PayPal: My 1st payment received

I had registered a PayPal account for sometime but somehow I do not really use it for any kind of transaction until recently. Last week I received my 1st payment through PayPal from PayPerPost on a post that I wrote a month ago on this blog. 20 dollars for a short post is really a good deal.

1st I received an email notification from PayPerPost on the payment. Then I logged in to my PayPal account and there was an unclaimed payment.

Now I have the choice to accept and deny the payment. Of course I clicked on the accept button, haha.

And the rest of the steps were easily completed. So, the next question is how am I going to use the money? Well, I have contributed a portion of the received income to LiewCF's Birthday ChipIn Celebration Fund. Erm.....may be I also can set up something similar as my birthday is coming soon, hehehe. Well, I plan to get few more dollars enough for me to buy some books from Amazon.com.

Owning a football club through the web

With the recent influx of foreign owners to the English Football Leagues such as on the Premiership giants Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Newcastle, 53,000 English football supporters has signed up a pledge to a scheme to buy a club in England.

Initiated by Will Brooks, each member will sign up to myfootballclub.co.uk by paying £35 as membership fee. With the current membership of 53,000, a total of £1.5 million will be collected which will be used to buy the club. Of course, this amount will only be able to purchase clubs at the fourth or fifth tiers of English football. However, if no club is being purchased within 12 months, the collected fund will be refunded to the member.

Each member who signed up will receive one vote-carrying share. This share will automatically make the member being one of the owners of the club. This enable each member to take part in the decision making process through the website on matters such as which club to purchase, team formations and players transfers based on the majority votes.

Currently, there are four clubs which has approached myfootballclub.co.uk to negotiate a takeover or purchase. One of them is Leeds United, an illustrious and famous club that used to play in the European competition and Premier League. The club also once boosted some of the talented players such as Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka and Lee Bowyer. The club has gone into administration last season due to insolvency.

Personal opinion:
This is an innovative business model where football fans are given the opportunity to own a football club. It would be more enterprising if the members are also entitled for any profit earned while owning the club. The liability of running the club will be £35 per person which turning out to be a low risk investment. Good idea! Do you think this idea can work in your country?

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Corporate Blogging: New Marketing Communication Tool

In recent years, the blogging environment is no longer exclusively restricted for individual or personal. Corporate has been actively pursuing a more business-like blogs for their marketing as well as organizational purposes.

As at June 17, 2007, there are currently 132 organisations has their corporate blogs. Among the big names include Accenture, Boeing, General Motors, Google, HP, Sun Microsystems and a lot more. A complete list can be obtained from The NewPR/Wiki. 40 (8%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging.

Corporate weblogs are used to reach its organisational goals. There are 2 major categories of corporate blogs namely internal blogs and external blogs.

Internal blogs – accessed through the corporation’s intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. The informal nature of the blogs may encourage employee participation, free discussion of issues, collective intelligence, direct communication between various layers of an organization and a sense of community. It is mainly used as a tool for collaboration and knowledge management.

External blogs – publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokepersons share their views. Main purposes include new product announcement, policies clarifications as well as being an informal press release of the organisation’s activities. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image.

Sun Microsystems Inc CEO, Jonathan Schwartz was one of the pioneers from Fortune 500 CEOs to start blogging and currently his blogging enthusiasm is being shared by 3,500 of his employees who have their own blogs. Jonathan’s blog helps to improve communication and attracting new customers. He also blog about life as a CEO and discuss new products online. His blog attracts approximately 60,000 readers on a good day.

These are a few useful resources on corporate blogging available from the Internet:
1. The CorporateBlogging.Info
2. The Corporate Blogging Book on Squidoo
3. Best practices on corporate blogging from Singapore Entrepreneurs

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GahooYoogle: A 2-in-1 search engine

iCalvyn posted an interesting post on the combination 2 popular search engines namely Yahoo and Google. When both search engines are merged, we will have GahooYoogle.

At first, I thought it was just a joke but when I clicked on the link, it did showed up with the search results from both search engines were listed side-by-side.


I tried to search My E-Commerce URL using this 2-in-1 search engine and the result was........


Try this out at GahooYoogle.com.

How to get 500 links?

MoreMerchant.com has came out with a suggestion on how to get extra 500 links to your blog in order to boost up your Pagerank.

Method:
Take this list below and post it on your site adding your name to the bottom. Nothing new here. Just a link list that is like chain mail.

-------------------------------------------
Step 1:

Start highlighting here
Derek Semmler
Make more Money and Save more Money
Cell Phones
John Chow
Binding Machines
Windshield replacement
Problogger
Music Reviews
My E-Commerce
Stop highlighting here

Step 2:
Paste the list on your blog post and recommend others do just the same. Add your link to the bottom and there you go. If you do this and 3 of your blog readers do this, and so forth, overnight you can well over 500 links to your site.

-------------------------------------------

Do you think this method will work? Based on the logical thinking, it may work if our readers did exactly as the 2 steps mentioned. In my opinion, I'm not sure whether it may or may not be working. Why not give it a try and see which direction that it will go. Anyway, this is an application of how viral marketing being used to promote a website or blog.

RFID for Malaysian Blood Bank

Realising the benefits of using tracking ability of RFID, 3 medical institutions in Malaysia, namely Universiti Malaya Medical Centre, Penang Adventist Hospital and National Blood Bank are testing the application of RFID systems for blood banks.

Siemens Malaysia Sdn Bhd and Intel MSC Sdn Bhd jointly developed the solution, callled BloodBank Manager.

This solution will helps to ensure the transparency and accountability through the logging, labelling and tracking of the blood products using the RFID technology. It also enable efficient handling of identification, cross-matching, inventory and logistics of blood bags.

The system also able to reduce the waiting time, errors or blood-type mismatches.

Mobile e-auction

JennyHow, a fulltime ebay seller in Malaysia, has posted 2 interesting articles on Mobile E-Auction this week. These topics are related to Mobile Commerce and E-Auctions.

1. Sell on eBay with your PDA or cellphones - using mobile phone to conduct eBay transactions.
2. Demo - How to submit listing to eBay with your mobile phone - A YouTube video clip on mobile listing to eBay.

Happy reading.

Are you addicted to SMS?

How many SMS that you send out each day? Do you know that Malaysian are just love to use SMS?

For the first 3 months of this year, a total of 11.7 billion of SMSes being sent out as compared to 7.4 billion for the same period last year. Wow, how we actually did it? An average of 563 SMS in three months was sent our by a user, around 6 SMS per day. Are you in this category? I'm sure it is not that difficult to maintain this rate everyday for three months.

Besides, the number of the handphone users in Malaysia also increased from 16.24 million in 2006 to 20.8 million last year.

It seems that Malaysian are good in breaking new records, especially on the SMS usage.

New Spamming Tactics

Spamming is the flooding of electronic mail systems with “junk e-mail”. Also known as unsolicited bulk messages sent through the electronic messaging systems.

Widely recognised form of spam is e-mail spam. Others types of spam are instant messaging spam, newsgroup spam, search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam and Internet forum spam.

Anti-spam software helps to reduce the influx of the unsolicited e-mails tremendously. This is evidenced in the Web-based e-mails services providers such as Yahoo, Google and Hotmail, where spam mails are easily filter out and diverted to the spam folders.

Now, the spammers are coming out with new tactics to outsmart this anti-spam software. These new tactics are PDF Spam, Piggyback Spam and Greeting Card Spam.

PDF Spam
E-mail message containing only a subject line and a PDF file attached. The receiver of the PDF spam will be curious to know the content of the PDF file attached that they will open it and read. Spammers are using PDF spam because most spam filters are unable to screen the contents of a PDF attachment. Solution: If you come across any e-mail message that has a PDF file attached but no text in the message area, just delete it.

Piggyback Spam
Highly graphical e-mail messages that look like they come from large retailers. They will ask you to click on a link if you cannot ‘view’ the message properly. Another tactic used is to include a few links in the message that will allow you to ask the company to stop sending you mail, register for access to some site or contact customer services. The links may actually lead to a downloaded file which in turn may install malware or spyware. These files may also send out spam from your computer. Solution: If you receive any e-mail from a retailer you’ve never heard or agreed to receive email from, just delete it immediately.

Greeting Card Spam
E-mail messages devised to look like greeting cards. However, it may contain dangerous virus. In the traditional e-greeting card systems, recipient would have to click on the link to view the full-blown greeting card online. The same concept is being applied in this spam. If you click on the link in a spammer’s e-card, it is most likely you are downloading a virus. Solution: Delete any e-card received from unknown person.

Other solution:

• Before clicking on any links, hovers your mouse cursor over the link.
• A full Internet address will appear.
• Study the full Internet address for a moment, even if you do not know exactly how to interpret it.
• If you see numbers or words does not correspond to the company that send you the email, delete it immediately.
• If you see an “.exe” or “.com” at the end of the address, delete it immediately too.
• Flag the spam for your spam filter to improve it catch rate.

TVB to protect its legal right in China

TVB is the largest television station in Hong Kong and well-known for its cantonese drama series. However, there are a few video sharing sites in China infringing TVB's series. This article highlighted the actions taken by TVB to protect their right in China.

Hackers benefited from online sharing of videos and musics

You may get free movie or music downloads from online sharing site. However, beware as because you may bring in some uninvited guests too. Hackers are exploring these sites for them to hack into computers.

Read more from the news article below:

MyLot.com - Discuss and get paid

How many of you are actively involve in online forum or discussion groups? I'm sure some of us did occasionally posted some comments in the forum as to share our personal opinions.

Recently, while I'm doing some research and information searching on the latest web advertising methods, I stumbled upon this website - MyLot.com, a discussion site where the latest blog postings, discussion topics and news can be found. It has more than 100,000 members and vast amount of topics and categories for discussion.

Beside participating the forum, readers who contributes responses will be paid for their postings. If the member starts a new discussion topics, he/she will also be paid for it. I tried it out by posting some comments and my MyLot's earning account is already running.


How much can be earned? Well, you can't expect too much. You may get USD$ 0.01 or 0.02 for each posting. You may get more if you start a new discussion topic. Besides, your earning can also be increase if you manage to get refer more readers to MyLot where 25% of your referral income will be credited to your account too. MyLot provide low payout of USD$10.00 via PayPal. Because of it's low earning, it may take some time before you can see the money in your PayPal account.

What I like the most of the MyLot is the opportunity to get lots of responses from the readers, from all over the world. I have started a new discussion topic yesterday (less than 12 hours ago from the time this post is being written) and now a total of 22 responses has been posted.

iZZi - Latest updates

Extra coverage areas:
There will be 5 more new areas to be covered by iZZi Wireless Broadband with the completion of 5 new base stations namely:

• Selayang Baru,
• Gombak,
• Ampang,
• Bandar Kinrara and
• Bandar Puteri Puchong.

Another 25 base stations will be constructed soon.

Screencaptured from www.izzi.com.my

I still hope that my place to be part of the coverage area soon.


Introductory price: (iZZione)
RM1,138 - 12 months of RM88 + Activation RM82 + Free User Terminal (PCMCIA) worth RM699. Installation and registration fees are waived.

Screencaptured from www.izzi.com.my

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