Malaysian Escrow Services for eBay

An Malaysian company, MOL Access Portal Berhad (MOL) has worked together with eBay to launch the MOL SafePay, an escrow services for online purchases.

This would be beneficial for local buyers and sellers when they conducting their transaction with www.ebay.com.my. Funds can be transmitted securely by using this service.

Among the features for MOL SafePay are:
1. Trusted 3rd party
2. Suitable for all items
3. Neutral and independent
4. Safe and secure
5. Accessible anywhere
6. Simple and fast


Escrow services assist buyers and sellers in the exchange of items and moeny. Due to the fact that buyers and sellers do not see or know each other, a trusted third party frequently is needed to facilitate the proper exchange of money and goods.

MOL SafePay charge a minimum of RM2 or 2% of the total amount purchased (inclusive of the shipping cost), whichever is higher. This mean if your purchase is RM1,000 and shipping cost is RM50, the service fee will be 2% of RM1,050 = RM21. On the other hand, if your puchase is RM50 and shipping cost is RM5, 2% of RM55 will be RM1.10, you will have to pay the minimum service fee which is RM2.

Generally the limit of the transaction size is RM10,000.

Can BlogRush helps to generate traffic to your blog?

It has been launched for more than a week now and its just mushrooming in most of the blogs. Everyone is having one. I also have one.

What's that? Its BlogRush - a new traffic generator widget. And its FREE too.

Within such a short period of time, it has served over 40 million headlines in the BlogRush widget.

How it work?
1. Sign up for a free account here.
2. Copy the code and paste it on your blog.
3. Earn credit = traffic to your blog. 1 credit = 1 page view to your blog = 1 blog post displayed at others blogrush widget.
4. Refer others to sign up to generate more credits.

Sound simple and interesting.

The most important component of the widget is the title of the blog post. How to make it interesting enough for the widget reader to click on the post title, eventually bring traffic to your site? Try to make your post title as catchy as possible like these.

SnowboardJohn also posted an entry entitled "Do you make these Blog Rush mistakes?".

My verdict:
Try it out and see whether it did bring in any additional traffic to your blog and then only to decide whether to continue or dicontinue the BlogRush widget. But as always, no harm trying!

US's WiFi Cities Remains as a Dream

Seem like major WiFi cities projects in US is being on hold. Projects such as the Chicago WiFi City is being scaled down due to the economic constraints.

Read the news article below:

Electronic Commerce - Blog Carnival (17th Sep 2007)

Welcome to the September 17, 2007 edition of electronic commerce (Vol. 1, No.1, 2007).

Blog carnival is a place where someone takes the time to find really good blog posts on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a "carnival".

Matt Everson presents Search Engine Marketing Strategy for Service Providers posted at Astuteo, saying, "There are a number of tactics a real-world service business can use to pull in customers online, but none so effective as simply being in the right place at the right time – a search engine's results page. Every search engine strategy requires a solid grasp of the keywords and search terms that will wrangle in the most relevant traffic. The system described here will show you how to break down your service business and discover those terms, beginning with a basic list of core terms and finishing with a final list of thousands of search terms suitable for categorizing and implementing in a new Google AdWords campaign."

Ant presents some SEO articles posted at The Beef Jerky Blog.

Millionaire Mommy Next Door presents Evaluation is Critical for Success. How to Measure Your Progress. posted at Millionaire Mommy Next Door, saying, "I have learned from past experience with my other projects, goals and small businesses that it is crucial to monitor progress using analytical measures. Regular evaluations of any project are important for keeping it on track and in alignment with one's vision. Today, on my one month blogiversary, I am illustrating this important evaluation process."

suzie presents High Voltage Multilayer Chip Ceramic Capacitors, Low Voltage Multilayer Chip Ceramic Capacitors posted at Blog Carnival listings.

Sidhusaaheb presents Innovative Solutions for preventing Piracy posted at I, Me, Myself.

ElTio Rob presents More thoughts on eBusiness in the UK posted at Hortal.com.
ElTio Rob presents Appalling state of eBusiness in the UK posted at Hortal.com.

Mommy Auctions presents Auction Scams posted at Mommy Auctions.

kaiwah presents New Spamming Tactics posted at My E-Commerce.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of electronic commerce using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: electronic commerce, blog carnival.

Shopping Cart Solution

One of the important mechanisms required for an electronic storefront to operate is the electronic shopping cart. An electronic shopping cart is useful for buyers as it allow them to accumulate items they wish to buy while they continue to shop. In short, shopping cart is the collection of items to be purchased.

Depending on the size of the organisations and companies, different strategies are being employed to obtain the shopping cart software for their transactional websites. Normally large organisation will use their own expertise or outsource its design and development of the shopping cart together with the e-commerce software with some well known software vendors. The designed e-commerce software is to be integrated with the company's ERP systems.

Medium sized companies will look for ready-made e-commerce software that are available in the market or over-the-shelf products. Small-sized companies or individual will normally use the services provided by commerce service provider or web-based electronic shopping cart such as Ashop Commerce.

The advantages of using web-based hosted shopping cart such as Ashop Commerce are cost saving, easy to maintain, no installation will be required, availability of technical support and customer services, and expertise provided by the service providers. This leading provider of hosted shopping cart software also provide total solution which incorporate the shopping cart with the ecommerce software. This make the job of setting an electronic storefront becoming easier and faster.

Top 50 Influential Bloggers

A list of top 50 influential bloggers who are the shaker and mover in the blogsphere was compiled by NorthxEast, a nice site that blog about blogging.

Check it out to see who on the list that you know and also getting to know other influential bloggers.


Among the top 50, there are only John Chow (ranked 48th) and Darren Rowse aka Problogger (ranked 23th) whom I am familiar with. The other names are a bit alien to me.

The top 3 bloggers are:
3th - David Sifry - founder and CEO of Technorati
2nd - Kevin Rose - founder of Digg
1st - Nick Denton - founder of GawkerMedia, the most successful blog network, a blog mogul with 8 blogs (including Gizmodo - well-known gadget blog) ranked top 100 in the technorati!

Happy reading and blogging!

Six Types of Corporate Blogs

As discussed in the previous entry on Corporate Blogging, there are 2 major categories of corporate blogs namely Internal Blogs and External Blogs.

Fredrik Wackå in his www.corporateblogging.info has wrote the following 6 types of corporate blogs. Sales, Relationship and Branding blogs are part of the External Blogs and Knowledge, Collaboration and Cultural blogs are forming the Internal Blogs.

He further explained the purpose, blogger and the target groups for each of the blog types.

Six Types of Corporate Blogs

Corporate (or Business, Organisational) blogs can be classified into six different categories. Each category shares common characteristics and the blog content can be expected to differ between the categories.

Furthermore, there are differences in terms of target groups and purposes. Even if we also see hybrid forms where blogs are examples of more than one category, an organisation that professionally incorporates blogging into its communications strategy will likely prioritize one purpose (for each blog).

Sales blogs - external
Purpose: To market or sell products/services, make citizens aware of public services, get donations for charities or political parties etc.
Blogger: The organisation itself, or more specifically individuals within it writing on behalf of the organisation.
Target groups: (Potential) clients/customers and citizens, that is persons and/or other organisations that are directly involved with the publishing organisation, or those it wants to reach with the purpose above.

Relationship blogs - external
Purpose: To create, uphold or strengthen relationships.
Blogger: The organisation itself, or more specifically individuals within it writing on behalf of the organisation.
Target groups: Often smaller and more specified than with sales blogs. Examples are support blogs aimed at customers of a certain product, finance blogs for IR purposes, PR blogs for media, blogs trying to reach students, future employees, politicians/officials etc.

Branding blogs - external
Purpose: To strengthen the brand, the profile, of the publishing organisation or individuals within it.
Blogger: Not necessarily the organisation itself. Individual employees’ or executives’ blogging ("insider blogs"), if supported by the organisation, can be viewed as a branding blog. The same goes for adverblogs and blogs that are not apparently connected to the organisation.
Target groups: See Relationship and Sales blogs.

Knowledge blogs - internal
Purpose: To give employees information and insights relating to their work assignments; news, business intelligence, reports about ongoing projects etc.
Blogger: The organisation itself through one or more designated bloggers, or potentially all employees through a entirely open blog publishing model.
Target groups: All employees with a certain interest.

Collaboration blogs - internal
Purpose: To provide a working team with a tool for research, collaboration and discussion.
Blogger: The team.
Target group: The team.
(There’s only a fine line - if any - between this blog category and business wiki’s. You could also see for example Relationship Blogs change into more wiki-like publications.)

Culture blogs - internal
Purpose: To strengthen organisational culture. Typically through informal content of social or non-work related character.
Blogger: The organisation itself through one or more designated bloggers, or potentially all employees through a entirely open blog publishing model.
Target groups: All employees as employees, and not as professionals (developers, managers, assistants and so on).

(As part of the copyright requirement by Fredrik, no amendment has been made to the original content.)

Boardband Internet Access for Train in Europe

Thalys, a high-speed train network in Europe is going to introduce Broadband Internet Access for its travellers by 2008. Thalys trains travel across major cities in Europe such as Brussels, Antwerp, The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Liege, Aachen and Cologne.

Continuous Internet connection will be available even at the top speed of 300km/h by using the combination of satellite, GPRS and UMTS technologies coupled with wireless networks.

For more information, click here - TheRegister: Euro trains gets broadband internet

With the double track systems from Seremban to Ipoh nearing its completion next year, this news may provide some ideas for KTMB for similar project in the near future.

My birthday poem - 2007

Time flies and its another year.

Normally I will compose a short poem to commemorate this day as well as to motivate oneself with a clear objective for another year.

My poem for this year birthday:

Marching forward steadfastly,
Filled with inner renaissance and youthfulness,
Creating unlimited glorious triumphs each moment!

Again, you will find that the theme of the poem lies with being Youthful & Advancement. Received lots of SMS wishes, Friendster's comments and messages, MSN messages plus phone calls wishes. Thanks a lots to all my friends. Wishing all of you a happy and nice day too.

In addition to a colleague who share the same birthday with me (he used to sit beside me for almost 2 years), today I found out that there is another colleague within the same department also sharing the same birthday with us. 3 persons within the same office celebrating birthday together, not bad right.

Birthday post 2006 and 2005.

My main wish list is:
World Peace and A Culture of Peace!

There is an ongoing exhibition entitled: "From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Transforming the Human Spirit" currently being held from 1st to 16th September at Wisma Kebudayaan SGM, 243, Jalan Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur. Tel: 03-2141 2003. For more information, logon to the website.

Benefits of Web-Based Video Conferencing

The advancement of web-based systems opens the door for improved electronically supported virtual meetings. An important area of virtual collaboration is electronic meetings such as the applications of teleconference and video conference.

Video conference offers various benefits such as providing the opportunity for face-to-face communication for individuals in different locations and supporting several types of media during the conferencing. Besides, it helps to improve employee productivity, increases the speed of business processes as well as the efficiency and frequency of communications.

Web-based video conference offers many benefits such as no additional software download, compatibility on multiple operating system platforms, secure conferencing and cost effective for all types of organizations and individual as well as the above-mentioned benefits.With such web-based services offered, individuals and organisations will be able to enhance their online communications and collaborations.

Top 5 posts for August 2007

It has been a hectic month of August as it was the end of the semester (with lots of assignment scripts coming in) plus the preparation for the 50th Merdeka preformance. Finally it was over. Just managed to post 13 entries and below are the top 5 posts that I have selected for August 2007.

1. Corporate Blogging: New Marketing Communication Tool
2. New Spamming Tactics
3. Owning a football club via the web - MyFootballClub.com
4. PayPal: My 1st payment received
5. MyLot.com - Discuss and get paid

Enjoy reading!