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The Fiesta is Built Ford Sexy.

April 5, 2011 By View Comments

Backview. Photo taken by Tony Wong.

One morning, on my way to work, a bright orange Ford passed by that made me take a second look. I don’t remember Ford cars looking this good and I posted about it on Facebook. The next day, an email from the head of marketing at Ford Malaysia came asking if I would like to take it out for a spin and I eagerly said yes.

So after a weekend of the best Ford-play I ever had, I can tell you the Ford Fiesta is the sex. I can’t tell torque from cork but I can tell you the sound system rocks. There are two audio presets that can direct all the sound toward the driver and another that spreads it out evenly for all the passengers to enjoy.

The UI. Photo by Tony Wong.

First thing I did was paired my iPhone with the car so that I could play any song from my playlist via Bluetooth. I could also play any radio station in the world through an app called Tunein Radio. I also had Wolfgang’s Vault and Last fm going. Suddenly, the Fiesta wasn’t a car any more, it was a live rock concert in Madison Square Garden or a bar playing the smoothest jazz from Nawlins. It was incredible, I could stay in the car all day wishing the jam would last forever. Thunderstorm, bring it on.

Ford is also pushing all the right buttons by taking away a lot of the usual buttons, knobs and levers. There is no door lock thingy on each door. It’s centralized into one button on the command center (pimped out dashboard). One push and all doors are locked to outsiders but passengers can open their doors at any time. There is also no lever to open the gas tank which Ford didn’t tell me so I spent a good few minutes looking high and low for it at the gas station. The attendant helped me with it and we found that it opens from the outside and there is no cap to cover the tank, you just stick the nozzle in and pump away. Woot. No more forgetting, losing or struggling with the cap and breaking a few expensive french-manicured nails.

Talk button. Picture by Tony Wong.

I get a kick out of machines talking back at me. I only wish the voice was a guy’s, like Colin Firth’s. The Fiesta comes standard with a female voice in British accent. Kinda like the voice you hear from an answering machine, “For English, please press 1.” Voice recognition was ok. It had no trouble recognizing the numbers I say out loud but when it comes to names – slight problem, especially names in Malay, Chinese or Indian. It’s still great for answering calls, dialing numbers and talking hands-free. The voice control also lets you change radio stations, play a cd or play from an external device like an iPod, iPhone or Android. It is not Ford SYNC® but it’s close enough. No other car in this price range comes with a voice activated control.

“But what about the driving experience?” you ask. The car handles very well on the road. Pickup is gradual but fast and sometimes too fast with a little jerk forward. Have to learn how to press the accelerator. The steering is fantabulous. The few friends I have passed the keys to to test drive agrees. It was very responsive and stable at sharp corners. I could almost turn the wheel with a finger and yet it stays straight when I’m going straight.

So, do you have to trade-in a kidney to buy a Ford Fiesta? If you want to but it’s pretty a-ford-able. The only thing stopping you from taking one home today is the waiting list which can be up to 3 months depending on the color you choose. White and Aurora Blue are the best selling colors. Honestly, take the Chilli Orange. The Fiesta looks best in bright colors.

Built Ford Sexy. Picture by Tony Wong.

For more information on the Ford Fiesta, go to http://www.ford.net.my/.

Thank you Ford for a lovely experience in the Fiesta. Especially to E.S. Lee, Hazel, Steven Tan and Vivienne Huang from the Ford family. Thanks also to Tony Wong (who took photos), CW Loh, Ramesh V, Azizi J for the feedback and inspiration.

No more blind spots with this side view mirror.

Filed Under: Design, Feature, Reviews, Tech Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m Uniflying

March 19, 2011 By View Comments

Unifi high speed broadband is now in my area and I finally got it installed. What is so amazing about Unifi isn’t just faster Internet but I get what I am paying for, all 5mbps of it.

I registered sometime late February at a kiosk set up under a giant umbrella near where I live. It looked really dodgy but since the registration forms were in triplicate – typical semi-government paperwork, it must be legit. Thankfully, the registration process was fast. I was out of the umbrella in 5 minutes.

I was told I’d have to wait a month for installation. Then I got a call from TM this week (2 weeks later) saying they were bringing my installation forward and I would get it by this weekend. Nice. Thumbs up for TM. They called me again yesterday to remind me they would be coming today at 2.30pm and they called me again today at 3.30pm to see if the guys were here already. The guys did come on time and it was all done in 2 hours. Two worked on the broadband connection and two worked on the TV. Two thumbs up for TM. I am just wowed by the whole experience. I love a company with great customer service. You can never fail with great customer service.

Get Unifi, you’ll love it. Many things you can do with Unifi’s high-speed broadband:

1. Broadband TV / IPTV- 13 free channels including TED.com
2. Free VOIP calls to any fixed-line phone (yes, it’s still around) in the country.
3. Watch HD videos/movies/tv shows – streamed live on YouTube or downloaded for later

The only slack thing is the TV content. Though the channels are ala carte instead of packaged like the other pay tv station, it’s lacking in quality. Syfy isn’t what it used to be. Warner TV is probably the best of the lot. What I’d pay premium for is the Comedy Channel but I doubt we’ll ever see it on our TV. You get a few minutes of free preview into all the subscription channels before deciding on which one you’d like to subscribe to. If you have it or when you get it, let me know what are your favorite channels and happy flying.

Filed Under: Feature, Marketing, Reviews, Tech, TV Tagged With: , , , , ,

The first local business with an offer on Foursquare

April 18, 2010 By View Comments

We finally see the first local business on foursquare to offer a mayor deal. I expected to see Starbucks or some other franchise but a food court business got there first. Amazing. Hidangan Pantai Timur, if you weren’t so far out in Kajang, I would go be mayor and support your bold move into Foursquare.

So I thought I’ll  interview the mayor to see what it’s like to claim the first Foursquare offer in Malaysia and I noticed the mayor of Hidangan Pantai Timur is also the owner of the stall, who has probably checked in no less than 19 times. If Seme continues to do so, would any of their customers be able to enjoy the offer? Seme, if you offer a mayor deal, the idea is for your customers to become the mayor, not the owner.

Some business owners have been checking in to Foursquare and using it to push out notifications and tips to promote their businesses.  Once you are ready to offer a mayor deal, could you perhaps delete your own and your staff’s checkins so that your customers can be rewarded?

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Reviews Tagged With: , ,

iDiGi iPhone Plans – Can’t it be simpler?

April 5, 2010 By View Comments

When DiGi recently announced they would also be selling the iPhone, the community rejoiced and celebrated the end of Maxis’ monopoly and no more ridiculous wait for an iPhone. We waited patiently for DiGi to announce its plans. They assured everyone it would be a better deal.

When the plans came out last week, we couldn’t make sense of it. What the heck was going on? I have not seen a more complicated table of numbers. I decided to take a visit down to DiGi’s flagship store on Sunday with a journalist friend of mine. She’s pretty sharp and gets things pretty fast but after 10 minutes of listening to the customer service rep explain the plans, she got even more confused and needed to leave the store to breathe. We went and got something to eat to fuel up our drained brains before People vs iDiGi plan Round 2 but a headache had developed in both of us. I came home, took a nap and looked at the plans again to see if I could simplify it myself. And here’s what I’ve come up with.

Compare this with what DiGi has developed and you’ll wonder if DiGi’s trying to hide the fact that their plans aren’t that much better than Maxis.

By the way, do you really need to put an “i” in front of every word? You have iDiGi, iWant and iGet. iGet is not even a plan, why in the world do you want to trademark that?

The real deal on DiGi iPhone Price:

1. Upfront cost for a DiGi iPhone is much higher than Maxis because you have to pay for the phone plus 6 months’ subscription in advance.

2. The contract period is 24 months. I found this a bit absurd. Does DiGi not know The 4G will be announced in June and we’re guessing it’ll arrive on our shores by end of the year? Locking customers into a 24 month plan is not going to make a lot of folks happy when the 4G goes on sale by either telco. If you get the 4G from DiGi later this year, will you have to serve a total of 4 years locked in a horrible back to back contract?

Is DiGi out of touch with customer habits? People who buy smartphones rarely keep their phones for more than a year. Why are telcos or service providers forcing contracts on customers that are as long as a life sentence (24months is bloody long). Mobile technology changes too fast these days. Couldn’t they keep customers from leaving with a great product and great customer service anymore?

3. On the plus side (small plus) there is a 5GB data option – more than the 3GB limit from Maxis. Not great but not bad for the heavy data user. This is a very expensive plan and you don’t really need it if you already have a 3G mobile data plan with a dongle and you’re serving time on that subscription.

So is this a good deal? Check list (if you checked everything then this is a no-brainer, buy it today):
1. You’re very happy with DiGi.
2. You’re not going anywhere (another telco) for the next two years. It’s DiGi or nothing.
3. You hardly change phone less than 2 years old.
4. What’s a little more up front for a DiGi iPhone. You have spare change.
5. You can’t wait 1 month for an iPhone from Maxis.
6. You’ll never subscribe to Maxis, ever.

This may not be a great deal to switch from another telco, perhaps it’s a good deal for existing DiGi customers.  I’d be interested to find out from you if you’re a DiGi customer, does DiGi value your loyalty with an offer of a zero contract plan at least? You’ve been with DiGi for the past 5-10 years, surely they don’t think you’ll take an iPhone and run, right?

iDiGi Plans – can’t it be better also?

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

In your wifi stealing your passwordz.

March 16, 2010 By View Comments

While you’re innocently checking your email at Starbucks, someone could be stealing the password to your email account with a wifi sniffer. David Hall, Consumer Product Marketing Manager, Symantec Asia Pacific, explained and demonstrated how our identity and personal information could be stolen in just four minutes online. Shocking.

David went on to tell us about phishing – the 419 scam and the Nigerian Prince scam, fake codecs, keygens, malvertisements, those horrible horrible pop up windows telling us our computer may be infected, better click on the button and run a scan now (which starts installing a virus instead of scanning for one now). I”ve learned to recognize most of them but what I haven’t seen before was SEO poison.

Within two hours after the Haiti earthquake, the digital terrorists have embedded viruses into pages that are SEO optimized to appear on the first page of your search. Norton found 19 out of 20 sites to be poisoned (that’s almost the entire first page of your search result) and David showed us a video from their lab tracking poisoned links on search pages after the Haiti earthquake, Tiger Woods scandal and a few other newsy events. Two to four hours is how fast these cyber criminals take to hit search pages to get their victim’s personal information. Thankfully, Norton has a free service online to help you check if a site is safe by copying and pasting that URL into Norton Safe Web to verify http://safeweb.norton.com.

Why are they after our info? Information is money. Credit card details are worth $0.90 each and email information is worth $10 each. Or you can be the guy that writes the program that pops up the evil window. He makes US$19K a week, more than the President of the United States.

So change your email password now and make sure to change it frequently. You know the drill, at least 6 characters long, one capital letter, one number and one symbol. Then you wonder, how the hell am I going to remember all the new passwords every time? Never mind, got an app for that. But how to come up with all these passwords? I too struggle with what password to use every time I had to change my password. David gave an example of how he comes up with them. He picks a song then uses the first word on the first line of that song as a password, the next time he changes it, he’ll go to the first word on the second line and so on. You can pick a poem too if you like.

We had an interesting time talking with David and I’ll just sum it up:

  1. Most of the world’s viruses comes from the US followed by East Europe. Haha and we thought it was China (death penalty there perhaps).
  2. Most popular platform – Windows (no surprize there), second is Apple (whose owners don’t believe there are Apple viruses at all) and third is linux (whose owners are aware of viruses but don’t believe it’ll hit them at all).
  3. Viruses hitting mobile devices – Symbian (Nokia) is the most popular platform. Wait, there are mobile viruses? Apparently so. There is one that clearly invades someone’s privacy and it is marketed as an app called “Cheating Spouse”. If you have this installed into someone’s phone, you can see what number the phone has called even after the number is cleared by the owner, etc.
  4. Viruses can also be stuffed into USBs that you buy from the shop. So scan every storage devices from now on.

Finally, we got down to Norton Antivirus. First, my personal experience. I’ve used Norton a long long time ago and stopped because it got so heavy. When it was scanning, everything just slows down to a halt. AVG was new and I switched to AVG and it also became sluggish after awhile. I moved on to Kaspersky then McAfee then Avast.

What’s with all these antivirus software starting out great then slowly suck the juice out of your processor as time goes on? I’ve learned never to buy an antivirus license for more than a year because the virus definition piles up and slows everything down.

Now why would I want to get back to Norton? I guess Symantec read my mind because here comes the benchmark reports from Dennis Technology Labs placing Norton 360 version 4.0 at the top first or second place in the fastest loading time, scanning speed and accuracy rate. They are managing virus definition files better and Norton 360 launched in September 2009 includes a reputation-based technology that crowd source from millions of users in their community to fight web-based threats.

Anyways I have been testing out Norton 360 version 4.0 antivirus for a week now and it is working very well. The UI has improved a lot from what I remember and I like how Safe Web is built in to show me what links on a search page is safe to click on. It also comes with performance improvement features such as PC Tuneup to diagnose, cleanup and optimize the PC. I ran all these first before doing a deep file scan. I have to say it’s fast, really fast. The new Norton Antivirus is worth a try if you’re not using it already. Let’s hope the performance lasts.

Where to get it:
Norton 360 v 4.0 has just been released in stores across Malaysia. You can also get it online at symantec.com. It supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Suggested retail price is RM229 for the standard edition for three PC license and RM119 for one PC license. It also comes with 2GB of online storage space. These are for one year only. The premium edition is RM279 and comes with 25GB of online storage. (Cloud storage is becoming a popular bundling feature, it’s just like PA insurance hey). If you just want to try before you buy, Symantec online lets you try Norton’s full standard version free for one month.

Filed Under: Apps, Reviews, Tech Tagged With: ,

Can brands use twitter list?

November 2, 2009 By View Comments

twitter Personally, I see twitter lists as another ego stroker. You know it is when people start thanking each other for adding them to a list or getting upset when they have been left out of a list and proceed to block, unfollow or both, the list curator.

I curated a list of Malaysians in Social Media for Listorious.com yesterday which I deleted today because it’s just not worth the emotional hassle. Some names are obviously left out because I don’t have every social media person on my follow list. Even if I did, I don’t count having 18K followers or someone who does not engage with others as being in or having a huge influence in social media.

Ego “twisting” aside for personal lists, there are great reasons for brands to curate their own lists.

Here’s my short list:
1. A brand can show what’s important to them with a list of tweeps they follow. It’s like Tony Hsieh’s alltop page where you’ll find blogs on customer service, lifestyle, fashion, shoes and tech. Knowing what Tony has accomplished in zappos, I want to read what he reads too.

2. I agree with point #5 on this list. Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Some brands have different names for different departments. Sometimes I wonder why. Customers want one website, one phone number and one email to reach a company.

Sometimes it works. If different twitter accounts are already established, a twitter list with all the brand’s accounts will help a lot. A great example is how AMC promotes the tv series Mad Men on twitter. Twitter accounts are set up for some of the main characters. One to check out is Betty Draper’s (a character in that show) twitter account. On her profile is a list of the other Mad Men characters which she has listed in her rolodex. It’s incredibly fun to read if you’re a fan of Mad Men like me. Betty also has a list of other people she finds interesting and she has them listed in Mad Men of the future (today’s mad men and women).

3. A brand’s staff/member list can also tell others who work or belong to that organization. Especially useful when someone in your organization deals with other people representing your company. When @xyz representing a publication asks me for an interview for example, I’d like to know if they are legit. Seeing their name listed on the staff list of the publication’s (account verified) twitter account gives me some confidence that he or she isn’t a competitor who just wants to get information on a new product I’ve released to the press that’s under embargo. Good example is the New York Times staff list.

Only three from me. There’s more from the many articles written by twitter pundits which you can do a search on. Final note, if you manage a brand or an organization on twitter, do get your list up soon.

Filed Under: Apps, Feature, Marketing, Reviews Tagged With: , ,

Nokia n-gage Age of Empires III rocks.

July 22, 2009 By View Comments

After accidentally recovering 30MB of free space on my Nokia N96′s phone memory, the phone started to work like new again. So I updated the n-gage app and downloaded Age of Empires III yesterday. Been wanting to play it since it came out couple of months back. I’m on mission #13 now, skill level veteran (a notch up from wimp level ‘Recruit’).

You have two game options: tackle missions or skirmishes. The missions are usually short and fast on smaller maps while the skirmishes throw you into the deep end where the battles are longer and the maps are bigger. Before going into combat, you will have to populate a small town and manage a crew of settlers who has to gather resources needed to build up your army. It’s SIM City-ish but it works well with the game play.

Graphics quality is awesome (for a small screen) with visual effects to match. I usually play with the music off to hear the sound effects which is not bad but not great, only a slight rush from bombs going off and clanging from the blade-on-blade fights. I still like the thumb-trembling sound effects from Resident Evil more, the zombie boss’ roar is still in my head.

Overall — great game! Very n-gaging. Lots of variety in the missions, challenging skirmishes and a community scoreboard to feed your gamer’s ego.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

I forgot to add that there is an Ngage arena where you can connect to and play with other players, live. This is the best part because you really don’t know what to expect from the other party.

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