is important is build alongside the form structure. Notice in this example above, it would be difficult to explain in text how comfortable the mattress it. A picture speaks a thousand words.

However, after my friend finish filling up all the booking details, as he was proceeding to the credit card payment phase, he was annoyingly greeted with an obstrusive “Member Sign Up” form. This part of the process was not executed as elegantly as I expected. As a rule of thumb, never add unnecessary processes in between the starting point and the goal- always use the Shortest Path Algorithm.

You can always include the “Member Sign Up” phase in the confirmation e-mail later, which in my opinion is much more relevant. And one can’t help but feel that the UI designer decided to take the easy way out by putting 5 equally prominent red bullets for the “Login”, “Register”, “Email me my password”, and “Back”. Hard work doesn’t always pay off now, but laziness almost always pay off instantly. The user could have been guided better and faster with a better layout design.

Lost in translation! Yup, Tune Hotels lost RM 5 just because some of the items listed in the website is not easily understood and was easily pass over by my friend. The word ‘Towel’ which is written only in English proves to be a headache for my friends who could have mistaken it as sanitary napkins. An icon would have done the job much better!

What is good design?

Over the counter, banks use queue ticket system to manage their crowd.

However, as with human nature, not all counters can solve each customer’s request in the same time duration.

Incorrect form entries, forgetting a company stamp, signature mismatch, and all other kinds of human-prone errors are bound to happen! This is where the queue system cannot easily filter out, making it half as efficient as it should have been.

To fix this little margin of “humanity-error”, we have implemented an “approval-based system”.

It’s quite simple really. The approval process kicks in the moment the first customer start queueing. The duty of the approval team will filter out the customers with problems and direct those who are error-free straight to the counter. Those with errors will be directed to the error-fixing team, where a dedicated trouble-shooting team will attend to them personally.

It’s not to be seen as a system to penalize customers with errors, but rather, it’s to reward well-prepared customers who gets their documents right and speed up the process for them.

In the end, both the erroneous customer and the error-free customer will be happy.

“More children in Cambodia can now attend schools for the first time in their life”

We believe that the Kumomo Tree is having this magical power of healing anyone sitting under it. It is this reason that drives us to create Kumomo.com, an advertisement booking platform which contributes to the Rural School Project on every successful booking.

By giving out the ownership of the domain name Kumomo.com, 26k USD was raised to build two schools in Cambodia. When asked, we have decided to name both new schools Kumomo Tree One & Two! Construction is expected to begin in mid February and should be completed in July 2008.

For the first time in my life too, I felt the magical power, so real and it is happening…

We need your help! We wish to upgrade both school with Internet access. With this, kids can access to the outside world, as well as to support the Girls Be Ambitious program.

If you have any extra stationery which you wish to donate to both schools, please send it to us (J-2-15, Jalan PJU 1/43, Aman Suria, PJ 47301, Selangor) before July 2008. Thank you so much!

No, not the canned meat product! This is the 5th Spam mails I have received from Malaysia Giant Supermarket through I have requested them to unsubscribe me from the their list. Guess their marketing team is really doing a good job to have a short email that go through most Spam filtering system!

Clearly, the result of conversion is, this was featured in my Blog for a wider marketing reach!

“Keep it in the store room first!”

You have a nice office chair that is broken. It can be fixed by replacing the circular plate beneath. New chair costs RM120 while fixing it costs you RM70. Most of us don’t throw it away or buy a new one because you know that the-lying-in-the-store-room broken chair can be fixed.

Making immediate decision is painful, so as making a change. Both explore a new possibility unknown. You can stay in your comfort zone by making no decision or change - will a comfort zone remains comfort without change, I doubt!

Your call to add a new junk worth RM50 to the earth, or to call BinChen for her help to fix your chair!

In many Chinese homes, the annual housecleaning is still done at New Year’s time. It is the Chinese way of sending out the old year and welcoming in the New Year. It gives you, at very least, no excuse for a change every year!

One of our project management practise was to keep all document related to a web development project in those hardcover folder. This is a decision made (by me), two years ago! Just in case, we need them someday - or never!

It happens to be never. So, we decided to throw it away. They are noice, they take up resources from our project managers to sort them out. Business change, and we are now focusing in only few projects! Ideally, we want to go greener and faster!

New table alignment, hair cut, shortcut to the office, are painful changes. Let’s see how much we gain from this change…

First, we empty all the shelves. We kept papers with only single-sided printed for reuse purpose. The rest of papers are donated to a charity organization who can come and pick up from your office regularly.

The result, one empty shelves, 5 rims of reused A4s, getting-to-know the contact of the charitable pick up service (call 03-79811320 if you have a change too. Sorry, I can’t recall their name).

Yes, another 10 extra PCs, 3 extra hubs, cables, 8 power adapters, bigger office space, power saving…

Plus a new playground (combined four tables by removing 8 legs) to have fun and meeting for our upcoming new projects!

The less choice for your site visitors, the higher the conversion!

Upon landing on your website, your visitors are expecting that you, the site owner is making the best arrangement for them. Just like how we trust Google. You believe Google returned the MOST relevant result to you, don’t you? Or at least, the is the best Google can provide to you.

But still, many websites are designed to give you the choices of you don’t want. Do you buy Cambodia and Bahrain travel guide at the same time? If not, why shopping cart are provided? Yes, it gives you the convenience of shopping around, but it also creates more steps to complete a deal.

The tricky part (it is nothing but test & measure), it is how you divert them to their choice before they make a choice! The best is, this is done indirectly, without their awareness. You won’t be pleased to be asked for your shoe size immediately when entering a boutique…

Cambodie e-Visa allows travelers to apply their Travel Visa to Cambodia. If the applications come from travelers themeselves, chances that the’re applying for no more than 5 applications at a time. The first part of the application form was designed to filter the applicants and provide them with the best experience while submitting their details.

The use of icons immediately telling the applicants the total price before the last step. Icons use no translation and no shopping cart is required!

• Interview with Mike on e-Visa system
• Other e-Visa travelers’ experience

My Sony notebook, loose with one screw missing. A tiny screw cost nothing but I will never go to a Sony support centre and fix it, or order it somewhere. Why? Because I am lazy. If someone come to me and offer this to me with RM1 for one screw. I will take it, simply because it comes to me, at the right time, right place.

Shopping centre provides convenience to us. Everything are in one plaze. That is one way of fighting the laziness.

Another way, if Sony website or their support centre make known to me that I can order a screw through their website, I will do it too.

Laziness - it is a curse to online business offering items with small values.

Last year, Terry Fox Run KL 2007 raised a total of RM282,081.92 through the runs and donations.

The Terry Fox Run KL Blog attracts about 12k visitors last year. It is pointing to the main Terry Fox foundation’s website at the moment!

You are offering an online service. You know that visitors from search engines and other online sources are most likely to be converted into your customer than those coming from offline medias such as newspaper or TV commercial.

Rasa Sayang Malaysia calls out to all Malaysians to share the wonders of our country with the world by sending an online postcard. I have yet to see any Asian people to write on a postcard while waiting for the flight in the airport, foreigners do. Why not targeting at those backpackers who travel to Malaysia to logon to the website and send the postcard? Isn’t that they have more friends who eager to know about Malaysia than our friends? Yet, their commercials appear on local TV channel, and one need to register before even given the chance to look at what are those postcard available…

Mobile Wallet, choose to advertise with full page coverage in today’s newspaper. The cost of acquisition for the conversion to take place is high. If, this is so-called part of the branding process, it is not measurable, and it definitely not a conversion. Search engines and other online channels are going to drive in more than 80% of their website traffic, in a more targetted and measurable way. Only, with a fraction of offline marketing fee can do much to the current website…

Who say running an online business is easy and everything seems to be auto-pilot - one just need to get the site running and start collecting money.

Email - Reliable, Manageable (forwarding, Spam Control), uptime. How marketing experience shares between your teams, solving customer support email while using it as an opportunity to train new support staff and at the same time to reduce operation issues…

Servers - Dedicated server, higher bandwidth, importance of understing every details of the platform including what is running in the Cron job, who is deleting the overflow log file, blocking the firewall, making sure the current datetime is correct and sync to the hardware clock, etc.

Domain name - Reminder to renew your domain name? Or, end up as the recent incident that caused the Advertlets.com domain to expire?

“China - after the Zheng He voyages in the 15th century, the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty in China became increasingly isolationist. The Qing Dynasty that came after the Ming often continued the later Ming Dynasty’s isolationist policies. Around the 1500’s China began isolationism. One reason China decided on this was to keep out as much foreign influence on religious beliefs as possible, especially from European traders who came into China with Christian missionaries…”

If we are too focus to be on our own online business and stop taking projects from other customers, we will end up to be second Ming Dynasty in China!

Online business is about passing traffic from website to website. It is one of the reason why YouTube was acquired! Example of how AirAsia expands and monetizes from their traffic (ignore sequence)!

AirAsia -> Snack Attack -> GoInsure -> Xpress Boarding -> AirAsia X -> AirAsia Games -> Tune Money -> Tune Hotels -> ??

Yes, this is an online business. If you are depending heavily on offline marketing to drive in visitors to your online business (unless you have already some establish offline business, and online is just an extention), you are probably hitting at the wrong target user-base.

In quick, sources of visitors can be broken down to Search Engine, Referral and Direct. Clicks from search engines of both Sponsored & free listing are one of the major source which you can never neglected. Referral is visitors landed at your website by clicking on any hyperlink that points to you, EXCEPT search engines. The hyperlink, can be in an email, from a Blog, from a banner, etc. Direct refers to those who type your URL in the web browsers.

Knowing where is your customers helps you to better plan your campaign!

If a Blog attracts 100 visitors a day - I need 4,000 Blogs to attract 400,000 visitors a day. If I am doing good enough to convert 10% of visitors into something, that would be about 40,000 successful conversion a day… day dreaming?

“You are on your half way to school, and rain starts to fall down. Here comes to a decision to be made. Either to rush back and get yourself a umbrella or sprint your way to school”

Puzzling? It is about decision, making the best decision at at the most right time!

Your online business just started. You have average 20 visitors a day. 2 out of 20 sign up for your online service. Well, you have just got yourself 10% conversion rate daily!

The two important measurement in this case, are Visitors and Conversion rate.

If you can increase Visitors to 40 a day - quite likely you are getting 4 successful sign up a day. Same goes to the conversion rate!

You post a comment in someone’s Blog with a link pointing back to your website. Yes, you drive more visitors but it does not increase your conversion rate. In another senario, you post some recent testimonials on your website, and this increase your conversion rate, but has nothing to do to drive in more Visitors.

Let’s make thing simple, if you have less than 100 visitors a day! Let’s see why we should focus in driving more Visitors first and only deal with Converision Rate later?

1. Without certain amount of Visitors, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of a change to your website for the sake of conversion rate!

2. You want to have shopping cart system, royalty program, membership login, etc. Let’s be true. Your website is new, you need visitors. You need their feedback to shape the features of your website. Shopping cart make buyers’ life easier (though we can also prove to you that not all your potentials know how to use a shopping cart, I will explain in future). No one come to your website because you have a shopping cart!

3. The more time you have spent in improving conversion rate, the less time you have to drive in more visitors!

I was reading a post and that was how I was introduced to this interesting Malaysia home-grown online shopping mall running since 2000. A very bad habit I have developed over the years of online experience can not stop me from checking the PageRank of this website - 3 out of 10.

Personally, I don’t know Quek. I admire his passion to continue running this store for more than 7 years. These are few humble suggestions from myself to improve the conversion (converting more visitors to customers),

1. Remove ‘Best viewed using IE…’. The compatibility issues is a challenge to store owner, not an instruction to your potential buyers.

2. On average, most visitors decide if they are to continue browsing on first page. The current landing page do nothing more than decreasing your conversion rate!

3. Make your site simpler. The current one is creating too many loops to discourage conversion to take place.

4. Use permalinks rather than dynamic page. Most of your pages does not maintain PageRank over the years.

Your services, products, how the system works, customer support give values to your domain name, not the other way round. When starting a new online business, we give no more than 2 days for a name, but countless night for the business planning.

Anyway, this does not mean that you should simply grab any name and start your online venture. A good name will somehow be able to go through the following filtering process.

1. buysellonline.co.uk (Use .com for big dream)
2. buysell-online.com (avoid special character)
3. buysellonline.com (too long)
4. buysell.com (Too generic)
5. dookia.com (nice but check first)

buysell.com seems to be a good name to many people, but it is not always true (unlikely to get and it could be expensive to acquire). A search result in Google doesn’t tell you how well is your business presence because the keyword ‘buysell’ matches not just your business, but thousand of other sites.

Run wild to get a name that matches none in search engines. dookia.com can be one such example. Find one with no more than 8 characters, easy to remember, etc. When your business grows to a legacy like Nike, you won’t wish to have a name that sounds like ‘Sport Shoes Inc’.

What is the value of the domain name ‘Google.com’ if it returns no ac