Maxis recently launched their new IaaS offering in the form called the Maxis Cloud. According to Lowyat.net the Maxis Cloud is said to be the " the most advanced on-demand, real-time, fully managed cloud service in Malaysia, Maxis Cloud allows businesses to scale their cloud computing infrastructure according to their needs at any time through its self-service portal."

That’s basically calling yourself Jaguh Kampung. Pardon the sarcasm, but the Maxis Cloud does seem a tad bit expensive for a such a late entry into the game. You’d expect new IaaS providers that show up this late in the cloud game throw everything including the kitchen sink to get new subscribers. That however, has been lacking and a marketing strategy that seems more intent on selling IaaS to non-believers as oppose to selling the Maxis Cloud itself isn’t helping their case.

I’d loved to be rooting for Maxis, but most of it’s offerings just don’t add up, and there’s a whole bunch of questions about it’s bandwidth charges, support availability and API specifications that aren’t clear enough to me to make any sort of comparison or even recommendation. Plus the fact that its self service portal had a ’technical issue’ when I logged on didn’t really bode well for my experience.

That being said, while analyzing I noticed that there is one thing Maxis could offer that could tilt the tables in its favor, Maxis is a communications company after all (unlike Amazon or Rackspace) and I think there just might be a chance it could offer something niche that would make it stand out. But first, let’s take a look at some key concepts:

The first (of probably many) xxx domain hijacks have started springing up. Earlier today, a reader contacted me about a recent post I did on the .xxx domains. He mentioned that he spotted popebenedict.xxx in the wild and was curious if this was the first .xxx domain hijack. He maybe right, but in a post on his blog, he also mentions that while ICM registry doesn’t find PopeBenedict.xxx a ‘sacred’ url, it thinks osamabinladen.xxx is sacred and should be blocked from registry. In fact a quick check on the domains reveals that osamabinladen.xxx is a “Domain that has been reserved from registration”.

If you’re curious, PopeBenedict.xxx leads to a page titled “Everyone will find Islam” and notes that the website is for sale – I suspect that sale would be to the highest bidder. The website further adds that it has a long list of other pope related urls, including josephratzinger.xxx (the popes real name) and holyfather.xxx. On a slightly off-tangent topic, I don’t think anyone would be visiting josephratzinger.xxx to look for porn, but holyfather.xxx may have some promise (tongue firmly in check).

In a remarkable infographic I stumbled across over at website 101, 25% of users will leave your page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. 25% more will leave if it takes more than 7 seconds, so in essence if your pages takes 8 seconds to load you’ve lost a half your audience even before your page starts loading. This is pretty remarkable, 8 seconds is all it takes to lose 50% of your customer base, that’s the time it takes for people who are ‘waiting’ to turn off and head on over to other websites, presumably websites who don’t take more than 8 seconds to load.

As unfortunate as it sounds, this is really a case of webmasters and blog owners screwing themselves over, after getting half the battle won which is getting visitors to click links to your site or heading over to your site via SEO or Social Networks, you then shoot yourself in the foot by having a slow websites.

Bernama reported today that The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission  (MCMC or the SKMM) together The Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim) would begin “collaborating to monitor lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) activities in the country, particularly on the websites.”

Apart from the usual gung-ho activity of from Jakim, its Director General  Othman Mustapha said “If we find that there are things that are unsuitable on the websites, information would be channeled to the committee for action to be taken,”

Now some of you may know that I contacted the Multimedia Commission some time ago about my Unifi Downtime and to investigate what compensation I could get from a 9 day down time above and beyond the pro-rated cost. In a nutshell their reply was “sorry can’t help you”. It’s quite apparent why they couldn’t help me, they’re busy looking for Gays online.

YTL Communications has been doing a pretty good job recently. The Star even went as far as claim that “YTL Comms to Break Even” until of course you read the article in which case it mentions that YTL require an additional 500,000 subscribers on top of it’s current 300,000 to achieve that.  However, it did offer a post-paid plan which was pretty decent, and who can forget the tie-up with Proton to offer a a 4G car. Why in the world would anyone buy a car because it has 4G, on the other hand why would anyone buy a Proton? (disclaimer: I still drive a 2004 Proton Waja which has served me well)

However, with Yes latest postpaid offerings I imagine it’s moving away from it’s niche position into more competitive environments, people may use Yes as a fallback, but post-paid is where the real money is and Yes is moving in. Yes Data plans come in various price points, from RM48 for 1.5GB up to RM168 for 10GB, the left-over credits don’t roll over to next month but there’s no extra charge for using over your quota just a speed throttle to 128kbps. (note to YES: 128Kbps is not broadband)

If you’re on Unifi you might have noticed that some sites are blocked and it’s due to government directives to block these sites.  Now that goes against what the Government of Malaysia promised it’s stakeholders during the advent of the MsC, in which it promised to not censor the internet. If you remember, somewhere in August 2008, the government issued a similar directive to censor Malaysia Today.

So what's a average user to do to bypass these internet blocks. The blocks themselves are issued by the government and issued to all ISPs, fortunately there are a couple of ways to bypass these internet blocks which amount to censorship, and it depends on what kind of mechanism your ISP uses to block it. I'm all for a free internet and here are some ways you can bypass those blocks.

Yeap, you read that right. Microsoft office is the bane of all small business owners, they need it to generate documents and spreadsheets, but it cost a bomb to own. The standard Microsoft Office suite runs well over Rm600, and according to this pricelist from software exchange, Microsoft Office 2010 cost a whooping Rm643. Now Rm643 may not seem like much, but when a laptop/desktop cost just Rm2000, that’s nearly 30% more cash upfront for your software needs.

How is this possible, well Microsoft is offering Office365 worldwide and has even partnered with TM to sell their cloud offerings locally in Malaysia. Office365 is a cloud based version of the Microsoft Office, and it even includes things like email, collaboration and project management software. All of this for just Rm18/month is a pretty sweet deal in comparison to putting down Rm600 per user as a initial capital expense.

Adobe is looking to release a cloud version of their creative applications online called creativecloud. From what I gather from their website it looks to be like a office365 version for creatives. This is probably a step in the right direction, Adobe software usually run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, and buying the licenses for that software usually incur a huge capital expenditure for startups looking use these applications.

Did you know Malaysia has a Multimedia and Communication Commission that oversees the quality of service for telecommunications companies including the broadband services they provide. I also understand that they are the enforcers of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, with a determination on the mandatory standards for the Quality of Service (Broadband Access Service) .

In not so many words, there are actually laws in place to ensure that your broadband provider meets a minimum standard in terms of uptime and service availability.

However, after reading the a short snippet of the Act from the SKMM website here, I was surprised to find that while it did have a specific outline for the quality of service, it did not have an outline for the penalty imposed if the quality of service was not met.

A couple of days back, I wrote about how copyright law was preventing a lot of us from listening the entire Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech because it was protected by copyright, and in order to listen to it you had to pay Martin Luther Kings family royalty. Today I did some searching on pinterest, and found some rather remarkable works of art around Martin Luther King that were pinned in pinterest, these works of art would not be possible if the family had further copyrighted other aspects of MLKs life, and with newer stricter copyright laws that could very well be the case.

Remember for a pinterest invite, just leave a comment on the post and I’ll send one to you as soon as I have the time. For now, enjoy!

From pinterest User Effeluna