Tough Not To Like Google

IT's not difficult to see why people like Google. It's simple, thoughtful things like this Year of the Tiger logo that endears many to the grestest search engine in the world.

In Malay, Adsense May Not Make Any Sense

Pictures are worth thousands words. Here's one screenshot that will tell you even more.



In plain English, the headline above says if you want to be a Malay, use Adsense. But I am sure the meaning is not that, of course. Some AI is at work here, no doubt. And this is what I am afraid of when my fellow countrymen do not know how to use the English Language properly in many years to come - just like Google's Ad makers' use of Bahasa Malaysia in this case.

I wonder where the NGOs that were rallying against the use of English in the teaching of Maths and Science in Malaysia months ago are now. Are they not concerned that the world is not using Bahasa Malaysia properly?

Free Calls - An Ad Model Here?

I was not the least surprised to see this story from NYT. I knew it would happen sooner or later - that phone calls can be made free in return for ads, depending on whether the industry is daring enough to venture into it.

The NYT story is different, of course. It's about an iPhone app that gives you free calls if you are willing to listen to ads in exchange. If you want free calls, minus the ad, according to the story, you pay US$10 a month. You can read more here: Free Calls, if You Don’t Mind Ads.

I am wondering free call model of a different kind. The phone user subscribes to the phone service who engages advertisers for mobile ads. For each add displayed (giving the advertisers the eye-balls in terms of return-of-investment (ROI) ), the subscriber gets air time in exchange.

The benefit for the advertiser would be monumental since mobile phone companies have the statistics of all subscribers and can zoom in by any category they have identified in their existing registration system, such as income-level, race, age groups, or even locality. Imagine the reach it would give the advertiser using this mode to target its users. Users may argue that they would not like adverts but if they finance their phone bills, what is there to complaint?

How it will work can be similar to that story in NYT. Well targetted ads wait in queue at the network base. Once the subscriber dials a number, and gets connected, he listens to the ad for say, 20 seconds, before being allowed through. As this was going on, the recipient of the call is also notified by the computer about the caller details and his call so that the recipient does not hang up in frustration.

IE8 Slow To Load Fix

Do you run IE8 on XP? Chances are that you might come to a point that it takes over 15s to load the application. I found a tech sheet that says you can overcome the problem by going to Command Prompt and insert regsvr32 actxprxy.dll command.

To do this, go to START and click RUN and type in cmd.

After the DOS black dialogue box jumps up, type in this: regsvr32 actxprxy.dll and hit enter. A dialogue box will jump up and say that the operation is successful.

Restart and your IE8 should work like a dream.

Good Job Celcom Marketing Comm Dept!

Once a while, you come across a good marketing communication strategy to get feedback from customers. Last week, I found this:



It is an interactive terminal's screen in English and Malay allowing customers to key in feedback immediately while waiting for their transactions to be carried out by the customer service personnel. It is not a very lengthy process, only six questions I think, asking you to rate the servioe and helpfullness of the counter staff, among others. I think government agencies should have this installed to collect feedback and improve service. KPI alone is usually insufficient.