Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ways to pay bills online

There are three ways to pay bills over the Internet:

Online banking
Customer signs up with the preferred bank online services and make all his or her bill payments from his or her bank accounts. This enable the customer to conduct the transaction from a single website. Most of the Malaysian banks are providing such facilities in the online banking services.

Biller direct
Customer will makes payments at each biller website using the credit card as the main payment instrument. Customer will view their bills online at the biller website and complete the payment at the same site too. This method require customer to visit all the biller website to make payments for all his or her bills. Utilities and telecommunications are the main website associated with this payment method.

Bill consolidator
Customer enrolls to receive and pay bills for multiple billers at the bill consolidator's website. Bills will be sent to the website and customer will initiate payments through multiple payments options. One of the local example of bill consolidator is Pay Bills Malaysia (http://www.paybillsmalaysia.com)

Price comparison for online shoppers

As more people are turning to the online purchasing, there are also increased for the need of sites and tools which are able to help consumers with online purchasing decision. Sites such as Savebuckets provide price comparison for a huge range of products online from the online stores. Customers can compare prices on the selected product before they proceed with the purchase on the selected store.

The site also have the feature to match the preferred maximum price put up by the customer with its continuous updating of the market information. This make the online shopping experience becoming more convenience, fast and cost saving.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Fans purchase football club through website

A few months back, I posted an entry on an innovative e-commerce business model - Owning a football club through the web where football fans paid to a community website, MyFootballClub.co.uk, to purchase a club of their choice.

This plan is becoming a reality after a deal was reached in principle with English minor league club Ebbsfleet United for a £700,000 takeover. Football fans will own 51% of the club which enable them to make decisions on all club matters such as transfers and team selection.



Ebbsfleet United was previously known as Gravesend and Northfleet before the team change to use the new name this season. Ebbsfleet is currently ninth in the minor league, which is the fifth tier of the English football, after the Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two. The team has never been in the proper Football League.



With this takeover, almost 20,000 of the fans who paid the £35 can fulfilled their dreams to be the Benitezs, Fergusons or Wengers of the minor league.



e-government: Malaysia is now ranked 25th

According to the survey done by Brown University on Rhode Island, US on international e-government ranking list, Malaysia has improved tremendously since 2005.

Malaysia
was ranked 157 out of 198 countries in 2005. This year, the ranking leapfrogs to 25! This is mainly due to the Malaysian government efforts in promoting e-government services.

The top four nations are South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and United States.

Malaysian e-government successful applications:
  • Government’s drive for e-government services
  • Electronic Labour Exchange (www.elx.gov.my) has matched 75,000 potential employees with employers since 2005.
  • SMS alert on e-government services
  • Online renewal of driving licenses
  • Electronic filing of income tax forms
  • Voter information
  • Details for government tenders
  • Employment opportunities

Problems faced in e-government implementation:

  • Lacks of public awareness – 60% of the public are not aware of the services offered. Solution: Increase awareness through TV advertisements and organizing workshops at shopping malls.
  • Online Behaviour - Malaysians remain sceptical on being distrust on electronic transaction especially on banking online and buying from an Internet store.
  • Language barrier – Most of the government websites had in the past been in Bahasa Malaysia. However, there are English versions now.


Electronic Commerce - Blog Carnival (16th November 2007)










Welcome to the November 16, 2007 edition of electronic commerce. (Vol 1, No. 5, 2007)


Matthew Paulson
presents Don’t Throw Away Your Analog TV Just Yet posted at Getting Green.

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor) posted at Mad Kane's Humor Blog.

redmaple presents Why firefox more suitable for online business or web surfing? posted at valuable articles, saying, "Security is one of the top issues for Online business. Firefox can provide a safe situation for online business and web surfing, you can know the reason and get free firefox download from this article."

Jim presents Common Cause Variation posted at The Kaizen Business.

Andrew Erickson presents ShopSite Version 9.0 Released posted at WebSite Werx.

John W. Furst presents Key Success Factor: Listen To Your Customers posted at E-Biz Booster Blog, saying, "Your customer does not have to be an anonymous number, when you re running an online business. Find out who your customer is and what he wants. The result is happier customers and more profits for your business."

Ian Richardson presents Ten Top Strategic Internet Marketing Tips posted at Make Everything EzyAs123.

Yuri presents 7 Shopping Cart Tips That Even Amazon Could Use posted at Improve the Web, saying, "Most ecommerce websites need to make it easy to buy from them. Even Amazon has to fix things."

Jim presents Eliminate Waste, Increase Profit posted at The Kaizen Business.



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: , .



Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Blog Oh Blog! sold for USD10,000

The Malaysian blogsphere is buzz with the latest news on a Malaysian blog being sold for USD10,000 recently.

Blog Oh! Blog was sold for USD10,000 only being after 5 months in the blogsphere. It is a popular Wordpress themes and make money online blog.

With a high Google PR at 6 and Technorati ranked at 44, no wonder it can fetched such as high price.


The new owner is jainischalverma who already started working on the blog with a new theme.


The blog can actually rake in higher price by looking at 2 other bids at USD19,500 and USD25,000 which has been rejected by the previous owner.

Another Malaysian blogger is also trying to sell his PR4 blog, BloggingSecret.net and currently the bid is at USD700. Catch up the latest bidding action at the SitePoint.com e-auction site.

Erm...I just wonder how much my blog will be worth of?


How to save more for online shopping

Festive season is coming soon with Christmas and New Year Day within our reach. Some are thinking about pampering oneself with their desired gifts as a reward or a long vacation.


As for myself, I am looking forward for a new enhancement gadget for my mobile and may be a new laptop as my current faithful laptop is currently performing slower as compared to my peers. One of my colleagues suggested me to check out for some of the available online shopping coupons for a better bargain on online purchases.


I found out that I can save a lot more when I use Cellhut.com coupons to buy a Nokia Bluetooth Headset. The Dell Home deals seem attractive too with more saving on a new brand of Inspiron notebook. Well, this serves me right to start a new year with some new technological gadgets! Happy Holiday!




Wednesday, November 07, 2007

JohnCow.com was hacked! and Unhacked!

Updates: (9th Nov 2007)
The so-called hacked blog of JohnCow is just a little joke as claimed by the owner to get the message of the importance of backing up the blog site. Do you find this joke amusing? Self-hacking own blog?

I would say this joke went too far and over the board in the spirit of blogging. I believe there are better ways to send the message rather than faking an own hacked site. There should be some lines of ethics or code of conducts that each blogger should adopt in this blogsphere.

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

One of the well known blog site, JohnCow was hacked and held ransom by a/some hacker/s. A message was left on the home page read as:

"This blog is hacked. If we do not receive $100 in 24 hours, Cow gets well done!!!"

A PayPal button was also inserted on the page for JohnCow to pay the ransom. Hey, is this a real hacking case or just a prank to generate more traffic? Just wait and see.

Screencaptured from www.johncow.com

How to prevent your blog from being hacked?
Blogging Mix listed a few tips on how to prevent your blogger blog from being hacked:
  • Keep Your Personal Information Private
  • Avoid Using One Password For All Accounts You Create
  • Use 'Alpha-Numeric' Passwords
  • Don't Use a Password That Can be Found on Your Blog
  • Avoid Using Public Computers
  • Set Your Browser According to Your Preferred Security Level
  • Use Anti-Virus Softwares on Your Computer
  • Register and Use Your Own Domain Name
  • Always Back-up All Your Post / Content
For Wordpress user, seolog.com has an article too on some steps to secure the wordpress.

Technical hackz and tricks has gone even further with a lengthy post on:
  • Step-by-step repair after a website hack
  • What to do BEFORE your website is hacked, so it doesn't get hacked
  • How to know if you've been hacked

Callender Create Blogs suggested to make sure the domain is being LOCKED.

Jonlee.ca provide 7 steps in a very interesting post on how to recover your hacked blog or site:
  • Regain access or control to your site
  • Restore files and database from a backup
  • Restore missing information
  • Locate the vulnerability
  • Eliminate the vulnerability
  • Do a sweep for suspicious files
  • Monitor site activity

Tech Tags:


Monday, November 05, 2007

Internet Herb Portal set up by Malaysian firm

A local company, Hewo Sdn Bhd, has set up an Internet herb portal to document and provide information on medicine herbs. This will help to boost Malaysia's position as the region's herbal hub.

The portal, www.hewo.com, is backed by a panel of 7 health care experts as advisors, hopes to provide accurate information and advice on how to obtain health benefits from herbs. Information from more than 15,000 plant species can be found in the portal such as its scientific names, common names and medicinal uses.


Among the interesting section of the portal are Herbal World, What's Herb, Did You Know?, Top Health Topics, Lifestyle, Technology/Environment, Blog and Communities.

Tech Tags:

IMPACT - to fight cyber terrorism

Malaysian Government has approved RM43 million to set up an international centre which offer the world the best brains and facilities to help fight cyber security threats.

The center is called International Multinational Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism (IMPACT). It will be based in Cyberjaya with leading names in the IT industry serving on its advisory board.

This will be the world's first international public-private sector collaborative institution against cyber terrorism. This idea was brought out last year by our Malaysian Prime Minister at the World Congress on Information Technology in Austin, US.

Well known names like Symantec Corporation, TrendMicro, F-Secure and Kaperskylab have agreed to be the key partners and serving the advisory board.

IMPACT will be run and coordinated by two local IT companies namely Ascendsys Sdn Bhd, a security services company and GITN Sdn Bhd, a government IT network company.

Another spammer gets jailed

A 2 years' jail is awaiting a 28-year-old spammer from New Jersey for sending out millions of unsolicited email, spam mails.

Todd Moeller were sentenced to 27 months jail and fined more than US$180,000 by a New York judge. Moeller revealed that he was able to send large volume of spam in a way that can concealed the email's true source.

Other related cases on spammers in US are listed below:
Tech Tags:

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Olympic Games Ticket System Crashes

Overwhelming demand for the Olympics 2008 tickets caused the booking system to crash, jamming the telephone lines and lengthy queues when the sales was opened on 30th Oct.

A total 8 million hits on the ticketing website were received in the first hour. The telephone calls received were exceeding 3.8 million.

This resulted the tickets sales to be suspended until further notice on Nov 5th.

This is an official announcement from the Games' website:
(BEIJING, October 30) -- The head of the BOCOG Ticketing Center said Tuesday that after careful consideration and discussions with the relevant technical partners, and to ensure the interests of the public, BOCOG has decided to temporarily halt the domestic ticket sales in the second phase to improve the technical plan and will announce new ticketing information on November 5.

Efforts have been taken to improve the system. A press conference was also being held to explain the suspension by the BOCOG official - BOCOG official explains the suspension of the domestic ticket sales

Tech Tags:


Friday, November 02, 2007

Maybank targeting double on online stock trading deals

Malayan Banking Berhad (Maybank), the largest bank in Malaysia, is forecasting that its online stock trading at its Maybank2U Internet portal to be doubled from the current transaction volume in six months time.

Currently, its online trading transaction is about RM30 million daily. An average of 9,000 transactions were conducted everyday. The online trading portal which was launched in 2000 has about 10,000 users.

Maybank is expecting the trading transaction to hit RM60 million in six month time. In order to achieve this projection, Maybank will be reducing the trading fees for its online traders from November 2007 onwards. Maybankinvest online customer can save up to 63% on their trading fees which enable them to break even their investment faster.

Maybank was the first local bank in Malaysia that introduce online banking. Maybank2u is controlling about 60% of the local Internet banking market. It has 3.6 million registered users, of which 830,000 were active.

The portal conducted more than 24 million of transactions in a month, valued at RM3.2 billion.


Electronic Commerce - Blog Carnival (2nd November 2007)










Welcome to the November 2, 2007 edition of electronic commerce. (Vol 1, No. 4, 2007)



ElTio Rob presents Open Source - essential to success? posted at Hortal.com, saying, "Open Source gives PayPal that rarest form of competitive advantage: control. With it, they’ve taken to change the world, redefining financial services for consumers worldwide. Banks, insurance companies and the rest of the eBusiness world better take notice."

Doris Chua presents Advice on Online Store Needed posted at A Meeting Place for All Home Office Women.

Stefan Töpfer presents THE SMALL BUSINESS BLOG » Blog Archive » Work-Life Balance 2.0 and Small Business posted at The Small Business Blog.

John W. Furst presents Attract International Buyers More Easily posted at E-Biz Booster Blog, saying, "Do you get orders from international customers? If not as many as you wish, you might look at your order process from the standpoint of an international shopper. Fix some basic most common problems and those customers are yours. Too many Web shop operators believe that their business will be an international one automatically. Not really, but it takes a one-time effort to get there."

James D. Brausch presents You Don’t Need Any Money posted at jamesbrausch.com.


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: , .



Thursday, November 01, 2007

Top 5 posts for October 2007

Finally the marking was over by the end of September. Another new semester commenced in mid-October.

These are the top 5 posts for the month of October.

1. Latest on Google PageRank: My E-Commerce is now PR3!
2. How to lose your ID easily to fraudsters at home?
3. 10 free e-books on blogging
4. Net Revolution in Africa soon
5. WidgetBucks - New PPC for bloggers


In case you have missed out the Top 5 posts of the previous months, you can get it here:
1. Top 5 Posts for June 2007
2. Top 5 posts for July 2007
3. Top 5 posts for August 2007
4. Top 5 posts for September 2007

Happy Reading!

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