A rather entrepreneurial friend of mine realized the Malaysia didn’t really have any niche bookstores that offered free delivery. Sure all the medical students knew where to get their textbooks from, and the designers knew where the best design books could be bought–but for the most part that involved a long trip to somewhere to the older parts of KL just to purchase a book or two. For some that may be a worthwhile sacrifice, just like buying electronics from lowyat, but for others that may involve either driving from Penang or even further just to get your hands on a desperately needed textbook at a an affordable price, that seemed a rather big price to pay.

So looking into that gap, he decided to start Unibooks, and what really makes me excited for him is the speed in which he manage to create the startup from nearly scratch and the fact that we’re seeing a lot of local startups flourish to meet the needs of Malaysians–the same needs that seem to be ignored by the bigger retailers.

As a tech blog in Malaysia, I thought it’d be interesting to see the latest Auditor-General’s report faired in terms of IT spend from the government. IT spend is a tricky thing, and most don’t understand just how tricky it is, particularly around big IT spend by governments–they often fail. In fact, one of my favorite blogs is dedicated solely to IT failures, aptly titled–IT Project failures.

However, even the Synopsis report of the AG report is a harrowing 87 pages long. It’s not just the length that puts of me off, but rather the sheer dry-ness of the language that is used. Interestingly, not a single diagram exist in the documentation filled with enough monotone text to put even the most ardent auditor to sleep, and I’m no auditor so I nearly dozed off after the 2nd page. I had to take a different approach if I was to get a synopsis of the synopsis, fortunately I work in IT (not auditing or law), and I know of function in Adobe Acrobat that let’s you quickly search a document–it’s called the FIND function, and I was a deadly ninja in the art of the FIND.

So, armed with the FIND function on Adobe Reader, I combed through the document looking for the word ‘system’ and where it tied with an actual IT system too see just how well our government was in delivering IT systems in 2011. Below are just a few paragraphs pertaining to the AG’s report and below are 2 prime examples of the the magnitude of IT failures from Putrajaya.

Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee–both Malaysians started a little porn blog called Sumptuous Erotica attracted headlines both in Malaysia and across the causeway. However, unlike other couples who’ve been caught with their pants down before, both Alvin and Vivian seem indifferent to the controversy surrounding them, more importantly they seem quite confident that they’ve done nothing wrong and have nothing to apologize for to anyone.

On the face of it–they’re right. Whatever you think Alvin or Vivians parents have against their children posting pictures of themselves naked online…that’s a matter for them to settle, not for you to be a busy body about.

Did you know the term ‘Yankee’ is thought to be derived from the Dutch name Janke, which means “little Jan” or “little John,” a nickname that can be traced back to the 1680s, when it was used as a slang term for pirates. Yes, you heard that right, the Americans were regarded by the Europeans as Pirates. At least that’s what Matt Mason, author of The Pirates Dilemma suggest.

Matt isn’t just an author of a book, but also the Executive Marketing Director of BitTorrent, so when he says something–I listen. Things like: [box icon=“chat”]

But the term really gained steam during the Industrial Revolution. Europeans began using the term to refer to all North Americans as a result of America’s national policies towards European intellectual property. America only industrialized as rapidly as it did by counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents and stealing intellectual property wholesale. Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle writes Doron S. Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. The United States employed pirated know-how to industrialize. Europeans saw America as a nation of bootleggers, which was a little unfair, as every major European country was also heavily engaged in piracy and industrial espionage at some point in the 18th century. Piracy was, in fairness, the only way the U.S. could keep up.

Consider a very specific example of the ‘drop down’ menu in the iOS. When I bought the iPhone4 for my wife 2 years ago, the only way you could get the ‘fancy’ drop down menu that enable/disabled 3G and Wi-Fi was by jail-breaking your iPhone. Now it comes standard with iOS from Apple, so you could in theory argue that the worlds best design company got their que from the pirate market–but you never hear apple admitting to this.

Just the other day, I walked into an MPH bookstore and saw something that looked oddly familiar. It was a book titled “When I was a kid” and I couldn’t help but think I’ve seen this somewhere. It took me a while, but suddenly it hit me–this was the book from kickstarter.

A couple of months back, I wrote a post for a kickstarter initiative by a friend of mine, in that same post, I touched on some other kickstarter initiative from Malaysians. One of those initiatives was by a guy name boey who wanted to write a rather interesting book based on his life. I remember thinking it to be a really unique style of story telling, and I was really thrilled to see it on shelves in Malaysia–but not just because I’m a book lover.

Apple was just awarded a 3rd patent for it’s Slide-to-Unlock feature, and while the internet is still abuzz with it, I just fail to see any reason to get excited.

Yes, Apple looks to be greedy and is apparently more than happy competing with HTC and Samsung in courtrooms rather than the open market–but we all knew this already.

Yes, Apple is patenting something so generic it may apply to ALL slide gestures on an unlock screen? – but we all knew the patent system in the US is whacky and open to abuse.

A lot of my search traffic comes from Google, in July I had slightly more than 8,000 visits to my site with just over 6,000 of those coming just from Google. So it made a lot of sense for me to look into some Search Engine Optimization to help boost those numbers. In September, I had more than 10,000 visits with more 8,o00 from Google, which of course begs the question who are the lovely people giving me 2,000 hits/month without going through Google.?

What is Search Engine Optimization?

In Laymans terms it’s making your site understandable for Google to analyze.

Google doesn’t employ thousands of workers to categorize every site on the internet, Google automatically ’tries’ to figure out what your site is about through a mixture of sophisticated algorithms and feedback from search results. SEO is about trying to help Google figure this out by adjusting certain elements of your site to fit what Googles algorithms are looking for, of course SEO isn’t just about Google, but the general concept is the same.