ASK is a new SMS-based directory search service by Yellotext Sdn Bhd. It enables users to find whereabouts of desired items and also contact details of their favorite shops from its ASK Listing directory, anywhere, anytime.

To use the search service, just type “ASK” followed by a search query e.g. “ASK hair salon curve” or “ASK hair salon” and then send to 36869. The search engine can also ‘understand’ queries in natural language e.g. “ASK looking for a hair salon at gardens.” Response time is typically under a minute (depending on network conditions).

Simple Steps to ASK Yellotext

Some search results are followed by supplementary mobile vouchers called ASK Poster (adopting Google AdWords concept). Poster is designed for merchants to send promotional vouchers to Yellotext’s search users and each Poster is tagged to a set of search keywords.

Someone who searches for a bookstore, for example, is probably more likely to have an intention to buy books. She will find a discount voucher for books useful and relevant (and timely). With ASK Poster, bookstore operator can effectively respond to purchase intention by enticing customers with promotional offers.

Mobile voucher is free to all ASK users. Instead, Yellotext charges merchants based on the number of times their vouchers are delivered to search users. Additionally, merchants pay for listing on the ASK search directory and search users pay RM0.30 for each set of search results.

Txt Msg Rules, Still

SMS usage is still showing strong growth. A recent market report “2008 Global Mobile - Data and Content Markets” by Research and Markets estimated over 2 trillion text messages will be sent worldwide in 2008 and the number is expected to grow further. “Market Trends: Mobile Messaging, Worldwide, 2006 - 2011” by Gartner also expected text messages to surpass 2 trillion in 2008; Asia-Pacific and Japan are the biggest users of mobile messaging with estimated 1.7 trillion messages to be sent in 2008. Gartner also estimated mobile messaging revenue to reach US$60.2 billion in 2008, a 15.7% increase over 2007.

In Malaysia, 56.9 billion text messages were sent in 2007 alone (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission). That’s about a billion text messages sent each week!

According to Chow Tuck Mun, CEO of Yellotext, ASK service “combines the two widely used applications, search and SMS.” Its ASK Poster is a well thought out approach to SMS marketing. Conventional bulk SMS marketing is spam-oriented whereas Poster is driven by users’ intentions and allows contextualized mobile marketing. Rather than simply throwing spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks, ASK makes SMS marketing more targeted, intelligent, effective and less intrusive.

ASK search is in early commercialization stage and its directory already has over 3,000 records (and growing) covering eight major shopping malls in the Klang Valley area - Pavilion, Suria KLCC, Berjaya Times Square, Mid Valley, The Gardens, 1Utama, The Curve and Sunway Pyramid. Currently, the ASK service is only available to subscribers of the three main Malaysian mobile carriers - Maxis, DiGi and Celcom.

Social technologies enable the creation of conversational platform for businesses to engage in richer interactions with customers. Traditional mass media lacks interactivity and information flow is dominantly unidirectional, from brand owners to consumer.

However, the new social media enables consumers to connect with one another and brand owners to co-create brand experience. Global corporations like Procter & Gamble, Dell, Coca Cola and many others are already adopting social media as part of their brand building infrastructure.

What about Malaysia’s biggest brands? Are they using social technologies? How are they using the conversational media to listen and interact with their customers?

To answer the questions, I’ve investigated social media plays of companies listed in Malaysia’s Most Valuable Brands (MMVB) 2007, created by the Malaysian Association of Accredited Advertising Agents, in collaboration with Interbrand. This exercise involves searching for the brand names in social networks (Facebook, Friendster, MySpace), video-sharing site (YouTube), online photo-sharing site (Flickr) and microblogging (Twitter, FriendFeed). The results are presented in the “Social-ize the Brands” table below.

Notes to the table:

• “Rank” is the actual ranking in MMVB 2007.
• Giant and Dutch Lady, which appeared in MMVB 2007, were omitted as both are non-Malaysian brands.
• Only initiatives created by brand owners are considered to provide a better indication on the importance of social media marketing to the brand owners.
• For more on how MMVB’s Brand Value is calculated, read here.

Social-ize the Brands: How Malaysia’s Most Valuable Brands are Embracing Social Media

Some Observations

1. Big brands adopting social media marketing
   • About 60% of Malaysia’s most valuable brands are leveraging social utilities like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
2. Conversations with AirAsia
   • The budget airline has the most interesting and purposeful usage social media marketing tools and are ‘designed’ to engage with its target audience.
3. User-generated content
   • AirAsia is tapping into the power of bloggers with its blog, “Just Plane Thoughts.” Besides contents posted by 16 AirAsia bloggers, the site also encourages its readers to post their travel stories and comments. Although the blog is moderated, negative customer comments also get posted. Newspaper The Star also allows its readers to post up contents on its Citizen’s Blog site.
4. Conversational vs Informational
   • AirAsia’s blog is more conversational than its competitor Malaysia Airlines’ Living Malaysian Hospitality, which is geared towards providing corporate news.
5. Facebook rules
   • The fast-growing social network is by far the most used social utility among the biggest brands in Malaysia, followed by YouTube. Facebook ranked 8th in Malaysia’s Alexa Top 100 Sites; YouTube ranked 4th (as of Oct 19 2008).
6. Tweet with Astro
   • The use of Twitter is gaining popularity among enterprises. Astro, the subscription-based satellite TV provider, is the one and only Malaysia’s big brand on Twitter.
7. Bank with blog
   • Malaysia’s largest bank, Maybank, is the first Malaysian bank with a blog; uses its “AllYou” blog to complement its online banking site, Maybank2u.com.
8. Blogging CEO
   • Tony Fernandes of AirAsia is the only Most Valuable Brand’s CEO with a blog.
9. Not-so-social lifestyle
   • Consumer-oriented retail brand, Parkson and apparel brands - Bonia and Padini - are notably missing in the social media sphere.
10. Financial-ly not social-able
    • Financial institutions dominated the MMVB list, with 32% representation. However, out of the eleven big brands that are not using social media, six of them (or 54%) are from the financial industry.

September 19 is International Talk like A Pirate Day. Even FrrriendFeed talks like one today.

GoThere is a location-based search engine with mashup, user-generated contents fusion. Launched in May 2008, the Singaporean start-up mashes together Google Maps and location information to create a highly informative, interactive and intuitive web service.

At its core, GoThere is about giving direction and enabling social discovery. To request for direction between two locations, enter ‘from’ and ‘to’ place names query to search. The search returns include instructions on how to ‘efficiently’ reach the intended destination (with estimated time and cost), using public transportation and roads.

Search Interface of GoThere

You can also search for a specific location and GoThere will pinpoint it on the map with place details. You can either search for a place name (eg. Hard Rock Cafe) or a generic term (eg. cake). GoThere map is embeddable on any website; users can interact with the embedded map to get information such as car park rates, bus routes and comments on retail outlets.

Probably, one of its cool features is its interactive location marker. Move the marker to a new spot on the map and new directional information will be displayed, on the fly!

GoThere also enables user-generated contents. You can edit details about a particular place such as address and associated tags and also rate it and add your feedback. Users are encouraged to share, geotag and review their favorite locations. With these contents, other users get to discover recommended cool places in Singapore.

Location Guide 2.0

GoThere aims for simplicity and speed and I think they’ve succeeded on both fronts. In the words of co-founder Toh Kian Khai, “We understand the importance of the user experience. We want to keep the interface simple as we ourselves are obsessed with speed; we want our users to get their results in the shortest possible time.”

Besides city dwellers, it’s an indispensable web tool to aid tourists in their exploration of Singapore. its repository of rich directional information is particularly impressive. For GoThere, the more locations tagged and reviewed by users, the more valuable are its service. With richer and expansive contents, this location-based web search service will one day becomes a perfect substitute for paper-based location guidebook / map.

Two days after Google Chrome’s release, its comic book surfaced at eBay. Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr is auctioning the most-viewed Chrome comic. Google mailed copies of the comic book to bloggers and press media, prior to the launch of Google Chrome.

Of course, you can get the digital version of the comic here. Nevertheless, the comic book drawn by Scott McCloud can be a valuable commemorative artifact because (1) Google Chrome is potentially a force to be reckon in the browser market; currently at version 0.2.149.27, the web browser offers glimpse of its potential to further evolve into something much more interesting and powerful compared to other offerings, and (2) the comic is the centerpiece of the launch; used to introduce the new browser to the world. Indeed, Google Chrome is a breath of fresh air, in terms of technology and PR product launch.

The auction ends September 12 2008. All proceeds from the auction will be donated to two charitable organizations, Beth Kanter and Beyond Blue.

At the time of this posting, there are already 2 bids with AU$127.50 as the highest bid amount. So, head on to eBay and place your bid. You may end up with the limited edition Google Chrome comic book and at the same time, contribute to charity. Good luck!

New Straits Times, the oldest English newspaper with second largest readership/circulation in Malaysia, is brandjacked on Twitter.

The Twitter’s account “NewStraitsTimes” has 100 Followers and 9,067 tweets (at the time of this posting). It has one following, a 20-year-old student named Felix Ker; this led me to suspect he’s the ‘brand hijacker’. Tweets consist of news articles, which are regularly updated and sync with New Straits Times Online website; TwitterFeed is used to auto-stream RSS feeds from the website to Twitter.

‘Brandjacked’ New Straits Times at Twitter

I would think the New Straits Times doesn’t even care and bother about this at all. As a matter of fact, Felix Ker is doing the newspaper a favor by streaming its news to Twitterverse.

Another brandjacked incident covered here is the one involving oil giant Exxon Mobil Corporation (see here and here).

On Becoming Mass ‘Social’ Media

Many corporations are worry about how their brands are being represented and perceived in the mass media but not so when it comes to social media. Corporations are still finding it hard to understand the new social media and how best to use it. But, we are seeing more social media ‘early adopter’ initiatives reaping positive results, outcomes and impacts.

In the media marketspace, sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are changing the way we consume news. More are discovering the latest news from the many microverses of ‘livestreams.’

Printed media used to play catching up to online news sites. Now, the online news sites are playing catching up to Twitter, et al and various other user-generated newsites. No wonder, we’re seeing more major ‘traditional’ news organizations like newspaper (examples: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Times) and TV (examples: CNN, Channel News Asia, and BBC) are  jumping on the social media bandwagon.

The ‘Under Construction’ web page of Burger King Malaysia is one of the most awful pages I’ve seen in recent times. It is so “Web 0.5″ and it bears very little resemblance to the Burger King’s main website.

Here are three ’sucky’ elements, which I’ve highlighted in the screenshot below:

• Logo - The logo used is not the current Burger King’s logo
• Brand Tag - The “The Fire’s Ready” campaign was created by Young & Rubicam in 2004. It was an unsuccessful branding initiative and Burger King axed the creative agency after less than a year. The current tag adopted by Burger King is “Have It Your Way.”
• Image - The burger image at the bottom is just plain bad. Period.

‘Under Construction’ Page of Burger King Malaysia

Burger King is the world’s second largest fast-food chain with more than 10,000 stores operating in over 65 countries. In Malaysia, there are over 20 Burger King outlets and the franchise-holder, Cosmo Restaurants Sdn Bhd plans to spend RM27 million (~US$8 million) over the next five years to open 50 more outlets across the nation.

For a fast-food giant like Burger King, I would expect a more presentable “Under Construction” page. The Web is over 10 years old and web designs have improved, leaps and bounds. Seeing such page design, especially by a global corporation, is quite mind-boggling. Burger King should just take the amateurish, poorly designed web page offline. Seriously, I just don’t see the page helping its branding infrastructure.

After two years of development, Google today unveils its open source web browser, Google Chrome (went ‘live’ at 11.46 PT, September 02 2008). With Chrome, Google outlines its vision of a next-generation web browser. Amidst a crowded browser market with players like Mozilla Firefox / Camino, Apple Safari, Opera, Flock and Microsoft Internet Explorer, the new Webkit-based browser does indeed offer a breath of fresh air.

Google Chrome is probably the first browser designed for the Age of Web Computing (George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, called Executable Internet). It is created from the ground up to accommodate the demands and challenges of modern interactive web applications.

Introducing Google Chrome

The following section highlights what’s new with Google Chrome:

User Interface
Layout Structure	Tabs-on-Top Tabs are located on top of navigation bar. More browser real-estate “File, Edit, View” menu bar not available. Options and controls are accessible via these two icons, located on the right-hand side of the browser. This translates to bigger ‘browser real-estate’ without sacrificing easy accessibility to functions and controls. Agile Tabs ,which can be moved from window to window (and the tabs retain its state). The example below shows “Technology Review” tab being dragged. Drag by holding down your mouse left button and once released, the tab will open in a new window. Integrated URL and search bar. Google called it omnibox. In addition to URLs of visited sites, omnibox can handles search, sites recommendations, etc. If you have used a search engine at a website, say CNN.com. The next time you type the URL, you can press TAB to directly search CNN from the omnibox. Full text search over browsing history. Window for App This window shows no browser UI; displays just the app. Below is a screenshot of Gmail app window. Download status at the bottom of browser window, similar to what Download Status extension can do on Firefox. The downloaded file can be drag-and-drop anywhere.
Tab Page	Display nine favorite sites, search ‘history’ box, recent bookmarked sites and recently closed tabs.
Security
Sandboxing	Stripped browser processes all its right; can compute but can’t write files or access sensitive areas in your computer. Isolated “sandbox” involves confinement of browser of processes; the confined perimeter can be defined based on permissions - low, medium, high. Closed browser tab to terminate rogue processes. “Incognito” mode for more private browsing; similar to Safari’s Private Browsing and IE In-Private mode.
Stability
Multi-processes	With its Multi-process design, each tab is a separate process. Each process is isolated with its own memory and global data structure. A tab with rogue process won’t crash the whole browser. Can restore crashed tab to state before crash.
Memory management	When a tab is closed, the process is destroyed and the browser gets to reclaim back the memory. Memory leak can be easily contained by just closing tab with ‘rogue’ process. Built-in Task Manager to see which sites are hogging memory. Moving from Site A to Site B are treated as two distinct processes. So, browsing with Google Chrome is a constant creation and obliteration of processes.
Speed
JavaScript Engine	Google Chrome’s new V8 JavaScript engine enables dynamic code generation. It converts JavaScript source codes directly to machine codes, which in turn, interact with your CPU. This turbo-charged execution. Also, its Hidden Class Transitions, in which objects with similar properties will share the same hidden class, enables dynamic optimization.

Source: Google Chrome Comic

When Google signed a marketing deal with Mozilla back in 2006, many thought Google will use Firefox to enter the browser market. Last week, the Internet search giant extended the deal to 2011.

However, building a browser from ground up makes more sense for Google because this approach is without path-dependent legacy, development assumptions, designs and other coded constraints. With a clean slate, Google can fully exert its creativity and authenticity when developing the new browser. This resulted in the development of multi-process architecture and V8 JavaScript engine. A quote by Albert Einstein aptly apply in this case:

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

In Search for Web Supremacy

“Google lives on the Internet,” said Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager (in Google Chrome comic). Google’s business is tightly-weaved to the Web and already has arrays of web-centric services, namely search, email, photo organizer, chat, map, online video sharing and interactive maps.

Currently, Google is spearheading two major industry initiatives - open source mobile platform, Android and open Web API for social networking sites, OpenSocial. With Chrome open source project, the search giant aims to influence the technological direction in the browser market and further catalyze the adoption growth of web-centric applications.

Better browser leads to improved Web applications performance and better user experience. This, in turn, catalyzes greater diversity, novelty and variety of applications / services to generate vibrancy in the Web ecosystem. A vibrant, bustling Web is, indeed, good business for Google.

Verdicts: Google Chrome offers a new kind of user-browser interfacing experience. I admire its ‘fluid’, agile and dynamic tabs, something other browsers don’t have. Google also rethink and remodel the way we interact with bookmark. Of course, last but not least, the integrated search-URL is smart and much more awesome than Firefox’s Awesome Bar. In a nutshell, Google Chrome is fresh, snappy and so much fun to use.

Google Chrome is available for download here (Windows only; Mac and Linux versions will be available soon).

This can happen to you with your Twitter account if you have 160,905 Following. That is probably the highest number of Following I’ve seen on Twitter. Maybe that’s why Oozzl’s Twitter account is suspended “due to strange activity.” Oozzl is a social networking site, based in the Neatherland.