Made “The Age” Again (4th March 2008)

I seem to have made The Age once again. This time I wasn’t expecting it. But hey! Warning: The article makes me sound cooler then I really am!

Ever wondered what Google wants ….? What about what Google does not want?

Well ask it! By trying this search . You’ll be surprised … And as to what Google does not want?- not that much, but still interesting

IRipple Makes the Age (16-Oct-2007)

IRipple made the The Age newspaper in Australia – check it out “Better to do it by the book”!

A Simple Small Free Photo Resizer

A couple of days ago, I received 67 emails with photos from a digital camera. Each photo was about 2MB. I can only begin to imagine the pain the person experienced sending these through. You can only begin to imagine my pain as I proceeded to download via POP all my email over the past 3 years and consequently blew my ISP bandwidth quota!

All because of some un-resized photos?!

The problem seems rampant and the solutions varied – ranging from using Adobe Photoshop (yes it has a batch mode), Irfan View (Another Batch tool) to even using MSPaint for Resizing.

So I wrote something quick and dirty – Photo Resizer (I know. Imaginative name) – small file (200Kb , always got to think of Africa) , place in the directory with the photos and run. Boom! Resized photos will be placed in the ‘PR-Resized’ directory.

Get it from http://www.dudubaya.com/photoresizer

IRipple – Why the changes

A number of users have noticed that they can’t click on ad’s as frequently as they used to and this can lead to extreme frustration. For example, Cecilia sent this email in to me..

Hello

I used to be able to click away happily as I spent time on Facebook, but now I can only do one click per visit. Even after I’ve clicked ‘water’ once, waited, seen the ad a few times, messaged a few friends, changed stuff on my profile etc, and come back to iRipple 10mins later, it puts up the ‘Whoa, bad karma’ message. This is pretty annoying. It’s NOT bad karma, it’s perfectly good karma – I’ve done everything right including watched the ad over and over. But then I can’t click ‘Food’ or anything else. Why is this happening? I want to be able to click multiple timeswhen I’m on Facebook.

Cheers
Cecilia

This is my response, and it’s a very quick explanation of the changes.

Hi Cecilia,

I know exactly how you feel. My wife shares your sentiment as do a number of other ripplers (and I have to hear that sentiment every morning from my wife).

Unfortunately, the advertisers count an “ad viewed” as a unique click if it happens once every session (which we have unofficially been told lasts 20 minutes).We could mislead our ripplers and let them click continuously – but that is really bad Karma – as we would making them think they are helping when they are not.

We will be changing the “Whoa” message to include a link to a blog post explaining why this has happened. The approach we have taken is what Wei Hung suggested in the boards - better to have a million people click once a day then one person click a million times – hence the emphasis on spreading the ripple.

Please if you have suggestions – do let me know. I know how frustrating this is for you.
Hafeez

So in the spirit of Wei Hungs idea, please invite people and spread the ripple.
Hafeez
PS – I know it can be frustrating trying to figure out just exactly when you can click on ripple. So now you will be given the approximate number of minutes until you can click again.

I am believer – ripple

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine, Jehan, let me know that he and his mates had launched ripple, an online charity that uses the power of internet advertising to collect donations.

The way ripple works is that sponsors advertise with ripple, when someone views an ad from any of these sponsors, 100% of the donations go to charity. When Jehan first ran the idea past me, I was quite skeptical on two levels:

1. Who in the world would sit in front a computer and look at ads just to donate to charity?
2. Why would someone sponsor an ad, knowing fairly well that the views were not outcome based

To cut a long story short, the guys, pursued the idea and have been successful beyond belief. From what I hear, traffic stats are rapidly increasing and the site has even made it into the daily papers.

After building the I,Ripple facebook app, I understand why the concept is successful. The idea of being able to donate to a charity by viewing an ad is so easy. For the advertiser who supports ripple, their brand is literally burned into the mind of the donater (thanks wishlist.com.au, I can’t get you outta my head)

Despite the success, ripple still has some challenges ahead. It’ll be interesting to see how it all ends up.

UPDATE: The Best Facebook Applications blog just featured the I,Ripple Application.

LINKS:

The ripple website
The ripple blog

Donate to ripple by clicking the below buttons:

AJAX In Africa = Not a Nice User Experience

NOTE: This is a repost from my old blog posted on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 – its still very valid.

I live in Australia and have just come back from a 4 week trip in Kenya. I have had about 5 different email accounts over many years however I use my http://fastmail.fm and http://www.gmail.com account by far the most. However before I left, I spent a lot of time trying to divert everything to Gmail because I like it so much.

The short of it: Don’t do this if you are going to Kenya. Gmail is plagued by problems when accessing it over a slow link.

Sometimes you get a blank page, sometimes you get the basic interface, sometimes you get “Oops, something bad happened…”. At first I thought it was the browsers at the cybercafe (which surprisingly all have the latest version of Mozilla firefox) – however even using my own laptop from Australia had the same effect. Very confusing and very frustrating.

I don’t think the problem is with Gmail alone though. I have noticed these inconsistent failures across anything that uses AJAX over in Kenya.

To investigate what was happening – I did an experiment redesigning http://www.dudubaya.com – a site I specifically designed for access speeds in Africa that currently performs very well.

The design I came up was smaller in size (http://www.dudubaya.com/test/redesign2/test.html) however to my surprise the load times were more then 4 times the basic page.

I installed livehttpheaders in firefox and did some poking around. It seems the overall size is not good determinant over high latency links, rather the more objects you have in your page and depending on how they are arranged means additional requests and the cost of each additional request is marginally much higher over high latency links (notice that I use latency because I have tried throttling my connection in Australia to slow speeds but I don’t experience the same problems).

Furthermore Firefox tries to pipeline the requests but this also depends on how the elements in your page are arranged. And doing this rearrangement cut down load times in Kenya significantly.

Key Lessons for high latency links (and Kenya in general):

• Less Objects
• Arrange your html carefully so the browser optimizes requests
• No complicated javascript. Most accesses to the internet happen over old computers and rendering time becomes an issue for complicated layouts.

Anyone had experience with this?

Outsource yourself to india

A funny email from my archives. Enjoy. See some links at the end that some of my friends sent through.

——————————————————————————-

Hey All,

At the strategic portfolio management training that was held recently we had a scenario where the CEO of a company needed to do something quickly about the state of affairs of her company otherwise it would go under (the cash burn rate was pretty high).

I came up with the wacky suggestion that the CEO should outsource herself to India. Considering the pay package for most CEOs, a CEO in india would be able to do the job at a fraction of the cost thereby boosting the bottom line, thereby giving the company more time to live (and perhaps even saving it just by the fact that local CEO’s don’t have a very good rap nowadays).

But then I got thinking. What if I was to outsource MYSELF to India? Think about it. Eventually companies are about the bottom line. And if companies can outsource employees, it will. So why not get the step up and outsource yourself first!

I know what you are thinking – am I really that outsourceable? Am I? Well, consider the work functions that you do, a lot of is research, writing documents, research etc. Now imagine if you had your very own pleb … I mean, Indian employee, that you could handball all this work to. Now you can.

Or maybe you think the kind of work you do is issues based consulting that requires complex modelling and thinking. I have no doubt given the right instructions and talent, you could find a similarly skilled person in India that would be able to replicate your functions – history’s proved it. Indians have launched rockets into space, they came up with the Kama Sutra and they make more movies in one day than hollywood releases in a year. Issues based consulting… pfft …child’s play. You just need to find the right talent (and there’s a lot considering the population).

Now that you are convinced that you are indeed outsourceable, what’s the business model? Well, you sell yourself to Australia at Australian market rates while your Indian proxy works at a lesser rate. You pocket the difference! And during the time you would normally spend working, you could do other things. Now that’s leverage!

You’ll of course need to sign an exclusive agreement with your Indian counterpart so he/she’s not adopting a shared pleb model and representing 2 people. You’ll also need to secure an alternative employee agreement – one where you are not obliged to show up unless required because…well why should you!

But what if the corporation decides to go direct? I don’t know. But my Indian-based consultant is working on it….

Regards,
Hafeez Bana’s indian representative on Behalf of Hafeez Bana

———————————————————————————
UPDATE:
I found an article describing and actual person outsourcing experiment.
http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20050909-outsource

The company offering the service:
http://www.brickworkanalyst.com/
http://www.brickworkanalyst.com/remote_assistant.htm

And to think I was joking…

Dudubaya goes Free

After a steady stream of requests to make postings free, I have decided to make posting on dudubaya completely free. I sent out an update email to all users who have ever posted to the site and its amazing how many email addresses are stale. Almost 10% of the emails have bounced.

For those that don’t know, Dudubaya is one of the little side experiments I started about 2 years ago to figure out the state of the Kenyan internet market and to help out my Mum. Initially I made some categories free and for all other categories, you need a PIN that can be purchased by obtaining a dudubaya scratchcard (shown below).

My rationale behind this was based on 2 things:

• Mobile phone prepaid scratchcards have spread like wildfire. Safaricom and Celtel (the 2 kenya telco’s) have almost every business as a reseller; the commisions these resellers get is measly. The card I would offer would have significantly higher commisions.
• Making the postings free would not help Kenyans out. There are a lot of enterprising Kenyans for whom this could become a full time job.

However contrary to my expectations, the whole scratchcard thing just didn’t pick up – I knew this from the first couple of months of feedback from the team on the ground. It took me this long to make the system free because a number of people had bought a years subscription worth of classifieds – it wouldn’t be fair to them.

Despite this, its been quite an interesting journey – from getting the team on the ground organized and building the site to getting a number 1 listing on google and yahoo – I have learnt a lot. I’ll share this over the next couple of months.

Snap Previews – The MS paper clip of the web

The boys at Eclipse recently sent an email out about adding a new feature to their website – Snap Previews. Only one word came to mind. YUCK!

I have been coming across SNAP Previews for a couple of months on the web and they are annoying. Here’s why:

• They popup without warning – its like walking across a minefield – mercy on you if there are many links on a page.
• They get in the way of what you are doing – I am happily reading and then KAPOW! , an image pops up and blocks the text. Add insult to injury, you dont know how to make it go away.
• They are not helpful but pretend to be – An itsy bitsy image does not substitute a visit to a website. An itsy bitsy image does not even tell me what the website looks like.

If you are going to post some links, then post some links – I assume you want me to visit those links rather then check out how cool some color combination looks on a site.

I would go so far an say that Snap Previews are the MS Paper clip of the web – Unhelpful, Cute Unassistive Assistants except now they are on the web!

Update: I sent an email expressing my sentiments about the SNAP Previews to the Eclipse creatives who sent out the announcement, this is the response I got.

Very original. Your Kung-fu is better then mine, Heiko-San! You win!