Colin Charles Agenda

Shopify, Off The Rack Asia – e-commerce hots up in Malaysia

Colin Charles — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 05:16:14 +0000

Some interesting news happening in the Malaysian e-commerce space today.

Shopify, the Canadian company, is now in Southeast Asia thanks to SingTel backing. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and India get access to Shopify, and by September, you can work with local payment gateways as SingTel will help Shopify get onboarded. In Malaysia, that means working with MOLPay (NBEPay) or iPay88. Both have woefully terrible pages that break the flow.

With Maybank pushing e-commerce and “blogshops”, I’m surprised they didn’t have the foresight to do this. Shopify could have chosen Malaysia as a headquarters, no? Alas, the sufferance when Singapore is your much more welcoming neighbour.

I read about a startup, Off The Rack Asia, that aims to compete with Zalora/FashionValet/Rakuten/etc. The story broke at FZ, which is also worth a read. They don’t disclose how much Cradle gave as a grant? It’s anywhere between RM150,000 – RM500,000 isn’t it (CIP150 or CIP500)?

This is great for merchants. They have more places to distribute their goods. Love that they’re supporting locals.
Target market is 18-35 – I think that’s two broad, you get at least 2 distinct age groups there, if not three!
I checked out the site – nice design. I notice that the items are generally quite pricey, so definitely not mass market fast fashion prices.
Checkout page can do with improvements. (I must accept terms but can’t read it via a clickable link?) Payment page basically sucks, it heads to MOLPay.
No idea if they’re drop shipping or holding inventory. Zalora started via drop ship, but soon realised that fulfilment was an issue, so they have a warehouse with inventory.
Zendesk is their Q&A platform (odd choice that you’d pay for such a service).

Overall, I’m hoping to see improvements in payment gateways with lobbying by all these players. And I wish the girls at Off The Rack the best, it’s a tough space to be in, but one that can only grow as Malaysia itself grows digitally (as does the region).

Evolution of expression – have blogs really changed?

Colin Charles — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:57:59 +0000

LinkedIn allows blogs (a publishing presence – read LinkedIn Builds its Publishing Presence). Medium is a place to read and write things that matter (a curated blog). Svbtle is a new kind of magazine. There are networks like Read & Trust, that eventually make magazines out of content.

WordPress requires setting up. It means you’re serious about writing something. WordPress.com is hosted and eventually you pay for it. Tumblr just got a billion dollar exit, for what? Allowing you to easily express yourself.

Have blogs really evolved or have people just found different mediums to get published? All mediums come with different levels of control. Discovery is crucial. Will end users ever get RSS or do dashboards need to be built?

Need private cloud services? Time to start entrepreneurs

Colin Charles — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 05:40:00 +0000

PRISM and the NSA has blown up recently. We have Malaysian politicians worried about it naturally. The opensource zealot will tell you need to prism break.

I’m more pragmatic. I prefer opensource. But if there are no opensource alternatives, I will use the proprietary tool. This extends to cloud software like Google Docs/Drive. Its great at collaboration, which is something you can’t get close.

I was suggested that FENG Office might work. I retort that it’s not the easiest install and it requires maintenance. Also, with PRISM, the web host clearly matters (they look at the pipes). I didn’t even think to consider LibreOffice due to lack of collaboration in desktop software.

In Malaysia, next generation children are going to be roped into the online Google world via Chromebooks.

So my thinking is simple: if there are no alternatives (to being hosted in the US or to having better controls over your cloud offerings), you should start one. This can be a great business. As the FT says, data privacy is a handy weapon to challenge the titans with.

Watch this video of Fred Wilson. If the world thinks Dropbox is suddenly insecure, its ripe for alternatives to crop up. It also doesn’t mean that people just start using alternative services… DuckDuckGo might have had a 50% increase in search traffic, but all that search traffic may be what Google processes in a moment ;)

This PRISM stuff isn’t going to blow away anytime soon. Now’s the time to come up with matching software that has additional features (like privacy, encryption, etc.). Maybe Kim Dotcom was ahead of the curve with Mega?

Malaysian postcode database

Colin Charles — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 23:14:46 +0000

I’ve been thinking about simplifying e-commerce checkouts in Malaysia.

At bare minimum you need:

Name
Email address
Phone
Street address
Postcode

State can be derived from Postcode. Country can be set as default, with the option to change it to something else (so a pull-down).

I found MalaysiaPostcode as a useful database. It looks like scraped data from POS Malaysia Location Finder.

Bookstores

Colin Charles — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:08:22 +0000

I’ve lamented the fact that there are very few stores in downtown San Francisco that I care about. The closure of bookstores, music stores, tech shops, etc. has been quite annoying to a frequent visitor.

Today after lunch I took a different path back and stumbled upon Alexander Book Co, on 2nd Street (between Market & Mission). I immediately went in. I saw a book that I liked, and the first thing I did? I whipped out my phone and checked it on Amazon. It was about USD$3 cheaper online.

Then I remembered that we have to support these indie retailers that are taking the trouble to still run a bricks & mortar store. I put my phone away and continued to find more interesting books, magazines, papers and more.

After browsing three floors, I walked out with many dead tree print items. I felt good. I know I spent more than if I had gotten it from Amazon, but I also know I would have never bought any of those items because I would have never discovered it online.

You can’t beat a physical space for discovery.

MariaDB replaces MySQL in RHEL7

Colin Charles — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:24:17 +0000

Subject says its all, this is of course, very good news coming out of the Red Hat Summit. Looking forward to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. And of course, CentOS 7 and the other builds that follow. Thank you Red Hat!

MariaDB replaces MySQL in RHEL 7. Glad to see that. #rhsummit

— Major Hayden (@majorhayden) June 12, 2013

at #rhsummit , rhel7 will come without mysql as it will be replaced with mariaDB; which is mysql api compatible. it will include mongodb too

— John Fulton (@fultonj) June 12, 2013

MariaDB 10.0.3: installing the additional engines

Colin Charles — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:40:46 +0000

So MariaDB 10.0.3 Alpha is out. Download it and remember to provide feedback.

When you run SHOW ENGINES by default, you don’t get CassandraSE or the CONNECT engine. Make sure you do a yum install MariaDB-cassandra-engine and a yum install MariaDB-connect-engine.

You will run into conflicts if you had an older MariaDB-CassandraSE engine (so yum remove MariaDB-CassandraSE).

Once you’ve got the packages installed, you can either install the plugin or just restart mysqld.

Happy testing!

Homebrew (Mac OS X) and MariaDB 10.0 series

Colin Charles — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:27:19 +0000

Today I performed a brew update. I noticed that MariaDB now exists as stable (5.5.30) and devel (10.0.2). Brew formulas also exist for MySQL (5.6.10) and Percona Server (5.5.30-30.2) now. 10.0.3 is around the corner but I wanted to run 10.0.2 now. This is how I did it:

brew unlink mariadb
brew install --devel mariadb

It’s that simple!

Street Art in Bali

Colin Charles — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 04:24:58 +0000

walking around Bali, i noticed many interesting bits of street art/graffiti, and thought i’d share some here. i don’t recall using any instagram filters either. wonder how many more there are that i missed?

Sara’s JewelPie – I’m getting some great food!

Colin Charles — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:47:21 +0000

Lately Sara’s been cooking a lot as she makes recipes for JewelPie.

Over the weekend, I had some petai pizza toast. Just bread, with toppings like tomato paste, cheese, mushrooms, onions, and petai (Parkia speciosa).

Yesterday, I got to try the Mini pepperoni pizza. It really can be made in about 15 minutes and I had no idea that as a base, gyoza/wantan/dumpling pastry works a charm. I’m a big fan of the “Hawaiian pizza”, so I got bacon & pineapples on my pizza. It was wonderful!

For dessert, I had jambu (syzgium) with some asam. It came with rather interesting presentation skills!