Your phone will create an instant community

Nokia has been working on creating a mobile phone feature that connects people with strangers (or friends) in their immediate vicinity.

Nokia Instant Community is a mobile social network fuelled by the people around you. It lets you chat, share content and interact with people close by via your mobile phone.

The concept was jointly created by Tampere University of Technology and the Nokia Research Centre.

It provides an insight into how we might interact with strangers in the future - via social networks and mobile communication. Nokia Instant Community is unique in the fact that it doesn't require mobile users to connect through WiFi, infrared or Bluetooth.

Instead the social network is run using the device's adhoc WiFi (a network that enables two or more devices to connect with each other directly instead of passing through a central access point or wireless router).

"The two apps showcased working on the platform demonstrated how you could instant message with folks nearby, share pictures, songs and contact information along with other content you'd like others to be privy to on your device," explained a post on the Nokia Conversations official blog.

On May 13, Patently Apple website revealed that Apple is also working on a powerful location-based service for the iPhone. Apple was granted the patent that would see service or retail applications temporarily appear on a user's phone when they approach a certain location.

For example, if a user came in the vicinity of a restaurant, a menu for that restaurant would temporarily appear on their device.

The technology could theoretically be used in a similar way to Nokia Instant Community, with near-by users' profiles temporarily popping up when they approach the device.

Nokia Instant Community is still in its research and development phase but you can view the initial concept behind the social network here: bit.ly/bTejSS

Rent HD movies and PS3 games

Do you have a long list of Blu-ray movies to watch and PlayStation3 games to play but not keen on spending so much money? Maybe you can rent them to save cost.

Check out Blackmango Games, an online videogame and movie rental service that lets users rent PlayStation3 games and Blu-ray movies.

The rental service is the brainchild of Ben Chan, an avid videogame and movie enthusiasts who started the service in 2007.

“I came up with the idea after not being able to find any local game rental service,” he said.

“There are a lot of hardcore gamers who complete a game in a day or two and move on to the next. Because games cost a lot, it makes more sense for them to rent,” he said.

Chan, who first started his virtual store on Lowyat.net forum, has since expanded the service to a dedicated website (www.blackmangogames.com) where customers can view the list of games and movies they wish to rent.

There are many subscription packages. For instance, the Hardcore Gamer package costs RM50 a month and entitles the subscriber to rent one game or movie at any one time. You can hold on to the title as long as you like or exchange it for another as many times as you wish.

The game will be delivered to you by Chan or dispatched via mail depending on your location.

Chan is planning on upgrading his website to allow subscribers to pick the titles they wish to rent online. — CHONG JINN XIUNG

Conference to spotlight hacker threats

In today’s fast moving world, security threats to a company’s IT network are rampant and rapidly evolving to become more menacing.

To drive home these threats and the vulnerabilities of company IT infrastructures, computer security certification company EC Council has organised its Hacker Halted Asia Pacific conference, which includes workshop sessions.

The event, organised in conjunction with Kolej Yayasan Melaka (KYM), will take place in Kuala Lumpur in November.

Hacker Halted is being billed as a “vendor neutral” event that will feature industry executives, technical specialists, IT managers and other experts who have agreed to share their knowledge and expertise in this area.

The list of speakers includes director of solutions architecture at WhiteHat Security, Trey Ford; president and CEO of Information Security Forum, Howard Schmidt; and former US National Security Agency codebreaker Jeff Bardin.

There will also be a workshop for a more hands-on approach to security, which will involve a practical guide through the security process and attendees should bring their own laptops.

Workshop presenters include personalities such as Tom Bowers, who is the technical editor for information security magazine TechTarget.

The Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry is backing the conference. It will be held from Nov 10-13 at the Nikko Hotel, Kuala Lumpur.

There is an attendance fee of RM1,399 for the conference and RM2,600 for the workshop. Those who wish to attend both will only have to pay RM3,400 each.

EC Council is also offering an early-bird discount of 15% for those who register and pay before July 31.

How much money is YouTube losing?

Internet video leader YouTube Inc’s losses have been overblown by some analysts, but corporate parent Google Inc doesn’t mind the misperception, according to a study released on Wednesday.

Technology consultants at RampRate Inc project YouTube’s operating losses this year at US$174.2mil (RM627mil) — far below the US$470.6mil (RM1.7bil) estimated by Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena in an April research report that became a hot topic on Wall Street and the Internet.

The duelling forecasts are the latest twist in a guessing game that has intrigued investors since Google bought YouTube for US$1.76bil (RM6bil at the current exchange rate) in late 2006.

Although YouTube has become an even more popular diversion since the Google deal, it still hasn’t proven it can make money.

Google has acknowledged YouTube isn’t profitable, but has refused to provide any specifics, leaving it to outsiders to figure out.

And the number crunching usually leads to inaccurate conclusions, according to Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette.

“Most people build outside views of what it costs us to do things, and often they exaggerate,” Pichette said in an interview with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s shortly after Credit Suisse released its YouTube report.

But Google has little incentive to set the record straight about YouTube’s actual losses, according to RampRate, which specialises in managing technology costs.

RampRate reasons the perception of large losses at YouTube helps Google negotiate more favourable contracts with movie, TV and music studios licensing their video.

What’s more, copyright owners also are less likely to go to court in pursuit of unpaid royalties and damages if they believe YouTube is a big money loser, according to RampRate’s thesis.

“Google is no doubt thrilled to let YouTube be known as a financial folly,” RampRate’s report said.

Cost cutting

YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost wouldn’t comment directly on RampRate’s report but he stressed that Google has been running ads near or in millions of videos in an effort to curb YouTube’s losses.

He also said Google had little incentive to magnify its losses because YouTube shares revenue with its business partners.

“We want our partners to do well, because when they succeed, we succeed,” Zamost said.

Although it has been cutting costs to cope with the US recession, Google can still afford to subsidise YouTube with the money it makes through its search engine. Google earned US$4.2bil (RM15bil) last year and started this year with a first-quarter profit of US$1.4bil (RM5bil).

Analysts generally concur with Credit Suisse’s US$241mil (RM867mil) estimate for YouTube’s revenue this year. RampRate adopted Credit Suisse’s revenue projections in its calculations, as well as Credit Suisse’s estimate that YouTube will spend about US$332mil (RM1.2bil) on video acquisition, advertising commissions and general overhead this year.

Keeping it secret

The big mystery is how much it costs Google to store and distribute the 20 hours of video that are sent to YouTube every minute.

After conferring with industry experts, Wang and Sena concluded Google will spend nearly US$380mil (RM1.4bil) on Internet bandwith, computer hardware, software and datacentres for YouTube. RampRate believes the figure is about US$83mil (RM298mil).

That lower estimate presumes Google has negotiated moneysaving deals with broadband providers and other behind-the-scenes players that move data through the Internet.

RampRate also believes Google’s own propriety technology has helped hold down YouTube’s costs, an idea that Pichette endorsed in hisMaclean’s interview.

“When people run models, they generally use standard industry pricing for bandwidth, storage, but we build everything from scratch,” Pichette said at the time. “So we know our cost position but nobody else does.”

Credit Suisse stands by its April estimates, said Sena, one of the analysts who wrote the April report. “We feel very comfortable with what we came up with,” he said on Tuesday

Malaysia covets China’s outsourcing spot

Malaysia wants to be the No 2 location worldwide for outsourcing activities, edging out China, in five year’s time, said the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC).

Datuk Badlisham Ghazali, MDeC chief executive officer, said the country will attain this goal by ramping up its production of knowledge workers.

Malaysia, in third place after leader India and China, has held that position for the fourth time in six years, according to global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney’s Global Services Location Index (GSLI).

According to MDeC, the total number of knowledge workers contributed by MSC Malaysia — MDeC oversees that national initiative — is 79,000. By 2010, MSC Malaysia alone will need 100,000 workers.

It is estimated that the demand for knowledge workers nationwide will far exceed that. MDeC, however, could not provide an exact figure.

To meet the goal, MDeC is collaborating with industry experts and professional outsourcing bodies to train and re-train fresh IT graduates, displaced workers and working professionals for the growing outsourcing sector.

Among its partners are Outsourcing Malaysia; Customer Relationship Management and Contact Centre Association of Malaysia; International Association of Outsourcing Professionals; and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and Customer Operations Performance Centre.

For those seeking professional qualifications, MSC Malaysia offers training and advancement programmes under its K-Workers Development Initiatives.

These are the MSC Malaysia Undergraduate Skills Programme, MSC Malaysia Undergraduate Apprenticeship and Development Programme (an on-the job training scheme), and MSC Malaysia Graduate Trainee Programme.

Hurdle ahead

Increasing its pool of knowledge workers is a big challenge for Malaysia because China and India have a huge human-capital pool, said Joon Ooi, A.T. Kearney South-East Asia managing director.

But he believes Malaysia is headed in the right direction. “The process of increasing the talent pool has already begun and will create a virtuous cycle,” he said.

“As more companies outsource their services to Malaysia, more relevant resources will be trained and developed, and thus increase the human capital pool. This will in turn attract more companies and so on.”

Delesh Kumar, ICT (information and communications technology) director at Frost & Sullivan, said that besides being taught technical skills, knowledge workers should also be taught soft skills, such as communication, which are currently lacking.

“We are competing with countries like India and the Philippines and their people’s command of English and communication skills are better than ours. We need to beef up our skills in these areas,” he said.

“Presentation skills, public speaking and people management skills need to be inculcated from a young age at primary and secondary school levels.”

Delesh said the development of a more industry-relevant workforce can also be done via the existing vocational school system, whereby they can help create a pool of technology-specific talents.

“Vocational schools are more focused on manufacturing-related jobs and this should change,” he added.

Multicultural edge

Badlisham said the availability of skilled workers, competitive costs and an ideal business environment are the reasons why companies choose Malaysia for shared services, outsourcing and offshoring activities.

He believes that Malaysia’s multicultural traits are a strong selling point. “Many multinationals continuously praise our workforce’s versatility and adaptability.

“These companies are already one step ahead thanks to our readily available pool of skilled workers who are also multilingual,” he said.

The outsourcing industry is the biggest contributor to MSC Malaysia’s revenue, accounting for RM5.3bil (31.2%) in 2007.

According to MDeC, Malaysia continues to attract outsourcing jobs from high-profile companies, such as US-based hard disk manufacturer Seagate Technology Ltd, which began outsourcing its IT services in May and Australian mining giant BHP Billiton that began outsourcing its financing operations late last year.

A.T. Kearney’s GSLI, released bi-annually, ranks the top 50 countries for outsourcing activities, including IT services and support, contact centres and backoffice support. The ranking is based on financial cost, people skills and business environments.

Let’s just stick to English

Whether Science and Maths should be taught in English should be decided solely by considering the welfare of the students and the country.

Our people should know how to read, write and speak the national language but, at the same time, to gain knowledge, they should learn and use English – Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

In 2003, before he stepped down as Prime Minister in 2004, Dr Mahathir made a major policy change in terms of education.

It was considered drastic at that time and made over the opposition of both Malay and vernacular language advocates.

He basically decreed that Science and Mathematics should be taught in English simply because that was the fastest way for Malaysians to access the rapidly changing developments in those fields.

It was a major change of position for Dr Mahathir himself, who as education minister in the mid-70s and subsequently prime minister from 1981 pushed through major reforms which saw the education system being transformed from English-based to Malay-based.

The parallel development was the evolution of vernacular education systems in Chinese, mainly, and in Tamil as well as Islamic religious schools, leading basically to four separate educational systems in the country.

But the edict by Dr Mahathir was a bold one and cut across all the educational systems to make it compulsory to teach Science and Maths in English in all of them.

Six years later, a generation of students have passed through the system and the vast majority of them have preferred to answer questions in English even though they were given options to answer in other languages.

Now, six years later, one wonders why there is even a need to re-think this process – the students have spoken by opting to answer in English, and there have been noticeable improvements in the quality of English. The infrastructure has been built. Why destroy all that now?

Have we not already suffered enough through a widespread decline of English among our students to the extent that many of our graduates from local universities are unemployable because of the poor quality of their English?

Now there is a proposal to make a pass in English compulsory before a candidate gets the Sjil Pelajaran Malaysia (Malaysian certificate of education) or SPM certificate. The ministry has invited public comments on this.

The proposal only adds confusion to the issue. Let’s settle the outstanding issue of whether Science and Maths should be taught in English, and then we can talk about another.

It’s vitally important to keep the two separate and not link them together in an attempt to come to some sort of compromise solution.

A pass in English should only be made compulsory after there is a huge effort to improve the quality of English taught in schools. Otherwise it would needlessly penalise.

It helps to state the underlying problem with respect to English: the quality of English has deteriorated so much that students can’t speak, read or write English and therefore are also unable to plug into the avenues which increase knowledge and competence in all areas.

Dr Mahathir’s solution was simple, elegant and practical – teach science and maths in English. That improves usage of the language, gives students the key necessary terms, and the tools to plug into the unfolding developments in the area.

The language purists, being purists and in many cases language extremists, insist that English can only be taught by teaching English such as grammar and literature and that subjects must be taught in the mother tongue.

But they pointedly ignore the practical aspect: language must be used if competence is to be gained.

Teaching Science and Maths in English ensures that English is used and not just learned, which will be the case if you increase the time for teaching English. That is a crucial difference.

None of this will be at the expense of the national language, Malay, or even Chinese or Tamil. All the other subjects are being taught in these languages, and students will gain more than sufficient proficiency in them.

Vitally, with the change already in place for six years, the students have also had an avenue to improve their English skills. It will be cruel to take that away from future generations. Give them the local languages but give them English, too.

There must come a time when we make decisions based on what is best for our children and our country – nothing and no one else matters more.

Our children will benefit im mensely from a good command of English, while a good command of English will help the country connect to the world and access all the knowledge and attendant benefits.

To clinch the argument, let’s quote Dr Mahathir again. This is what he said at an international conference on English last year in Kuala Lumpur: “Our people should know how to read, write and speak the national language, but at the same time, to gain knowledge, they should learn and use English.”

Narrow, parochial considerations of language lobbyists and extremists have no place. A pragmatic decision must be made. Not only must Science and Maths continue to be taught in English, more measures must be devised to improve English usage and capability.

A pass grade in English to get an SPM qualification may be a bit premature in the absence of concrete measures to improve English quality.

Certainly such a measure should not be used to barter away the teaching of Science and Maths in English.

瀑布

上星期日，我和朋友们一起到Sungai Gabai的瀑布玩。我们早上七点三十分就开始出发了，到达目的大约九点。

到了目的地，我们就开始爬上大约两百米长的路程到山中。到了地点，觉得有点累，平时没有运动的我就是这样了。休息一阵子，我们才下去玩水。

那边的水好冷，比我家的自来水好冷，水又很干净。我们玩得好开心。不知不觉已到中午了，感觉肚子好饿，就把大包来的饭一起吃。过后，我们就收拾准备回家了。当我们下山时，有很多游客才到。场面很热闹。有些懒惰爬到上面的就在下面玩好了。看见很多下孩子很开心的一起玩水。

我好久没到瀑布去玩了，感觉上好开心和放松了在城市里的压力。希望下次有机会。我一定会去玩的。