of US$110 million.

In the unlikely case that CHIP reader does not know, Friendster is a global social networking site with over 115 million registered user. That’s roughly 3 4 times the whole population of Malaysia…

Related articles

• Malaysian Firm Buys Friendster (wired.com)

Okay… yah… Friendster is yesterday’s news. It was big 4-6 years ago but has fallen down hard since the arrival of Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the service practically had its funeral in USA.. they say. Check out the graph below (from WSJ) and you can see how its market share in Asia-Pacific has dwindled from 8% in 2008 to 2.9% in 2009.

But hey… it’s been a long time that we have last heard a Malaysian IT company made a splash in the IT world. Since the slow fizzle of MSC’s glitter the last 5 years, IT has effectively been in a backburner in our economy. Yeah… the usual PR machine by MDeC and ministries still keep churning out grants, new initiatives etc. But let’s face it, we don’t feel it in our gut. The fire is no more there baby… where’s the passion?

Can Vincent Tan’s purchase flare the flame again? Let me see…. MOL (the online micro-payment company that’s the vehicle used in this deal) is not exactly the most exciting company around. What else does Vincent Tan has in his stable….
(affiliated with him – one way or another)

• McDonald – he brought this chain to Malaysia in the 80s. It’s doing good business though a way off from KFC that you can find almost any corner of the country
• Starbuck – another chain that he brought in. One of the market leaders for coffe bistro
• U-Mobile – hmmm…
• MiTV – bigger hmmmm…
• 7-eleven –
• Borders
• Krispy Kreme
• Wendy’s
• others…

Any of the above that inspires? In the IT world, 2 of them U-Mobile and MiTV stand out like two sore thumbs.

But hey.. you never know. I hope the fella managed to get a good CEO that have the juice to salvage Friendster from it’s Sad Fate. It’s a tough market for second stringers out there – so he’ll need someone that can overcome the odds much better than U-Mobile and MiTV. (Or even Thaksin’s purchase of Manc City)

In the spirit of Malaysia Boleh… good luck and hope everything will go well to this US-Malaysian marriage. Maybe all gamers should register for an account with Friendster (and get free MOL points in the process). Hehh… that’s not a bad idea ah. (c) Ash Report 2009

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For the FB and Tweet addicts, I wonder… did it feel like the world suddenly has no purpose? Tcshk.. so melodramatic.

Both Facebook and Twitter reported that they suffered waves of cyber attacks on their sites last week that caused their services to be disrupted. Apparently it was of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack type and it was orchestrated in 2 waves. The first wave was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by one of its users. The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites’ servers by sending lots of junk requests to that users’ page.

Therein lies the crux of the issue. The attacks were not directed at these sites themselves but rather to one of their users. Apparently it is politically motivated and was targeted at a blogger who goes by “Cyxymu” — Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi, a city in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia in Georgia. So someone somewhere who hated his (or her) guts attacked his online presence at several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal. In other words these sites are just collateral damage in this political war.

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For most of us, the damage was minimal – if any. These social networking sites are just casual indulgence. But what about organisations that have chosen to use these sites as crucial part of their business? The outages would have caused them losses – just like the losses incurred when our TNB suffered blackouts a few years back.

Surely many have asked, is it wise to put your business reliance on this fragile online facilities? Will it be safer to do business offline – face-to-face the old way? It is easy to agree with this logic. But this is the same argument faced when one decide whether to embrace new things. Like automation of factory against traditional way of doing things. Like computerising your documentation against pen-and-paper methods. Like travelling on air against using road or sea.

But it still is daunting to think that someone could just bomb you when you have done nothing wrong. The thing is – we live in Malaysia where many of these cyber terrorism and physical terrorism are just things that your read happenings elsewhere. It could not happen to me – you think. But a lot of hatred is being sowed – especially online. We might not be so safe anymore…

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After launching a jab at Google via the Office Web announcement, Microsoft today delivered a left hook that it hoped will deliver the solid punch to rock its rival, Google the Cloud King.

Microsoft and Yahoo seal web deal screamed the headline today. Microsoft’s Bing search engine received a shot in the arm with this deal that allows Microsoft to take control of Yahoo’s search engine and search advertising technology.

Funny eh.. Yahoo! who once ruled the search engine world ago is now resigned to be the sales-rep. Yahoo! new CEO, Carol Bartz, thought that this is a great deal. Let someone else deal with the techie stuff headache, we’ll still get to keep 88% of the ad-revenue – plus the deal would “boost Yahoo!’s annual operating income by $500m and secure $200m in savings“. The income is from guaranteed revenues per search for the first 18 months of the 10-year deal + rights on premium adverts. Premium Adverts is trade talk for advert deals that are concluded face-to-face (usually with major accounts) as opposed to those placed online by mere mortals like us and these deals accounts to almost half of Yahoo!’s advert income.

Apparently, it does not matter that Yahoo! doesn’t get a single cent of cash upfront out of giving away its family jewel. Some CEOs sure think ‘out-of-the-box’. Maybe she’s been visiting PKFZ to pick up some tips. Using my Casio calculator, I can’t figure out how (US$500 million + US$200 million) x 10 is better than US$47 billion – that’s before taking into account the fact that the income is only coming in over ten years.

Ask this: What happens in 10 years, when the partnership ends and Microsoft’s Bing engine powers all of Yahoo’s search queries? Maybe the same way when Yahoo! send the out-of-date Geocities to its demise.

On the other hand, Microsoft is obviously delirious that its effort to take control of Yahoo! since late 2007 has finally borne fruit. And it appears to cost Microsoft a lot less than US$47.5 billion that was offered in Jan 2008.

“Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Mr Ballmer. “Microsoft and Yahoo know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search,”

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What does this mean?

• In one stroke, Microsoft will now get to control 30% of the US advert market. (We wonder how will this translated into iron-clad features of the to-be released Windows 7) and Microsoft finally gets to be a genuine contender in the search-ads world
• Yahoo! is now no more a search engine company, but is an advertising and media company (like AOL)

The King of Cloud, meanwhile, still controls over 2/3 of the ad-sales market. Looking down at the Babel Tower being built by the pretenders. As at the time of writing, we haven’t received any reports of shudders from the throne yet.

It was reported by BBC that Ofcom (the UK equivalent of our MCMC here) has complained that broadband users in UK are not getting the speeds they are paying for. Less than 9% of users received more than 6Mbps whilst the average users across the UK suffers actual connection speed of a paltry 4.1Mbps. Tsch…. pity them Brits huh.

What about the rest of the world… what kind of broadband speed that they are getting now?

Look at the Japanese enjoying a zippy 60Mbps connection. “Very fast, eh” “Arigatou gozaimas“. The Koreans as expected also enjoyed very high connectivity speed too. Greece and Mexico… that seemed more like our level of standard.

What hope do we have?

you may ask. I’ve given up hope on the WiMax fellas. Half of them are just interested in making press conferences just to keep their licenses alive, whilst a couple has actually spent money in rolling out services in Klang Valley but the service quality is still questionable.

Luckily there is still the much touted RM15 billion High Speed Broadband (HSBB) project by Telekom Malaysia to keep our MSC dream alive. It was claimed that HSBB will offer speed of up-to 1Gbps to commercial users whilst residential users will be offered speed from 10Mbps to 100Mbps.

By next year, some lucky residents in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Bangsar, Subang Jaya and Shah Alam are supposed to be able to enjoy the HSBB service. By 2013, an ambitious number of 1.3 million users are being bandied about.

But how much will this cost us? Telekom has not announced any figures yet but I read a blog posting from an inside sources that quoted RM500++ for the 10mbps package. Alamak…

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Of course I have to hear it from the horses mouth. So I went and asked the director in charge of HSBB project, Ahmad Azhar. He was coy about divulging the actual numbers but promised that the cost will be ‘lower than what TM would have liked it to be’. Pressed into more details of what the actual offerings of HSBB will be, he said that TM is focusing on the triple-play package (telco talk for services that offered voice, data and video).

That’s great news because that’s what I have been waiting for. Triple play service would allow IPTV offering in Malaysia – full-scale interactive High Definition television channel. However, this will require fast fibre optic connectivity and HSBB will have to be properly configured with good quality switching equipments to make it happen. Another Screamyx in the making?

In the USA, two service providers are slugging it out in this fibre-optic services arena. Cablevision is offering 15mbps broadband for US$15.99 a month. There is also the 50mbps package by both Cablevision and Verizon prized at US$144 per month. In the UK, Virgin Media (reported by Ofcom to have the fastest service) offered 10mbps package at £14 per month and £35 per month for 50mbps (both exclude the bundled telephone fees). A basic triple play package from BT

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with 8mbps download speed will cost £30.33 per month (exclude telephone charges).

Are those cheap or expensive?

Hey… how dare you youngsters ask what is Geocities and what’s so great about it? Heck, this is the service that democratize the internet. Before Geocities come about in 1996, Internet has been around long before but it was the domain of geeks and university scholars (yeah.. geeks as well). But with Geocities, suddenly any Ahmad, Mutu and Ah Beng can have their own webpage on the world-wide-web for all the world to see. Anybody can have a page (something like http://www.geocities.com/~coolashreport) and post information about themselves, pictures of their dog and cat, list of midi-files and other banal stuff.

By today’s standard, the Geocities pages are gawdy. Pages with black background with neon yellow flashing text and oh-so-cool java-scrolling text are common. Why not, even the homepage is… just have a look yourself down here.

What Geocities look like in 1996

Geocities arrranged pages into community with like minded interest. When you register, you need to choose one community to park your homestead (that’s what yet call your pages). “Area 51″ “Beverly Hills” “Silicon Valley” etc. There are other free community pages like “Angelfire” “Tripod” but Geocities are the grand-daddy of them all. At its peak in 1997, it is the 5th most visited sites in the world and hosting 3.5 million sites. Certainly impressive even compared with today’s community sites like Facebook or MySpace.

Geocities demise started when it was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for US$3.6 billion. Yahoo! actually paid over US$100 per profile (out of which US$200 is attributed to yours truly). Not long afterward, the dot-com bubble burst and caused serious decline in advertising money.

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It will not be so bad if Yahoo! had let Geocities evolve into web 2.0 and kept up with alternative community sites. Instead, Geocities remain trapped in the time zone.

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Cyworld. An example of what Geocities could not become

The picture above is from Cyworld, a leading Korean social networking site. The site is targeted at teens and 20-somethings – people who have time to create networks, homepages and 3-D virtual rooms. Users can buy virtual items to decorate their 3-D rooms. A staggering 25% of the Korean population have an account with Cyworld. Cyworld is now in Japan, China, Taiwan and USA. And it’s profitable too – bringing in a cool US$300,000 a day.

This is what you can do in Cyworld:

• Create your own 3-D room in pixel art
• Create a pixel art avatar of yourself
• Fill your 3-D room with virtual items
• Slick and cute interface
• Photos, videos, journal, sketchbook, file storage, etc. all integrated
• Add friends as “neighbours”

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Now that’s cool. And if Yahoo had the vision to transform the 3.5 million homesteads and get the teenage and 20 somethings to buy stuff for their virtual world, we would not have abandoned our Geocities pad. Actually we can say the same thing to Yahoo! the classified-listings turned search-engine too.

So here’s an ode to Geocities – the grand-daddy of webpages. And as a rememberance, here’s a typical Geocities page for you. (for obvious reason, I can’t put up my own Geocities page or I’ll be the butt of joke of the office for the next ten weeks

)

RIP Geocities!

P/S : Don’t be shy, please leave here the URL of your geocities pages before they disappeared in October.

Yeah… it seems that the catfight is going to get more interesting by the day. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are putting their cash-cow app “Microsoft Office” on line. By 2010, a new lite version of Microsoft Office called “Office Web” will be available online for free.

Will the Cloud King shudders with fear? After all, the Desktop King recently encroached the Cloud Kingdom with their own search engine called ‘Bing’ and now they have put their most potent arsenal in the Cloud. (Office brought in US$4.5 billion of revenue for first quarter of 2009 out of the total US$13.6 billion earned by Microsoft)

Office Web will be part of the Office 2010 general release, which is slated for the first half of next year. And if your organisation is a ‘volume license customers’ – you can run it through your own webserver. Mere mortals like us though will have to access Office Web through Microsoft’s Windows Live portal.

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How will you accept this new development? Personally, I’ve tried Google Apps. And with our standard of Internet connectivity in this country, it is a very frustrating experience. So I don’t give much thought about it and I suspect the same nonchalant attitude will be reserved towards Microsoft’s new project.

Really, if I want free office applications to do my work, I could just take out this month’s CHIP cd and install the free OpenOffice.org 3.1. They’ve improved a lot recently and I don’t have to be a slave to the Net to do my work. PS. just in case, we should also avoid the birth of Terminator’s Skynet Superman II: Director’s cut release .

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The latest buzz this week in the IT world has to be the news from Mountain View that after dallying with the Chrome browser, Google wants to go into OS development next.

The hegemony of Microsoft is continually being challenged by the Google boys. Google is undoubtedly the King of the Cloud – now that they have dominated the search engine world. Get this… for the year 2008, Google generates US$21,128,514,000 just from advertising income alone. (That is a cool RM74 billion).

The King is not happy with his current kingdom, which king ever has

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, and wants to extend his kingdom down to desktop-earth. His logic said that since the internet cloud is accessed through the plain old browser, the next step would be to conquer the browser world. Voila! Google Chrome was born.

Unfortunately, the Cloud King discovered that the browser by the incumbent Desktop King, ‘IE’ ,is hard to beat. Most of the world netizens are tied to the operating system provided by the Desktop King. 87.8% to be exact. And the Desktop King has sneakily made his browser intertwined with the OS. No amount of legal challenges and court orders have managed to separate them.

What is the Cloud King to do?

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What else, let’s build our own OS

, say the King. We’ll say that the OS will be simpler and fresher. Surely the faithful netizens would love a new thing that’s clean and elegant as Google interface – compared with the complex overbearing system they have to bear with now. The Fruity King Pretender? We’ll deal with him later. Let him rest first. Corvette Summer buy

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And that’s how we are faced with Google Chrome OS – supposed in one year time. Of course, they put it in a nicer context:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

That will be interesting to watch eh. I just hope that it does not become gajah dengan gajah bergaduh, kancil ditengah mati tersepit.

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What do other people think?

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commented that:

Microsoft may look vulnerable, but it’s a behemoth with loyal (if not enthusiastic) users, billions in cash and a willingness to eventually catch up to faster competitors.

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Ms Foley, who writes under category ‘All About Microsoft’ in Zdnet cautioned whether Will Google’s Chrome OS look rusty by late 2010?.

All the world is a playground – and when your salary comes to RM78 billions – the Cloud King can afford to play a lot!