Ian On The Red Dot

A few weeks ago, when I was in town, I received 3 smses on my phone. They were promotions sent by M1. They were unsolicited. I had been included into a trial of the new location based ad system without being asked for my permission or notified. If you had read the business section of yesterday’s and today’s newspaper, you would have been able to see the announcements by Singtel and M1 on their location based ad system.

Basically, using your phone, these two telcos can track your location and serve you ads for shops at that location. For example, I was at Paragon and received a promotion for Coffee Bean.

There are 3 things that concerns me about this ad system.

1. As A Consumer.

Firstly, they didn’t ask my permission to be included in this trial. Secondly, they didn’t notify me. Thirdly, it takes 10 days before my opt out is in effect. 10 days! Does it really take so long to administer a change after I opt out or do they want to be able to keep sending me smses for at least 10 more days.

I wonder whether their ‘Terms Of Service’ has anything to say about this. I guess they might have covered themselves over there.

2. As An Individual.

They started tracking my movement and location without my permission. Who knows when they started tracking. Who knows what they are tracking. This raises issues about privacy or in this case the lack of privacy.

Is anyone else concerned about this? Or maybe this is all in the TOS which no one really reads. Is it possible to tell telcos that I do not want to be tracked at all under any circumstances.

3. As Someone Interested in Information Technology.

Phones now have the ability to determine location. There is no need to get an additional gadget to use GPS. Some phone manufacturers expose that ability to developers through an API. However even with some phone manufacturers providing the API, promoting adoption of location based services where the user had to install a software on the mobile phone was not easy. It seems that people are less inclined to install software on their phone.

So developers became creative. Services like Dodgeball got users to sms in their location. There was no need to get users to install software. The heavy lifting was done at server side.

M1 and Singtel has shown that there is another way to do it. This way works because of their status as the service provider for mobile communications. While it is encouraging that the telcos are trying out new technology and services, the question that I have is that doesn’t them doing this possibly kill all form of competition and might eventually stifle innovation in this space.

Sure there is going to be competition between the telcos but is it now possible for other developers to compete with the telcos?

Of course, the telcos could create an API to their infrastructure which is tracking the mobile users and allow other developers to use it. For example, once a user has signed up for a service developed by another company, Singtel could request authentication from the user by sending a sms. The user replies with a confirmation and now the tracking information is passed on to the service. The telcos effectively becomes a broker for our location information and not just an ad provider.

I already have an idea for what such a system might look like and how it can be implemented.

The question then is would the telcos be like Facebook desiring everyone to build applications within their walled garden or would they be something like Twitter where everyone can use their API in the bigger environment.

Of course, even the jury is out on which scenario will be best for innovation if there is a difference at all.

I have been obsessing over two events that have happened when using Firefox. I tried to replicate them but only managed to do it once for each case but not able to consistently trigger the events. Please do help me see if you face the same issues.

The first event happens when I’m typing a URL directly into Firefox. For example, when I type “singaporedaily.wordpress.com” I get redirected to the search.com site. I tried to figure out why this was happening so I typed in “singaporedaily.wordpress.com.com” and got redirected to the same site. I then realized whenever I key in a subdomain of com.com, I would get redirected to the search.com site.

Here is the thing. I’m pretty sure the URL I’m typing is “singaporedaily.wordpress.com” so how is the ‘.com’ being appended to make it “singaporedaily.wordpress.com.com”? This doesn’t happen all the time when I manually enter URLs. In fact, it has only happened twice. How am I sure that I’m using the correct URL? I typed the URL into TextMate and copied it.
Has anyone experienced anything similar?

The other thing I’ve been trying to replicate has to do with this Flash app to display Flickr photos - PictoBrowser. PictoBrowser has a function that generates the code which you can use to embed a similar browser into your own site. The problem is this. When I try to copy the code (i.e. select the text, right click, choose copy), I got redirected to this page which details a Apple Quicktime exploit. When I saw this happening, I immediately backed to the previous page with the PictoBrowser and tried again. And I got the same page again. I tried a third time. Nothing happened. Code got copied.

I have been trying again and again and this event isn’t occurring anymore. So I’m wondering, has anyone ever been redirected to a page when trying to copy stuff off a Flash swf file.

When it is an advertisement! I saw Estee’s post on ‘Why I LOVE BOYS with BALLS and … a good set of wheels‘ and I found it interesting. Parts of the post sounded a lot like ad copy. So just to test, I took the phrase ‘They amaze us with their skills, humble us with their rootedness‘ and googled it. These are the results. Check this site out.

Learning this brought up a whole mix of thoughts and feelings. I have nothing against ads on blogs. Bloggers have the right to want to monetize their blog. I have nothing against endorsements also. Celebrities do it all the time when they go onto TV and say how wonderful a particular product or service is. Bloggers should be given the right to do so too on their blog.

The thing is that when it comes to blogs, we tend to expect (and possibly unfairly) that bloggers should always speak with their own voice - endorsements or not. While Estee did inject her own voice into the post, a part of it wasn’t hers. Which begs the question - next time, when do we know if it is really Estee speaking?

Should Ad copy be separated?

To be fair, Estee did put a disclaimer in the post title with the letters ‘ADV’ in brackets. And she probably isn’t the only blogger involved in this campaign by Nike.
Another thing that I’m still not sure about is how to feel about bloggers putting ad links within a post. Looking at the link information to Nike’s site, you can tell that Nuffnang is the ad provider.

One reason why ‘Pay Per Post‘ has raised the irk of certain bloggers in the States is because the medium makes it hard to differentiate between genuine show of support versus paid endorsements. In TV, it is easy. We can tell that a segment is an advertisement. Product placements within shows are easy to spot. Advertisements occur before a movie. In magazines, it used to be easier, but now with increasing number of advertorials, it is getting harder. Blogs started out as personal diaries but its use is evolving. I think the nature of the birth of the medium is one reason why some of us feel strongly against the invasion of paid posts. It is like inviting a friend to your house or visiting a friend for a party and they only reason why they want you there is so that they can try to sell you some multi-level product which you don’t really need so that they can make money.

On a final note, I do hope Estee forgives me for using her blog post as a reference point for my thoughts on this issue. And in no way am I insinuating that Estee has been dishonest. She did put a disclaimer as I have mentioned above.

You can read about what happened during the event at E27 and Sg Entrepreneurs.  I just have one thing to comment about the night and that is what I learned about Trey who is the programmer of the F8-winning application.  He isn’t a computer science student nor a computer engineering student.  He is majoring in philosophy.

When he shared this about himself, I started wondering about the oft mentioned lack of innovation in Singapore.  And I wondered if it is because students in Singapore are not interested in knowledge across domains.  In other words, are we too specialized?

In NUS, we are made to take modules outside our faculty as part of the university requirements.  Most of the people I knew in Engineering would try to bid for the easier modules - the non-Arts faculty modules.  There was the general consensus that Science modules would be easier for an Engineering student, followed by Business, then Arts.

The friends I had in Arts would try their best to stay away from Engineering modules and go for the Science or Business ones.

There is a tendency to choose the easiest possible module from another faculty with interest in a module sacrificed as a result.

Of course, not all NUS students are like that.  There are those who do choose a module out of interest and worry about grades later although I cannot help but feel they are the minority.

What are the backgrounds of the people interested in being entrepreneurs in this Web 2.0 phase?  More importantly, do we have cross-domain knowledge?  Do we pursue interests outside the domain we are supposed to specialize in?

Why would that be important?  There are many reasons, but one of them is that a problem in one domain can be abstracted such that solutions to that problem which have been solved in other domains could be applied to it.  Increasing our knowledge in other domains adds to our arsenal of problem solving tools, tunes our pattern recognition and trains the abstraction of problems.  These can help us in being more innovative.

I wouldn’t presume that it was Trey’s philosophy background that helped him in being the winner with his application.  But maybe, just maybe, it was because he wasn’t in a computer science course that he didn’t have the ‘we must add more features’ hang-up that programmers arguably seem to have.  Maybe, just maybe that helped him spot that application which was simple in concept and technicalities but was what people wanted and needed.
It is time for us to step out of our little circles.

allfacebook shares Facebook will be launching their new ad system.  This will be the next step after the improvement made with Facebook Flyers which has been argued by ReadWriteWeb that it might not be something Google should be too worried about.  Valleywag talks about Google’s ad system being about servicing expressed intent, while Facebook’s is to service latent intent if not create intent.

What would Facebook’s new ad system look like?  These are my thoughts.

1.  They target you based on your preferences.

With the information entered onto your profile page, they already know a fair bit
about you.  Advertisers can already use Facebook Flyers for what looks like highly
targeted advertising based on preferences which could be revealing latent intent..

2.  They know your relationships.

How does the social graph help in advertising?  It can be used to infer behavior,
intentions and preferences.  How?

Say I have a friend who puts that his interest is rock climbing.  He is connected to
a lot of people whose interests are also rock climbing.  One of his friends has not
put rock climbing as an interest.  Basically, this friend has not bothered with
putting much information on the profile page.  Now, this friend and the one who
likes rock climbing have common friends where a significant percentage of them are a
subset of those who do like rock climbing.  Facebook could infer that this friend
also is into rock climbing.

How about behavior?  This can be inferred by the events you get invited to.  Say
friend A gets invited for lots of events.  They fall into two categories - tech
conferences and clubbing.  But my friend only invites me for clubbing events.  My
friend probably would do so because he as a friend knows I find tech conferences
boring with the lack of hot babes (although I am going to try to score brownie
points by saying Singapore females geeks are HOT ).  So this relationship and how
my friend and I interact using Facebook has revealed important information that can
be used for targeting.

So maybe on a Wednesday morning I might not have any plans yet.  But Facebook knows from the invites that I have been accepting from my friends that I tend to go for clubbing on Fridays but not on a Wednesday.  But what if there is a really good deal for a Wednesday clubbing event?  Or say that it is a Friday morning.  The intent to go clubbing that night is already there.  Why not target it?  Facebook would have the information to allow advertisers to do so.

3.  They already know who the influencers are.

Who are the ones who pass on messages?  Who are the ones who consistently invite
people?  Who are the ones who share stuff?  Facebook already knows that.  More
critically, who are the ones who get their invites accepted?  Who are the ones who
get clickthrus on what they share?  Also, who are the ones who share new stuff as opposed to who are the ones that just pass on stuff.  Now based on relationships and interaction between people, Facebook might be able to deduce who are the innovators or early adopters.
It won’t be too hard to imagine that targeting the influencers and innovators/early adopters with a well constructed message will probably help advertisers achieve better results.

Well, Facebook’s social graph can help provide that information for that extra edge in targeting.

4.  They already know the statistics about the different demographics.

Granted not the whole world is on Facebook, but the number on it is pretty big.  I don’t think it would be too presumptuous to say that major political decisions have probably been made polling less people.  So Facebook is able to establish profiles of different demographics.  What could they possible do with that information?

a.

Sell the aggregated information without revealing individual details to marketing people.

b.

Use that information to target ads off Facebook.  Put a code on your website and tell Facebook what your website is about.  Facebook could use information on your website to deduce the possible profiles of your visitors.  Based on the demographic of the visitors to your site, Facebook could use the aggregated information about the different demographics to know what sort of ads your visitors might most likely be interested in.  They serve relevant ads based on that information.

5.  They know what people are currently interested in.

Related to what people currently put on their profiles, the events they go to, the groups they join and what people share, Facebook will also be able to understand what is the currently hot trend or topic.

Possibly more interesting is when individuals change their profiles.  What is removed?  What is added?  Does this change happen just at the individual level or is it happening across groups of friends?  Across networks?  Across demographics?

Facebook is a data miner’s dream.

It started with cable.  But the fix wasn’t enough.  Then YouTube started hosting clips.  Things got better.  Then Comedy Central improved their site.  I was happy.

Today, I learned that ‘The Daily Show‘ has a new website.  Hallelujah.

Currently searching using the timeline doesn’t return much results before 2005.  But the timeline extends all the way back to 1999 so I’m staying hopeful.

The new site looks so much better than the old.  More importantly, it signals that execs up there are finally realizing that the net is the distribution platform for people in my generation or rather those who like me have the same online usage behavior.  Even my mom started using YouTube to get videos of church concerts.

The thing about ‘The Daily Show’ is that it is actually the only news show I enjoy watching.  I know it is supposed to be fake news, parody and satire but often their insights and analysis beats anything that I get from the local news.  In fact, I don’t even think local news provide much analysis.  They just report.

Maybe this article from the New York Times will help explain why I love ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ so much - The Gospel According to Mr Colbert.

The current hot topic has to do with Section 377A. You can go over to Singapore Daily to follow the discussions. I grew up being taught that homosexuality is morally wrong. Even now, although I support the repealing of 377A, I cannot shake the belief I grew up with.

One of the arguments made by those who support the repealing of 377A say that there are a lot of immoral issues which are not illegal so why should consensual homosexual sex between two individuals be treated differently. I agree with them. There should be a separation of state and church.

Pause. I’m still figuring how to go with this.

Unpause.

I was taught that homosexuality is immoral because it isn’t natural. The simplified argument is God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. There was the rather lame joke that the right tool should be used for the right job and poking another man’s butt with your penis was definitely a misuse of the tool.

I was given biblical evidence of verses which showed how God was against sodomy and sex between males. I was taught that Rome’s elite indulged in homosexual acts by choice and that showed how decadent they were.

Basically, since young, my mind has been hardwired to think it’s wrong and now, even using logic, while I can reason why 377A should be repealed, I cannot prevent myself from thinking it is morally wrong.

Ok. Where am I going with this…

Is being gay biological? I don’t know. Depending on where you look, what you read and who you listen to, you will get evidence supporting both the ‘it is natural’ and ‘it is un-natural’ arguments. I don’t know.

It was from Yawning Bread that I learned the difference between homosexual acts and being a homosexual. I’m not sure if this was a distinction he was consciously making but it is this distinction that I’m trying to reconcile everything in what I believe about God and homosexuality.

First, let me digress. I think it was when I was in upper secondary and doing biology for O-Levels that I went for this field trip to NUH. There was this room where they had preserved babies. More specifically, deformed babies. There were some with their hearts outside the body. There was one with one eye. There were many strange sights in that room. This babies I learned were a result of mutation. Unfortunately, these mutations were such that they could not survive in the womb or outside after being born.

Where am I going with this? There are many forms of genetic mutations. One of them is sickle-cell disease which apparently makes the people who suffer from this disorder resistant to malaria. Is it possible for gays to be a mutation in the human race? Why not? And when I say mutation, I mean it in a good way like getting Xavier-like psychic powers or Logan’s healing factor.

As a young Christian, I was taught that when God made us, he made us perfect. Ok. He made man, then he perfected the art by making women, but I digress. Anyway, you know the whole story. Adam ate the apple and like being the coward he was blamed Eve … you know the story. I was taught that everything went to the shit-hole after that. Death entered into the picture as the consequence of sin. Disease. The whole Pandora’s box was opened. That is why we need Jesus, so that when we die, we get eternal life and we can be part of God’s original plan when he created us.

Now, if everything changed after we got kicked out of the garden why can’t mutations be a part of that? Yes, it may be producing a different result from God’s perfect plan and what he had intended (although, I always like to point out if it was so perfect, he would have known we were going to fuck it up by making the wrong choice to eat the apple and thus start this whole fracas…I digress again) but it could be natural, or rather natural in the current broken down world we live in with natural disasters, diseases, mutations…
Does that make it immoral?

Wouldn’t God in his infinite wisdom know which gays were being gay because it was natural for them as opposed to which were just indulging in homosexual acts because they just couldn’t stop sticking their penis into any hole even a vacuum cleaner’s.

And what would God do? Punish them? Are we to take everyone who was created that deviates from God’s plan to be immoral and sinners (actually Christian doctrine says we all are, even Christians, which is depressing since we start life as a condemned needing to be saved). Are we to be like Glenn Hoddle who believes that handicapped people are so because karma is being a bitch to them for some past sins or in the Christian case just sins. I mean, I don’t think God when he first created this universe intended anyone to ever be born handicap and yet now it happens. It is a natural occurrence in a broken down world. Are these ‘deviations’ from God’s perfect plan also immoral for being handicapped?

I guess what I’m trying to do is reconcile within myself that God may dislike homosexual acts (which is a notion I probably wouldn’t have if I didn’t grow up in a Christian family,although my parents were not the ones who put these ideas into my head,but you know, Sunday school and all that…) and that it really could be natural to be gay in this time and age. I am sure the God I want to love and one day hope to whole-heartedly do so wouldn’t want the homosexuals to be considered immoral sinners that will be condemned to hell just because they do not want to repent by changing their behavior when they can’t because it is not their choice to be so.

Of course, some people would argue that some people are born with a temper problem and yet they can control that so…

I guess like a wise Chinese man once said, “He who sits on fence hurts his balls.’

And since, I’m lukewarm, I know where I’m probably going. Sigh…

Saw a post over at Yawning Bread where he shared about how males seem to fare better in talent contests.  This was something I noticed too.  The theory I had then was this - Guys naturally tend to support the female contestants.  Girls tend to support the males.  Even if a show might have an equal number of guys and girls following and both a male contestant and female contestant have the same number of fans, the voting numbers are still probably going to be skewed towards female voters.  Why?  Girls bother to take action to show their support.  Guys not so much even if they really think the girl has talent or just plain hot.

Another theory I had was that a male contestant would probably appeal to both sexes while female contestants might appeal mainly to males.  In other words, if a male and female were equally talented and visually appealing and there were the same number of male and female viewers of the contest, a guy would have more chance in poaching the male support of a female contestant versus the female poaching the female support of a male contestant.  Why?  I have no statistics to back this up, but I get the feeling that female viewers in Singapore get threatened by seeing another female who is successful on a contest while male viewers not so much when they see another male doing well.

Not saying that guys are never threatened by the success of another guy or other guys for that matter.  It is just that our zone is smaller.  If you’re not in my immediate ’sphere of influence’ then I won’t care so much (though the sphere extends once our gfs support you …).  Maybe it is because guys tend to think something like this, ‘Yeah.  You may be a good singer, but if I get you onto the soccer court, I’ll dribble around you and score awesome goals.’

Well, I’m not much of a sociologist or psychologist so these are just random theories with nothing to substantiate them.

Maybe someone knows why exactly male contestants tend to do better in Singapore?

On the last page of the Money section in today’s Straits Times is a report titled ‘ New ZapCode billboard a hit with shoppers’. Many thoughts came to mind when I read this report. The first was that this sounded a lot like an advertisement.

ZapCode is a 2D barcode technology that is being promoted by SPH NewMedia for advertising purposes. So when the newspaper printed by SPH says that ZapCodes are a hit with shoppers, I would take the claim with a lot more than a pinch of salt.

Some of the details in the report make me wonder if ZapCode is really such a hit. A billboard with a ZapCode has resulted in more than 1200 responses. Let’s be generous and say there were 1300 responses. These responses were received from 168 different mobile phones. This means, on average, each phone sent 8 messages ( I rounded the number upwards ). It has been about 3 weeks since the end of last month, so to be generous, each phone zapped the code 3 times in a week.

I’m not sure if each code was for a different piece of information. Apparently, there is a weekly lucky draw which people who zap the code are entered. Does zapping the same code increase your chance of winning? The report does not mention it and I haven’t had a chance to see the code yet. Does anyone know if within a week the code changes or the information changes? Does anyone know if zapping the code more increases your chances of winning in the lucky draw. I think this is important in ascertaining if ZapCode is indeed a hit. It is important because not all interaction with consumers are equal. Consumers may just be interacting with the code to win prizes without any care for the brand advertising.

And the number. 168 different mobile phones. I would believe that the Midpoint Orchard mall is a heavily trafficked area. To get 168 mobile phones zapping the codes seems to me like a small number.

So here is the thing. Is ZapCode really a hit with shoppers? Or is Straits Times disguising advertising as reporting to build hype about their own product?

Please share your views.

Reminded today that there is a difference.

1.  Gay Marriages Would Violate Equal Protection

2.  Equity vs Equality-or-What-Will-New-Jersey-Do-Next

3.  Misunderstood

And sometimes spotting the difference ain’t easy.